Chapter 8 - of alleys, whizzing orbs, and phoenix feathers
“What happens to the world, if all the heroes lose?”
(Jack Kirby - Captain America 211)
It was still three hours before Willow came from Oxford, and Buffy was looking for things to pass the time. She had not had time to be bored, and for that she was grateful. London was something new - although, never having travelled much, Buffy had reckoned without the disconcerting effects of TV. So much of what she had seen was familiar to her from movies and shows, that she sometimes felt that she had stepped on to a set. And when she first heard people speaking like Giles - and, better still, like Cockneys in TV shows - she almost laughed out loud.
She decided to head for Diagon Alley. This London, she felt, was both too much and not enough: too much to take in in one day, and not enough to focus on one particular thing. And she wanted to familiarize herself with what she was told was the headquarters of magical life in London, where she would be studying and working from now on.
Buffy had been given a map to the Leaky Cauldron, the pub that guarded the entrance to Diagon Alley. She found it easily. But… People were walking back and forth, never once looking at the tiny, grubby-looking entrance; and she had a feeling that she was the only person who really noticed it. “Well, that’s magic, I guess,” she shrugged, and went in.
Inside, she was immediately aware of a difference. For one thing, there was nothing whatever that even looked like plastic and chromium, or even the large mirrors so often found in Muggle pubs. The place seemed made entirely of wood and bronze, and looked more like an ancient tavern than something to be found at the end of the twentieth century. Buffy felt like she had stepped into a history book. Then she took a look at the clients and thought again: not a history book, a storybook. There were people in every possible sort of dress except sober, everyday suits or jeans. A man in the furry, decorated dress of a Siberian Shaman was having a discussion (though Buffy could not hear any words) with a large owl, who seemed very argumentative. A man who looked rather like Prince Valiant was drinking a large, frothy drink with four or five obvious goblins. Three sorcerers, each in widely different dress, were carrying on a debate in the academic style about advanced transfiguration; and a woman in what seemed to Buffy medieval dress was thrashing out the details of her dress and make-up with a quite exceptionally cantankerous mirror. The old barman, whose face was one network of creases and lines, disengaged himself from a self-pitying and quite drunk hag, and addressed her. When she showed him the letter Giles had given her, he became very correct. He drew out his old, heavily stained wand, and led Buffy out of the bar and into one tiny walled courtyard. He tapped one particular brick, and…
“Oh,” went Buffy, hardly daring to breathe. “Oh!!”
Turrets, spikes and arches; dressed stone and gold; latticed glass and stained glass and carved wood and brass and gold; bow windows and flying buttresses and acute arches and niches and statues and pillars and gold and gold. This was more than a storybook, it was like the essence of everything she had ever imagined about England - more like England than any England she had seen. It was the essence of things precious beyond telling, sheltered, gathered together and hidden away. Here the past did not die, but grew and gave fruit; this had magic done.
England is metal, but behind the metal,
Behind the rusty, murderous progress
Is the lost land of desire ethereal,
Of love, of distance, of loss beyond redress;
Of timid faeries shying away from steel,
Of all nostalgic defeats in the past,
Hidden away from iron lies that steal,
From unclean bustle that triumphs at the last.
As she took her first tentative steps into the land of magic, her eyes moved from the buildings to the people. Buying and selling, debating current events, meeting and shaking hands. Like normal people, and yet… not. Perhaps more like a crowd of academics; there was a sense about most of them of thought, of ideas pursued and particular interests; and yet… not. There was a strangeness, an individuality, a sense of infinite different directions, that was unlike any university she had ever seen. A warrior herself, she sensed that some of these men and women were great champions in wars that she might perhaps never encounter; and others pursued things simply too weird and quirky to have a name. It was as though all these different people, each moving in his or her unique direction, nevertheless managed to form a crowd, and a community, and a common life. There were shops that sold magical animals; shops for flying brooms; shops for clothes and tools and (releasing very unattractive smells) several shops of magical ingredients whose very list made her gorge rise. But the clothes! Shamans and Brahmins, Wonderworking Rabbis in black Jewish dress, African sorcerers with lion or leopard skins on their shoulders, men who looked like Greek philosophers (and probably were), men and women in clothes of all the colours of the rainbow and none, men and women with pointed hats and long trailing robes, people who looked like superheroes in capes and people in brass-bound nineteenth-century military uniforms. Buffy just rambled on, all but dizzy with the sights, the sounds, the smells.
