PAPER CONFINES.
37. / By the Morning I Will Have Grown Back

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        Amoret had bug bites carving up her legs that would not heal. She wondered at what point she should be concerned at her body's sudden resistance to creams and tonics for the rashes that had developed from her scratching, but had no room in the thousand other concerns occupying her mind. As a distraction, she bit long enough on the nail of her thumb that it had broken off, and then moved on to the other fingers: all short, jagged edges. She would have chewed the cuticles raw if she wasn't so worried those wouldn't heal either.

Her anxiety had to be conscious. No breaking of skin.

So she lugged herself through the days and into November, and most of the mosquitoes scattered out of the cold. Amoret thought Tom had a way of shunning them to the meadow and keeping it shut—the tender, angry wound of the horcrux.

It didn't help that that voice was still goading her, indecipherable as it was. Her name was clear enough amongst the rest, following her through every corridor, silent only when Tom spoke.

Something wanted to talk.

Amoret did not indulge it.

She laid on the floor of his library, fingers in the bristles of the bicorn hide, sighing loudly every so often.

"Make it blue," she mumbled, staring at the ceiling.

Tom made the room blue.

Purple, she told him next, like a child granted endless wishes, bored of greater ones. Pink. Red. Back to green, the candlelight splashed across his cheeks. He didn't seem to mind; he just sighed back at her in equal frequency and kept on with whatever he was reading.

When she asked him in a gentler request to turn the room black, he paused before obliging.

The light went out. She looked into the new darkness and imagined herself sometime else.

"What are you thinking?" Tom asked, and Amoret heard the flutter and snap of his book closing.

"That I want you to play music," she said softly, like a secret, "and... I want not to be sick anymore, and to pretend I'm here because I have a Transfiguration exam next week, not—" She opened her mouth to say something else, but closed it again.

Tom conjured the phonograph, and the needle pressed down smoothly on a record he had played once some months ago during a lesson. Sombre and pretty, but similar to Chopin in a way she hadn't mentioned because of his aversion. Maybe to avoid bothering him. She mentioned it now.

"I suppose," Tom agreed stiffly, and she wondered if he did that more often now because bothering her was something he did avoid, or because he meant it.

Amoret drifted wordlessly into the notes of the piano, but all they did was remind her of how much she failed to pretend anymore. A year ago, drunk on stolen whisky and desperately alone, she might have imagined Colette at the keys. She might have fallen asleep. Now she scratched welts on her calves and rolled numbly onto her side, restless. She couldn't see Tom in the dark, but she knew he was watching the place she laid like she watched the chair he sat. It wasn't something they had to ask anymore.

"I'm going to go on a walk," she muttered, inching up slowly from the rug.

There was a pause—his restraint not to prod for wheres or whys—before she heard his fingers smoothly brushing, and the candles sparked a plain, warm gold to guide her back. "All right."

Hollowly, she turned and joked with a hand at the door, "You're cooking tonight, by the way."

Something about him softened. He made an effort not to show it, and returned to his book with a deliberate exhale; a yes in Tom's language.

It frustrated her that she couldn't upset him anymore—that of all the things that used to earn his ire, all that did it now was endangering herself, that to anatomize that awakened something ugly and wrong in her, and that however contemptuous and selfish and pitiful he was, not even her anger made her feel alive anymore. The only thing that did that was him—this—his reluctance to tenderness, entombed and reanimated, ever crawling toward the surface.

She wanted it.

She left.

The corridors were wrought with dull wind from no particular direction, and Amoret shivered, uncorking a phial of Tom's draught and wiping the excess from her chin. Cognizant only of a numb desire for purpose she couldn't find anywhere else, her feet carried her to the hospital wing and stopped there. The wind was stronger, and she questioned her previous assessment; if it was coming from anywhere, Myrtle seemed a logical source.

She pried the door open and crept inside as if heavy feet could wake the dead. But Myrtle's corpse no longer did so much as breathe under stasis, her skin as sallow as the day they found her, her face as sunken. The aura of the spell cast over her was a dim, cool indigo. Hers was a rest with no revitalization.

Amoret swallowed, remembering her ghost, and inched toward her bedside despite the ache that welled inside her with each step.

Her fingers jolted at the first touch. The milky bone of her cheek was cupped in Amoret's palm like a stone; it cut and she kept it there, awed at its sharpness. What masochism, Tom would have chided, snatching her hand away, and she sought the fear and wanting in his eyes but hadn't known it enough to imagine it right. All she could think of was Sybil's hand on her mother's cheek, lulling her to sleep each night to help her wake again the next morning.

Myrtle was a daughter. Was she also a sister? Had she tended someone she loved once, and been tended to in turn?

With gritted teeth and fingers trembling through resistance, Amoret sat beside her, pulled the thick, black length of Myrtle's hair into her hands and began to braid.

She hummed hoarsely to the melody of the phonograph's song, lilted, unsure if her voice could even be heard. Every weaving of strands was like a new sliver serrating her palms. It drove her forward—the pain, the guilt, the emptiness sorely glutted. Distractions from un-itched bites and bruised cuticles. Wounds that didn't bleed. The horcrux screamed at her, a choir pitch of a thousand livid ghosts.

Amoret knew she couldn't save her. She'd put a stopper on time and forbidden the word.

She freed her fingers from the twining threads of the braid, and it spilled down the pillow, held together by the yellow ribbon of her sister's birthday.

The pain dissipated in the absence of Myrtle's touch, and with it, all of Amoret's absolution.

A challenge, then, as she returned to the Room of Requirement—could emptiness get so big it became something too? It sounded like a philosophy from one of Tom's books, and she slid uselessly down the wall beside the black lacquer door considering it abstractly. Frustrated tears pricked her eyes.

She cupped an ear to the door, legs curled to her chest. The music was still playing inside. The warmth of the candlelight rippled faintly beneath her. She could picture Tom still reading, his hair tousled, a moleskin pressed open in one hand to take notes he sometimes showed her. It offered more than survival, and it terrified her. Her hands were empty and he was something to hold. She could have gone back to him, swung her feet from the kitchen counter while he grumbled over the cooktop and teased his use of salt, or she could have gone to the margin a day early and written to someone who could hold her too.

