Helena Ravenclaw felt the knife before she saw it. She swallowed nervously past the lump forming in her throat and looked into the eyes of the wielder. It was her friend from a happier time. The eyes that were once filled with so much purpose and love was now replaced with bitterness and hatred.

The only thing that showed any resemblance to the old colleague was the shell the bitter soul inhabited. Her friend was gone.

The knife sat precariously on her skin, soft enough not to pierce the soft pale column of her throat, hard enough to enforce this man's intended message.

The harsh metal should have been cold and raw against her bare skin, but Helena's numb body could not feel anything except for the excruciating pain of his betrayal. Her throat and heart held in a silver grasp, and all she could do was stare lifelessly at the brown eyes that held the blade and a terrifying coldness that she had never seen in him before.

She had always thought his eyes were golden, but looking at them now, Helena could see no trace of the vibrancy they once held, no trace of the man that she had once known which so much promise and untapped potential.

Trembling, Helena Ravenclaw tipped her chin up into the sharpened edge, tempting him to end her anguish, half hoping that he would. Anything but to suffer like this in the ambiguity of not knowing. A small stream of blood trickled from the feeble cut she could not feel, but he did not flinch or remove his listless eyes from Helena's.

A cruel smile stretched out across gaunt features. Helena's frozen heart shifted at the sight of his merciless gaze, her legs almost failing beneath her. His steadfast grip on the polished weapon shifted, causing more crimson liquid to flow from the raw wound that he had just inflicted.

Helena let out a muffled cry of pain as the man holding her throat hostage slowly lowered his weapon and instead, plunged the dagger deep into her chest. The knife met flesh, soft and pudgy, and made a satisfying squish as the tip of the blade sank deep enough to make his victim scream.

The man twisted the blade in his hands, all the while sinking it deeper and deeper. Her skin was tearing to shreds as the knife rotated, the sound of her muscles and nerves being gouged growing louder. Then, without warning, he jerked it all the way into her back, until the shiny metal had disappeared inside her and the black handle was pushing against her broken skin. Her cry was a brilliant sound, guttural chokes mixed with an agonized roar.

The man smirked and pulled the blade out of his now deathly white victim. She sank to her knees, continuing to scream, convulsing, and trembling like a rabid animal and thick blood flowing freely from the gaping hole in her back. The cascade of the girl's life source gushed out in all directions, scarlet liquid squirting up all over him.

He turned away as her plead for mercy became quieter, the sweet tang of blood tingling in my nostrils. The man ignored Helena's cries of pain, her pleading whimpers. All her life she had feared death, suppressed dealing with the notion, never ready to depart.

Always for her there would be tomorrow and the day after. As she'd aged, she'd kept company with older folks. But there came a day when every one of her older friends had passed on and a fair few of the younger ones too. Time was no longer her casual acquaintance but leading her steadily onward whether her feet wanted to follow or not.

A mist, with silent steps. Helena's eyes fell on its figure, her heart drenched by fear did not throb any longer, and neither did that corded muscle within the confines of her chest. Everything fading into abyss. Its eyes on Helena; burning coal with no shape.

Numb, she could not feel anything around her. Eyes struggling to move, Helena Ravenclaw looked at her murderer's face twisting and contorting with grief and remorse through her blending vision. Paralyzed in fear, Helena felt her breath being taken. She closed her eyes, and the last thing Rowena Ravenclaw's daughter heard was the murder's trembling voice, cracked, warbling, and faltering in his resolve.

"Don't leave me alone."

And so, like a silent companion, Helena Ravenclaw waited. And waited, till at last she could take the man's hand and leave the living; they were not truly, how could they? It dawned on her at the moment, although ironic for a dark being whose soul was no longer tethered to the earthly coil of her body that bound her to the physical world of the wizarding realm, she knew, that she felt...she felt?

Pain? Regret? Despair? Rage? Yes, Helena remembered. The hand that had been offered to her was warm, familiar and a giver of true happiness. But she could not yearn for that, for to love the very man who had ended her life but moments ago was forbidden. It was forbidden. When Death came, and offered her his hand, she took his hand and, for the first time in a long time, she was completely at ease and safe, though she refused the Angel of Death's offer to be greeted like an old friend.

Helena knew she needed to stay, for this man had done, what he had taken from her, she could never get that back, and he needed to suffer.

She took one final glance at her family who clutched her lifeless body and smiled an ambivalent smile before walking into the deep abyss

Sparing the man a last glance just before he plunged the own dagger into his chest to rip out his own heart, Helena sped off into the comforting folds of darkness and wandered away, her spirit cherishing the twisted grimace she had bequeathed him as she stepped into a place of light. Helena Ravenclaw was more silent than the body her spirit arose from, staring with heavy lidded eyes and a slack mouth.

Her cheekbones accentuated the skeletal look and in her gaze my mind was robbed of emotion. Instead of running, or screaming the man stood more still than the statues of the Hogwarts' Four Founders that they'd always bonded over together. She beckoned with fingers that rapidly faded to only a suggestion of form. Without even realizing what he was doing, the man followed Helena. She became more solid again, but this time her skin bore many silver scars, thick and jagged.

He began to think new things, "I want to stay here with her, forever." The thought became a desire and his insides lit with an intensity to make it possible. His body crumpled to the floor, leaves and mud met the side of my face and my knees curled up like an unborn as he plunged his dagger into his own heart, and reached for Helena's physical hand, so cold, lifeless, and he realized that it was his fault.

It was then Helena heard him shout her name, over and over, and Helena opened her mouth to speak to her murderer, this wretch, this monster, this beastly demon. "When I come to you in the darkness, my body long ago decomposed, you will try to awaken though you no longer sleep. By then, it will be too late. When your eyes open to find me there, it is I that choose your end. Pretty or poetic – often both though I doubt we share the same notions of beauty. There is nothing else for a ghost but to be the servant of the nothing. Don't take that as regret, it is merely a fact. You have killed me. Why have you done it?"

Her murderer said nothing, and Helena continued, hearing the very anger drip from her words like poisoned honey, the rage in her otherwise sweet tones evident. "When you come to this place, I will find you. When you come with your divine soul shining in your eyes, I will snatch you away. I will take what the gods want and trap it in a cage they cannot break. I will own you, keep you, bring you pain. You have made me ghost; you have banished me to nothingness where I wander for eternity."

Helena fell silent and watched as even the passage of the light slowed and the sounds became as if underwater. Aside from the beat of his heart, no muscle would move. That pounding inside beat a rhythm to the words of her murderer's execution, the cold steel his judge and jury.

The knife entered as if he were nothing, just meat, blood bones, blasting a cavity in her back as it burst crimson into the fading day. His face, so beautiful in life was frozen, eyes open, mouth slack, as he was propelled backward and sprawled out in a crumpled heap next to Helena's lifeless body.

His eyes held Helena's and in those fractions of seconds he was there and then gone. Her murderer had taken his own life and had died cold, alone, and unforgiven.

And that, she supposed, was good enough for her.