But there is some sort of law that says that a Slayer must always get into trouble. Suddenly Buffy knew that she was in the wrong place: the crowd, the shops, the very smell of the air, had all changed. This, had she but known it, was Knockturn Alley, the bad part of town. Her senses told her that there were vampires there, ready to come out as soon as the sun went down; hiding in the gloomy buildings whose empty windows looked down on her like eyes. She knew, without having to ask, that there were passageways between the buildings, and that some presences she could sense were moving from house to house, keeping up with her. The crowd moved around her in a curious fashion, with unexpected swirls and eddies, as though she were surrounded by an invisible bodyguard; only, she thought, these were people who moved in her same direction not with any friendly reason, but to be sure where she was going - and to assault her. The situation, she realized, could quickly become ugly. The houses were tall, the alley narrow; the time of the sun was fading fast, even in summer, and soon the whole street would be shadowed over. Buffy looked up and realized that soon vampires and other sun-haters would be able to move at will.
Suddenly things changed, in a way that would have made many people faint. Buffy heard her name and the word “Slayer” called, and she turned.
There stood a huge man covered by a long black cloak, leaning on a massive runestaff. One of his legs ended in a well-worn wooden leg in the shape of a tiger paw, the other was covered by a heavy travelling boot. His face was quite incredibly scarred; Buffy had never seen a human being with a visage so covered in every kind of mark, though some of the demons she had banished or killed were of a similar cast. It was framed by a mane of long hair shot through with white and black, with an electric effect; half his nose was missing; and where one of his eyes should be, there was a whizzing, whirling blue orb, something like an artificial eye, but completely unlike any eye she had ever seen. All told, it would be hard to imagine a more threatening apparition. Buffy fell into a fighting stance, looking straight at him. “I don’t know who you are, mister, but if you know I’m the Slayer, you know I’m someone you don’t mess with.”
“I believe I heard something of the kind,” he answered, with a thoroughly unsettling approximation to a smile. “I am Alastor Moody, and Rupert Giles told me you might be here and alone. To mention that you were the Slayer was partly for your protection; they will not try anything against the two of us now.”
…………………………………………………………………………………
The frail young American girl and the grizzled and bloodied veteran understood each other from the start. Soon they were sitting at a table at the Leaky Cauldron, Buffy drinking Butterbeer (her favourite discovery yet in the magical world) and Moody something from his flask, exchanging anecdotes about dastardly deeds, desperate battles and vile enemies. And all the Cauldron’s customers looked around, in astonishment not unmixed with fear, at the sudden and unfamiliar sound of Moody laughing - howling with laughter, all composure lost, his fist banging on the table - when Buffy told him how, in one of her very first fights, she had tricked the vampire Luke.
“You’ve forgotten the sunlight… It’s nine hours away, you moron… oh, Merlin… The old ones are still the best, aren’t they, Buffy? HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW…”
“They are, Mr. Moody.”
“Call me Alastor, Buffy (HAW HAW), call me Alastor…”
Willow was not a similar hit. When she turned up to join her girlfriend, a definite pall fell over the party, though she herself did not notice it. She was herself tense and worried; Buffy was surprised to see that she looked neither impressed nor interested with the wonders all around her - she knew her lover well enough to expect her to babble with excitement. Something had happened at Oxford, something not good; Willow would only say that it was better if Giles explained it.
Alastor Moody looked on all of this unblinkingly and without expression. He was not happy with Willow’s presence, let alone with her role in the life of someone he had already come to reckon as a trustworthy colleague. He was all too aware that, had things not gone differently, he might have had to hunt her down himself, and fight her to the death. There was a residual air of tainted magic about her that dismayed him deeply; he felt that someone of such strong and polluted power would be a dangerous ally and an even worse lover, for she carried her own seducer within herself.
“Well, ladies,” said Moody, getting up, “shall we go to Ollivander’s?”
“You mean to get wands?” burst out Willow. “I mean, I never even thought that they existed… I didn’t find them on any of Giles’ books, so I always did without…”
“Rupert Giles” said Moody quietly “needs no instruction in wand use, and he did not expect to meet anyone who did - he had gone to train a Slayer, after all. He simply took none of the acknowledged texts.”
