Literatti: Fiction By Deslea

This story, written for 2014 HP Horror Fest, explores Albus Dumbledore's guilt and self-loathing after his sister's death and his estrangement from Gellert, as well as his final betrayal of his love for Gellert by defeating him at Nurmengard. The catalyst is Tom Riddle, who as a young man has worked out Albus' weakness. He embarks on a campaign of psychological torture, impersonating Gellert and young men who resemble him to seduce him and get inside his head, in revenge for his belief that Albus abandoned him as a child. Interestingly, Tom appears not to have resumed his campaign after his fall in 1981, but by this point Albus' own mind has turned on him, and the impact continues right up until the moment of his death. Read it here

"Lucius and Tonks, who I wrote a lot in 2012, started out as a happy accident. I wrote a novella (Two of a Kind) where they fell in with each other by chance after the war, while they were grieving Narcissa and Remus. It was supposed to be a love-through-shared-trauma-despite-being-worlds-apart kind of thing. But I found they had a really interesting pair of voices together, and in fact, there are synergies. Tonks is a Black, and in many ways a younger version of Narcissa, and she has reason to be repelled/intrigued by her family of origin. (We see hints of this in her enmity with Bellatrix, which seems to have been mutual – she took grim pleasure in seriously injuring Bella's husband). There is also a shared ruthlessness between them, though tempered by morality on Tonks' side. Tonks, with Kingsley, is an active political player in the Ministry for the Order, as much as Lucius is for Voldemort. There are also intriguing espionage possibilities rising from his position as Voldemort's senior lieutenant and hers as the Order's spy; those were central in Sons of July, The Substitute, and The Blue Vial. There are also suggestions in her relationship with Remus that she is susceptible to tangled relationships with older, unwise men, so Lucius isn't really that much more of a stretch."

Ratings are roughly equivalent to those used by the Motion Picture Association of America.

G: General audiences.
PG: Parental Guidance. Adult concepts and dilemmas, but without graphic detail.
M (or R): Mature audience. Adult concepts and dilemmas, anti-social attitudes, people doing the wrong thing and not necessarily feeling guilty about it. Also includes low-level sexual content (a few soft-focus paragraphs with little or no direct discussion of body parts). Most of my work is M.
NC-17: No children 17 or under. May contain explicit and extended descriptions of sexual activity, brief but graphic sexual descriptions, or graphic violence. A couple of my works contain rape scenes; these are graphic but not sexualised, and are appropriately marked with content warnings.
Trigger/Content Warnings: I take a conservative approach to triggers and will generally warn for anything that might trigger reader trauma to do with violence, self-harm, or grief. If the term "dark themes" is used, this may mean too many dark themes to mention, a dark theme that I don't want to reveal because it's a plot twist, or a vague dark feel that doesn't have a more precise description. Caveat lector.