How many of those cases would be where the villain felt they had to use a ranged, interceptable spell to kill a literal baby though?
Spells in Silence (Harry Potter)
- Thread starter Silently Watches
- Start date
- Pronouns
- Male
That's irrelevant, I was replying to your belief that Lily's sacrifice was untainted by other emotions.
eschwartz
Glorious Wordsmith and Author-Whisperer
- Location
- Roundworld
I'm sure they feel it's their *duty* to *protect* their child.
I'm not at all sure they feel it's their *duty* to *die* for their child. I feel like we can probably chalk that one up to love.
Ch. 21, Red Teeth
Silently Watches
Professional Stalker
- Location
- Right behind you
The creaks around her caused Hazel's eyes to flutter again, and she sighed silently as she turned her head to face the dying coals in the fireplace. The last few days had been… different was probably the best way to describe it. She had received lessons on the basics of potions here and there from Elise and Amorette, but that was nothing like working alongside a family of hags whose primary source of income seemed to be selling their potions to apothecaries, who then in turn sold them at a profit to the wizards who wanted or needed them. The different members of the family all seemed to have fairly defined roles, too: Elfriede gathered up the ingredients, Gertrud brewed the potions, and Hedwig as the youngest and most human-looking was the one who went to the wizards to do the actual haggling and selling.
From what Elfriede had explained, the older a hag got, the wartier and greener and hunched-er they became, which meant young hags were the ones who were often assigned the task of dealing with humans. Elfriede herself had done the same when she and Gertrud were younger. It also explained why Hedwig was basically never at home until it was time for dinner, and why she went to bed earlier even than her mother and aunt.
A door creaked, and Hazel's eyes flickered in that direction. The only worry she really had was Gertrud leaving her bedroom for a midnight snack, mostly because of how hard it was to trust that particular woman. For all that Gertrud had been fully focused on the work at hand whenever Hazel assisted her, she reverted to her previous bloodthirstiness as soon as she was separated from her cauldrons. It was a change in personality that neither she nor Elfriede could explain. From what little Elfriede had explained, however, this was how Gertrud normally was, and it was her behavior during the potions lessons that was the abnormality rather than the other way around. Nonetheless, it left Hazel with no secure footing with which to deal with the younger of the sisters.
The figure sneaking into the darkened kitchen was soon revealed not, in fact, to be Gertrud. It was Hedwig. What really caught Hazel's attention was what the young hag was wearing. All the times she had seen Hedwig before, she wore heavy, sturdy clothing. Functional and hardy, nothing fancy or eye-catching. Right now, though, she was wearing what looked like it was a red or pink or maybe purple dress – it was hard to say for sure with only the little bit of light coming from the covered jar of flames Hedwig was using to see by as she rooted through a cabinet – with only one shoulder covered up and the other bare.
It was much fancier than anything Hazel had ever seen her wear before, and that made her curious. What was she up to?
Whatever Hedwig was looking for, she apparently found it. Pulling a vial from the cabinet, she uncorked it and quickly swallowed it down. A moment later, she hunched over and grabbed at her belly. Hazel's eyes opened wide, and she was a split-second from jumping out of the chair in which she had tried to sleep when she realized what the potion was doing.
Hedwig's arms, inhumanly long just like her mother's and aunt's, were shrinking. Her shoulders narrowed. Her skin seemed to darken in what little light was available. Her nose, just barely visible at this angle, shortened out of sight. After those few seconds of pain, Hedwig stood straight and placed the vial on the counter, and she looked nothing at all like herself.
Hazel watched as she crossed to the fireplace with her dress fitting so much better than before, and reached into a shallow pot on the mantle. Withdrawing a handful of glittering powder, she tossed it onto the embers and coals and said, "The Galloping Griffon." The fireplace came alive with tall green flames, and Hedwig stepped through them and vanished.
As soon as the hag was out of sight, she leapt to her feet. Those emerald flames were familiar; they looked almost like the fires in the braziers people came in and out of when they went to Place Cachée, the shopping center in Paris. Where in the world was Hedwig going, though, and why was she sneaking around? The curiosity burned in the back of Hazel's mind, and it took but a moment for her to decide on her plan of action.
Moving as quickly and quietly as she could, she hurried to the door and fumbled around for her trainers. In the time it took to find them and slip them on, she resolved to ask Elfriede some more questions about a special paste the hag had mentioned using to see plants and animals in the forest when she had to go looking for nocturnal ingredients. It would be nice to actually see what she was doing in the dark. Hazel looked down at herself and the clothes she was still wearing from the day earlier before shrugging. They were not completely clean, but she was not planning on being seen by anybody either.
