The Heiress of Slytherin

Snakes, Secrets and the First Send-off

Ivy and Kyria stepped out of the fireplace into an empty room, coughing furiously and brushing soot off of their clothes and out of their hair. "Bloody wizard traveling methods," Kyria was muttering angrily under her breath. "Could've swum here by now and we'd be all the cleaner for it..." She caught Ivy's eye and let her sentence trail off, the furious greens and greys of her eyes shifting to an amused pale blue as she saw her daughter trying to hold in a laugh.

"Here, scourgify," with a flick of her hand-me-down wand, Kyria returned her mother's robes, face and hair to their previous respectability, before pointing it down at herself and swiftly removing the grime from her own personage. When they were both content that they would not embarrass the Stone name, Ivy allowed herself to look around with a moderate amount of interest at the plain room they had stepped into. The walls were lined all the way around with large fireplaces, and to the left of each one there stood an odd looking machine with same sign hung upon each one:

"One knut for a handful of floo powder! Two knuts for a trip there and back!" Ivy patted her own little satchel of extra floo powder subconsciously, knowing that she would have to send it home with her mother alone once she left. The thought stirred her from her reverie and caused her to furrow her brows. She wasn't excited at all about having to leave her mother, in fact the thought of it made her quite ill. But both her and Kyria knew that it was a necessity. Athemar would never entertain the idea of her continuing her education at home - not that he knew she had started it.

Athemar hadn't come with them at all, deciding instead to remain at home and attend some boring parties, hosted by an even more boring hosts, where the conversation would be the most boring thing yet. It would make him feel important however, and as both mother and daughter knew all too well, having Athemar feeling important made everything go smoothly for everyone.

As she thought about her father, her mind strayed to the two parting gifts he had given her, and how he had personally instructed her and Kyria on how to use the floo powder, and where to go, actions which were so uncharacteristically warm of him, that Ivy found she rather didn't know what to do with them.

One of her gifts was a ring, so beautiful that it had taken her breath away when Athemar had placed it on her hand. It was a silver ring in that coiled around her finger in the shape of a serpent, so that its tail, one loop of its body, and its head lay upon the front of her ring finger. It was inlaid with diamonds traveling up the whole of the body, but it had emeralds set every few stones, with two more placed as the eyes of the snake. Athemar had said it was a family heirloom, which had shocked her, as had never before let her so much as enter the gallery in which he stored evidence of their family line. But more so than that, it had touched her because she knew that it was his own way of compensating for a fight the father and daughter had been engaged in for several weeks leading up to her departure.

You see, Ivy only loved, really truly loved, two living things: her mother and Stheno. Stheno was a snake whom Ivy had happened across when she was only six and a half years old. She had been walking with her mother along the coast, talking with her about the legends of her ancestor Sirens, when ahead of her she had seen a beautiful, smooth green snake desperately trying to flee from an eagle. She had shouted out in alarm and without thinking, run towards the scene. Her flailing run and loud wails were enough to persuade the bird to pursue a different meal, but Kyria had been furious with worry once she caught up to the scene and saw her daughter cradling the snake, the same way another child might've held a puppy.

With enormous amounts of self-control, she had managed to limit her scolding of Ivy to a few short lines about not recklessly putting herself in danger, and about the long term-consequences of such actions, before she relented and knelt down by the still-sobbing girl, holding her close and humming a tune softly until her tears stopped flowing and her cries turned to hiccups.