Loyalty, Unity, Confusion

Later that night she laid them out on her bed.  Tilted her head this way and that.  Added the purple squares she had created for classes that term in among them.  Loyalty, unity, and confusion to the enemy, she thought.  Totenberg came and stood at her elbow, laid one hand on the Slytherin star, traced the linked rings of Hufflepuff.

"Could do worse," he said, "than to sleep under a piece of your soul, yah?"

Spike thought about it.  In all the stories, wizard placed bit of their souls in majestic and important things -- the eggs of firebirds, cloven pines on lonely mountaintops, even Voldemort had fallen for the idea of creating his Horcruxes in glamorous, historically important items so that the wizard finding them would be tempted on several levels not to destroy such a venerated object.  Almost worked with Dumbeldore, too, she thought.  Tempted to keep the Horcrux whole, just for the value of thing itself, then tempted to use it for his own ends when it began to whisper.  Would have been the death of him, either physically -- or turned him to the dark, with a withered hand.

"It wouldn't look like such a much," she mused aloud, "Just a little Second Year's security blanket, made by loving hands at home.  Kept for sentimentality's sake."  She glanced up sidewise at her bodyguard.  "I think you may have something there, Totenberg."

A few wand movements later, the thing was conjoined and bound into one.

Spike vowed to keep it close, as a remembrance of this term, and a lesson in power learned.