Amoret took a final glance at the door and turned away. Something baser than the horcrux objected, entirely her own.

The draught danced through her like hot, fizzing stars as she descended the castle grounds, a buzz under her skin, of which she rarely had covered like it should have been this time of year. She had sewn a half-decent dress from floral scraps in the Hufflepuff common room and wore it under Tom's coat when she wasn't sweating it off and carrying it instead. It was thin and the collar was lopsided and some of the stitching had come undone already, but she swore he was charming it together between its wears; a permanent reflex of a childhood spent climbing up the hand he was dealt. Amoret hadn't felt that urge with him since before the horcrux.

Still, the seams were impossibly neat as she balanced herself on the trees between laborious breaths. Even in the wind they didn't pull.

She pushed through green into white, and sank into the supple hammock of the margin.

For a while, her quill rested just barely dipped in the ink pot, her hand motionless around it. Usually, the words came with the movement, but the first incision of hopelessness had cut away her inspiration. It had been a month without an answer, a month within a year of her absence.

Had no one found the book? Had no one thought to look for her beyond what was materially plain?

It was possible her writing didn't translate. The ink of her missives did fade away upon drying, but she had been too grateful not to have to dwell on her miserable sentiments to assume the worst—that they faded before they could be read by anyone else.

Reality had begun, slowly, to creep in.

Amoret's breathing did not steady as it often had once the walk from the castle quieted in her body. Her nerves were still inflamed by Myrtle's proximity, her vision split, and she wrote with the urgency of a girl fearful of the one truth she still tried to bury: that she was dying, and she was alone.

Where are you? she scribbled furiously, unsure who she addressed.

It's Banks. It's Amoret. I'm here.

The diary is a horcrux, she added, as she always did in the case that that message was her first received. Dippet won't know what that is. You likely don't either, the book on it is almost certainly in the Room of Requirement. I don't know if you can summon it. I'm positive Tom has some enchanted safeguard on the room he keeps.

Slughorn

She abandoned the thought.

Dumbledore might know. There's always been something off with him and Tom.

Amoret traced the cursive with her fingers, and stained her hands with the ink. For a while she did nothing but stare at them, the deep blue of the sea that claimed her father, the colour of Tom's eyes, the sticky film of blood on the beige of her palms. She wrote again in the lettering of a child.

It's Etta.

Are you going to get me?

Her quill quivered.

Reid.

Reid,

You're supposed to solve things like this

That's your job. You left me for it.

You have to come back for me.

Reid?

The only voice that answered was her death, calling to her from the meadow. The words dissolved to dust.

An exhausted sob tore through her as her quill came down on the parchment, again and again and again. It was impossibly thin and soft as a cradle, and it would not pierce. She bled for nothing, but the horcrux didn't, and this was their difference. The barb struck. Feathers mashed in her fist. And the parchment stayed intact.

Amoret threw the ravaged quill into the white end of the world and crawled back to her feet, her breath uneven from the exertion. She clenched her jaw.

Fine—if it wanted to talk, she would talk.

Gravity and will aided her uphill journey to the castle, and she panted into the echo of the corridors and the great staircase. The mechanical sound of the magic grinding still unnerved her a year later, but she held steadfast to the railing and remembered the only one who could die here was her. It was more merciful to imagine herself a corpse than someone else—macabre as she had become in the soft cot of death, it was worse than merciful—it was easy.

And then the rose-and-thorn door was before her, and the corner of Ruby Belahue's slaughter was clean in her absence. The room crooned at Amoret's return. The vines shuddered hungrily for her, twisting forth in eager pursuit, serpent bodies of their creator's design. She wondered if Tom saw how much of himself existed in even the faintest minutiae of this place. He was fretwork and stone and sky, abandoned tins in the kitchen cupboard.

"Death-stealer," hummed the rose, and the thorns crept closer to claim their due, "Life-bringer."

Amoret proffered their wanted blood without resistance, but still winced at the thin trickle that crept down her wrist and twined at her fingers like a ring. As the door yawned wide, she cupped the wound with as much pressure as she could muster. Her wand was half-lax in her free hand.

She went still and swallowed at the threshold.

The meadow was like a cosmos; a thousand stars took shape in damselflies and grazing fawns, rabbits on the hillside, fish swept up in the dripping beaks of birds, two eagles perched to prowl on the oak tree at the lake. Everywhere she looked, light. Everywhere, a piece of her.

Death-stealer, it called her. Life-bringer.

She felt sick at the sight of it. Splayed out and liquefied, her heart and soul given to something wretched, fed to him. Did he feel it? Did it sate him to consume her, desired or not?

Amoret staggered down the meadow more than she walked it, and the black embrace of the woods took her greedily. A barricade of boughs affixed behind her. Her stars dimmed to blackness.

Just like the first day, the forest was tenebrously lifeless: it all congregated at the meadow, and she understood dimly that perhaps that was because this place belonged to something else. The rest knew better than to enter its domain. Undulating, hidden like the faerie queen that took the Slaughters' midwife years ago, maybe it existed underground. Maybe it brewed unseen, waiting for her.

The choir called out again. Banks, Amoret, Etta: all the names she had written and given away. It was the first rule her father had taught her, and yet in all that had been taken from her, she had forgotten there was always more to lose.

Darkness thickened in the heart of the woods.

Even above, the branches warped to shade the sky. The dirt was as black and powdery as soot under her feet. Amoret procured a small sphere of light with her wand but the shadows were thick and textured; she could have rolled them between her fingers and been left with a mark. She coughed, her lungs too weak for a place so keenly heavy.

The voice led her to the familiar clearing where she first found Tom. The darkness clustered around an uneven silhouette in white. A bedsheet. Supper shoes. Within it something trembled like a body wracked with sobs, and Amoret squeezed her wand. A year ago, she sought to help this creature. Now she dreaded to consider what it really was.

"Are you the one calling to me?" she asked faintly.

The whole forest stilled.

"Amoret..." In its furor, the name echoed into a second voice, a third in the trees, a fourth in the earth, all physically resonant and varied in pitch: the choir.

