Spells in Silence (Harry Potter)

[Silently Watches]

"Where'd she go?! She was right here!"

A too-thin girl slowly leaned over the edge of the rooftop and glanced down at the six boys milling around aimlessly in the narrow dead-end between two school buildings. All of them were practically vibrating with confusion, their thoughts bouncing around as they tried to figure out where the target of their 'fun' could have gone, but the biggest and meanest of them had a thread of fear running through him. Thoughts like "People don't disappear" and "She has to be here" warred with "How'd she do that?" and "Freaky..." in his head. The blond boy lifted his head higher, as though thinking she might have climbed up the walls, and she pulled back so he would not get a glimpse of her shaggy black hair or her green eyes.

"She must have jumped over the fence."

"We were right behind her, Dudley! She's not that fast!"

"You got a better idea?!" Dudley demanded. No one answered him, and even from on top of the building and out of sight she could still feel the satisfaction that flooded through him at their acceptance. Three years he had spent putting his little gang together, she knew, and even now he still feared that one of them would challenge his authority and knock him from the top. He had reason to fear this, too; Marcus had considered it several times over the last year, and the only thing that was stopping him was that he in turn was afraid that none of the other boys would back him up and instead would hold him down where Dudley could beat on him. "Let's go. We'll get back at her tomorrow."

The 'her' in question flopped onto her back with a quiet huff. She rarely expected tomorrow to be any better than today, and after hearing that she felt her doubts were once again going to be well founded. Boys were not supposed to hit girls, that was something the teachers constantly told everyone at Little Whinging Primary School, but none of those same teachers would lift a finger to defend her.

Everyone from the other children to the teachers to the principal all thought the same thing. Hazel Potter was weird, a freak, and she deserved whatever happened to her.

Hazel pushed herself upright and glared at the pockets of snow still lingering on the tiles. It was not as if it was her fault that strange things always seemed to happen to her! Like the time her Aunt Petunia told her she had to wear a black and white dress that looked like it was from the 1930s, a dress she knew her aunt had picked up for less than a pound at a charity shop. Her aunt had been so pleased with herself about that, about how ugly she knew the dress was and how Hazel did not deserve to have 'normal people money' spent on her. The next morning, Hazel had woken to find the dress had shrunk overnight so small that it would not fit even a doll, let alone her. She had spent a week locked in the cupboard under the stairs after that, even though no one ever tried to explain how she was supposed to be responsible for that.

Or the time when one of the girls in her class had been making fun of how quiet she was only to start braying like a horse. Marissa was unable to talk normally for the rest of the day and had to be taken home early by her mother. Because Hazel had been the victim, the school had called Aunt Petunia to tell her about it. Hazel's shoulder twinged at the memory of Uncle Vernon's punishment for being 'freakish' in public like that.

Even her appearance was considered 'abnormal'. Not necessarily the faded skirt or the overlarge shirt that had once been Dudley's, nor the wild black hair that Aunt Petunia insisted on cutting as short as a boy's, nor the grass-green eyes that stared out from behind ugly plastic glasses. No, it was instead the aftermath of the incident that had killed her parents. Her fingers reached up to trace the pale, puckered line crossing her throat, sloping upwards slightly as it ran from the left to the right. Whatever happened had not just stolen her parents; it also left her without a voice to call her own.

Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon said her parents died in a car crash while driving drunk, but that was a lie.

Her silence was in all honesty only the second oddest thing about Hazel Potter, but it was the first thing on people's minds when they saw her, and in many ways it was the most debilitating. She could not talk with other children in her class, and until she had learned her letters and how to read and write when she first started school, she was left with no way to communicate even if she had anyone at home willing to listen. Stuck playing charades or writing out anything she wanted other people to know, she was intimately familiar with the feeling of being ignored because it was so much easier for teachers to ignore her than they could other kids who yelled out whatever they wanted to say.

"Miss Potter! Where are you?!"

Hazel winced at the shrill sound of Mrs. Nicholson's voice and climbed to her feet. Break must be over. Stepping to the edge, she waved her hand until the teacher glanced up. The oldest teacher still working at the school stared at her for a long moment. "The bloody hell is she doing there?" the woman asked, using language Hazel had seen her smack people's hands for using in front of her. Finally she voiced the obvious question. "How did you even get up there?"

Her shoulders slumped at the stupidity of anyone asking her a question like that.

"Right, never mind. Just get down here, you creepy little shit." Hazel ignored the insult with the ease of long practice and started looking for a ladder, but she froze in place when she heard Mrs. Nicholson's next words.

"When you come down, go to the principal's office and wait for your aunt."

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The car ride back to Number 4 Privet Drive was anything but quiet, even if nobody spoke. In the back seat next to Hazel, Dudley sat with a big fat grin, his piggy little eyes watching her in anticipation of the punishment she was sure to receive. Ugly laughter echoed in his head, and his thoughts turned towards what his daddy would do to the dumb freak. In the driver's seat, Aunt Petunia was distracted by having to keep her eyes and attention on the road, but whenever she looked in the rearview mirror and caught a glimpse of Hazel, a terrible anger would overtake her and she would have to look forwards again. "She's not just a freak. She's an abomination. Why were we the ones who had to take her in? Should have taken her to an orphanage as soon as we found her on the front step."

Hazel had been six years old when she realized hearing other people's thoughts was not something Normal People did. It was certainly not something anyone else on Privet Drive and the nearby streets could do, otherwise the ladies in Aunt Petunia's tea group would realize they all hated one another and quit wasting their time trying to impress everyone else. She only knew for sure that it was something abnormal – something special and unique to her – when she had asked her year 1 teacher why she thought Hazel was so disturbing. The teacher gave her a nonsense answer about how all children were special and precious even as fear and the question of how she could be so easily seen through danced around her mind.

Over the next few years, Hazel had learned a number of lessons that made her ever more eager for the chance to leave Little Whinging when it came time for secondary school or, barring that, when she turned eighteen. First, the people in this town were all awful. The children thought she was weird and creepy and were happy to remind her of that if she came too close to them. The adults, the same ones who smiled and said everyone should be treated equally and everyone should be nice to each other, were more than willing to turn a blind eye whenever anything happened to the mute girl who always saw too much, always knew too much, for they had the same opinions as their children.

Second, and related to the first, people were liars. Rarely did their words match their thoughts, and many of them were quick to punish people for the same things they did. Mrs. Nicholson was a prime example of this.

And third, the Dursleys were not her family. Not really. Families were supposed to love and care for each other; they were supposed to be the one group of people she could count on no matter what. That was what all the books she had read in school told her. The Dursleys did not care for her. They hated her, Aunt Petunia even more than Uncle Vernon and Dudley, and wanted nothing to do with her. Every time they locked her in the cupboard that served as her bedroom, they wished they did not have to have her in the house at all.

The only reason they had not thrown her out already was an image of a dark figure that sometimes crossed their minds when they let her out of her cupboard or after Uncle Vernon smacked her. She did not know who this figure was, but she knew they feared him more than they hated her, if only by a little.

She did not know when or if their opinions would tilt the other way, but it seemed like as she got older, their hatred and more recently their fear of her were growing stronger and faster.

They pulled up into the driveway in front of Number 4, and Hazel barely had time to grab her backpack before Aunt Petunia opened the door and twisted her ear. "Get inside, freak, before anyone sees. In your cupboard. Now. Should lock you inside and let you starve. We'd be rid of you then. What have I told you about being… abnormal in public?!"

Hazel reached for her bag to grab her pen and pad of paper, but Aunt Petunia yanked harder on her ear. It was not as if she did whatever she did on purpose! Aunt Petunia did not really care about that, though. Intentions or accidents meant nothing when it came to her.

"She's getting worse. She'll be just like Lily at her age soon."

Like Lily? Hazel twisted in her aunt's grasp to stare up at the blonde woman. Aunt Petunia rarely thought of Hazel's mother, in fact did her best not to think of her at all, and this was the first time Hazel had heard anything about her mother being like her. The confusion and curiosity in her eyes startled Aunt Petunia, and the woman opened the cupboard door and threw Hazel and then her backpack inside. "You'll stay in there for a week. If you do anything freakish, any magic, it'll be longer!"

That word swirled around in Hazel's mind as she sat for hours in the dark and spawned countless questions to which she had no answers. Magic? What she could do, that was magic? Her mother could do magic? What else could she do, could they do? Were there other people like her out in the world?

She knew exactly when Aunt Petunia told Uncle Vernon what happened earlier that day because the wave of utter rage and terror hit her almost like a physical thing. He stomped up to the door of her cupboard. For a long moment she worried he would decide to reach inside, but in the end he decided to stay on the opposite side of the door "Maybe we should have listened to Marge. Drowned the girl when she was a baby. You are staying in this cupboard until you've learned your lesson! Do you hear me, girl? It's long past time you start acting like a regular, normal person! But she won't. She was never normal, and she'll never be normal. I won't have that in my home!"

The thoughts in Uncle Vernon's head sent shivers down Hazel's spine. She barely breathed until he finally walked away towards his and Aunt Petunia's bedroom. This was not the first time a Dursley had wanted her to die, but before it had only been Aunt Marge, Uncle Vernon's sister, who thought that. Until tonight, that was, and the very fact that he was seriously considering following her advice terrified Hazel.

Whoever that dark figure in the Dursleys' memories was, he was no longer the person they feared most. But unlike him, her they could do something about.

She had to escape this cupboard. This house. These people. Or else they might very well kill her this time.

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Whenever the Dursleys locked her in her cupboard for days and days like this, they did not leave her entirely alone. She was let out to use the loo and drink a glass of water exactly twice a day. Two glasses of water a day was not enough; they knew that, and therefore Hazel did too. As the days went on, she would feel more and more sick until most days she wanted nothing more than to go back into the cupboard and sleep.

Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon both thought this was the best way to 'fix' her.

Hazel looked up at the bottom of the stairs that made up the top of her cupboard and waited for silence to fill the house. Six days she had spent locked in her cupboard so far. The fear and anger the Dursleys had not decreased, though unlike that first night they were no longer considering starving or drowning her. Their minds instead had focused on all the chores they could give her to keep her too busy to cause trouble. They thought if they physically wore her out, strange things would cease to happen around her. She doubted it would work, but as the days went by and the sense of danger shrank, she was tempted to keep her head down and not rock the boat.

The downside to that idea was that she would have to let go of the questions Aunt Petunia's accidental thought had uncovered.

The house creaked, and Hazel closed her eyes and tried to focus. That was fear of the unknown talking. What she should be afraid of was what would happen in the future. The odd events – the magical events – around her were becoming stronger and stranger, and her aunt and uncle's punishments for them were getting worse in response. They had decided not to kill her this week, but would that continue to be the case in a year, or two, or five? In the worst case, was it possible for their patience to last another nine years until she turned eighteen and finally left Privet Drive behind forever?

She did not like those odds. The sooner she escaped this place, the safer she would be.

Her punishment gave her the perfect opportunity to work through what had happened at school. One moment, she was being chased by Dudley's gang, and the next moment she was on top of the building. Other than a strange squeezing sensation, almost as if she were toothpaste being forced out a tube, it had been instant. Teleportation was yet another thing the Dursleys said was impossible, but so was everything she had ever done. What she really wanted to know was whether she could do it again. Every night when the Dursleys went to sleep, she attempted to repeat the experience.

The results so far were… less than encouraging.

Once again, Hazel imagined that squeezing sensation and pictured the kitchen of Number 4. Once again, that sensation failed to come, and she opened her eyes to find herself still in her cupboard. What am I doing wrong?, she wondered, scrubbing her eyes to wipe away the sleep dust that was trying to form. Practicing all night and trying to sleep through Aunt Petunia moving around in the house watching the telly during the day did not lend itself to much in the way of rest, and that was not helping either, she was sure. Still, she had limited time in which to figure out what she was doing. Now was no time to relax.

When I did it Friday, I was running from Dudley. Can't exactly run around in here, she thought with a look around the cramped interior of the cupboard that was not large enough for her even to stand, and I wouldn't ask Dudley to chase me even if I could. I wanted to be somewhere else, but I'm imagining where I want to go and not getting there. I know I don't want to be here, but that doesn't work either. Nor does imagining the kitchen and wanting not to be here. What else is there?!

After so many nights without making any headway, Hazel was losing her patience. How could it be so difficult to do intentionally what she did on accident without even knowing she could do it? She swept her hand out and yanked it back when it banged painfully into the wall. She was not asking for much, was she?! All she wanted was to be. In. The. Kitchen—!

The cupboard collapsed around her and squeezed all the air out of her chest. For a long second she was afraid she would suffocate, but then with a 'crack' she fell forwards onto a linoleum floor. She recognized these tiles.

Hazel would have whooped with joy if she could make such a sound. Instead she climbed to her feet and ran to the cupboard. Unlocking it was easy now that she was on this side of the door, and she pulled out the few clothes she had and stuffed them into her backpack. Her school books and notebooks she left on the cot in the cupboard with the exception of one blank pad of paper and the collection of colored pens she had collected over the years whenever she found one abandoned on the floor. These she would need if she wanted to talk to anyone she met.

She had plenty of space left in her bag, and she ran down the mental checklist she had made the first night locked in the cupboard when she had decided she could not wait until she got into secondary school or became an adult. She was leaving Privet Drive for good. Tonight.

Just because she was young did not mean she was a fool. She knew she could not run away and stay away with nothing but a few changes of clothes in a backpack. She needed something to live off of. Her next stop was therefore back in the kitchen. Cans of vegetables and meat, a jar of peanut butter, and a loaf of bread filled that extra space easily. It weighed her down, of course, but it would give her something to eat while she was planning her next move.

Her eyes fell on Aunt Petunia's purse, and she nibbled on her bottom lip. Taking food from the cabinets was one thing. Stealing money was another altogether. Stealing was something no one was supposed to do. But neither is treating 'family' like Aunt Petunia does me, she thought. Opening the purse before she lost her nerve, she pulled out a sheaf of bills and shoved them in her pocket.

There. She had clothes, food, and money. She had everything she wanted to take with her from Privet Drive.

She stopped and looked down the hall in the direction of Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon's bedroom. Nearly everything, that was. She set her backpack down in the front hall and padded her way through the house in her socks, slowly opening a door to reveal her aunt and uncle lying in bed sound asleep. There was one thing Aunt Petunia still had that Hazel wanted, needed, more desperately than she has ever needed anything else before.

Aunt Petunia's thoughts were proof that Hazel's mother had abilities similar to her own. What exactly was their magic capable of? How much did Aunt Petunia know about the hows and whys? Hazel did not expect her to be a walking encyclopedia of all things magic – the idea that her aunt would go out of her way to learn about something she so clearly hated was laughable – but whatever she knew was more than Hazel did. Even a single hint would give her a direction to start looking.

If the number of odd things that had already happened around Hazel were any hint, she could probably spend her whole life digging into its mysteries. She could not say for sure that she would want to do that forever, but it was far and away the most interesting thing she had come across in her life so far. It was better than learning her multiplication tables and how to use semicolons, that was for sure.

Hazel leaned over her sleeping aunt. She had only done something like this once, when she was trying to figure out why Melissa Grant hated her so much back in year 3. By 'pushing' herself into Melissa's eyes instead of just listening, she had gotten a flurry of sounds and images and a splitting headache and given Melissa another reason to hate her. The entire thing had caught her off-balance, but with Aunt Petunia asleep and plenty of time on her side, she should be able to get a better picture of what was going on.

Peeling one of her aunt's eyes open, she let herself fall into the mind behind it. Tell me about my mum. Tell me about our magic.

Images flew past her, bits and pieces of memory trying to drown her in the past.

…"I don't want you or your freak boyfriend here!" Petunia, dressed up in a fancy white gown, screaming at a woman with long red hair and Hazel's eyes…

…That same woman, now a girl not much older than Hazel herself, leaping off a swing and drifting to the ground…

…A letter with old-fashioned writing on it, addressed to Petunia Evans…

…"Lily, stop it!" Petunia shouted as cups and dishes whirled around a crying teenaged girl…

…A flower in a little girl's hand, opening and closing while she giggled…

…Hazel staring up at her, eyes cold and distrustful…

…Opening the door to get the milk only to find a basket with a black-haired girl inside…

…"Muggles are not allowed"…

…Lily holding a teacup in her hand as it shifted smoothly into a white mouse…

…"It's good you're being separated from normal people"…

…"Your sister and her husband have passed away"…

…Teenaged Petunia shoving Lily away, causing the younger girl to burst into tears…

A loud snort distracted Hazel from the onslaught of memories, and Uncle Vernon rolled onto his side and sat up. He pushed himself out of the bed before taking a couple of steps towards the loo. Hazel held her breath, hoping against hope that he would keep walking and close the door. If he did that, she could slip away and make her escape with him being none the wiser.

He scratched his belly and turned to the side, his sleepy mind filled with thoughts of finding his slippers. Seeing something out of the corner of his eye, he looked over and stared straight at Hazel. All thoughts of sleep or slippers vanished and were replaced by fear that burned into anger.

"Girl!"

Hazel was already moving, her sock-clad feet slapping against the wooden floor. She had to run! Now! She slid through the living room and bounced off the wall, her backpack and the front door only a short distance in front of her and taunting her.

Uncle Vernon ran out of the bedroom, a cricket bat held tight in his hands.

There was no time to stop for her shoes or her coat. She ran down the hall, her backpack jumping into her hand without her having to bend down and pick it up. The front door opened outwards rather than in, a small mercy now, and a moment later she was sprinting down the snowy sidewalk towards Magnolia Crescent.

"You better run, girl! I'm going to bash your head in!" Uncle Vernon had not stopped at the doorstep. He was still after her, and while he was even less of a runner than Dudley, he was taller than her and had longer legs. She dared not look behind her to see whether he was gaining on her or falling behind. She did not have the time to spare. She needed to be away from him, away from here. Somewhere, anywhere, she did not care. As long as it was somewhere safe!

Her entire body was squeezed through a tube, and Hazel Potter vanished from Privet Drive.

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I will not include the majority of the ANs I have for this story over on FFN, but this one I thought important enough to keep around:

I did some research into runaway youth before writing this story. The statistics are downright depressing. For example, did you know Hazel would be just one of the more than 100,000 kids who run away from home in the UK every single year? I won't include many of the major risks runaways face in this story (especially drug use and needing to trade sex for food or shelter), but some of the other things Hazel will experience are similar to those faced by real-world runaways, just with a fantasy bent.

Also, I'll be uploading the chapters I've already posted for this over the next several days, basically a chapter a day until it has caught up to the FFN version.

 

[Silently Watches]

The poorly lit sidewalks of Privet Drive vanished into darkness, and something came out of nowhere to crash into Hazel's chest and drive her to the ground.

It was only as she lay on a surprisingly carpeted floor trying to catch the breath that had been knocked out of her that her eyes adjusted to the lack of light that she realized where her terrified teleportation had taken her. She was back at school, more specifically in the library. That thing that hit her? A table she had run into all on her own.

Why in the world had she come here of all places?

She pushed herself up on her hands and looked around at the bookcases that surrounded her. Maybe it did make a little bit of sense, she decided as she thought over it some more. This was not like the little skip and hop she took to get from her cupboard to the kitchen; it was closer to what happened when she was running away from Dudley and his gang. Once again, she was running away from an angry Dursley, and one again this freakish—

No, she decided as she realized what she was thinking. She was still believing the lies of her aunt and uncle. She was not a freak. She was special. She was a witch, a sorceress, a magician.

Who else could have done something like this?! She had just teleported! It was like having superpowers off the telly.

Hazel climbed to her feet and nodded. She had magic powers, and Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon were scared of her and what she could do. Which was really, really stupid of them. She held no illusions about what they wanted out of life. They wanted to be praised and talked about and envied. If Aunt Petunia had taught Hazel what little she knew about her mother and their shared powers, she could have done all sorts of things for their benefit.

It would serve them right if she came back once she had learned what she was doing and taught them a lesson.

Thinking about that confrontation brought back the recent memory of her uncle chasing her down the street with a cricket bat, and she shuddered. Maybe getting even with the Dursleys was something to put a little farther down on her to-do list.

Anyway, the library. She knew why she showed up here when she was trying to go anywhere to get away from Uncle Vernon. The library had been her safe place more often than not whenever Dudley was after her. The librarian did not approve of ruckus or horseplay, and as long as Hazel was quiet – obviously an uphill battle – when Dudley wanted to start something, it was the boys who would get thrown out and she could be left alone.

Miss Brandine was probably her favorite out of all the staff at school, if only because she was the only one who appreciated Hazel's inability to speak.

She rubbed the lingering ache in her chest and carefully wandered over to where she thought the light switch was. A minute or two of searching finally found it, and she smiled when the library was lit up so she could actually see. That smile faded a moment later.

Yes, she was away from Privet Drive. That just meant she had no clue what to do from here. It was not as if she could stay here at school even if she wanted to. Everyone here ignored her at best, and it was not as if there were any classes here about what to do if someone suddenly learned they had inherited magic powers from the mother their aunt never talked about.

…At least, she did not think there were. Hazel took a moment to imagine that but quickly shook her head. That was silly. The people of this town were too plain, too boring, to be training a coven of witches in secret.

Knowing that she could not stay here did nothing to help her figure out where she did want to go. A yawn caught her by surprise and reinforced the importance of deciding on her next step. She had spent the last week pushing herself every night just to get the one thing she could do working. She needed rest.

She would get neither here, not sleep nor information—

Some place in the back of her mind snapped the pieces together, and her eyes opened wide. Perhaps she should look for both in the same place. She would not find any useful information in the school library, but she might in a real library. Little Whinging did not have a public library, but Greater Whinging did. She had seen in, too, albeit from a distance during a school trip when Aunt Petunia could not come up with a reasonable excuse for why Dudley could go but Hazel could not. Her mother must have learned how to control her magic to be able to do all the things Hazel saw in Aunt Petunia's memories, which meant a book or a teacher existed somewhere. She just had to find it.

Why did Uncle Vernon have to wake up before she could learn anything useful?!

Greater Whinging had another advantage, now that she thought about it. No one would recognize her. Being unknown meant no one would call the Dursleys and tip them off about where she was hiding. Somehow, she did not think they would welcome her back with open arms after this. Uncle Vernon would be more likely to try finishing what he started.

Now that she had a plan, Hazel wracked her brain trying to remember what the library looked like. Teleportation seemed to work better if she knew where she was going. That she appeared in the library when she reached out for somewhere safe was proof enough of that. Try as she might, she could not remember what it looked like, but she thought she remembered where she had been when she saw it on the trip. They had lunch at a small sandwich shop, though it did not serve normal sandwiches. It was something foreign. Cuban, that was right; Uncle Vernon had thrown a fit that the school fed his precious Dudders 'dirty Commie food'.

