CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Curses and a Cloak
“Ancient Runes is the most interesting class taught here at Hogwarts,” said Professor Jack Montgomery as he stood at the front of a dimly lit classroom on the second floor of the castle. Lily, Gwendolyn, and Marlene were seated around a rough wooden table, and it was the first day of classes. The trip on the Hogwarts Express, the Welcoming Feast, the Sorting; all were over and their third year had begun. Lily was excited to be back with her friends, of course, but was even more excited to begin her new elective classes, starting with Ancient Runes.
The Professor continued, his face illuminated by a few flickering candles on the head table: “I know you’ll probably hear that in most of your classes today”well, perhaps not History of Magic”” Gwendolyn snorted and smiled at Lily’s right. “”but I alone am telling the truth. Ancient Runes are the most fascinating aspect of Magical culture. They contain our history, they are our history. From the very beginning years of magic wizards have experimented with runes, and now you, thousands of years later, get to interpret them. This class will cover not just typical Scandinavian or Norse Runes, but magical alphabets and inscriptions from all epochs of history. Many of them are as old as magic itself, older even than this very school. They can be enlightening, humorous, puzzling, and”more often than not”dangerous. If you think studying manticores and werewolves raises the hair on the back of your neck, imagine unearthing a curse tablet from two thousand years ago. You can’t read it, you don’t know its purpose, but you know it is sinister.”
He paused and let his words sink in, and with great effect: Lily felt a chill run up her spine. She knew that she was going to love this class; the professor was so charismatic! He was a bit dishy, too, Lily reluctantly let herself admit. Young”maybe in his late twenties?”with dark brown hair and piercing blue eyes. He had a very serious attitude about him”like Professor McGonagall”but she could tell that he was going to be incredibly fun, too. Lily stole a glance to her right and saw that Gwendolyn looked positively smitten. Gwen turned her head and gave Lily a smile bursting with elation. Lily twitched the corners of her mouth into a grin, shook her head at her friend, and focused her attention back on Professor Montgomery, who had just turned on a slide projector. “Before we start translating,” he said, waving his wand to further dim the lights in the classroom, “I want to give you a brief overview of the different runes and codes we’ll be studying over the course of the next five years”that is, if you stay with me.” There was no doubt in Lily’s mind that she would.
He tapped his wand on the machine and the first slide appeared, an old metal tablet with Latin writing carved on it. “This is a curse tablet from the Roman Empire,” he said. “We’ll be starting with these because they are easiest to read, being in the same script as English. But that doesn’t make them any less exciting: the Romans were heartless when it came to their curses. And by translating and reading just a few of these, you’ll be able to grasp the formula that many curses take, and this will aid you as we plunge into more difficult runes and languages.”
He tapped the projector again and a new tablet appeared, this time made of stone and in strange characters. “Etruscan,” said Professor Montgomery. “From a civilization in Northern Italy that predates the Roman Empire. Not much is known about the Etruscans”at least to the Muggles, that is. Wizards, however, have put forth the internal hypothesis that it was an early wizarding community, and that’s why the Muggles have such trouble translating the script”what’s recorded is composed entirely of spells. The grammar and syntax would be wholly different than any other script Muggle archeologists have encountered.”
Once again, he tapped the machine and a third slide come into focus. It was a picture of Stonehenge. “Stonehenge is not, as some think, a cluster of rocks left by extraterrestrials or some strange otherworldly race. We have found tablets with inscriptions,” he said, clicking to the next slide, “very near the site, and have good reason to believe they are related, and that the stones were placed in this configuration for some sort of magical ritual or game by ancient Celtic wizards.”
Gwendolyn’s hand shot up. “But haven’t archeologists dated the stone to older than 2000 BC?” she asked, without lowering her hand.
Professor Montgomery raised his eyebrows appreciatively. “Ah, we have a history buff! Well, Miss...”
“Hightower,” she supplied. “Gwendolyn Hightower.”
“Well, Miss Hightower, you are indeed correct. Muggle archeologists date the stones to between 2500 and 2000 BC. However, Wizard historians have reason to believe that the ancient Celtic wizards”if they were indeed the ones who built the monument”placed a charm on the stones and on the ground surrounding them in order to make them appear older than they are. We’ll be discussing the reasons for this later in the course, but you are very keen to bring up this fact.”
