Absit Omen RPG

The two Aurors looked at each other, communicating silently as the others had. They cradled their cups of hot chocolate and stood tall in their coats, but their gazes were grim, much like hers.

They asked the same questions she'd already been asked. Until the last one - is this over?

The house elf thought of the two dead bodies in the field, buried some distance from the greenhouses and the cottage. It was over for the dead. One Legilimens, who Lorelei had kidnapped to save Leander. And one muggle, who had poked around the wards one day until Lorelei had invited him in from the cold.

What a dedicated person you are, Lorelei had greeted him, offering him tea and a spot by the fire.

The muggle had spoken of the strange lights and sounds that his father, Alan, kept ringing him about, and did Lorelei know anything about that? It was probably nothing, but he was worried about his father living alone out here. He hadn't seen him for the holidays, and he didn't visit often enough.

The house elf looked up at the sky and finally shook her head. Enough time had passed that she could pretend to have forgotten the question, she could pretend that she was shaking her head at the memory of the muggle thanking Lorelei for the last words he would hear. Lorelei had called him dutiful. A good son. He'd never noticed Jeeny on the cellar steps, tapping a warning every time Lorelei had lied.

What else?

Jeeny looked down at the ruined photo and the warped frame in her hands. A white circle blotted the image of the greenhouse and marked the pentral's escape. Lorelei hadn't told her what to do with the pentral's empty prison.

As she paused, the wood of the coffin radiated heat. The frame slipped a little from her fingers. The folks above seemed like good people. Dedicated, dutiful. Devoted.

Her hands trembling, the house elf slowly held the portrait over her head, looking at the Aurors with wide eyes. With one finger, she tapped the image of the land beneath the greenhouse. One tap. Then two.

There! Below us!

A low rumble shook the bottom of the coffin. The house elf kept her arms stretched up, the picture in her hands, and the hope in her mind - was it over?

Could it be over, without more death?

She wasn't hers, the pentral told herself when Lorelei's cold hands plucked the locket from the wall. The thud-thud-thud of Lorelei's heart warmed the walls of the locket prison, and she thought of the ticking of the clocks in the house she'd once called home, and the way her footfalls had sounded out of rhythm when she'd walked down the corridor of stolen faces, her steps going thud-thud-thud, her heels hurting just because Lorelei wished to make an entrance.

Even then, even when she'd looked at the spirits trapped under glass and her eyebrows had twitched downward and her mouth had softened, she'd felt more sorrow than guilt. Her hand had clutched Lorelei's wand and her hand had wielded cruel magic but not her soul, not her will, not the very lack that had kept her from what she'd wanted in life. 

She wasn't hers, the pentral thought when Shadow Man watched the scrying mirror beside Lorelei. Did he remember her? Did he remember that he'd almost set her free? He needed to remember, because she couldn't promise she would. The warmth of the ritual candlelight kept drawing her against the hinge of the locket, a new bright thing competing with her memory of the burning cottage, and the more distant, hazy realization that that wasn't the first time a house had burned down around her.

She wasn't hers, the pentral clung onto her existence as Lorelei's skin and hair warmed underneath a brighter sun and the heat of a gentle breeze that felt as close to life as she could get. She shivered against the goosebumps of Lorelei's skin when the witch ventured again and again into the depths of the cold tailor shop where the whispering voices found her and told her secrets Lorelei would never know.

Where was she? One day Lorelei removed the locket from her neck and placed it on a thin, flat surface. Lorelei closed the paper walls until there was no light and no air. A talon scratched against the box and it wasn't Zee-por-ee! with the star for an eye, but a creature she'd used to love. The owl lifted the box with her in it and went to the window. Was this it? The world dropped out from under her and the sun felt so close and she was soaring, far away from Lorelei and the brother, away from Shadow Man and ara-fell, into the sky with the flapping of wings.