“But I mean, won’t I be just stupid and clumsy using them if I’ve never… Like, I’m klutzy enough as it is… Won’t my wand just make me klutz times ten?”
So this was the babble Rupert had described. Moody was torn between irritation and a vague kind of pity; his life had not geared him to deal with nervous young women with inferiority complexes.
“You are an excellent witch by all accounts, Miss Rosenberg. I’m sure you will do just fine with a wand.”
……………………………………………………………………………………
Ollivander’s was the strangest shop they had ever seen, even in Diagon Alley. Rows upon rows of drawers and shutters in ancient, browned wood, seemed to stretch to the very end of vision or end in impossible angles. It was, thought Willow, like a picture she had once seen of a nightmare library, or like an M.C.Escher vision of an antiquarian’s palace. She was not surprised - though she was startled - at the apparently bodiless voice that came suddenly out of one of those distant, misty corners; which proved to belong to a dusty, stooped, pale wizard with large, watery, moon-like eyes. Both voice and owner belonged so well in that faded and mysterious atmosphere.
“Miss Summers, Miss Rosenberg. I was hoping I would have the privilege to work for you.”
“It was Alastor Moody who answered. “Ah, yes, Ollivander. So that is your view, is it?”
“What else should it be, Alastor? A Slayer is a very powerful magical creature. Therefore, Muggle or not, she is capable of performing magic. Therefore, I can fit her with a wand.”
“I am glad” rumbled the large man “that you confirm the thoughts Dr.Giles and I had.”
“Giles… Rupert Giles… twelve inches, beech and dragon heartstring, was it not?”
“Do stop wandering, Ollivander”, grumbled Moody softly.
“He is not wandering, Moody” said a cultured voice behind them, “It is his peculiar way of acknowledging my presence.”
“GILES!” shrieked both girls, and flew into his arms.
Moody watched their display of mutual affection with the eye of an old soldier, looking at everything in the light of a campaign. Evidently there was no possible way to pry the Slayer loose from her dangerous girlfriend. They were too tightly bound… pity, though.
“Giles,” said Buffy, “what happened in Oxford? Willow would not tell me, and I thought…”
“Later, Buffy,” answered Giles, his eyes though not his head motioning towards Ollivander, “Later, when we have time.”
…………………………………………………………………………..
“…the core of a wand is composed of a substance from a powerful magical creature, Miss Rosenberg. Hippogriffs, dragons and unicorns are popular choices. One particularly evil wizard I knew… no, not He Who Must Not Be Named… made his own, after I and other wand-makers had refused, with a vial of unicorn blood.”
“Why did the wand-makers refuse?”
“Because, Slayer, to slay a unicorn is a monstrous crime. To handle the results of his crime would have made us as bad as he was; tainted us in ways that no wand-maker, whatever his or her personal character, wished to contemplate.”
“And what happened to that wizard?”
“After he had made his wand, he went on a revenge mission against the wand-makers who had tried to thwart him. Three renowned wand-makers were captured and savagely tortured. But it did him little good: when he came after me, a young Auror, just starting on an illustrious career” - and Ollivander bowed in Moody’s direction - “captured him and freed his prisoners. It was one of his earliest great deeds.”
“Mr.Moody?” asked Buffy.
“Alastor, Buffy, Alastor. Yes, I remember it well. Ugly little rat as he was… Ollivander modestly left out his own part in his rescue.”
“I did very little…”
“Anyway,” Willow broke in, “you said a part of any magical creature?”
“The core of a wand. Yes, indeed, madam.”
“And does it have to be a beast? I mean, like dragons and hippogriffs? Can’t it be an intelligent being - you know, like a dwarf or a Siren?”
“Indeed it can, Miss Rosenberg. Why, not so long ago, I came across a wand cored with hair from a Veela’s head… And if you are thinking what I think” - his large pale eyes wandered slowly from Willow to Buffy - “it seems to me an apt choice, and as likely as any to succeed.”
“Well,” said Willow with a definitely flirtatious air, “when you mentioned magical creatures, I just happened to think that I have one of the most magical creatures in the world right here with me…” She looked at Buffy with affection; and Buffy, who had failed to get the point of the previous exchange, suddenly understood, smiled, and blushed very prettily. She reached up and tore some long strands of hair from her scalp, uttering an agonized OWW! as she did so; then handed the strands out to Willow, who blushed in turn. She touched the tips of her fore- and middle finger to her lips, and then placed them on Buffy’s cheek. “You may now kiss the bride,” said Giles under his breath.
