zephre (![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} zephre) wrote,@ 2007-11-29 22:08:00 |
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NaNo FanFic Part 26
Previous Part
Pairings this part: None mentioned
Rating: PG-13
Notes: This is mostly Michelle's fault. ;)
October 2007, The Valley of the Kings, Egypt
Luna had the strangest feeling that she'd been here before. Perhaps in was simply the perspective - it wasn't every day that one got a close look at tomb paintings upside-down because one's foot was caught in a fissure where a great chunk of the ceiling used to be. She was very glad she had decided against the voluminous robes and worn sensible, close-fitting garments.
She examined the room as best she could in the single beam of sunlight pouring from the hole her body had made in the rock. It did not seem immediately threatening, so Luna used a combination cushioning and levitation charm to slow her fall and wrenched her ankle free. The room was not actually as tall as the tapering lotus pillars made it seem, and Luna's spell actually bounced her off the floor before she got it under control.
She would have to remember to make a note on that effect in her Charm Journal for her report to Master Collins.
Once she gained her feet, brushed herself off, and ascertained that her only injury was the bruise making itself felt inside her boot, she examined the paintings with more attention. They were not classic tomb paintings, but a sort of odd hybrid of late Ptolemaic figures with early moving portraits. Most of the art seemed somnolent, but a few heads turned to follow her movements as she left the circle of sunlight and moved deeper into the tomb. Once a hawk's head screeched something at her, but Luna did not understand Egyptian. "I'm sorry, could you try Latin, perhaps?" The hawk glared and turned back to profile.
When Luna reached the extreme edge of available light, she stood at the end of a long corridor. "Lumos." The illumination at the end of her wand did very little to disperse the gloom, but it did have another affect.
"Rrrrrrrhhhhhhhuuurrrrrrrggggggggghhhhhh
She was distracted by the glint of metal in the border design of the corridor painting. It was a thread of gold, just coming free in places of the paint and plaster that held it to the wall. "You all must be under a localized muffling charm, then," she said to herself, examining the thread. "Revelatomnes."
A stream of greenish light shot out of the golden thread and into the palm of Luna's hand, where it settled into a vaguely pyramidal arrangement of heiroglyphics and thaumaturgical symbols. Luna had slightly more experience with archaic thaumaturgical terms than she did with ancient Egyptian, which is to say that she'd once seen a museum display of similar symbols.
"Well, that wasn't at all helpful, was it?" Luna sighed and stuck her wand behind her ear, still lit, so that she could pull out her journal and a self-inking quill. Used to taking notes in odd and inconvenient moments, she quickly made a neat sketch of the spell diagram and dismissed it.
"Rrrrrruuuuuuurrrrrrggggghhhh." The moaning noise was louder now, and accompanied by a soft sussuration, as of cloth dragging on the floor.
Luna peered down the corridor, and took a few steps toward the noise. The paintings on the walls were jumping up and down now, and one cow-headed woman was apparently enacting the ending of Hamlet single-handed. Luna had no time for amateur theatricals, although she did applaud politely when the cow lady suffered a particularly nasty stab wound and bled out beautifully on the throne of Osiris.
Now the sussurations of cloth were definitely accompanied by stumbling footsteps. "Who's there?" Luna called. She took her wand back into her hand, extinguished the Lumos, and pulled a candle from the pouch at her waist. A wandless spell lit the candle, which provided about the same illumination as the Lumos but left her free to hex if necessary.
The painted pharoah on the wall across the way had definitely just made a vulgar gesture. "Really, is that any way to behave?" Luna asked him, flicking her glance to the wall for a split second, then back to the darkness of the corridor. "If you were a bit more polite, perhaps I could work on taking the muffling charm off your walls, did you think of that?"
Just at the edge of her peripheral vision, the painted pharoah waved his arms angrily at her. She ignored him as a portion of shadow in the corridor abruptly took on substance and form. A human figure stumbled out of the darkness and stopped in the gray half-light just out of the candle's range, a figure swathed head to foot in fine linen strips that looked rather in rather good shape for being, in all likelihood, at least two thousand years old.
