Chapter Text
chapter one: good looking
you're not who you are to anyone, to anyone, these days
The Fawley estate sat at the edge of Ayrshire’s forgotten hills, tucked behind a thicket of silver beeches and thick, whispering hedgerows. It was a house that had learned to stay peacefully private over the centuries. Its sleepy windows watched the world like half-lidded eyes, content to be overlooked. But inside, something was always bubbling—always brewing. The air in the Fawley household was thick with the scent of dried herbs and the faint bitter tang of freshly crushed ingredients, a comforting and familiar aroma to Arden. The earthy aroma clung to her skin, even after a long day’s work, lingering like the warmth of her father’s quiet presence in his potions lab.
Arden Fawley moved amongst the cauldrons with practiced ease, her fingers deftly adding drops of moonstone tincture to the simmering cauldron in front of her. Her father, Aros, stood at his own table nearby, meticulously grinding up a handful of ingredients, a practiced, steady rhythm to his motions. Despite his calm demeanor, there was always a sense of quiet anticipation when they worked together. It was as if the air itself held its breath, waiting for the magic to unfold.
Arden stood at the worktable in her father’s potions lab, sleeves rolled to the elbow, a glass stirring rod in hand and green dragon bile dripping into a steaming pewter cauldron. The mixture hissed as it hit the surface, spiraling into streaks of luminous chartreuse.
“Counterclockwise,” Aros Fawley reminded her gently, not looking up from the notes he was annotating in the margin of a weathered book. “If you stir clockwise now, the entire thing will congeal.”
“I know, Father,” Arden said, suppressing a smile. “I’m not twelve.”
“You were twelve when you forgot last time,” he replied without malice.
“I was experimenting,” she muttered, cheeks flushing from the memory.
Aros chuckled quietly, tapping his quill against the page. He wore his usual lab robes—charcoal gray with silver trim, faintly singed at the cuffs—and his wild, graying hair looked even more unkempt than usual, like he’d walked through static. The lab, tucked beneath the east wing of the house, was paneled in dark wood and lit by golden orbs floating above the workstations. Shelves wrapped the walls from floor to ceiling, laden with crystal phials, preserved specimens, leather-bound texts, and strange artifacts brought back from Cairo, Patagonia, and Tirana.
The late August light streamed in through the small round window above Arden’s head, dust motes drifting lazily in the beams like tiny golden flecks.
The potion thickened. She adjusted the flame beneath the cauldron with a flick of her wand, and Aros murmured something approving without looking.
“What exactly is this one for?” she asked, glancing down at the thickening liquid. “It looks like a healing draught, but it doesn’t smell like one.”
He didn’t answer immediately. His weathered quill stilled on the page.
“It’s... a stabilizer,” he said eventually, still staring at the book. “Theoretically.”
“For?”
Another pause. “Nothing urgent.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You said that about the silencing serum. And then we had to clean echinus slime off the ceiling for two hours.”
“That was a valuable lesson.”
“In what? Viscosity mismanagement?”
“In humility.” He finally looked up, one brow raised.
Arden snorted and turned back to the cauldron. Despite herself, she liked these afternoons. The lab smelled of oak and iron and dried peppermint; it was cool even in summer, and there was a rhythm to brewing that soothed her nerves in a way nothing else quite managed. It wasn’t just the work—it was doing it beside him.
Even at his most absentminded, her father had always treated her like an equal in the lab. She could remember standing on a stool as a child, barely tall enough to peer into the top of a cauldron, watching the colors change with breathless awe while Aros guided her hand on the stirring rod.
That was before the world started changing.
Lately, the lab had taken on a slightly different energy. Not frantic—Aros was never frantic—but purposeful. Urgent. Some of the ingredients he used weren’t ones she’d ever seen before. Some she knew were restricted. And when she asked what he was working on, he always gave her vague answers.
She didn’t press too hard. Not yet.
“Do you think people were meant to live forever?” he asked suddenly.
The question hung in the warm air like a drop of black ink in clear water.
Arden blinked. “That’s a bit morbid for a Wednesday afternoon.”
Aros turned another page. “I didn’t ask if they could . I asked if they should .”
“Well,” she said slowly, “I suppose it depends on who’s asking. There is a big difference between someone who lives for good, and someone who lives for power.”
He nodded, almost imperceptibly. “And if you’re a father?”
That gave her pause.
“If you’re a father,” she said at last, “I imagine you’d want to live long enough to keep your daughter safe.”
Aros smiled faintly but said nothing.
Arden added a final drop of salamander blood to the potion and let the stirring rod still. The surface shimmered with a faint, ghostly sheen. It had turned a strange iridescent color—like oil on water, but brighter. She frowned.
“That’s not what it’s supposed to look like, is it?”
Aros stood and walked around to her side of the table. He peered into the cauldron, then let out a thoughtful hum. “It’s close. But it’s... reactive. More than I expected.”
“Reactive how?”
Before he could answer, a sharp knock echoed down the hall outside the lab. Three quick raps. Then silence.
Aros’s face changed—not fear exactly, but a flicker of tension around the eyes.
“I’ll get it,” Arden offered, already pulling off her gloves.
“No,” he said quickly. “No, I’ll go. Clean up, will you?”
