Grandmother Stryga

This morning, my parents set me up on a playmat in the living room. Our house is relatively well decorated, but with a rather old style that is peculiar to the wizard and their desire not to modernize things too much.

A chimney that must surely be connected to the Floo network is placed in front of two green sofas and a wooden coffee table whose top is covered with a mosaic representing a tulip in bloom. Fun facts, they still have a television set on a piece of furniture in a corner of the room.

Right next to it is the dining room with a simple wooden table and a dresser on which is placed a crystal vase with a bouquet of white roses from our garden. My mom probably grows them with magic because it's not the season.

A delicious smell comes from the kitchen where my mother is cooking lunch. The advantage of having parents who are not in favor of modernity is that I am not entitled to the small commercial baby pot but to small dishes cooked with love every day.

Out of boredom, I start lighting small balls of light above my head. My father raises his head from his newspaper and looks up to the sky.

"Finite" He takes out his wand and makes the small lights that sparkle in the living room disappear.

I can't help but laugh at his exasperated face. No matter how hard they try to teach me not to do magic anymore, I can pretend I don't understand anything and drive them crazy.

"Is he doing it again?" My mom comes in with my plate and sits me down in my baby chair." You couldn't make me a girl. You had to give me a turbulent boy." She gives a false pout.

"I'm sorry, honey, but I think that given our temperament when we were younger, it was a pretty obvious that we were going to have… energetic children." My father laughs and puts his newspaper on the coffee table to join us.

I begin to eat the green porridge with small pieces of meat served to me. It tastes better than it looks, and I'm trying not to give them more work with me by taking the time necessary to coordinate my movements, so I don't drop my food. Not wasting food is one of the things I learned during my studies on a tight budget.

As my parents are about to begin their own meal, the doorbell rings. My parents, who weren't expecting visitors, seem worried. My father gets up and takes out his wand to go take a look in the door peephole. He relaxes when he sees our visitor and opens the door.

"Mother-in-law! How are you?"

'My back hurt. I took one of those flying things that Muggles call planes. I never thought we could put so many people in a piece of metal flying in the sky without magic. I was afraid to die every time that damn thing shook. And the seats, let's not even talk about them, no comfort and hardly the place to put your legs." I like her gruff tone and she has a kind of eastern accent when she speaks. "So where is he?"

"We're here, mom." My mom raises her voice to be heard by her mom. She enters the house and now that I can see her closer, I realize that she must be a pure blood veela. Her hair and eyes are like those of my mother, but her skin glitters as if covered with a thin layer of frost. She seems unusually young for someone who is a grandmother. She looks at me from top to bottom as if she was looking for something.

"So, he's really a boy." My mom suddenly looks more serious.

"Is it serious? He's not going to have a problem because it's not a girl?"

My grandmother starts laughing. "Oh yes, lots of them. Starting with all the hearts he's going to break." She takes a deep breath, and she becomes more concerned. " I've never seen one, but I've heard rumors. From what I know, they are very much like their father and very little like their mother. But here, it's completely the opposite, your features are almost invisible, Arthur. Maybe a little in the ears?"

"So, you don't know either?"

"I'm sorry, this whole situation is as strange to me as it is to you."

A long silence settles where my mother and grandmother look at me with concern.

"What if, ..." The two women turn to my father who just spoke." I know it may sound crazy as a theory and even more so when you know that he probably doesn't know the difference between a boy and a girl. But what if Sean was basically a girl and had changed sex in his mother's womb with his metamorphmagus powers because he wanted to."

I'm so shocked by the possibility that my brain bug for a second and I drop my spoon.

The more I think about it and the more I saw it as a true possibility. Because of my old life, I am very attached to being a boy and it is possible that I unconsciously changed sex to match what I imagine myself to be.

"Is he a metamorphmagus?" Stryga seems curious. To answer his question, I change the color of my hair from platinum blond to dark green. " Fascinating! It must be the first time in the history of the world that a veela has that kind of ability and it's even more intriguing when you know he's a boy!" She lifts me up and hugs me and burps me. She smells like grandma's old perfume; I hate that smell that lifts my heart. "If the Queen ever heard of him, I'm sure she'd be interested in meeting him."

"Is that old hag still alive?"

"Elena, your language!" She sighs and shakes her head. " Even if your meeting didn't go well, she remains our queen and the guarantor of our traditions."

I finally let out a small burp and I manage to restrain myself from regurgitating on her. It would have been a bit bad for our first meeting. She sits on the couch and put me on her knees.

"Why don't I tell you a little bit about your origins, hmm? I was born in a small veela community in the Bulgarian Mountains. We were four sisters Anisia, Kathala, Morgana, and your dear grandmother Stryga. I still remember our games in the snow early in the morning as if it was yesterday. Now that I think about it, I haven't seen them in years."

Small tears form on the corner of her eyes, but she erases them with a gesture of the hand before they begin to flow.

"When I was older, I got tired of the peaceful life of our little village. I wanted to go on an adventure, exploring the world. I started traveling around the world, collecting suitors who wanted my favors until the day I arrived in a village called Little Hangleton. It was not the most beautiful village I saw, nor the liveliest, but the calm that reigned there reminded me of my home where life flowed as calmly as the stream."

She seems nostalgic and her eyes get lost in her memories for a second as if she was seeing the scene again in her mind.

"That's when I met your grandfather, you know. Well, meeting him is a big word, and accidentally capturing it would be fairer. I was walking through the forest when I suddenly found myself upside down attached to a tree by the ankle. I spent hours screaming in vain for someone to come and rescue me and it was finally your grandfather, Morfin Gaunt, who came to untie me. He wasn't very handsome, he wasn't very smart, but he was gentle. He took care of my ankle and helped me go back to the village and a few weeks later we both left to escape his father and the death threats he was making for both of us. A few months later, your mom was born. Then she met an idiot who charmed her without me understanding how he did it. And now here you are."

"Hey!" My father raises his head from his plate with an angry look on his face.

So, this is how Death granted my wish to be a descendant of Salazar Slytherin, creating a meeting between my grandmother and Morfin. Well, that's fine with me, it gives me a certain legitimacy on the stone of resurrection and the other relics of death.

"My story could have ended here, and everything would have been for the best, but our world is not so merciful. Your great-aunt Merope fell in love with a muggel and gave birth to a demonic child, a being that not so long ago shook the whole world, Tom Riddle. The day your mother came to tell me she was pregnant; this demon came to get the Gaunt family ring. Your grandfather did everything he could to protect us. He hid us in a secret basement while he confronted his nephew. He failed to defeat him and paid the price with his life. Your mother joined your father and they decided to come hide here while your old grandmother went to hide with her cousin in France."

The atmosphere of the house suddenly became very dark, and the silence is the only thing that follows the end of Stryga's story.

"Why am I telling you all this? You probably don't even understand what I'm telling you."