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𝐒𝐈𝐂𝐊 𝐎𝐅 𝐋𝐎𝐒𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐒𝐎𝐔𝐋𝐌𝐀𝐓𝐄𝐒

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you and atlas are one in the same, my dear

cursed to hold a weight you can't bare

and still standing

not because you can

but because you have to

- m.h

·͙*̩̩͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩̥͙　✩　*̩̩̥͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩͙‧͙ .·͙*̩̩͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩̥͙　✩　*̩̩̥͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩͙‧͙ .

𝐄𝐀𝐑𝐋𝐘 𝐍𝐄𝐗𝐓 𝐌𝐎𝐑𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐆, before the other three were awake, Elara left the tent to search the woods around them for the oldest, most gnarled, and resilient-looking tree she could find. There inits shadow she buried Mad-Eye Moody's eye and marked the spot by gouging a small crossin the bark with her wand. It was not much, but Elara felt that Mad-Eye would have much preferred this to being stuck on Dolores Umbitch's door.

Then she returned to the tent to wait for the others to wake, and discuss what they were going to do next.

Elara, Harry, and Hermione felt that it was best not to stay anywhere too long, and Ron agreed, with the sole proviso that their next move took them within reach of a bacon sandwich. Elara and Hermione therefore removed the enchantments she had placed around the clearing, while Harry and Ron obliterated all the marks and impressions on the ground that might show they had camped there.

Then they Disapparated to the outskirts of a small market town. Once they had pitched the tent in the shelter of a small copse of trees and surrounded it with freshly cast defensive enchantments, Elara ventured out under the Invisibility Cloak to find sustenance.

This, however, did not go as planned. She had barely entered the town when an unnatural chill, a descending mist, and a sudden darkening of the skies made her freeze where she stood.

"But you can make a brilliant Patronus!" protested Ron, when Elara arrived back at the tent empty-handed, out of breath, and mouthing the single word, dementors.

"I couldn't . . . make one," she panted, clutching the stitch in her side. "Wouldn't . . . come."

Their expressions of consternation and disappointment made Elara feel ashamed. It had been a nightmarish experience, seeing the dementors gliding out of the mist in the distance and realizing, as the paralyzing cold choked her lungs and a distant screaming filled her ears, that she was not going to be able to protect herself as well as she could.

It had taken all Elara's willpower to uproot herself from the spot and run, leaving the eyeless dementors to glide amongst the Muggles who might not be able to see them, but would assuredly feel the despair they cast wherever they went.

"So we still haven't got any food."

"Shut up, Ron," snapped Harry, moving to take the empty wicker basket basket and sat Elara down on the tattered couch.

"Lara, what happened? Why do you think you couldn't make a Patronus? You managed perfectly yesterday!"

"I don't know."

Elara sat low in one of Perkins's old armchairs, feeling more humiliated by the moment. She was afraid that something had gone wrong inside her. Yesterday seemed a long time ago: Today she might have been thirteen years old again, the only other one who collapsed on the Hogwarts Express. Ron kicked a chair leg.

"What?" he snarled at Hermione. "I'm starving! All I've had since I bled half to death is a couple of toadstools!"

"You go and fight your way through the dementors, then," snapped Elara, stung.

"I would, but my arm's in a sling, in case you hadn't noticed!"

Elara moved to lunge at Ron, a newfound rage settling in her stomach. Harry's grip remained strong around her waist, gluing her to the couch, an unfortunately safe distance away from Ron.

"Yeah, I have, because I'm the one that saved your goddamned, miserable, pathetic — "

"Of course!" cried Hermione, clapping a hand to her forehead and startling the both of them into silence. "Lara, give me the locket! Come on," she said impatiently, clicking her fingers at Elara when she did not react, "the Horcrux, Lara, you're still wearing it!"

She held out her hands, and Elara lifted the golden chain over her head. The moment it parted contact with her skin she felt free and oddly light. She had not even realized that she was clammy or that there was a heavy weight pressing on her stomach until both sensations lifted.

"Better?" asked Hermione.

"Holy shit," muttered an astounded Elara.