Moody’s mind, meanwhile, was re-adjusting to this new and significant development. That it was Miss Rosenberg who asked for a token from the Slayer… that had potential. It bound them in different ways than just the sexual; it bound the potentially fearsome and corrupt Miss Rosenberg magically to the far more stable and trustworthy Miss Summers. Yes, thought Moody… It had potential.
……………………………………………………………………………
There had been no hitches in the making of Willow’s wand. A casing of willow, her own name-wood, enclosed Buffy’s strand of hair, producing a supple and attractive wand that burst into sparks as soon as Willow’s hand touched it. Ollivander looked as cheerful as his somewhat wan countenance ever allowed.
Buffy, on the other hand, was a problem. Wand after wand produced no result, and, while Ollivander’s confidence remained unshaken, she herself began developing hideous insecurities. Perhaps she really had no magical potential whatever. Perhaps she was a common Muggle and had no business being there. She thought of her friends: she thought she saw disdain in Moody’s face, boredom in Willow’s, and a heartfelt wish to be somewhere else in Giles’. As a matter of fact, she was wrong: all they felt was concern for her; and, in a better moment, she would have understood it. But she was too gripped by fear and self-doubt not to misrepresent. Finally, a rather dubious-looking Ollivander held out to her a night-black wand with a gold tip. A great light blazed into the shop.
Ollivander was most obsequious as he took his payment from Giles and handed Buffy the wand, now truly and undeniably hers. A calculating light shone in his eyes. He took Moody aside and spoke softly: “Mad-eye… Do you know what is the core of that wand?”
“Of course I don’t. Care to enlighten me?” growled the one-eyed wizard.
“It contains a single perfect phoenix feather. I only ever sold such a wand twice.”
“You mean…?”
“Yes, indeed. The wand that chose Miss Summers is the twin of those carried by Harry Potter… and by He Who Must Not Be Named. Oh yes,” Ollivander almost whispered, “I think we will hear from young Miss Summers again.”
(Jack Kirby - Captain America 211)
It was still three hours before Willow came from Oxford, and Buffy was looking for things to pass the time. She had not had time to be bored, and for that she was grateful. London was something new - although, never having travelled much, Buffy had reckoned without the disconcerting effects of TV. So much of what she had seen was familiar to her from movies and shows, that she sometimes felt that she had stepped on to a set. And when she first heard people speaking like Giles - and, better still, like Cockneys in TV shows - she almost laughed out loud.
She decided to head for Diagon Alley. This London, she felt, was both too much and not enough: too much to take in in one day, and not enough to focus on one particular thing. And she wanted to familiarize herself with what she was told was the headquarters of magical life in London, where she would be studying and working from now on.
Buffy had been given a map to the Leaky Cauldron, the pub that guarded the entrance to Diagon Alley. She found it easily. But… People were walking back and forth, never once looking at the tiny, grubby-looking entrance; and she had a feeling that she was the only person who really noticed it. “Well, that’s magic, I guess,” she shrugged, and went in.
Inside, she was immediately aware of a difference. For one thing, there was nothing whatever that even looked like plastic and chromium, or even the large mirrors so often found in Muggle pubs. The place seemed made entirely of wood and bronze, and looked more like an ancient tavern than something to be found at the end of the twentieth century. Buffy felt like she had stepped into a history book. Then she took a look at the clients and thought again: not a history book, a storybook. There were people in every possible sort of dress except sober, everyday suits or jeans. A man in the furry, decorated dress of a Siberian Shaman was having a discussion (though Buffy could not hear any words) with a large owl, who seemed very argumentative. A man who looked rather like Prince Valiant was drinking a large, frothy drink with four or five obvious goblins. Three sorcerers, each in widely different dress, were carrying on a debate in the academic style about advanced transfiguration; and a woman in what seemed to Buffy medieval dress was thrashing out the details of her dress and make-up with a quite exceptionally cantankerous mirror. The old barman, whose face was one network of creases and lines, disengaged himself from a self-pitying and quite drunk hag, and addressed her. When she showed him the letter Giles had given her, he became very correct. He drew out his old, heavily stained wand, and led Buffy out of the bar and into one tiny walled courtyard. He tapped one particular brick, and…
“Oh,” went Buffy, hardly daring to breathe. “Oh!!”