She wasn't hers! The beat-beat-beat of the wings faded to the back of her mind and she pushed her limbs against the locket and imagined that she were taking a flying leap into the lake and this moment was hers, the moment of suspension, the memory of Iona's laugh as she splashed and said she'd gotten there first.

Her cousin was always one step ahead of her. In life, in death.

As long as the pentral flew, she was free.

She wasn't Hunt's, though. She didn't belong to her. The pentral had remembered herself all this time, despite the horrors wrought by the shell of herself.

He couldn't, he said.

You can, the pentral encouraged.

I won't possess you, she continued without a trace of irony. I won't get very far before I...

She hesitated. She wasn't sure what would happen. She wanted nothing, but she wanted the stars, the moon, the sun.  This existence measured by inches and marked by the slow thud of Lorelei's heart, held together by a golden hinge and clasp, her features fading, her hair a streak of rust, her wispy limbs forever curled; it wasn't an existence at all, and if he opened the locket, she might make it to the window, and she might not. Her time was running out.

She won't be able to trap me again.

The pentral understood this instinctively. A third attempt would be her last.

Ah, thank you! She remembered what she wanted now. She didn't want home, or safety, or any of the things she'd cared so much about in life. When the other pentrals had escaped, she'd still been stuck.

I want to be free, she thought more easily and hopefully this time. Could he hear her? The warmth on the locket had returned, but his voice sounded cold.

If he let her out, she would thank the Air-uh-fel, and then she'd go, past the dozen suns and the storm of feathers, out the window or out the door.

She missed the other spirit almost immediately, repeating its chime in her head. It meant help was coming. As the suns orbited the shadowed man, she hoped the spirit wouldn't forget her for what was brighter and more alive.

Footsteps sounded; a heavier, reluctant sort of step that reminded her of Lorelei's brother.

She went very still within the locket, and startled at the human touch on the metal. It wasn't a hand closing around her, suffocating, but only the tip of a finger, restful, steadying the locket-prison.

A human mind, reaching out.

For a few seconds she stayed still, then reached a wispy limb to the inside of the locket where the hand was pointing.

What had she meant to ask? It was so, so important.

It was so, so strange that this shadowed man had come over to do the spirit's bidding. Her surprise helped her shape her thought into words.

Are you trapped or free?

Oh no, not the right question.

This post is written from the point of view of two pentrals (written collaboratively by Elle and Sparky!)


Flung around a tower where the walls were closing in, the pentral pressed her wispy limbs against the metal confines, trembling and flickering in the midst of the attack. Not Lorelei, but a lightning strike against the oak wall, a sunset sharp as knives and the bright sun scanning side to side.

Let... go!

Her words were carried on a breath spent from too many fires burning year after year. She took another breath to reform her plea, bracing for the next clap of thunder.

But the next clap never came. Instead, the almond-shaped orange eye came to peer into the locket again. The dark pupil widened as if greedily sucking in all the light it could from her hiding place, and then got very small, showing streaks of alien gold in the striated pupil.

“Tzippori!” A harsh human voice cut through the air. “Leave it alone!”

There was a rattling sound, like bones clacking together. The skeletal-armor spirit retreated, leaving her alone with the fading heartbeat.

Let-me-out-and-I'll-tell-you, let-me-out-and-I'll-tell-you, the pentral thought again and again until the words became nonsense words without place or time. The moment had passed, hadn't it? The storm had rolled in and left just as quickly.

---

It could have been seconds, minutes, or hours when the next intrusion came. But her second visitor was not an interloping spirit hiding inside a strange bird-skeleton. Instead, it came as a rolling silver fog, feeling its way carefully around the cracks in the locket.

Sorry, we’re sorry, the pentral spirit told her. It doesn’t know any better. It can’t understand why we’re still here in this place.

The pentral drew back in the locket. A person! Speaking to her! Not Lorelei. Who did this once-human voice belong to? Who was Zee-por-ee-! with the star for an eye, imploding from the black hole within? Who was the shadowed man who kept so much light around him?