"Maybe we ought not to wear it. We can just keep it in the tent."

"We are not leaving that Horcrux lying around," Elara stated firmly. "If we lose it, if it gets stolen —"

"Oh, all right, all right," said Hermione, and she placed it around her own neck and tucked it out of sight down the front of her shirt. "But we'll take turns wearing it, so nobody keeps it on too long."

"Great," said Ron irritably, "and now we've sorted that out, can we please get some food?"

"Fine, but we'll go somewhere else to find it," said Hermione with half a glance at Elara and Harry. "There's no point staying where we know dementors are swooping around."

In the end they settled down for the night in a far-flung field belonging to a lonely farm, from which they had managed to obtain eggs and bread.

"It's not stealing, is it?" asked Hermione in a troubled voice, as they devoured scrambled eggs on toast. "Not if I left some money under the chicken coop?"

Ron rolled his eyes and said, with his cheeks bulging, "'Er-my-nee, 'oo worry 'oo much.' Elax!"

Elara, who was on her fourth cup of coffee as to prepare for the midnight watch, began laughing so hard that tears ran down her cheeks. And, indeed, it was much easier to relax when they were comfortably well fed: The argument about the dementors was forgotten in laughter that night, and Elara felt cheerful, even hopeful, as she took the first of the three night watches.

This was their first encounter with the fact that a full stomach meant good spirits; an empty one, bickering and gloom. Hermione bore up reasonably well on those nights when they managed to scavenge nothing but berries or stale biscuits, her temper perhaps a little shorter than usual and her silences rather dour.

Elara didn't mind, as long as she had coffee (warm or cold, she didn't care).

Ron, however, had always been used to three delicious meals a day, courtesy of his mother or of the Hogwarts house-elves, and hunger made him both unreasonable and irascible. Whenever lack of food coincided with Ron's turn to wear the Horcrux, he became downright unpleasant.

"So where next?" was his constant refrain.

He did not seem to have any ideas himself, but expected Elara, Harry, and Hermione to come up with plans while he sat and brooded over the low food supplies. Accordingly Elara, Harry, and Hermione spent fruitless hours trying to decide where they might find the other Horcruxes, and how to destroy the one they had already got, their conversations becoming increasingly repetitive as they had no new information.

As Dumbledore had told Elara and Harry that he believed Voldemort had hidden the Horcruxes in places important to him, they kept reciting, in a sort of dreary litany, those locations they knew that Voldemort had lived or visited. The orphanage where he had been born and raised; Hogwarts, where he had been educated; Borgin and Burkes, where he had worked after completing school;then Albania, where he had spent his years of exile: These formed the basis of their speculations.

"Yeah, let's go to Albania. Shouldn't take more than an afternoon to search an entire country," said Ron sarcastically.

"There can't be anything there. He'd already made five of his Horcruxes before he went into exile, and Dumbledore was certain the snake is the sixth," said Elara. "We know the snake's not in Albania, it's usually with Bitch Boy."

The nickname was one that Ron and Elara had come up with in replacement to the word Voldemort. It considerably lightened the mood of any conversation that would have anything to the Voldemort. Harry seemed to quite enjoy the new nickname, while Hermione would stick to You-Know-Who

"I can't see him hiding anything at Borgin and Burkes," said Harry, who had made this point many times before, but said it again simply to cover every base. "Borgin and Burke were experts at Dark objects, they would've recognized a Horcrux straightaway."

Ron yawned pointedly.

Repressing a strong urge to throw something at him, Elara continued on, "I still think he might have hidden something at Hogwarts."

Hermione sighed.

"But Dumbledore would have found it, Lara!"

Harry repeated the argument he kept bringing out in favor of this theory whenever he backed Elara up.

"Dumbledore said in front of me and Lara that he never assumed he knew all of Hogwarts's secrets. I'm telling you, if there was one place Vol — Bitch Boy would have any attachment too, it's Hogwarts!"

"Oh, come on," scoffed Ron. "His school?"

"Yeah, his school! It was his first real home, the place that meant he was special; it meant everything to him, and even after he left —"

"This is You-Know-Who we're talking about, right? Not you?" inquired Ron.

