Chapter Text
Arabella Blackgrim was a legendary witch, recognized as the brightest of her generation. She possessed all the virtues that the four founders of Hogwarts admired and sought in the students of their own houses: the bravery of Godric Gryffindor, the ambition and cunning of Salazar Slytherin, the wisdom of Rowena Ravenclaw and the loyalty of Helga Hufflepuff. It was said that her lineage descended directly from Morgana le Fay and that the blood of ancient wizards, as ancestral as Merlin himself, ran through her veins.
Arabella was also known for possessing an exceptional, almost supernatural beauty, which many described as impossible to ignore. Her most distinctive feature was her deep and brilliant purple eyes, a unique and hereditary characteristic of the ancient Blackgrim family. Legends claimed that those eyes were a mark of the ancient power of her lineage and that no member of the family had been born without them for centuries. Her presence commanded respect even among the most powerful wizards, and many claimed to feel a strange fascination when looking directly at her.
House Blackgrim was one of the oldest and most reserved magical families of the era. Arabella grew up surrounded by her parents and siblings within a lineage obsessed with preserving the purity of its blood and the secrets of its ancestral magic. Despite this, Arabella was always different from the rest of her family: kind, curious and eager to know the world beyond the ancient family traditions.
Her intelligence, charisma and power were so extraordinary that she managed to earn the loyalty and admiration of the four founders. As a symbol of respect and devotion, each of them gave her an object belonging to their personal collection, magical relics of incalculable value. Those gifts not only represented gratitude, but also a kind of oath of loyalty, as if Arabella were destined to become a queen of the magical world. However, over time, the founders began to notice something disturbing: those who remained too close to Arabella ended up becoming deeply fascinated by her, to the point of obsession.
Rowena Ravenclaw was the first to discover the truth. Researching ancient forbidden texts, she understood that Arabella’s blood was linked to an ancient magic inherited from Morgana le Fay, an ancestral power capable of awakening admiration, devotion and even madness in those around her. It was not a conscious spell, but rather a magic that lived within her lineage. Even so, the founders decided to keep the secret and protect her.
As the years passed, legends began to arise around her figure. The most well-known recounted that both Salazar Slytherin and Godric Gryffindor were deeply in love with her. The rivalry between them grew until it became an obsession, especially on Slytherin’s part. When he decided to officially ask for Arabella’s hand in marriage, Godric stepped forward first and challenged his former friend to a duel. The confrontation was fierce and became engraved in history as one of the most impressive duels of the era. In the end, Gryffindor emerged victorious thanks to his incomparable skill as a duelist.
However, neither of them cared to ask Arabella what she truly desired. Tired of being treated like a trophy and fearful of the chaos that her presence caused, the young woman decided to escape alongside Edmund, Rowena Ravenclaw’s brother, with whom she had fallen deeply in love. The two fled far away from Hogwarts in the hope of beginning a new life, far from the intrigues and the shadow of the prophecy that seemed to pursue Arabella since her birth.
But tragedy soon reached the family. Helena Ravenclaw, consumed by jealousy upon seeing that Arabella had become the center of everyone’s attention and admiration, conspired against her. Driven by envy, she ordered the Bloody Baron to murder Arabella and recover Ravenclaw’s diadem, promising him in return that she would marry him.
The Baron, blinded by his obsessive love for Helena, fulfilled the order and ended Arabella’s life. However, upon realizing that he had been capable of killing for her, Helena felt terror and regret. Fearing the Baron, she fled toward the forests of Albania. The Baron pursued her until he found her and, in a burst of rage and despair, ended up murdering her as well. Consumed by guilt, he took his own life shortly afterward.
Arabella’s death plunged the founders into profound sorrow. It is said that that pain forever marked the destiny of Hogwarts and fractured the relationship between them. United by grief, they made an ancient oath: when the soul of Arabella Blackgrim was reborn in another witch, they and all their descendants would faithfully serve House Blackgrim, destined — according to the prophecy — to lead the magical world into a new era of glory.
But the suffering did not end there. After Arabella’s death, the founders understood that her existence had provoked wars, obsessions and betrayals capable of destroying the magical world before Hogwarts could even establish itself as a place of peace. Fearing that Arabella’s descendants would be persecuted or used by other ambitious wizards, they decided to hide the truth forever.
Using a powerful ancient magic, the four founders erased almost all evidence of Arabella Blackgrim’s existence. Her portraits were destroyed, the records altered and the relics they had given her were hidden in different secret corners of Hogwarts. Even the Blackgrim surname was forbidden in certain magical circles. The spell was so powerful that it also affected those who cast it: over time, the founders themselves began to forget fragments of their memories about her.
The curse of oblivion also reached the Blackgrim family itself. Her parents and siblings slowly began to lose their memories of Arabella, as if she had never existed. The spaces where her portraits had once stood remained empty, and conversations about her disappeared from the family’s memory. As the years passed, the members of House Blackgrim died of natural causes, taking their secrets to the grave without even remembering the reason for the sadness that seemed to constantly haunt them.
The centuries transformed Arabella’s story into mere rumors and incomplete legends. Some claimed that hidden chambers existed beneath Hogwarts where relics linked to her still remained; others believed that Ravenclaw’s diadem preserved echoes of her lost memories. However, officially, to the magical world, Arabella Blackgrim had never existed.