She only had so much time before her words would fade, too. She paused for several seconds or minutes, forming her question.

You're... free?

Her first words were careful, each one measured and cut from her soul.

How-why?

Like always, more words tumbled out unbidden. She watched the cloud between the cracks, and forgave-forgot the bright storm. Her attention often drifted to the brightest flames, the loudest clacking of bones.

If the other pentral had seemed at all cautious at first, it grew quickly in its boldness. Tendrils of mist crept around the edges of the locket, pressing at the corners, feeling along the cracks.

Its answer came in a racing mix of words, sensations, and pictures. Surrounded by darkness, weighted with anxiety and fear. It had raced from one flickering bit of safety to another, fleeing from the ravenous, shadowy maws that were greedy for its light. Then a bright spot in the darkness. Warmth. Light. Respite. It had charged towards the dancing candle flame, but then a glass prison had closed around it again, and it had feared that its freedom was once again lost.

But then something unexpected. The mist of the pentral spirit quivered, as if uncertain how to put the feelings into words.

This time, the prison had opened for it. It had been set free to dance around and around a lantern. It had darted between a hundred burning candles on a dusty chandelier, burned hotly in the face of danger, and bravely charged straight into the gaping mouth of a different hungry-spirit to drive it off. There were still dangers lurking, still shadows outside (Lorelei Hunt, the pentral whispered fiercely, the name that had been seared into each and every one of them), but they were less frightening now. Instead, it had a blue-glass home that it could curl up tightly inside, and the shadowed man, friend-protector against the darkness.

You should come out, it told her. It’s better in the light.

The pentral flickered faintly in frustration.

She reached a wipsy limb to the hinge of the locket where the crack was widest at the sides, to the presence full of light and joy there. She'd tried to escape before, and there was something engraved on this prison, some piece of her, possibly, that kept her from getting out. Her reach was like a hand on a window, a reminder that Lorelei Hunt had made the pentrals the same, whatever their differences in life would have been. Here, there was only free and not free. And yet here, she still couldn't escape and the other could.

Though she didn't know the shadow man, and she didn't trust anything made of glass, she felt the other pentral's sincerity.

She tapped the latch and exhaled her request:

Ask shadow man to open it.

The other pentral hovered for a moment around the edges of the locket, still prodding for an opening, pressing for her foggy tendril. It gave a twinkling chime of agreement, and then quickly withdrew.

Evening at the Black Chimaera. This post is written from the point of view of a pentral that Lorelei has trapped in a locket.


When the warmth of skin and heartbeat vanished, the pentral woke. She hung, suspended not by a pale neck, but by something thinner, something less alive that curled out of the wall of oak like a twisted fingernail.

The pentral hung silently, getting a sense of the room.

Pinpricks of light flickered in clusters, reflecting off a smooth, round surface as still as a lake. Shadows threatened on the walls, and one shadow was a wizard who chanted words like a song and scolded the bones that skittered freely on the floor.

Clocks did not tick in this place, and if there were mice, she couldn't hear them, and if there were a window, it must be shrouded by a curtain, and Lorelei should be a few rooms away, perhaps having found the brother she'd brought back from the dead. A thin, red thread of amusement drifted on the locket's chain. The beat-beat-beat of Lorelei's headache still echoed between the golden hinge and clasp.

The pentral tumbled in on herself in the smallest home she'd ever had. Waiting.

This post is written from the point of view of Jeeny, the house elf.

Sometime later...

They'd found her. Someone had thought to ask where the pentrals had come from. They'd perhaps spotted the air holes poking out of the flower bed, or the loose paving stones beneath the table in the greenhouse. It had taken them time to reach her, but here she was. She heard them say that the ground floor of the house was still standing, the fire put out. Smoke drifted in the air, and the wind chime still rang on the porch.

They worried for their fallen. She didn't know, just by their words, if they meant their comrades were dead or alive, but altered, certainly, changed - yes.

