บท 278: Some Things End, and Others Begin

Upon hearing the sound of fluttering wings, Oleandra spun around in time to see an owl land on a nearby gravestone. It was holding an envelope in its claws.

"And there's the letter from the ministry for using magic outside of school," Oleandra grumbled as she untied it from its leg. "Well, at least now they'll know I'm still alive."

Oleandra waited for the usual banter to come from the partner of her heart; but none came. She was all alone in her own head once again.

"Oh. Right," she said out loud, her voice trembling slightly. "Viviane's gone for good, isn't she? And Harry's probably dead, too…"

The void in her heart grew slightly bigger. When Viviane first manifested herself, Oleandra had wanted nothing more than to be rid of the woman who lived rent-free inside her head and who watched everything she did, but after spending so much time together, Oleandra had come to enjoy her company.

It had been comforting having a sort of older sister who always knew the answers to her questions. Viviane and the other shadows had always been there for her, to help guide her decisions and offer mental support. Hot tears began running down Oleandra's cheeks, her shoulders heaving as her body was racked by quiet sobs. She would never be seeing her again.

The owl hooted impatiently, so Oleandra wiped away the tears and shook her head helplessly; she had nothing on her but the clothes on her body, so she couldn't give the owl a bronze Knut or an owl treat for its trouble. After watching the owl fly off, hooting disdainfully, Oleandra dispassionately tore the envelope open and read through the letter's contents. She was slightly surprised to find that the letter was not from the ministry, but from Hogwarts.

"It's just the list of school supplies I need to buy for this year," she sniffed, not even knowing why she was still bothering to speak her thoughts out loud without Viviane to hear them. Probably to curb the loneliness, she briefly thought to herself.

At that moment, Oleandra could scarcely care less about buying school supplies. She was currently stuck in a graveyard in the middle of nowhere, so the first thing to do was to get her bearings.

"Right," Oleandra sighed. "Cloak the Lethifold's gone too, so no more flying around…"

The problem with external sources of strength was that they could be taken away; nobody understood this better than Wizards, the vast majority of which couldn't cast magic to save their lives without a wand. A cursory check of her pockets later, and Oleandra found them empty. She had been wearing her Basilisk-skin combat robes at the time of her 'death,' but those weren't the clothes she had been buried in. She was currently wearing flowery white funerary robes.

"Cambio Exuvia," Oleandra said, clasping her hands together.

Oleandra's combat robes instantly appeared on her body, replacing the funerary robes. It briefly occurred to her that she might be summoning the robes right off the back of one of her sisters, if they happened to be wearing them at this precise moment. She hoped that wasn't the case, or they would now be naked.

She then checked the new robes' pockets. No luck; none of her belongings were in there. She didn't have her trusty pouch, which meant she had nothing: no Muggle identification cards, and no money. There was nothing to do but to wait for the rescue party; a supposedly dead girl had just used magic twice while being underage, so surely someone from the Ministry would be coming to collect her.

Oleandra plopped herself down on her own tombstone and thought about what she had dreamed. Even though Viviane and the shadows had sacrificed themselves and taken the brunt of the Avada Kedavra Curse, Oleandra evidently hadn't escaped completely unscathed.

"My soul must have taken a severe blow, having an important part of itself wiped away," she theorized to herself. "As a result, I fell in a reparative coma, and right before she died, Viviane must have put my body in stasis; otherwise, I would have died of thirst before my spirit could have had a chance to repair itself."

Her theory was correct. Before being able to wake up again, Oleandra had needed to put her shattered soul back together, and so, her subconscious had taken the concept of the maze of hedges from the third task as a basis for the dream she would navigate. The maze had led her to finding the scattered parts of herself and of her past selves in order to reorganize them. It would have taken longer still, had Viviane not taught her the basics of Legilimency…

Oleandra's lips quivered, but she resisted the urge to cry again. Viviane had done so much for her; she had been her teacher and her friend— she had helped save Astoria— and she had sacrificed herself for her. She wouldn't have wanted her to fall apart, she would have wanted her to be brave. And brave she was going to try to be. She shook her head, shooing away the sad thoughts as best she could.

However, there were two things that bothered her about her visions:

Firstly, Merlin had spoken to her from within Viviane's memory, as if he had known that thousands of years later, she would be watching. Oleandra could scarcely believe it was possible to be that all-knowing, but how else could she explain what she had witnessed?

"For any who might be listening in, I have a few words of advice. Have faith; for what you seek is closer than you might think. And should you ever find yourself lacking a weapon to call your own, look to the Vale of No Return, in the forest of your ancestors," he had said.

She frowned; what had Merlin meant when he had said she seeking something? She had wanted to win the Triwizard Tournament, but that was done, so apart from that, what else could she possibly have been looking for?

Secondly, the memories from her early childhood deeply unsettled her. Her own mother had tried to kill her moments after giving birth to her; the Healer had explained it away as postpartum psychosis, but Oleandra wasn't so sure. Hadn't Viviane claimed that her own human mother had treated her the same way?

"They say mothers know their children the best," Oleandra murmured. "Could she have noticed something alien about me…?"

Oleandra tapped her foot impatiently. What was taking so long for the Ministry to come looking for her? Bunch of incompetents; she hoped they had at least caught Peter Pettigrew and his strange lizard-like homunculus.

But after waiting another hour, she had to come to the conclusion that nobody was coming for her. Her apparent death had probably caused some clerk to remove her Trace's records from the register of British underage Wizards and Witches.

"Should you ever find yourself lacking a weapon to call your own," Oleandra muttered, examining the remains of her broken wand. "I am going to need a new wand, and something tells me Ollivander isn't going to have anything better for me than the last one…"

Viviane had told her that she had known the first Greengrass; she had lived in the forest of Brocéliande, in France. A rudimentary plan emerged in Oleandra's head; if her temporary death had removed the Trace from her, then she now possessed unprecedented freedom of movement… as long as her survival remained a secret awhile longer.

"Step one, get out of this cemetery," Oleandra said out loud. "Step two, find out what day it is. Step three, go to France and find this forest. Step four… I'll see when I get there."