Manor

I’d grown accustomed to the dark long before you came. The room in which they kept me was always dark, except for when he wanted to question me, and when he wanted to question me he tortured me. Thus, with the initial pain light caused my now-nocturnal eyes and the promise of harsher pain to come, light became synonymous with agony in my mind. Perhaps this was not the most rational of conclusions to come to, I knew why the two were linked and that it was merely in this situation that my new principle applied; I have always thought myself a fairly lucid thinker. But to a starving, lonely old man, strange things start to make far too much sense in the shadowy corners of the mind. Dark became my solace, it became synonymous with peace and quiet, or more accurately silence, for my own screams were as troublesome to me as to them.

When first the door was thrown open, and light flooded the room, I automatically cringed away from this invasive illumination. There was something different, though; though the light from torches outside pained me as though the whole room burst with sunshine, the room itself was not lit. This was abnormal; if He Who Must Not Be Named were coming to question me, there would be light. Dismal light, but light all the same. The Dark Lord, as they call him, likes his theatrics, they function well.

This inconsistency made me curious, and curiosity has always been among my more prominent traits. I opened my eyes to see what difference there was, what had changed. What I saw astounded me beyond what any of my sad words can describe. You stood before me, ethereal despite Wormtail (as He calls him) shoving your roughly forward. As though gliding on air you came into my darkness. Your face, silhouetted against that light, was hidden from me, though your eyes, I am sure, were blue from the glimmer of them. But your hair was what caught my attention. The light filtered through its lightly waving whiteness, softened from burning fire to gentle beams of sweet moonlight. I didn’t recognize you in that moment, but never the less you were more powerful than any curse He Who Must Not Be Named had set upon me. I loved you more, I believe, than anyone could ever have loved another person. You were everything to me in that moment; you were my daughter, my sister, my friend. Perhaps absurd, given that I cannot say I recognized you at all, but it is true all the same.

For the first time in what felt like years, decades, the light was not my tormentor. The light was deliverance, delivering you into my darkness and solitude. You were light. He was not.

And then the door was closed upon us both, and it was dark again.

“Mr. Ollivander?” you said into the dark. My eyes had been rendered temporarily sightless, but I heard you lowering yourself into a kneeling position to match mine. Your questioning identity check of me reminded me that while I had seen a moonlit, glowing silhouette, you had more than likely got a shadowed view of my face. I smiled into the dark, however, for you speaking to me accomplished two things: it brought me a fresh voice, a kind one the likes of which I was beginning to forget all together, and it allowed me to identify you in turn. Your voice brought back a memory from years past, from a year when times like this were restricted to our most fearful nightmares.

I remember every wand I’ve ever sold, Luna Lovegood. Every single one.

Now that I remembered your wand, more memories about you came to my mind. Ash with a few fine threads of ebony, precisely fifteen inches to the mark, unicorn hair core. Good for charmwork, and strong in defensive magic. Flexible. I remember comparing your hair to that of a unicorn in my private mind. The wand’s choice of you helped to form my opinion of your eleven-year-old self. From the laughs I saw you ignore coming from outside directed at your appearance, others clearly found something different in you. Little did I know that, for the time being, at least, it was I who saw something different from the general populace. It happens often in wandmaking. I predicted that you would use your wand to protect yourself and your friends well, guarding those most sacred to you. A sophisticated but unselfish wand.

“Yes,” I finally answered you, “I am he. How came you to be in this place, Miss Lovegood?” My eyes were beginning to adjust once more, and I could sense your vague outline in the dark. The rejoice I felt upon your initial appearance had gone, snuffed out like the torchlight that had so briefly illuminated the room. You were a child, by all definitions (what were you, sixteen?) I was old, I am old, there was nothing wasted on me. It was terrible, an abomination, you being here. Abhorrant. What were you doing there?

“Oh,” you said, with that soft, complacent air and gentle voice, “I was taken off the Hogwarts Express on the way home for the holildays. It’s Christmastime, Mr. Ollivander. My father’s the editor of The Quibbler, you see, and he’s supported Harry from the beginning... The Ministry’s been completely taken over by Voldemort,” you said his name despite the Taboo...perhaps you no longer cared, “and his followers. They didn’t like Daddy telling people they ought to be helping Harry,” of course, you meant Mr. Potter... “so, they took me off the train.”

Sins of the father. And it was Christmas! My method of counting days had never developed, and thus it came as a complete surprise as well as totally expected at the same time. I’d had no idea, but that made it so that it could be anytime. It had been at least a year since my inprisonment then... I was silent for a time, and I could almost feel you about to say my name when I spoke again.