"Yes," she answered. There was no point in lying to it; it knew every name she had but one.

Bitsy was hers. That she would not give up.

"You said you would help—help us... help us?"

What a strange, quartered thing. Like consciousness snapped and strung back together. Amoret frowned; it hadn't been like this the first time she came. "I don't know how to help you if I don't know what you are."

That wasn't a lie either. She wasn't sure why she was tip-toeing around them, like a fae forbidden, but somehow she felt safer bearing technical truths than deceptions.

"Half," it whispered shamefully, rising wilted from the ground. "Unfinished."

"Because the ritual was interrupted?"

Its voice split off again, grasping to be heard. "Yes. Yes. You're the one he thinks of. He... he calls you Amoret. You broke it."

It was too much revealed and nothing at all. The misery of the creature was one that demanded mercy, to be stitched whole or put to rest.

"You mean Tom. You're half of him?"

"We don't know!" it spat bitterly, "He... gave half, but it's broken."

Apprehensively, Amoret stepped closer. It stumbled out from the bedsheet at a snapping twig under her boots, a boy scowling, his face wan and sunken. She knew him at once from a memory, how he gritted his teeth not to wail into the night.

Tom, startled like a rabbit strung from the rafters. This one would bear the fresh wounds of fire beneath his collar. This Tom would carry them in his anger. His shoulders tensed with an involuntary breath, pointed as a cat's raised hackles. He carried fear, too.

"You said you would help us," he muttered, looking off at something invisible to her.

"I—"

"But you took, and you won't give it back."

Amoret shook her head. "My life is mine," she said feebly, knowing he wouldn't understand.

"No!" he snarled, and then his face settled. It was scary how the mannerism had stuck with him even now. "No. One of you will give it back, or... or we will hurt one of you."

"You mean Myrtle?"

He nodded, a little shiver coursing through him, erratic, most-rabid.

This was the manifestation of Tom's soul? This was the half of himself he had severed? It seemed unlike him, even for a child, even when his nerves bore the same twitches, his mouth set the same dissatisfied curves. No, this was half of him made hungry. This was a soul reduced to the fledgling husk of sentience, who knew nothing else but that he had been withheld what he was owed.

Amoret was a toy wrenched free from a poor child or meat dangling over a starving dog's mouth, and she should not have come here.

"I can't do that," she said, releasing her arm to swap her wand to the dominant hand. Blood trickled freely at once, the wound not scabbing over.

"Then—he will! He'll take it from you."

"Is that what you want?" she challenged, searching his eyes, "To be half a soul, stuck here until he tires of eternity? That's no life, Tom."

He seemed confused for a moment, stirred by an unfamiliar script. His little fist jabbed into the side of his thigh. He was of two minds or none at all, mangled across the horcrux. "You just want to keep it. You want to live forever, like us."

"I'm dying," she pressed desperately, "Do you think if I wanted it I wouldn't have claimed it?"

"We don't believe you!"

"How can I prove it to you?"

"Tell him to kill her."

That set her back a step. "He... Tom can't. It has to be me."

"He lies!" the boy hissed, "It's ours! He lies to you and me. He wants you to take it, but we won't let you."

"No. No, if he could stop this he would have done it already."

"He wants you to live."

"But I'm dying!"

"He wants you to live forever."

Amoret tried to find a reason the boy would lie and couldn't. He was half a soul, tied inextricably to the horcrux—self-preservation personified—and he was telling her she could have been free. Tom had kept her here. He could have killed Myrtle, like he could have killed Amoret that day in the clearing, like he'd tried to in anger when she turned him back from the coin.

How stupid she was not to have known it then and there; she could have gone home. And instead he had kept her.

"We will take it back," the boy whined.

"Please, Tom—"

She hadn't seen through wet eyes how his body pulsed; fervently, oppositely alive—he changed.

Amoret stumbled backward. The ground was hard and her dress had new flowers blooming, the red of her blood like carnations.

The spine grew first.

Thick, black plumes burgeoned from the body, its pores fat and gaping, the seedlings of feathers too fast for the skinning, the boy pink-raw and smothered under his new shape. Amoret heard him somewhere inside of it, screaming. A snap of limbs as he contorted, folded to all fours. The horcrux consumed him, and from his body a bird took shape—stuck halfway a wight, pallid and human-eyed—and then watched for her fear and snarled in dissatisfaction.

The blood shook free from its feathers as the Cat Sìth grew, skin of the boy shed on the earth.

Amoret's hand was limp over her wand. She couldn't move. All she thought of as the Cat Sìth descended upon her was the gentle darkness of its open mouth.

No end followed.

"Foolish girl," said a little voice.

She imagined it was one of hers, carried in her subconscious and willed to life at the end. Sweet, Scottish lull, she knew it from years ago, though she couldn't pinpoint from where.

The Cat Sìth fell aside, black of its maw supplanted by eyes of the same shade.

Caoimhín's darkness was candles snuffed at midnight and her sisters' hands in hers.

The pixie drifted nearer. It was aged, or maybe Amoret's memory failed her—its body wrapped in thin leaves and gingham ribbon. Sybil, she knew at once, and probably invented the sudden smell of linen and rose. It was enough to start crying again. "Stand, Etta."

Etta, Etta, Etta. It was as if for a moment she had gone home.

"How—" She choked back a sob— "How are you here?"

"Because I saw you here seven years ago, girl," Caoimhín said brusquely, "and I told you I would."

"The... the pixie dust. Did you—"

"It was the younger first. All song and stones and silence, she wrote to the eldest. Summoned her back."

Amoret knew she should have stood and listened, but her chin trembled in her bloodied hands. Reid might not have heard her, but she had come back.

"They're—are they looking for me?"

"Yes. Now up, girl."

She nodded dizzily, pushing back from the Cat Sìth's limp form, finally able to grasp the magnitude of it. Its fangs prodded a jaw the width of her shoulders, black fur split by white down the spine like etched bones, a burst of light streaking its chest. It would have devoured her.

"Is it dead?"

"No. The boy is the horcrux's shape, but it cannot be killed here."

