July 1993
I was elbow-deep in the garden, of all things — trying to work out whether the strange silvery shrub in my front garden was decorative or actively dangerous, a question my NEWT-level Herbology knowledge hadn’t quite prepared me to answer on sight — when I became aware I was being watched.
Not in a threatening way.
In a way that felt, oddly, like being observed by something that had wandered in out of curiosity rather than intent, the way a cat investigates an open door.
I turned around and found a girl, maybe eleven or twelve, standing just inside my garden gate with an expression of serene, unhurried interest, wearing what I was fairly sure were radish earrings.
“You’re not a Nargle,” she said, by way of greeting, sounding faintly disappointed.
“I thought you might be, the way the light bends around your house.
But you’ve got shoes on, so probably not.”
I decided, on the spot, that I liked her enormously.
“I’m afraid not.
Just a person.
Sorry to disappoint.”
“That’s alright.
Most things are disappointing at first.” She tilted her head, considering the shrub I’d been examining.
“That’s Whisper-thorn.
It hums if you’re sad near it.
Daddy says it’s very rare, but I think it just likes people who listen.” She looked back at me, entirely unbothered by having wandered into a stranger’s garden.
“I’m Luna.
We live just past the Weasleys, over that way.” She pointed with total confidence in a direction that, as far as I could tell, was mostly trees.
“I’m glad to meet you, Luna.
I only moved in a few days ago.”
“I know.
Daddy felt it — a new sort of quiet in the wards, he said, which usually means somebody sensible has moved in, because loud people make loud wards.” She said this as though it were simple, established fact, the kind of thing everyone already knew.
“Are you sensible?”
“I’d like to think so.
I’m trying, anyway.”
“That’s the best anyone can do, really.” She wandered a few steps further into the garden, entirely at home, and crouched down to look more closely at the Whisper-thorn.
“It’s humming a little.
Not sad-humming.
Curious-humming.
That’s rarer.” She glanced up at me, matter-of-fact.
“You should come meet Daddy.
He’ll want to interview you for the paper.
Don’t worry, it’s usually not very embarrassing.”
I was still working out how to respond to that when I heard voices approaching from the lane — several of them, young, arguing cheerfully about something I couldn’t quite make out — and a moment later three more children appeared at my gate: a girl with vivid red hair who couldn’t have been older than twelve, and two boys, fifteen if they were a day, unmistakably twins, tall and grinning and radiating the specific energy of people who had appointed themselves in charge of investigating anything new in the neighbourhood.
“Told you there was someone here,” one of the twins said to the other, with the satisfaction of a man who’d won a bet.
“You didn’t tell me anything, you just walked faster than me,” said the other.
“Details.”
The girl rolled her eyes at both of them with the long-suffering patience of a younger sibling who’d had years of practice, then looked at me directly, friendly but appraising.
“Sorry — they wanted to come see who moved into the old Fenwick place.
I’m Ginny.
These two are my brothers, Fred and George.”
“Which is which is a secret we’re saving for someone who really earns it,” said the twin on the left, entirely straight-faced.
“He’s Fred,” said Luna, without looking up from the shrub.
Fred looked briefly betrayed.
“How does she always know?”
“I listen properly,” Luna said, which didn’t answer the question at all and somehow answered it completely.
I found myself grinning, genuinely delighted by the whole chaotic little parade of them.
“Well — you’re not wrong that I’m new.
Moved in a few days ago.
I’m setting up a shop in Diagon Alley, actually — enchanted items.”
That got their attention properly.
George — I was fairly sure it was George, though I made a private note not to bet money on it — leaned on the gate with sudden, genuine interest.
“What kind of enchanted items?”
I hesitated for exactly a second, then decided there was no good reason to be cagey with a group of children who’d walked over out of simple curiosity rather than suspicion.
“Come see, if you like.
I’ve got a couple of prototypes.”
