Sylvia Mordue
October 29, 2019 8:21 PM
Sharing the misery by Sylvia Mordue
Sylvia really had not felt much since returning to Sonora, effectively without Nate, even though they were haunting each other like spectres. She felt the raw mawing claws of grief, but that was more like everything had been ripped out from inside of her than anything else. It did not feel like a feeling, so much as the absence of everything. Occasionally, she felt a flicker of something like annoyance. This was primarily directed at other people's happiness. How dare they be so content whilst everything was so wrong with her own life? She knew that was ideal, of course. People being happily focussed on themselves instead of noticing and commenting on her misery, that was what they were all supposed to want, but still it grated on her. As did being told to sit still, be quiet, wait for it to wash over - 'it' seeming to include losing Nate. How was she supposed to just sit back passively and wait for it all to feel better?It was an itch she rather wanted to scratch. She could not, after all, take out the misery she was feeling on the people responsible - the awful man and ex-Aunt Cynthia were out of her reach, it really wasn't father's fault, and Nate... Nate should not have abandoned her but she could not yet bear to concede that he really had, nor to punish him. She wanted to, in that she was angry enough to, but even after everything, she wanted someone other than Nate to bear the brunt of it. She could, however, make anyone else who had annoyed her over the years suffer. If she could not have control of her own life, she could kick and tear at other people's.
Not directly, of course. She had to be smart about it. But where her lessons currently failed to stir her curiosity, the research she was doing here was making her feel alive. It made it feel like her blood was pumping, like her mind was awake again as it searched, hungry for answers rather than shut up in its own misery. She remembered various revenges and pranks appearing in the pages of her Mount Ivory books. At first, she was annoyed that she didn't have those at school with her, but then she realised it might be better not to, if that was where she was taking ideas from. She had flicked through some of the library copies when she knew herself to be unobserved, gathering ideas. She had found a good punishment there for Jasmine, but not yet for her first target. Jasmine would be here a while yet, and there were other people whose misery was time sensitive. The books had, however, got the wheels turning, reminding her that a few spiteful words could do more damage than many hexes. She just had to work out a way to start a rumour or to say something unkind without it being obvious it was her. In her books, the girls slipped things into the school paper. Sylvia was not convinced of her ability to get something salicious published with anonimity. What she had composed in her head was not worthy of going into the paper, and if she turned it into anything more clever, like a real riddle, there was every chance that the dense population of Sonora would not get it.
Whilst it was not worthy of the paper, her composition was fit for a bathroom wall. It was a low act, graffitiing a toilet stall and she knew it, but perhaps that made it even more suitable. It certainly made it less likely that people would connect it with her. She had taken other cares too, with how her message was conveyed. Inking it on with a thick pen, rather than by magic, rather than with the more witchly medium of ink (it was also terribly hard to write well with a quill on a vertical surface) and using small, printed capitals, that most anonymous of handwriting. She didn't know whether it was impossible to trace handwritten messages by magic but it was certainly harder. She had also gone as far as checking the school charter and her rights to privacy, and she was fairly sure that being so heavy handed as to tear the place apart with all manner of complex tracing spells, if they even existed, was going to be considered over doing it for a bit of graffiti. At most, they would get a group lecture on respect, and a few of the more likely suspects might be pulled in for questioning - the icing on the cake being that that was most likely to be the Muggleborn students. Besides the fact that she, obviously, would never ever do such a thing, she was still clearly grief stricken. She had taken care to keep the cold, dead stare and hollow cheeks on show, even as her brain came back to life.
The only magic she had used had been a concealing charm. It would have been very obvious, after all, if the words appeared just after she was in the bathroom. She had therefore concealed them for a few days, and then used a casual 'finite' one day as she was passing the bathroom, trusting the range of her spell, given that she could visualise exactly what she was cancelling. That little trick was one she had picked up from overhearing Dorian Montoir enthusing to his long-suffering girlfriend about all the tricks he'd used in Teppenpaw's theatre performance, which just went to show there was no such thing as wasted eavesdropping, even if at the time she had been hoping for something more juicy. And thus, as if by magic, but actually by carefully planned hand, the words appeared on the wall of a stall in the girls' second floor bathroom:
What's the point of acquiring gemstones? Yes, they're pretty, but they're overly expensive and usually inert.
13
Sylvia Mordue
Sharing the misery
1413
1
5