That place she remembered.

She hitched her backpack higher on her shoulders. Step one, get to the sandwich shop. Step two, find the library. Step three… she would figure out when she finished the other steps. Picturing the restaurant as best she could, she closed her eyes and willed herself to be there.

One eye cracked open to find her still in the school library.

Perhaps it was a good thing she could not speak because the words running through her head right now would have even loving relatives washing her mouth out with soap. This worked three times already! Twice on accident, and again on purpose! Why was it not working now?!

Alright Hazel, she asked herself, pushing her frustration away just as she always had to do back home, what's different this time? There had to be an explanation. It obviously was possible since she had done it. It could be done intentionally, too. She had to be missing something, something fundamental.

The first time, she was trying to escape Dudley.

The second time, she was trying to escape the cupboard.

The third time, she was trying to escape Uncle Vernon.

Hazel blinked. Was that the secret after all? Was what she was doing only for getting away? That seemed astonishingly limited for magic of all things, but she only learned about magic a week ago in the first place. There were bound to be rules she knew nothing about. I'm not going to the restaurant. I'm just trying to get away from this place, and the restaurant is the most convenient place to go.

Still nothing.

She gave a nearby chair an angry kick and hopped on her other foot when the chair hit back. No shoes, right. She fell into a different chair, one that thankfully did not attack her, and rubbed her stubbed toes. If escaping was not the trick, what was?

The message of her aching toes slowed to a stop. This was not the first time she got angry tonight. She had been angry at her lack of success, and that was when she actually succeeded. When she was running away, she was scared, terrified in the case of Uncle Vernon. And now that her thoughts were running in this direction, she looked back at all the other times she had used her magic, even if only by accident. Every single time, she was angry or scared. Not when she was happy, the few times she had truly been happy. Not when she sat in her cupboard crying.

Anger. Fear. Those were the only common factors. Was that the fuel her magic needed?

It was not difficult to feel angry, nor after everything that happened this night. Being lied to. Being chased down. Being stuck in her school because her magic would not cooperate. She had every right to be angry! All she want was to go to a stupid sandwich shop! Was that really so hard?!

She jumped up in the air—

—and her feet landed in snow.

Her breath blew out in a thick cloud while she looked down an unfamiliar street, and she turned her head to the right to find the front of a little eatery squeezed between two bigger stores. She jumped again, but this time in joy. She had done it! She was one step closer to mastery over teleportation and her magic in general.

Hazel hoped as she got more experience, she would be able to do stuff like this without needing to be mad. She only imagine what kind of person she would become if she had to be angry all the time. If Aunt Petunia's memories were any indication, though, her mother appeared to be able to control her own powers without it, so more likely it was just a matter of practice.

An ice-cold wind swept through the street and drove knives into her skin. Dudley's castoffs and the few cheap skirts Aunt Petunia had reluctantly purchased for her were too old and worn thin to provide effective protection against the winter's chill. It would be pitiful for her to escape her relatives' wrath only to freeze to death on the way to safety. Instead she wrapped her arms tight around her thin body to try to hold in what warmth she could and started trekking through the snowy sidewalks. She thought the library was this way, but with all the snow in the air that had been kicked up by the wind, she could not say for sure. She would have to hope she got lucky.

Her own thought startled a scoff out of her. Luck. Right. Because she was just the epitome of a lucky girl.

The wind pushed her off the sidewalk more than once as she stumbled her way down the street on feet that had long ago gone numb, but eventually a white building came into view through the storm of white that was nearly blinding her. Several steps later, the words Greater Whinging Public Library could be seen carved into the wall above the pillars. And beyond those pillars lay doors that would be her salvation.

Hazel slipped as she walked up the steps and scrambled the rest of the way on all fours. Inside of the library lay only darkness, but she would take it so long as it was warm. Her hand wrapped clumsily around the handle, but no matter how hard she tugged, the door refused to budge. It was locked tight.

Tears of frustration gathered in her eyes. This wasn't fair! Not when she had come this far. Was it too much to ask for to be allowed to live after running away from the only home she knew? Could she not get even that little bit of mercy?

It was only because she was pressing her head against the door that she heard the soft click. Trying the handle again, the door moved easily.

She squeezed through the door and closed it quickly behind her, breathing out a sigh of relief. Oh warmth, how I love you. Looking up from the ground, she smiled when she saw the stacks stuffed with books of all sorts. This place was so much bigger than she had imagined. It was surely far from the largest library in the country, of that she had no doubt, but it was large enough for her to start her search. Exactly what she would look for was a decision for after sleeping.

Climbing the stairs to the top floor, she found a room with several desks pushed against the walls. One lesson she had learned at Privet Drive would likely remain useful for a long time to come: as long as she stayed out of the way, people would be less likely to actively search for her. She pushed her backpack into a corner under one of the desks and climbed in after it.

Sleep claimed her almost before she closed her eyes.

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Opening her eyes was nearly painful, but slowly Hazel managed it and looked around herself. The room she had chosen as her temporary resting place was all but empty, and the one man who was in the room had headphones covering his ears as he stared into a machine sitting on the desk that she had not noticed during her wandering. With sight and hearing both occupied, it was no challenge to leave him to his research into… fashion trends of the 1930s?

Hazel stared at him for a long time before shaking her head. Grown-ups were weird.

This time she really did leave him alone, moving on for her actual goal. The question still lingering in her mind was where she would find any information about magic. It was clearly something rare, otherwise she would have heard of it before now. Any stories that talked about it were make-believe if her teachers were to be trusted. So where would she find hints about how to control her powers and use them at will?

A sliver of worry wormed itself into her heart. Maybe the reason it was considered nothing but a flight of fancy was because it was so rare that there were no books or lessons to be found. Maybe her mother had nothing but her own guesses to guide her, and now what lessons she had learned were lost forever.

She shook her head. This was not the time for despair and doubt. There was something, somewhere, to help her. She was sure of that much.

Outside the room where she had slept, the main room of the library was open in the middle from the ground floor all the way to the third, giving the building a bright and open feeling. Coming off the circular walkways on the higher floors like the one where she stood now were a number of rooms full of more books. It was certainly a better place to start looking for magic lessons than anywhere in Little Whinging. She just hoped it would be enough.

Unfortunately she had no clue where in this building she needed to start looking, but another look downwards gave her a guide. Specifically, the card catalog was in the middle of the circular ground floor. Surely there would be a listing for magic in there. Right?

It was only when she started down the stairs that she realized there might be a small problem.

"Why isn't she wearing any shoes?"

"Look at her clothes. Did she dig them out of a skip or something?"

"Who let someone like that in here? I didn't give them a donation so they could let her kind in here."

She shot the man who made that last thought an ugly look. What did he mean, 'her kind'? Was he talking about her clothing? It was not her fault this was all she had from the Dursleys. She would wear better clothes if she had them!

Forcing his nastiness out her her own head, she meandered over to the card catalog and pulled open the drawer labeled 'M'. It was time to find some answers.

"What are you doing here? Probably plans to pick people's pockets or something." Hazel looked up to find a librarian staring down at her, her eyes holding none of the faint warmth that Miss Brandine's had. They instead flickered to each article of her clothing in an increasing wordless disgust. Then those judging eyes reached her feet and lit up with satisfaction. "There's a reason I can get rid of her. You can't be in here without shoes, girl. Get out."

She looked around quickly, searching for a piece of paper or anything else she could write on. She did not know what kind of lie she would tell, especially not when this woman was already set on kicking her out, but anything would be better than silence.

"I said out!" The librarian grabbed a long ruler, and knowing from the direction of the woman's thoughts that her choices were to leave without being hit or to be driven out after getting hit, Hazel took the less bad option and started walking backwards towards the door. That walk became a run when the angry librarian chased after her. The door slammed shut behind her, and she looked back to find the woman shaking the ruler at her. "And she better stay out. Tramps like her can find somewhere else to stay warm. Libraries are for decent folk."

Decent folk, ha! Hazel glared at her through the glass door before shivering. 'Decent' people did not throw other people out of buildings to stand around in nothing but socks in the snow. Again. Not that the librarian cared, if the warning look she gave Hazel before returning to the front desk was any indication.

Another shiver swept through her body. Of course, any extra clothes she could put on to stay warm were all safe and sound in her backpack inside the library, as was her food and what little money she had. Even if she did not still need to look for books about magic, she would need to sneak back inside for all her stuff.

It looked like she would have to stay on a schedule where she lived by the moon rather than the sun.

The cold was still a problem, and Hazel hopped from one foot to another before striking off down the little alleyway between the library and whatever building was next to it. She needed to find somewhere to keep from freezing while she was waiting for night to fall and the library to close to everyone except her. Somewhere that was warm, close to the building, and would not throw her out for wearing her Dursley clothes. Somehow, she had a feeling the last would be the sticking point.

A glance upwards at the fire escape on the side of the other building caused her to see a puff of white smoke wafting through the sky. It looked like it was coming from the library, but there was no reason it should be smoking like that. She hoped it was not on fire, but nobody was running out the front doors, so that was not it—

She slapped her hand over her face in exasperation with herself. That was not smoke. It was steam! The library was a big building, so like her school it probably had a boiler room or something to heat it. And steam was nice and hot. The roof was not the best place to wait out the day, but it was better than freezing to death here on the street. She just needed to get up there. Fortunately, she had exactly the skill needed to do that.

It took little effort to get mad at the librarian again. She was mad, and she wanted to be up there. Hazel jumped up, but a moment later she hit the damp ground again, no higher than she had been before.

This was certainly not helping her temper, but this time it was directed as much at herself as it was anything else. The inconsistency in all this was really getting on her nerves.

She leaned against the brick wall and tried to walk through what had gone wrong this time. She had it working just fine last night, when she got angry at being in the library. She was clearly still missing something.

Anger, check. Knowing where I want to go, check. Or check-ish? She looked up at the roof again. Maybe it was because she did not know where it looked like? That had not interfered with her teleporting when running away from Dudley, but it seemed to apply the other times. So it could just be a limitation in that she had to know where she was going.

The other possibility was that maybe the anger had to be more directed, and that one struck her as more true. She could not explain why, even to herself, but it just felt right. Her emotions had been aligned the previous times with moving from one place to another, not just anger at anything at all.

I'm not just angry at her for kicking me out. I'm angry because not only did she kick me out, she did it where I'm going to have to cuddle up to a steam vent just to stay warm. Where I'm going to have to wait until night falls just so I can get back to my stuff. Focusing on this directed anger and the desire to be up there instead of where she was, she hopped once and felt the world try to crush her in response. When it failed to do that, she opened her eyes to find that she had appeared on the top level of the fire escape just where she was aiming. That had been almost easy.

Could she do it again? Twice in a row?

Focusing on the rooftop and all the metal ductwork she could see, including the short pipe where the steam was pouring out, she ignored the fact that she was thirty or so feet above the ground and all it would take was one bad hop for her to tumble over the rail and crack her head open like an egg on the tarmac. All she cared about was the rooftop. She fed more anger at her situation into her magic, then she jumped again.

A blast of steam nearly burned her face off, and she staggered backwards to get away from too much heat before she jumped into the air and threw both her hands over her head. She did it! She was starting to get the hang of this whole magic thing!

Even better, at least for her immediate needs, the roof was relatively dry, and there was a section of air vents that was lifted up to provide a small crawlspace. An adult would not be able to fit in it, but for a girl as short and thin as she was, it was actually rather comfortable. Steam coming out from several feet away wafted around her, reaching a nice comfortable middle ground rather than freezing or boiling. It was pleasant enough that she found her eyes drifting closed even with three cars backfiring in quick succession nearby.

She had intended to be up at night and sleep during the day. Might as well start now.

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A chill dragged Hazel back from the land of dreams, and she poked her head out from under the ductwork to find that the last rays of the sun were vanishing below the horizon and the street lights were already lit. She wiggled out from under the ducts and stretched with a wide-mouthed yawn. She must have been a lot more tired that she had thought if she was able to sleep the entire day away on a roof.

That was then, though. Now she was awake, and it looked like all the people previously in the library were leaving for their own homes. Probably they have a nice warm dinner waiting for them, she added when her stomach chimed in with how much it would like a big dinner right about now. She gave it a pat. It would be fed soon enough, just as soon as nobody else was in the building and she could let herself inside. There was a peanut butter sandwich and a tin of Spam calling her name.

A glance around reminded her of the major issue with her current situation. Namely that she had to get back to the ground. She tried to make herself mad at the librarian again, but despite her attempts all she could manage was a general sense of irritation. There were no flames of anger scorching the back of her eyes. Part of it, she knew, was that she did not want to be angry. All she wanted was to get to her food.

Worry started crawling around in her belly, and she walked over to the edge of the room and looked down. That was a long drop, but what if she could not get down on her own? Her magic got her up here when she should not be able to do so, but that also meant no one would come up to help her down. That assumed she could even get their attention, since it was not as if she could simply yell for help.

Her feet scuffed the edge of the roof just as a gust of wind pushed against her. She hopped backwards away from the edge before she could fall—

—and a moment later had to gasp for air when she reappeared in the alleyway. Her head whipped up to stare at the roof she had just been trapped on before that burst of teleportation caught her off guard. She shook her head. Helpful, but she would rather this magic she was exploring be difficult than unpredictable.

Getting back into the library when the library was locked tight was a little more difficult, but this time her frustration caused the doors to unlock themselves just as they had the night before. Hazel gave the doors a considering look as she turned the knob to lock the door again. That was a useful trick. There were many a day at Privet Drive she would have appreciated being able to do just that to let herself out of the cupboard.

She had no intention of turning on every light in the building, but a torch would be just as useful. In a building this size, they had to have one somewhere. A quick search of the drawers in the front desk, and then she flicked the light on and shined it at the card catalog.

Another rumble from her stomach reminded her of her priorities. Right. Food, then magic.

 

[Silently Watches]

The sun had long since set when the head librarian slid the last book into its proper shelf. Whistling to herself at a job well done and thoughts filled with images of the meal her husband said he would prepare tonight, she flipped the lights off and walked out the back door so she could lock the library up for the night. Confident that all would be as she left it when she came back first thing in the morning.

Hazel waited five minutes after all noise in the library had stopped and she could no longer hear the librarian's thoughts before she poked her head out of the boiler room.

Once she was satisfied no one was around, she crept the rest of the way out. The borrowed torch was in one hand, and she quickly clicked it on to light up the dark stacks. In her other hand, she held a tin of Spam and a plastic spoon she had found in one of the back rooms of the library. It was probably the librarians' lunch room if the microwave and coffeepot were anything to judge by. Hopping up onto the top of a nearby table, she sat with her legs crossed beneath her and peeled open the tin.

Her eyes roamed over the bookshelves in front of her while a faint frown settled on her face. It was probably getting close to time for her to move on. Partly because she had been living in this library for the better part of a week, which meant she was running out of the food she had taken from Privet Drive. Partly because what she had found so far was… less than helpful.

She started her search in the obvious place: the nonfiction section. Hazel had not expected to find anything there, and she had not been disappointed. No books about how to access hidden magical talents. No history books talking about witches as though they were real. Magic truly was something that had been lost and forgotten.

Lost, not imaginary. She had found one section in the nonfiction section that provided some support for her assumptions: the folklore section. Celtic fairy tales, stories by the Brothers Grimm, even tales from the Americas or Africa. Folk tales were full of fantastical creatures and spellcasters, but in modern times they vanished. The books said it was because magic was just an explanation ancient cultures used to explain what they did not understand, and thanks to science the theory of magic was no longer needed and could be safely abandoned.

Hazel had a different conclusion. She knew magic was real; that she teleported to this library was proof enough of that. If magic used to be common knowledge and later was forgotten, that meant something had happened. Maybe a war between witches and normal people that the former lost. Maybe a disease that wiped out most of the families capable of magic. Maybe whatever power flowed through her and her mother's veins had been diluted or weakened and needed centuries upon centuries to return.

No matter the explanation, her worries seemed to be confirmed. Her mother probably had to explore the limits of their ability all on her own, which meant Hazel would, too. A thought passed through her head, and she mulled over it for a moment. If she had inherited her magic from her mother, and her mother had presumably gotten it from one of her and Aunt Petunia's parents, why had that parent not taught what they knew to her mother? Why would Aunt Petunia consider it so unnatural if she grew up with it?

She shrugged, putting the question out of the front of her mind and into the mental box that contained all the other questions she had that she knew would never be answered. Maybe if she could figure out how to summon her mother's ghost – because that was something that showed up way too often in folklore not to be true – she could ask, but otherwise there was nothing more she could do about it.

The problem with trying to emulate magical beings in folklore was that none of them were the kind of people she wanted to be. Most of the witches the stories were about talked about them cursing people or brewing up poisons or doing something else horrible. They were the cause of everything bad that happened, and when they were killed life for everybody else went back to normal. That seemed to be the moral behind them all: kill the witch as quick as possible, or else things would go from bad to worse.

Not that human witches were the most dangerous things in folk tales. That would be ignoring the vampires and evil spirits and massive beasts that grand heroes had to do battle with. And the less said about the absolutely terrifying fairies in Ireland, the better. She had quickly resolved never to go there, even if the Troubles did calm down.

Once she had decided that the vast majority of the nonfiction section was worthless to her, she moved her attention to fiction. Hazel smiled at that thought. Normally anybody looking for advice in fantasy books would rightfully be laughed at, but what she as looking for there was different. She was not looking for hints on the 'hows' of magic. It was obvious she would have to come up with that on her own. She wanted ideas for the 'whats'.

If she was stuck experimenting to learn anything useful about magic, she might as well have ideas to work with. She could and would come up with her own, but there was no reason not to start with a list ready-made.

She would have been even happier with that plan if fiction had been more help, but sadly it was not. In order to get as many ideas as she could, she had been skimming more than sitting down and really reading, so it was possible she had missed something, but from what she saw witches and wizards generally fell into the same categories as they did in folklore. Either they were the villains who had to be defeated before they could destroy the world, or they were the old men and women who gave a trinket to the sword-swinging hero that would help him on his quest. No mention of how they did what they did, and the few times wizards did go on adventures, they always vanished halfway through only to pop up again at the end of the book.

Maybe it was because so many wizards in stories were based off the wizards in fairy tales? That would explain the consistency.

Licking the tin and the spoon clean, she tossed the can in the air a few times as she pondered her situation. There had to be a reason the folk tales focused on the items, and she did not think it was a lack of imagination. Could it be that the toys themselves were the real power at hand? She would be the first to admit that she knew almost nothing about magic. She could teleport, and with effort she could lock and unlock doors, but that was it. Could the reason so many magicians had magic items on hand be that there was only so much she could do with her willpower alone, so witches of yore would make these things to do more than they could by themselves?

It would explain why the stories always showed the wizard having the right tool for the job. They were already using those tools in their own lives, so when the boy hero of destiny came to them for help defeating whatever evil was threatening the land, their own trinkets were the only help they could realistically give. Thinking it through a second time, she nodded. That made far more sense than wizards being terrible packrats who just collected a bunch of junk.

It also meant she was stuck in a bad spot. She hated arts and crafts. She had never shown any natural talent for the arts, and she had heard that same opinion for too many years from too many teachers whenever they were given some artsy project for homework. Unlike the other kids in her class, she had no parent who would help her or do the entire thing for her like Theresa's mom always did. Aunt Petunia would not deign to do that, and Dudley had taken so much pleasure out of ruining the first project she was ever assigned that from then on she had to work on her homework late at night when the other Dursleys were asleep. Working on drawings with glue and glitter in almost complete darkness was not conducive to marvelous works of art.

Hazel shook her head and put those concerns to the side. If she had to make stuff to use her magic the most effectively, she would deal with it later. Right now she still had things she wanted to try out. Setting the empty tin onto the table, she returned briefly to the boiler room. When she came out her hands were empty of the spoon but now held three paperback novels.

Of all the books in the library, these were the ones that were the most interesting. While most of the books she had found depicted wizards as allies and sidekicks, these had wizards as the main characters, albeit in space and dealing with aliens and laser guns. Because the wizards were the most important people, the books actually went into a little bit of detail about how they supposedly used their spells. The space wizards seemed relatively limited in her opinion – none of them could teleport, for instance, and while they could sense emotions to some degree they could not hear thoughts like she could – they did have a couple of tricks that looked useful. Clouding people's minds was a skill she could see applying to way too many problems.

But that was something to play with later. Tonight, she had two other things she wanted to try.

She closed her eyes and took a big breath, then let it out. One of the key features of the space wizards' magic was that they did not run it off their emotions. They actually claimed that using anger and fear was the road that led other magic users to become evil villains like in the other stories. Instead they were all about peace and calm, using something called meditation to 'calm their minds'.

A dictionary, an encyclopedia, and then a couple of random self-help books had told her what meditation actually was, and from there she had her next test. She could all too easily remember how many times she failed at her teleporting because she was not angry at the right thing. If she could be calm but still be in the right frame of mind to use her magic, that would make everything that much easier. Getting a spell right one time out of three or four was not a sign of a talented magician!

More deep breaths came and went, and with each one she tried not to think about anything at all. It was far from simple, but the self-help books had all said that she did not need to have a completely blank mind. She just needed not to dwell on any of her thoughts. If they poked in, she let them flit away again and focused on the calm feeling she wanted.

This was the second night she had attempted this method. The night prior, she had not quite gotten it down by the time the sun was cresting the horizon, but she felt like she was close. Now it was a new night, and she wanted to get this right!

Three times she had to hop off the table to go to the lavatory or drink a glass of water, and another time she made herself a peanut butter sandwich, but late in the night she could feel her mind relax. It was almost like she was drifting off into sleep, but she knew she was still fully awake. Instead nothing could bother her. Not here.

Opening her eyes, she looked at the tin that was still sitting on the table. Move, she ordered.

The tin just sat there.

A moment of frustration threatened to bubble up, but in this calm place it was easy to prick it and let it disperse into nothing. Go away. Back up. Up?

Still the can did nothing, and she tilted her head and looked for a different way to get what she wanted. When she teleported, she had to think about where she wanted to go and how much she wanted to be there. The few times she had tried locking and unlocking a door, she imagined a key turning in the keyhole. The second option, the key, felt right to her. Maybe she could imagine something lifting the tin instead of the tin just floating up into the air all by itself.

That thought triggered another, and she hopped off the table to go back to one of the bookcases. In her search for answers, she had found a book that did not tell a story but instead was a rulebook for some complicated board game. It talked about different characters the players could be, and some of them had magic spells, including a spell to move things. Sure enough, as soon as she flipped to the pages about the wizard character, she saw the description for a hand that would move around and touch things.

