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Moondanger
She rises from the fire perfectly formed and stretches her arms towards Tom, pale palms stark against the rest of her. Her flesh is stained dark with the secrets of her continent and her tongue is slicked red with the centuries as she says, “taken from my right vein my blood gives life. Taken from my left it kills.” It all begins with a question about origin. Tom is sixteen when he realizes that, after four years of the charms and spells, accio and leviosa, he is no closer to answering the call of magic that drummed in his nighttime veins and broke the rhythm of his heart. Hogwarts paling, and he knows only that the call was old beyond books and wands. He asks himself: where did magic begin? Never one to do things halfway, that very night he begins the journey that would take him to Africa, to her. Africa: the beginning of everything, dark womb of life. (Egypt, Tom. There is no known magical history before Egypt.) The Egyptians called it the Land of Trees, knowing only that the Nile flowed from it. (The African interior? Nothing but wilderness, I say, and lots of it.) Man was born there, yet to him no other continent is so closed to him. (Magic requires wands. The poor savages there, even if there were a few magical ones, would never know what to do with themselves.) Stepped for thousands of years in myth and fantasy, Africa the blank space on the map of civilized world. (It’s little wonder that there’s so much superstition even now. After all, they’ve probably never even heard of proper wizardry.) Silly to belittle one’s own origins. But then, Tom is used to silliness. He begins his search with the myths. Images of the serpent priestess Medusa first surfaced in ancient Libya, where it was inscribed that nobody could lift her veil, for to glimpse her face was to glimpse the image of one’s own death. She appears to him between crumbling pages of a mythology book. His fingers do not tingle when they pass over her paragraphs but it is the next best thing: his breath snags in his throat and he sees everything with complete clarity, the musky shadows of the Amazon floor where she was made, trees and magic weaving into each other above. They worshipped her then, the destroyer and the sovereign wisdom. Deep in Dark Continent they worshipped her. Old myths. But Africa is a mythical place. Palace of Knosses, 1600 BC: Depicted religious posture with snakes coiled around her arms and legs, entwined in her hair, and whispering into her ears. “What’s that?” Tom does not move his fingers cupping the book, the set of his shoulders, the rhythm of his breathing. He turns his head marginally and says, “Hmm?” Now the boy, a bespectacled fifth-year, thinks that he should not have intruded. “The book you’re reading. Is that mythology?” Tom says, “Yes, it is.” The boy feels the burn of Tom’s eyes on his back all the way out of the library, although Tom has already turned back to the book. The serpent is a totem to the cycles of life, death, rebirth, and the seasons. It is the connection to the fertile earth and to the underworld. It also symbolizes immortality as it was thought to shed its skin indefinitely. Now his fingers do tremble, slightly. He takes one last look at the text, committing it to memory, and erases it with a whispered spell. 750 BC finds Medusa as the central piece in the Greek temple of Artemis. Snakes are tied around her waist in the sacred healing knot. Tom lies on the floor of the abandoned third-floor washroom, watching his breath pushing out of his open mouth like a line of ghosts in exodus. Patiently outlasting the pain. A casual observer would find two identical boys lying side-by-side. One was slicked with blood and gasping air; the other was translucent, and motionless except for where it rustled softly in the slight draft. When he is able to Tom gets to his knees, turns on the shower, and watches his old skin collapse and swirl down the drain. The symbol of her ancient wisdom lies in her ceremonial mask. It has unblinking, all-seeing eyes that see through men, penetrating their illusions and looking into the abyss of truth. Her skull-like mouth is deadly and devouring of all life; her tongue protrudes like a snake’s. Tom shows his Dark Mark to one person. He had planned to obliviate immediately but something about his creation catches him and the boy wakes up the next morning covered with bite marks the colour of wine. She kills so that life may continue. In the last day of Hogwarts the same boy kisses Tom and wonders, for a moment, why there is a rift in the middle of his tongue. Her transformation began in Greece, in 7th century BC. In this new age the serpent was evil and so was she: her hair turned into snakes and her gaze changed men into stone. “Look at me.” “No.” The same boy, now a man, cannot meet his eyes. “Why not?” Tom laughs shrilly, freely. “Your…your face.” “Yes?” He breaks down. “Oh Tom, what’s happened to you?” His response in a smiling half-reverent whisper, “Africa.” * Even in death Medusa’s blood retains its powers. She was drained and used later by Asciepius to raise the dead. Tom was twenty six when he raises her in the darkness of Africa. She says, her wrists held out, “taken from my right vein my blood gives life. Taken from my left it kills.” “What are you?” he questions, “a memory? An incarnate? Flesh and blood?” “I was mortal once,” she says, "But in the end there was not enough human left for me to die." "In that case," Tom says, and cuts out her heart. Later Her blood dribbles like copper pennies down the side of his mouth and Tom dies for the last time beside the embers with the cold of marble tiles on his back. Voldemort wakes up and thinks, it's only skin. Got my Medusa snaps off http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/classes/fi
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