"Oh," Luna sighed. "You poor thing. And you probably don't speak Latin, either." She tried it out, just to be certain, as the mummy stared at her, its eyes also remarkably well-preserved, if dried to the point of looking like lumps of amber. "Do you understand me when I speak like this?" Just on the off chance, seeing as the tomb did seem to date to the Ptolomaic years, she added, "Or maybe better when I speak like this?" in Greek.
The mummy came to life when she spoke the Latin, standing up straight and moaning piteously, then it lunged forward when she added the phrase in Greek. The noises it was making were hopelessly garbled, but it did not seem too eager to do the traditional mummy things, like trying to rip her limb from limb or eat her heart from her chest.
Luna backed away, holding her hands up to keep the unfortunate creature at a distance. It understood enough of her gesture, and her incipient retreat, that it stopped in its tracks and slumped down on itself. Luna watched it for a moment and had the strangest feeling it was acting like an animal, trying to make itself less threatening by appearing small.
"Slow down, now. I will ask you questions. If the answer is yes, nod your head. If the answer is no, lift your right hand. Do you understand?"
The mummy nodded slowly, deliberately, with such exaggeration that its chin almost rested inside its bandaged ribcage.
"Very well." Luna tapped her wand against her chin. "Are you under a curse, that you know of?"
Yes.
"Hmm. Do you know the counter-curse?"
Yes.
"Is your inability to speak a part of the curse?"
The mummy stared at her. After a moment, Luna realized that she had not left the mummy an option for I don't know. Nor for It's too complicated for a yes/no answer.
"Ok, wait. Let me think. Is there a magical, as opposed to physical, reason you cannot speak?"
No.
"Can the physical problem be fixed without breaking the curse?"
The mummy just looked at her again. Luna sighed.
"Well, we don't know. Can I try a spell on you to see if we can help you speak properly?"
If the mummy had not been firmly wrapped in linen, Luna was certain his head would have flown right off his neck, so vigorously did he nod.
"Right then. Hold still, and no sneaky ripping out of hearts while I'm casting, agreed?"
The mummy shrank back down into its helpless puppy mode and nodded more sedately.
Luna stepped closer and held her wand ready. "Open your mouth," she instructed with a flick of the wand.
The mummy obediently let its jaw hang open. The dessicated remains of its facial muscles held the bones tenuously together, and there were quite a few good-looking teeth still in the jaw. Luna gently placed the tip of wand just outside the mummy's mouth, concentrated, and whispered, "Linguavalesco."
It was not a standard healing spell, nor was it the sort of spell that allowed a non-living item to speak. Rather, it was a charm Luna made up on the spot, to grow back muscle and flesh, hydrating and energizing the remains of tongue and palate. It did not make the mummy look any less a mummy, but within moments of the spell's completion, the creature was smacking newly-plump lips and running its tongue over its teeth. The hole in one cheek allowed the maneuver to be visible for far too long.
Luna stepped back and lowered her wand to waist height, alert but not worried.
"Thank you," the mummy said in perfectly decent Latin, although its voice was hoarse and its breath whistled through too many holes.
Luna relaxed. It was extremely rare that a creature with such decent manners turned into a bloodthirsty madman, at least without outside intervention like a full moon or a sudden dousing with holy water.
"You're welcome. Now, how are you called? My name is Luna. Do you have any idea how long you have been down here?"
The mummy picked up a trailing piece of linen and secured it more tightly around its arm. "You may call me Sefu. My other names have no meaning now. It has been, what, a thousand years?"
Luna looked up at the walls. "If I am interpreting the walls correctly, more like two thousand. The world has changed many times."
The mummy managed to look wistful. "Two thousand years? Two thousand years. I cannot imagine it. There has been nothing here but the walls and the rats since the last robber made off with my treasure."
Luna gestured to the walls with her wand. "Do you know why this wall has been muffled?"
The mummy, or Sefu as she supposed she must call him now, nodded. "To prevent them from warning any victims of my presence, of course. In the beginning, there were many. Some dropped here by soldiers to die, others came on their own seeking the treasure."