That might just work.

Back to the table she went, and she closed her eyes and focused. This time she was not thinking about nothing. One of the same books that taught meditation mentioned being mindful about the movements of her body. To create a magic hand, she needed to know how her own hand felt.

She had no way of knowing how long she sat there, curling her fingers first one by one, then two in tandem, then three. Closing her fist before opening it up again. The skin on her palm and the back of her hand stretching and curling as the bones and muscles she imagined she could feel shifted with every movement. Her fingers wiggled, sending a rippling sensation from the pinky side of her palm to the thumb side.

Hazel's eyes opened, and she closed her hand one finger at a time before opening them all at once and imagining what she wanted.

A single pinprick of light appeared above the can, and it unfurled like a flower in the spring. A flower that glowed a pale blue and had only five petals, four on one side and the last off at an angle. The petals thickened and became round, and then the new fingers relaxed.

She clicked the torch off, but the light from the ghostly hand shed no light onto the stacks. It just sat there, the only thing in her sight until she turned the torch back on with a nod of acknowledgement. It was not there for real. It was a picture in her mind, just like the key that would unlock doors. That would be fine so long as it did what she needed it for.

She crooked her index finger in an almost 'come here' gesture, and the index finger on the ghost hand did the same. A small smile came to her. That made things easier. The hand moved with her own, dropping faster than her fleshy hand, until it was only a couple of centimeters above the can. Her fingers closed as if she was holding something, her hand lifted back up...

...and the ghost hand rose up with the can firmly in its grasp.

Another gesture, and the ghost hand tossed the tin into the air and caught it as it came back down. Dropping the can so she could take it to the rubbish bin, she let the hand in her mind disappear in a puff of shimmering smoke and her smile grew into a grin and a silent laugh bubbled up in her chest. So what if she had to use a workaround? She could now move things with her mind!

That was enough success for tonight. She had found a few books she wanted to read for fun, and she was going to do that until she went to bed. Tomorrow she could start with the last thing she needed to say goodbye to Greater Whinging.

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Her sleep that night was deeper than she had intended, and when her eyes finally opened she cracked the boiler door open to take a look out she could see that it was late in the afternoon, though there were still plenty of people in the library. Unlike every day prior, this time she actually wanted to have people around. There was no way to know if what she was about to do would work if no people were around to try it out on.

She knew her clothes were not pretty or nice, and especially not when she needed to wash them in the sink because she only brought a few sets. If she wanted to visit other libraries, she would need some spell that would keep anybody from paying attention to her and throwing her out like the librarian here had the first day she arrived. That way she could go in and out and do whatever she liked, and no one would care!

Hazel scoffed to herself as that thought fully sank in. Back in Little Whinging, she had been ignored whether she wanted to be or not, and now she had to make people leave her alone. That was just typical of her luck.

Oh well. It was what it was. If nothing else, she had plenty of experience being ignored.

More than a little thought had been put into this idea, and the success in creating a magic hand the previous night had bolstered her confidence. She could do this. She closed the door and then her eyes. Her breathing slowed, and with not effort but intent she pushed her anticipation away. She had to get this right. She was going to get this right.

Once she found her mind in that same calm state as she had before, she slowly and carefully called up memories of when she was ignored. One by one she looked at them, ignoring the frustration and anger and sadness that came with being overlooked and instead focusing on that nebulous feeling of being completely alone despite all the people who were around her. Like being in her own little world, she passed through crowds without eyes doing more than flick towards her for a moment before moving on.

Her chest hurt from the feeling of being so bloody isolated and alone, and tears stung her eyes. Opening them up, she released all those feelings with a great exhale and a tiny silent sob.

What emerged from her lips was not air. A cloud of smoke came out, and she watched it wrap around her like a blanket that tried and failed to offer the slightest bit of comfort. She reached out a finger to try stroking it nonetheless, and just like she had the crowd, her finger slipped through the smoke without the faintest hint of resistance.

She dashed the tears from her face and shook her head. It was a picture in her mind, like the hand she made, and that was all it could ever be. Right now, it was time she got a move on. Slinging her backpack over her shoulders, she opened the boiler room door and stepped out to walk around other people for the first time in a week.

When the first person, a harried-looking woman trying to corral a trio of little kids, looked her way, Hazel could almost feel her heart skip a couple of beats in sudden worry. Her flash of fear settled back down when the woman's eyes skipped over her and she went back to the kids. A grin appeared on her lips as she walked away from the family. Here she was, wearing ratty old clothes and dirty socks, but despite all that the woman did not see anything wrong with her at all.

She was the most uninteresting thing anyone had ever seen, and she was going to take advantage of that for everything it was worth!

Hazel all but skipped the rest of the way to the front door, and a glance behind her showed that the same librarian who had chased her outside the first day she was here was once more sitting at the desk. The older woman could not see her, but Hazel nonetheless stuck out her tongue and waggled her hands on either side of her head.

Her good mood carried her as far as the door, but as soon as she opened it a gust of wind hit her and drove her back inside with a shiver. The snow on the ground had mostly melted, but it felt like it was colder now than it had been on the night she arrived! She looked down at her clothing with a mental groan. There was no way this would do her any good whatsoever to protect her from the winter winds. If it was this cold already, she could only imagine how much worse it would be tonight.

But I can't exactly stay here, either, she thought, hiking her backpack up again and feeling the lack of weight. I don't have a whole lot left in the way of food, so I need to get some of that, too.

Guess I'm headed for the Tesco.

Bracing herself this time, she opened the door and pushed herself into the terrible winds. She eventually found the main street, and from there it was relatively easy to find the familiar blue and red logo of the supermarket. This would be her one-stop shopping destination. It would have everything she needed, and more importantly she was already here and could get out of the cold.

Her concentration on her 'ignore me' spell broke on the way to the store, and when she got there she ducked around the back and huddled up beside a dumpster so she would have protection from the wind if nothing else. Out here in the cold, it was far harder to try to fall into meditation, but her desperation appeared to worked just as well as anger or fear. A stream of smoke came from her lips and wrapped around her, at least, and that was all that really mattered.

Freshly ignorable, she hurried into the store and sighed in relief at the warmth within. Clothes first, she decided. The food she could get after.

Nobody else was visible in the clothing section, but she still moved quickly to grab several pairs of jeans in a couple of sizes, just as many shirts, and a new jumper. The shoe racks were between her and the changing room, so that was a quick stop to grab a pair of trainers as well. Dashing into the changing rooms, she shut the door, locked it, and slumped against the wall. Even knowing she was effectively invisible, there was still an element of panic. She had not felt it when she was in the library, probably because she was already leaving, but getting thrown out of the store before she had everything she came here for would be a disaster.

A bit of trial and error was all it took to figure out which size of clothing she really fit into, even if the fact that the clothes were still loose on her was a bit disappointing. She knew she was smaller than everyone else in her class and that all Dudley's clothes were several sizes too big, but she did not think it was this bad. Now clad in her new outfit and looking like a real girl, she pulled the tags off the clothes and took a look at the prices listed with sinking feeling in her stomach.

She pulled out her notebook to run the sums, then she pulled out the wad of notes she had taken from Aunt Petunia's purse and counted them out. Even if she stuck only to a single outfit plus the trainers, she did not have enough, and that was not counting the coat and gloves she would need as well. Nor the food, which she absolutely could not do without.

Now she wished she had grabbed more money before she left. Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon owed her warm clothes that actually fit, at the very least, not that they would have ever spent that money on her.

The thought had been one that came from a fit of pique, but the more she thought about it the more it made sense. How they treated her her entire life was the reason she had to run away in the first place. If they had been willing to give her even a fraction of the love and care they showered on Dudley, she would have been perfectly happy staying with them.

They didn't want to spend money on me? She tore a sheet of paper out of her book and angrily scribbled out a note for whoever found the pile of clothes she was leaving behind. Fine. They can make up for it now.

Please contact Vernon Dursley for payment for the clothes.
His address is Number 4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey.​

Looking at the note again, she added the phone number for the house, and a moment later added, "And the food I'm taking, too." That should cover everything she needed.

Her aunt and uncle would be furious when they heard about this, but right now she did not care. They did not want her in their home? Fine.

The least they could do was cover her expenses now that she was out of their lives forever.

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Far to the north, in a place Hazel never could have imagined, stood a squat castle that had been a school of magic for near a thousand years. It was a place of wonder and danger, of beauty and dark deeds. The room at the peak of one of the shorter towers of this castle was the location of the office of the headmaster for this school, a room with squishy furniture, portraits that moved of their own accord in their gilded frames, and a wide number of knickknacks that served functions entirely mysterious to anyone except the headmaster himself.

Right now, in that room, one of those gadgets came to life for the first time in eight years. It spun like a top upon its shelf and let out a shrill whistle loud enough to wake the dead from their graves.

The previous headmasters in their frames slapped hands over their ears and screamed at each other as if one of them was responsible for the ear-rending sound. The current headmaster, the one who had set this device to monitor the status of a very specific ward and alert him if anything happened to it, would have been eager to know that his alarm was going off. Unfortunately for him, he was currently off on the Continent in the middle of a meeting of the International Confederation of Wizards, just one of the many roles he bore. For two days he had been gone, and he was not to return for another five. His phoenix, having just undergone a burning day, was sitting in his pocket in the form of a chick.

For a solid minute the device shrieked and squealed, until finally it went quiet once again. The portraits slowly uncovered their ears and sighed at the return of blessed silence, and they went back to whatever they had been doing before the onset of the noise. Sleeping, for the most part.

Portraits, it must be said, did not have the best recollection. They could remember what they knew when the memories used in their creation were added to the paint, and if bound to a specific task, they could recall what was needed to complete it. Otherwise, the goings-on of the living humans around them tended to stick in their minds for only a few hours at a time before being lost. When the headmaster of this school returned, none of the portraits would recall the alarm going off at all.

How unfortunate.

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Hazel set the note down next to her clothes, and as she did she could almost feel her heart becoming lighter in her chest. It felt good, in some way, to make this break with the Dursleys. They did not want her back, and she had no intention of ever seeing them again. She was free.

Free was not the same as prepared, of course, and she popped out of the dressing room to grab a thick puffy pink coat, gloves, scarf, and several changes of socks and underwear. The tags and bags for all of these were added to all the other things she was leaving behind, and she wrapped herself in the smoke that made her unnoticeable. Her next stop was the food section; despite the three changes of clothes in her bag, she still had plenty of room for more cans and loaves of sliced bread. Batteries were next, to provide electricity to the torch she was borrowing long-term from the library.

With that, she strolled out the door of the store with no one the wiser.

The wind was still freezing cold, but bundled up as she was she could barely feel it. Instead she struck out towards the setting sun until she found a set of railroad tracks and shifted course, following the iron road as she pulled a map from her backpack. Once unfolded it revealed several dots marked on it in blue ink, the nearest of which was just two counties over.

Her time spent in the library had not been solely for skimming through fantasy books, and despite what she had found she could not entirely give up on the idea of finding some kind of teacher to help her discover everything she could do. A quick search through a few travel guides had given her a list of several sites that were supposed to be magical in some way or another. If anybody was left who could teach her, these would be the best places to look.

First on her list was of course the most classic site, one she was sure was known the world over.

It was time to visit Stonehenge.

 

[Silently Watches]

The sun had set below the horizon in front of Hazel several hours ago, yet still she walked through the deep darkness. Using the railway as her road was turning out to be a double-edged sword in ways she had not expected when she first picked it. Her initial thought had been that it was a fairly direct path to get where she wanted to go, and unlike the streets there would be no one driving along who might stop to find out where a nine-year-old was going and why she was traveling in the middle of the night.

Those advantages were still present, but unlike the smooth surface of a road, it was rough and unsteady as gravel switched to wooden ties and back to gravel. She was never sure which one her feet would hit next, providing a constant urge to keep the beam from her torch fixed firmly at her feet.

Something rustled in the dark to her side, and the torch's beam flew towards it only to reveal nothing at all.

As her heart rate slowed down just a little she took a deep breath and resumed walking. That was the reason she could not just watch the tracks. The night along the railroad was not silent the way it was back in Little Whinging. Back with the Dursleys, once the neighborhood went to bed everything was quiet. Here and now there were always rustlings or an owl's hoot or what she hoped was just the wind creating an eerie whistle. Sounds that distracted her and demanded the attention of her light.

The wind for sure this time blew again, funneled through the opening along the course of the railway and sending icy knives into her. Between her puffy coat, her gloves, and her scarf, everything between her nose and her waist was warm, but it did little for her legs and absolutely nothing for the top half of her head. Should have grabbed a cap too, she thought as a shiver worked its way through her thin body. Stopping in the middle of the tracks, she stomped her feet for almost a minute to get some warmth moving around instead.

Hazel would be lying if she told herself that she was not considering turning around and walking back to Greater Whinging. Not because she planned to stay there long term, but because she had nothing with which to try warming herself up. She had no lighter nor matches to start a fire, and certainly no heater to blow warm air onto herself. Closing her eyes, she made yet another go at trying to imagine a fire springing up. Nothing happened, and she had the same results once more when she pictured a nice hearth.

Mental keys and hands she could manifest with no problem. The creation of fire, on the other hand, was eluding her no matter how hard she tried.

How could I have forgotten something to start a fire?, she chided herself, though she knew the truth behind the answer. She was used to having somewhere warm and dry to spend the night, whether that was Privet Drive or the library. Never in her life had she ever spent the night outdoors. Of course she could not know everything she would need right from the start.

Unfortunately, this left her with two equally unpleasant options. First, to keep walking through the dark, doing her best to keep warm, and hope that by the time she was ready to fall asleep she found someplace that had a lighter. Second, to 'jump' back to the Tesco, break in, and look for matches. It was dark enough out here that she could not guarantee she would be able to return to where she was, which meant she would have to give up the hours of progress she had made and restart her trek from the very beginning.

The idea of turning back was enough to spur her forwards. She could not turn around, not now. If she did, there was no telling where she would stop, and all that waited for her at the end of that road was Privet Drive.

The beam from her torch flickered.

Hazel's eyes grew wide, and she struggled to take her backpack off. The torch had looked like it was growing weaker for the last couple of days, so this was not unexpected, but could it not have chosen a better time to fail on her?! Finally off her shoulders, the bag dropped to the ground.

And the light went out.

Come on, Hazel begged as she turned the torch off and tried to turn it back on again. Anything to eke even a few more seconds of light out of it. No matter how many times she slid the switch, though, it remained stubbornly dead. Come on!

Something creaked in the woods, invisible in the inky blackness, and Hazel's heart raced as she crouched next to her backpack and set the torch down by her feet. She had put batteries in the bag when she was shopping, but like an idiot she put them with the cans and clothes and everything else in the main pocket! Her hands shook when she finally found the zipper, and she reached into the backpack. Can, can, jeans maybe, something sharp that was probably the can opener— Where were they?!

Her desperately searching fingers finally touched slick plastic at the very bottom of the bag, and she pulled out the pack of thick batteries she picked up specifically for her torch. Grabbing both sides of the shell, she pulled and tugged with little hope for success. She had seen Uncle Vernon struggle with these all the time until Aunt Petunia convinced him to use a pair of scissors, and she knew she would not have any more success with her skinny twig arms. Giving it up as a bad job, she instead put her hands on the ground and walked them around until her fingertips found the edge of a pointed stone that felt thin enough to poke a hole in the plastic.

A shuffle of feet to the side made her jump, and she grabbed the stone and pushed the point of the stone into the plastic until it broke through. Two, three, four more times she did this until finally she could wiggle her fingers into the shell and violently ripped it apart.

Something, no doubt the batteries she needed so desperately, clattered onto the ground.

Hazel's heart leapt into her throat, and she threw the rock to the side so she could feel along the ground again. One hand found something far too smooth to be plain stone, and then the other hand found another. She needed a third hand to pick the torch back up, so instead of putting the batteries back down she shoved them into the pockets of her jacket. The torch was right where she left it, and she hastily unscrewed the head and swung the body of the torch to the side where the sound had come from.

Even if she expected them, the cracks of the batteries hitting the ground made her jump. There was no telling what was out there, what animal lurked in the shadows that thought she would make a tasty midnight snack! Her torch was now open for her, and she grabbed the first battery. Have to get this right. Have to get this right. Where's the bump, where's… There! Bump on the top, in the torch, and the next one. Not this end. Other end, found it. And in! Both batteries inside the plastic case, she screwed the head back into place and flicked the switch. Bright light shot out of the light bulb, and she swung the beam in the direction where she heard all the noise.

Her light found nothing. Nothing whatsoever.

Her panting breaths were clearly visible in the now bright air, and she hugged herself and took several slow, deep breaths in the hopes that it would force her heart to stop pounding quite so hard. It was fine. She was fine. There was nothing out there in the woods that wanted to eat her. The creaking and rustling she had heard was probably just the wind or some tiny animal like a mouse or something going about its business.

The last two batteries that had flown out of the package were easy to find, and this time she put them in one of the little pockets on the side of the backpack. She needed them to be easier to find the next time her torch decided to give out on her.

The brighter beam illuminated more of the train tracks and the woods to the sides, and it was with steps that certainly were not in any way faster than before that she continued on down the railroad.

It was still early in the morning, hours probably before the sun would rise and turn the starry sky blue, that the tracks shifted to the side and split off into a pair. The reason for the change became clear the closer Hazel came: she had reached the first rail station on her trek. Another shiver ran through her body, the cold coming with greater frequency the entire time she walked, and with a silent groan she pulled herself up the short wall onto the platform. This was as good a place to look around for some kind of fire-starter as any. If she found nothing, she could just keep on moving.

Walking to the front of the train station, she shined the beam of light into the night. At the very edge of the light she could see something glinting, though not well enough to determine just what it was. Hazel shrugged to herself and started walking. Her steps grew quicker the closer she got, her excitement filling her up.

It was a petrol station, and petrol stations had boxes of lighters just waiting to be bought. Even better for her, the building was dark.

She ran to the glass door and swept through the interior with her light. Sure enough, a box of plastic lighters sat right there in front of the cash register. A tug on the door proved that it was closed for the night and locked securely. No one would be able to get in without breaking through the glass.

No one without magic, that was.

Setting the torch on a brick windowsill so the light was still on the handle of the door, she dropped her backpack to the ground and took several deep breaths in with her eyes shut. She knew what she was doing. She had experimented with it back in the library. Besides her teleportation and her ability to read minds, this was the skill she had practiced most. Once she felt herself settling into a sense of calm, she opened her eyes again and pictured what she needed.

Before she closed her eyes, there had just been the handle and the keyhole. Now, there was something else added to the scene. An almost transparent key floated in the air, old-fashioned in design with thick teeth on the end of a long stem. The head of the key was not a ring like old keys she had seen pictures of. No, the head of this key was a cartoony skull wearing a smile.

Her magic could unlock any door. It was only appropriate it take the form of a skeleton key.

There was no way the teeth of this key would be able to fit in the keyhole if it were real, but all it was was an image in her mind. It slid into the hole without issue and turned. A soft click was audible, and when Hazel grabbed the handle again, this time the door swung open invitingly.

She grabbed her backpack with one hand and her torch with the other, the door propped open with one foot. A beeline to the lighters, and she grabbed two of them before thinking about it a moment longer. Three more came down, and all five of them made their way into the pocket on the other side of the backpack from the one she put her batteries into.

Hazel nibbled on her lip for a moment, indecision warring within her. The Tesco where she had gotten her new clothes was a huge business. Uncle Vernon had certainly complained about how rich the company was. This petrol station did not look anything near the same. She did not want to steal from the people who owned this, not if she could help it. Reaching into her bag again, she pulled out the thin sheaf of bills she took with her from Privet Drive and slapped a five-pound note on the counter where it would be easily seen.

There. Now she wasn't stealing. She paid for the lighters.

Locking the door behind her, she made her way back to the train tracks. There were a few more miles she wanted to cover before the sun came up and she looked for a place to rest. Except now, she could actually stay warm while she slept, even if she was stuck in the middle of the woods.

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Hazel kept her eyes on the coach as it trundled down the road. She knew from prior exploration that this road led all the way back to the nearby visitor center, and based on where the sun was in the sky, this should be the last group leaving the monument. So long as she could avoid being spotted, she would have all the time she wanted without being bothered.

Over to the west, in the direction of the setting sun, stood the tall pillars of Stonehenge.

The emptiness of the plain meant that Hazel did not even need to bother with her 'ignore me' smokescreen. She simply walked in the direction of the massive monument, hopping over the knee-high rope that marked the edges of where normal tourists could go. She did not want to stand here ten feet from the nearest stone. She needed to be right in the middle of the structure.

Stonehenge was on the top of her list of places to visit for a couple of reasons. One of them was simple, accessibility. Most of the places she wanted to visit were to the west of Surrey, and of them all this location was the closest. She pretty much had to pass Stonehenge on the way to anywhere of interest, so she might as well visit here first. The other reason was the history of this place. According to an old book she found in the library, it had been built by the druids, the priests and sorcerers of the ancient Celtic people. If what she read was true, they had also used it for human sacrifice, which was… icky and something she hoped was not necessary for big amazing pieces of magic. If it was, she would have to rethink whether she really wanted magic to be a main focus of her life.

Just the thought of what kind of person she would become if she dived headfirst into murder and human sacrifice made her queasy.

Regardless of its original purpose, she had to wonder about how even after years of study, nobody knew how the heavy stones that made it up had been moved from wherever they were carved. Something so extraordinarily difficult that it bordered on the impossible? That sounded like the work of magic to her.

Hazel stepped through one of the square archways and into the center of the stone circles. In the dying sunlight, this place was magnificent and awe-inspiring. But did it hold secrets for a desperate magician? That was the question of the day, and so far, nothing was jumping out at her.

Maybe it would just take time, and thankfully, she was well prepared for that. Under one arm was a good-sized collection of sticks and branches she had picked up off the ground before the woods ended and the plains began. It had taken her a couple of hours yesterday to figure out how to get a fire going with her new lighters and how to keep it lit, but she thought she had the hang of it now.

Sure enough, it only took her twenty minutes and five attempts at lighting it this time to get a little fire burning!

With her fire giving her warmth, she pulled her coat tight around her and sat on the ground with her legs crossed under her and her back against one of the fallen pillars. Her experiments with her magic hand proved how useful meditation was. Perhaps this was what she needed to get any information from these ancient stones. Or maybe once the night finally fell, something would show itself. Anything at all would be nice.

The sun sank beneath the horizon. Night took over the sky. Nothing at all happened among the massive stones.

