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Disclaimer: I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us
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The Memory of Water
This was written for a challenge at the WhySnape? Forum. The requirement was to mark what would have been Snape's 50th birthday, on 9th January 2010, by writing about the Voldemort wars as seen from the viewpoint of someone who was not one of the main characters, nor closely involved with the main action. They were also supposed to be based closely on the author and how they thought they would really have reacted in that situation, but since I already have a partial self-insert in the Mood Music/Sons of Prophecy sequence, I skipped that bit.
They say that the black-haired boy could talk to snakes, but that was before my time. That was the other boy, of course, the one who grew up to be one of the four first chiefs of the school here - it was he brought us here. He came from a place of many waters and he liked anything odd, not human. He had a snake, a basilisk, and when he quarrelled with his lover and left we could hear her twisting through the pipes for so long, so lonely without a mate or a master.... When she was young they say she used to come out of the pipes into the loch and swim, and we had to stay away from her gaze, but that was before my time.
Then the other one, the one called after a puzzle-with-words who wanted to devour death, he let her out and let her kill but she didn't feed, though we fed her fish, from pity, through the pipes. Did he eat the bodies himself, that he kept from her, do you know? He was born the same year I was, but you air-breathers age too fast.
Not that we.... See we have gills, here, under the ear and we can live under the surface if the water breathes, if it's live and singing with oxygen, but where the water is dead we have to come to the surface for air, being mammals like you, and if we can't then we too can drown.
Did you think we were fish, like those silly drawings of merwomen with scaly tails? Can you see me sitting on a rock, luring silly sailors to their doom? No, we came from lemurs a long time ago, like you, but we went back into the water to live with the dolphins and seals. We went down to the sea but the first one, the one who hatched the basilisk, he came out to us in a little boat and talked to us and told us about this new college of wand-magic that he and his friends were starting, something to rival Dún Scáith, and how we could come to this loch and be part of it; we could share - "pool", you say, like water flowing together? - our knowledge and learn together and in the early days, when there were less than fifty human students, we studied with them and spoke with them, we taught them the Long Dance and the Dance to Summon the Fishes and the Soundless Song, and they shared their wand magic and their spell magic with those of us who had the skill.
But as time went there were more and more of them and they went away from us, they lost interest in us - they only wanted to know about one form of magic, their own, and we were allowed no part in it. We had been here almost since the beginning and been part of their college but their new rules forbade us from bearing wands or learning what they taught here. We became menagerie animals to them, like the squid. One of you humans brought him here when my grandfather was little and called him "kraken", they fixed him up with magic so he could live in fresh water, the same way they did with us and then left him here with no mate, to be looked at, to feed on the fishes we needed for food, and try to feed on us. We can go down to the sea when we wish, if we swim the streams by night: there's a channel underground to the wizards' village and from there it's only a little way, our warriors go down to the sea and come back wearing shark teeth and big scars but the kraken cannot pass: the way is too shallow for him.
Sometimes he tries to talk the way the krakens do, with the colours and patterns flashing across his skin like clouds in the high sky, but there is none here to answer him.
This speech we are having, this is for ray-dee-oh, the box of words, yes? You put your memory into a bowl and play it back so you can copy my words? I will listen if I can, if I can borrow a box from the giant's child.
So.... As humans lost interest in us, we lost interest in them, also. A few still came to speak to us: the long one, the one called "White" who is in the tomb on the shore, he was friends with Mercus, our Lady, since both were young although she of course is still not old, and he learned our language from her and taught us many things, especially the war-games called chess, halma and back-ham, although we had to play with stone pieces.