Turrets, spikes and arches; dressed stone and gold; latticed glass and stained glass and carved wood and brass and gold; bow windows and flying buttresses and acute arches and niches and statues and pillars and gold and gold. This was more than a storybook, it was like the essence of everything she had ever imagined about England - more like England than any England she had seen. It was the essence of things precious beyond telling, sheltered, gathered together and hidden away. Here the past did not die, but grew and gave fruit; this had magic done.
England is metal, but behind the metal,
Behind the rusty, murderous progress
Is the lost land of desire ethereal,
Of love, of distance, of loss beyond redress;
Of timid faeries shying away from steel,
Of all nostalgic defeats in the past,
Hidden away from iron lies that steal,
From unclean bustle that triumphs at the last.
As she took her first tentative steps into the land of magic, her eyes moved from the buildings to the people. Buying and selling, debating current events, meeting and shaking hands. Like normal people, and yet… not. Perhaps more like a crowd of academics; there was a sense about most of them of thought, of ideas pursued and particular interests; and yet… not. There was a strangeness, an individuality, a sense of infinite different directions, that was unlike any university she had ever seen. A warrior herself, she sensed that some of these men and women were great champions in wars that she might perhaps never encounter; and others pursued things simply too weird and quirky to have a name. It was as though all these different people, each moving in his or her unique direction, nevertheless managed to form a crowd, and a community, and a common life. There were shops that sold magical animals; shops for flying brooms; shops for clothes and tools and (releasing very unattractive smells) several shops of magical ingredients whose very list made her gorge rise. But the clothes! Shamans and Brahmins, Wonderworking Rabbis in black Jewish dress, African sorcerers with lion or leopard skins on their shoulders, men who looked like Greek philosophers (and probably were), men and women in clothes of all the colours of the rainbow and none, men and women with pointed hats and long trailing robes, people who looked like superheroes in capes and people in brass-bound nineteenth-century military uniforms. Buffy just rambled on, all but dizzy with the sights, the sounds, the smells.
But there is some sort of law that says that a Slayer must always get into trouble. Suddenly Buffy knew that she was in the wrong place: the crowd, the shops, the very smell of the air, had all changed. This, had she but known it, was Knockturn Alley, the bad part of town. Her senses told her that there were vampires there, ready to come out as soon as the sun went down; hiding in the gloomy buildings whose empty windows looked down on her like eyes. She knew, without having to ask, that there were passageways between the buildings, and that some presences she could sense were moving from house to house, keeping up with her. The crowd moved around her in a curious fashion, with unexpected swirls and eddies, as though she were surrounded by an invisible bodyguard; only, she thought, these were people who moved in her same direction not with any friendly reason, but to be sure where she was going - and to assault her. The situation, she realized, could quickly become ugly. The houses were tall, the alley narrow; the time of the sun was fading fast, even in summer, and soon the whole street would be shadowed over. Buffy looked up and realized that soon vampires and other sun-haters would be able to move at will.
Suddenly things changed, in a way that would have made many people faint. Buffy heard her name and the word “Slayer” called, and she turned.
There stood a huge man covered by a long black cloak, leaning on a massive runestaff. One of his legs ended in a well-worn wooden leg in the shape of a tiger paw, the other was covered by a heavy travelling boot. His face was quite incredibly scarred; Buffy had never seen a human being with a visage so covered in every kind of mark, though some of the demons she had banished or killed were of a similar cast. It was framed by a mane of long hair shot through with white and black, with an electric effect; half his nose was missing; and where one of his eyes should be, there was a whizzing, whirling blue orb, something like an artificial eye, but completely unlike any eye she had ever seen. All told, it would be hard to imagine a more threatening apparition. Buffy fell into a fighting stance, looking straight at him. “I don’t know who you are, mister, but if you know I’m the Slayer, you know I’m someone you don’t mess with.”
“I believe I heard something of the kind,” he answered, with a thoroughly unsettling approximation to a smile. “I am Alastor Moody, and Rupert Giles told me you might be here and alone. To mention that you were the Slayer was partly for your protection; they will not try anything against the two of us now.”