She glanced over at her satchel and her staff, as well as Morgan who was sleeping in a little puffball. They will be fine, she told herself. She was not planning on being gone long, nor was she planning on staying away. Even so, her hands itched to grab them and bring them along.
Perhaps it was a good thing after all that she had decided to carry all she owned with her rather than stashing it away in various places if this was her reaction to leaving for just a few minutes without them.
Moving over towards the fireplace, she pulled the pot off the mantle and set it on the floor before taking a pinch of the dust within and tossing it into the fire. The flames once again rose up to lick the flue. Now, how was she to direct it? She could not speak the words, and while she could look up what 'galloping griffin' was in German, it was not something she knew off the top of her head.
'Take me to the last place you went,' she thought as firmly as she could at the bright green flames. Then she stepped across the threshold and into the fire.
As soon as her back foot left the floor, the bottom of the fireplace fell out from under her. She tumbled through a glowing green void, spinning around and around as though she weighed no more than a feather on the wind. Something heavy and hard smacked her in the back, and when the blow tossed her aside it only put her in the path for something else to have a go at her. The spinning got faster, and faster, and little squares of white light streaked past her in a nauseating stream. She closed her eyes and silently asked anything that might listen to little druids like her to let this please be over—
She was yanked to the side, and she tumbled out onto a hard surface before rolling to a stop. Cool air met her face, and she gulped it in greedily before opening her eyes at last. She lay on her back in a darkened room, a few benches sitting empty on her left and her right and a wooden ceiling above. Pushing herself to her feet, she shook her head and glanced around. The room in which she stood looked, strange as it might be, almost like an indoor waiting area at a train station. It was rectangular, with two doors farther in. One of them, the one on the left, was open to reveal a lively tavern or pub; the set of doors on the right were closed, darkness clearly present behind the glass windows.
Hazel hurried to the closed doors and stepped outside into the night air. She hoped she was in the right place to pursue Hedwig, although if she were honest with herself she had no idea how she was even supposed to know whether that was the case. She did not know where she was, nor where Hedwig was going beyond the name of the building.
I was not far behind her, she reasoned. If I don't see her, then I'll go back to the cabin.
She stood on a fairly busy street with plenty of pedestrians, but all of them seemed to instinctually give the doorway in which she stood a wide berth. Looking to the right, she saw just a crowd of people, but no one recognizable. Looking to the right, she smiled when she saw a woman in a one-shouldered red dress for just an instant before she was swallowed up by the crowds.
It was not much, but it was something to go on.
Breathing out her ignore-me smoke, she took off in pursuit of the woman she could only assume was the disguised Hedwig. What was Hedwig doing? Why was she here? These were the questions that plagued Hazel, as well as a niggling, worrying suspicion.
Was Hedwig on the hunt?
With as nice as the hags were to her, in large part because they considered her one of them, it was easy to forget or ignore that they had outright admitted that they ate people. Part of that was because other than Gertrud, the hags' thoughts did not revolve around eating or hunting. They were like regular people, just trying to get through the day. It made them, in many many ways, too similar to the werewolves she stayed with in France to view as monsters, and it was hard to reconcile those two images in her mind.
Walking down the streets of this city, she followed Hedwig until the disguised hag entered a line to get into a building. The main hold-up in the line was the large man in a tight suit standing at the door and looking at everybody's identification before allowing them inside. Hazel stopped nearby and looked back and forth between the man and the line. Would she be able to sneak in under her smoke? She was not sure, but the more she looked at it the more doubt she had. Her spell was great at hiding her within a crowd, but she had never tried it when somebody was actively examining every single person. The closest comparison she had for this was when she snuck into Shervage Wood behind another family so she could blend in with their kids. This… might be a little more complicated than that.
Thankfully, she had other options.
She waited for several minutes, peeking through the door each time it was opened so she could get as good of a mental picture of the inside as possible. When Hedwig slipped inside, she made her move. Walking away from the entrance to the building, she went around a corner and jumped—
—landing in a small alcove she had spotted through the door. Reinforcing her smoke just a bit, she walked deeper into the building.
Down the hall, she entered a large room that was split in two levels. On the bottom was a massive multicolored floor lit from beneath, already filled with a horde of people dancing and jumping to the music blasting out of the multiple speakers that hung from the ceiling. The top level was less an actual floor and more a wraparound balcony that overlooked the dance floor. Quickly glancing around, Hazel soon found Hedwig not among the dancers but instead leaning over the balcony and watching the people below.