Luna surmised that most of those victims had been killed to slake the thirst for vengeance most standard mummy curses came with.
"Why are you not trying to steal my flesh, then?"
The mummy looked down at its feet and mumbled something.
"Speak up. And in a language I know, please."
"I said," Sefu bit out with clacks of teeth and whistles of breath, "that I was bored. I don't know how long it has been since the last robber ran away, but it was a lonely time, even with the walls to talk to. I thought perhaps if I did not kill you, I might find a way out of here by following when you ran."
Luna pondered the realities of a bored mummy in a modern Wizarding World. "Does your curse keep your flesh from falling completely apart, then?"
Sefu nodded and held his arm out for her inspection. "It will not let me fall into dust. But I am overdue to do so. When the curse is gone, I will just shrivel into nothing."
Luna looked him in the eye without blinking, which was easier considering he had no eyelids to blink with to remind her to. "Do you wish for that?"
Sefu jumped away from her, scrambling into the twilight-zone of light at the edge of the candle's range. "No, no, I do not want to die yet. Anything but death."
Luna shook her head. "Well, I'm not going to uncurse you, stop that. I don't think I could even if I knew how. That would take a professional curse-breaker." Sefu flinched. "Now, now. You don't want to die, you don't want to stay down here. What do you want?"
Sefu leaned against the wall. The falcon-headed man in the painting behind him made a few choice gestures over the mummy's head, which Luna chose to ignore. She was getting very tired of the endless melodramatic pantomime from the walls.
"I want to read something besides these walls for once. I want to have my library again."
Bells began to sound in Luna's head. Not alarm bells, thankfully, but chimes of excitement. "Could you be around human people without feeling the need to, you know, rend limbs and eat hearts?" she inquired carefully.
Sefu crossed his arms. Luna thought he might have been trying to glare at her, but he didn't actually have the facial muscles to do so. "If I had books? I might manage to restrain myself."
Luna switched to her horrible Greek. "And translating? Could you perhaps write, as well as read? Or dictate?"
Sefu's Greek was much more elegant than his Latin. Luna would have liked hearing it from a throat that wasn't perforated like so much Swiss cheese. "Yes. Any of those. You have scribes to take my notes?"
Luna coughed. "Something like that."
For the next few minutes she interrogated Sefu on his skills, and found quite a few that could be applied outside the tomb.
"Sefu, I want to break you out of here. But in order to do so and make sure you don't disintegrate the minute we leave, I want to bring in a professional. May I call in my friend?"
Sefu gave her that trying-to-glare look again, then slumped. "Very well."
Luna walked a few paces down the corridor and turned so that Sefu could not see her wrist as she engaged the watch. Bill was just across the river in Luxor, and could be at the wadi she had been hiking in minutes. She gave him a very brief - the watch was not like a muggle telephone, after all - overview of her situation: new tomb, cursed mummy Sefu wishes peaceful occupation, require assistance to exit. hole in rock at 2km from hike start. And entered the apparition coordinates for the start of the path she had been walking.
Bill was not happy with her.
Sefu sat, legs splayed in a shallow V, against the muffled wall, playing an odd version of cat's cradle with a piece of thread pulled from a fraying bandage. The mummy had been steadfastly ignoring the low-voiced argument between Luna and Bill for at least fifteen minutes. Luna thought that should speak well for the mummy, and told Bill as much.
"Luna," Bill said with such exaggerated patience that Luna wanted to slap him, "a cursed mummy is not a creature who can just go work in a library."
"Why not? Just because he keeps his organs in jars in a separate room is no reason to discriminate against him."
Bill pinched the bridge of his nose. "It's the danger to regular people's organs that concerns me, here."
Luna tilted her head and waited for him to look at her once more. "Really, Sefu has already said that he is more interested in a useful occupation than in rending humans limb from limb. Isn't there some spell you could place on him to be sure he doesn't get too close to people if you're worried? Stick him in the archives with those ghosts who drip slime on visitors, they'll all get along like a house on fire."
Bill groaned. "That's exactly what the librarians would be afraid of."