The house elf held a broken picture frame in her hand. It showed a photo of the cottage and the bright white blot where the pentral had made its escape. Jeeny traced the initials -L.W.- on the back with her thumb. It was all she could do for it now.

Red-robed humans looked down at her. She thought she saw confusion on their faces, but also a touch of relief. It was just her. The Wold children were not here.

Time was the danger and the hope. Her final orders were to remain in this coffin, be silent, do nothing magical, and wait. The more time she had, the more hope she had that something within her would find freedom. Perhaps the damage to the cottage she'd lived in for several months would grant her freedom, or perhaps the absence of Lorelei and the locket around her neck.

She needed time, and she and Lorelei both knew it.

But with time, the danger grew. It grew along the walls of the soil. It grew in blood-red vines that crept around the edges of the wooden coffin and pushed against the slats beneath Jeeny's feet.[1] Far above, frost gathered on the glass panes, but here below the house elf's feet were growing warm. She shifted on her heels, then on her toes.

Had they found the other coffin yet? The one buried in the other greenhouse? Empty, save for the other broken picture frame?[2] She imagined it too, was cradled in vines. She sniffed the air, smelling no more smoke than usual.

If these humans would leave this greenhouse and this land that wasn't theirs, they would be safe.

Why she still cared, the house elf didn't know. She supposed it mattered, a little, that they had so carefully removed the dirt above her coffin, and had so carefully lifted the wooden lid to find her there. If they hadn't been so careful, she would not be looking up at them now and they would not be looking down at her.

Can you speak, one asked. Can you move, wondered another. She should stay there for now, the wariest said. The house elf remained silent, her face tear-streaked but her eyes dry. Look, you witches and wizards. Look at the sweat on her brow. Look at the size of the coffin, how spacious it was.

The wards around both greenhouses had fallen during the battle. They had fallen from above, from the sides, and below. 

Listen, the house elf wished she could say. Listen to the gnomes gleefully burrowing into the soil.

The house elf looked up at two new faces - one older man and one redhead. Unlike the others, they wore muggle clothes.

Leave! The house elf lifted her foot as if to stamp it, then thought better of it. She widened her eyes.

What could Jeeny do? What hadn't Lorelei thought of?

They only had a little time left.

1.	Someone familiar with herbology might recognize the vines as looking similar to a fire seed bush.
2.	The picture would show the cottage and the farm from another angle. Lorelei wrote the initials W.W. on the back

At the Black Chimaera, Lorelei stood beside Aviad and watched the scene unfold in his scrying mirror. Her gaze tracked every moment that could be caught between the foggy border on the edges of the mirror. Well done Aviad, she'd said earlier. Now bring me the scene again.

Her gloved hand still clutched the mirror shard she'd stolen from the Wold's farmhouse. In its reflection, a fire raged in the upper story of the cottage. Lorelei curled her fingers over the shard again and again, flashing the light at the pentral in her locket and the pentral in her head, barely cognizant of the warmth of the enchanted shard, or of the locket around her neck hanging limp and cold.

The dementors kept coming, drawn to the pulsing glow in the two greenhouses. More Ministry officials appeared on the farm, flinging gray-white patronuses at the dementors. Carstairs and Trevelyan must have called in help.

If they wouldn't believe a child like Wesley Wold, at least they believed their own eyes.

When the Aurors dispelled the wards around the greenhouses, the dementors surged forward, their ragged cloaks blotting the sky and their bony hands reaching for the same light and life. A wave of gray-white dancing creatures pushed them back. Patronus against dementor. She'd give them this - the Ministry had learned a lot these past few years.

The two pentrals floated out of the greenhouses. They soared down the path. There! The Aurors had left a gap for them to escape.

You've lost them. Two more you've lost, the pentral in her head crooned. Lorelei barely heard her, leaning toward the scene. Pentrals were who they were. They would feel the life around them.

They stopped in mid-flight. They were close now, to the line of Aurors defending them. Go on!

