The Comforting Wings of a Raven - (Incomplete)

Off in the distance the sun began to set on the horizon. As the burning orb sank below the tree line of the Forbidden Forest it cast rays of bright oranges, reds, and yellows, that seemed to bathe the whole world in a glow of warm gold. Tyeira Durant sat alone on the hard stone of a windowsill in one of Hogwarts many spired towers. This was Ty's get away, her place of solace and solitude. It was her place away from the Common Room in the Gryffindor tower. Away from all the noise and people. She'd found the tower once during her second year when she was looking for a good place to go cry after a humiliating encounter with Cordelia Darling; the bane of her existence.

Ever since that day Tyeira had come here when she needed to get away. No matter the time of day (or night) Ty's tower had been a safe place for her to be. It was always completely deserted. Not even Mrs. Norris, Filch's bitch of a spying cat even found her way up here. On much happier days Ty often wondered what this particular tower had been used for in days past. It had to have been here for some reason. It was obviously to anyone but the completely blind however that the tower hadn't been used in years, possible even decades.

Many spiders had taken up residence in her tower over the years. Large cobwebs hung in many of the nook and crevices in the stone walls and corners. Dust mites collected and grew to somewhat alarming sizes and sometimes when the wind blew through the cracks in the sides of the decaying windows and caused them to dance they startled her. They resembled large rats sometimes; Ty like most girls didn't really enjoy the company of rats. Luckily for her she'd never come across one in her tower. Actually she'd never seen a rat anywhere in the castle, except for the dungeons. Perhaps Hogwarts was magically devoid of those pesky rodents...with that one particular exception of course.

But today Ty hardly even noticed the dilapidated state of her favorite getaway, she didn't even give the space one small musing. Instead all of Tyeira's thoughts were turned inward. To say that she'd had a bad day was the understatement of the century. Ty would have had a bad day if she'd only simply forgotten a step in her potions instructions causing the potion to explode violently from her cauldron covering her partner, a shy Ravenclaw girl from head to toe in a painfully burning liquid. The poor girl had to be rushed to the Infirmary where she was promptly treated, but apparently had suffered a severe and unfortunate change in the color of her skin from a pleasant tan brown to a bright fuschia for the time being.

Ty would have had a only a terrible day had she also only just managed to have 20 points deducted from her house total because she was caught talking to another student during an exam by Professor Flitwick. Only Ty hadn't been talking, perse. All she'd done was try to tell the idiot Slytherin, Parke, behind her to sod off while he was trying to copy her history exam. But no the short stub of a Professor would have none of her explanation, despite the fact that she was an outstanding student of his and that Emory Parke very often caused all manner of disruptions during Flitwick's lecturing; including but not limited to a slew of very unoriginal short jokes.

But of course even that was nearly as bad as what had happened hardly 20 minutes ago in the Gryffindor Common Room. Ty had just gotten back from visiting her Potions partner in the infirmary and started to relax and settle into her reading for tomorrow's Transfiguration class with Professor McGonagall. She had been ready to close out her day by doing something constructive and to just put all the days miseries behind her. That was when her friend Edward Brauning entered the Common Room loudly proclaiming to the room "Happy Friday the 13th!"

Tyeira had instantly felt stupid, guilty, and completely shocked that she'd managed to forget the date. September the 13th; Riordan, her boyfriend's birthday! Ty had dropped everything that she'd been doing and ran up to her dorm room and grabbed the small crimson box with gold ribbon that she'd left abandoned there this morning and dashed down to the Common Room. She had looked frantically all over the Common Room for her boyfriend Riordan without any luck at all. Eventually she found out from a mutual friend that Riordan had still been out at the Quidditch Pitch a few moments ago. So Ty had raced out of the Common Room and down the corridors towards the pitch.

She'd made it out to the courtyard in record speed only to have to stop to take a breath. Usually she had much better endurance, one of the things she'd picked up while trying as a Chaser on the team, but apparently today the running added with the panic of forgetting her boyfriend's birthday had left her a little winded.

That's when she saw it. Or rather, that's when she saw him. Off to the side of the courtyard was a little lattice area covered in ivy. From most vantage points the inside of the little cove was completely hidden by the heavy ivy foliage that worked it's way up the white lattice work. Ty knew the place well, it was one of the more popular places for students to go to have more 'private' conversations each other. Ty knew the place even better than that because she had been there a few times herself to 'talk privately' with Riordan.

At that moment she could only stand there frozen and stare into the little cove. All mental processes and even most of her physical ones stopped at once. As Ty looked back on it, she was surprised her heart hadn't stopped beating as well. Because there almost hidden, but not quite well enough was Riordan, her boyfriend, and Cordelia Darling, the meanest, bitchiest, and not to mention the most incredibly gorgeous, Slytherin in their year; and they weren't exactly just talking. Riordan was apparently in the process of unwrapping her birthday 'gift' to him. And Ty had just stood there rooted to the spot, not knowing how to do anything but that. Part of her had wanted to scream and tear Cordelia away from him, hitting and hexing the bitch until she was nothing but a broken heap on the floor. Another part of her had wanted to yell and scream and divert every single soul in the school's attention to her lying and cheating boyfriend. A third part of her wanted to break down into a heap on the cold courtyard stone and cry for a very long time. And the final broken fourth of her wanted to just run away from what she was seeing and not look back. Niether part seemed strong enough to actually make her do anything though, so instead she just stared.

It wasn't until Riordan had opened his eyes for a second and looked dead into Tyeira's, that Ty felt control of her body come back to her. In that instant she had turned and fled the sounds of Riordan's pleas behind her. Pleas like "Wait!" "Tyeira, no!" and "It's not what it looks like!" reached her eyes and then faded as she'd hurled herself into the castle and up the flights of ever changing stairs to her solace, to her solitude, to her place of rest; her tower.

And so here she sat now on the windowsill in the upper most part of her tower. After she'd exhausted that fourth of her that wanted to run away from the scene of Riordan and Cordelia in the courtyard and made it to this particular spot, the part of Ty that had wanted to break down and cry won over. Tears streamed down her face now, blurring the beautiful vision of a perfect sunset from her chocolate brown eyes; Ty hardly noticed. All she was aware of at the moment was the awful, constricting pain in her chest, the dull, throbbing of a crying headache that was beginning to start, the memory of Riordan clutching Cordelia close to him, his hands roaming her skin, and the weight of the small crimson and gold wrapped box that she clutched close to her as she held her knees against her chest.