Chapter Text
You’ve heard of me, I’m sure.
Not the truth—don’t flatter yourself—but you've heard something. People prefer their legends with a safe distance built in. They like a story they can hold at arm’s length, turn over, and place back on the shelf when it becomes inconvenient. They cling to them the way frightened children cling to nightlights: not because the light is strong, but because it is familiar. Because it is easier to believe the girl who ended the goblin rebellion was simple to understand. Manageable. Contained. Safe.
The Ministry tried to make me a case study. An anomaly to be documented, dissected, and filed away until they could stop worrying about it. The Prophet, ink-smeared and smug, called me unstable. A threat to our kind.
And Rookwood—well. He had names for me too. He kept using them right up until the moment I burned him into ash.
What still astonishes me is not what they said—but what they never asked. Not one of them wondered who I believed myself to be. Perhaps they feared the answer. Perhaps they sensed—correctly—that I would never hand them a version of myself they could shelve and forget.
But you’re here.
You want the real story.
So—I will give it to you.
My name is Aurelia Carrow, and yes, before you say anything: those Carrows. The old bloodline whose name echoes through Wizengamot chambers like a curse nobody admits to casting. A family that mistook cruelty for discipline, tradition for righteousness, and obedience for virtue. People like to imagine the Carrows as rulers.
They weren’t.
They were prisoners polishing their own chains.
I was meant to become one of them. I was meant to bend. Instead, I broke—and I learned quickly that breaking is rarely loud. Most of the time it is simply a refusal no one notices at first. A quiet sort of disobedience that becomes, eventually, impossible to correct.
Ominis Gaunt once told me his childhood was carved from the same stone as mine—only his family made no effort to hide the blade. The Gaunts wielded curses openly; the Carrows dressed theirs in etiquette and expectation. Two legacies, same poison. Sometimes I think our meeting was inevitable: two children raised by names that believed themselves divine, destined to unlearn every lie our families ever taught us.
If I could touch the shoulder of the girl I was at fifteen—brittle, exhausted, trembling under the weight of secrets she did not yet understand—I would tell her to run. Not from destiny. From the parts of herself she wasn’t ready to meet. Power found me long before I ever sought it. And when it finally woke, it did so violently—a creature stretching inside a cage made too small. It thrilled me. Frightened me. Because magic like that never arrives without reason. It arrives when the world is preparing to demand something devastating from you.
Sebastian came to me like wounded things do—all heat buried under ash, hands shaking as though he’d held fire too long—and asked me to save Anne. Sweet, suffering Anne, whose life had been carved down to its bones by Rookwood’s curse. I didn’t refuse out of cruelty. I refused because I was ignorant, and ignorance has always been my least favorite sin. Isidora’s memories weren’t lessons; they were warnings sewn into the ruins of another woman’s life. Still, I followed Sebastian anyway—into every tomb, every dead end, every lie he swore held a clue. I told myself it was loyalty. I told myself it was compassion. I told myself a great many things.
Guilt makes a loyal companion. Love, even more so.
And neither are gentle.
When Solomon confronted us underground and turned his wand on me, I froze. Not from fear of him—but from fear of myself. I knew exactly what would happen if I fought back. Something inside me would surge without restraint, and then it would be over. The story would end in the sort of way the Ministry loves: clean, decisive, and written by the victors.
Sebastian had already lost so much. His parents. His twin. His childhood. I couldn’t stand the idea of being the reason he lost again.
And Solomon wasn’t wrong. Not really. I did have power I couldn’t control. I had encouraged Sebastian’s reckless devotion to saving Anne. So when his uncle’s wand lifted beneath a collapsing ceiling, the thought slipped in—fast and ugly and almost… relieving—that maybe this was how it was meant to go. That maybe I was the mistake that needed correcting.
Sebastian, however, disagreed.
The Killing Curse is an inelegant thing—crude, almost graceless in the way it rips life from a body. Green, cold as old stone, and then absence. Solomon didn’t fall so much as fold, as though the curse plucked out the thread holding him upright.