She let out a sigh. Not surprising, but it was disappointing. Perhaps meditation would get her somewhere. Closing her eyes, she let her breathing even out and her mind clear. She wanted to be receptive to any signs or secrets this place wanted to share with her. With the fire warming her, it did not take long for her to sink into the place of calm where her meditation was supposed to take her, and she waited as patiently as she could for any hints or whispers. Surely something would come her way. Surely.

Soreness in her side and back nudged her, and after several minutes she opened her eyes and blinked in surprise. Why was the world turned sideways? Why was the sky bright? The fog in her brain slipped away, and she blinked a few more times before pushing herself upright, cursing herself in her head. It was morning! Somewhere in her meditation, she had just fallen asleep instead!

A moment of panic surged through her, and she staggered to her feet. If it was daytime, that meant there would be a tour group coming up any minute. She would be arrested for trespassing, and the police would probably make her go back to the Dursleys!

Looking out over the field, she expected to find a crowd of people looking back at her, maybe with a couple of police already in attendance. Instead, she was met with absolutely nothing. No people. No coaches. Nothing at all.

The terror receded, and actual thought took its place. She let out a quiet huff. She was worried about nothing. Of course there was no one here right now. There would not be anybody here until tomorrow.

Stonehenge was closed on Christmas Day.

She shrugged and scattered the ash and half-burnt sticks of her long-dead fire. Intellectually she knew she should be disappointed about being by herself and homeless on Christmas, but the holiday had never meant anything special to her. If anything, being alone and free was the greatest gift she had ever received. It was definitely better than being forced into her cupboard so the Dursleys could spend the day pretending she did not exist.

A few minutes spent gathering the rest of her belongings and sticking them in her backpack, and she was ready for the road again. She looked at the dirt on one side of her coat and her jeans and frowned. It might be getting time to find a building to stay in for a few days so she could wash her clothes, and she could restock her food supply at the same time. Plus, if there was a library anywhere near her, she could do some digging into whether there were any supposedly magical holidays. Yule was supposed to be around the same time as Christmas, right?

Birdsong from the trees distracted her as she was about to leave the plain on which Stonehenge was built. Over to the right, decorating the branches of three or four trees, was a large flock of bright blue and yellow birds singing to greet the day. She smiled at the cheerful sound they produced and the way they seemed to be keeping each other company.

Come to think of it, she thought after a moment, a lot of stories about witches and sorcerers talk about them having a familiar. I'd be a poor magician if I didn't have a pet of my own, wouldn't I?

Hazel tried to whistle the same tune the birds were singing but managed only a sputtering sound. Whistling was not something she had ever tried before, and this was a terrible first attempt. About the only good thing about it was that it had not scared the birds away.

If I can't sing them closer, maybe I can call them silently? It seemed to be worth a try. Birdies! Come here.

The birds continued their song.

Hey, she called with more force. She had never tried to talk to anybody in their own minds, not really, so maybe she was doing the mental equivalent of whispering. Over here! Come on, come here!

The singing softened, then fell silent. Even though the birds rustled in the trees, it did not look like any of them were about to fly towards her. If anything, it looked more like they were about to flee, as if something had spooked them.

She stamped her foot in frustration, and that was the signal the birds were waiting for. They sprang from the tree to the air with a great flapping of wings.

No!, she screamed. This was not what she wanted! All she wanted was for one of them to come over and be her friend! Her eyes caught one bird that was on the edge of the flock, and she all but shouted, You! Come over here!

The bird she picked out dropped for a second, almost as if its wings had stopped working, but almost before she could worry about it hitting the ground and getting hurt it started flapping again. It did not follow the rest of its fellows, however. Instead it wheeled around and swerved in her direction. Its flight smoothed out in the few seconds before it backpedaled and landed gently on her finger as soon as she reached out her hand. For a moment its eyes had a foggy greyish cast to them, almost as if they were covered by a film, but a blink and it was gone.

She gave it a smile and received a short twittering in return. When her other hand rose, it gave her fingers a quick look, but as soon as she touched its yellow breast feathers with the back of her fingers it puffed up and wiggled in place in delight.

Like that, do you?, she asked as loudly in her head as she could. Her question got another short snippet of song. She would take that as a yes. Do you want to stick around with me for a while? I can help you get seeds or fruit or whatever else you want to eat.

The bird cocked its head at her and jumped back into the air. It flew almost at her face for a moment, then it was out of sight. She sighed. Of course not. Nobody wanted—

A tiny weight dropped onto her head and shifted around in a circle before singing again.

The smile on her face was making her cheeks hurt, it was so wide, but she was not going to complain. We're going to be the best of friends, you and I. I just know it, she told the bird before hiking her pack higher on her shoulders. Now. Let's go! There's a whole world out there waiting for us!

 

[Silently Watches]

A gap existed in the line that no one sought to close, and it was in this space that Hazel stood, a blue and yellow bird on her shoulder and a bag of trail mix in her hand. With every handful she gave the sunflower seeds to her new friend and saved the raisins and chocolate bits for herself. It was a decent way to fill their stomachs and pass the time as they waited to enter the park before her.

When she had charmed her little bird to join her, she had had no idea just what kind of bird he was nor what he needed to eat. She was no bird-scientist, after all, and it was not as if she had ever made birdwatching a hobby before she left Privet Drive for the road. Thankfully, she did not need to be. A library was conveniently between Stonehenge and her next destination, and not only was that a nice place to wash her clothes and hole up through the storm that came blowing through the day after Christmas, it also gave her a chance to check on the needs of her new friend.

According to all the bird books she could find, she had as her new familiar a European blue tit, and a healthy specimen too if his bright colors were any indicator. She did not actually know for sure if the bird was a boy or a girl – all the books said the genders looked similar unless she used ultraviolet light, which was just so common around her – so in an effort not to name him or her something super silly she had instead decided on the name Morgan.

She took another handful of the trail mix and split it between them, doing her best to ignore the guilt that welled up with each bite. Needless to say this bag of food was one she took rather than bought, but she was not sure what else she could do. After paying for her five lighters, she had a grand total of thirty-eight quid to her name from the money she took from Aunt Petunia. With no way to get more short of finding it or taking it from somebody else, the only options she had to feed herself was to take the food instead. It was not as if she could go out and get a job even if she wanted to be stuck somewhere forever.

The fact that it was a necessity did not make her feel any better about sneaking in and taking things, though.

The people around her started moving again, and it was easy to let the crowd all but carry her to the entrance of Shervage Wood. The library in Greater Whinging had some information on this place, but the library in Nether Stowey had been much more helpful in confirming her information. According to the stories she read, there once had been a massive serpent or dragon called the Gurt Wurm living in this forest and the hills nearby, one that ate sheep and cows in the nearby fields and would do the same to anybody who tried to enter its woods. No one had been brave enough to fight the creature until one old woman tricked a woodsman into going into the forest to chop down some of the trees. While taking a break from his chopping, the fallen log he sat on started moving, and he hacked it in half with three blows from his axe before he could realize that he was sitting on the snake rather than a tree. She would think that the first blow would have been enough to figure out this was a flesh-and-blood creature and not a log, but the story also said he was drinking heavily before he went into the woods, so she supposed that was as good an explanation as any.

And supposedly the creature had laid a mighty egg sometime before its death.

Hazel knew the chances of finding an unhatched dragon egg were slim to none at best, and even if she did find it, she would want to stay far, far away. Regular eggs went rotten after a short time out of the refrigerator, and this all happened several hundred years ago. What she really wanted was to find something, anything, that could serve as proof that dragons really did exist back in the day. They for sure were all gone like the dodos, that much she knew. Giant bloodthirsty fire-breathing flying lizards were one of those things that would be hard for anyone to miss. It was more that if she could prove even to herself that such creatures once lived, it was a sign that smaller, less obvious magical beasts and monsters might still be around.

The line continued forwards, and she slipped through the entrance behind a family of five. All of that family were nicely dressed, new-looking clothes and hiking boots that did not have a speck of dirt on them. Not that it would be hard to miss considering the youngest girl's bright pink mud boots, though as any three-year-old would be she looked eager to get dirty. There was also a prominent bulge in the father's back pocket.

"Damn it, Michelle," the man thought over the chattering thoughts of his kids and wife, all of whom were commenting on the trees and bushes around them. "Why do we have to be out here? I told her if I finished working on the Bruckheimer account early, we could count on another five or even ten thousand pounds added to my bonus. And it'd be a lot more comfortable than being out in the woods in the middle of winter."

Hazel bit her lip and fell behind the family several yards before looking around to see if anyone was watching and dropping the grey mist that had kept anyone from seeing her. Anyone around probably would have been surprised when a girl suddenly appeared from thin air, but thankfully for her there was nobody watching. It looked and sounded like this was a family that was not hurting for cash. They would not notice a few pounds getting 'lost'.

Right?

Letting the distance stretch farther, she curled the fingers of her right hand closed, starting with her pinky and ending with her thumb. Opening her hand again manifested her magical hand, hovering right over the man's pocket. She took a big, quiet breath in and let it out, then both her hands dipped down and squeezed as if trying to pinch something between her fingers. When her magic hand moved up again, it held a nice leather wallet in its grasp.

The father, still preoccupied with his internal griping and ignoring the natural beauty around them, just kept walking. Completely oblivious.

The ghost hand and the wallet streaked towards her, and she wrapped her real hands around it so the family would not see it even if they turned around. Only when it looked like she was safe did she open it. Any hopes of taking just a small amount of money were immediately dashed: the smallest note in the main compartment was a tenner, and she saw several more twenties and even a fifty peeking out.

The bite turned into a nibble as she looked back and forth between the wallet and the family. It was tempting, there was no mistake about that. Very tempting. If he carried this much cash on him, he might not even notice if one of the score notes went missing.

Hazel shook her head. No. He might sound like a jerk, but she would not take that much money from him and his family. Another little pocket was on the inside, and a quick check with her finger found that it contained coins. That was more palatable. Pulling one coin out, she pocketed it without looking at it and sent her ghost hand over to slip the wallet back in his pocket when his wife distracted him with looking at a curiously twisted tree.

Her crime committed, she breathed out more smoke and slipped unseen off the trail between the trees. Answers to her questions were not waiting for her on the common paths, and if she were honest with herself she wanted more distance between her and the people she just robbed. Only once she could no longer see and could barely hear anyone else in the park did she pull the coin out of her pocket to look at it. What had she grabbed? A ten pence? A fifty?

Opening her hand, she stared in surprise at the two-pound coin gleaming in her palm.

Okay. That's more money than I expect—

Her thought was cut off as her feet slipped off a wet rock, and before she could catch herself she went tumbling down the hill on which she stood. Stones and fallen branches slapped at her. Something jabbed her in the side with a sharp snap. Her hair was snagged and tugged, and she finally rolled to a stop as something crunched beneath her.

She spat a few strands of hair out of her mouth and opened her eyes. Vague blurs greeted her, and she blinked her eyes several times to try to clear them before a sense of dread overtook her. The hand not holding the coin rose to touch her face and found skin and eyelids, not the smooth plastic of her glasses.

Hazel now had a good guess as to what that last crunch was, and she rolled over off her back and felt around the dirt and muck. Sure enough, after about a minute of searching her fingers felt something that was anything but natural. One half of her glasses was in her hand, the bridge cleanly snapped, and she rubbed the dirt off the lens with the tail of her shirt before putting it over her right eye so she could see something. The left half was in even worse shape when she finally spotted it, the leg twisted to the point she knew she would be unable to wear it.

A flash of panic and worry ran shivering down her spine at the thought of being all but blind. One half of her glasses was not going to be enough to see what she was doing, and there was no way her money would be enough to buy a new pair. Nor could she just steal some. It had been a while since Aunt Petunia had taken her to get this pair, but she remembered that every pair of glasses needed their own prescription. Taking one at random would be just as bad as wearing none at all.

Cradling the halves of her glasses in her hands, she pulled at her magic to do something. To make a new pair or un-break these. That would be even better, and with the panic she knew was still coursing strong through her, she pulled at it. Fix them. Fix them. Fix them, fix them, fix them fix them fix them fix them fixthemfixthemfixthem!

A shattering sound came from nowhere, and threads of crackling lightning erupted from her hands and danced along the outline of the frame. This bright green lightning was the only thing she could see clearly, and that more than anything else was the hint she needed to figure out what it was.

This was not real. Like her key or her hand or her smoke, it was just something in her head that she saw when her magic was doing something.

The frame of her glasses twisted in her hands, and when the lightning died out she moved them closer to her face and slipped them on. The left lens was covered in filth, so she still could not see anything out of it, but other than that they seemed fine to her.

A furious tweeting came from nearby, and she looked up to find Morgan sitting on a nearby bush, his feathers puffed up and his little brown eyes glaring at her. He did not look injured or hurt at all, but evidently he had not appreciated the wild ride down the hill.

I'm sorry, she told him with just a bit of an edge to her 'voice'. I didn't mean to fall off the hill, you know. It just happened.

She picked herself up and wiped the dirty lens as best she could. A little stream or something would not go amiss, somewhere she could wash her glasses and get them really clean, but she could see. That would do for now. Looking up at the smear she left when she fell down the hill, her eyes landed on a sapling that was bent and broken at the base, its few remaining leaves pressed against the ground as if a girl had rolled over it in an uncontrolled fall.

I'm sorry, she told the baby tree with much more sincerity than she had used addressing her familiar. A closer look showed that the tree was not completely broken, but only a few strips of wood held the bulk of it connected to its roots. She picked the sapling up and set it upright, but despite looking better she knew the moment she let go it would tip over again. There was no way it was going to live, not destroyed like this.

Sucking on her lip for a moment, Hazel tried unsuccessfully to let her eyes unfocus for a moment to glance at her glasses. She had no idea how much her glasses looked like they used to, but they seemed to be fixed. Could she use that same magic to try fixing the tree? Glasses were not alive like a tree was, but plastic and wood were not that different.

It was worth a try if nothing else, she decided, and she braced the top part of the sapling against her shoulder while she wrapped her hands around the pieces of the tree above and below the break. She knew she could do this now, and with that confidence pushing her forward it took just a little focus to bring the lightning back. It sparked and spat around the break, and she watched as the splinters of wood realigned themselves and reformed into a solid stem. On the outside of where the break had been visible there was now a puckered line of lighter brown, almost like a scar on the surface of the bark.

She pulled her hands away from the newly repaired sapling and glanced between the tree and her hands. She would have assumed that healing an entire tree would require more work, more focus, more something than fixing a pair of plastic glasses. If anything, it felt… easier.

Something niggled at the back of her mind. From what she read about the druids when she was researching Stonehenge, they were Celtic sorcerers but also seemed to have a connection to nature. Was that the explanation? Did her powers work better on this tree because she and her mother were descendants of druids?

It was not the strangest assumption she had ever made about her powers. She knew that game book or whatever was not real, just make-believe, but she could not help but remember that even that had a nature wizard. This was something that needed more investigation.

What do you think?, she asked Morgan, who was still sitting in the bush. I'd say I'm about as off the beaten path as I can possibly be.

She was not expecting any kind of response from the bird – she was just thinking, after all, not talking – so it was a surprise when he gave her a snippet of song and fluttered off the branch back to her shoulder. That sounded very much like an agreement to her.

Okay, then. Onwards to maybe find a dead dragon!

Hazel had no way of knowing how much time she spent wandering among the ancient trees after setting off from the path, but if she had to guess she would say she spent two or three hours darting around and overall just enjoying herself before she found something decidedly… odd.

In the middle of the trees stood a random clearing, perfectly circular and easily visible, as if the sun were peering through the canopy and shining a sunbeam onto grass that should not still be so green in the middle of winter. Except, she noticed when she looked up, there was no break in the branches and no sunlight streaming through the thick layer of clouds in the sky. Within that circular clearing stood another circle, but this one was made up of six stone pillars. Pillars that looked suspiciously like some of those she had seen at Stonehenge.

Pushing her way through the random bushes, she stepped onto the springy soft grass of the clearing and took a long look at the pillars. On the outsides were sections that she supposed was writing at some point, but most of the letters had been worn away by time, and what few sections were left were words she did not understand. Maybe they were even a different language; she had no way to know. Whatever these pillars had to say, it was lost forever, and she doubted she would be able to fix this as easily as she had her glasses and the tree.

The inside of the pillars were a different story. Or, more literally, the same story.

Stepping inside the ring, Hazel blinked in surprise at the carvings still visible. They were worn, just as the outside had been, but these carvings were not fragile letters. They looked like scenes out of a picture book. One pillar showed nothing but a snake-like head with curling horns, its mouth open as flames shot out over the gap between the pillars and reappeared on the one to the right, now consuming a house. Moving to the left, the next pillar showed a serpentine body with a pair of wings rising up, but below the body were people with bows and swords. Knights, fighting this monster?

She continued walking in an anticlockwise direction. The pillar past the knights showed more men, these armed not with weapons but with thin rods they held over their heads. Magicians, she thought with excitement. That made so much more sense than some random woodsman killing this beast. It was a giant effort between lots of people, both magicians and not. The stone after that held the tail of the snake, and this time there were not just men but women as well, staves in their hands and not wearing much in the way of clothes if the round breasts on display were anything to go by. The last pillar showed one man, again in robes, holding an oblong shape and handing it to a childlike figure with long ears and a long nose.

She really, really wished those carvings had not been worn away now. Why were there two different groups of – she assumed – magic users? Did they use magic differently? Why were there only women in the last group with the staves? Was one of them a group of druids, and if so, which one was it and what was the other group? Why was the truth about the killing of the Gurt Wurm hidden from everyone? Was that shape on the last pillar the egg she read about? Was it being handed to an elf or a dwarf or something? Why?

She had so many questions and naught in the way of answers.

After a moment, she realized that was wrong. She did have one answer, and it was the answer to the most important question she had. Was there at one point a group of magic users, taught and trained and working their craft outside of folk tales and storybooks? Clearly the answer was a resounding yes.

The magic of this place was still intact, and that made it better than Stonehenge to try her hand yet again at meditation. If nothing else, it felt like a more comfortable place to spend the night than the well-trod ground at the more famous circle.

She held a finger out for Morgan to climb onto, and then she gave him a light toss into the air. You might want to make yourself comfortable. Either I'll find something, or it'll be a long night.

Only then did she take her backpack off and set it outside the stones, then sat herself in the exact center of the circle. She closed her eyes and took several breaths in and out to put herself into the proper state of mind.

It was time to see if this place had any secrets to tell her.

xxxxxxxxxxxxx​

The following morning, Hazel and Morgan left the stone circle and headed southwest.

Despite hours and hours trying to meditate in what was so clearly a place that magical people had touched, she had nothing to show for it. No hidden knowledge, no responding brush of magic, not even a new question that needed answers. Nothing.

She was starting to question whether her initial assumption about the value of meditation was on point or just very wrong. That doubt plagued her through the three days of travel required to reach her next destination, this time yet another forest that had a reputation of magic. Unlike Shervage Wood, Wistman's Wood's supposed history was much darker and bloodier. It was rumored to be a site of druidic magic and sacrifice, a forest covered in moss and inhabited by unnaturally venomous adders and demonic dogs and restless spirits. Numerous people who had visited the site and written of their experiences all suggested the same thing: this was a place of terrible, frightening power.

It was the second little forest on her list, and she could only hope it would yield as much or more knowledge than Shervage Wood had.

No one else seemed to be interested in touring this wood, not like the line she had needed to navigate a few days prior. Passing by a large stone with old writing carved into it, she slipped into the shade provided by the stumpy oak trees covered by moss and vines. Shervage Wood was more beautiful, but this? This was far more mysterious.

Morgan let out a curious snippet of song when she stopped and closed her eyes for several seconds before moving on again. I don't know what I'm looking for, she admitted. Maybe I'm wasting my time. Maybe I'm just doing this wrong. I don't know. I'm going to try doing this one more time and try it a few different ways, and if nothing still happens, we'll give it up as a bad job. But first I want to make sure I'm in as magic-y a place as I can find. Best chance of something happening.

Every thirty or forty feet she stopped and waited with her eyes closed as she hoped for something to give her a hint of what direction she needed to go. She clambered over rocks, slipped on patches of moss, ducked beneath low tree branches. For an hour she moved through the woods, the only strange feeling she got the one of being watched. Try as she might, she could not find where the source of that feeling was coming from.

Pushing through a thin wall of branches, Hazel stopped in her tracks and blinked at the sight before her.

In the middle of the forest in front of her burbled a little stream running a crooked course between the outcroppings of rock, and above it the canopy broke up more than anywhere else in the forest to send more than just dappled light onto the water. Closing her eyes once again, she waited. And waited.

Was there maybe a little hint of a strange feeling in her mind? She could not honestly say if she really felt different or if it was all in her imagination.

A huff, and she slipped her backpack off and sat down on a nearby rock that was not completely encased in thick moss. Even if it was all in her imagination, she was tired of wandering around. Last chance, Hazel. Make it count, she told herself. Doing her best to ignore Morgan shuffling around on her shoulder, she closed her eyes and focused.

With all the practice she had gotten over the last few weeks, it did not take her long to push away her worries and her doubts and find that floaty feeling of calm. That was no different than it had been since she started doing this in Greater Whinging. It certainly did not get her any closer to what she wanted.

Time to try something new then. When she was meditating, it was by its nature a passive act. She was not doing anything, just reaching for a sense of balance. Maybe she needed to be more active with it. How would anything know it needed to talk to her if she did not tell it she was there?

She could imagine what she looked like sitting on the rock: a dirt-stained girl in stolen clothes, big plastic glasses and roughly cut hair. Now she imagined something else, a wave of white light bursting off her as if a bubble of magic was lifting off her skin. The bubble popped, sending the magic in all directions with a silent pop.

She waited, and waited, and waited. No answering call. No whispers in her mind. Nothing. After several minutes, she imagined the bubble again, and again it popped. Still nothing. The next time, she held the bubble in place. Was the pop not the key, but the bubble itself, and she kept it around for too short a time to get any response?

Several minutes passed before she quit imagining the bubble. This was doing no good.

Another idea she had on the trek from one wood to another had been trying to breath in any nearby magic, but while that was a decent idea, she had no idea how she was supposed to find the magic in the first place to try breathing it in. Plus that should have worked while she was meditating in the middle of that stone circle, and nothing had happened.

Mum and I might be born druids, she reminded herself. She could heal plants. Her mum had made flowers move and turned a teacup into a mouse, a living thing. Could she just be doing it wrong? To get in touch with the magic of this place, of nature, did she need to be like nature?

Her body was already sitting straight like a tree trunk, and now she gave herself roots. Crooked and twisted roots shot down from her imagined self into the rock and earth. Trees needed roots to suck up water and vitamins and other stuff from the ground. She would use her own roots to try sucking up a little teeny bit of magic.