Despite not wearing the Horcrux, Elara was visited by a desire to throttle him.

"You told us that You-Know-Who asked Dumbledore to give him a job after he left," said Hermione.

"That's right," said Elara.

"And Dumbledore thought he only wanted to come back to try and find something, probably another founder's object, to make into another Horcrux?"

"Yeah," said Harry.

"But he didn't get the job, did he?" said Hermione. "So he never got the chance to find a founder's object there and hide it in the school!"

"Okay, then," said Elara, defeated. "Forget Hogwarts."

Without any other leads, they traveled into London and, hidden beneath the Invisibility Cloak, searched for the orphanage in which Voldemort had been raised. Hermione stole into a library and discovered from their records that the place had been demolished many years before. They visited its site and found a tower block of offices.

"We could try digging in the foundations?" Hermione suggested halfheartedly.

"He wouldn't have hidden a Horcrux here," Elara said.

She had known it all along: The orphanage had been the place Voldemort had been determined to escape; he would never have hidden a part of his soul there. Dumbledore had shown Elara and Harry that Voldemort sought grandeur or mystique in his hiding places; this dismal gray corner of London was as far removed as you could imagine from Hogwarts or the Ministry or a building like Gringotts, the Wizarding bank, with its golden doors and marble floors.

Even without any new ideas, they continued to move through the countryside, pitching the tent in a different place each night for security. Every morning they made sure that they had removed all clues to their presence, then set off to find another lonely and secluded spot, traveling by Apparition to more woods, to the shadowy crevices of cliffs, to purple moors, gorse-covered mountainsides, and once a sheltered and pebbly cove.

Every twelve hours or so they passed the Horcrux between them as though they were playing some perverse, slow-motion game of pass-the-parcel, where they dreaded the music stopping because the reward was twelve hours of increased fear and anxiety.

Elara's forehead kept prickling whenever Harry wore the Horcrux. She forced down any reaction she might have to the pain to comfort Harry.

"What? What did you see?" demanded Ron, whenever he noticed Harry wince, despite withering glares from Elara.

"A face," muttered Harry, every time. "The same face. The thief who stole from Gregorovitch."

And Ron would turn away, making no effort to hide his disappointment. Elara knew that Ron was hoping to hear news of his family or of the rest of the Order of the Phoenix, but after all, he,Harry, was not a television aerial; he could only see what Voldemort was thinking at the time,not tune in to whatever took his fancy.

Apparently Voldemort was dwelling endlessly on the unknown youth with the gleeful face, whose name and whereabouts, Elara felt sure, Voldemort knew no better than they did. As Harry's scar continued to burn and the merry, he learned to suppress any sign of pain or discomfort, only discussing the thief when neither Ron nor Hermione were paying attention.

As the days stretched into weeks, both Elara and Harry began to suspect that Ron and Hermione were having conversations without, and about, them. Several times they stopped talking abruptly when they entered the tent, and twice Elara came accidentally upon them, huddled a little distance away, heads together and talking fast; both times they fell silent when they realized she was approaching them and hastened to appear busy collecting wood or water.

Late into a 4 a.m. watch, Elara and Harry sat outside, huddled under a blanket, discussing the heavy tension surrounding them.

"Ron and 'Mione think this is pointless, don't they?" asked Harry quietly, eyes intently trained on the sky above.

"I'm pretty sure they thought we had this brilliant plan that they would learn in due course," answered Elara, her tone one of amusement.

"We don't have the slightest clue what we're doing," said Harry, cracking a smile.

Elara laughed quietly, her chest rising and falling as she shifted to lean closer to Harry.

"When have we ever?"

In desperate attempts to set the journey on track, the pair tried to think of further Horcrux locations, but the only one that continued to occur to either of them was Hogwarts, and as the other two didn't think this at all likely, they stopped suggesting it.

Autumn rolled over the countryside as they moved through it: They were now pitching the tent on mulches of fallen leaves. Natural mists joined those cast by the dementors; wind and rain added to their troubles.

