Gone with the Wind
As her tenure on the Durmstrang Quidditch team increased, Liliya Starkova had naturally grown more comfortable in the skies. Even against Durmstrang’s unforgiving chill, even as the snowfall of Scandinavia left flecks of wetness on her jacket, even when she was fighting through headaches and stomach cramps, she had taken to the skies. Even when the memories had grown to much for her. Especially when the memories had grown too much for her.
Yet today as she stepped onto Hogwarts grounds, having slipped out of her shared cabin with her younger friend a mere two hours before curfew would have struck, she could not quite pin down why her feet carried her to the open field of the training pitch. She was not plagued by the attacks of remembrance, was not challenged by the horrors of memory. Merely, she ached to feel the wind tousling her hair and the gales biting her cheeks. Merely, she ached to feel alive.
Finding her own broom too unwieldy to bring on her travels, Liliya had opted to make do with what Hogwarts had to offer. The school brooms did not seem like they would be ideal, but before she had secured a place on the Quidditch team, it was what she had been riding. Having been too embarrassed to ask her newfound adopters Ivan and Oliwia for a purchase, she had gotten by with the rickety, treacherous nature of the free supplements. Getting her own Silver Arrow had been a dream, and as her stead steadied, so did her heart. What was first rooted as fear grew into passion, and she found herself riding more for joy than practice.
Liliya was not quite certain what to make of Hogwarts. The layout was no different from her familiar residence of Durmstrang, yet the mountains that loomed in the distance were not the glaciers of the Laplands but the terrain of the Highlands; the lake beyond the far shores were not the iced planes of Norway but the deep lochs of Scotland; the language that rang out across the pitch — the encouragements, the bereavements, the curses — were not in her familiar Russian but English that was grating to the ear. Yet, smothered in the solitude of night, where she could barely see the landscape over the fog, or barely here the ripples of the lake over the screeching of crickets, she could ignore all these aspects that reminded her she was all too far from home.
Home had always drawn complications in the difficulty of its subject. Was home that old Volkov residence in faraway St. Petersburg, or was home the Starkov manor nestled into the Kaliningrad ports? Was home any of the houses she had bounced from, or was home the Durmstrang she now resided in? They had all provided a roof over her head, food in her her belly, and valuable lessons, even if love was not always present. Perhaps the home she would build one day would be their combination, rather than any separate penchant. Home, she deemed, was something she would make entirely on her own terms.
She would continue her pondering in the expanse of the sky — if she could defy gravity there, she could also defy the shackles that tied her down onto a history that served her no purpose.
She emerged from the storage room with a school broom in hand, and grimaced as it seemed to threaten to crumble in her hands. Well, Hogwarts’ terrible equipment might just be the death of her. The least she could do was leave a legacy of trick dives and joy rides.
Before she mounted, her eyes darted in the darkness that surrounded her. Part of her wished for isolation, part of her wished for companionship, so when the unmistakable sound of footsteps broke through the silence she had sculpted, she found herself freezing.
@Erast Yan & @Rosaline Everhart | banner by Camille de Varenne
INPC of Archer Duncan