A Desperate Prophecy (When Magic Interferes)

The Trials and Tribulations of a First Year

On the first day of classes, the Third of September, Kane Wyllt had woken in his new dorm excited and hopeful for the day to come. He was confident his aunt's lessons in the month he'd spent with her before school had started would come in handy that day, helping him get through the day without getting overwhelmed. But oh, how wrong he was.

There were a hundred and forty-two staircases in Hogwarts Castle: wide, sweeping ones; narrow, rickety ones; some that led somewhere different on a Friday; some with a vanishing step halfway up that you had to remember to jump. Then there were doors that wouldn't open unless you asked politely, or tickled them in exactly the right place, and doors that weren't really doors at all, but solid walls just pretending. It was also very hard to remember where anything was, because it all seemed to move around a lot. The people in the portraits kept going to visit each other and Kane was quite sure the coats of armour could walk. The four Founders' heiresses didn't seem to have such a hard time with directions, having an innate sense of where they needed to be and how to get there. The others didn't share in this comfort, getting lost multiple times a day and needing help to get to and from classes.

The ghosts didn't help, either. It was always a nasty shock when one of them glided suddenly through a door you were trying to open. Nearly Headless Nick was always happy to point new Gryffindors in the right direction, but Peeves the poltergeist was worth two locked doors and a trick staircase if you met him when you were late for class, curtesy of the Marauders Kane was sure (from the stories his aunt told him, the three of them could've taken down the whole school if they'd wanted to). He would drop waste-paper baskets on your head, pull rugs from under your feet, pelt you with bits of chalk or sneak up behind you, invisible, grab your nose and screech, 'GOT YOUR CONK!'. (The Weasley Twins also did not help, always there to encourage the poltergeist's mischief.)

Even worse than Peeves, if that was possible, was the caretaker, Argus Filch. Seamus Finnigan and Ron managed to get on the wrong side of him on their first day. Filch found them trying to force their way through a door which unluckily turned out to be the entrance to the out-of-bounds corridor on the third floor. He wouldn't believe they were lost, was sure they were trying to break into it on purpose and was threatening to lock them in the dungeons when they were rescued by Professor Quirrell, who was passing.

Filch owned a cat called Mrs Norris, a scrawny, dust-coloured creature with bulging, lamp-like eyes just like Filch's. She patrolled the corridors alone. Break a rule in front of her, put just one toe out of line, and she'd whisk off for Filch, who'd appear, wheezing, two seconds later. Filch knew the secret passageways of the school better than anyone, except perhaps the Weasley twins, who Kane knew were the current owners of The Marauders Map, but don't ask how he knew this. He had his ways (AKA Ginny told him once while they were walking to class when he'd asked). Because of this, Filch could pop up as suddenly as any of the ghosts. The students all hated him and it was the dearest ambition of many to give Mrs Norris a good kick, especially those of Slytherin and Gryffindor House, who were known to be hated by the caretaker and his demon cat. (It was one of the only things the two houses agreed on.)

And then, once you had managed to find them, there were the lessons themselves. There was a lot more to magic, as Kane, Hadrian and Hermione quickly found out, than waving your wand and saying a few funny words. (Being the only three of their group to be raised among muggles meant that they'd only had a month to understand things, and that had clearly not been enough, even with all the books the three had read).

They had to study the night skies through their telescopes every Wednesday at midnight and learn the names of different stars and the movements of the planets (Leo and Draco had an unfairly easy time in this, as the Black Family taught their children about this as part of their Pre-Hogwarts lessons). Three times a week they went out to the greenhouses behind the castle to study Herbology, with a stout little witch called Professor Sprout, where they learnt how to take care of all the strange plants and fungi and found out what they were used for (Neville and Elena were known as the stars of the class among their year, already known as prodigies in the class with their natural talent at it).