Gwendolyn nodded, blushing. It wasn’t unlike Gwendolyn to raise her hand in the middle of professors’ lectures, but Lily had rarely seen her do it with such enthusiasm, and was proud of her pureblood friend’s knowledge of Muggle archeology. Lily could see why Gwendolyn was so entranced”it was fascinating stuff. Professor Montgomery kept the slideshow going for another ten minutes, and the students saw inscriptions and tablets from all over the world: Mayan, Greek, Egyptian, the list went on and on. Each culture seemed to have some feature unique to its tablets and scrolls, and by the end of the show, Lily was practically itching to get her hands on a Runic Dictionary. Gwendolyn looked like she was about to faint out of sheer glee.
As Professor Montgomery brought the lights back up, he smiled a knowing smile. “I bet you had no idea all those wizards and wizarding cultures had such a fascinating past. Professor Binns thanks me every year, because after my Runes students go to his class, they suddenly show a much keener interest in history.” The students laughed and Lily couldn’t help but notice Professor Montgomery’s dimples as he flashed them another smile. “Are there any questions before we move on?”
Gwendolyn’s hand shot up again, almost slapping Lily in the face in the process. “When do we start?” she exclaimed, again without waiting for Professor Montgomery to call on her.
He laughed, and Lily swooned just a tiny bit. “Well, Miss Hightower, I want to start examining the Latin tablets together in class today, but your homework assignment tonight will be to begin to familiarize yourself with the Etruscan script. We’ll start looking at those tablets very soon, I imagine.”
Lily caught a sidelong glance at her friend and knew that this year was going to be very interesting. If Gwendolyn weren’t careful, she would find herself very much in love with Professor Montgomery! Lily let out a small laugh as the class opened their books to the section on Latin curse tablets and noticed that Gwendolyn was staring openly at Professor Montgomery. Lily gave her a small nudge and Gwendolyn’s head shot down to look at her book, but the smile remained etched on her face like spells on a Roman tablet.
***
“These curse tablets are weird,” Lily whispered to Gwendolyn as they sat together in Ancient Runes the following week. Their last two classes had been spent poring over curse tablets from the Ancient Romans, and Lily was thoroughly creeped out. The dark room and cold, dusty stones hardly lent themselves to cheeriness.
Gwendolyn, on the other hand, was as cheerful as ever. True love will do that to you, Lily surmised with a smile. “I know!” Gwendolyn whispered as she flipped a few pages in her Latin-English dictionary. “Don’t you love them?”
Lily wasn’t so sure about that. They had become pretty familiar with the form and pattern of the tablets over the course of the week and they were, in a word, sinister. First of all, they were almost always inscribed on lead. Tiny, tiny slabs of lead. Professor Montgomery had to cast Engorgement Charms on all the tablets, making them about ten times their size just so the class could read them. And they all followed a similar pattern: repetition, constricting words, dark deeds”reading the tablets made her positively claustrophobic, as if the bad magic was creeping in from all sides.
“Bind him, bind him, bind Phillius, born of Himera…”
“Cast him down, cast down his soul…”
“Make him and his things cold; constrict his tongue…”
Lily shivered. The maker of this tablet certainly didn’t like poor Phillius at all! She wondered if there were any Dark Wizards who still used curse tablets today. Not like they would be necessary, seeing as there were”unfortunately”much more powerful spells that could do the trick. Curse tablets probably didn’t even work. What had their most recent Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, McQuillen, said? In order for an offensive spell to really work, you had to be clearly focused on or looking at your opponent? Professor Viridian had showed them as much in his many, many demonstrations during first year. The curses on curse tablets were so vastly different from any sort of spell they had learned so far.
Of course, Hogwarts students wouldn’t be learning dark magic. At least, Lily hoped not. Still, the thought of someone writing a curse tablet about her was not a pleasant thought.
She looked down at the table, surprised to see that she had breezed through her entire stack of tablets. Gwendolyn and Marlene each had a few to go, so Lily raised her hand. “Professor Montgomery?” she asked. “I think I’ve finished with my stack.”
He looked up from the tablet he was inspecting, his blue eyes twinkling. “Oh, well done, Miss Evans. There’s a full box at the back of the room if you’d like to get a little bit more practice in before the end of the period.” He bent back down over his desk, furiously flipping pages in a dictionary of unknown provenance.
