The Dark Arts
By Landen O'Nally
   Death. It is an inevitable part of the circle that we call life and one that we all must come in terms with at some point within our lives. Death, as some choose to see it, it held in the hands of Fate. We die when our "time is up", or when our duties have been somehow completed and our bodies are no longer of use in this world. Some believe that we've been placed in this world, this world of muggles and wizards, for one purpose and one purpose only. When this purpose is fulfilled and we are no longer needed within this world, we die. How death comes is the wonder of this phenomenon which is life.
   Death comes naturally, with age or illness, or it can come accidentally. Accidents happen every day due to carelessness, but there are instances where death is neither accident or merely part of the pattern of life.
   Spells are useful, or so they seem. Our wands are the taxis from which our magical essence is emitted, and the spells that emit from our wands are found buried deep within ourselves. Before we are able to call upon our inner power, we must be schooled and lectured on how to control this power. We learn spells for seven years of schooling, and beyond these seven years, we continue to learn. We learn to become helpful witches and wizards, to lend a helpful hand to our communities when needed. We learn to battle evil by using spells and charms to protect ourselves and the ones we love. We learn to grow and mature at a rate that will ready us for life outside of our castle walls, a life where death is forever looming. Death and destruction. But there are aspects of wizardry that we do not learn, and have been created for the duty of evil. I believe because a portion of our world is denied to us, we remain ignorant to the destruction that we as a wizarding race have created for ourselves. These spells of evil were created by the darkness of man, and it's because of this uncontrolled hate that these spells that we deem "curses" are so lethally efficient.
   The Unforgivable Curses. There are three. One takes away the right of our own free will, rendering us mere puppets beneath the hand of master puppeteer. We are controlled by unseen strings and have no power over our actions or words. Set on a stage, we are played like toys beneath The Imperious Curse. Another is said to cause the victim "intolerable pain", though no statement can word the insurmountable and excrutiating feeling that is given through the Cruciatus Curse. The will is broken, your screams only seem to intensify the torture, and because the wand is in the hand of a person cruel enough to administer the spell, there is no sympathy. The wails are answered only by a smile, a wicked smile that can haunt a person's dreams for the rest of a lifetime, no matter how young the victim may be. How a person can smile when administering such torment I do not know, but I do know that the heartless do wander our world, cloaked in darkness, impenetrable to the light of good.
   And now there is death. Avada Kedavra. There is a green light and nothing more. An empty blackness follows .. if death is actually a dark hole of a never-ending nothingness. Being alive, I cannot speak of what happens after death, but I can speculate. Being killed by a curse I believe is a curse within itself. The soul of the damned is forever damned by the damned. Avada Kedavra is said to be unblockable. In theory, there is no counter curse that can deflect the spell, though that brings forth questions. Has the curse been tested against every other known spell? I can't believe that this is true for reasons of morality. A curse that brings immediate death cannot be safely tested against another human being, and creatures of the animal kingdom do not posses the same magical abilities as witches and wizards. So perhaps, there is a counter curse that has not been tried or discovered. I cannot believe that there is a spell that's superior to all, and I have my own hypothesis.
   The rune Ansuz is said to be a protector against death and fear, and that raises the question of the correlation of fear and death. If one doesn't fear death, then would the curse still be fatal? Does one have to fear in order to die beneath the flash of wand? And if the rune Ansuz is inscribed in wood and stained with the inscriber's blood, then would that rune protect against the death caused by such a curse? Runes and the dark arts seem to tie together more often than not, for each rune does have a dark connotation along with a more uplifting one. Could runes be the answer to the impending fear of being killed beneath the blink of an eye? Or perhaps, our savior lies within the lost magics of old. We learn the new arts, and asides from Ancient Runes, we know nothing of the magic of the past, though that may be because of no documentation of that magic of prehistory. Maybe these lost arts are what I seek, and what many seek when battling this Unforgivable Curse.
   If a treasured life is lost, it should not be by the hands of man and emitted through the tip of a wand, but day by day, it happens. If lucky, that person is found and his or her death is announced through newspapers. Though there are a countless many who have and who will die in secrecy because of this spell of hate. These people who have cried, laughed, felt joy and pain; smiled, hated, loved, and lived...these people will be lost and forgotten beneath the ominous flash of an emerald light.