"So..."

"Your Tom is true in this, at least: one must die, and it cannot be the horcrux itself unless its maker wills it so."

Amoret blinked her gaze away from the creature. "Wills it?"

Caoimhín's jaw tightened, hand held out. Amoret took it, as big as a pebble in her palm, and followed it from the clearing. "You'd let credulity damn you now? A man does not surrender a power like that once he has it."

"I don't understand. The boy—the horcrux—it said he wants me to have it."

"That is not surrender. That is coalescence."

"I don't understand," she repeated, but unsalvageably, hopelessly, she thought she might have understood that more than anything else.

"You can become him, girl, but you cannot save him."

Amoret stopped, fingers gently unclasping to release Caoimhín's small hand. "What do you mean, if he wills it?"

The pixie laughed. An odd, tinny giggle, blown in all directions. "Foolish, maudlin, incomprehensibly human little witch," it said. "Do you imagine he dreams as you do? Hopeful for your goodness?"

"You're here to help me, aren't you? Tell me!"

It fluttered high and fast, black eyes peering tauntingly into hers. "A horcrux can only be undone by a healed soul. Have you been trying to make him better, in your time twined? Hm. Or have you learned to take him as he is? I think you have." The forest winds billowed, and Caoimhín snapped an encroaching branch with a scowl, her fingers knobbed and muddy. "The creature wakes. Come."

Amoret pursued, no longer holding onto the pixie in some lost camaraderie, as if its limbs connected to her sisters' limbs, a bridge to seven years ago. It startled a gasp from her. "Seven years. You said to keep your name for seven years, but the horcrux—"

"Time is akilter in this place."

"So it's—"

"1944, as you would call it."

Another branch snapped. Amoret couldn't breathe. "Stop. Stop."

She rummaged fiendishly through her bag, tinctures and phials and pressed flowers spilling from a moleskin. The draught was shaky in her hands. Rarely did she need a second dose so soon, but blood still dribbled from her wound and her head was spinning.

"It has taken this from you, hasn't it?" Caoimhín urged, tracing the bleeding arm.

Amoret nodded.

"Soon it will not need a monster to kill you."

"I know," she grumbled through the aftershock of the draught. The invigoration was smaller each time. Her legs ached, calves stinging.

"Come."

Amoret listened, but she trudged semidelirious through the ashen ground and the woodland slowly waking. "So I have to kill to live? You came here just to offer me that?"

"Is it not enough, girl? I saved you."

"Thank you," she said miserably.

"You must kill, yes. But—"

A low howl rippled from the clearing.

Chills spanned the bare skin of her, and her eyes darted between her saviour and demise. "...Caoimhín?"

The pixie's responding stillness spoke of the severity of the threat. How ancient was it, and still to cower even momentarily at the roar of a new beast?

"Your mother lives," it pronounced sternly, quickly, as if reading from a list, "your sisters search—and there are others—names I do not know but faces I do see. You have given me yours, but do not ever give it to the woods: the one you still hold close to your heart. Remember why, little one."

Amoret held her breath. She waited for more, and knew there was none. Caoimhín had not come just to extend answers she already knew; she had come to remind her of hope. Amoret's mother was alive, and that was all she needed.

The ground trembled distantly. Caoimhín bared jagged teeth. "Go."

"Are you—"

"Live," it growled, "but do not live in his eternity. It is not made for you."

Amoret couldn't have come up with an answer if she had the time for one, because Caoimhín, in a way incomparable to the horcrux's grotesque metamorphosis, scattered into glimmering mist, and came out something new.

The bear that strode forth was like night itself. It was proud, navy-dark, and as unnaturally tremendous in size as the Cat Sìth, towering over Amoret where she had before loomed above the pixie. As it surged deeper into the forest, bristling, she caught the wintry depth of its eyes in a parting glance.

Then she ran.

As fast as she was able, she flung herself along the path to the meadow. A fresh coldness took as she heard the first clash of animal bodies from the clearing, the brutish roar and holler, the tear of teeth. She stuffed one phial of dittany in her boot before throwing her bag aside to eliminate any excess weight. It would take all her strength to run free. The horcrux might have been occupied by Caoimhín, but it was Amoret it wanted.

The fighting lashed closer, wet-sounding, indiscriminate. The ground shook with every tree struck in the distance, the horrifying, rapid footfall of one beast freed from the other's jaws before being caught again. It was impossible to tell which was which. As Amoret ran, she cast pathetic defensive measures against the forest's onslaught. Imperturbable, Fianto Duri—Protego Maxima, when those failed and branches beat down from the trees and shattered her focus. And focus was a farcical word for it; her blood was dripping from wrist to leg now, her gaze in saccades between her escape and the creature chasing her, her body fending off exhaustion all the while.

Something in her knew before she did that she wasn't going to make it like this. There were slivers in every shield she rose, cracked down the middle in seconds like glass, and she couldn't afford what injuries she'd take if she didn't conjure them again in time.

Her eyes wrenched shut. Adrenaline wasn't enough. She needed to be strategic.

With the horcrux's energy expended on Caoimhín, Amoret suspected a weakness—hopefully, desperately, because if she was wrong she was dead—"Bombarda!"

One efforted explosion and the bough-nest of passed trees fell in a barbican over the path, gnarled and sizzling to thick, blinding smoke. Flames sputtered from the friction.

It was time bought. Amoret pulled her dress high so the collar covered her nose and barrelled forward.

The new wall tampered the fight between the beasts, but she could hear as she ambled upward to the edge of the woods that they had clashed against it at last. There was a distinct rending of something harder than flesh, and the barbican's flames stirred on impact. Amoret's eyes clouded with smoke as the fire exacerbated.

She came to a halt. The forest gate was imposing, thicker than her makeshift obstacle albeit ostensibly destructible. She released her collar to better aim her wand. It was as important that she could wedge her way out as it was she could breathe clean air again, and a small gap was all she needed to slink through. She focused her attempt on the most vulnerable section of the branches, seemingly thinner than the rest from what she could tell through burning, slitted eyes.

"Bombarda!" she shouted.