"Sefu likes books! And he could translate! Perhaps you could set up a payment system for him that involved renewing the spells on his flesh, that way he wouldn't need to eat hearts or steal souls or whatever to regain his body."
The wrinkle between Bill's brows deepened. Luna wondered why everyone had such difficulty absorbing such simple concepts. "How is this any different from employing a werewolf or a ghoul?"
And that was when she got him, because of course it wasn't that different, and the curse-breaking field was full of werewolves and ghouls who had strict employment contracts ensuring that they were a danger to nothing and no one except the curses they broke.
It was not hard, once Bill had accepted the basic premise, to make notes of basic contract provisions on a blank page in her journal. She tore the page out and walked over to Sefu. "Here is what will happen now, Sefu. We are going to be sure that you can leave the tomb safely, then we will take you to the Luxor Wizarding University. Things will be quite strange to you, I'm sure, but just keep an open mind and try not to go crazy until we get you to the library."
Sefu's decayed cheeks had just enough flesh from her spell to draw back his lips into a smille. Well, Luna hoped it was supposed to be a smile. "A library. I thank you, Moon maiden."
Luna grinned, tucking her wand behind her ear once more. "Let's get you out of here."
Years and years later, when it became more difficult to get out of bed and the winter cold ached deep in her bones and even her great-grandchildren could not keep her mind from the reunion waiting for her beyond the Veil, Luna received an ornate box decorated in Egyptian style from an anonymous owl. She smiled when she saw it, and once more when she read the scroll inside. Her youngest great-grandchild climbed up on the bed beside her and read over her shoulder and later Luna heard him ask his mother, "Is the long sweet sleep like in the fairy tale?" Luna did not listen for the answer her granddaughter gave; she was deep in memory, hearing once again the wheezing voice of a two-thousand-year-old librarian who could choose to live forever.
Luna would not use the spell quite yet. The spring was coming soon, and somehow that long sweet sleep did not seem so appealing before she saw wildflowers blooming over the Devon hills one last time. When the time was right, she would know, and then she would let Sefu's last gift ease her into that long, sweet sleep and carry her peacefully over the threshold of death.
Previous Part
Pairings this part: None mentioned
Rating: PG-13
Notes: This is mostly Michelle's fault. ;)
October 2007, The Valley of the Kings, Egypt
Luna had the strangest feeling that she'd been here before. Perhaps in was simply the perspective - it wasn't every day that one got a close look at tomb paintings upside-down because one's foot was caught in a fissure where a great chunk of the ceiling used to be. She was very glad she had decided against the voluminous robes and worn sensible, close-fitting garments.
She examined the room as best she could in the single beam of sunlight pouring from the hole her body had made in the rock. It did not seem immediately threatening, so Luna used a combination cushioning and levitation charm to slow her fall and wrenched her ankle free. The room was not actually as tall as the tapering lotus pillars made it seem, and Luna's spell actually bounced her off the floor before she got it under control.
She would have to remember to make a note on that effect in her Charm Journal for her report to Master Collins.
Once she gained her feet, brushed herself off, and ascertained that her only injury was the bruise making itself felt inside her boot, she examined the paintings with more attention. They were not classic tomb paintings, but a sort of odd hybrid of late Ptolemaic figures with early moving portraits. Most of the art seemed somnolent, but a few heads turned to follow her movements as she left the circle of sunlight and moved deeper into the tomb. Once a hawk's head screeched something at her, but Luna did not understand Egyptian. "I'm sorry, could you try Latin, perhaps?" The hawk glared and turned back to profile.
When Luna reached the extreme edge of available light, she stood at the end of a long corridor. "Lumos." The illumination at the end of her wand did very little to disperse the gloom, but it did have another affect.
"Rrrrrrrhhhhhhhuuurrrrrrrggggggggghhhhhh
She was distracted by the glint of metal in the border design of the corridor painting. It was a thread of gold, just coming free in places of the paint and plaster that held it to the wall. "You all must be under a localized muffling charm, then," she said to herself, examining the thread. "Revelatomnes."