“We are underground,” I told you, in case they had blindfolded you coming here. “We are below the Malfoy manor, which He Who Must Not Be Named uses as a temporary base. There is but one door to this room, and it cannot be Apparated out of, at least by wizards. There are, of course, no windows. I have no way of knowing at what intervals of time they give food, for I rarely sleep now and I have no record of the days, but I know it is not often and the food can barely be labeled as such. There is no hope of escape for us, Miss Lovegood, unless by outside help.” I admit that your character was a bit lost on me by that point, for I rather expected you to say something like “oh” and then lapse into gloomy silence. It is, no doubt, what many people your age would have done.

“It’ll be all right, Mr. Ollivander,” you said, and I could hear your smile, “Harry will come. Or Ronald or Ginny or Hermione...or Neville. We have friends...someone will come.” You were so incredibly certain, so calm and optimistic that it seemed as though it must be true. The evidence I had faced for over a year that no one was coming was worthless; you had friends who would find us. We would be saved.

If you spoke to me of things that were comparatively unimportant during those black hours, it seemed as though you were both interested and, at the same time, working to keep us both lucid.

“I would speak to you, Miss Lovegood,” I remember saying to you near the beginning, “of happier things than this dismal circumstance, but I’m afraid I’ve rather lost touch with the world. I have been here some time.”

“Well,” you replied, “why don’t you tell me something about yourself, Mr. Ollivander? Talking should keep away any stray heliopaths that’ve escaped Fudge’s private army and are now underground...they think our voices are quite ugly, you know.”

I told you about where I lived above the wand shop, about how I hadn’t properly interacted with society outside Diagon Alley for years. You told me about Dumbledore’s Army, how the youth at Hogwarts were resisting the oppression of Severus Snape’s regime. I knew, of course, that Severus had killed Albus Dumbledore; it was difficult not to hear somebody talking about it, particularly since the task had been originally assigned to Draco. I must admit I was surprised, though, that Snape seemed to be a true Death Eater. Curious, it had always seemed to me he was different. You told me about catching Plimpies for soup during the summer, about your mother, bless her soul, and about your father. You told me again and again about your friends.

After you arrived, they didn’t come again for some time. He didn’t come again for quite some time. It was at once a blessing and an inconvenience. We were not fed for a good while, and both of us felt the pains of it. When the door did open again, it was Him. He came with His light and once more that light meant agony, for I did not know what he wanted me to tell him. Light meant screams and torment. I was without you, for I could not see you (my eyes were squeezed shut), and you were not permitted to touch me. Between my own cries I once heard you demand of Him that he cease. I hated hearing your screams more than anything I have ever detested in my entire life. I finally told Him not what he wanted to know, but what he hoped to discover: a way to find his goal. I told Him that a fellow wandmaker had what he searched for; I repeated a rumor I’d heard long ago: Gregorovitch posessed the Elder wand.

In the time that passed after His most recent visit, we spoke very little. As we lay in our own small worlds of recuperating pain, your sweet voice assured me that all would be well, that someone would come for us. When your pain had begun to numb, though, your demeanor was unchanged. You were still the kind, moderate soul who arrived weeks before. Though bloodied like the rest of us, your head remained unbowed to war.

You told me in a brief and exhausted conversation that your father had told you about the Elder wand, once. We did not speak of it again, however, because, most unfortunately, more appeared. A student from Hogwarts a year above you, Mr. Dean Thomas. Part of, you said, Dumbledore’s Army. And a goblin. In a way, you were right, someone had come. But they had not come to save us, Luna. They had come merely to join us.

I will call it weeks, as I have already, those stretches of time that passed. Only you, I believe, remained fully sane through those times. Eventually the others ran out of things to talk about, forgot what it meant to be interested. Curious, for from what you had told me many thought you to be the opposite, a lone madwoman. Curious indeed. I do not doubt, from what I was later told, that my estimation was fairly accurate in this, if not any other period. You remained adamant that someone would come for us. I do not think the goblin, Griphook, appreciated your sentiment.

And then come someone did. Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, the Chosen One himself, a friend, came. He and his friend, your friend, Ronald Weasley (careless with his wand, he was. He snapped the poor thing in two pieces when he was but twelve years old. He bought a new one from me.) They came horrified of what was happening to another friend above. They came the way the others did. But something told me, and I believe you felt it as well, that they had come to save us. That they would save us. The light they came with wasn’t your beautiful light by far, but it was neither his light nor the light of prisioners. They came with the fire of righteous anger, with the purpose of Dumbledore’s Army.

The next to come appeared without any new light at all. An elf who you and your friends seemed to know. Mr. Potter called him Dobby. Fires blazed as we escaped Malfoy manor. Fires burned my eyes, and it was purely due to your friends who you had said all along would come that we escaped. It was purely due to you.

And when I felt fresh air on my skin for the first time in so very long, it was nighttime, and in the soft black sky overhead there was a full moon, gentle and glowing. Before I was lost to unconsciousness, I saw that light falling onto you, your eyes like moons themselves, your hair filled with soft white light, transforming you into the vision I had first seen when you joined me in my darkness. The moonlit angel who saved me. Luna.