Risen From The Ashes || A Clare Siobhan/Harry Potter Crossover

Chapter One

SEVEN MONTHS LATER

"Attention, Spellcasters! You have ten minutes to complete your potions! I repeat, ten minutes remaining!"

Raven sighed heavily, rocking back on her rickety wooden stool. In half an hour of potion making, she had not touched their potion once. Beside her, her best friend Nita Collins was bent intently over their bubbling concoction, only looking up to check the ticking clock on the dungeon wall. Without tearing her eyes away from her handiwork, Nita reached out absent-mindedly and pushed Raven's chair back onto four legs.

"Rae, if you're not prepared to help me, can you at least sit still for a few minutes so I can concentrate?"

"Hey!" Raven cried indignantly. "I would help you, if only you'd let me!"

Determined to show Nita that she wasn't completely useless, Raven bent over the recipe book to read the instructions, before seizing a bottle of salamander blood from Nita's ingredients kit and reaching out to tip it over the cauldron. Immediately, Nita's hand shot out and seized Raven's wrist, wrenching the bottle from her grasp. 

"What? I was just trying to help!"

Nita sighed heavily and shot Raven her best I-just-can't-put-up-with-you-sometimes look. "Did you read the instructions first?"

"Yes!" Raven pointed to a line in the recipe. "Add two drops of salamander blood and two valerian roots," she read aloud. 

"But I hadn't finished the seven anticlockwise stirs!" Nita seized the book and gestured to the line above the one Raven had read. 

Raven slumped back in her seat. "Oh," she muttered sheepishly. "I'll leave you to it, then."

A loud snort of laughter came from behind them. Raven wheeled round to find herself looking at the sneering face of Nanami Okawe. 

"Probably for the best," she hissed under her breath, so only Raven could hear her. "Nita doesn't want the worst alchemist in the whole Realm ruining her potion."

Raven resisted the temptation to make the Japanese girl's potion explode in her face. She and Nanami had been enemies ever since they had met at age nine. Raven's godmother, the famous movie star Summer Callery-Aiken, had been marrying Nanami's brother Seiji, and Nanami had hated both Summer and Raven on sight. It was for this reason that Raven had been horrified to find that Nanami's parents had gone back to Japan, and that she was to be staying with Raven, Nita and Raven's father Francisco for a few months, and even more horrified that Nanami had followed Raven and Nita into the Magic Realm and decided to become a Spellcaster. 

Trying to keep a hold of her temper, Raven shot back, "Well, at least our potion doesn't look like a bowl of grey goop!"

Nanami was about to retort when Grace Anasi, the sage of Alchemy, called out, "Time's up, alchemists. Please step away from your cauldrons."

Raven got to her feet and pushed the stool against their cauldron. She waited in silence for Grace to reach their potion, ignoring Nami's whispered taunts from behind her. 

Grace stepped up to their cauldron and lifted the ladle, examining the frothing purple liquid. "Excellent, Nita!" she said proudly. "Not that there was much competition, of course, but we have our winner!"