The sound of the wind blowing through the trees and the faint splashes of the brook against the rocks changed. It was not sudden, not extreme, but slowly the noises grew louder. The feeling of the trees surrounding her pressed tighter against her. It was as if the whole forest was closing up around her, squeezing her in the middle. But not cruelly, not as if it was trying to hurt her. More as if the forest had suddenly come alive and was trying to wrap her up and keep her with it and never let her go.

It was no secret whispered into her ear, but it was a feeling of acceptance and belonging. Or maybe it was all in her head.

Twittering in her ear threatened to distract her from this feeling, but the more she tried to shut it out the louder it got. A mental fog broke open as she realized it was Morgan she was hearing, and it was not his normal song but something more along the lines of a shriek. What had gotten into him?

A splash, louder than the normal water sounds, came from right in front of her.

Hazel opened her eyes, not sure what she was expecting to see. Whatever it was, it was not what she found. Standing in the middle of the stream was a large dog or wolf-like creature, its coat a solid black from nose to tail. The fur was ruffled and spiky, and it looked almost like it was smoldering, for here and there little wisps of dark smoke were rising. Its eyes were enormous, taking up most of its cheeks, and unlike the brown of blue of a normal dog they were a bright red that seemed to glow in contrast to its dark fur and pulsed slowly, growing dimmer and brighter by turn. As if the color and glow were not enough, it did not have round pupils like a dog or slits like a cat. The pupils were thick rectangles sitting on their sides, almost like a goat.

The dog-creature opened its mouth to let its pink tongue hang out and show off its long, yellowed fangs.

Oh. Right. Wistman's Wood was said to be inhabited by creatures called hellhounds.

Her immediate reaction to coming nose-to-snout with this beast was to ready herself to jump through space, but it was not coming any closer. It was not growling. It was just staring at her, as if it did not know what to do with the girl who had wandered into its domain.

The lack of attacking was not reassuring at all to Morgan, who had quit his warning calls and was now huddled up like a ball of puff at the junction of her shoulder and neck.

The hellhound tilted its head, and she tilted her own to match. Was it hungry, maybe? What did it even eat? Probably meat, and lots of it, but even then it still had not lashed out.

An idea came to her, and even knowing it was stupid she still did not have any better plans. Never taking her eyes off the hellhound's, she unzipped her backpack and pulled out the mostly empty bag of trail mix. A little shake told her just how little was left, but nevertheless she poured the last of the nuts and chocolates and raisins into her left hand and stretched it out towards the smoking wolf.

The hellhound took its eyes off her and looked down at her palm, then back at her face, and back at her palm. Its paws splashed in the water when it came closer, its head now nearly close enough for her to reach out and pet. Not that she would because the size of its mouth and teeth meant it would not have any trouble biting off an unwanted hand. The wet black nose approached the trail mix and took several deep sniffs.

A moment later it snorted, and the hot, sour breath it let out was foul enough Hazel could not keep herself from gagging.

Something wet smeared itself over her hand, and she looked down to find the food gone and replaced by a coat of thick, sticky spit, trails of it stretched out between her fingers. Her face scrunched up in disgust. The hellhound, on the other hand, just turned around and bounded off, splashing through the stream before it vanished into shadows that looked much too small to hide such a big creature.

That went well, she told herself and the songbird still pressed into her neck. Gross, but hey, we didn't get eaten. That's something to be happy about.

Let's get out of here before that changes.

 

[Silently Watches]

The sun had already vanished below the horizon not quite an hour before when Hazel set foot in the town of Tavistock. There was nothing special that drew her to this place; it was simply somewhere to stop and rest for the night. She had initially planned to sleep in a little village called Peter Tavy, which was along the more direct route from Wistman's Wood to her next destination – and was supposedly haunted to boot! – but taking stock of her supplies she had found that she was running out of food again. Tavistock was not a large town, but it was bigger than Peter Tavy and would have somewhere she could stop to grab stuff to eat.

Street lamps were already lighting up the streets, and she kept a wary eye out as she wandered down the pavement. She was not worried enough about being seen to cloak herself in the grey smoke of her invisibility, but neither was she interested in the police coming to find her. School may have started already, and there was no way she was giving up her newfound freedom to sit in a classroom all day. Truant officers were therefore a legitimate concern.

The wind blew again, colder even than the last time and with a dampness that spoke of coming snow. She ducked down an alleyway and huddled against the brick wall. She had spent a few nights out in the elements since leaving Little Whinging, but when the worst weather came through she always tried to duck into a building to sleep. She did not trust herself to get through a snowy winter night without some kind of cover. That seemed like a wonderful way to turn herself into a popsicle.

Without warning, the door on the opposite wall a little ways deeper into the alley opened up, and an older man wearing a black apron and a white shirt stepped out. The large rubbish bag over his shoulder was flung into the dumpster nearby, and he turned enough that his eyes fell onto her.

"Dear god!"

Hazel flinched back at the sound of his thought. That was a sharper reaction than she had earned since leaving Privet Drive. She should have made herself invisible.

A moment later, the flash of fear left. There was nothing here to really fear. If he tried to do anything, she could always teleport somewhere else in a single jump. Not to mention that other than the Dursleys, most adults preferred to ignore her. So long as he stuck to yelling at her to go away, she would be fine.

"Calm. Calm," the man continued in his own mind. "Can't scare her away. Hello, little one." He raised one hand slowly in a tiny wave, the care of his movement odd but fitting with the voice he had used when he finally spoke to her. It was the voice of someone trying to tease a wounded kitten out from behind a box. "Mighty cold out here tonight, isn't it?"

She gave him a strange look back before surreptitiously looking down at her clothes. Was something on her that was making him react so strangely? Her jeans were dirty from several days out on the road, and her coat had grime shoved deep into the creases of the puffs, but she did not look that bad.

He must have noticed her look because his face crinkled and his small frown grew. "I think I have some soup left inside. Good thing I didn't dump the pot yet. Be nice to get something warm in your belly, wouldn't it? Come on, girlie. Please just come inside. All I want to do is help."

That last thought drew a blink from her. Most of his thoughts were throwing up red flags of stranger danger, but that put everything in a different light. There was little chance that could be a trap, though. It was not as if he routinely came around mind-readers. She took a single step closer, then a second.

"There we go. That's a good girl. Come on, lass. Don't want you freezing to death."

Thinking the matter over again, she shrugged to herself and approached much less tentatively. It was not as if he could do anything to trap her here even if he wanted too. She had jumped from a locked cupboard to the kitchen the night she left the Dursleys. It followed that she could get out of any locked room.

The man stepped backwards when she got closer, holding the door open for her until she crossed the threshold. The room she entered was full of gleaming steel counters and cooking things and strange gizmos, obviously the kitchen of some restaurant or something. "Have a seat," he said, pulling a stool closer to one of the counters and grabbing a spoon from a plastic rack. "Not the broccoli and cheese. Too rich for her stomach. I'll be right back. The beef soup. That'll do."

The man turned away and hustled along the counter for a moment and around a corner deeper into the building. With him out of sight, she glanced around until she could see her reflection in the polished refrigerator. She frowned in confusion while looking it up and down. What had disturbed him like that? Sure, her cheeks were a little sunken in, the bones above more prominent than before, but not to the point that she looked like a skull or something.

He returned before she could think too much on that, a bowl in one hand and a plate in the other. The plate had chunks of bread on it along with a glass of water, but it was the bowl that really caught her attention. Steam rose from it, bringing a scent to her nose that instantly made her stomach growl. The spoon was in her hand almost without a thought. Her eyes rose briefly to glance his way only to find that he was very intentionally not looking directly at her, as if he thought she would run if he watched her eat.

The spoon dipped into the soup, rose, and moved to her mouth. Flavors so basic and yet so foreign to anything she had eaten lately swept over her tongue. A second spoonful quickly followed, then a third and a fourth and a fifth.

"Poor thing acts like she hasn't eaten in a year."

His words hit her ears, and she slowed down enough to focus on what she was doing. In what felt like only seconds, she had downed half the bowl, and one of the pieces of bread was in her other hand dripping with broth after having been dunked in the soup. The flavor of beef, beans, and spices still danced in her mouth, and if anything her stomach felt even emptier than before she started eating.

Unease wormed into her belly alongside the food and squirmed. She had tried to avoid stealing as much as she could, which meant making the food she did take last as long as she could. Even before she escaped from her cupboard, she had gone a week without any food whatsoever. When was the last time she had eaten a full meal? A month? Longer, considering the Dursleys always gave her the smallest portion of whatever Aunt Petunia cooked?

On the one hand, no wonder she was hungry now. On the other, if she was wolfing down whatever was put in front of her, clearly she needed to eat more. And if that meant stealing more often...

"Don't worry about running out," the man told her, now sitting on a stool. His thoughts were not words, just a tide of sorrow. "There's plenty more where that came from."

She returned to her meal, though not quite as hasty as she had been. If nothing else, the slower pace let her savor the flavor.

Her ravenous appetite started flagging at the end of the third bowl of soup, and she waved off a fourth when it was offered. She was comfortably full now, even if she had no idea where she had just put it all, and she did not want to overstuff herself and tempt all of it coming back up. Only once she leaned back against the wall to the side did she look up and find the man still looking at her with sad eyes. A brittle smile came to his face. "Feeling better?"

Hazel gave him a nod.

"I bet. Not that it will do a lot. One good meal will only go so far." He leaned forwards, propping his elbows on his knees. "You know, you don't have to live out on the streets. If you want some help, I can get in touch with someone I know. She can help you out. Warm, dry place to stay. Food every day. I hope Karen still works at that shelter, anyway. It isn't a long drive from Plymouth. Might be able to come by tonight, or at the latest tomorrow. What do you think? Sound good? Please say yes. She can help get in touch with the girl's family too, I bet."

She shook her head, doing her best to ignore the last thought. He had no idea what her life had been like with the Dursleys. It was not a threat, that thought, just him trying to help as best as he knew how. She appreciated the sentiment, but he did not understand that that form of help was the last thing she needed. For the first time in what felt like a long time, she slipped the backpack off her shoulders and dug into it for her pad of paper and a pen.

"I'm going somewhere," she wrote before turning it so he could read.

"Homeless, hungry, and can't talk. Terrible." The man nodded his head, acting as though his thoughts were not affecting him. "Going somewhere, huh? Family, maybe? Someone who can take care of you? It would be faster getting there by car rather than by foot. That way if there isn't someone there, somebody can still take you to safety."

"I'm enjoying the trip."

His bottom lip slipped into his mouth. "Should just call Karen anyway, but I don't know how I'd keep her here. Wouldn't do any good to call the police. Saw them chase that other guy out of town for no good reason. Don't want them near a slip of a girl like this. She looks like she'd get hurt by the wind blowing the wrong way."

The pen was already moving as she wrote out her next, and probably last, statement. "I need to get moving again. Thank you for the food. I really appreciate it." She held up the page long enough for him to read it, then slipped both the pad and the pen back into the pack. It was the truth. She did appreciate his kindness, accepting a total stranger into what she assumed was his place of business and giving her food just because she looked like she needed it.

But just because her freedom was hard, harder than she expected when she first set out, did not mean she wanted to give it up. It was better than anything else in her life had ever been.

"Agggh. At least take something with you. Come on." He waved for her to follow him to the rear of the building. "I can at least make sure she doesn't starve for a couple of days."

The rear of the building turned out to be its front, and she stepped into the brightly lit front of a deli. While she admired the red and white tiles, the man quickly sliced two loaves of bread and stacked them high with meat and cheese, followed up with fresh slices of lettuce and tomato. Once both thick sandwiches were made, he wrapped them up in wax paper and handed them over with a conflicted expression on his face. "If wherever you're going doesn't turn out right," he slowly said, "you can always make your way back. That offer to get you some help will still be here."

Giving him a bright smile, she slipped the sandwiches into her backpack and with barely a second thought stepped forwards to give him a hug. He was surprised at the sudden gesture, but in her eyes he deserved it. Here he was, a total stranger, and in the last half hour he had been kinder to her than her own family or anyone who knew her growing up in Little Whinging. She pulled away and gave him a nod.

She highly doubted she would wind up taking him up on that offer, but it was good to have it in her back pocket just in case.

A few steps out the front door, she stopped and looked back at the deli. Was there anything she could do, any bit of magic that she had that would repay his kindness? None came to mind, but maybe there was something else she could do. Laying her hand on the brick wall, she closed her eyes and let out a deep breath.

This man is kind, she said to anything that might be listening to a little witch like her. He did a good turn for someone he didn't know out of nothing but the goodness of his heart. That should be worth something, some little reward. His business matters to him. Let it succeed. Let it grow and prosper, so his kindness is returned to him many times over.

Her eyes opened, and she pulled the backpack higher on her shoulders. She had no idea if that would work, but it was all she had to give back. Hopefully it would do something.

xxxxxxxxxxxxx​

Waves crashed against the nearby shore, and a dark rain pelted ground that was normally safe from the water. Hazel had to shield her eyes to look out over the turbulent waters to find the narrow footbridge that led from the mainland to the tiny spit of land and the steep, narrow stairs that led higher to the ruined castle on the peak.

She almost wanted to slap herself. In hindsight, she really could have chosen a better time to visit the remains of Tintagel Castle.

The stone bridge was slick beneath her feet, but at least there was nobody else around. She had watched the ancient site for most of the day, and it was shocking how long people were waiting to take a look at the site. The crowds finally cleared out as the dark storm clouds rolled in, but even then she chose to wait until the staff were likewise absent. Considering she had seen people showing tickets to enter, they likely would not think kindly of her trying to sneak in.

Another wave washed over the stones and threatened to wash them away into the cold sea. She knew that was unlikely to happen this night, not when it had survived for hundreds of years, but nevertheless the flow of the water pushed her into crossing the bridge quicker than she had been. Once across the bridge, she just had to climb up a set of downright treacherous steps, and then she would be inside the remains of the castle where King Arthur himself was born.

As soon as she set her feet on the stairs, a nasty wind blew and forced her to huddle against the cliff face in which they were built. The stairs themselves were steep, uneven, and slick with the rain. She did not want to chance falling backwards and tumbling down. She could fix her glasses and a tree, but that did not mean she wanted to try doing the same with a busted skull.

Lightning flashed, glinting off the wet steps beneath her, and when the thunder cracked she took the last step and stood on the broken stone and the grass on the top of the island. Without the moon above, she had to rely on her torch for light, even if the frequent blasts of lightning provided its own eerie glimpse at the rest of the landscape. The unrelenting rain did not improve her visibility any.

Crouching down behind a ruined wall, she pulled the map of the site from her back pocket and opened it underneath her bent torso so she could keep it as dry as possible. Not that it was going to be any drier than anything else on her, and sure enough the colored inks were already starting to run through the sodden paper. She could still make out the overall layout of the island, but the small numbers were gone, so she had no idea what any of the structures actually were. She was essentially walking around blind.

Thunder burst around her once more, and she wiped her growing strands of hair off her face and glared up at the storm for a brief second before her glasses were too smeared to see out of them. This is a bad idea, she decided after a moment. It's too dark and too rainy to see anything. I don't know if I'd be able to find any signs of magic even if the were there. Nor did she think she could stop and meditate. The raindrops pelting her were distracting enough as it was, and the crackling storm above her had its own strange, almost frightening power that she expected would mask any subtle feelings of magic.

I should probably call it quits and find somewhere dry, but… Her torch focused on the ground and her feet moving carefully so as not to fall off the cliff, she reached the edge of the little plateau and shined the beam down at the bridge. A fortuitous flash of lightning lit up the sea and revealed a dark hole half-submerged on the edge of the island.

If she could not find any secrets within the castle, she had no option but to explore Merlin's Cave. It was not as if she were not already soaked to the bone. What harm could a little more water do?

The beam of the torch played along the edge until she found the stairs again, and she started the climb down. It was only a hundred or so steps. As long as she was careful, she would be fine.

Her left foot hit the edge of one of the steps, and it crumbled just enough for her trainer to slip off.

Hazel's eyes went wide as she felt herself start to fall.

Hard, unforgiving stone slammed into her legs. Her chest. Her head. She spun as she fell, opening more targets for the stone stairs to bash and break. Something sharp stabbed through her leg and ripped a harsh gasp from her mouth. Halfway down, her hand finally caught a stair and turned her tumbling fall into a slide that ended another five steps down.

The end of the fall made the pain in her leg burn even hotter, so strong that tears were pouring down her cheeks and mingling with the rain. She looked down through her right eye, the only side that still had her glasses intact, and a wave of nausea swept through her when she saw how her leg was twisted the wrong way around below her knee. Something white and slicked with red had punched through the skin, and darkness creeped into the edges of her vision and threatened to make her pass out before she blinked and looked away.

There was no way she was walking on that. She was trapped here, in the middle of a storm with a broken leg.

The snap of bone she heard during her fall was familiar, and swallowing down the urge to throw up all over herself she reached down with both hands to hover just above the leg bone sticking through her skin. It was just like when she broke the sapling. She healed that. She could heal this. She could!

Scrunching her face, she tried to imagine the green lighting bursting forth from her hands to course over her injuries and seal them shut. She tried to imagine the pain shooting up from her leg all the way to her belly stopping. She tried to imagine being able to walk again.

Her hands shook, and water dripped from them, but aside from a few glimmers of light around the edges of the wound was nothing. There was too much pain, too much to distract her and steal away her focus.

Several minutes passed, and she looked up to a sky that was completely covered with clouds. Great sobs escaped her, but she could not stop them any more than she could stop her tears or the pain. The storm still rumbled, the thunder growing louder if anything, and she let loose a silent scream of anger and pain at the heavens. A tiny growl eventually escaped at the very end, the air from her lungs passing through a tightening throat even if her vocal cords were useless.

It was the storm's fault she was like this! Why she was hurting and could not walk! She already could not speak, and now she was further crippled?! It wasn't fair! Her hands grabbed her ruined leg, her anger spiking further while the flashes in the clouds above came faster and faster. She did not want much! She just wanted her leg fixed!

A sharp crack shredded the air and made her ears ring, lightning striking scarily close and the thunder that followed nearly shoving her to the side into the rocky cliff. The storm unleashing the power she had already felt, clearly not pleased at being yelled at.

And in time with a second crack, emerald lightning erupted from her hands at last.

Perhaps it was the nature of her power. Perhaps it was how her spell seemed to be affected by the storm raging around her. Whatever it was, her healing was anything but gentle. A slurp came as the bone was all but yanked back under the skin. Her shin spun with as much violent force as had been used to break it in the first place. Pins and needles raced down her leg from knee to the tips of her toes and then bounced back harsher and faster all the way to her hip and lower back, another wave of nausea roiling in her stomach.

Gasping and grabbing still at her leg, Hazel stared down at where the break had been and was no longer. She bent and straightened her knee, then rolled her ankle around and around. Everything felt… fine. As if it had never been hurt in the first place.

Her glasses were still broken, so she reached up and found that the frame itself was still intact, if admittedly twisted on her head. It was the left lens that was ruined. Pulling the glasses off her head, she held them in her hand and forced the lightning out again. The plastic reformed, and the glass or plastic or whatever it was in the lens felt like it was regrowing from nothing until her glasses were once more restored to their former self. It was noticeably harder to do this than when she fixed them in Shervage Wood, and that worried her. Was there a limit to the number of times she could fix something? Or maybe it was just that healing her leg had used up too much of her magic power and she was running on empty.

That had its own worrisome implications.

The thunder started to soften, but the rain was still coming down in buckets, and understandably she had less than no intention of walking down the stairs after this experience. She pushed herself onto her feet and grasped the straps of her backpack. There was enough worry in her gut that she was dearly tempted to hold onto the rock wall, but she forced that away long enough to hop in place—

—and land on the island side of the bridge.

The sudden appearance created a splash in the air as she suddenly took up the same space as the drops of rain, and she did her best to shake off the extra water. For all the good it did, anyway. Now she was not in as much danger of being electrocuted by sudden blasts of lightning, but in return she was back in range of the waves.

Her gaze found the entrance of the cave, and she bit her lip. The entire reason she came back down so soon was because she wanted to get a look at a cave affiliated with Merlin, the greatest wizard she had ever heard of. That was before she broke her leg, though. Was she willing to risk another injury like that so soon?

Another wave hit the shore of the island with a violent crash, and she imagined herself being thrown into the cliff with that much force.

Nope. Not doing that. She gave the cave a sad look and a small wave. The shiver that raced down her spine added further weight to her decision. Sorry, Merlin. I'll come back to take a look at you later, maybe. But not tonight.

 

[Silently Watches]

Raindrops pelted Hazel's head, and she took a moment to look up at the sky and glare. After two days at Tintagel waiting for the rains to stop, she had left the island and the cave that still taunted her with the mysteries she was sure were hiding within. The rain and the cold ocean waters together were enough of a deterrent that she planned to put off swimming into the cave until sometime in the summer, when it was not freezing cold.

And then the blasted rain followed her as she walked back east.

Her thoroughly filthy trainers squelched through the mud, and she looked up the slope of the hill towards the stone tower that sat at the top. She had actually been excited to visit Glastonbury Tor, but the pictures she had seen in various books were all taken during the day. It was much less impressive seen behind all the rain coming down. She hoped the tall St. Michael's tower would provide some little respite. On the plus side, the rain meant that fewer people were here than she expected would be here on a normal day, currently just a smattering of umbrellas huddled around the tower.

Glastonbury Tor was the site of several myths of different types, and she was eager to discover which one was true. She had read that it was connected to the Isle of Avalon, the island where the dying King Arthur was brought to be buried. Another book had said it was the place where the Holy Grail was kept, the sacred cup that would give eternal youth. Yet more books talked about it being an entrance to Annwn, one of the Otherworlds of the Celts and ruled by a fairy king named either Gwyn ap Nudd or Arawn. Or maybe it was a portal to the realm of the dead. There was no telling which story was true, and she knew even less which one she wanted to be true.

If she were honest with herself, she would admit that finding a doorway to the land of the dead would be… worthwhile. To be able to find her mother and ask questions, just to be able to see her? Hazel knew that was surely not going to be the case, but part of her could not help but hold out the tiniest sliver of hope.

Her hopes for getting dry were dashed into nothingness when she arrived at the tower itself. The walls were intact, of course, but the same could not be said about the roof. It was not as if it had recently be damaged, either; where the tops of the walls ended was just a square hole. The stones that made up the floor were slick and smooth from years and years of water pounding them, and remembering her relatively recent experience in the ruins of Tintagel she carefully watched her step while walking around the interior.