Horrifically, nothing. Instead, as if cast fifty paces ago, she heard the unmistakable crash of something bursting through the barbican.

Her heart lodged in her throat as the branches resisted a second shot.

A slimy growl lodged free from one of the beasts, too close for comfort: the sound of a bite forced open by a new wound, teeth wrested from a neck to fall back. Then Amoret heard the speed of one pick up, and reasonlessly, she was certain it was the Cat Sìth.

"Confringo!"

There was the predatory pant of an animal closing in on trapped prey. A purr.

The wall remained.

"Bombarda Maxima! Expulso—" She cursed, pointing to the ground instead, hoping for a hole to burrow in and out of. "Deprimo!"

Not even a crater formed. Soot, instead, shot up from the unmarred terrain, mingled with wind and smoke. Amoret recoiled as it filled her eyes, and in her blind panic, something curled around her ankles and pulled.

She landed roughly against the trunk of a tree. Bark scraped her bare skin. They were shallow wounds, she knew that, but they would still bleed, and she couldn't heal. She should have worn Tom's stupid fucking coat.

"Diffindo," she cast desperately at the roots that bound her.

They shrivelled negligibly under her spell before reforming anew. No, stronger. Amoret tried to blink away the soot and stay calm, but—the horcrux learned. It split its efforts between her and Caoimhín to not be fooled again, and strengthened its territory to hinder her where it couldn't reach.

She would do well not to forget that no matter how it presented itself, it was still half of Tom.

Wrestling against the hold of the roots, Amoret began to cough at the accumulating smoke. The trees offered no breaches for oxygen or light. The shadows of the forest suffocated as much as the fire she'd set, and in her blurring vision and restrained limbs, she could only hear and feel the Cat Sìth approach, a tremor in the trees and earth at something like kin coming home.

Violet dots peered out from the dark. If the environment hadn't given it away, the feline glow of those glassy eyes would have.

Amoret writhed with accelerating urgency, ticking off spells that dwindled to dust, her wand tossed aside, her wrists bound.

As the Cat Sìth prowled closer, she could see nothing but the reflective light of its eyes and the bloody, slavering drool in its teeth.

And then the bear came down upon them.

A gruelling yelp burst from the Cat Sìth's mouth. Caoimhín's teeth were bracketed around the side of its neck, and blood sprayed from both the bite and the shriek so near to Amoret's face.

The roots at her wrists slackened in an instant. New circulation flowed to her hands and she scrambled for her wand, blasting the restraints clamped over her ankles.

The horcrux's magic had subsided at the impact of the assault, but it wailed in its furious plight, tumbling over the bear for dominance. Amoret could only see the outline of them. The Cat Sìth was nimbler, taller, and bipedal. It aimed more often with its claws, slashing at the weaker parts of the bear's musculature to bring it to heel. Caoimhín's bear shape, in comparison, was antonymic to its true form: all savage, brute strength and great limbs thrashing with incredible force. Teeth and claws, it wasted neither. It fought to protect.

But the horcrux's resentment was revitalized in being kept from its sacrifice again. Amoret sensed it before it struck, as she pushed off the tree and limped for the newly vulnerable border—an eerie swivel of its head in her direction.

She saw with new clearness the moment the beast's eyes became the boy's, and when it struck again, it was Tom who looked back at her.

An invisible force swept her to the ground. Her spine took the impact, crunching, then warm and wet. The pain reverberated in her skull.

There were no leaves in a forest like this, so the roots came instead to cup her face. They seized her throat in an embrace, and crept tender as a kiss to her mouth. The air began to slip, very softly, from her lips.

It was what he had done to Billy.

In equal fury, the bear lunged for the Cat Sìth, claws wide, tongue lolled between yellow teeth. But no blow landed. The open paw was suspended in midair.

Amoret tried to scream as the palpable wrath of the horcrux expanded and the branches seized Caoimhín, the glorious bear strung up by all limbs, its eyes wild.

As Amoret squirmed against the foetid vines muffling her spells, the Cat Sìth lashed at the bear's abdomen. Only the offensive howl could be heard. If the bear roared in turn, or the pixie wept, the sound was trapped within the bounds of the magic holding it. But the cut was deep. And deeper yet, the Cat Sìth hurled again. And again. Amoret heard the claws rip through fur and flesh. She saw the gristle of bone, blood drooling from the spilling meat. She forced herself to watch. The skin was dangling to the muscle, and the Cat Sìth—the boy inside, diminished by this ancient creature's power—cried out as he struck at the open wound and the bear split down the middle.

Caoimhín's black eyes were limply pleading, and then went vacant.

Only then did Amoret look away. The warmth of something long forgotten slipped free from her, a reminder in its absence that she had had it at all.

She imagined she was praying when she closed her eyes.

Knelt at a velvet pew, she wondered what the church in Lower Slaughter looked like on the other side of the stained glass. What would she have asked for—that she hadn't asked a thousand other unseen forces? Wine and communion? A seat inside? Forgiveness? Amoret didn't know what to do with forgiveness. She wanted naïveté forever. She wanted to unlive the lessons she had learned, and pluck flowers for kitchen windows instead of graves. Peonies, lotuses, daffodils: flowers for life.

It wasn't what she was given.

In either end, her mother had written.

But not without her.

The Cat Sìth, exhilarated, slinked closer. Amoret heard the slosh of viscera as it went, the dorsal half of the bear no obstacle in its path. Its feet came down upon it. There was the bone crunch. The froth. Innards linked and skewed, and her breath, skidding from her lungs with nowhere to depart. She smelled the stench of death and felt the heat of its body as it crept above her. No killing blow came. Nothing so quick; it wanted to watch her die as Billy almost had, an enemy of the boy, not the beast.

She rose from the pew. She prayed for something that could hold her.

Through the staggering pain, through endless grief, Amoret found Tom.

Her head pounded with the effort, her mind latched to his for a fraction of a second—dark, undefended, too far, she shadowed the edge of his thoughts and wept, sunken at the foot of a proverbial door with one fist softly thumping.

Help me, she called out.

In an instant he was there.