Creeping over towards the disguised hag, she thought about how she wanted to approach this. She had numerous questions, but Hedwig probably would not appreciate her writing in the air with her sparkler and drawing attention to their magical nature, and the notebooks she had used before creating that spell were all in her satchel back at the hags' home. Not to mention, she was clearly too young to be in this club, so dropping her smoke in order for Hedwig to see her would let everybody else see her, too.
She looked at the thick wisps of grey smoke that encircled her, and she wondered. She had no trouble covering Morgan with her smoke, so clearly she could bring other creatures into her smoke with her. He also always rode on her shoulder, so she had no idea if there was a distance limit to her spell, but there was no way Hedwig would be able to sit on her shoulder or the other way around.
You won't know what is possible until you give it a shot, she reminded herself. She walked over to stand next to Hedwig, then she blew. The smoke billowed out from around her, tendrils reaching out like vaporous fingers as if to drag Hedwig closer to her. The smoke finally drifted far enough away to completely envelop the hag, although as it did so an uncomfortable tension was also taking up residence behind her eyes. Hazel wrote a short question in the air beside her, and then she reached out and tapped Hedwig twice on her bare arm. 'What are you doing?'
Hedwig jumped at the sudden contact and whipped her head around to look at Hazel. As soon as their eyes met, her almost mocha-colored skin paled to an unhealthy degree. "Hazel, what are you doing here?" she hissed, her eyes darting from the floating words to the smattering of people around them and back to Hazel. "You can't be here, and you can't go around using magic!"
'It is fine. No one is looking at us.' At her reply, Hedwig narrowed her borrowed brown eyes and looked around again, now more attentive to what the nearby people were actually doing. Sure enough, they were being completely ignored. When Hedwig turned back to her, Hazel had already written, 'I have a spell for this.'
"I do not know whether to be shocked or impressed by that. Why are you here?" Hedwig asked instead.
'I wanted to see why you were sneaking out.' Casting a meaningful look around and down at all the people in the room, she asked, 'Are you hunting?'
At that, Hedwig stared for just a moment before starting to laugh. "Oh, my. I suppose I should have expected that question. No, Hazel, I am not on the hunt. I'm just here to enjoy myself a little." She waved her hand over the dance floor. "I think you have noticed that home can be a little boring. Wand-wavers are not much better. Pig-humans, though? They are much more exciting."
'If they are so exciting, why do you eat them?'
"You say that like you think it is a choice. How to explain this?" she asked herself as she tapped her fingers on the railing. "Have you ever smelled bacon being cooked?"
Hazel nodded. Bacon had been a common staple in the Dursley household, and with her aunt relegating many chores to her over the years she lived there, she was more than familiar with cooking it.
"It is not a perfect example, but that is similar to how humans smell all the time. We could have just eaten a gigantic meal and be stuffed so full we are on the edge of throwing up, but then we encounter a human? Our mouths start watering, and our stomachs start growling and aching. The longer it goes on, the hungrier we get." Hedwig shrugged. "That's just how life goes. We don't eat humans because they taste good. Or, not just because they taste good, because they absolutely do. Don't get me wrong on that one. Eating pig-humans is definitely not a hardship." Hedwig licked her lips for a moment before blinking and looking back at Hazel, apparently remembering now where she was and to whom she was talking.
'You are doing okay not eating anyone right now,' she could not help but point out.
"I spend a lot of time around humans, both wand-wavers and not," Hedwig explained with a small wave of her hand to encompass everything around them. "It means I got used to being hungry. I still feel it, but I am better at ignoring it for a while."
Hazel turned to look out over the crowd of dancers and frowned lightly. She had to wonder, what would happen if hags decided just not to eat people? She was no stranger to going hungry, not when locking her in her cupboard without food for several days had been a favorite punishment at Privet Drive, and while it was terrible it was also survivable. Could a hag bear that hunger? Would it eventually become something they got used to? She did not want to cause pain to these people she had met, but if it meant they did not need to kill people in turn, was that not better for everyone?
A quick bit of writing had her question floating beside her, and after several seconds of silence and a feeling of sadness coming from Hedwig, she looked over to find the hag staring out into nothingness, lost in memories of which she could only pick out fragments.
A quick poke in the arm brought Hedwig back to reality, and the hag looked at her question again before sighing. "It isn't pretty, or something we like to talk about."
'I am sorry. You do not need to tell me.'
"No, you deserve to know, if only to understand how lucky you were to be spared inheriting that aspect of our nature. Mother had a cousin who decided she would no longer eat humans. She felt it was evil to eat another creature who could feel and think. When no one could talk her out of it, her mother and sisters tried to help her, fed her all she could possibly eat. They hoped to change her fate in any way they could."