One corner of the building was drier than the others, sheltered beneath a low overhang that had almost crumbled away through the centuries, and she huddled underneath it. Morgan, apparently noticing that it was not as wet as it had been, sidestepped out of the crook of her neck where he had done his best to avoid the rain. A flutter of wings and feather sprayed what rainwater had accumulated on him all over the place, and he turned his puffed up head towards her and gave her a birdy glare.

It's not my fault everything's wet, she scolded him. He had settled himself into a tree when she was trying to explore Tintagel, but there were no trees close to the hill of the Tor. Her pet was okay waiting a short distance away, but when she had suggested he wait in a dry bush just over a kilometer away his response had been to peck the lobe of her ear and squeeze closer as if he were trying to slip beneath her skin. Besides, you're a bird. You should be used to getting wet. I doubt your flock only flew around when it was clear and sunny.

He ignored that entirely and settled back down. Hazel, on the other hand, looked around with a grimace. It seemed that the few people who had made the trek up here were already leaving, and if she had any money worth betting she would guess it was because the rain was only getting heavier as the day wore on. The sky was not getting any less grey, that was for sure.

For all her chiding, she would not mind getting dry either. As it was, she was going to be stuck in wet clothes for the rest of the day. Wet and dirty clothes, she reminded herself with a look at everything from her knees down. A grass and dirt hill was fine for walking when it was not being turned into a pile of mud.

Plus, she was getting tired of having to wash her clothes in sinks. She knew that proper washing machines used special soap to clean clothes, but that also was just one more thing to keep in the limited space in her backpack. She had tried a few times to imagine a washing machine, even an iron, to clean her things, but the mental picture never took. She supposed it was because unlike a hand or a key, both of which were simple to picture or feel, she had no idea how either machine worked. Or maybe her mental tools just could not be machines and had to be simple. She could not know for sure, not when she was still making this all up as she went.

Pools of water had formed on the floor, and she watched as raindrops fell into them and sent ripples spreading out over the surface and crashing into each other. She was a little tempted to wash her shoes off right here and now; the motions just make it look so clean, even if she knew the water was dirty from hundreds and thousands of dirty feet walking all over it. It was just so unfair—

Her thoughts stopped in their tracks, and she watched the ripples more intently. It did look clean. Just seeing it, her mind went to getting clean, washing dirt and grime off everything and leaving it pristine.

Not all her tools were copies of real things. Doctors did not use lighting to heal people. Being covered in smoke did not make people unnoticeable. They were pictures in her head to give her magic something to focus on. If lightning and smoke worked, why not rippling water?

You might want to settle in, she told Morgan. This is going to take a while.

Hazel was happier than ever that this corner of the tower was more or less dry. She slid down the wall onto the ground, the rear end of her jeans becoming damp from the water that was there. Still, it was not so bad that she could not close her eyes and try to focus. If anything it helped get her started.

First things first. Water is wet. As obvious a statement as it was, that was to be the basis of her newest spell, assuming she could get it to work. Hazel thought of the wet on her pants, then about how it felt when her hands were fresh from the sink. Water washes away dirt. She remembered how her hands felt when she finished working in the garden for the Dursleys only to stick them under the faucet and let the water wipe the dirt away. She added soap to her framework, thinking about how it felt slick in her hands and the almost nothing weight of the bubbles that accumulated when she washed her clothes. Then the water dries. Clothes straight from the sink, still dripping wet, went from being heavy to dry and returning to their normal weight.

That was what she wanted. Not just to get things wet. If that was all she was capable of, she might as well keep sneaking into buildings to wash her clothes in the sink. She still did not know how many spells she could learn to cast before she had to rely on special items to help her out like so many wizards and witches in books did. She was not going to waste what might be a limited resource on something that was not useful.

Taking those feelings she had, the memories she had called up, she stared at her trainers, the white toes and sides invisible under days of caked on dirt, and the brown smears covering most of her lower legs. I want them clean.

Something shifted at the edge of her jeans, barely peeking from the other side of her leg. Another mental push, and ripples of pale blue swept over the dirt and mud. Slowly at first, but quickly getting faster, they bounced back and forth and off each other, just like the ripples in the pool had done. Where they moved, the layers of brown lightened, and they kept going and going and going until every speck of dirt was gone.

I did it. Morgan, I did it! She scrambled to her feet and jumped in joy – her spell worked! – and slammed the top of her head against the stone shelf that was providing protection from the rain. Her butt hit the ground again as she covered her aching head with her hands. Ouch!

Morgan, who had jumped off her shoulder at the sudden movement, twittered at her in a manner that sounded suspiciously like laughter.

Still, she had succeeded! Never again would she have to hide somewhere just to get clean or scare nice old men because she looked like something that crawled out of the dumpster. You can quit laughing now, she told her bird with a frown when she realized he was still chirping at her. Besides, we haven't figured out what this place really was. There has to be something here. It wouldn't have as many stories about it if there weren't.

…Then again, there was story after story about Stonehenge, and she had found absolutely nothing there. This could be the same way. She hoped not, but she could not rule it out.

Shoving those thoughts from her head, Hazel settled back down in a cross-legged position and closed her eyes. She knew from her experiments in Wistman's Wood that reaching 'roots' into the ground had connected her to the forest. Could she do the same thing with the hill? It was worth a try.

She had to adjust herself a few times before she managed to ignore the wet, but eventually she managed to get herself in the right frame of mind. Almost immediately her eyes popped open again. There was something here. She could not describe just what it was, even to herself; the closest she could manage was that there was an itch on the inside of her skull coming from one side. It had pulsed and throbbed in her mind as soon as she reached into the ground. No subtlety or welcoming like the Woods had offered her, either. This was right there, standing apart from everything else.

Hazel picked herself off the ground, avoiding the shelf this time around, and waited for Morgan to flap back to her shoulder before she left the tower. This itch was on the steep side.

Glastonbury Tor was not the tower at the top of the hill. It was the entire hill, a strange structure of seven steps or terraces that had smoothed out and been covered by thick green grass. The hill itself had two sides. One, the side she had climbed to get here, was longer with a gentler slope. That was the side most everybody climbed. The side opposite was steeper, the terraces nearly merging into each other. That was where her feet and her feeling carried her. She could not tell just where it was outside the tower, and even looking back and trying to compare where she had felt it coming from while she was sitting down was ineffective.

Scuffing the ground, she sighed. It was a good thing she had figured out now how to clean her clothes. She was going to need it.

Three times she had to sit down in the rain and mud in order to feel out where the itch was located, each time moving closer to the source. Finally she stood on the middle terrace and looked at the side of the hill. Her last brief meditation told her it was supposed to be right here, but no matter how hard she looked, she could not find anything. Was it inside the hill, not on the surface?

Morgan chirped in her ear, and she shrugged. She had no idea what she was doing. But since she was already here and already dirty, there was no reason not to do something silly just in case whatever she was looking for was here but hidden from her sight. Closing her eyes, she pressed the tips of her fingers into the side of the hill and slowly walked her way towards the itch.

The dirt vanished beneath her fingers, and she almost fell into the nothingness in front of her before she caught herself. Her eyes opened up to reveal she had taken that one all-important step from the outside into a stone stairwell of all things. The meager sunlight piercing through the clouds was just enough to illuminate the first few steps, but beyond that there was nothing but darkness. Nudging Morgan from her shoulder to her opposite hand, she slipped the backpack off and pulled out her electric torch.

Her feet followed the stairs, twisting to the right and then to the left and back to the right in a serpentine pattern that quickly left the light of day far behind. It took five minutes or so to reach the end of the stairs, and her eyes widened as she stood on the last step and stared into the chamber beyond. The room had been a perfect sphere, smooth as anything she had ever seen, but that was before it was carved into. Lines crisscrossed along the surface, not random scratches but obviously intentional. The lines merged into triangle and squares and intersected with circles containing alien symbols, a diagram that would have been complicated enough drawn on a sheet of paper but made even worse covering a three-dimensional shape and overlapping with a second and a third and likely a fourth. It was a dizzying pattern she could not understand but was clearly meant to do something.

Something glinted to the side when she swept her torchlight around the chamber, and she brought it back to take a look. A metal plaque was pressed into the wall of the tunnel. The words were unreadable, some of the letters not even in the alphabet, but after a moment's staring the plaque became blurry and a little bit painful to her eyes. She blinked, and when she looked at it again the words had changed into something recognizable.

WITH THREEFOLD RITUAL
SEALED BY SALT AND BLOOD AND IRON
THE ROAD TO THE GREENWILD BANISHED AND BARRED
MAY THE GREAT FAE ROT IN THEIR GLORIOUS HALLS
NOT TO STEP UPON THE LANDS OF MEN FOREVERMORE​

Hazel could only stare for a minute. Two. Eventually her brain caught up with her eyes, and she started breathing fast and heavy. The fae were real? The fae were REAL?! Every story she had ever read about the Irish fae depicted them as immensely powerful, stronger than she had ever believed any human could ever match. They were absolutely terrifying.

Her gaze and her light flickered along the pattern again. The fae were no joke, creatures with morality utterly unlike humanity and with the sheer magical strength to go with it. And somebody had just… shut down the portal from their world to this one? Closed and locked it as simply as if it had been a door?

This room and everything in it was the work of someone way smarter than her, standing so far above her own abilities that she could not find the starting point to get from here to there. Even if she assumed this was the utmost limit of what magic was capable of – human magic, anyway – she had a long, long way to go.

I guess it's a good thing I have something to aspire to?, she told Morgan, the sound of even her own inner voice wavering in disbelief and just a hint of mortal terror. If this spell, ritual, whatever it was ever collapsed, she somehow doubted the things that came out would be in a pleasant mood. But right now I just want to get out of here before I touch something I'm not supposed to.

xxxxxxxxxxxxx​

Hazel skipped out of the Tesco the following day, her backpack full of food and her clothes brighter than they had ever been since she pulled them off the racks back in Greater Whinging. She had not realized before now just how poor a job she had been doing washing her clothes, but clearly she had been overlooking some spots. There was not a speck of dirt or mud anywhere on any of her clothes now.

A small, thoughtful frown crossed her face. I wonder where all the dirt went, she admitted to Morgan. It wasn't on the ground, so it didn't fall off, and it didn't make a big cloud of dust either. Making it all just vanish, poof gone, isn't the strangest thing I've ever done, I guess, but it's still curious.

Shaking that thought away, she kept walking down the street. It was not as if she was going to get any answers standing around.

As she walked, her ears picked up something other than the normal noise of a town. There seemed to be music of all things coming from several blocks over. A concert or something? But it's the middle of the day. She looked over at Morgan, who simply looked back at her. No help from that quarter, it seemed.

She was pretty much done with Glastonbury, she told herself. The Tor was the only reason she was here. There was nothing keeping her from taking a peek at whatever was going on before she headed north.

The music got louder and clearer the closer she came, and she scratched concert off the list of possibilities. The tune was too happy, not to mention it repeated itself very quickly. There were no words, either. The people there seemed to be having fun nonetheless, as the closer she came the better she could hear their cheers and laughter. She stepped around a corner and stopped in her tracks as she saw what she had been hearing, her eyes wide and a smile growing on her face.

This was a fair!

Her eyes greedily ate up the colorful rides swinging through the air, and her nose was picking up the smells of popcorn and all the treats for sale. She had never been to a fair before. Her aunt and uncle had been happy to take Dudley to them any time one passed through Little Whinging, but her they locked in her cupboard while they were out. A few times Uncle Vernon had thought about bringing her along to leave her there, something about how 'her kind' would be right at home with the 'carnies', but nothing ever came from it. The dark figure that lingered in their minds whenever they thought about doing something too bad to her was deterrent enough to keep her around.

But now? Now she was on her own, and that meant no Dursleys telling her she couldn't see what was so special about the fair.

Getting in was easy. She just had to wait until a family stepped up to the gate leading into the fairgrounds, and she slipped in behind them under her veil of unremarkableness. She did not want to risk the boy at the gate taking in the admittance fees paying extra attention to her if she tried to go in by herself. Her smoke had so far been successful in getting people to ignore her, but she knew she was not really invisible. Not bringing attention to herself seemed like it was the best way to help her spell along.

Once she was within the crowds, however, she split off and let her smoke fall away. With freshly cleaned clothes and among a bunch of other kids, no one was going to pay much attention to her anyway. She was just a girl and her bird, nothing to see here. Her gaze darted this way and that, taking in everything. There were rides to ride, snacks to eat, and performances to watch. So much to do, and only today to do it!

A stall selling candy floss was close to the entrance, and despite the cheery smile on his face she could hear the frustrated muttering in his head whenever he saw people pass by the stall without buying his treats, few though they were. While he was distracted with all the people lined up to pay, Hazel curled the fingers on her right hand one at a time and opened them all at once. Her mage hand appeared next to the cone of floss farthest away from the man and the crowds, and with a quiet breath she lifted the cone just enough to get it out of the plastic holder and lowered it to the ground.

A quick look around did not find anyone staring at her or the cone. No one had noticed a thing.

Rather than walk right by the front where the man could see her, she floated the floss closer to the back of the cart and walked nearer before jerking her right hand towards her. The motion shot the cone into her left hand, and she let her spell disperse. Her eyes almost bulged out of her head when she took the first bite. It was so sweet! She had never had anything like this, and by the second bite she was wiping her tongue around in her mouth and looking for something to drink to cut through the sticky sugar feeling.

The rides were the next thing that called to her, and she tried a few before making the mistake of climbing into a spinning bowl ride. By the time the minute or so the ride ran came to an end, she was staggering around and trying to hold down the candy floss and water in her stomach. No more rides for me, she said to Morgan when he fluttered back down to her shoulder. He had been smart enough to avoid that one, and now she regretted not following suit.

After a few moments, her feet felt steady enough to walk away and look for something not quite so nauseating to do next. A sign next to a darkened cart caught her eye, and she approached closer to stare at the hand with the eye in the palm. Madam Enigma's Psychic Readings, the words above the hand proclaimed, and below it continued, Learn what Fate has in store for you!

What do you think?, she asked her companion. Do you think it'll be worth it?

Morgan did not answer, his head twitching around and looking at all the sources of noise.

You're no help at all. She looked back at the sign and shrugged her shoulders. The Dursleys had been of the firm belief that fortune telling was a bunch of nonsense. That was reason enough to give it a chance as far as she was concerned.

The inside of the cart was filled with smoke, and she coughed at the strange almost-herby scent. A single woman with stringy brown hair held back by a bright blue headband sat on the other side of a table that was covered by a tie-dyed cloth, her brown dress fitting more with the overall darkness than the patches of loud color. She was also younger than Hazel expected for someone called 'Madam', maybe in her late twenties at most. Madam Enigma blinked her eyes a few times before her gaze finally focused on Hazel. "Well, well," she said in a slightly hoarse voice. "Hello, little girl. You enter the realm of mysticism and divination. And interrupted my me time," she added in a voice that did not sound at all like the one she spoke with. "Oh well, duty calls. Do you have a question, little one? A question that burns in your heart and soul?"

Hazel frowned and thought for a moment. She had many, many questions, but whether they were ones a fortune teller could answer? She finally shrugged again and nodded.

"A girl of few words, this one. Good. Sit, sit," Madam Enigma said, waving at the chair on Hazel's side of the table. "What question can I answer for you?"

Pulling out her pad and one of her pens, Hazel thought for a moment before writing something down and turning the pad so Madam Enigma could see it. "I need guidance on where to go next."

Madam Enigma looked between the pad and Hazel several times, her previously placid face now showing a little bit of concern. "Mute? How unfortunate. That can't be easy. And it takes anything interactive like the crystal ball off the table. I guess I could do some palmistry, but…" She turned around and rummaged in a short cabinet behind her before coming back with a thick deck of long cards. "For life in general, I have always felt the Tarot to have the clearest answers. Bob said we needed to raise the price for some of my readings, but for this girl it will be five pounds, and then we shall discover what the fates have in store for you, my dear."

A discount? She nibbled on her lip for a moment before reaching back into her backpack and straightening back up with a five pound note in her hand. She would not say no to that offer.

Once the note was secreted away, Madam Enigma started shuffling the deck with quick, practiced motions. "I want you to think about what you want. What you really, really want. Think about what you've done to try achieving that goal. Concentrate on it. It's a lot more useful than 'opening your inner eye'."

Hazel blinked in surprise at that. That last bit had sounded completely different than either the woman's voice or thoughts, instead being a high, wavering voice. It was almost as if she was quoting somebody. Her teacher, maybe?

How was it that people could find teachers for fortune telling, but she could not find one for magic? The world was so unfair sometimes.

The shuffling came to an end, and Madam Enigma drew the first card and laid it down. Hazel could only stare at the picture of a man lying facedown on the ground, a number of swords stabbed into his back. She had no idea that Tarot cards were so violent.

"Oh my. That is an inauspicious start. This card symbolizes your self, who you are at your core. It changes just as you do," Madam Enigma said, keeping the surprise in her thoughts out of her tone. "The Ten of Swords represents loss and painful endings. Betrayal, even. You've lost someone close to you already, haven't you?" she added in her real voice.

Hazel could only nod. "My parents," she wrote.

"I'm sorry for your loss." Hazel nodded again, and Madam Enigma pulled the next card and laid it crosswise on top of of the first. She had to turn her head to see another man looking at a bush in the corner that was decorated with stars. "Here we see the problem facing you. The Seven of Pentacles reversed. You said you want to know where to go from here, but it is hard to see the path when you do not have any long-term goal."

The next card was above the other two. A hand coming from a cloud and holding a green stick. "The Ace of Wands. Your focus is the search for inspiration and growth."

She nodded. That sounded about right. Sadly, so did the comment about not having any long term plans. It was hard to have those when she knew so little.

The fourth card went below the crossed cards. "This card represents your subconscious. It is what is pushing you from behind, even if you don't know it…" Madam Enigma trailed off and looked a little harder at the man on the card who had turned his back on a stack of glasses. "The Eight of Cups. What drives you is a need for escape. You are not running towards anything. You're running away from something. This is not a happy spread."

Hazel picked up her pad to try arguing that, but before her pen touched the paper she hesitated and put it back down. That was right, as much as she did not want to admit it. She was trying to escape what her life was like in Little Whinging. She did not want a dreary life devoid of magic. She did not want to be stuck around people who thought her creepy and weird. Even sitting here listening to her fortune was because it was not something the Dursleys believed in.

Madam Enigma cleared her throat. "Let us look now at your past. Perhaps it will clear up what you are running from." This card went to the left of the crossed pair. A woman standing surrounded by more swords, a blindfold over her eyes. "The Eight of Swords?" Madam Enigma said in a voice less confident that she had been using. Her eyes flicked over at Hazel. "You felt confined, trapped. Imprisoned. That is why you are running so far and so fast even thought you don't know where to go. You need to spread your wings because you could never fly before now."

She could only grimace. That was way more true than she thought these cards could figure out. Maybe fortune telling was not a bunch of rubbish after all.

"I know it can be hard hearing things about yourself that you wish to ignore, but it is only through understand where we are starting from it makes sense where we are going. But the hard part is over," she said in a forced cheerful voice, pulling one more card from the top of the deck. "This card will show your future and what is waiting for you. Please be something good, for her sake. The—"

Madam Enigma stopped with a slight choking sound, her eyes glued to the last card. Hazel was not sure what was so special about it. It was more detailed than the others, showing a tall pillar against a dark sky. Lightning was striking the top, and it looked like someone had fallen or jumped off to get away from the bolt.

"The Tower," Madam Enigma finally said in a strangled voice, but her eyes were not on the card. They were on Hazel. "What the hell is wrong with this girl that she has the Tower as her future?! Change is coming, my dear. Something unlike anything you've ever known before. Yeah, change all right. Violent, chaotic, destructive change. I wouldn't wish this card on my worst enemy. But only you can make that change worth the cost."

Somehow, Hazel had the suspicion that this 'cost' was way more than Madam Enigma was implying it would be.

"Thank you," she wrote before putting the pad back into her bag. On that note, she had lost her taste for the fair. She needed to get moving through Gloucestershire to reach her next destination.

She stood up, but right as she turned around Madam Enigma spoke again. "Little girl?" She turned around to find the woman worrying her lip. It took her a minute to figure out what to say, but finally she said in a soft voice, "Be careful."

Hazel gave her a nod. Even before this, she had planned to be careful. After the reading? Absolutely.

 

[Silently Watches]

The soft creak of a squeaky hinge drifted through the room. The sound, quiet as it was, was still enough for Hazel's eyes to pop open. By the time the man in the yellow apron had stepped fully into the room, she was surrounded by grey smoke and watching him rummage through boxes of pots and pans and blankets. Only once he grabbed whatever he was looking for and closed the door again behind him did she let the spell fall.

She had never been the deepest sleeper, not living in the cupboard under the stairs as she had, but living on her own and wandering from place to place had only sharpened her sleeping ears. Waking up to any nearby sound meant she would never be caught when she was at her most vulnerable. The last thing she needed was for a well-meaning meddler to stumble upon her and start making arrangements that she had nothing to do with.

This was not the first time she had woken up when somebody decided to do something in her sleeping space without knowing she was there, and she was sure it would not be the last.

With a sigh, she picked herself up from the corner she had chosen early in the morning as her place of rest and peered out through the window. The sun was sinking fast, which meant it was time to move on. Upper Milton was the last town for a while, because next she had to make her way through the Mendip Hills. She had been tempted to wait until the daylight to start her trek, if only because she had never been to a national Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty before, but that was also the reason she decided to stick to her nighttime schedule. It was far easier to avoid anyone who might ask awkward questions when there was no one else awake and walking around.

She quickly changed her clothes, but unlike before Glastonbury she did not shove her dirty clothes into the backpack. Now she could send waves of blue magic running over them to get rid of every speck of dirt before they took their places next to clothes that were similarly clean with a wide smile on her face. Of all the spells she knew, this was rapidly becoming one of her favorites. It was not as incredible as her jumping or her healing, but it was just so very useful in her day to day life.

Casting her eyes around, it was relatively easy to find the puffball that was her friend sitting on one of the metal shelves a few feet away. Come on, Morgan. Wake up. The feathers ruffled slightly at the sound of her mental voice, and after several seconds her bird pulled his head out from under his wing. He blinked at her a few times before tucking his head back out of sight.

Morgan, she told him more sternly this time, one hand propped on her hip. Let's go. We have to get moving.

His head came into view again, and he blinked blearily at her. It was clear what he would be telling her if she could speak bird.

Yes, I know it's night and you're a daytime bird. Once we get to Bristol, we can do daylight traveling, but not while we'd be noticeable. He only looked at her for a moment, and she sighed. I promise we'll go back to doing daylight stuff, okay? Promise. We just need to get there first.

With a low warble, Morgan shook out his wings and fluttered over to her shoulder. He might very well fall asleep on her while they were walking, but that was fine. She did not need him to be awake so much as she did not want to risk leaving him behind.

