#andromedagaunt

[bloodandlegacy]

I: The Name She Couldn't Take

June 25, 1953

Dear Diary,

They call me "Andy," but I hate it. It feels like another way she’s trying to scrape away the parts of me that belong to my mother. I was born Andromeda. She named me after stars—something bright and beautiful, something that mattered. But in this house, in this world of shadows, I’m just "Andy," some girl she’s molding into whatever suits her. It feels like every time she says it, she’s taking away what little is left of my mother’s love.

The woman I call "mom" is someone my real mother left me with—a friend, she claimed, though I can’t imagine why. She’s all harsh words and cold hands, her face set like stone whenever she looks at me. Maybe she thinks raising me like this is doing me a favor, maybe she believes she’s “saving” me from something. But she doesn’t feel like a mother. More like a jailer, someone who locks me in the dark and expects me to grow blind to the light.

Sometimes I whisper my real name to myself, just to feel its weight in my mouth. Andromeda Gaunt. That’s who I am. That’s who I’ll always be, even if no one else ever says it.

Today I turned 11. She gave me this diary, probably just to shut me up. "Happy now?" she said, and tossed it to me like it was something I didn’t deserve. But it’s mine, no matter how I got it, and here I can say whatever I want. Here, I can be Andromeda.

Not that there’s much to say about today. Just me and her, like it always is. I asked if we could do something different, maybe just sit outside, but she just scoffed. "Birthdays are for foolish children," she muttered. Maybe she’s right. Maybe it’s childish to want something special, to pretend I could be more than… whatever she says I am.

Still, when she left, I went out to the garden, where the sun was warm and the flowers bright. I sat there, eyes closed, just listening. Sometimes I feel like there’s something in me that wants to break free, some spark or fire.

There was one time I got so angry, the glass on the table shook. She said it was because I was careless, but I’m not so sure. Sometimes it feels like there’s a spark inside me, like a tiny fire that wants to be seen. But every time it tries, it gets smothered. I feel it waiting, hiding in me, as if it knows better than to show itself.

Anyway, I made myself a promise, here in these pages: one day, I’ll understand who I really am. Maybe even make something of myself.

-Andromeda Gaunt

Looking back, I barely recognize that frightened little girl, clutching her diary as if it were the only friend she’d ever have. In a way, it was. No one else was going to tell me who I was, so I told myself in those pages, letter by letter, a quiet rebellion against a world that refused to see me.

I was born a Gaunt, yet I grew up a nobody. If fate had been a bit kinder, or perhaps less cruel, my life would have looked very different. Instead, my earliest memories are of a broken-down house, the smell of stale alcohol, and the rough, cold hands of the woman who raised me. She wasn’t my mother, of course; my mother was dead. She died when I was three. Her best friend—a half-blood who thought she was doing my mother some great favor by keeping me “safe” from magic—became my caretaker. Safe… that’s what she called it.

Safe meant beaten, bruised, and terrified to my core of whatever magic stirred inside me. Safe meant hiding every spark, every flicker, because to her, magic was filth, and I was the living embodiment of it. Each flicker of magic was met with harsh words and harsher hands, a constant reminder that magic was something ugly and shameful. And I believed her, for years. I shrank myself down, smothered the spark within me until it became something dark, something I feared as much as she did.

Every time something unexplainable happened—like the time the flowers in the vase grew at my touch, or when the lights flickered with my anger—she called it “devilish nonsense.” And I was punished, each time harsher than the last, until I learned to swallow it all down. Until the thing inside me that once felt like a fire turned cold and dark, like a storm I didn’t dare unleash.

But I never let go of that name: Andromeda. It was mine, a tiny link to a mother I couldn’t remember, a life I’d never know. In that name, there was power, a power she couldn’t touch, no matter how hard she tried to make me "Andy," her quiet, magicless little project. Andy was her way of wiping away the name my mother had given me, the legacy that flowed through my veins. She never realized that every time she called me “Andy,” all she did was fuel the fire she was so desperate to extinguish.

For years, I thought maybe I was just cursed, different, unworthy of anything else. But then I discovered I was a witch. And a Gaunt.