There was a distinct crashing noise downstairs, and Amina woke with a loud gasp that echoed throughout the soundless room. And for a moment after, everything seemed still, a better word perhaps, would be to say that everything seemed dead. It was the type of eerie silence Amina had not often, if ever, experienced and in response, for about a moment, she lived in fear. It was in this achingly empty moment that fear seized her heart, for no other reason then as a reaction to a bad dream. There was an uncomfortable stretch of silent seconds, and Amina lived in paranoia for a few moments more before she was comforted in the fact that she was home, in her bed and safe. As she wondered at the noise which startled her awake a new fear crept into her mind. She was the only one home, she's always the only one home, so what had made that sound?

Amina cautiously lifted the duvet off her body, and took a single silent step forward, towards the door. Her heartbeat rose with every passing second, her thoughts were reassuring her, but her intuition told her that something was very, very, wrong. Thud. Thud. Thud. A faint sound grew louder and bolder, until she heard the familiar beat of footsteps, right outside of her room. I must have imagined that, Amina thought, there is nobody home….there can't be….it's only...me… it's just… me…I'm safe….safe...nobody would bother with this... Yet, even as those thoughts raced through her mind her pale hand reached out to the bedside table, shaking and fumbling until they were clenching her phone in her grasp. The footsteps grew closer, and louder, if that was even possible. THUD. THUD. THUD. Amina was now panicked and desperate, her movements clumsy in an attempt to click the correct number, yet just as she was to dial 911, the door burst open, with the silhouette of a man standing right behind it. Amina let out a piercing scream, and in her frightened state, her trembling hands dropped her phone.

She did not remember much after that point, but some things she would never forget. For one, Amina did recall the adrenaline that surged through her veins, and the strength of the man whom grappled and wrestled her away from the ground. Away from the phone…away from her salvation…. She remembered how she had hoped that she was crawling fast enough to reach her phone, and a pair of monstrous hands clamping around her neck, suffocating her, just as she was to click the call button. Her head had snapped backwards quickly with a worrying crack, but she had still evaded death. She could remember how it felt when her lungs were fighting for air, and her hand clawing at anything and everything, battling against her captor with furious thrusts and kicks. Above all, the only thing she was capable of concentrating on was her relentless NEED FOR AIR!...Right then, she was the personification of raw desperation, fear in it's finest form. She had continued to struggle for a while longer, but her body began to falter, and eventually her will failed her. And It was then that she accepted her inevitable death. Her legs had grown weak, her arms hung frail at her sides, and her body had been twitching and writhing in a pathetic display of defeat…and it was not long after that she drew her last breath, her final memory of this life to be of malicious laughter to haunt her every thought.

Though it seemed it was not the end yet, for there was this one moment after, and it was a very peculiar moment indeed. It was also a very short moment. Amina could feel her sense of understanding slipping away from her, her very being retreating into a cold, dark abyss of wonders unknown. She wasn't able to know for much longer, not because she didn't want to, but because she was forgetting how to know and if she had been capable of feeling she would have been so, very, confused. At that present moment of time it would be quite incorrect to refer to her as an it, much less a she. What had become of her soul was only just on the verge of existing and so very far beneath the scale of that which measures what is and what isn't. The entire process caused the not-very-existing being more pain than that felt in any a life time, the pain experienced by everything and everyone in their lifetimes infused, multiplied a thousand times more. At that point, the feeling was at a height too extreme to even label as pain. Even then, you could only possibly, understand a slither of what the not-very-existing being might have felt if it could have felt anything at all, but the not-very-existing being was galaxies away from that sort of conscious sense. For the being Amina had become retreated far further than any other creature or thing could think to go, for it was past the bounds of their imagination, just as the not-very-existing being was past the limitation of laws and physics. Such a thing that made as much sense as that was left behind much earlier in the not-very-existing being's time period of existence. It was this state of complete nothingness, teetering on the edge of everything and anything, which had saved the not-very-existing being. It fell back into forwardness, and the-not-very existing being became less and less, and simultaneously more and more, almost enough to be enough, if you know what I mean.

This had all happened in such a short amount of time that it was beneath the limits of human comprehension, yet, taking so long that the lifespan of space and all in it would seem but a Nano-second in comparison. The ultimate paradox.

Just as Amina drew her last breath in her small, cozy cottage home for one, Regulus Black Jr inhaled her very first breath in the dark, unwelcome abode that was Grimmauld Place.