She watched him go, the heels of his boots tapping lightly on the stone. The moment he was out of sight, the lab felt colder. Arden turned back to the cauldron. The potion had calmed, but a slow swirl had started near the center, as if stirred by something unseen.
She stepped back.
It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened.
She glanced at her father’s notes on the desk nearby, pages scattered and ink still drying. She shouldn’t. But she did.
The diagrams were unlike any she’d seen in a Hogwarts textbook—circular runes overlaid with potion cycles, alchemical symbols alongside ancient Sumerian glyphs. Her Latin was good, but this was older than Latin.
One phrase repeated itself in English, however, written in Aros’s unmistakable looping hand:
The plant lies beneath the sea.
A chill crept up her spine.
Before she could read further, Aros returned. His face was unreadable, but his hands were clenched.
“Everything all right?” she asked.
He didn’t answer at first. “Just someone from the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. Routine questioning.”
“About what?”
“Nothing that concerns you.”
She hated when he used that tone. But she said nothing.
That evening, the air outside the manor was thick and warm, the sky streaked in violet and rose as twilight descended. Arden and Aros took dinner in the greenhouse, as they often did in summer. Magical bulbs cast soft glows among the herb pots and blooming nocturnas, their pale petals curling open as the sun dipped below the hills.
The meal was quiet. Aros picked at his lamb and barely touched his wine. He had lit only half the lanterns. The other half stayed dim. Shadows gathered at the edges of the greenhouse, settling between the rows of potion herbs and creeping like dusk.
The clink of cutlery was the only sound for a while.
“They asked about Eleadora Wilkes,” Aros said finally, as if he’d been deciding whether or not to speak for the last half hour.
Arden paused with her fork halfway to her mouth. “From the Ministry?”
He nodded, eyes fixed on his plate. “Department of Experimental Magic. Brilliant mind. Too brilliant, if you asked some of the older purebloods in the Improper Use of Magic Department. She used to send me rare extracts—Acromentula venom, phoenix tears. Just last spring she was trying to develop an inhalable pain reliever that wouldn’t interact with memory charms.”
“What about her?”
“She’s gone. Her and her whole family. Muggleborns.”
Arden’s stomach dropped.
“They came for a routine check-in,” Aros went on, his tone clipped. “Just a few questions. Had I seen her recently? Did she leave anything with me? Did we share notes? Harmless, on the surface. But the kind of questions you ask when you already know the answers.”
“What does that even mean?”
“It means they’re not just looking for her.” Aros pushed his food away. “They’re looking for anyone who might be building things they don’t understand. Or worse, things they can’t control.”
A silence settled between them.
“Did she disappear?” Arden asked.
Aros’s jaw worked. He didn’t answer right away. “Gone. Her and her family. Entire house sealed off by the Department of Mysteries. The Prophet ran some half-page article about ‘domestic relocation following internal instability.’ And not a single name.”
“That’s not just gone,” Arden whispered. “That’s—erased.”
He nodded slowly. “They don’t want a spectacle. Just... silence. A removal. Not a purge. Not yet. Not something people will rise against. Just enough to unsettle. Just enough to frighten.”
The windows of the greenhouse reflected nothing but shadow now. Arden stared into them, her own face faint and ghostlike in the glass.
“You’re afraid,” she said.
Aros looked at her for a long time. “Of course I am. Only fools aren’t.”
“But you never used to—”
“I’ve never seen it done so quietly before.”
He stood and walked to the far end of the greenhouse, trailing a hand along a row of withering scarlet thistle. “You know what Eleadora said to me once? That potions were time magic. Not time travel—time memory. You’re preserving moments, reactions, possibilities. A draught is a captured truth. Even a healing elixir is a way of refusing death—for a moment longer.”
Arden watched him in the half-light. There was something about his silhouette she couldn’t name—something weary, or maybe something... watchful.
“She used to joke that if the wrong sort of people ever came into power, they wouldn’t need to burn books. They’d just poison the cauldrons.”
Aros turned back to her. “That’s what this is. It’s not about silencing dissent. It’s about severing collaboration. If we don’t trust each other, we stop building things together. We start working in isolation. And then... we become easier to remove. One at a time.”
Arden swallowed hard. She suddenly felt young in a way she hadn’t in years.
“I didn’t know you were close,” she said softly.
“I wasn’t,” he admitted. “But she reminded me of you..”
His voice cracked slightly, and he covered it with a sip of wine.
Arden didn’t reply. There wasn’t much to say.
“She was brilliant,” he added after a moment. “Not just talented—curious, insatiable. She never saw boundaries, only possibilities.”
He looked down at his plate, expression unreadable.
“And now she’s disappeared, and the Ministry would rather I burn her name out of my notes than ask questions.”
Another silence stretched between them, but this one was heavier—thicker. It felt like a border they’d crossed.
Aros leaned back in his chair, looking suddenly older than he had mere moments ago.
“You know,” he said, almost musing, “there’s this idea in ancient magical philosophy—especially in Babylonian schools—that knowledge isn’t just power. It’s memory. A way of cheating oblivion. You pass it down, and down, and down, and it outlives you. That's what makes it threatening. Not the knowing, but the remembering.”
Arden stared at her plate.
“Do you think that’s what they’re afraid of?” she asked. “People remembering what came before?”
He smiled, but it was a grim smile. “I think they want to decide what gets remembered. And by whom.”