Tell me about the girls from Durmstrang.
Tell me about how they felt both very lucky and very afraid when their parents told them that they would be sent to the school that sat deep in the black, icy mountains, abreast of two bottomless lakes.
Tell me about the friendships, the girls who held each other’s hand when boarding the Durmstrang ship because one of them was deathly afraid of the sea and the other had heard terrible things about the monsters that lived in the mountains surrounding the northern waters.
Tell me about the stone-faced sixth year girls who would swoop in to protect the younger students when they were bullied or threatened.
Tell me about the girls who found the banished books in the dark recesses of the forgotten library and discovered that the great, dark halls of their proud school had been built by a woman.
Tell me about the halls growing darker, the Dark Arts classes more sinister, the duels more dangerous when Igor Karkaroff became headmaster.
Tell me about the way the girls stiffened their backs, locked their jaws, built an impenetrable wall around themselves to show that they would not be bowed, they would not be broken.
Tell me about the eleven-year old child weeping in the corridor, surrounded by three older girls who brushed her face clean of tears, telling her in low voices that only the strongest had survived this school and that she would too.
Tell me about how the female Quidditch players were the most feared on the pitch, and not a single male student dare fly within ten feet of the Beaters for fear of having their head bludgeoned clean from their shoulders.
Tell me about their war paint as they strode onto the bleak, frosted field; the smear of red across their eyes and noses, the warriors’ braids, metal clasps inscribed with family crests and ancient Gaelic knots that invoked the spirits of ancestors long dead.
Tell me about the way the girls always somehow knew how to cast the Cruciatus curse in duels long before the boys could ever muster up the fury to really mean the unforgivable spell.
Tell me about the young girls, trying to stifle their sobs of pain in the night when blood first stained their robes beneath the waist, and the older girls risking dire punishment to slip from their beds and offer relief in the form of whispered spells.
Tell me about how no male student would ever think to mock a girl just for being a girl because if there’s anything a Durmstrang student knows it’s that witch and wizard are an equal match in a fight to the death.
Tell me about the magic performed at the lakeside when the teachers weren’t watching, great animals and sculptures made of ice bursting from the water’s surface at the sweep of a girl’s wand because even students from a school as hated as theirs could still make something beautiful.
Tell me about how noble and terrifying the young women looked as they performed ceremonies outside in the dead of winter, wrapped in thick cloaks of black and red, furs draped across their shoulders, their wands black against the snow, their voices commanding in the stillness.
Tell me about how they were never taught the Patronus charm, but sometimes, when they were alone in their dormitories, they practiced together, summoning memories of home and family to illuminate the darkness with bounding silver creatures - hawks and snowbirds, hares and deer and timber wolves, polar bears and arctic foxes, and how they all fell silent in awe of the happiness incarnate that they had created.
Tell me about the Great War, about the daughters who turned against their Death Eater families, young women who fought and died with a bravery their parents had never known.
Tell me about the women of Durmstrang, the warriors we never had the chance to know. Tell me everything.
2087
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