It was all the time he had for his eyes to flash over the Cat Sìth, Amoret's neck and limbs pinioned by the bramble, and then he was commanding them free. The beast of him cried out like never before, head snapped in his direction. She wondered dimly if Tom knew it was his own self he contested as he sent the Cat Sìth barrelling through the trees, and then thought, as she breathed again, that he must have. He was wincing.

The impenetrable wall parted by his hand, and he let the stars in again.

Amoret felt herself being lifted, but it was something far away. Like he was still in the library, immaterial to her. She could barely muster the strength to hold on as he carried her through the threshold into newly blinding light. Her wounds were gaping and her mind was half-gone, but she wrapped her arms around his neck and clung with all the life that remained to her.

She realized they weren't moving when the warbled snarl of the Cat Sìth shook the earth beneath them.

Her voice came out in a croak. "Tom?"

"I can't Apparate," he said numbly.

There it was—the fear. The look she wanted. She traced his cheek faintly before her limp hand slipped to his shoulder.

Liar, she thought, or maybe she mumbled it aloud, because his face twisted in confusion.

What had he lied about? She couldn't remember now.

It didn't matter; Tom summoned a new wall behind them and started to run.

She jostled in his arms, clutching tight to the fabric of his shirt, her eyes pinned on the forest over his shoulder. It was a great stone bulwark he had erected in place of the old trees, but even then, something rammed against it from the other side. At odds with the directions of the other half of its master, the stone cracked and filled again, remade just as it was destroyed.

The bump of each uphill surge bisected Amoret's speech. "Why—can't—you—"

"I don't know," Tom heaved.

"But you App—arated—"

"Stop talking."

The Cat Sìth shrieked, and the wall shattered.

Amoret saw the wave before she felt it sweep the earth beneath them, crawling frenetic up the meadow. She tried to warn Tom, but all that came was a scream as she was thrown by the force of it to the ground. Blood speckled the grass. Hers, she supposed.

She rolled downwards, helplessly clawing for purchase until someone reached back. Tom's hand clasped hers. The Cat Sìth was too close, their progress negated by the quake.

Running within this proximity only invited it to pounce with their backs turned. He had to know that too; it was the only advantage he had that the beast seemed hesitant to engage in a fight with itself. Instead it warred against Tom for access to her, dripping red with the blood of the bear and the chunk taken from its neck, rabidly tracking its true prey as she limped away.

Tom cast a freezing spell. The Cat Sìth deflected, negligibly slower but lowering to all fours like it had chosen animal over boy at last. He hurled Incendio, and it grazed the ear of the beast, the rest shrugged off as if fireproof.

Amoret, impaired and crawling up the hill, rasped as articulately as she could, "The ground. The environment is—weaker."

His eyes flashed in her direction. A mistake. The Cat Sìth lunged without a moment's pause, and Tom hissed in rapid succession: a shield spell, a ricketing force to bring the Cat Sìth to the ground, and a sinkhole to swallow it.

The beast plummeted into the growing void. Its claws latched for the edge until they disappeared. It wasn't death, Amoret knew that. Caoimhín had said so.

"Don't do that," Tom rebuked, his breath in fragments.

As Protego fell, Amoret realized he had conjured it solely around her.

"You're welcome," she coughed, lugged like dead weight into his arms again.

He didn't answer as he brought them higher into the meadow than they'd reached before, the terrain more difficult now that the quakes had torn through the soil and Tom's attention was half-dedicated to shovelling the Cat Sìth's temporary grave. It was a fast pace, but it wasn't quite running, and Amoret was glad—but she was also bleeding, and almost positive her phial of dittany was no longer in her boot. The only thing that kept her sane was her wand, poking out of Tom's back pocket. She wriggled across his arm for it.

"Where will we go?" she asked weakly.

Tom didn't answer. Her eyes struggled to keep open.

She realized he was casting under his breath, and looked over his shoulder in slow blinks at wall after wall after wall. One surged from the earth after the other, a silent domino of bulwarks.

But the Cat Sìth had employed his strategy too, back in the forest with the trees. He couldn't fight something that knew every move he was going to make; it was Amoret's tactic that had confounded it, if only briefly. Whatever Tom did next was exactly what it wanted him to do.

The silence wasn't just him. The rumbling in the sinkhole had stopped.

"Tom—" she sputtered, hands flailing on his back— "Tom."

The animals occupying the meadow turned to them in unison.

Amoret remembered how fluidly the lake's eagle had decollated the fish, and her heartbeat caught in her throat.

The herd, aglow with her life, charged at them.

Tom cursed. Then they were running.

His bulwarks were traded for a round, dense shield enveloping them both. He couldn't maintain so many constructs while fending off the forces that would soon strike, and that alarmed her. She had seen no end to his magic thus far.

It made sense, though, that the only thing that could threaten his power was himself.

The deer hit first, three of them, a bark of light. Their antlers butted ruthlessly against the shield. It crackled on impact, but Tom withstood the first blows, hurrying to the hill's acme with rekindled tenacity. Gravity, at least, would no longer complicate the chase. The deer grinded along the shield with a nauseating squeal, their antlers scraped to gleaming silt.

They tripped over one of the quake's ridges with simultaneous whines, and crashed down the meadow.

Amoret prodded more frantically for her wand, the blood loss noticeably dizzying. Vaguely, she understood that was bad.

She hadn't seen the birds. Neither of them had from above.

Their wings rained down on them like pellets of a pistol. The ones that struck ricocheted, but dented the shield enough to encourage the rest to follow. They concentrated their efforts on weakening the top of the sphere, and Amoret watched in horror as two black limbs pulled free from the sinkhole, and the starlings broke through.

They were on her without hesitation.

Only a few could permeate the small crater: enough to swarm her, but too few to risk the integrity of the shield in favour of an offensive spell. They prodded at her eyes and ears and mouth with whetted beaks. The lashes were thin and stinging. She tasted blood and light, and, unable to reach her wand, instinct compelled her hands to their necks. The plumage was soft. She snapped one, and two, and three. Their death-cries were more paling wheezes, silence squeezed from the throat.

Something inside her protested. A strange disquiet. And yet, saturation. Fullness.