That was, in retrospect, possibly the single most effective decision I made in my first week in this world, because within about ninety seconds I had two enthusiastic fifteen-year-old inventors examining my storage ring with the kind of focused, delighted intensity most people reserve for their own children, peppering me with questions about the anchoring charm and whether it could be scaled down further, whether it could be built into something other than a ring, whether — and this came from both of them at once, with an eerie unified excitement — it could be adapted to smuggle things past someone rather than just store them.
“That,” I said, laughing, “is a conversation for when I know you both a bit better and trust you not to immediately test it on a Ministry official.”
“Fair,” said Fred, entirely unoffended, already moving on to examine the glasses instead.
Ginny, meanwhile, had drifted over to stand near Luna by the Whisper-thorn, the two of them talking quietly about something that seemed to involve the shrub’s opinions on the weather, and I found myself simply watching the four of them for a moment — a stranger’s garden, a stranger’s shop-in-progress, and already it didn’t feel like I was performing a role.
It felt, disarmingly, like the beginning of something ordinary and good.
“You should come meet Mum,” Ginny said eventually, glancing back at me.
“She’ll want to know who’s moved in properly, not just second hand from us.
She worries about that sort of thing.”
“I’d like that, if she’s not busy.”
“She’s never not busy,” George said cheerfully, “but she’ll drop it all for a new neighbor.
Fair warning.”
●●
George had not been exaggerating.
The Burrow, when I finally saw it, was exactly the kind of house I’d have built if I’d had six more years and considerably less self-control than I’d shown Death across that table in the grey nowhere — stacked and lopsided and clearly held together as much by love as by magic, chickens wandering the yard with total confidence that they owned the place.
I’d barely gotten through the gate before a woman appeared in the doorway, wiping her hands on an apron, radiating the specific warmth of someone who had decided, on sight, that I needed feeding.
“So you’re the mystery next door,” she said, ushering me in before I’d properly finished introducing myself — I’d barely gotten as far as “Marcus” before she’d swept past it entirely.
“Molly Weasley.
Sit down, you look like you haven’t had a proper meal since you moved in, which I’d wager is exactly true.”
It was, in fact, exactly true, and I found myself sitting at a kitchen table that seated approximately fourteen people despite there being, as far as I could tell, seven Weasleys total, being fed something extraordinary involving potatoes while Molly extracted my entire life story with the gentle, unstoppable efficiency of a woman who’d raised seven children and considered polite deflection a personal challenge rather than a boundary.
I told her the broad shape of the truth — orphaned young, educated privately rather than at Hogwarts, here to set up shop in Diagon Alley — and watched something in her expression soften from suspicion into sympathy, which I felt faintly guilty about even as I let it happen.
Arthur came in partway through, delighted beyond reason to learn I was in the enchanted-items trade, and spent a solid twenty minutes asking increasingly specific questions about how the storage ring’s anchoring worked, questions I suspected he’d been saving up for exactly the right stranger to ask.
Two more Weasleys drifted in over the course of the meal, drawn, I suspected, by the smell of food rather than any particular curiosity about me.
The elder of the two introduced himself with a formality that stood out sharply against the rest of the household’s easy chaos — Percy, soon to be head boy shook my hand properly rather than simply nodding the way the twins had.
“You built a working expandable storage device at your age?” he said, once Arthur had finished extracting every detail of the anchoring charm he could think to ask for.
“Forgive me — I don’t mean that as an insult.
It’s simply that Extension Charm work of that stability usually takes Ministry-certified Charms Masters years to get right, and most of them are considerably older than you look.”
“I am actually a Ministry-Certified master in Enchanting,” I said, “sat the exam directly with the Department a few months back.
Technically that does require advanced Charms, Runes and Arithmancy.”
Percy’s expression sharpened at that.
“Sitting the Ministry examination without going through a training program first — that’s rarely done.
Which program prepared you for it, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Nothing formal enough to have a name you’d recognize,” I said.