Lily wandered to the back of the classroom. There was still a good bit of time before the class ended, so she decided to rifle through the box and pick a few more tablets. The back wall of the class was a veritable Ancient Runes library with dictionaries, grammars, and textbooks lining the shelves on the walls. Illuminated tablets and scrolls were hung on the walls, and there were multiple boxes full of little pieces of stone or scraps of parchment. Lily felt like she was looking at the storeroom of the British Museum. It was wonderful.
She found the box labeled “Roman curse tablets” and started rifling through the enlarged stones, when something caught her eye. It looked like a normal curse tablet, but there was definitely something wrong with it. Something was off... She picked it up and weighed it in her hands. It seemed to be the same weight as the others, and it was made of lead, too. The writing seemed to be all in Latin, so that wasn’t it. What was it that made her feel so... scared? Yes, this tablet felt somehow darker than all the rest, as if the magic concealed within it was real. Fresh.
“There are a lot of tablets back here. Do you think Montgomery has read them all?”
The voice came from her right, and shook her out of the strange trance caused by the tablet. She was still holding it, totally transfixed, but she managed to tear her gaze away and look at the person to her right. It was Severus Snape”the Slytherin that James and Sirius often called “Snivellus.” She had hardly ever spoken to him”apart from her very first night at Hogwarts when he had taken her boat on the shore of the lake. That was hardly enough to form an opinion of a person, but the boys had done plenty to fill her in with their personal interpretation of his character. Still, fully ninety percent of what James Potter and Sirius Black said could not be trusted (in her opinion), so she decided to disregard it all. The Gryffindors and Slytherins had Defense Against the Dark Arts together, and as far as she could tell, Severus was very intelligent. She smiled at him. “I’ll bet he has. He seems to really love the stuff.”
Snape’s eyes lit up, and Lily got the distinct impression that he had not expected her to answer. She was overcome by a fleeting feeling of pity for the boy, but it evaporated when the bell rang, signaling the end of the period. Lily looked up, startled. She must have stared at the tablet longer than she thought. Severus also seemed startled, for his head twitched a little and he cleared his throat. “Okay, well, see you next class.”
“Yeah, okay,” Lily said, watching him shuffle away. She waited until he had gone before taking another look at the mysterious tablet. All the students were gathering their things to leave, but Lily knew she didn’t want to”no, couldn’t”put this tablet away. She quickly pulled out her wand. “Reducio,” she muttered, sticking the shrunken tablet in the pocket of her robe. Casting a quick glance left and right to make sure no one had seen, she made her way back to the table where Gwendolyn was asking a few follow-up questions of Professor Montgomery. And though Lily knew it probably wasn’t against the rules to take a tablet from class, she couldn’t help but feel guilty as she walked into the hallway, dragging a reluctant Gwendolyn with her.
“I wish we had double Ancient Runes everyday,” Gwendolyn said with a sigh, turning her head back in the direction of the classroom as they headed for the Great Hall.
“You’re just in love with Professor Montgomery!” Marlene giggled.
“Well, that’s certainly true, but I actually enjoy what we’re studying in there, too. Don’t you, Lily?”
Lily was quiet, thinking about her find. When she felt two pairs of eyes on her, however, she snapped back into focus. “Oh, yeah, definitely. It’s great.”
Should she tell the girls what she had found? Yes, she probably should. She wanted to know if they felt the same strange pull that she did.
But, another part of her wanted to keep the tablet to herself, to not share it with anyone. Maybe she should work on translating it first and then share the results with them? That would be good enough. Yes, that’s what she would do....
***
“Give me the potatoes, Sirius, or I’ll write a curse tablet about you!” Gwendolyn teased one Friday morning at breakfast.
“Oh, I’m so scared!” he replied from his seat at Gwendolyn’s left, using his wand to nudge the bowl of potatoes just out of her reach.
“You should be”they’re really creepy. All this stuff about binding you and squishing you, taking away your stuff, making you unable to speak… say, maybe I really should write one,” she said with a wicked grin as she lunged for the dish.
Sirius scoffed and stacked his own plate high with potatoes, then passed the bowl down to Peter on his left. “You’d just like some one-on-one time with Professor Montgomery, from what I’ve heard.”
Gwendolyn’s eyes widened in shock and her face flushed nearly as red as the ketchup Sirius was squirting on his plate. She knew she would be trapped in a lie if she said anything, so she settled for stammering a bit.