…………………………………………………………………………………
The frail young American girl and the grizzled and bloodied veteran understood each other from the start. Soon they were sitting at a table at the Leaky Cauldron, Buffy drinking Butterbeer (her favourite discovery yet in the magical world) and Moody something from his flask, exchanging anecdotes about dastardly deeds, desperate battles and vile enemies. And all the Cauldron’s customers looked around, in astonishment not unmixed with fear, at the sudden and unfamiliar sound of Moody laughing - howling with laughter, all composure lost, his fist banging on the table - when Buffy told him how, in one of her very first fights, she had tricked the vampire Luke.
“You’ve forgotten the sunlight… It’s nine hours away, you moron… oh, Merlin… The old ones are still the best, aren’t they, Buffy? HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW…”
“They are, Mr. Moody.”
“Call me Alastor, Buffy (HAW HAW), call me Alastor…”
Willow was not a similar hit. When she turned up to join her girlfriend, a definite pall fell over the party, though she herself did not notice it. She was herself tense and worried; Buffy was surprised to see that she looked neither impressed nor interested with the wonders all around her - she knew her lover well enough to expect her to babble with excitement. Something had happened at Oxford, something not good; Willow would only say that it was better if Giles explained it.
Alastor Moody looked on all of this unblinkingly and without expression. He was not happy with Willow’s presence, let alone with her role in the life of someone he had already come to reckon as a trustworthy colleague. He was all too aware that, had things not gone differently, he might have had to hunt her down himself, and fight her to the death. There was a residual air of tainted magic about her that dismayed him deeply; he felt that someone of such strong and polluted power would be a dangerous ally and an even worse lover, for she carried her own seducer within herself.
“Well, ladies,” said Moody, getting up, “shall we go to Ollivander’s?”
“You mean to get wands?” burst out Willow. “I mean, I never even thought that they existed… I didn’t find them on any of Giles’ books, so I always did without…”
“Rupert Giles” said Moody quietly “needs no instruction in wand use, and he did not expect to meet anyone who did - he had gone to train a Slayer, after all. He simply took none of the acknowledged texts.”
“But I mean, won’t I be just stupid and clumsy using them if I’ve never… Like, I’m klutzy enough as it is… Won’t my wand just make me klutz times ten?”
So this was the babble Rupert had described. Moody was torn between irritation and a vague kind of pity; his life had not geared him to deal with nervous young women with inferiority complexes.
“You are an excellent witch by all accounts, Miss Rosenberg. I’m sure you will do just fine with a wand.”
……………………………………………………………………………………
Ollivander’s was the strangest shop they had ever seen, even in Diagon Alley. Rows upon rows of drawers and shutters in ancient, browned wood, seemed to stretch to the very end of vision or end in impossible angles. It was, thought Willow, like a picture she had once seen of a nightmare library, or like an M.C.Escher vision of an antiquarian’s palace. She was not surprised - though she was startled - at the apparently bodiless voice that came suddenly out of one of those distant, misty corners; which proved to belong to a dusty, stooped, pale wizard with large, watery, moon-like eyes. Both voice and owner belonged so well in that faded and mysterious atmosphere.
“Miss Summers, Miss Rosenberg. I was hoping I would have the privilege to work for you.”
“It was Alastor Moody who answered. “Ah, yes, Ollivander. So that is your view, is it?”
“What else should it be, Alastor? A Slayer is a very powerful magical creature. Therefore, Muggle or not, she is capable of performing magic. Therefore, I can fit her with a wand.”
“I am glad” rumbled the large man “that you confirm the thoughts Dr.Giles and I had.”
“Giles… Rupert Giles… twelve inches, beech and dragon heartstring, was it not?”
“Do stop wandering, Ollivander”, grumbled Moody softly.
“He is not wandering, Moody” said a cultured voice behind them, “It is his peculiar way of acknowledging my presence.”
“GILES!” shrieked both girls, and flew into his arms.
Moody watched their display of mutual affection with the eye of an old soldier, looking at everything in the light of a campaign. Evidently there was no possible way to pry the Slayer loose from her dangerous girlfriend. They were too tightly bound… pity, though.
“Giles,” said Buffy, “what happened in Oxford? Willow would not tell me, and I thought…”
“Later, Buffy,” answered Giles, his eyes though not his head motioning towards Ollivander, “Later, when we have time.”
