Amelia was slightly thrown by Professor Wilson’s direct question to her – most professors merely asked a question of the entire class rather than an individual. She was not incapable of answering the question, though. The Ravenclaw girl felt as if they had covered the unforgivable curses ad nauseum since arriving at Hogwarts, each professor somehow managing to align them with their own subject area.
She was pleased to have another student pointed out before her, both to give her time to formulate her answer and to avoid the bulk of the attention focused on her. Although Amelia sometimes provided the answers in her classes, she was not usually all that bold about it. Most of the time, she preferred to keep her comments and answers to herself, proving her abilities through her wandwork, which was often much more reliable than her words.
The boy, a blonde Slytherin she hadn’t encountered before, provided what she would have described as an adequate answer to what the professor had asked. Wilson, however, seemed to have developed a dislike for the boy who had introduced himself as Landon, responding with a degree of sarcasm similar to that which he had punished earlier. Amelia found it ironic that he should display this sort of hypocrisy, but she wasn’t about to question it. She owed far more loyalty to the professor than to some random boy she had never met, though she could sympathize with Landon. Her barbed tongue stood to get her in a lot of trouble, which is why she so often held it.
When prompted, Amelia cleared her throat, launching herself into recitation mode as she recalled the passage most often associated with the third and most feared of the Unforgivable Curses.
“The Killing Curse, more formally Avada Kedavra, is considered the most serious of the three Unforgivable Curses. This curse, along with Crucio and Imperius, will earn any witch or wizard a one way ticket to Azkaban if used on another,” Amelia obliged, focusing her eyes on the professor to avoid looking at the number of eyes that were likely watching her.
“This curse is especially dangerous because there is no effective counter curse or blocking spell. Avada Kedavra leaves no mark of death. Ironically enough, this curse originated as a spell for healing rather than hurting. Avada Kedavra can trace its roots to an ancient spell in Aramaic, then cast as abracadabra, meaning ‘let the thing be destroyed’, the thing being an illness. It was only through a series of twists and malformations by dark wizards that the deadly and tragic Avada Kedavra came about,” Amelia finished, silently thankful for her father’s obsession with magical etymology. Her parents might have pushed her harder than she would have liked a lot of the time, but it did have its rewards.
by Landon Rooney Tue Mar 02, 2010 1:18 pm
