The Marauders: Year Seven Part Two

See Page 478

February was flying past it seemed - to everyone that is, except Regulus Black.

He had never felt more alone in his entire life. None of the Slytherins would dare to speak to him anytime off the Quidditch Pitch, and he was constantly having to fight off the probing mind of Severus Snape. He would get a nod or a wave from Sirius and the other Marauders in the corridors if they passed by one another, but even that couldn't go much further outside the safety of the Room of Requirement because they didn't want Regulus's cover to be blown. So most of his time was spent sitting about in his dormitory or the library, doing homework, and when the homework was done, just poking about, reading about random topics.

One particular day in late February, when it was snowing quite a lot outside, Regulus sat in the library, reading from the gigantic Glossary of Magical Theories & Procedures. This book was one that he visited often, desperately hoping that he might stumble across something - anything - that could bring Maryrose back from the dead... if even for a moment. He knew better, of course. There was no magic that could return someone once they were gone - aside from some power of Death himself, Regulus reckoned, but there was no way to bargin with Death himself that he knew of, and even if... what did he, Regulus Black, have to offer?

There was of course loads of spells to prevent death, mostly referencing dark sources that Regulus skimmed over, uninterested in what they had to say. After all, the time for preventing death was passed by. That was something that he needed before Voldemort had taken hold on his wrist, before Maryrose's body crumpled to the ground, before... Regulus pushed the thoughts out of his mind as his finger traced the page, eyes moving across the words of the text as he went, his brain on a sort of autopilot.

IMMORTALITY cannot be easily achieved, even for those with the purest magical blood. Death is a foe hard to defeat. That is not to say that he has never been held at bay so long as the living choose to survive. Many wizards of history have postponed their demise until a time such as they were prepared to meet Death by their own choice. Ignotus Peverell (see page 592) most famously hid from Death beneath his Cloak of Invisibility (see page 367), and the famous alchemist Nicolas Flamel created the Philosopher's Stone (see page 1054), which provides unending years to the bearer so long as they choose to defy Death's calls. Other wizards that have defeated Death in the past include Herpo the Foul (see page 462), the creator of the first known Horcrux (see page 478) , and Kostos Mopsus, the notorious Blind Seer (see page 831).

Regulus stared at the name Kostos Mopsus. The Divination teacher, the one that he'd heard quite a lot of from Voldemort, who controlled the precious seconds. He sat up straighter, glancing around the library, to see who else was there. He didn't know why he particularly cared if anyone saw him reading an article about Kostos Mopsus - it wasn't as though there was anything particularly wrong about doing so, but it felt somehow as secret as his allegiances. Seeing only a couple Hufflepuffs and half of Ravenclaw house about the room - not a Slytherin or Gryffindor in sight - he finally turned his eyes back to the book and quickly flipped to page 831.

MOPSUS, Kostos. Youngest son of the great sorceress-seer Agatha the All Powerful (see page 211), and the rightful King-turned-Pauper, Amphilochus Mopsus (see page 830). It was Amphilochus's belief that there ought not to be one ruler almighty above all others, but that a government should be built in which the people ruled and the leadership served. Unheard of in his time, Amphilochus Mopsus was considered absurd, and faced much opposition to his political views. He took the sorceress-seer Agatha as his bride, and lived in the towns outlying the castle's shadows in order to serve the people as he believed. Amphilochus believed in living as low as his lowest subjects, to encourage them and experience life as they did. It was in this village that Kostos Mopsus was born. Born blind, he was often mocked coming from a long line of those gifted with the Third Eye with the title of The Blind Seer. Kostos was the last remaining member of the Mopsus family following attacks from a rival seer, Calchus (see page 305), who acted to self-fulfill the predictions he once made to Amphilochus that his kingdom would fall and his bloodline cease to survive. After killing the king himself, Calchus sought to rule over the Wizarding World. Calchus, a reader of entrails, violently murdered the elder Mopus boy, Octavius Mopsus (see page 834), as well as Agatha the All Powerful, directly before the unseeing eyes of the young Kostos. It was that very night when Kostos Mopsus swore to revenge his family against Calchus so that the predictions of death and the ending Bloodline would fall upon his head instead of Amphilochus's. It was widely rumored and since become legend that Kostos Mopsus found a way to make a pact with Death himself, promising Death the lifeblood of every member of the Calchus family that would ever live. Hungry for such a promise, Death agreed to allow Kostos Mopsus to live immortally until the blood of the last Calchus descendant had been shed. However, this is proven mythological as Kostos Mopsus died shortly after the attacks on the Grecian village where he lived, at the age of 19, and was buried on an Island in the Mediterranean Sea. Many believe that the reports of Death taking Kostos Mopsus then were a lie, however, a belief that arose in the 1800s - two thousand years after Mopsus's supposed Death - that Mopsus was alive and believed to be teaching Divination at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, a position allegedly bestowed upon him by none other than Salazar Slytherin (see page 2105) during the formative years of the school's history (Slytherin's involvement is questioned by most historians and those who contest Mopsus's immortality). More recently, from 1967, Kostos Mopsus was believed to own a Clock Shoppe in Diagon Alley after retiring from teaching at the school upon the defeat and incarceration of his good friend, Gellert Grindelwald (see page 504) by the new headmaster, Albus Dumbledore (see page 256).