Hedwig trailed off into silence, and after a minute Hazel could not help but ask, 'What happened to her?'
Brown eyes filled with sorrow met her own. "She starved to death."
Oh. Hazel looked down at her feet for several minutes, unsure of just what she should or could say in response to that. She had not meant to make Hedwig feel so sad or bring up painful memories. Her self-recriminations were cut short when she felt an arm wrap around her shoulders and pull her into Hedwig's side.
"Do not blame yourself for asking," Hedwig said with a sigh. "If you were a hag, a full hag anyway, this is still something you would have to know."
'Is that what happened to Gertrud?' she finally asked. Might Gertrud have gotten so hungry that it actually hurt her mind? If that were the case, it would be hard to blame her for her behavior. Starving to the point that she was always hungry… Hazel shivered lightly. She had never imagined that such a thing could be possible, but it sounded awful.
"No. Aunt Gertrud has… a condition, one she was born with. It is called the Insatiable Hunger, and it is exactly what it sounds like." Hedwig gave her a squeeze. "It does not make her any safer for you to be around by yourself, but please do not hold it against her. She just cannot help herself."
It was not the same as what Hazel had imagined, but it was little better. Hearing all this made her feel a little bit guilty, too. This family had opened their home to her and welcomed her in, started teaching her what they knew, and all the while she was making them feel constantly hungry.
She could not blame the hags for their actions, either. This was not unthinking evil, not like the folktales made it sound. It was simply nature at work, just like when she saw some vultures eating a dead rabbit on the side of the road as she was walking towards the border. Everything had the right to eat and survive.
One last squeeze, and Hedwig pushed her upright. "Go on back home," she said with a wan smile. "I only have a couple of hours of beauty with this potion, and I mean to enjoy myself with them, not play babysitter. I will see you in the morning."
'Okay. Have fun?'
Hedwig chuckled, her thoughts already moving towards the dance floor. "Don't worry. I will."
From what Elfriede had explained, the older a hag got, the wartier and greener and hunched-er they became, which meant young hags were the ones who were often assigned the task of dealing with humans. Elfriede herself had done the same when she and Gertrud were younger. It also explained why Hedwig was basically never at home until it was time for dinner, and why she went to bed earlier even than her mother and aunt.
A door creaked, and Hazel's eyes flickered in that direction. The only worry she really had was Gertrud leaving her bedroom for a midnight snack, mostly because of how hard it was to trust that particular woman. For all that Gertrud had been fully focused on the work at hand whenever Hazel assisted her, she reverted to her previous bloodthirstiness as soon as she was separated from her cauldrons. It was a change in personality that neither she nor Elfriede could explain. From what little Elfriede had explained, however, this was how Gertrud normally was, and it was her behavior during the potions lessons that was the abnormality rather than the other way around. Nonetheless, it left Hazel with no secure footing with which to deal with the younger of the sisters.
The figure sneaking into the darkened kitchen was soon revealed not, in fact, to be Gertrud. It was Hedwig. What really caught Hazel's attention was what the young hag was wearing. All the times she had seen Hedwig before, she wore heavy, sturdy clothing. Functional and hardy, nothing fancy or eye-catching. Right now, though, she was wearing what looked like it was a red or pink or maybe purple dress – it was hard to say for sure with only the little bit of light coming from the covered jar of flames Hedwig was using to see by as she rooted through a cabinet – with only one shoulder covered up and the other bare.
It was much fancier than anything Hazel had ever seen her wear before, and that made her curious. What was she up to?
Whatever Hedwig was looking for, she apparently found it. Pulling a vial from the cabinet, she uncorked it and quickly swallowed it down. A moment later, she hunched over and grabbed at her belly. Hazel's eyes opened wide, and she was a split-second from jumping out of the chair in which she had tried to sleep when she realized what the potion was doing.
Hedwig's arms, inhumanly long just like her mother's and aunt's, were shrinking. Her shoulders narrowed. Her skin seemed to darken in what little light was available. Her nose, just barely visible at this angle, shortened out of sight. After those few seconds of pain, Hedwig stood straight and placed the vial on the counter, and she looked nothing at all like herself.
Hazel watched as she crossed to the fireplace with her dress fitting so much better than before, and reached into a shallow pot on the mantle. Withdrawing a handful of glittering powder, she tossed it onto the embers and coals and said, "The Galloping Griffon." The fireplace came alive with tall green flames, and Hedwig stepped through them and vanished.