Sirius nodded wisely and took a big bite. He smiled, exposing the half-chewed mush rolling around in his mouth. “In that case, dear Gwennie, feel free to curse away! But tell ol’ Monty it better be an extra strong one to knock me down.”
James watched the exchange and smiled. He had overheard bits of the girls’ conversations about Ancient Runes and it sounded pretty interesting. Sometimes he was visited by brief pangs of regret for not signing up for the class, though he was pretty happy with his electives so far. He was not as happy watching the potatoes loll around in Sirius’s gaping maw as he rattled on about Gwendolyn and Professor Montgomery, but some things just could not be helped.
He periodically scanned the Great Hall searching for two things that would brighten up the cloudy September morning: one being Remus Lupin returned from a night of lycanthropy and the other his owl bearing a promised package from his father. Remus was nowhere to be found and James hoped it hadn’t been a terribly rough night, but he could not focus on that much longer as he heard the familiar squawking of hundreds of owls swooping in to deliver the mail.
He recognized his family’s owl as it made a beeline straight for his goblet of juice, landing with surprising deftness on the brim after releasing a largish brown package from its talons. James felt a thrill of excitement run through his veins”he had a suspicion what this package contained, and if he was right… well, suffice it to say that his remaining five years at Hogwarts would be a lot more fun.
He ripped open the card on top of the package and found a note written in his father’s familiar scribbling hand:
Your time has come, my boy. Enjoy this cloak as I have enjoyed it, as my father did, as his father did, and so on and so forth into the farthest reaches of history. I would say “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” but that is a very small list that I have every confidence you and Sirius will disregard entirely. Wear it proudly, James, but not showily. Not everyone can fully understand the significance of what is contained in this package, though I know you can. I am proud of you, son. --Your Father--
Goosebumps erupted on his skin as James lifted the package in his hands. It was light”much lighter than he expected. It was taking every single ounce of determination he possessed not to rip it open at the table, but that would only arouse questions and suspicions”two things the boys very severely disliked. Instead, he directed knowing looks at Sirius and Peter who both abruptly dropped the forkfuls of food they were aiming at their respective mouths and hastily excused themselves from the table. Not the smoothest operation, but still: time was of the essence!
“Lily?” James whispered as Peter and Sirius hurried back toward Gryffindor. “Will you tell Remus to meet us in the dormitory if he comes down to breakfast?”
A brief look of confusion crossed her features but then she must have remembered that yesterday was a transformation and Remus would be arriving from somewhere other than the dormitory. She nodded and gave James a small smile. He felt a fresh batch of goosebumps raise the hair on his arms as he smiled in return and then hurried to catch up with the boys.
“What was that all about?” Gwendolyn asked as she craned her neck to follow the boys’ breakneck path out of the Great Hall.
“I have no idea,” Lily answered honestly and turned back to her crossword puzzle.
***
The Invisibility Cloak was everything James had expected and more. It had been in his possession hardly more than five minutes before he and his friends had developed a copious list of things to do while concealed under its folds”for once they couldn’t wait until curfew fell in order to test it out.
Remus had joined them, fresh from the Hospital Wing and with a new scar to show for it. He held the cloak in his hands and gazed at it as the four boys sat on James’s bed. Janus Killeffer, the other third-year Gryffindor, was nowhere to be found, and James was glad”he wasn’t planning on sharing this secret with Janus, who was friends with a great many Slytherins.
“This is incredible,” Remus breathed. “I’ve never seen anything like it!”
“Of course you haven’t,” James said. “It’s absolutely one of a kind. And it’s mine!” He was positively giddy.
“Do you mind if I try it on?” Remus asked, and James nodded. The boy slipped it over his shoulders and was gone. “WOW! This is unbelievable! You really can’t see me?”
“Not one bit. You’re just a disembodied voice.”
“Fantastic. Think of the things we can do with this! The places we can go! Sirius, we can test out your theory of the passageway behind that statue of the goblin.”
