your disobedient servant, fabian prewett (disobedient) wrote in raveled, @ 2017-03-25 21:12:00 |
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The sun had gone all the way down and this far out in the north, there were no muggle-made lights to muddy the sky. Only moonlight and starlight filtered down to touch this place, which was what made it so good for charging ward-related crystals for a season or four. It was May Day, an esbat and a turning point, if a minor one, of the year, and time for Fabian to collect some items that he'd charged magically and left to marinate in moonlight, or under the earth and the moonlight. He'd brought Ione with him; like him, she had fresh stones ready to work with and possibly to retrieve. Just because he hadn't seen her here before didn't mean she didn't have her own ways of finding out where to go. Her mother probably knew better places than this. Fabian drew his warmth-charmed cloak close around him him as he set his broom down, well away from the stones across the water and the area where the work was usually done. Wizards had been performing ritual magics in this part of Orkney for millennia, both the kinds of things Fabian and his professional colleagues got up to and, he suspected, older and Darker magics as well. But there was no stain of Dark power on the site, and that was enough for him. "I know, it's bloody cold," he grumbled, anticipating Ione's objections as a chill wind swept through. "But there's no Muggle lighting at all here, so it's perfect for what we need to do." This was one of Ione’s favorite parts about her job. The parts where she was (nearly) on her own, without anyone getting in her way or telling her what to do. Being out alone in nature, preparing for the future. Truth be told, she was always fascinated by this part of magic. The magic that had nothing really to do with her. Just a crystal in the ground, soaking up the moonlit sky, and absorbing everything around it. Doing it’s work, when she wasn’t even there to tend to it. She appreciated things that didn’t need attending to. Her own warming cloak was pulled tight around her, but as she had her hands full, it wasn’t doing as nearly a good job as it should. Whether she had been here before was anyone’s guess. Her mother did have much nicer places, or at least nicer for her. She liked to do this on her own time, in her own space. Alone being the key word. Though if she had to be around anyone, she was glad it was Fabian. As they walked, Ione found herself humming something her father had taught her. A rather somber and haunting melody, one perfect for being out in nature at this time of night. Despite the cold, she had been kind of lost in thought, when she realized Fabian had said something. What? Oh. The cold. “People freeze to death out here, I’m quite sure. It’s fine. I’ve been through colder.” At least she was dressed for the part. Lots of layers, inside that warming cloak. “I wasn’t complaining too loudly back here, was I?” "No, but I've been out here with people who do complain. Loudly. And not just me." He stopped outside a circle of carefully-laid stones: stoned he hadn't personally laid but which he'd helped shore up in the years he'd be coming. "Here we are. Or at least here's my spot. Anything that doesn't have a circle round it, you can make your own. Just mark it off so nobody bothers it. You'll see others wandering by later. The only rule is no shop talk. Or dueling or shedding blood." While Fabian theoretically had access to better working grounds (and did sometimes use them), there was a value to seeing and being seen at the more public working places. "But that won't be until later. We've probably got an hour or so. Benefit of starting from Hogsmeade." Fabian knelt in the cold dirt inside his own working circle and began to lay out a cloth containing the stones he was bringing for working purposes: the ones needing a good dose of moonlight and the ones he'd be burying for charging purposes. Those would be replaced with the charged stones from under the circle by the time they left. Ione started looking around for a nice place to do her own work. “Well then what are we supposed to talk about? The weather?” Not that she was going to be talking to anyone else out here, but him. It was too cold to duel, so she was fine. When she found a decent spot where no one else had seemed to claim, she knelt down and started to do the same. Though she could have used her wand to do most of the digging, she used her hands instead. The ground was cold, and nearly frozen solid, but she found her own hands better at the work instead of magic. She picked up one of the crystals in her dirt stained hands and looked it over. “Can you imagine being the first person in the entirety of the world to look at crystals, and tell someone .. oh you know, I think we should bury these. Maybe they thought it would grow into something, like a tree.” And then when it didn’t, they realized it had other sources of power. Fabian had brought a lovely little silver spade with