As soon as the hag was out of sight, she leapt to her feet. Those emerald flames were familiar; they looked almost like the fires in the braziers people came in and out of when they went to Place Cachée, the shopping center in Paris. Where in the world was Hedwig going, though, and why was she sneaking around? The curiosity burned in the back of Hazel's mind, and it took but a moment for her to decide on her plan of action.
Moving as quickly and quietly as she could, she hurried to the door and fumbled around for her trainers. In the time it took to find them and slip them on, she resolved to ask Elfriede some more questions about a special paste the hag had mentioned using to see plants and animals in the forest when she had to go looking for nocturnal ingredients. It would be nice to actually see what she was doing in the dark. Hazel looked down at herself and the clothes she was still wearing from the day earlier before shrugging. They were not completely clean, but she was not planning on being seen by anybody either.
She glanced over at her satchel and her staff, as well as Morgan who was sleeping in a little puffball. They will be fine, she told herself. She was not planning on being gone long, nor was she planning on staying away. Even so, her hands itched to grab them and bring them along.
Perhaps it was a good thing after all that she had decided to carry all she owned with her rather than stashing it away in various places if this was her reaction to leaving for just a few minutes without them.
Moving over towards the fireplace, she pulled the pot off the mantle and set it on the floor before taking a pinch of the dust within and tossing it into the fire. The flames once again rose up to lick the flue. Now, how was she to direct it? She could not speak the words, and while she could look up what 'galloping griffin' was in German, it was not something she knew off the top of her head.
'Take me to the last place you went,' she thought as firmly as she could at the bright green flames. Then she stepped across the threshold and into the fire.
As soon as her back foot left the floor, the bottom of the fireplace fell out from under her. She tumbled through a glowing green void, spinning around and around as though she weighed no more than a feather on the wind. Something heavy and hard smacked her in the back, and when the blow tossed her aside it only put her in the path for something else to have a go at her. The spinning got faster, and faster, and little squares of white light streaked past her in a nauseating stream. She closed her eyes and silently asked anything that might listen to little druids like her to let this please be over—
She was yanked to the side, and she tumbled out onto a hard surface before rolling to a stop. Cool air met her face, and she gulped it in greedily before opening her eyes at last. She lay on her back in a darkened room, a few benches sitting empty on her left and her right and a wooden ceiling above. Pushing herself to her feet, she shook her head and glanced around. The room in which she stood looked, strange as it might be, almost like an indoor waiting area at a train station. It was rectangular, with two doors farther in. One of them, the one on the left, was open to reveal a lively tavern or pub; the set of doors on the right were closed, darkness clearly present behind the glass windows.
Hazel hurried to the closed doors and stepped outside into the night air. She hoped she was in the right place to pursue Hedwig, although if she were honest with herself she had no idea how she was even supposed to know whether that was the case. She did not know where she was, nor where Hedwig was going beyond the name of the building.
I was not far behind her, she reasoned. If I don't see her, then I'll go back to the cabin.
She stood on a fairly busy street with plenty of pedestrians, but all of them seemed to instinctually give the doorway in which she stood a wide berth. Looking to the right, she saw just a crowd of people, but no one recognizable. Looking to the right, she smiled when she saw a woman in a one-shouldered red dress for just an instant before she was swallowed up by the crowds.
It was not much, but it was something to go on.
Breathing out her ignore-me smoke, she took off in pursuit of the woman she could only assume was the disguised Hedwig. What was Hedwig doing? Why was she here? These were the questions that plagued Hazel, as well as a niggling, worrying suspicion.
Was Hedwig on the hunt?
With as nice as the hags were to her, in large part because they considered her one of them, it was easy to forget or ignore that they had outright admitted that they ate people. Part of that was because other than Gertrud, the hags' thoughts did not revolve around eating or hunting. They were like regular people, just trying to get through the day. It made them, in many many ways, too similar to the werewolves she stayed with in France to view as monsters, and it was hard to reconcile those two images in her mind.
Walking down the streets of this city, she followed Hedwig until the disguised hag entered a line to get into a building. The main hold-up in the line was the large man in a tight suit standing at the door and looking at everybody's identification before allowing them inside. Hazel stopped nearby and looked back and forth between the man and the line. Would she be able to sneak in under her smoke? She was not sure, but the more she looked at it the more doubt she had. Her spell was great at hiding her within a crowd, but she had never tried it when somebody was actively examining every single person. The closest comparison she had for this was when she snuck into Shervage Wood behind another family so she could blend in with their kids. This… might be a little more complicated than that.
