Serpent's Embrace | A Sebastian Sallow Story

Chapter One: The Family Squib

 Hogwarts could be a place of warm welcome and celebration, inviting and homey, with its endless portraits, vast and beautiful grounds and impossibly endlessly intriguing classes. There was always something in the air that surrounded the idea of the school, ever since Madeline Nott was a small child. Endless imagination of the things she could learn, of the things she was desperate to learn, filled her head nightly on account of the stories her mother and father shared with her from the time she could understand words and had first stolen her mothers wand in the dead of night, attempting to cast spells beyond her years.

This trait had started when she was old enough to walk, slipping into her parents room and taking the wand from her mothers bedside table when the moon had long since been in the air. Her father, a Slytherin wizard, admired her cunning, her mother, a Ravenclaw witch, admired her desire for knowledge. It wasn't long until spell books would vanish from the dining table, and her parents would find her hiding under her blankets, reading by candlelight, practicing wand movements for spells they themselves had only mastered in their adulthood.

Her parents knew she'd be a powerful witch when her time came. Encouraged the practice, grinning broadly at their little girl, who's dark hair curled in ringlets just as her mothers did. The Black family genes were strong, evidenced by the pale, black haired girl before them. Every outing the family took her parents bought more books, nodding vigorously as she devoured them all, determined to be the best when it finally came to be her turn at Hogwarts.

Though, no matter how old she got, the spells never  worked.

Her parents insisted that it was just because of the use of another witches wand, and that surely her magic would show itself in all its beautiful glory when they ventured to Hogsmead for her shopping for first year.

Still, year after year, she tried. Stealing her mothers wand in the dead of night, and after years of failed attempts started stealing her fathers wand. Not a single spark, no accidental magic in young unbridled, uncontrollable ways. For years she had shown no signs of being magically gifted in the slightest of ways. She didn't miss when her mother would whisper in the night to her father, assuming she was asleep, that she was growing worried about the lack of magic in her daughter.

It only made her that much more determined to show her ability with magic.

It only made her that much more determined to be the strongest witch the world had known.

The weight of being the first Squib in the family should never have been placed on a child's shoulders. Her parents had attempted to keep their conversations to themselves, in the dead of night, to spare her feelings. But try as they might, the walls were thin, and they didn't know she stayed up nightly to listen to them talk about her and her lack of magic.

About what a disgrace she would be if she didn't show magic soon.

While the days had counted down until her eleventh birthday, pages of the calendar she had made herself being ripped away impatiently day after day, running outside into the small hamlet in which they lived every morning waiting for the owl post.

This was the final chance she had to prove to her parents, who's smiles didn't quite reach their eyes when her birthday approached, that she wasn't going to be the outcast of the family, and the death of a pureblood line. She'd never be allowed near anything to do with the Wizarding World after she turned eighteen.

There was only a few days left.

Surely the letter would come. There was no other option.

But eleven came.

And eleven went.

No owl extending her invitation to Hogwarts, offering her acceptance. No owl telling her that it was just the fact that she had indeed been using the wrong wand all these years.