She did not have to walk through the store to get out, for which she was thankful. She instead left via the same access door that she had used to get inside as the sun was coming up. A map of western England was in one of the pockets of her backpack, and she pulled out it and the compass she had 'borrowed' from the same store. Turning herself to face north, she checked the map and started walking in that direction but just a little to the right.

Bristol was not her ultimate destination – there was still plenty left to see throughout England, and that was not even counting the sights she was sure existed in Wales and Scotland – but it was a reasonable place to stop and do some more research about what was still waiting for her and start planning her next steps. It would also be the largest city she had ever set foot in. Half a million people? She would have no problem at all vanishing in that.

Rather than walk on the road itself, she followed along not even a dozen feet to the side. There were a few trees scattered around, but even without them it would be easier to hide from any approaching cars if she did not have to get off the road first. Not that she really had to worry about that happening once the sun had fully disappeared and she was reliant on her electric torch for light. That she was fine with. From what she could find and checking with her map, she should be able to get from Upper Milton to one of the towns on the edge of Bristol over the course of tonight, and from there she could go to Bristol proper tomorrow.

The crescent moon rose higher in the sky as the hours passed. Hazel rubbed her eyes for a moment, and when she dropped her hand something caught her attention from the edge of her vision. She squinted at it once she was fully looking at it, but even then she was unsure of what she was looking at. The closest thing she could think of was a little campfire, flickering in the night, but it was not the normal yellow and orange she was used to. It was a bright pale blue of all things. It was not natural.

Might it be magical?!

Without a moment's hesitation she left the side of the road and walked towards the field. The fire could not be that far away, maybe a couple hundred feet. That would not take long to cross, and when she got there, maybe she would get some answers.

The closer she walked to the fire, the more obvious it was that something was off. The fire was growing larger in her view, but not as much as she would have expected. It was almost as if it were moving away, though not as quickly as she was moving towards it. Picking up her pace, she started jogging and then running. She had to get there before whoever's campfire it was vanished. It might be her only chance to talk to somebody else who was like her!

Now that she was running, she was actually making progress, so of course it would be at that moment that the fire winked out of existence. No!, she screamed, her eyes still focused on the last spot where she saw it. This could not be happening. Not when she was so close to answers!

Her torchlight fanned this way and that, and finally it landed on something. Hazel knelt to take a look at it and frowned in confusion. This was not a campfire. It was a single thick stick, and while one end was thicker and wrapped in half-burnt cloth, it would not explain the size of the fire she saw. Nor would anyone carry a burning torch close to the ground like what she saw. Old fashioned torches like that were meant to be held up in the air—

Something hard and heavy smashed into the back of her head, and all she could see were stars.

Falling to the ground, she heard Morgan twittering in anger, and she blinked quickly to try to get her vision to clear. When it did, she almost wished she had stayed blind. The creature that had hit her now loomed above her as best as its short stature allowed. Its wrinkly face split into a smile that revealed yellowing triangular teeth that sat below a long, crooked nose and glowing eyes the same blue as the flames that lured her out here. Its dirty fingernails, what few were visible, were long and curved like claws. One hand was wrapped around a thick wooden club, and the other came into sight from behind its back along with a shimmering green knife. It giggled and jabbered something in a language that was most definitely not English, the slight movements of its head shifting a long hat that reached almost to its feet and was the same brownish red color as rust.

Or long-dried blood.

It's a red cap, she thought in quickly mounting terror. It's a red cap!

The murderous fae raised its knife higher, the direction of its gaze at her chest telling her just where it planned to plunge the sharp blade, when a ball of yellow and blue flew screeching into its face. The red cap yelled something undoubtedly cruel at Morgan and waved its club to ward him off, and that was the opportunity she needed. Pulling her legs to her chest, she kicked out and slammed both feet into its stomach. The force was enough to double it over, but where she had hoped to knock it to the ground all it did was take a couple of small steps backwards. She pushed herself to her feet, only one thought on her mind. She had to get far, far away from this thing, and now.

As fast as her scrambling was, the red cap was faster. She was not even fully upright when the red cap leapt into the air and brought its club down, this time right into her face. The blow itself, heavier than the red cap's size would have suggested, drove her to the ground, and then searing pain erupted around her nose and her left eye. An instant later that eye started stinging as something hot and wet dribbled into it.

Squeezing that eye shut, she turned her head to keep her right eye on the fae that was again advancing on her, its earlier smile gone and a snarl in its place instead. Hazel pushed herself backwards with both arms with all the haste she could muster, her torch lying on the ground where she had dropped it when the little monster clubbed her in the face. The more she crab-walked away, the less of the torch she could see, and without that light the less of the world she could see.

If she was hoping to hide in the shadows, she was going to be disappointed. The red cap kept stride, not chasing her down but not losing any ground either. It was toying with her, waiting for her to tire herself out or just until it grew bored. Then it would kill her and, she assumed, eat her.

Morgan swooped in to her defense once again, but the red cap batted him away with little difficulty now that it knew he was there. Her one good eye flicked from the red cap to the line of grass lit up by the beam from the torch. She needed to get out of here, but it was not going to let her stand up and run away.

She did have another option, but she had never tried doing it when she was almost laying on the ground like this. It might very well simply not be possible.

But did she have anything at all to lose right now?

Her right eye focused on the red cap again, who had apparently noticed that she had something in mind. She could no longer see its expression, but she could see its head tilting. She could see its left hand raising the knife again. Had it grown bored already? Did it intend to keep her from trying whatever plan it could see her brewing?

Baring her teeth at it, the closest she could get to a grin, she shoved herself backwards again—

—and landed on the grass behind her torch. Snatching it up, she screamed in her mind, Morgan!

The red cap spun around looking for her, and she pushed herself to her knees at the same time its eyes fell on her. Morgan, get your rear end over here! The red cap started running at her, its little legs covering far more ground than they should have.

Her heart pounded in her chest. She could not abandon Morgan here. Who would get to her first?

The redcap was halfway to her.

She pushed herself fully to her feet.

A quarter of the way to her.

She pointed the beam square at its face, hoping to blind it, and took several steps backwards to get a little distance.

Ten feet from her.

A tiny weight landed on her shoulder, screeching all the while.

The green knife swung at her in a horizontal line right at her belly, a blow that would gut her—

—if she were still there. The full-body squeezing sensation swept her away from the field and back to the storeroom where she had slept. Her backwards momentum continued, and she toppled over a low stack of boxes and fell to the ground as brightly colored packages of dried noodles spread out around her.

Wings flapping pulled her attention back to her friend as he landed on her chest and narrowed his beady little eyes at her. She let out an explosive breath and dropped her head onto the hard concrete floor. Okay, okay. You were right, she admitted. Trying to walk to Bristol tonight was a terrible idea. We'll make the trip in the morning.

Morgan tweeted in victory.

Oh, shut up, she told him with a silent sigh. You didn't know there were red caps out there, either. You can't claim credit for that.

…Thank you. Morgan stopped his song and looked at her again. She gave him a weak smile and reached up to stroke his breast feathers. For charging in and distracting that thing. He could have crushed you in one blow, but you still tried to keep him off me. That was very brave of you.

This time his call was even prouder.

Picking the songbird off her, she rolled over and slowly pushed herself to her feet. Her face was starting to ache now that she was no longer in terrifying mortal danger, and she staggered out of the room on shaking legs and into the main store. She needed to find a bathroom and see just how bad she looked.

The answer, Hazel discovered a minute later, was awful.

Poking her nose lightly with a finger, she winced and then winced again at the pain the first one caused. Her nose was smushed flat and already starting to swell, and at some point after getting smacked in the face it had started bleeding. Not a little bit, either; the entire front of her shirt, a cute green with horses on it, was now stained red. Blood was smeared over the left side of her face, too, leaking out from a long cut above her eyebrow. Even the lens of her glasses on that side was covered.

First things first. Resting the fingers of her left hand on her cheek beneath her glasses, she half closed her eyes and let brilliant green lightning flicker over her face. Her nose was yanked straight, causing her to gasp, and then it and the skin around her eye turned red then purple then yellow before they went back to the same color as the rest of her.

Even if that was still a few shades paler than she was used to seeing.

Pulling her glasses off and balancing them on top of the pipes leading to the toilet, she twisted the faucets of the sink so she could splash ice-cold water over her face and scrub away the flakes of dried blood. Only when she was starting to shiver did she blindly fumble around for her glasses and stick them under the water as well. She rubbed and rubbed the left side, but the more she did the more she frowned. What were all those bumps?

She pulled the sleeve of her shirt down over her hand to dry the glasses, and once they were back on her face she peered closer at them to find out what was wrong. The answer was immediately obvious. A spiderweb of cracks crisscrossed against the entirely of the left lens. Closing her right eye to look just through the left, she immediately opened it again. There was no way she would be able to see out that side. Everything was just too jumbled together.

Okay. I can fix this, too, she told herself. It was not the first time she had fixed these, though at least now she could blame someone other than herself. She pulled her glasses off, and lightning again erupted from her fingertips. After several seconds she cut it off with a frown. That had not felt right, but there was only one way to be sure.

Putting them back on her face, she scowled. No. That was not right. Instead of fixing itself like it had before, getting rid of the cracks entirely, the left lens was… smeared, was the best way she could describe it. It was all in one piece, but all the lines of the cracks were now thicker streaks of a light grey. It was just as impossible to see through as before she tried fixing them, except now it was because she could not see anything through them rather than because the world was shattered like a broken mirror.

What was wrong? She had done this before, back in Shervage Wood and again in Cornwall. What was going on? Was it something the red cap did when it attacked her? She thought harder, remembering what they looked like before they were broken as best as she could. Maybe she just was not focusing enough.

Lightning coursed through her hands, and she tried to hold back the frown at just how wrong this felt. Only now that she was paying attention could she notice how different trying to fix her glasses was to healing herself. Her face had felt warm, as if her magic was sinking into the skin and bones and gently shifting them back where they were supposed to be. With her glasses, it was more like the lightning was wrapping around the plastic and doing its best to put it to rights, but the force behind it was just too much and instead was crushing and cracking her glasses even more.

She brushed a finger over the lens again, and this time there was no hiding her frown. It was no longer cracked, and she doubted it was smeared, but now she could feel ridges of raised plastic dancing over both sides of the lens. She put her glasses on again and stared; where before it was just the lens that was a problem, now the frame itself was warped and twisted. It looked almost as if her spell was starting to melt it.

How in the world was her spell doing so much damage to her glasses and yet could heal her body with no problem? It was not just her that her magic could heal. Even putting that sapling back together had been easier than her glasses, and that was when she had come up with this spell in the first place!

Thinking through her memory, her face gained even more of a pallor. Running out of the bathroom, she looked through the aisles of the store until she found a pack of long wooden skewers meant for grilling. She ripped the package open and pulled one out, then she snapped it over her knee.

Please don't let me be right.

Bright green lightning flashed over the two halves of the skewer, reconnecting it and sealing the seam with not a single issue. Concentrating on it as she was, she could also feel how the magic was reacting.

Her spell had sunk into the wood and pulled it together from the inside.

Hazel slid to the floor, the skewer still held tightly in her hands. She could heal herself and a tree, fix a piece of dead wood. All living things, or at least that had been living. Plastic and glass had never been alive. They were manmade, artificial.

And she had already been pretty sure that she and her mum were from a druidic line.

The skewer twisted in her hands, threatening to break once again. She could fix natural things without any problems, but that was because it was from nature where she got her powers. Plastic was not natural. Was nature just too strong for her glasses to hold up when it was trying to fix them?

She took a deep breath in and let it out. Okay, Hazel. You can deal with this. Bristol is a day's walk from here. Get there, and you can figure out what to do about your glasses. There should be a solution there. Somewhere.

The image of the red cap came to mind again, and she looked at the pointed tip of the skewer. She had one more quick stop to make before she bedded down for the night. Just to be safe.

 

[Silently Watches]

For all that she left Upper Milton at the crack of dawn the second time, the sun was already sinking below the horizon by the time Hazel hopped off the road proper onto the pavement alongside it. The streets of Bristol lay before her, or at least the neighborhoods that surrounded it. She was sure she would not get to Bristol proper for another hour or two, but she was glad to be back in civilization if only because it meant far less chance for that red cap to try ambushing her again.

Her hand relaxed as her worry subsided, and eventually she let it drop and stretched out her fingers. No longer held in a death grip, the nail she had taken from a hardware store back in Upper Milton fell to dangle around her neck as the shoelace she had tied around it kept it from dropping any farther. It looked like it was iron, or she certainly hoped it was. From the reading she had done about the fae, iron was essentially their one weakness and one she did not want to be without in the future. Just in case.

She had been wondering about that the entire walk here, even as her eyes flickered back and forth around the road to make sure nothing was going to jump at her in the daylight. The sealed portal-gate-thing she found in Glastonbury talked about sealing the fae in their own realm, or that was how she first read it, but she had encountered a murderous fae just a few days later. That had not made any sense, and she thought she had two possible answers that made sense with what she knew.

The first was that maybe it only sealed away the most powerful of the fae, entities like Gwyn ap Nudd who was said to rule one of the Otherworlds that could be reached through Glastonbury Tor. If that was the case, maybe the red cap she ran into was too weak to be driven back when the gate was closed.

The second, and in some ways the scarier one, was that it might only close the road to one of the fairy lands. She had jumped back to Glastonbury when that thought crossed her mind, and sure enough upon a second reading of the plaque it did not say that it kept out all the fae. What it said was that the 'great fae' were banished from Earth, but more specifically the strange room she found closed 'the road to the Greenwild'. If there were multiple fairy realms, just as the Celts described with their talk of multiple Otherworlds, then the Greenwild might only be one such realm. Perhaps the red cap was from a different Otherworld and so was not caught up in whatever happened with the road was closed.

That possibility was the scarier of the two because if it were true, she had no way to guess how many Otherworlds there were and how many still had open roads. For all she knew there were thousands and the sorcerer who built the massive chamber she found had only closed one or two of them.

Morgan let out a birdy yawn and snuggled up into her neck, and she reached up to give him a little scratch. She would love to be able to send him ahead to scout, to see through his eyes somehow, but she did not think that was possible. At the very least she had been unable to feel anything like a mental connection the few times she tried it over the course of the day, and she could not think of any tool that would let her do something like it.

Reaching her arms to the side, she stretched as well as she could with a drowsy pet on her shoulder. Having a scout would be nice, but it was nothing that would make or break her plans for the next couple of days. Her main focus right now needed to be how in the world she was going to restore her ability to see.

Hazel was tempted to reach up and pull off her glasses again, but she had done enough of that already in the last twenty-four hours. When she woke up, she had decided to give fixing her glasses another chance. It did not work any better than the last time. Now the left lens of her glasses was not just covered in ridges, but the frame itself had twisted and dripped and mixed into the lens itself as if they were taffy melding together in the summer heat. She could basically not see anything on that side of her head anymore.

The sun had set completely by the time she left the little towns and entered the metropolis that was Bristol. What do you think?, she asked Morgan, rousing the songbird in the process. Where would be the best place to look for an optician?

Morgan gave the soft skin of her neck an unhappy peck and shifted on her shoulder again, his message clear. He wanted to sleep, not explore.

She blew out a frustrated breath and kept walking. Several minutes of aimless wandering later, she caught sight of a familiar bright red box. A telephone box, she realized with widening eyes, would be perfect. The book within would not just have phone numbers; it would have addresses, too.

And with an address and a map, she could find anything in this city that she wanted.

Finding the book within the box, she flipped to the yellow pages and ran through the listings until her finger stopped beneath the word 'Optician'. Even more conveniently, there was a map of the city in the first few pages of the book, so she could compare where these places were to where she was now and start walking to the closest one. She had been walking all day already, and while she had gotten used to spending hours and hours on her feet, it did not mean those same feet were immune from getting sore.

Even with the coming of night, there were still plenty of cars and lorries running through the streets of Bristol, so she walked the rest of the way surrounded by her grey smoke of un-noticeability. Was this what living in a big city like this was like, people constantly going around at all times of the day? She hoped not. That would make her… foraging… that much more difficult.

Her destination came into sight after many minutes of searching, and Hazel pressed her hands firmly against the window, followed by her good eye. The inside of the optician's store was dark as the sky outside, clearly closed for the day, and after checking the electric sign outside the bank a few streets down she knew it would remain closed tomorrow. One of the benefits of coming to town on a Saturday night.

Now she just had to decide what to do.

On the one hand, it would not be hard at all to break into the building. She could unlock the door with her key, or she could just jump in with no one being the wiser. She might be able to pop out the lens on her right side and put it in a new pair of glasses, and then they would look right.

On the other, she could still vaguely remember how things went when Aunt Petunia took her to get this pair of glasses back when she had just entered Year 1 and it turned out she needed glasses in the first place. It was not just a matter of picking up a pair and walking out. The man in the shop had measured her vision with a funny-looking device, then he spent an hour or so making the lenses themselves and stuck them in the frames Aunt Petunia chose on the basis of being the ugliest of the available options that she could get for free.

She had no way to measure her own eyes, and she would not know what to do with the numbers even if she did. Switching frames might make them look normal, but it would do nothing to let her see on the left side.

While she could not recall all the details of that day, one thing that still lingered with her was that Aunt Petunia had given her more chores after that to 'pay them back' for buying the glasses even though they had not cost the Dursleys a single penny. They would have cost some amount of money, but Aunt Petunia had a card that made the government pay for them instead. A card that Hazel did not have and that she doubted the Dursleys had kept when she left Privet Drive months ago.

She had not gone back to check, but she fully expected they had burned or thrown away everything that belonged to her and that she had not taken with her.

Regardless, that left her with a situation that had no solution. She could not just steal a new frame, because what was the point of her glasses at all if she could not see out of them? She could not use whatever machine the man here had to make her own lenses, and she doubted she would be able to fiddle around with it for a few hours and get it right. Talking to him was more likely to have him calling the police than giving her a pair of glasses, and she doubted what money she had in her pocket was enough to pay for them even if he did listen to her.

She pointed the index and middle fingers of her right hand out, and her ghostly skeleton key came into sight with a wavering motion and slid into the lock of the door. A twist of her wrist slid the deadbolt out. Pulling the door open and slipping inside as quickly as she could, she peeked through the window to be sure that no one had paid any attention to her entry. She could not find anybody, but she locked the door behind her anyway just to be safe.

The beam from her torch swept around the room and glinted off the dummy lenses of all the glasses on display. An entire wall was taken up by stacks of frames. The back had a small office and a cabinet full of trays holding papers and more frames, but as if to further mock her there was no obvious lens-making machine. Even if she wanted to experiment, she could not.

One hand rose to brush Morgan's feathers again. Well, this is a problem, no two ways about it. What was she going to do? It was not as if there was a magical solution to this.

Or was there?

She frowned and lowered her backpack to the ground. She had not found any mention in folklore of people who needed glasses getting rid of them after a spell, but there had also not been any mentions of sorcerers locking down a road to the Otherworld. Just because it was not in folklore did not mean it was impossible or had not happened. It only meant she would need to figure out how to do it on her own. There might very well be a story in some book or another that would give her a starting point. She just had to look for it, which meant she needed to make a run to the local library.

Her stomach gurgled, and she gave it a silent sigh. Fine. Food first, then research.

xxxxxxxxxxxxx​

Something pricked her ear, and once Hazel was half-awake the bright sunlight shining on her face refused to let her slip back into her dreams. She yawned and tried to sit up, but as she did an awful yanking sensation grabbed at her cheek for a moment before letting go. That woke her up fully, and she rubbed her cheek and looked around.

I fell asleep in the library, she realized as she looked around. That was was definitely the most obvious answer for why the table she sat at was surrounded by bookshelves. The table itself was covered by open books, as if the Hazel of last night thought that the more pages visible the better her chances of coming up with a solution.

That version of her deserved praise for her optimism if nothing else.

She had no idea how long she had spent flipping through all the books of druids and wizards in folklore she could find, which had been quite a lot, but none of them held any answers. Maybe it was because spectacles were too new to be included in the old stories, though if she were honest she did not know when they were invented in the first place. Maybe it was because the tellers of folklore did not care about half-blind people like her; that would not be terribly surprising since the deaf and the mute were not exactly well represented in stories either. Or maybe it was because what she wanted, what she was hoping for, just was not possible.

But there had to be some kind of a solution!

She glanced down at the book she had used as her pillow if the drying puddle of drool was any indication. It had started to smear one of the woodcut pictures in the book, specifically a group of druids surrounding a giant statue of a man made of branches and filled with actual people. This book said the idea of the druids performing human sacrifice had little actual evidence, which was comforting, but apparently it was so ingrained in views of the druids and the Celts that the truth might never take the place of the fantasy.

Opening her mouth wide until her jaw cracked, she looked at the picture again, and a strange idea came into her mind. She had no plans of killing anybody or anything at all, but did she have to? Some of the other stories featured deals made with the fae or with wizards, an exchange of one thing for something else.

Would they be interested in anything she had? That was assuming she wanted to deal with them at all. She flipped through the books again, and her eyes fell on a picture of a man talking to an eagle, the caption stating that the eagle was not a bird but a witch transformed. Changing one thing into another may also do it, though she was not sure what she would change into functional glasses.

Or maybe she could make it something that would let her see despite not being strictly speaking a pair of glasses. She would not say no to a bandana or something that would give her the ability to see.

It seemed like either way, she would need to give something up, and her right hand came up to rest against that side of the frame. If she had to sacrifice something, it made sense for it to be something of equal value. Would that be a valid trade, giving up or transforming the one lens that still worked for something else that would let her see?

The idea of such a trade being refused or transformation failing worried her. She could still see okay at a distance without her glasses, but that was a poor consolation prize when everything in range of her hands was just blurs of color. Even just taking the glasses apart would render her functionally blind for near everything she wanted to do.

Morgan waddled up to her and tilted his head curiously, and she gave him a weak smile. What do you think? Is it worth the risk?

The blue tit bobbed his head as if to say, 'How would I know? I'm a bird'.

Fat lot of good you are, she told him with a huff. Still the idea would not stop circling around and around in her head. It seemed… appropriate, somehow, that she had to give up her glasses if she wanted to gain another way of seeing. That was one lesson she had learned at Privet Drive that had proven true again and again and again.

She could not get something for nothing. It did not matter if it was money, time, or work; anything worth having would cost her something else. Not even magic could change that.

Pulling off her glasses and holding them in both hands, she blinked at the loss of detail and definition in front of her. If this plan of hers failed, this might be the life she was stuck with. She would be all but helpless and still with no ways of getting a replacement. If anything it would be even harder.