A stream of greenish light shot out of the golden thread and into the palm of Luna's hand, where it settled into a vaguely pyramidal arrangement of heiroglyphics and thaumaturgical symbols. Luna had slightly more experience with archaic thaumaturgical terms than she did with ancient Egyptian, which is to say that she'd once seen a museum display of similar symbols.
"Well, that wasn't at all helpful, was it?" Luna sighed and stuck her wand behind her ear, still lit, so that she could pull out her journal and a self-inking quill. Used to taking notes in odd and inconvenient moments, she quickly made a neat sketch of the spell diagram and dismissed it.
"Rrrrrruuuuuuurrrrrrggggghhhh." The moaning noise was louder now, and accompanied by a soft sussuration, as of cloth dragging on the floor.
Luna peered down the corridor, and took a few steps toward the noise. The paintings on the walls were jumping up and down now, and one cow-headed woman was apparently enacting the ending of Hamlet single-handed. Luna had no time for amateur theatricals, although she did applaud politely when the cow lady suffered a particularly nasty stab wound and bled out beautifully on the throne of Osiris.
Now the sussurations of cloth were definitely accompanied by stumbling footsteps. "Who's there?" Luna called. She took her wand back into her hand, extinguished the Lumos, and pulled a candle from the pouch at her waist. A wandless spell lit the candle, which provided about the same illumination as the Lumos but left her free to hex if necessary.
The painted pharoah on the wall across the way had definitely just made a vulgar gesture. "Really, is that any way to behave?" Luna asked him, flicking her glance to the wall for a split second, then back to the darkness of the corridor. "If you were a bit more polite, perhaps I could work on taking the muffling charm off your walls, did you think of that?"
Just at the edge of her peripheral vision, the painted pharoah waved his arms angrily at her. She ignored him as a portion of shadow in the corridor abruptly took on substance and form. A human figure stumbled out of the darkness and stopped in the gray half-light just out of the candle's range, a figure swathed head to foot in fine linen strips that looked rather in rather good shape for being, in all likelihood, at least two thousand years old.
"Oh," Luna sighed. "You poor thing. And you probably don't speak Latin, either." She tried it out, just to be certain, as the mummy stared at her, its eyes also remarkably well-preserved, if dried to the point of looking like lumps of amber. "Do you understand me when I speak like this?" Just on the off chance, seeing as the tomb did seem to date to the Ptolomaic years, she added, "Or maybe better when I speak like this?" in Greek.
The mummy came to life when she spoke the Latin, standing up straight and moaning piteously, then it lunged forward when she added the phrase in Greek. The noises it was making were hopelessly garbled, but it did not seem too eager to do the traditional mummy things, like trying to rip her limb from limb or eat her heart from her chest.
Luna backed away, holding her hands up to keep the unfortunate creature at a distance. It understood enough of her gesture, and her incipient retreat, that it stopped in its tracks and slumped down on itself. Luna watched it for a moment and had the strangest feeling it was acting like an animal, trying to make itself less threatening by appearing small.
"Slow down, now. I will ask you questions. If the answer is yes, nod your head. If the answer is no, lift your right hand. Do you understand?"
The mummy nodded slowly, deliberately, with such exaggeration that its chin almost rested inside its bandaged ribcage.
"Very well." Luna tapped her wand against her chin. "Are you under a curse, that you know of?"
Yes.
"Hmm. Do you know the counter-curse?"
Yes.
"Is your inability to speak a part of the curse?"
The mummy stared at her. After a moment, Luna realized that she had not left the mummy an option for I don't know. Nor for It's too complicated for a yes/no answer.
"Ok, wait. Let me think. Is there a magical, as opposed to physical, reason you cannot speak?"
No.
"Can the physical problem be fixed without breaking the curse?"
The mummy just looked at her again. Luna sighed.
"Well, we don't know. Can I try a spell on you to see if we can help you speak properly?"
If the mummy had not been firmly wrapped in linen, Luna was certain his head would have flown right off his neck, so vigorously did he nod.
"Right then. Hold still, and no sneaky ripping out of hearts while I'm casting, agreed?"
The mummy shrank back down into its helpless puppy mode and nodded more sedately.