him to do the hard work of opening the near frozen ground without magic. Well, minus whatever magic was on the spade, which had to be significant since it cut through the near-frozen sod like a hot knife through butter. "They are seeds in a way. Just seeds of something very different to plants. What I wonder is how people discovered what to do with them, how they used them, how they developed the magic of the runes and all of that. You know, the Irish used to be able to perform transfiguration into swans--not like animagus transformation where the animal chooses you, but choosing the form, too--and I wonder how they learned that. Old magics like that are powerful, and dangerous. There's a part of me that thinks if I could do anything I wanted, if money were no object at all, I'd do what Rodolphus Lestrange is doing and research the ancient magics. Not just the ones in books and scrolls, though: the ones too old for all that, even." “I guess you can look at it like that. I still don’t know why you’d look at these and think plants though.” Maybe they would though, she didn’t know. It was a bit like asking which person thought it was a good idea to milk a cow and drink whatever was in there. That person had to be brave indeed. “I think people were a lot more tied to nature back then. Considering that you had to be well connected to it, or you died.. They didn’t have stores. I imagine when you take care of the land, and the land takes care of you, and there’s a symbiosis.. Maybe it’s easier to do things like that.” It was just a guess, one that she didn’t have anything but intuition from. One crystal went into the hard earth, and she started to cover it up. “Wandless magic? Beyond all that? The trick with that I guess, is that it’s not written down in books to just research it. Obviously. I wonder if having all the money in the world would even help, when trying to figure out things like that.” She hadn’t heard that was what Rodolphus was up to, but she wasn’t that surprised. But Fabian had hung up on something Ione had said a moment before. "Sometimes," he said, "I think that's part of their logic. Hating Muggle technology, I mean; that we're so far from the land and the natural rhythms of life that we've lost a lot of the old magic and may not be able to recover it." When she couldn’t feel her hands any more, then she grabbed her little spade and started to dig. Sure she liked digging with her hands, but sometimes the ground was just too frozen. She knew when she was defeated. By dirt. “Of course. People fear what they don’t understand. They worry that soon magic will be completely bypassed. Who wants to do magic, when you can watch television? Everyone always worries about the old things going away. The new things taking over, and you can’t get the old things back.” She understood that. "Nothing's going to bypass magic," Fabian scoffed. He sat back, putting his spade down for a moment. "Even I don't think that. But we use magic for smaller things now, and at less risk. I'm not just talking about things like Dark magic now, but--the way the Ministry forces people to register. Not just werewolves and the like, and the way it treats fully magical beings and creatures as second class, but the way it's illegal to be an animagus without registering. That last is just about control, and keeping people safe--not even from other wizards, but from themselves." Ione couldn’t help but tease him, by rolling her eyes a bit. “You clearly haven’t seen MASH.” It was much less risky to take someone out with magic. It definitely made things impersonal. Detached from the consequences or the guilt. It felt completely different than say.. throttling someone with their bare hands. Not that she had any first hand experience in that. “Keeping people safe by registering everyone? You really believe that?” she asked, actually curious about his answer. There was a fine line between all of those things. "Yes and no. More like, 'we're safe if we know about everyone who can do these powerful things' and obviously in terms of the werewolves, there are other motives. Also in a big organisation like the Ministry, there are a lot of people with conflicting interests--" a point that their legal education had made clear, if only so they could pry apart those interests when necessary "--which is a whole nother tray of flobberworms. Also the 'we' I was thinking of doesn't necessarily mean all wizards. "But it's the whole way the Ministry handles things as well as the people who make up the Ministry. I'm sure, bringing it back round to the Lestranges, that Rodolphus does things that are technically less than legal, and yet I'm sure whatever risks he's taking are known and understood, even if they're ones you and I wouldn't take in his boots. But if he were in Mysteries, under the control and supervision of the Ministry, a lot of the same things are almost certainly legal, or at least covered up so well we'd never know if what they were doing was illegal. "So I think there's safety, and there's control, and they