Life.

Tom's nails dug into Amoret's arm in as much of a fist as he could make without compromising her, and the breach sealed as four more starlings dove inside, bursting the instant he let go. Feathers and mist filled the confines of the shield.

Amoret's vision burned. Her left eye was blurry, red and caustic; her cornea might have been lacerated in the assault, but she couldn't be sure. The swelling was taking too quickly. The sky had begun to howl. Darkening to a storm, the Cat Sìth had appeared to turn the elements in its favour.

She whimpered as cutting winds lashed through the shield, accumulating slivers until it was impossible to see, and they trudged blindly forward.

Animals, indistinguishable, continued to bash into the faltering sphere. Tom's gaze was straight ahead, his jaw set.

"We aren't going to—"

"Shh."

Amoret found room in her still to despise him.

He knew she was right. She knew he did. It came out in a second curse and a plan she saw form hastily in his eyes.

The shield vanished, and rain immediately poured down on them, bleak and heavy.

Tom did three things very quickly: he set Amoret down, he shifted the wind to propel the herd and the Cat Sìth to the bottom of the hill, and he cleaved the meadow in two.

It was one concussive strike. In place of the sinkhole, the ground split open, a gash from the path to the lake to the infinite pasture at the edge of the woods. It didn't end. It expanded, a new sea, the guttural tear of the earth swallowing the animals that attempted to dash across it. Some of them opted for the lake to swim, but the door was too far. They wouldn't make it before Tom and Amoret did.

She panted on the grass, cupping injuries she didn't have enough hands for.

"Tom," she croaked feebly.

He swallowed, nodding. His pallor was feverish from the expended strength. They had found his limit.

"Where will we go?" she wheezed out again. She doubted the horcrux would be contained to the meadow if it could employ the animals to its bidding.

New pressure flattened against the starling's lacerations. Tom, hands firmly pressed to her abdomen, scanned the wounds. His mouth was closed in a line despite his chest heaving. Droplets trickled down his cheek, and he glanced at the door as if with an inexplicable answer to her question.

It didn't matter. A shadow blacker than the storm consumed what was left of the light as the horcrux plunged in a new shape from the sky.

The bird.

A harpy eagle, three times the size of her chosen, in the form it had first taken in the forest. It looked almost... sorry. Half of a soul inspecting its creator on descent, as if understanding now that it couldn't get to her without hurting him first. For our own good, the boy's caged eyes seemed to say, and its massive talons carved a clean, devastating line down the arm Tom raised in guard.

It didn't want him dead. But it needed him very fucking close.

One taloned fist pummelled before the next. Another. The force of its blows was relentless. They came down like two battering rams, feral, with no lapses for Tom to do more than gasp before the next strike. His body was splayed out in the grass, crushed under the eagle's straddling weight.

Amoret's ears were ringing. Her wand was still in his pocket, and the door was mere feet away.

She crawled.

It could have killed her—the choice of her direction—but she had no time to decide anything else, lugging herself through the mud toward the door and pressing upwards, just high enough to graze the handle. It didn't budge. Her shoulder burned with the pull of mangled nerves. Something was dislocated.

She heard the slowing frequency of the eagle's blows, and imagined it was time, stunted, instead of Tom sufficiently broken. She had to. She couldn't look.

Amoret propped herself against the wood and pushed, screaming at the pain the movement sparked, to stand against it and clutch the frame.

Her voice was hoarse and her hands were empty. When she turned at last, the sight almost brought her back to her knees.

He was so bloody. It wept from him only in the heavy sheet of rain, crimson ribbons trickling from his mouth. His shirt was in tatters, contusions swollen and dark. The eagle huffed above him, finished, and Tom's breaths beneath it—God, she couldn't see the breaths beneath it.

It occurred to her that the look wasn't his alone; the fear, the wanting, her wretched hunger to see him terrified for her when he feared for no one else. It was hers, too.

She was a fool, and she wanted him to live.

The eagle surged skyward with a vanquishing screech. Its wingspan parted the sunless clouds, the stirring black of new night invented. A violent tempest erupted from the momentum. Lightning burst from the horcrux's sky, but Tom was free, and that was all she needed.

Amoret twisted the doorknob, stretched a hand toward him, and wandlessly, cast Accio.

She knew the logistics of the spell. It clasped around the clothes, not the body—a lead attached to the collar of Tom's shirt. His hand stretched out as if understanding, half-limp, and still reaching for her. Amoret poured all her magic into him.

She yanked.

His breath sputtered loose. Accio took in a stagger, the movement too sharp and fast. His knees dragged along the feet of grass between them until the connection snapped and he stumbled to the ground, steps from her waiting hands.

"No," Amoret whispered. She clambered towards him, echoing her denial. "No, no—"

She knew the spell would be weaker in her state, but it wracked a gasped sob from her body to know it was just barely insufficient—so worthlessly, achingly close. Her reserves were depleted, her fingers numb from the effort. Whatever renewal the birds had offered had spooled apart, fractals of light once again taken from her.

She was so tired of losing. All she had asked for was him.

Amoret's resolve calcified.

"No," she growled, braids whipping her cheeks in the tempest.

She collapsed beside him and shook. As if he were stubbornly asleep, as if by choice he had damned her again, she clutched him by the shoulders and demanded—after all he had put her through—that he was going to get them out of here.

"Come on," she rasped, "Tom."

The eagle's glare centred on the two of them and the open door, and the storm lashed inwards as it jettisoned towards them.

It was trying to pull them back.

One of her hands, fingers slippery with blood, dug into the wooden sill. It wrenched some dislodged bone or muscle to stretch her arm so far above her, and her nails—her stupid fucking nails—were bitten to the plates. The wind was too strong. She had nothing to hold onto. Cries trebled from her clenched teeth as her fingers began to slip. Slivers of wood protruded from the skin. She was clutching Tom with pathetic strength not to flee but just to stay rooted, too slow to escape the eagle's imminent strike when she bowed her head as a last defence, praying the first collision wouldn't kill her.

Light gleamed from the talons. They swiped through the space between Amoret's eyes, a sharp gust of air drawing prickles down her neck. But death did not come.