Luna stepped closer and held her wand ready. "Open your mouth," she instructed with a flick of the wand.
The mummy obediently let its jaw hang open. The dessicated remains of its facial muscles held the bones tenuously together, and there were quite a few good-looking teeth still in the jaw. Luna gently placed the tip of wand just outside the mummy's mouth, concentrated, and whispered, "Linguavalesco."
It was not a standard healing spell, nor was it the sort of spell that allowed a non-living item to speak. Rather, it was a charm Luna made up on the spot, to grow back muscle and flesh, hydrating and energizing the remains of tongue and palate. It did not make the mummy look any less a mummy, but within moments of the spell's completion, the creature was smacking newly-plump lips and running its tongue over its teeth. The hole in one cheek allowed the maneuver to be visible for far too long.
Luna stepped back and lowered her wand to waist height, alert but not worried.
"Thank you," the mummy said in perfectly decent Latin, although its voice was hoarse and its breath whistled through too many holes.
Luna relaxed. It was extremely rare that a creature with such decent manners turned into a bloodthirsty madman, at least without outside intervention like a full moon or a sudden dousing with holy water.
"You're welcome. Now, how are you called? My name is Luna. Do you have any idea how long you have been down here?"
The mummy picked up a trailing piece of linen and secured it more tightly around its arm. "You may call me Sefu. My other names have no meaning now. It has been, what, a thousand years?"
Luna looked up at the walls. "If I am interpreting the walls correctly, more like two thousand. The world has changed many times."
The mummy managed to look wistful. "Two thousand years? Two thousand years. I cannot imagine it. There has been nothing here but the walls and the rats since the last robber made off with my treasure."
Luna gestured to the walls with her wand. "Do you know why this wall has been muffled?"
The mummy, or Sefu as she supposed she must call him now, nodded. "To prevent them from warning any victims of my presence, of course. In the beginning, there were many. Some dropped here by soldiers to die, others came on their own seeking the treasure."
Luna surmised that most of those victims had been killed to slake the thirst for vengeance most standard mummy curses came with.
"Why are you not trying to steal my flesh, then?"
The mummy looked down at its feet and mumbled something.
"Speak up. And in a language I know, please."
"I said," Sefu bit out with clacks of teeth and whistles of breath, "that I was bored. I don't know how long it has been since the last robber ran away, but it was a lonely time, even with the walls to talk to. I thought perhaps if I did not kill you, I might find a way out of here by following when you ran."
Luna pondered the realities of a bored mummy in a modern Wizarding World. "Does your curse keep your flesh from falling completely apart, then?"
Sefu nodded and held his arm out for her inspection. "It will not let me fall into dust. But I am overdue to do so. When the curse is gone, I will just shrivel into nothing."
Luna looked him in the eye without blinking, which was easier considering he had no eyelids to blink with to remind her to. "Do you wish for that?"
Sefu jumped away from her, scrambling into the twilight-zone of light at the edge of the candle's range. "No, no, I do not want to die yet. Anything but death."
Luna shook her head. "Well, I'm not going to uncurse you, stop that. I don't think I could even if I knew how. That would take a professional curse-breaker." Sefu flinched. "Now, now. You don't want to die, you don't want to stay down here. What do you want?"
Sefu leaned against the wall. The falcon-headed man in the painting behind him made a few choice gestures over the mummy's head, which Luna chose to ignore. She was getting very tired of the endless melodramatic pantomime from the walls.
"I want to read something besides these walls for once. I want to have my library again."
Bells began to sound in Luna's head. Not alarm bells, thankfully, but chimes of excitement. "Could you be around human people without feeling the need to, you know, rend limbs and eat hearts?" she inquired carefully.
Sefu crossed his arms. Luna thought he might have been trying to glare at her, but he didn't actually have the facial muscles to do so. "If I had books? I might manage to restrain myself."
Luna switched to her horrible Greek. "And translating? Could you perhaps write, as well as read? Or dictate?"
