O r p h a n ● Tom Riddle [Harry Potter Fanfiction]

➎ Cinq - Parlez-vous Francais?

I let out a sigh as I leaned back against my door; I doubted I'd be getting a personal visit anytime soon. Walking towards my sad excuse for a bed, I leant down and pulled back the loose board beneath it. The book was just as I had left it.

Pulling it up from the hidey-ho, I plopped down onto my bed, admiring the gold rose embossing on its spine as it lay on my lap. If books were people, this book was an elegant and powerful woman cloaked in black - a woman to be feared, but a woman whom the world yearned with curiosity for. I sighed with envy; she was a woman I strived to become.

I carefully turned over the cover, finding that the book held a lingering smell of lavender that wafted beneath your nose at each turning of a page. The first page held a single sentence in beautiful cursive: notre avenir est plein de secrets, presque aussi complet que notre passé

French.

I groaned.

My mother always boasted about French being the "Language of Love", and I agreed. It was a beautiful language, and I knew it well, but I was hardly fluent.

I turned over the page. It was blank. Flipping over the other pages I found them to be blank as well... was this a mistake? Had my mother given me the wrong book?

Just as I was about to close the book in defeat: magic happened.

In the middle of the page I watched a sentence be written in by some invisible hand/pen/quill/???

Newly scribbled in, the page was no longer blank, and it now read:

Welcome, Master Vivienne Celia Rosewood

I sat wide-eyed and bewildered.

How may I help you?

One would have thought I'd been turned to stone! I sat frozen, and unmoving. The book was... communicating with me. I began to fluster about: What do I do? Do I just ask? Can it hear me?Where do I begin?

"H-... Hello" I spoke with a shaky little voice, feeling a bit silly as I sat alone in my room.... talking to a book.

Hello, Miss Rosewood.

With each new sentence it replaced the other, not leaving any trace of what was previously said.

I took a deep breath, I needed to focus, and keep an open mind.

I became more confident, I believed in my mother, I trust her, so I would have to trust the book and it's powers... whatever powers it may have besides literacy.

"What..." I thought about what I was going to say before continuing, "What are you?"