Chapter Text
Walburga watched in horror as the tables that would contain the glasses were set to celebrate the toast to her engagement to her cousin four years her junior, Orion. The décor was exquisite, the Black Manor formal drawing room was resplendent and had been restored for the occasion. The floor was so polished that they had to put a spell to prevent people from slipping
The vases were already being filled with ecstatic flowers and the magic fountain of rising jets was being calibrated by her brother Alphard. The engagement dress was being finished by hand embroidery with the best dressmaker from Walburga's favorite store and the future fiancé was getting ready.
Everything was perfect. Everything but Walburga
She was as eager to marry Orion as she was to receive a crucio from Gellert Grindewald.
Walburga left the room in disgust and walked down the hall to the family tree carved into the marble of the entrance wall. On the gigantic engraving there was an inscription "Toujours Purs". Walburga stood in front of the engraving and remembered her grandfather Sirius of her taking her there with all the children and telling them about her branches, promising a sweet to the first children to find the names that belonged to them.
Walburga looked at the number of times that the branches were intertwined to join names to people who were in other branches. Her name and Orion's were so close compared to others.
She didn't know what Pollux was thinking about marrying her to her brother's son. The most intertwined branches were the ones that died out first.
And besides, Walburga couldn't feel love.
She wasn't sad about it. She was the fruit of Amortentia, it was something common in thoroughbred marriages. To conceive a child they resorted to potions of love or lust. And one in ten thousand children was born as Walburga
With an empty heart of love.
Pollux and Alphard had been born good, it was Walburga who had been born bad. It was Walburga who was defective. There were no tears to shed, Walburga was well aware that for many people she was a monster without feelings.
That is why she was as good as an interrogator for the Wizenmagot, that's a secret and very confidential job, but gave her good benefits. She didn't stop where other people did. But she now she had to leave it all behind to get married
God, marry Orion. Be the next Lady Black.
A position appealed to her, but there was the fact that she couldn't bear to be touched by men or women. She could not bear the idea of having children. She hated that idea with strength and despair. She knew that she would hate her children and her husband. But she was the best eligible wife
She was a Black woman, the best of the best.
Flawless lineage, beauty and education. The most desired bride and with the best dowry. An honors graduate, an exceptional and powerful witch. She was as if she had been tailor-made to be a lord's wife.
And she had almost been like that. After all it was the goal of her parents to have daughters to marry to Lords and sons to continue the line.
Walburga walked out of the hall and down the stairs to the ritual room. There she lay the true source of the Black's power, not the metamorphomagic, that pentagram with nineteen circles with more than three hundred runes linked in each one of them.
She couldn't get any closer, only the lord could. The barriers that protected the relic were very powerful. The jewel of the Black family. The circle of temporal regression. It was created by Pleiades Black after she rejected marriage to Lord Mortis Gaunt some seven hundred years ago.
The Gaunts were angry, they were a powerful and prominent family at the time, and the Blacks were hardly middle class. So Lord Mortis killed all the Blacks except the Pleiades. Mortis had other plans for the woman. He captured and raped her, keeping her as a sex slave for almost fifteen years, forcing her to bear her children, until she managed to flee from him.
Pleiades spent the next fifty years in a cave creating the regression circle to send memories of her past years and tragedys to her parents in her childhood. Pleiades managed to send her memories and the Blacks prevented Lord Mortis from meeting Pleiades before she was married to an important Lord of the time. And after that the Blacks had slowly destroyed the Gaunts.
And for centuries her family had used the circle to send memories into the past, beneficial investments, new potions, spells, important events,… All it took to turn the Blacks into a rock solid figure of power and authority. In addition to not being able to send anything else, the magic cost was very high
-Please, this is a mistake. Please, once again we need the guidance of the future to avoid a great misfortune.
Of course no one answered her and Kreacher appeared next to her to lead her to start getting ready. Walburga decided to go face the inevitable