But it wasn’t Solomon that struck me.
It was Bash.
The way he held his wand—arm locked tight, fingers trembling in a fury so incandescent it barely looked human. His face wasn’t twisted in triumph or righteousness. It was stripped bare. Raw. A boy who had finally shattered under the weight of every impossible choice the world had forced on him.
And as the green light died, something inside Bash died with it.
I felt it—a hollowing, a violent unmaking, the moment a star collapses and becomes something else entirely. The echo of that curse hummed through my bones, charged the air until it tasted metallic, like lightning and grief. He stared at Solomon as if expecting the earth itself to recoil from what he had done. Then his gaze flicked up to me.
Not seeking approval. Not forgiveness. Just… terrified that I had finally seen him for what he feared he truly was.
My voice wouldn’t form. My breath wouldn’t move. I stood there, wand useless at my side, because the truth was sickening and impossible all at once:
He hadn’t done it out of malice.
He had done it to save me.
When we told Ominis afterward—every frantic, shaking truth tumbling out of us like stones—we expected him to go straight to the Headmaster. Straight to the Ministry. Straight to anyone who might absolve him of the responsibility of knowing what we had done.
But he didn’t.
Instead, something in him shifted.
Whatever faith he had once placed in structure, in rules, in the comforting illusion that order keeps the world from rotting at the seams, unraveled in silence. His trust in Sebastian didn’t simply bleed; it darkened, thickening into something brittle and sharp.
When I finally looked at him—truly—bracing for fear or revulsion or the clean, easy condemnation his upbringing promised, I found none of it.
I found understanding.
A strange, terrible, soul-recognizing understanding that tightened around my ribs and refused to let go.
Not of me.
Of Sebastian.
By the time summer came, I was unrecognizable to myself.
The Carrow Estate closed around me like a tomb built for someone who was technically still breathing. Every whisper sounded like accusation; every footstep in the corridor felt like a verdict. I was their shame, their liability, their failure wearing a daughter’s face. My father’s rage prowled the halls, sharp as broken glass. My mother’s disappointment followed in its wake—quieter, softer, and far more suffocating.
“What shall we do with her? This behavior cannot—will not—be tolerated. I have half a mind to transfer her to a new school again.”
As though moving me like an inconvenient chess piece might scrub the blood from the board.
I learned quickly how to disappear inside my own room. I locked the door. Sealed the windows. Barricaded myself behind stacks of books and failing candle stubs. Silence pressed in until it became something usable—a crucible. I fed it the scratch of my quill, the ache of sleepless nights, the manic devotion of someone clinging to a single, impossible hope.
I devoured everything I could find on curses—their architecture, their logic, the awful elegance behind their design. I learned the philosophy of pain the way other girls memorized poetry. I traced how dark magic travels through flesh, how it roots itself in veins and marrow, how it refuses to let go.
Every page promised nothing.
I kept going anyway.
Because somewhere beneath the theory, beneath the cruelty, beneath the ancient notes written by people who had already failed, there had to be a thread leading to a cure.
Anne’s cure.
She was not merely cursed.
She was bound.
Her life had been tangled into a spell shaped from the bones of Cruciatus—stripped of excess and honed into something deliberate. Slow. Relentless. Parasitic. A curse meant to last. One designed not simply to kill its victim, but to wear her down piece by piece, savoring the work.
I remember the moment I understood.
The candle had burned itself to the desk. Ink stained my fingers. My reflection stared back at me from the glass—too thin, eyes too bright, a girl who looked as though she had already died once and refused to admit it.
To save Anne, I would have to become something the world feared.
Something it hunted.
Something my family and the Ministry would want to control or destroy without hesitation.
By September, I had stopped searching for answers.
Now, I was making one.
Sebastian Sallow had saved my life.
And I intended on returning the favor.
These are the things we do for love.