The fact that both Elara and Hermione were getting better at identifying edible fungi could not altogether compensate for their continuing isolation, the lack of other people's company, or their total ignorance of what was going on in the war against Voldemort.

"My mother," said Ron one night, as they sat in the tent on a riverbank in Wales, "can makegood food appear out of thin air."

He prodded moodily at the lumps of charred gray fish on his plate. Elara glanced automatically at Ron's neck and saw, as she had expected, the golden chain of the Horcrux glinting there. She managed to fight down the impulse to swear at Ron, whose attitude would, she knew, improve slightly when the time came to take off the locket.

"Your mother can't produce food out of thin air," said Hermione. "No one can. Food is the first of the five Principal Exceptions to Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfigur —"

"Oh, speak English, can't you?" Ron said, prising a fish bone out from between his teeth.

"It's impossible to make good food out of nothing! You can Summon it if you know where itis, you can transform it, you can increase the quantity if you've already got some —"

"Well, don't bother increasing this, it's disgusting," said Ron.

"Lara caught the fish and I did my best with it! I notice we're always the ones who ends up sorting out the food, because we're women, I suppose!"

"No, it's because you two supposed to be the best at magic!" shot back Ron.

Elara clutched her dinner knife and joyously thought of all the ways she could get Ron to shut his mouth. Hermione jumped up and bits of roast pike slid off her tin plate onto the floor.

"You can do the cooking tomorrow, Ron, you can find the ingredients and try and charm them into something worth eating, and I'll sit here and pull faces and moan and you can see how you —"

"Shut up!" said Harry, leaping to his feet and holding up both hands. "Shut up now!"

Harry's raised voice jerked Elara from her daydream. Hermione looked outraged.

"How can you side with him, he hardly ever does the cook —"

"Hermione, be quiet, I can hear someone!"

His hands were still raised, warning them not to talk. Then, over the rush and gush of the dark river beside them, Elara heard voices. She looked around at the Sneakoscope.It was not moving.

"You cast the Muffliato charm over us, right?" he whispered.

"Lara and I did everything," whispered Hermione, "Muffliato, Muggle-Repelling and Disillusionment Charms, all of it. They shouldn't be able to hear or see us, whoever they are."

Heavy scuffing and scraping noises, plus the sound of dislodged stones and twigs, told them that several people were clambering down the steep, wooded slope that descended to the narrow bank where they had pitched the tent.

They drew their wands, waiting. The enchantments they had cast around themselves ought to be sufficient, in the near total darkness, to shield them from the notice of Muggles and normal witches and wizards. If these were Death Eaters, then perhaps their defenses were about to be tested by Dark Magic for the first time.

The voices became louder but no more intelligible as the group of men and seemingly one woman reached the bank. Elra estimated that their owners were fewer than twenty feet away, but the cascading river made it impossible to tell for sure.

Hermione snatched up the beaded bag and started to rummage; after a moment she drew out four Extendable Ears and threw one each to Elara, Harry, and Ron, who hastily inserted the ends of the flesh-colored strings into their ears and fed the other ends out of the tent entrance.

Within seconds Elara heard a weary male voice.

"There ought to be a few salmon in here, or d'you reckon it's too early in the season? Accio Salmon!"

"Dad?" whispered Elara, already setting down her ear and starting towards the entrance of the tent.

The back of her jacket was seized by three hands. She turned to see Harry, Ron, and Hermione gripping her clothes tightly. The panging in her heart willed her to continue on, fight them if she had too. Her father was only twenty feet away.

"Let me go," demanded Elara hoarsely, desperately trying to free herself from their grasp.

She was quickly rooted to a chair. Tears stinging her eyes, she decided the next best option was hearing her father's voice.

Over the murmur of the river he could make out more voices, but they were not speaking English orany human language he had ever heard. It was a rough and unmelodious tongue, a string of rattling, guttural noises, and there seemed to be two speakers, one with a slightly lower, slower voice than the other.

A fire danced into life on the other side of the canvas; large shadows passed between tent and flames. The delicious smell of baking salmon wafted tantalizingly in their direction. Then came the clinking of cutlery on plates, and Ted spoke again.