…………………………………………………………………………..
“…the core of a wand is composed of a substance from a powerful magical creature, Miss Rosenberg. Hippogriffs, dragons and unicorns are popular choices. One particularly evil wizard I knew… no, not He Who Must Not Be Named… made his own, after I and other wand-makers had refused, with a vial of unicorn blood.”
“Why did the wand-makers refuse?”
“Because, Slayer, to slay a unicorn is a monstrous crime. To handle the results of his crime would have made us as bad as he was; tainted us in ways that no wand-maker, whatever his or her personal character, wished to contemplate.”
“And what happened to that wizard?”
“After he had made his wand, he went on a revenge mission against the wand-makers who had tried to thwart him. Three renowned wand-makers were captured and savagely tortured. But it did him little good: when he came after me, a young Auror, just starting on an illustrious career” - and Ollivander bowed in Moody’s direction - “captured him and freed his prisoners. It was one of his earliest great deeds.”
“Mr.Moody?” asked Buffy.
“Alastor, Buffy, Alastor. Yes, I remember it well. Ugly little rat as he was… Ollivander modestly left out his own part in his rescue.”
“I did very little…”
“Anyway,” Willow broke in, “you said a part of any magical creature?”
“The core of a wand. Yes, indeed, madam.”
“And does it have to be a beast? I mean, like dragons and hippogriffs? Can’t it be an intelligent being - you know, like a dwarf or a Siren?”
“Indeed it can, Miss Rosenberg. Why, not so long ago, I came across a wand cored with hair from a Veela’s head… And if you are thinking what I think” - his large pale eyes wandered slowly from Willow to Buffy - “it seems to me an apt choice, and as likely as any to succeed.”
“Well,” said Willow with a definitely flirtatious air, “when you mentioned magical creatures, I just happened to think that I have one of the most magical creatures in the world right here with me…” She looked at Buffy with affection; and Buffy, who had failed to get the point of the previous exchange, suddenly understood, smiled, and blushed very prettily. She reached up and tore some long strands of hair from her scalp, uttering an agonized OWW! as she did so; then handed the strands out to Willow, who blushed in turn. She touched the tips of her fore- and middle finger to her lips, and then placed them on Buffy’s cheek. “You may now kiss the bride,” said Giles under his breath.
Moody’s mind, meanwhile, was re-adjusting to this new and significant development. That it was Miss Rosenberg who asked for a token from the Slayer… that had potential. It bound them in different ways than just the sexual; it bound the potentially fearsome and corrupt Miss Rosenberg magically to the far more stable and trustworthy Miss Summers. Yes, thought Moody… It had potential.
……………………………………………………………………………
There had been no hitches in the making of Willow’s wand. A casing of willow, her own name-wood, enclosed Buffy’s strand of hair, producing a supple and attractive wand that burst into sparks as soon as Willow’s hand touched it. Ollivander looked as cheerful as his somewhat wan countenance ever allowed.
Buffy, on the other hand, was a problem. Wand after wand produced no result, and, while Ollivander’s confidence remained unshaken, she herself began developing hideous insecurities. Perhaps she really had no magical potential whatever. Perhaps she was a common Muggle and had no business being there. She thought of her friends: she thought she saw disdain in Moody’s face, boredom in Willow’s, and a heartfelt wish to be somewhere else in Giles’. As a matter of fact, she was wrong: all they felt was concern for her; and, in a better moment, she would have understood it. But she was too gripped by fear and self-doubt not to misrepresent. Finally, a rather dubious-looking Ollivander held out to her a night-black wand with a gold tip. A great light blazed into the shop.
Ollivander was most obsequious as he took his payment from Giles and handed Buffy the wand, now truly and undeniably hers. A calculating light shone in his eyes. He took Moody aside and spoke softly: “Mad-eye… Do you know what is the core of that wand?”
“Of course I don’t. Care to enlighten me?” growled the one-eyed wizard.
“It contains a single perfect phoenix feather. I only ever sold such a wand twice.”
“You mean…?”
“Yes, indeed. The wand that chose Miss Summers is the twin of those carried by Harry Potter… and by He Who Must Not Be Named. Oh yes,” Ollivander almost whispered, “I think we will hear from young Miss Summers again.”