Sefu's Greek was much more elegant than his Latin. Luna would have liked hearing it from a throat that wasn't perforated like so much Swiss cheese. "Yes. Any of those. You have scribes to take my notes?"
Luna coughed. "Something like that."
For the next few minutes she interrogated Sefu on his skills, and found quite a few that could be applied outside the tomb.
"Sefu, I want to break you out of here. But in order to do so and make sure you don't disintegrate the minute we leave, I want to bring in a professional. May I call in my friend?"
Sefu gave her that trying-to-glare look again, then slumped. "Very well."
Luna walked a few paces down the corridor and turned so that Sefu could not see her wrist as she engaged the watch. Bill was just across the river in Luxor, and could be at the wadi she had been hiking in minutes. She gave him a very brief - the watch was not like a muggle telephone, after all - overview of her situation: new tomb, cursed mummy Sefu wishes peaceful occupation, require assistance to exit. hole in rock at 2km from hike start. And entered the apparition coordinates for the start of the path she had been walking.
Bill was not happy with her.
Sefu sat, legs splayed in a shallow V, against the muffled wall, playing an odd version of cat's cradle with a piece of thread pulled from a fraying bandage. The mummy had been steadfastly ignoring the low-voiced argument between Luna and Bill for at least fifteen minutes. Luna thought that should speak well for the mummy, and told Bill as much.
"Luna," Bill said with such exaggerated patience that Luna wanted to slap him, "a cursed mummy is not a creature who can just go work in a library."
"Why not? Just because he keeps his organs in jars in a separate room is no reason to discriminate against him."
Bill pinched the bridge of his nose. "It's the danger to regular people's organs that concerns me, here."
Luna tilted her head and waited for him to look at her once more. "Really, Sefu has already said that he is more interested in a useful occupation than in rending humans limb from limb. Isn't there some spell you could place on him to be sure he doesn't get too close to people if you're worried? Stick him in the archives with those ghosts who drip slime on visitors, they'll all get along like a house on fire."
Bill groaned. "That's exactly what the librarians would be afraid of."
"Sefu likes books! And he could translate! Perhaps you could set up a payment system for him that involved renewing the spells on his flesh, that way he wouldn't need to eat hearts or steal souls or whatever to regain his body."
The wrinkle between Bill's brows deepened. Luna wondered why everyone had such difficulty absorbing such simple concepts. "How is this any different from employing a werewolf or a ghoul?"
And that was when she got him, because of course it wasn't that different, and the curse-breaking field was full of werewolves and ghouls who had strict employment contracts ensuring that they were a danger to nothing and no one except the curses they broke.
It was not hard, once Bill had accepted the basic premise, to make notes of basic contract provisions on a blank page in her journal. She tore the page out and walked over to Sefu. "Here is what will happen now, Sefu. We are going to be sure that you can leave the tomb safely, then we will take you to the Luxor Wizarding University. Things will be quite strange to you, I'm sure, but just keep an open mind and try not to go crazy until we get you to the library."
Sefu's decayed cheeks had just enough flesh from her spell to draw back his lips into a smille. Well, Luna hoped it was supposed to be a smile. "A library. I thank you, Moon maiden."
Luna grinned, tucking her wand behind her ear once more. "Let's get you out of here."
Years and years later, when it became more difficult to get out of bed and the winter cold ached deep in her bones and even her great-grandchildren could not keep her mind from the reunion waiting for her beyond the Veil, Luna received an ornate box decorated in Egyptian style from an anonymous owl. She smiled when she saw it, and once more when she read the scroll inside. Her youngest great-grandchild climbed up on the bed beside her and read over her shoulder and later Luna heard him ask his mother, "Is the long sweet sleep like in the fairy tale?" Luna did not listen for the answer her granddaughter gave; she was deep in memory, hearing once again the wheezing voice of a two-thousand-year-old librarian who could choose to live forever.
Luna would not use the spell quite yet. The spring was coming soon, and somehow that long sweet sleep did not seem so appealing before she saw wildflowers blooming over the Devon hills one last time. When the time was right, she would know, and then she would let Sefu's last gift ease her into that long, sweet sleep and carry her peacefully over the threshold of death.