The two pentrals pushed back and forth at each other. They swirled together, shining brightly, their glow reflected on the outside of the greenhouse glass.

Lorelei cocked her head. What were they doing?

Their gap to freedom was closing - closed. The Aurors ran around like red ants, their line nearly breaking against the dementors. These pentrals were ignoring danger and life to embrace one another.

The embrace only lasted seconds.

In one rush, the pentrals turned on the closest human. Light! Life! They surrounded the human in a fog. All the shield spells in the world, the red robe, and the badge could not stop them. The other Aurors tried to defend their comrade. But they weren't prepared, Lorelei saw, to sing to souls, entice them, and give them somewhere safe and nice to nest that wasn't a body. Trick them, trap them, or they will always turn on you.

The human was on the ground. Alive? Dead? The remaining pentral pressed against the human, looking for its other half. The pentral circled the body, but there was no place for it to go, and the other Aurors were crowding in. Wands raised against the pentral they'd tried so hard to save.

Invade, Lorelei silently urged the pentral from afar.

The pentral did not. 

It streamed into the sky, following a patronus that was chasing a dementor. Lorelei almost laughed. Go on! Risk it!

The pentral veered just as the patronus dissipated. It flew to the cottage with the dementor on its tail.

It dipped in circles around the upper story, peeking into the child's bedroom - light? Life? Death. The dementor caught the end of the pentral. Took a deep breath.

The pentral fought, shuddered, slipped and shook free. It careened shakily around the cottage rooftop once more, its form becoming as gray as the smoke billowing out.

It flew above the bedroom where Lorelei had started the fire.

It paused for what felt like hours.

The dementor dove for it. The pentral dove - fell? - into the flames.

Lorelei squinted, even glanced at Aviad. Had that really just happened? The fire in the cottage kept raging. The dementor stopped short, mouth open in a silent scream. Then, too late, a patronus chased the dementor off.

Had the fire killed the pentral? Lorelei couldn't be sure. The reflection of the flames danced in her eyes as she leaned close to the mirror, her lips parted, about to smile.

In the end, the pentral had succumbed to its instincts. It hadn't flown into the sky, or into the grave, or into a person, or into a dementor, but into fire. The core of life.

Lorelei blinked back an itch in her eyes. Her brows rose at the front and her mouth tugged downward. Her face first felt the sorrow and tried to send it to her body, to make her know it, to match the foreign thoughts in her mind.

Lost... lost... separated forever. One lost to a body, the other to fire. The dementors were retreating, but the pentral in her mind had never been more present. Lorelei's cold hands clenched, the sharp shard digging into her palm.

Light. Warmth. The spirt rushed over the flowers and vines and the black pots and the black soil that held them, and over the scratched and worn wooden table, finding warmth in each life, finding promises that everything was alive.

It could almost feel the metal of the greenhouse frame, and the caulking between the glass panels, and it could feel the heat and humid air beneath the glass, and the layer of shimmering magic coating the underside of the glass, and the sunlight pressing on the outside of the glass, and the sense of clouds in the distance, more substantial than the spirit's own form.

Every time the spirit reached for the glass, it felt warmer and brighter, but it couldn't find a way out. The door wouldn't budge. The rafters wouldn't shudder. There was only the narrow tube in the ground that the spirit had just escaped from.

Where was this and what was this? The pentral flitted to the other side of the greenhouse, trying to focus on what was less alive. The land was alive, but neglected. There was a cottage next door, made of old bricks, a patchy roof, and a window that looked into a child's room. The window where the pentral could remember looking out at the two glass houses.

The pentral fell away, clinging to the damp ground. It thought it had escaped the photograph of the sad cottage, the broken frame left in the dark below, but Lorelei Hunt had only trapped it here, in this same place, inside a larger glass frame.

It would never be home.

