"The moon is the reflection of your heart and moonlight is the twinkle of your love."
There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery. The moon...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Everybody got up late on Boxing Day. The Gryffindor common room was much quieter than it had been lately, many yawns punctuating the lazy conversations. Hermione's hair was bushy again; she confessed to Harry that she had used liberal amounts of Sleekeazy's Hair Potion on it for the ball, "but it's way too much bother to do every day," she said matter-of-factly, scratching a purring Crookshanks behind the ears. On coming across Elara the first time, next morning, Harry felt his face burning. After last night's realizations, Harry looked at Elara in completely different light.
Ron and Hermione seemed to have reached an unspoken agreement not to discuss their argument. They were being quite friendly to each other, though oddly formal. Elara might or might not have given Ron a strict lecture. Ron and Harry wasted no time in telling Elara and Hermione about the conversation they had overheard between Madame Maxime and Hagrid, but Elara and Hermione both didn't seem to find the news that Hagrid was a half-giant nearly as shocking as Ron did.
''There's nothing wrong with that,'' Elara said with a raised eyebrow. ''Not all are horrible.''
"Well, I thought he must be," she said, shrugging. "I knew he couldn't be pure giant because they're about twenty feet tall. But honestly, all this hysteria about giants. Like Lara said, they can't all be horrible....It's the same sort of prejudice that people have toward werewolves....It's just bigotry, isn't it?"
Ron looked as though he would have liked to reply scathingly, but perhaps he didn't want another row, because he contented himself with shaking his head disbelievingly while Hermione wasn't looking.
It was time now to think of the homework they had neglected during the first week of the holidays. Everybody seemed to be feeling rather flat now that Christmas was over - everybody except Harry, that is, who was starting (once again) to feel slightly nervous.
The trouble was that February the twenty-fourth looked a lot closer from this side of Christmas, and he still hadn't done anything about working out the clue inside the golden egg. He therefore started taking the egg out of his trunk every time he went up to the dormitory, opening it, and listening intently, hoping that this time it would make some sense. He strained to think what the sound reminded him of, apart from thirty musical saws, but he had never heard anything else like it. He closed the egg, shook it vigorously, and opened it again to see if the sound had changed, but it hadn't. He tried asking the egg questions, shouting over all the wailing, but nothing happened. He even threw the egg across the room - though he hadn't really expected that to help.
Harry had not forgotten the hint that Cedric had given him, but couldn't understand it. He wished Cedric would have been a lot more explicit. He, Harry, had told Cedric exactly what was coming in the first task - and Cedric's idea of a fair exchange had been to tell Harry to take a bath. And so the first day of the new term arrived, and Harry set off to lessons, weighed down with books, parchment, and quills as usual, but also with the lurking worry of the egg heavy in his stomach, as though he were carrying that around with him too.
