"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...
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Harry and Elara felt as though they were carrying some kind of talisman inside their chest over the following two weeks, a glowing secret that supported them through Umbridge's classes and even made it possible for them to smile blandly as they looked into her horrible bulging eyes. The two and the DA were resisting her under her very nose, doing the very thing she and the Ministry most feared, and whenever they were supposed to be reading Wilbert Slinkhard's book during her lessons the two dwelled instead on satisfying memories of their most recent meetings, remembering how Neville had successfully disarmed Hermione, how Colin Creevey had mastered the Impediment Jinx after three meetings' hard effort, how Asher Carter had produced such a good Reductor Curse that he had reduced the table carrying all the Sneakoscopes to dust.
Harry was finding it almost impossible to fix a regular night of the week for the DA meetings, as they had to accommodate three separate: team's Quidditch practices, which were often rearranged due to bad weather conditions; but Harry was not sorry about this; he had a feeling that it was probably better to keep the timing of their meetings unpredictable. If anyone was watching them, it would be hard to make out a pattern.
Hermione and Elara soon devised a very clever method of communicating the time and date of the next meeting to all the members in case they needed to change it at short notice, because it would look suspicious if people from different Houses were seen crossing the Great Hall to talk to each other too often. The two girls gave each of the members of the DA a fake Galleon (Ron became very excited when he first saw the basket and was convinced they were actually giving out gold).
''You see the numerals around the edge of the coins?'' Hermione said, holding one up for examination at the end of their fourth meeting. The coin gleamed fat and yellow in the light from the torches. ''On real Galleons that's just a serial number referring to the goblin who cast the coin. On these fake coins, though, the numbers will change to reflect the time and date of the next meeting.''
''The coins will grow hot when the date changes,'' Elara continued, ''so if you're carrying them in a pocket you'll be able to feel them. We take one each, and when Harry sets the date of the next meeting he'll change the numbers on his coin, and because Hermine and I have put a Protean Charm on them, they'll all change to mimic his.''
A blank silence greeted Elara words. She looked around at all the faces upturned to her and Hermione, rather disconcerted.
''Well--we thought it was a good idea,'' she said uncertainly, ''I mean, even if Umbridge asked us to turn out our pockets, there's nothing fishy about carrying a Galleon, is there?
''But... well, if you don't want to use them--'' Hermione started but was cut off.
''You both can do a Protean Charm?'' said Terry Boot.
Hermione and Elara exchanged a look, ''Um, yeah?''
''But that's... that's NEWT standard, that is,'' he said weakly.