Thankfully, she had other options.
She waited for several minutes, peeking through the door each time it was opened so she could get as good of a mental picture of the inside as possible. When Hedwig slipped inside, she made her move. Walking away from the entrance to the building, she went around a corner and jumped—
—landing in a small alcove she had spotted through the door. Reinforcing her smoke just a bit, she walked deeper into the building.
Down the hall, she entered a large room that was split in two levels. On the bottom was a massive multicolored floor lit from beneath, already filled with a horde of people dancing and jumping to the music blasting out of the multiple speakers that hung from the ceiling. The top level was less an actual floor and more a wraparound balcony that overlooked the dance floor. Quickly glancing around, Hazel soon found Hedwig not among the dancers but instead leaning over the balcony and watching the people below.
Creeping over towards the disguised hag, she thought about how she wanted to approach this. She had numerous questions, but Hedwig probably would not appreciate her writing in the air with her sparkler and drawing attention to their magical nature, and the notebooks she had used before creating that spell were all in her satchel back at the hags' home. Not to mention, she was clearly too young to be in this club, so dropping her smoke in order for Hedwig to see her would let everybody else see her, too.
She looked at the thick wisps of grey smoke that encircled her, and she wondered. She had no trouble covering Morgan with her smoke, so clearly she could bring other creatures into her smoke with her. He also always rode on her shoulder, so she had no idea if there was a distance limit to her spell, but there was no way Hedwig would be able to sit on her shoulder or the other way around.
You won't know what is possible until you give it a shot, she reminded herself. She walked over to stand next to Hedwig, then she blew. The smoke billowed out from around her, tendrils reaching out like vaporous fingers as if to drag Hedwig closer to her. The smoke finally drifted far enough away to completely envelop the hag, although as it did so an uncomfortable tension was also taking up residence behind her eyes. Hazel wrote a short question in the air beside her, and then she reached out and tapped Hedwig twice on her bare arm. 'What are you doing?'
Hedwig jumped at the sudden contact and whipped her head around to look at Hazel. As soon as their eyes met, her almost mocha-colored skin paled to an unhealthy degree. "Hazel, what are you doing here?" she hissed, her eyes darting from the floating words to the smattering of people around them and back to Hazel. "You can't be here, and you can't go around using magic!"
'It is fine. No one is looking at us.' At her reply, Hedwig narrowed her borrowed brown eyes and looked around again, now more attentive to what the nearby people were actually doing. Sure enough, they were being completely ignored. When Hedwig turned back to her, Hazel had already written, 'I have a spell for this.'
"I do not know whether to be shocked or impressed by that. Why are you here?" Hedwig asked instead.
'I wanted to see why you were sneaking out.' Casting a meaningful look around and down at all the people in the room, she asked, 'Are you hunting?'
At that, Hedwig stared for just a moment before starting to laugh. "Oh, my. I suppose I should have expected that question. No, Hazel, I am not on the hunt. I'm just here to enjoy myself a little." She waved her hand over the dance floor. "I think you have noticed that home can be a little boring. Wand-wavers are not much better. Pig-humans, though? They are much more exciting."
'If they are so exciting, why do you eat them?'
"You say that like you think it is a choice. How to explain this?" she asked herself as she tapped her fingers on the railing. "Have you ever smelled bacon being cooked?"
Hazel nodded. Bacon had been a common staple in the Dursley household, and with her aunt relegating many chores to her over the years she lived there, she was more than familiar with cooking it.
"It is not a perfect example, but that is similar to how humans smell all the time. We could have just eaten a gigantic meal and be stuffed so full we are on the edge of throwing up, but then we encounter a human? Our mouths start watering, and our stomachs start growling and aching. The longer it goes on, the hungrier we get." Hedwig shrugged. "That's just how life goes. We don't eat humans because they taste good. Or, not just because they taste good, because they absolutely do. Don't get me wrong on that one. Eating pig-humans is definitely not a hardship." Hedwig licked her lips for a moment before blinking and looking back at Hazel, apparently remembering now where she was and to whom she was talking.
'You are doing okay not eating anyone right now,' she could not help but point out.
"I spend a lot of time around humans, both wand-wavers and not," Hedwig explained with a small wave of her hand to encompass everything around them. "It means I got used to being hungry. I still feel it, but I am better at ignoring it for a while."
Hazel turned to look out over the crowd of dancers and frowned lightly. She had to wonder, what would happen if hags decided just not to eat people? She was no stranger to going hungry, not when locking her in her cupboard without food for several days had been a favorite punishment at Privet Drive, and while it was terrible it was also survivable. Could a hag bear that hunger? Would it eventually become something they got used to? She did not want to cause pain to these people she had met, but if it meant they did not need to kill people in turn, was that not better for everyone?