A twist of her hands, and she heard a snap.

It took a bit of wiggling, but she managed to pull the right-side lens from her now thoroughly ruined glasses and dropped the frame onto the table. A smear of blue and yellow moved over and pecked at it. It's too late to change my mind now, she told Morgan even as she clutched the lens protectively. If she dropped this… She didn't want to even think about it.

Come on, she ordered, holding out her hand for emphasis. The tiny weight of her friend hopped into her hand and fluttered up to his customary perch on her shoulder. I know just where we need to do this.

She jumped in place, and her feet landed on soft grass rather than the hard linoleum of the library. The daylight was warm on her head and face, and she smiled at the standing stones that she could not clearly see. When it came to places to make a deal or perform a transformation, she had two choices. First was Wistman's Wood, home of hellhounds and cruel vipers. It might have been the first place she connected with the magic of nature, but it was a little too dark and brooding for what she wanted.

Her other choice was the standing stones of Shervage Wood. It was one of the few places that she was absolutely sure that had been touched by a human's magic. If there was anywhere she could make a deal with a fae or something else that might play gentle with a novice druid like her, it was here.

Lowering herself to the ground, she felt Morgan take off to stand guard over the proceedings. It was now or never.

Just as she had in the other woods, she let herself reach out and become like a tree. Imaginary roots dug and twisted into the dirt, reaching out and out to keep her firmly grounded in this place. And just like a tree, she wanted to drink up drips and drops of the magic around her, to make herself part of the greater world around her.

Is there anyone here?, she called out as loudly as she could when her words were entirely silent. Is there anyone who can hear me? Anyone… Does anyone want to make a deal?

No one answered her. That was not a surprise; for all that the stories mentioned deal-makers popping up within the first few seconds, she did not expect that to be the case. It was more reasonable to wait a few minutes, even an hour, before giving up any hope or dread that her own personal Rumpelstiltskin had stood her up.

The seconds and minutes ticked by, just her and Morgan and the enchanted memorial to the killing of the Gurt Wurm. Finally she let go of the sigh that had building in her chest. Making a deal, a trade, was clearly not in the cards.

Plan A was a bust. What about Plan B?

The precious lens had sat in her cupped hand for the last hour or so, but now she pulled it closer to her chest and laid her other hand overtop. Transformation was her only option now.

Okay, Hazel, she told herself. You have the lens. Time to turn it into a full set of glasses.

It was hard to imagine just what her glasses looked like in complete detail, mostly because she had never been able to examine them except in the mirror when she was wearing them, but she pictured them as well as she could. Would this even work? She knew changing one thing into another was possible since both folk stories and Aunt Petunia's memories of her mother told her it was, but none of the strange magical things that had occurred around her growing up had ever been one thing changing into another. That was one of many pieces of magic whose 'feel' she did not know.

Still, just because she had never felt it before was not a reason she should not give it a try. She knew it was possible; that was the hardest part. In her mind, she watched the oblong lens shift in shape and color, stretching out and curling around itself into a pair of glasses identical to the one from which she took it. She wanted it to change, needed it.

Lifting her left hand, she felt what was in her hand. It was not a new set of frames, that was for sure.

Come on. Work!

She kept imagining what she wanted to happen, and with every attempt she became more and more frustrated. Under normal circumstances, this would have even been a good thing – she already knew that anger served as a useful if unreliable fuel for her spells – but the madder she got, the harder time she had focusing on the image of her glasses.

After several minutes, she had to accept what was right in front of her. This was not happening.

Hazel blew out a harsh breath between her lips, the breath coming out almost as a raspberry, and leaned back to prop herself up with her hands behind her. Great. She was stuck with one functional lens, and even if her broken glasses had not been found and thrown away already, she did not trust that her fixing spell would not melt her good lens. She could have kept the glasses she had and actually been able to see a little bit, but not with what she had left.

Maybe… maybe transformation magic was not in her capabilities. Not yet, at least. Aunt Petunia's memories included watching her mother change a teacup into a mouse, but her mother had been older than she was in the memory, already a teenager. It might become something she could do later on, but that did nothing to solve her problem of how she was meant to see now.

Her fingers dug into the thick, strong grass, and her worried scowl softened and became thoughtful. Or maybe she was going about this the wrong way. She had proven to herself with her meditations and her experiments that her magic was deeply connected to nature. She herself did not have the power to change her glasses' lens, but did she have to do it all by herself?

She pushed herself back into a sitting position and let her 'roots' dig into the earth once again. I need help, she told anything around her that might be able to hear her. The grass beneath her bum, the standing stones around her, the branches of the trees overhead. I can't do this on my own, and if I can't see, I can't do anything. I have this— She held out the lens. —but it isn't enough on its own. I need something, anything, to give me a hand. Please.

Her plea, her begging, out for all of nature to hear and reply if it wished, she closed her eyes and let her senses stop focusing on what she wanted to happen. She needed to listen now, if only to know if anything was willing to help.

Soft gusts of wind whispered as they blew.

Wings of birds flapped.

Branches creaked and moved.

Insects buzzed and hummed in the distance.

Blades of grass scraped against each other.

Upright stones grumbled.

And something swirled behind her.

Hazel kept breathing steadily as this something, this unknown, brushed ever so gently around her as it twisted first around her chest and then pushed itself higher almost imperceptibly against her head. The weightless entity rolled down her back and then slithered along her arm. A faint tinkling, like little bells in the distance, was audible just above her hand.

Quick as a blink, the lens was taken from her hand.

The sudden loss caused her to open her eyes and look around, but she could see nothing around her. Not even that she could not see anything with great detail; there was nothing and no one within the stone circle besides herself. She closed her hand to prove to herself that the lens was gone, and then she ran her hands through the grass just to make sure she had not dropped it. That was likewise fruitless.

The lens was just gone.

You wanted a deal-maker, she reminded herself as she closed her eyes again. This is lots better than a creepy old man walking up to you. At least this… whatever it is… only came around when you asked for help.

…I hope it comes back.

Putting her concerns aside for the moment, she focused again on the feeling of nature all around her and kept her hand stretched out. If the thingy really had stolen her lens, there was no chance of getting it back. But if it was trying to help, or if it had taken the lens in exchange for something else? She wanted to be in the right frame of mind to interact with it.

Long, boring minutes passed in silence, and still she waited. Just as she was wondering for the umpteenth time how long she was willing to wait, something rustled her hair. It did not feel like a hand, more like a breeze stirring the strands, but simple wind could not go back and forth as quickly as that had. The not-hand departed, and she held her breath—

Something bonked her in the face.

Her eyes popped open again only for another wave of tinkling to quickly fade away behind her. She twisted her head to catch as good a glimpse as she could, but nothing was there. What was present, though, was something that had fallen into her left hand. Her fingers ran around the surface, and what they told her was that she was holding a circle of something. Almost breathlessly she lifted it up to her right eye and looked through it.

The standing stones in front of her were clear and crisp, just with a very faint lavender-ish tint laying over everything.

Yes! Yes, yes, yes! Hazel hopped to her feet and turned her head this way and that, looking at how clear everything was again. Morgan, I can see!

Her friend twittered his own excitement.

Glancing about the stones again, she yelled as loudly as she could, Thank you! Thank you so, so much! I can't even tell you how grateful I am. Nothing replied, but that was not unexpected. Waving Morgan to join her, she jumped again with joy—

—and landed back in the optical shop next to her backpack.

Okay, okay, okay. Next step, next step. I need to put this in something where I can wear it and not constantly hold it up to my eye. Almost skipping over to a nearby mirror, she looked at her new lens. It was indeed faintly purple, almost as if it had been carved from a piece of crystal rather than glass or plastic, and it was wider than her lens had been. It would be more at home as a monocle rather than in a pair of glasses. Too bad those went out of fashion about a century before.

Still, the idea of a monocle would not leave her, and she looked around the store again. On that wall of empty frames were several that were metal and contained round frames. Some of them even looked large enough to hold her new lens.

…Surely it couldn't be too hard to modify one of them into something appropriate for a single lens. Could it?

Searching the store, she eventually found a pair of thick, stubby scissors, and then it was a matter of testing out the different frames until she found one that looked like it would fit best. She wrapped both hands around the handles of the scissors and squeezed as tight as she could until the frame went snap and fell apart in two pieces. The larger piece went on her face with the crystal in front, and she looked at her reflection again.

What she saw made her sigh. The little metal bridge above her nose that held the nose pads just looked stupid, and a quick shake of her head made the partial frame go flying off. That was not going to work. She did not want to chance breaking her only means of sight yet again. Which also ruled out monocles, she realized, since those looked like they were even easier to have fall out.

What to do?

She reached down and picked up the cut-up frame and twirled it in her right hand while the left still held the crystal to her eye. Glasses were out of the question, a monocle would not work, so what was she going to do? How was she going to hold this crystal lens on her face where she had both hands available to do what she needed to do?

Catching sight of her reflection again, an idea wormed its way into her head.

Looking through her crystal only occasionally, she went back to work, this time with the half of the frame she had put aside as scrap. The shears went snip again, cutting off the leg right next to the frame, and then a third time to cut the circle open. She popped the fake lens out and fitted the crystal in place. Good enough, and the little bit of extra room from the frame being just the tiniest bit too big was actually perfect for her plan. She dug into her backpack again and pulled out a shoestring, the twin to the one she had tied around the nail dangling from her neck. One end went around one side of the frame, the other went around the other, and after a few adjustments she slotted the crystal in place with only a little bit of effort. Green lightning, the only clear thing in her field of view, crackled and snapped, and then she was done.

She picked up her project and held it up to her face. As soon as her eyes landed on her reflection, she could not hold the giggles in. This looks so dumb, she told Morgan while looking more intently at her reflection. Rather than chance having the frame fall off, she had pinned the shoestring between the frame and the lens, leaving just enough room that she could slip the whole thing over her head. It was now more of an eyepatch than anything else, and combined with her uneven and scraggly hair that she needed to cut short again she looked like a young mad scientist about to play with her first chemistry set.

The colorful bird hopped over and gave her a burst of worried song.

She waved off his concern. It's fine. I mean, yes it looks silly as can be, but it doesn't matter to me whether I look silly or not. Who is going to care? What matters is that I can see, and this won't come off. Giving the two ends of the shoestring a quick tug, she pulled them back and carefully tied them to the headband portion of string to make them stop dangling. Another look at her work, and she gave herself a nod.

Was it the perfect solution? Absolutely not. Would it do? Yes it would. And, she noticed after rolling her eyes to check if she could still see clearly when she looked around, the vision out of her one good eye might even be a little wider than it had been when she wore mundane glasses. That would help when all she saw out of her left eye were still just blurs.

Through the windows she could see the sun beginning to set. She had not thought she spent that much time out in the woods. It's only the middle of March, she thought to herself after checking the calendar that hung from the wall. That means I have just under a month until I need to be in Derbyshire. I don't want to miss it, but it won't take a month to get there. A week, week and a half to be on the safe side.

She nodded to herself. She had two weeks for sure with nothing she needed to do, and she was in a big city with a good-sized library nearby. Maybe it was time for a bit of a break to relax. She could afford it.


The second scene went in a VERY different direction than I had planned. I guess after powerful fae and then literal gods showed up in my stories, the minor spirits decided they wanted their turn in the spotlight. How that's going to change things moving forwards, I do not know but am a little nervous about.

I did a bit of digging into the details of how the NHS's vision coverage worked back in the 1980s into early 1990, but I couldn't find a whole lot. As such, Hazel's thoughts on how Petunia bought her glasses may not be totally accurate. I hope you can all forgive me.

Relatedly, my headcanon has always been that Harry is farsighted. Mostly because the description of what he sees without his glasses doesn't match my own experience of being nearsighted.

 

[The Game]

Okay, this took a bit, but here I go:

He had a headache.

Of course, 'He' had a name, but he was also an Unspeakable, and as he was currently in his working hours, the only ones who knew his name was his peers in the same profession, and his superiors, and even then, it wouldn't be spoken by any of them unless they were outside working hours, which could vary depending on what issue he was handling. The usual research on what the common witch and wizard regarded as 'forbidden arts' (mostly due to their lethality towards their practitioners, the world around them, and on rare occasions, the fabric of reality) took some twelve hours. When his work-day wasn't being taken up by an experiment on how to weaponize 'Love' or somesuch, he could be found in the library of the Department of Mysteries, reading whatever happened to catch his fancy, usually, this lasted for about half the time. At the moment he had an eye on an interesting tome that he was looking forward to completing, containing speculation concerning how magic might or might not work in other planets, using the Muggle's Moon Landing as an inspiration for his musings.

Of course, sometimes, things came up. Events that took a considerable amount of time to solve, sometimes days, sometimes weeks. It hadn't happened in more than half a century, but he could remember that the last 'Event' involved a patch of Devil's Snare that some completely and utterly brain-damaged baboon had decided to alter so that, not only would it no longer fear sunlight, it had the capacity to uproot itself from its origin point and drag its mass elsewhere. The incident reports he'd read about it made him feel pity for the Unspeakables, Aurors, and Obliviators that had to take care of the mess.

And, as his headache could attest, Hazel Potter arriving at Hogwarts as she did was most certainly an 'Event'.

His department had asked Dumbledore about her whereabouts several times over the years, but he didn't say anything beyond 'She is in a safe location'. He understood the need for secrecy. The Department of Mysteries had been infiltrated once, after all, and one could never know who was a sympathizer of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, but at some point, it became rather annoying to be stonewalled in such a manner when it came to the location and wellbeing of the one who had saved Magical Britain.

Well, the one who had saved Magical Britain twice.

In retrospect, it all started a few months before Hazel arrived at Hogwarts. He had been one of the three Unspeakables who had met with the Headmaster regarding some students who showed promise and might make good Unspeakables in the future, and someone had asked after the Potter girl's whereabouts. Dumbledore gave a light chuckle and reassurances as he usually did, but they all noticed that he had twitched. They interpreted it as annoyance at the, now ten years worth of inquires regarding the girl, and moved on. Perhaps they should have suspected that Dumbledore may have been lying, and had no idea of where the girl was or what she was doing.

Then the girl had reappeared, as expected, as it was known that she would be attending Hogwarts soon. Contrary to his expectations, however, he and several other Unspeakables had been called by Dumbledore. When they had arrived at his office in Hogwarts a month before classes were supposed to start, they were surprised to see a very tired looking Albus Dumbledore talking to a... human? Girl? It was definitely Hazel Potter, but there were several abnormalities that he had immediately identified and begun categorizing.

The first was the dozen little motes of light that seemed to be dancing all around the office but always returned to orbit the girl at some point. At first, he thought that the girl had enough control of her magic to cast a variant of Lumos to amuse herself before coming to Hogwarts, but the control necessary for the display that had greeted his eyes couldn't be achieved by a girl that, at the time, was busy petting a completely mundane bird, probably her pet. Their movements were too complex, they were reacting to the environment, to each other, and they also seemed to produce an odd tinkling sound every so often. It almost sounded like laughter.

It was when The-Girl-Who-Lived turned towards them that he noticed everything else that was wrong about her. She seemed to be wearing some kind of eyepatch with a slight lavender-colored lens instead of an actual patch. A closer examination revealed it to be a crystal of some kind, perhaps magical in nature. Her eyes were green, this alone was relatively rare, but there seemed to be a strange but subtle glow to them that he didn't like. In his experience, when something glowed when and where it shouldn't, it was best to draw wands and take cover. Then her ears came to his notice, ears that would be more at home on the head of a goblin or a house-elf. They were approximately five centimeters longer than a regular human's ear. They tapered backward and upwards, becoming a fine tip that poked through the back of her messy hair. Hair that carried the distinct smell of tree leaves. Her skin was pale, paler than even the palest purebloods, but not as pale as You-Know-Who is said to have been in the months before his death. And then she smiled at them. Her fangs weren't anywhere near as sharp and noticeable as a vampire's but were definitely sharper than any humans. And that was when he noticed her body language.

The human mind is a very complex mechanism. It can pick up on a great many things that a person cannot do so consciously. One of these things, one of the most important even, is human body language. How someone would sway a little when they stood in place as to not topple over. How the eye would blink without input. How the cheeks would hitch upwards for a moment when hearing something humorous. Fiddling fingers, tapping feet, and more. That's without counting the small movements that are almost imperceptible to the human eye. Even when asleep, the human body is always moving. The Potter girl wasn't moving.

That was the only explanation as to why Hazel Potter seemed to radiate a wrongness that he commonly associated with mannequins and statues that were well made enough to be almost lifelike, but couldn't quite close the gap between human and non-human, causing the subconscious mind to start mislabeling the object in question, hopping from human to non-human every time it spotted a new characteristic to analyze.

Silently, he and the other Unspeakables turned towards Dumbledore, looking for an explanation. Which he and the girl gave.

As the girl's last living relative, Petunia Dursley née Evans was legally obliged to take the girl in, and according to Dumbledore, very few knew that she existed at all. Sending her there and warding the house was understandable. But apparently, and Dumbledore declared he was not aware, Potter's relatives were of the opinion that magic was 'freakish', and the best way to 'treat' it, was by treating her like a house-elf, at best. Once the outrage had passed, the girl took over the explanation.

The Unspeakables were surprised at how much control over her magic she must have, seeing as she learned Apparition at nine years old, and that was ignoring her being a talented, nay, instinctual Legilimens at the age of six. And then Hazel started telling them about her efforts to decipher her magic. Some chuckles were had at the thought of trying to learn magic through muggle fiction of all things, but the results couldn't be denied, but then... well, she started talking about her search of magical places.

Hence the source of his headache. The undecipherable sealing array inside Glastonbury Tor, and its purpose.

A small chime rang out signaling that it was time to rest. He turned away from his section feeling relieved that he was perhaps a fifth of the way to figuring out what the twenty square centimeter section he had been assigned to was supposed to be. It was just a part of the three square meters he was currently responsible for, but thinking of his section as several smaller parts made him feel better. He slowly, painfully slowly, willed the magic carpet he was laying on to move. He shuddered a little at the thought of having to do this while on a broom. An embargo on magic carpets wouldn't stop the Unspeakables from fulfilling their duty.

It had taken a day of testing to confirm that magic cast inside the spherical 'room' wouldn't disrupt the array, and even then, they were limited to very simple spells, just in case, as the wrong rune being smudged just a little could doom them. His section was part of the ceiling, so he had been laying on his back for the past nine hours, looking at a small part of what had to be, by far, the most complex set of wards to have ever been put to British stone. He carried with him his wand, only to cast the simpler scanning spells used by Curse-breakers, one, in particular, was only used as a training exercise, barring very specific circumstances; he also had a pile of parchment and an Auto-Fill-No-Spill Quill and Inkpot, to jot down all his notes, observations, and speculations. The pot itself was magically connected to a very large cauldron outside, filled with ink so that the inkpot would refill itself without needing to move from his position.

As he floated towards the entrance he turned to look to the other three Unspeakables in the room with him, ignoring how his neck joints popped a little. They had started their scanning outwards from the door, and over the course of the last day, they had made slow but steady progress. After dividing the room into sections, he had started working upwards, the others, downwards and to the sides, each on a flying carpet to make sure that they never touched the surface of the array. None of them looked too hurried to leave just yet. His opposite was laying down on her front, meticulously scribbling on a piece of parchment before turning it around, only to realize that the other side was also used and take a new one. The other two weren't much different, but the one who had taken the left side looked about to fall asleep. He'd have to remind him to take some Pepper-Up potion or get some sleep soon. They were perhaps a third of the way done and they all needed to be at their best. As he reached the tunnel entrance, got off the carpet, and, after picking up the sheaf of filled parchment, walked outside.

A dozen of red-robed Aurors greeted him. Well, not greeted, more like acknowledged while casting scanning spells to make sure that he was still himself. One could never be too careful. Ignoring the Aurors, he reflected on the knowledge that he and the others were slowly gaining from examining the array. Those first few hours had been quite exciting, as they slowly realized that this discovery would advance the field of Ancient Runes and Arithmancy the same way the creation of the Philosopher's stone had advanced the field of Alchemy. But little by little, the fear had begun to creep in as they advanced and the sheer power, complexity, reach, and breadth of the workings they were examining were revealed. How mighty were the beings beyond that such a ward had to be created? If they got loose, would the modern magical world prevail? Dumbledore was the greatest wizard alive but even he had been utterly stumped when it came to figuring out the array. Would he be the equal of whoever had cast it? Who had created it in the first place?

All these questions would likely have no answer for a long time, however, as there were more immediate questions in the minds of those involved in this. How had all these places been forgotten? How many others have been forgotten? The Road to the Greenwild was just the most important, and the most critical to figure out, as far as they knew. And that was exactly the problem. As far as they knew. Thinking of how much farther they had left to go, he felt a twinge of jealousy towards the wizards and witches working for the Department of Regulation of Magical creatures and Aurors out in the woods trying to identify all the types of spirits Hazel Potter had bargained with or trying to corral the Shadow-Apparating packs of Hellhounds. Especially the ones tasked with analyzing Hazel Potter herself. Just because the Great Fae were barred from Earth didn't mean that all the fae were and according to the girl, she had been taught magic by one of the most powerful fae left on Earth. All their experience with such beings was limited to garden fairies, redcaps, and house-elves, and only the elves had any magic worth mentioning. He hadn't been part of the demonstration of the girl's magic, but he had heard rumors that had sprung up after it. Of what the, in his opinion wasted, magic of the house-elves could do when properly put to use by a witch. Last he had heard of the Unspeakables tasked with examining Hazel, they had been grumbling about Potter being uncooperative about sharing her teachings and demanding something of equal value. Of course, as an Unspeakable, he knew of the potential inherent in the kind of magic Hazel wielded and seeing as she was the only witch alive who could make proper use of that potential, that made her knowledge... well, it was safe to say that they wouldn't be getting the know-hows of her magic for a very long time, if ever.

As the other Unspeakables made their way out of the room one by one, each with their own pile of parchment, to compare notes with the others, he couldn't help but think about Potter. The elfin ears, the twinkling followers, the fangs, the smell of leaves, the wrongness, the magic...equal value...

As he sat down at a table and began trying to put together the four latest sets of runic arrays, arithmantic equations, and observations, along with the other three Unspeakables he wondered... What, exactly, had the girl offered that was of equal value to the complete teachings of the magic of the fae?

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
And here it is! I feel like I might have exaggerated the complexity of the whole place, but looking it over, I feel that it went better than I expected. Also, I didn't mention any other magical places because, uhh spoilers, I guess? and also because I'm not really familiar with British folklore, so I used the places we've seen Hazel do magic stuff in. So @Silently Watches , how was it?

Edit: Hey, look at that! This is the 100th post on this thread!