Tom's arm wrapped around her waist as the wind suddenly spun, inversed, and pushed them from one side of the threshold to the next.

The door slammed shut behind them. The castle's corridor was warm.

Amoret couldn't risk a moment's respite, curled over Tom and pressed tightly to his chest—she barely had to scan him for injuries to know they did not have time.

And her own pain... The flicker of adrenaline was strange, before the comedown. Her heart was beating so wildly alive, and yet she felt the stickiness of blood enveloping her, and saw the left of the world in red, and there was a spinning, drunken quality to every sensation. The pain was distant. She was here.

"We have to—"

"I know."

Tom sounded wrecked, but he was fine. Alive and here and hers.

"Where did... you said—" Amoret gasped upon trying to move— "Oh. Ow. Ow."

It was a nightmarish sort of agony, actually, in that she sensed it more acutely than she understood its specificities. Her brows furrowed. She could hear the sound of some bone in a hundred pieces with complete uncertainty as to which bone, where? Her shoulder. Her ribs. Her spine. So much of her was battered that it all blurred together, but—yes, the adrenaline was slipping. Addled and without magic, what she could deduce was that she was bleeding out, and she could not heal.

That was bad.

"We have to... you said..."

Tom hadn't said anything. She had read a look in his eyes and taken it as an answer.

Emphatically, the rose-and-thorn door shrieked, cursing at her in a language she didn't understand. Pounding rattled the frame from within. Sawdust shook from the hinges.

Tom nodded, lips parting and closing as if just realizing the metal taste in his mouth.

"Tom." Her wobbly tone bordered on a question, a dare. Incredulous. How dare he? She was dying, and he was—

The door changed.

It took a moment to settle, warping between colours like the ones she'd asked him to summon that morning. Had time sped up rather than slowed down? It felt so long ago. These colours were muted, too pinkish, red—and, right—every colour was red to her now. She nearly laughed.

Amoret couldn't tell if Tom's rough wince was from the exertion or something else: a wrongness like snapping the necks of animals made of you, or making an enemy of the soul you split.

She wondered what that was worth to someone like him, who had discarded it so easily.

But then the door settled, and her heavy eyes were drawn from his. There was merciful silence. Above them, the door had turned as plainly wooden as the meadow's exit, but along the panels were painted motifs she had to squint to see: little sailboats, flowers, cats and constellations.

It was... her.

Tom tested something. A murmuration Amoret couldn't hear, her gaze pinned dizzily to the door. Something glittering affixed to his palm.

She finally looked at him. Summoned from the hospital wing, swigged back in a second, he'd drunk a phial of something. Amoret didn't need to know what it was to know it would not satisfy the healing he needed, but—if he was to carry her again—a necessary start. Some of his wounds closed partway, the swelling receded, and she knew things were bad because as soon as the fog cleared from his eyes he was tightening his grip, breath hitched at the sight of her.

"Amoret—"

He summoned another phial, his magic well and truly returned in the absence of the beast, and tipped the potion toward her without pause.

Amoret turned her head, frowning, drooping from his lap. "Don't... Tom. I can't."

"You need to—"

"I can't heal."

His face fell. She couldn't think of a word for it. No one had ever looked at her like that before.

Then there was something frantic happening. To her. Outside of her. She had very little part in it.

The door creaked open, her body an anchor in high tide. Waves carried her along. They smelled like someone she knew, softer than she remembered but desperately ebbing. She sagged against the firm sway of them, resigning herself to this single familiarity. It was night above her: warm and dry and indigo, and the sea was impossibly small if she was seeing it right. It curled beside a distant, garden-bowered homestead, a flash of colours and flowers Amoret had forgotten. The dream was sweet. The house had a green door.

This impossible sea brought her there.

She smiled, hazy, vaguely aware of thick pillows beneath her but unsure where they had come from. Hadn't she just been running? She was fighting for something. She was frightened for it.

The top buttons of her dress were undone to expose a collar redder than she imagined it should have been. White ridges jutted from the left side of the bone. Fluid lapped from the gaps. Hands were pressed against it, limbs to a kind, worried face she saw between long blinks. Syrupy lamplight kissed his taut cheeks. He was saying something to her.

"I don't..."

She couldn't hear it all.

"How to... for... God... tell me how..."

He swore, pacing, slamming pretty cabinets, and she knew he was doing something important, so she tried to pay attention.

She didn't think he had found any recourse as he returned beside her. She was on a bed, she thought. His weight dipped the quilt beside her, a hand on her cheek, the other pressed so firmly to the red stain on her dress that she groaned, snapped somewhere away from the dream.

She heard him.

"Tell me how to fix it, Amoret."

He sounded small, bruised. She knew his voice. Knew that it shouldn't have sounded like that.

Amoret searched her memory for more of him. She recognized his hands, the way they looked unmarred instead of shaking and dark and damp, cradling white petals. Snowdrops. Gifts for her. Had he brought her gifts once, her impossible sea? She grimaced to recall it, her mind roaring at the attempt, but she forced herself through. She... yes—she had asked him for them: flowers mended from scraps she plucked to teach him, the stems still dirty, remade anew as all things were upon resurrection.

"Heal," she breathed.

His mouth parted, head gently shaking. "Amoret..."

She took his hand, still placed over her cheek, and remembered him. "Tom."

Her breathing stuttered as the pain returned twofold, clutching in weak hands what she now realized was a terrible wound, and then surrendered herself to the dream. She hummed in broken notes, her roses in a vase at the open window, lace curtains fluttering in the breeze, the smell of blackberry bramble and salt. Amoret didn't know what else to give. She had no idea what she'd been fighting for, but it seemed too long.

So she let go.

And Tom healed.

[ . . . ] ( tw: gore ) hey guys is it romantic to save the person intrinsically soul-bound to me from the corporeal manifestation of my soul? is it romantic to wage war with half of myself to save her? is it romantic to have meticulously designed the future she's dreamed of her whole life as her only pocket of refuge to ward her from myself? just wondering haha i think it's probably fine

^ alternatively, amoret.  /  word count. 9954

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