---

The other pentral couldn't go down into the grave, not with the little one sitting there, her not-quite-right-sized soul shining out of her big eyes. It was dark in the ground and the pentral wouldn't go down there again. It missed home, where there had at least been a warm fire and a family and the one that the pentral had loved most.

Its first trap had been the home that they'd shared, the sun a constant, false light in the sky. Only when she, Lore, had walked by with a light cupped in her palm, could the spirit feel what was on the other side of the hall. A night sky, framed against the black wall. A shadowed figure in the picture, always there, always watching. Its face and name a mystery.

The second trap had been smaller than the first. The pentral had made it smaller still, hiding in the cellar of that pale cottage. There were no windows in the cellar, and the pentral could pretend not to hear the tapping of Lore's fingers on glass.

So it knew this place, this third trap. It could almost feel the other greenhouse, and the rundown cottage next to it.

Most of all, it felt the other pentral, shining brighter than the sun in the sky.

Who was this? The pentral mimicked the other's movements, flitting to each wall and corner that the other went to, cheek to cheek, and continuing the dance even when the other sank towards the ground.

And who were these two figures between the glass houses? Light and warmth? Alive. Just like the girl and boy[1] who had freed them once.

---

While the bright mists beckoned and swirled in the two glass houses, a dark cloud gathered on the horizon.

The dark cloud split, and clawed one, then two, black scratches in the sky.

The black scratches grew cloaks and hoods, and floated over the barren land, over the corpses buried in the land, toward the glass houses in a silent rush of hunger.[2]

1.	Abby and Calix
2.	a pair of dementors

As the Aurors inspected the child's bedroom, a few things happened at once.

Outside - a white glow filled each of the two greenhouses. The glass panes acted like a magnifying glass, brightening the wispy form growing within each garden.

Inside - the smallest toy duck broke away from the family of ducks and knocked into Solomon Carstairs' foot. It let out a loud quack and beamed a bright yellow light[1] directly at the unfortunate Auror.

1.	Ducks, always ducks

This post is written from the point of view of Jeeny, the house elf.


In the dark, in the confines of a coffin six feet underground, a house elf cried as she broke the frame of the portrait in her hands.

Silent tears, a constant nuisance, streaked her cheeks and dripped off her jaw and chin most days, whenever Lori-Lore-Lorelei wasn't staring at her. Sometimes, she didn't notice until they dripped onto the cloak she was mending or the floor she'd just cleaned. Tears did her no good, and still, she cried.

She had reason to cry in the total dark and silence, the slats of the wood coffin hard against her back. Tears made her nose stuffy in the already stuffy space, and though she could use magic to make a light or bring in more air, she'd been ordered not to. She'd been ordered not to do many things, and ordered to do much worse.

She'd been the one to dig beneath the two greenhouses. She'd been the one to make the two coffins. The coffins were incredibly large and could fit several humans side by side. But only Jeeny sat here now.

House-elves grow attached to houses, her mistress had told her, and nothing got past her, not Jeeny's growing tolerance for this land, for the little treasures the children had left in the floorboards, for the peeling yellow shutters that needed painting, for the little nails she found and twisted up in the floor for her mistress to step on.

Their contract would break soon, one way or another.

Sorry, so sorry, the house elf told the pentral in the portrait. Sorry, so sorry, she'd thought in the cellar as Lorelei's locket had swung close and the house elf had kept her hands at her sides.

The painted canvas tore, and with a gust of air, the pentral streamed out of the broken portrait, hovering over the house elf.

The house elf squeezed her eyes shut, all her defenses raised. She wasn't sure why, exactly, the pentrals left her alone, but they had at the lakehouse and this one did beneath the ground[1], terrified of the dark but rearing back from her, and then finding the narrow airhole tube in the coffin, and streaming up through the flower bed and into the light-filled, fragrant greenhouse.

Tears streaked down the house elf's face, imagining the pentral's short-lived joy.

---

The elf snapped her fingers, apparating into the second coffin beneath the second greenhouse, where she would have to stay until this was over. She broke the second portrait, her hands shaking. Another pentral slipped free.