James had rarely heard Remus so excited about anything. He surmised that it was not often Remus felt so totally invisible: for once, no one could see his scars. James was excited about the prospect of adding secret places and passages to The List, but he had his own aims for the cloak as well. Suspicious by nature”though he preferred the term curious”James had some investigations to undertake. True, most of them centered around denizens of Slytherin House, but there was at least one inhabitant of Scarlet and Gold Gryffindor that he wouldn’t mind following a bit…
***
Five nights after she had found the mysterious tablet, Lily was holed up in the library. It was almost nine and she knew she would be unceremoniously booted from her literary enclave very soon, but she still had not finished with the translation. The strange tablet she had stolen from class was not, as she had first guessed, written in Latin. Well, it was in Latin characters, but there seemed to be some strange cipher in place. The letters were out of order and the grammar made no sense, at least not compared with what Lily had seen in class so far. She had spent quite a few hours alone in the library, poring over book after book, but with no success. Whoever had written this tablet was either very stupid or very smart”and her hunch was siding with the latter.
“Did you take that from Professor Montgomery’s class?”
Lily very nearly jumped out of her chair at the question. She was so wrapped up in the tablet and its mystifying aura that she had not noticed Severus Snape standing at the table, his dark eyes alight from the candles surrounding her stacks of books. How long had he been there?
“I’m sorry, what?” she shook her head and rubbed her eyes in a vain attempt to clear the fog clouding her mind.
“Did you take that tablet from the Ancient Runes classroom?” he repeated.
“Oh, yes, but I’m going to return it!” she said defensively.
He smiled. “I’m not accusing you; I think it’s neat. What does it say?”
She instinctively pulled the tablet closer to her, not yet willing to share its secrets”though what good were they if she could not unlock them? “Um…” she began, looking down at her haphazard collection of scribbled notes. “I don’t actually know. It seems to be in Latin, but with a twist, or something. The grammar doesn’t make any sense.” She looked up again at Severus, and wondered if the eerie sensation she felt was from the tablet or the image of his pale face swathed in candlelight.
“Do you mind if I take a look?” He seemed almost hungry to get his hands on the tablet”did he feel it, too, whatever “it” was?
Lily hesitated again. Part of her wanted again to keep the tablet to herself, but this part was slowly being overpowered by another sense that Severus could help translate, or at least could appreciate the mystery with her. “Sure,” she said after a moment and cleared a space for him to sit down next to her.
She scooted the tablet in front of him and watched his eyes flick back and forth over its surface. He muttered something under his breath”perhaps he was reading it aloud to himself? Whatever he was doing gave Lily the chills and she let out a nervous laugh and rubbed her arms. “Cold in here,” she said by way of explanation, and Severus smiled.
“There’s something strange about this one, don’t you think? It doesn’t feel like any of the others we’ve read.” He looked at her as he said it, as if hesitant to throw out a theory like that. As soon as Lily nodded her agreement, however, his smile widened and he dove headfirst into an ancient dictionary.
He was flipping furiously through the pages when Lily heard what she swore was a sneeze coming directly from across the table. Severus must have heard it, too, for he jerked his head up. “Who’s there?” he demanded to complete darkness. No one responded. “I thought we were alone,” Severus said quietly, his dark eyes narrowed.
Lily nodded and squinted her own green eyes, trying to penetrate the darkness lying just outside the path of light created by the candles. No luck. She glanced at her watch. “Oh, it’s almost nine. We’d better pack it in for the night or we’ll get thrown out.”
Severus nodded, then helped Lily start to gather up the books. “Do you mind if I keep the tablet tonight?” he asked after a minute.
“Oh… Um, yeah, I guess that’s fine,” Lily said, nodding. “D’you want to… meet in here tomorrow night to try and work on it again?”
His eyes widened and a smile crept into one corner of his mouth. “Yeah, that would be good. Eight o’clock?”
“Sure.” Lily shoved the last of the books into her bag, watched as Severus tucked the tablet carefully into a fold of his robe, and then walked with him to the door.
They parted as he headed for the Slytherin Common Room, but as she headed through the twisting corridors back to Gryffindor, Lily couldn’t help but feel that she was being followed. Maybe it was just leftover jitters from staring at the peculiar tablet all night, but Lily was certainly relieved when she was once again ensconced in the familiarity of the Gryffindor Common Room.
Of Cauldrons and Comrades by LuthAn
Chapter Notes: Hello hello, dear readers! Apologies for the extended pause between chapters--I had to digest Deathly Hallows! And what a digestion it was. I had always planned to make Lily and Snape friends (or at least acquaintances), but I've had to speed up the timeline just a bit. It's still not totally canon-compliant (hence the Book 7 Disregarded warning), but it's as close as I can get for now! As always, thanks to Nielawen for beta reading. Enjoy!