A quick bit of writing had her question floating beside her, and after several seconds of silence and a feeling of sadness coming from Hedwig, she looked over to find the hag staring out into nothingness, lost in memories of which she could only pick out fragments.
A quick poke in the arm brought Hedwig back to reality, and the hag looked at her question again before sighing. "It isn't pretty, or something we like to talk about."
'I am sorry. You do not need to tell me.'
"No, you deserve to know, if only to understand how lucky you were to be spared inheriting that aspect of our nature. Mother had a cousin who decided she would no longer eat humans. She felt it was evil to eat another creature who could feel and think. When no one could talk her out of it, her mother and sisters tried to help her, fed her all she could possibly eat. They hoped to change her fate in any way they could."
Hedwig trailed off into silence, and after a minute Hazel could not help but ask, 'What happened to her?'
Brown eyes filled with sorrow met her own. "She starved to death."
Oh. Hazel looked down at her feet for several minutes, unsure of just what she should or could say in response to that. She had not meant to make Hedwig feel so sad or bring up painful memories. Her self-recriminations were cut short when she felt an arm wrap around her shoulders and pull her into Hedwig's side.
"Do not blame yourself for asking," Hedwig said with a sigh. "If you were a hag, a full hag anyway, this is still something you would have to know."
'Is that what happened to Gertrud?' she finally asked. Might Gertrud have gotten so hungry that it actually hurt her mind? If that were the case, it would be hard to blame her for her behavior. Starving to the point that she was always hungry… Hazel shivered lightly. She had never imagined that such a thing could be possible, but it sounded awful.
"No. Aunt Gertrud has… a condition, one she was born with. It is called the Insatiable Hunger, and it is exactly what it sounds like." Hedwig gave her a squeeze. "It does not make her any safer for you to be around by yourself, but please do not hold it against her. She just cannot help herself."
It was not the same as what Hazel had imagined, but it was little better. Hearing all this made her feel a little bit guilty, too. This family had opened their home to her and welcomed her in, started teaching her what they knew, and all the while she was making them feel constantly hungry.
She could not blame the hags for their actions, either. This was not unthinking evil, not like the folktales made it sound. It was simply nature at work, just like when she saw some vultures eating a dead rabbit on the side of the road as she was walking towards the border. Everything had the right to eat and survive.
One last squeeze, and Hedwig pushed her upright. "Go on back home," she said with a wan smile. "I only have a couple of hours of beauty with this potion, and I mean to enjoy myself with them, not play babysitter. I will see you in the morning."
'Okay. Have fun?'
Hedwig chuckled, her thoughts already moving towards the dance floor. "Don't worry. I will."
I mean the having to eat humans must be a curse or something, right?
Equating it to being nature at work doesn't really work since I can't really think of any animal that solely has to eat one other certain/specific kind of animal.
I mean maybe humans have something comparable to a vitamin/nutrient the hags need? In which case it ought to be possible to create an artificial substitute.
Equating it to being nature at work doesn't really work since I can't really think of any animal that solely has to eat one other certain/specific kind of animal.
I mean maybe humans have something comparable to a vitamin/nutrient the hags need? In which case it ought to be possible to create an artificial substitute.
- Location
- Colorado
- Pronouns
- She/They
Pretty sure their obligate diet is more magic than nutrition based; they need human life force, or soul, or magic or something. @tfesmo's probably on the right track of ethical harvesting, but it's unknown if whatever hags consume is replenishable in people.
Since this does reek of a curse, the straightforward if not easy solution is to break the curse.
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YuffieK
(Verified Ninja Princess)
So, the 'vampires running the blood banks, ghouls and zombies running funeral homes & coroner's departments' solution might be needed.
That's still a potentially gray area ethically, but it's something that crops up a lot in the relevant settings.
Suseiseki
Last Order Songstress
- Location
- Peru
Kind of a weird idea, a coven of hags runs a morgue, they do the usual stuff a morgue do but once they send the body to a mortuary they send a convincing lookalike or use a hag run one and keep the body as dinner, because in the end the body will just end in a ditch in the ground looking pretty, is a waste of resources and people die in the hundreds daily.
- Location
- Colorado
- Pronouns
- She/They
It could be that whatever magical nutrient hags require from humans may be inescapably tied to that human's life. Like either the human must die and the majority of their cadaver be consumed for the magic nutrient to be transfered, or a hag does eat a limb, and consume whatever magical nutrients are in it, but as a consequence that limb can't be magically regrown, or if it is the human can longer feel or use it, like an inverse phantom limb.
