20 Facts About Salazar Slytherin (HP,1406 words, 12+)

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Title: 20 Facts About Salazar Slytherin
Rating: 12+
Word Count: 1406 words
A/N: Written for the Harry Potter Random Facts Fest.

20 Facts About Salazar Slytherin

1. "It is clear from my observations," Salazar writes, "that these Muggles are hollow creatures without souls."
    
2. It's 894, he's just barely sixteen, and, as he writes, the East Angles break their treaty with Alfred the Great, marching futilely on Exeter; it's the beginning of the end of the Danish occupation, though it will be twenty five years before they'll be subsumed into the greater population of what will become England.
    
3. Though Salazar is of Danish blood - though he was born here in Thetford, in the timber castle on the motte, storm eyed and screaming - he can not bring himself to care for paltry politics; his loyalty is to the greater brotherhood, the truer nation, formed of those who, like himself, forever feel the power thrumming under their skin.
    
4. (Salazar's father, Asgrim, is a Nordic pagan out of Viborg during an age of great Viking expansion, a man notable for both the cunning and the viciousness of his martial tactics. His mother, Velasquita, is an Iberian from Coimbra and a woman of great learning. It's 875 and they meet on Lindisfarne amidst battle, duelling first each other, then their mutual foes. Velasquita is following rumours of great magical artifacts hidden with the bones of Saint Cuthbert. Asgrim is retracing the steps of his grandfather who had been part of the first raid on the island and thus witness to the birth of the Viking age. They find, in each other, a small measure of what else they sought: power, privilege, and recognition.)
    
5. "It is our duty as wizards to protect and promote the superiority of the magical over the mundane," Salazar writes in 894, in a letter he will leave for his mother to find long after he has slipped away. "I am therefore leaving to seek journeyman positions with as many of the puissant masters of this age as I may."
    
6. It does not go well. He quickly learns the reputations of the wizards and witches of the island far outstrip their abilities. Four hundred years after Merlin and the land, though filled with his descendants, holds little of his power or knowledge. In disgust, Salazer turns his attention to Europe.
    
7. "Ignorance is the faltering step of ambition," he tells Rowena Ravenclaw in 912. Leo VI, Byzantine emperor, has been dead for less than a month and from his papers Salazar has seized a collection of oracular poems whose import have brought him to this table in Constantinople. "It is an excuse for the lazy, a panacea for the weak willed, and a weakness for the wise."
    
8. (True Divination is the only skill that ever properly escapes him; by the century's turn he has dismissed the practice as foolish quackery, lamenting the time wasted on its reliance and his researches. "I understand now that the future is not a thing already written, waiting to be seized," he writes to his grand-daughter, Mirella, on her marriage to Aloysius Gaunt in 1004, enclosing with the letter a heavy gold locket bearing his mark in green gemstone. "Rather, we must carve it out ourselves from the bedrock of time and build it on a foundation of blood and bone.")
    
9. Rowena and Salazar have a brief intimate relationship neither finds particular satisfactory and part amicably, collaborating on each other's research, she in eastern Europe and southern Asia, he in Africa. In 916, he meets his first wife, Aabida, in Sousse in the Fatimid Caliphate. His flagrant courtship incenses her family whose influence rapidly leaves Salazar destitute; defying them, Aabida and Salazar flee together, marrying in London and then travelling on to the Highlands, where Rowena takes them in. Their happiness lasts less than a year; in 917, Aabida dies in childbirth. Their daughter survives her mother only by hours.
    
10. Grieving, Salazar flees the Highlands for the West Country, where he buries himself in botanical research, spending long months alone in the forest of Dean. As a Dane in a county now steadfastly controlled by Wessex, what few encounters he has are antagonistic at best. He finds himself winning duel after pointless duel until, in 921, he encounters Godric Gryffindor, a soldier by trade and lately protecting the merchant routes of the areas iron works and coal mines. They duel for seven hours straight before Godric takes the upper hand, and drink together afterwards for just as long.
     
11. Discussions about duel training lead to discussions about teaching which leads to them opening a duelling club which leads to them taking on full time students, so that by the time Helga Hufflepuff - a long time friend of Rowena's, known for her innovative household charms - is sent to fetch them (Rowena having grown tired of the lack of communication), they are teaching half a dozen classes each. It is simply a matter of convenience to join their students to hers; that it becomes a formal school afterwards is almost a matter of accident.
     
12. (It acquires the name by accident, too, when a local dignitary complains the school is spreading through the town like warts on a hog, leading to Godric booming "More Hogwarts! More Hogwarts!" at every new student and laughing loud enough to shake the walls. When even his own students start using the name, Salazar begrudgingly acquiesces to its formal use.)
     
13. When it rapidly becomes clear that proper grounds are needed, they pool their resources and manage to acquire a small, run-down castle in the Highlands, which they promptly tear apart and remake to their own standards. Since they are teaching all the while, it takes decades, and, the closer they get to fruition, the more the differences in their methods and requirements begin to grate. The fewer details there are to arrange, the greater the fights over them, until, by the castle's completion, Salazar and Godric are locked in stony detente with Helga and Rowena proving a poor buffer between them.
     
14. "Slytherin was aware from an early age of his greatness," Rowena writes in a letter to her daughter in 992, snow dancing across the windows of her tower at Hogwarts, "and he has grown mad from his need to force greatness on the world around him; I do not believe he will suffer the deprecations of yon Gryffindor for much longer."
     
15. Her words prove prophetic. The snow is still thick on the ground when Salazar and Godric's argument breaks out into a full on duel. Salazar casts first, Godric last; half the castle is razed to the ground between them, the lack of major injuries to students a testament to the two men's skill. Godric demands submission or exile and Salazar, sneering, gladly takes the latter.
     
16. ("My temper has always been my greatest shame," Godric will write some months later. "I deeply regret my actions of that day and I truly believe that some middle ground may yet be discovered to allow us to continue in our work, if not for ourselves, then at least for the greater good." The letter, apparently unopened and certainly returned without reply, remains in the castle's collection.)
     
17. Salazar meets his second wife, Emma Peverell, in 942. They have thirteen children, of which six live to adulthood. Between them, they have twenty seven grand-children. Each is a powerful wizard and witch in turn, parseltongues all, cunning and ambitious. By the time Salazar has left Hogwarts, his ideals have already become ingrained in his House, which accepts each of his children and grand-children in turn.
     
18. "To accept muggleborns as true," Salazar dictates to his wife in 1065, his eyes failed and his hands too stiff to write, though they'll hold his wand still, "is to presume you can pour vintage wine into a cracked and broken clay mug and still drink it fresh and without spills. It is an absurd suggestion that evidence demonstrably fails to bear out; nothing I have seen in my life has ever convinced me that I am wrong in this regard. Magic can not grant Muggles souls."
     
19. Less than a week after his last book is bound, Emma succumbs to Vanishing Sickness. Salazar refuses to attend her funeral, sending letters from Rowena back unopened. He retires to his workshop and refuses all visitors. When the Norman invasion sweeps through the area some months later, they find only an empty manor, its rooms burned clear, its black stone walls burnished as pure and shiny as glass.
     
20. (Deep beneath Hogwarts, the basilisk slumbers restlessly. Salazar Slytherin is not seen again by human eyes.)