overlap, but they're not the same thing." Fabian glanced up from his work to get a look at Ione's expression as best he could. After all, Rodolphus was her cousin in some respect by marriage. (They were all cousins at some remove. That was what blood purity meant.) Her expression was decidedly in the dirt, as she was carefully covering up one of the crystals with the stuff. What he said about Rodolphus didn’t phase her at all. Of course he did illegal things. Everyone knew that. “No, you’re right. They’re not the same thing. It’s when they get all mixed up together, that’s when there’s problems. Everyone always thinks they’re right though. Morals are a tricky subject.” Especially among their lot. She didn’t know what she really thought of it. Sometimes she thought about being a werewolf. Sure she knew that it was probably a pretty terrible existence, but she couldn’t help but be in a bit of awe about it. If she was one, the thought of registering made her stomach turn. Of course she’d want to do it, in that same regard, so that people didn’t think she was a complete monster. “Privacy only comes in small batches,” she said with a shrug. Another crystal covered up, and Ione set about digging another hole. “In the end, it doesn’t matter if someone is registered or not. Known about or not. They’re still going to be feared. I’m not sure it would make much difference in people’s opinions,” she said after a moment. Fabian could have argued with that. There was some truth to it, and at least one respect in which he thought Ione was completely wrong. (And that was without knowing what she was thinking.) "As long as we know who to watch out for, in some ways it doesn't make much difference. Not as things are. With privacy not being universal, as you say." The real question for so many of them, and this, Fabian thought, was how they differed from him, was that they--the Death Eaters for sure, and a lot of the old wizarding families in general, pure or not-quite-pure--thought there wasn't much danger in Dark magic, and Fabian did. But just as he'd come to understand that blood purity was about arbitrary lines designed to keep power in the hands of the pure(r)bloods whose fingers were tight on its reins, he could see how they felt the same about Dark magic. And, technically, anything they did to harm other people was Dark, more or less. Every time they dueled, Fabian was doing things that were at least somewhat Dark. And he'd killed someone, too, even if it hadn't been an intentional murder. How far down the same road had he gone? He stopped and closed his eyes, concentrating on the feel of the cold ground on his knees and the dirt between the fingers of his glove and the stubbornness of the frozen sod as he laid it over the crystals he'd been placing. The kind of distraction he was feeling couldn't harm the crystals according to the doctrines he'd learnt, but Fabian wasn't entirely sure. He had the techniques to clear his mind and so he did. "And you're right," Fabian agreed after a long silence. "Morals are a very tricky subject." Her lips rubbed together in thought. “Must be always on the lookout for the things that go bump in the night,” she said half heartedly. Toying with dark magic wasn’t exactly her forte. She wasn’t really good at it. Not that she couldn’t be cruel, or full of anger. Her first instinct was always to lash out with her fist, than to grab at her wand. At first she had thought her tendency for physical altercations came out of the fact that most wizards weren’t expecting it. In the time it took someone to pull out their wand and say a few words, she already had a hold of their hair and was pushing them into the dirt. Now she thought that it was self protection. Instinct was to always defend herself, and that was just easier to do with her body than her magic. Whatever the reasons, she too could understand why they all clung to the old. The older you got, the harder you clung. That wasn’t true in all cases. Some. Holding on to things wasn’t something she was very good at either. Nothing was permanent, and everything fleeting. “I think I’m just about done here,” she said in return. “Pretty sure even with my cloak, I can no longer feel my fingers. You’re going to have to make me tea and soothe my poor hands.” "Yeah, I've laid all mine out too." He glanced around; others had started to arrive and Fabian definitely didn't want to talk to them, not in the mood he was in. Ione probably didn't either. He pushed himself to his feet, ignoring the twinges brought on by cramping muscles and achy joints in the sub-freezing weather. Offering a hand to Ione, he added, "Come on, let's go somewhere warm." Ione wasn’t interested in talking to anyone else either. She was just kind of watching him. With a weird look on her face. Not that it was a bad look on her face, as she was watching him. Just something.. Unreadable. She took his hand and got up to her feet. “Yes, please. I think we should get waffles. Because for some reason, I’d really like waffles. Are you into waffles?” |