Because this seems much less like an evolved diet than an imposed one, through curse or enchantment. Maybe hags' ancestors were cursed ages past, and their hunger and starvation are caused by said curse, irrelevant of any actually dietary requirement. Or they're descended from dark wizards who tried to enchant themselves to grow stronger in magic with every person killed, but borked it up so that instead it being optional for power, it became obligatory to live.
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There's a couple parasites and I think a small raptor in florida that has these kinds of issues. That said there's no non-magical reason you couldn't create alternatives for any of those. It's just that nobody wants the parasites to have options.
So from a biological standpoint an alternative should be doable. The problem is magic, it could be a basic bitch blood curse, or it could be tied deeply into their nature.
Pandora
Gotta say, blood IS as tasty as I make it look~
- Location
- Brazil
I wonder, if a Hag just made house near the worst place of humanity... Ya know the main one I'm thinking about, but also near huge slums, native tribes without ready access to medical help, prisons maybe...
They could run quite the operation then. Butchering, selling, and eating without concern for rationing. Unless they are affected by mundane drugs in their victims' bloodstream?
They could run quite the operation then. Butchering, selling, and eating without concern for rationing. Unless they are affected by mundane drugs in their victims' bloodstream?
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Zakara
Semi-Found Cat
- Location
- Chaldea, Bleached Airspace
There's really too many possibilities to pin down when considering just how hags ended up on the Soylent Green menu. They're very human-adjacent, to the point of interbreeding, so they probably used to be humans at some point in their history, but there's so many ways they could've gotten from there to here.
Curses are the likeliest cause, but it could've been purposefully induced for whatever reason. Maybe as an overpopulation remedy or for combat. It also could've been cannibalism itself twisting the original hags. North American Wendios are created when a person consumes human flesh, regardless if it was out of malice or desperation.
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Odds are they are Decendants of those who Forced the High Fae out and as a going away gift were cursed to be Hags.
Tiny_Dic
Carbon Cringe Lifeform | Hyperborean Coomer
- Location
- My Room
I found that way more funny than it should be. It's the hag equivalent of using your phone lock screen as a torchlight!
Wow, that was heart-rending. I really like how you've characterised the hags so far. It really adds a level of depth in complexity and character to them.
...I suppose the difference is that monsters are who they are, whereas human monsters are who they choose to be.
Hmm. Did she starve due to lack of human in her diet, or being unable to tell regular hunger from wanting Soylent Green?
Also, I believe it's the action that's important not the intent; you're equally at risk if someone else feeds you human flesh knowingly or not.
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serra2
Himouto! Sylvanas-chan
Reminds me of Yusuke's ancestor from Yu yu Hakusho. High level demon who fell in love with a human, and decided to never eat human's from that point on, despite requiring them in their diet. That kind of tragic dedication really hits a mark for me.
Silently Watches
Professional Stalker
- Location
- Right behind you
Hedwig mentioned that her cousin's family was stuffing her with food, so it was not that she lacked calories. It was the lack of human flesh as far as they can tell.
Roth963
If I become inactive with this massage, I died
Magic, when magic get's involved, basically anything can breed with anything, so it doesn't mean anything.
Zakara
Semi-Found Cat
- Location
- Chaldea, Bleached Airspace
There's definitely a spiritual component then. Humans aren't very unique nutrition-wise; there's nothing in us that you can't get from other, less inventive prey. For that matter, the meat tastes fairly awful, given how often animals tend to pass us up.
A feeding condition spiritually dependent on humans and nothing else is almost certainly malicious design, the real question is if it's a curse or a pact, seeing as the hags get some benefits in exchange for Horror Hunger. A curse would be simpler, as they always have escape clauses somewhere in the fine print. A pact you actively want to avoid breaking, as the consequences can be quite horrific.
A major point in a few fantasy settings I've seen is that humans have the unique power to choose their individual paths, while the other races are bound, if not strictly, then at least moderately, by their natures. A man can choose to be a monster, but a monster has no choice in what it is. Willingness to try anyways is rare, and all the more precious.
eschwartz
Glorious Wordsmith and Author-Whisperer
- Location
- Roundworld
I saw what you did there, tease!
*waits at the edge of his seat for future installments to provide more points of data*
You can't just sneak chicken skin into a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The eater can tell.
Roth963
If I become inactive with this massage, I died
This will probably be a very bad idea.