It too, hovered over the house elf, terrified of the total darkness.

It too, found the airhole and flitted into the second green garden.

The house elf curled her knees up to her chest. Her final orders. She might just be the safest one here, in the dark.

1.	I'm thinking because she's a house elf and not a human

On the upper floor of the cottage, Lorelei stood with her back to the window and watched the two wizards approach. Their outlines blurred in the enchanted mirror that hung on the wall, but they strolled up like they already owned the place. Two of them, just like Aviad had said.

Aviad was a useful charmer  - a rare combination in a wizard. She appreciated the pentrals he'd returned to her these past few months. He would learn something today.

When the wizards frowned up at the cottage, Lorelei's fingers curled tightly over her wand. Carstairs! He still walked like the Gryffindor who had once shunned her.

No manners. Neither wizards removed their caps as they barged inside. Jonas Trevelyan, who took such care to knock at the homes of muggles, left dusty bootprints on the porch step. Their low voices sounded, warning her as the jingle-jangle of the wind chimes should have warned them.

Aurors, but only two. Only two, but such prizes, both of them. There must be more waiting. Aurors should always believe children, Lorelei sneered, tearing her gaze from the mirror.

She removed the glass cover from the lantern flickering in the window. She held the flame to the curtains, letting the fire catch the sun-paled linen fabric. Once caught, Lorelei draped the flaming curtain over her bed and stepped back. She'd start with fire, like Abby Reid had.

What next?

Her gaze snapped to the window, her eyes brightening with the slowly growing flames. Despite the closeness of the light, the pentral in the locket around her neck drew in on itself.

Lore turned, aiming her wand at the mirror. She stepped towards it as the pieces crashed down, plucking a large, jagged shard off the floor with her gloved hand.

The pentral in her head stirred at the shatter that felt like freedom, but wasn't.

Lorelei slipped the mirror piece into her pocket. As the yellow curtains blossomed orange and red, tendrils of smoke pressing against the wooden beams of the ceiling, Lorelei apparated away with a pop.

Early Evening, March 20th


Sasha Schlagenweit lived in a nice apartment building, more suited for professors than students. Out of all his residences - his many, lavish residences - Lorelei had selected this one for several reasons.

As Lorelei was outside, pretending to struggle with a huge basket of flowers in her arms, a muggle moved to unlock and hold the door of the building open for her.

"Wow, thank you!" She mimicked Abby's tone and voice. No house elf, no dog, no gates or fancy wards to stop her. She just strolled through the mail room, up the stairs and to the floor where Sasha Schlagen - no, Sasha Snow lived.

Lorelei Hunt had never heard of a more ridiculous name.

She brought him the first day of spring, not winter. At Sasha's front door, Lorelei set her basket of flowers on the welcome mat.

She gently unrolled the trellis out of the basket, the flowers already tied to the twine. The trellis was nearly the same height and width of the front door when she held it up. The hall was empty, so she used a few sticking charms to attach the flower trellis to the door. Red peruvian lilies, red amaryllis, red clematis, red peonies, red azaleas, red tulips - red cascaded down, smelling like the greenhouse gardens she'd abandoned, her last gift from those glass coffins. 

Lorelei stood back, admiring her work. The petals curled out from the door, soft as red hair.

In the center of the flower trellis was a heart. No, not a real heart. A heart made of red oleanders, smelling faintly like apricots.

Smelling nothing like the poison they were.

Lorelei had one more thing to add.

With her gloved hands, she reached into the bottom of the basket. The cardstock had plain black lettering on it. Lorelei hung the note from the doorknob, and let a curse fly silently from her mouth. Anyone who touched the note for a second too long would soon find themselves suffering the same pain that poisonous flowers brought.[1]

Her work done, Lorelei picked up her basket and left.

---

1.	Poison effects such as irregular heartbeat, blurred vision, vomiting, fainting or disorientation, possible death