“I studied on my own, and sat the Ministry’s exam directly, rather than going through one of the training courses.” Which was true enough not to feel like lying, and I watched him file that away with the slightly dissatisfied look of a person who liked answers to come with proper paperwork attached.
He asked two more careful, well-structured questions about certification and Ministry registration before Molly gently redirected him toward finishing his own plate, and I got the distinct sense I’d just been quietly assessed by someone who fully intended to look the matter up later out of pure thoroughness.
Well good luck to him.
I would be shocked if he could find a single fault with paperwork arranged by Death.
The younger boy, by contrast, said almost nothing at all — tall for his age, a smear of mud on one elbow, glancing up from his own plate only often enough to confirm the conversation hadn’t turned toward him.
“This is Ron,” Molly said, in the tone of a woman well practiced at introducing a child who wasn’t going to introduce himself.
Ron gave me a brief, not unfriendly nod, muttered something that might have been hello around a mouthful of potatoes, and went back to eating with the focused dedication of a boy who’d clearly decided grown-up conversation about Charms Masteries wasn’t worth interrupting a good meal for.
I didn’t push.
Some people warmed up on their own schedule, and I’d learned by now — Luna, Xenophilius, the twins — that everyone in this particular corner of the world eventually did.
It was Arthur, predictably, who steered the conversation somewhere considerably more interesting than credentials.
“You’ll have to forgive Percy, he can’t help himself around a new qualification,” he said, with the fond exasperation of a father who’d long since made peace with his son’s particular temperament.
“Now — enchanting for storage and anchoring, you said.
Tell me, does that sort of work ever cross over into transportation charms?
I only ask because I’ve got rather a lot of personal experience with one particular transportation problem.”
“Arthur,” Molly said, in a tone that suggested she knew exactly where this was going and disapproved on principle.
“It’s relevant, Molly, he’s in the trade.” Arthur turned back to me, entirely undeterred, practically radiating the same delight he’d shown over the ring’s anchoring.
“I may or may not have modified a Ford Anglia some years back.
Flying, invisibility booster, rather more boot space than the manufacturer intended.
Strictly for research purposes, of course, though it’s proven remarkably useful for the school run besides.” He said this with the specific pride of a man confessing to something he knew was faintly illegal and regretted nothing about.
“The anchoring on the extended boot space — did you use anything like your ring’s approach, or is a vehicle different enough that the theory doesn’t transfer?”
I found myself grinning, genuinely delighted by the question.
“Similar principle, if I understand the modification correctly — you’re still anchoring extra space to a fixed object and keeping it stable under motion, which is actually the harder version of the problem I solved.
A ring mostly just sits on a finger.
A car’s being thrown around constantly, which means the anchor has to be considerably more forgiving of sudden shifts than mine needs to be.”
“Exactly what I said to the fellow who sold me the anchoring components, and he looked at me like I’d grown a second head.” Arthur looked thoroughly vindicated.
“Molly thinks I should have left well enough alone.”
“I thinks several things about that car that, repeatedly, and will happily say them again,” Molly said, though there was more fondness than heat in it, “starting with the fact that it ended up wrapped around a Whomping Willow this past year and I’d rather not discuss the specifics at the table.”
Arthur laughed, entirely unrepentant, and spent a further quarter hour walking me through the modification in more detail than I suspected Molly had ever willingly sat through, delighted to finally have found someone who wanted to talk enchanting theory rather than simply ask when he intended to get rid of the thing.
By the time I left, stomach full and slightly overwhelmed in the specific way only the Weasley household seemed able to produce, I’d been informally adopted into whatever loose category of “family friend” the house apparently extended to anyone who sat still long enough to be fed.
●●
The Lovegoods’ house was, unsurprisingly, nothing at all like the Burrow — a tall, round tower of a building that looked like someone had built a chess rook and then decided it needed several more windows than architecturally advisable.
Xenophilius met me at the door already mid-sentence, as though our conversation had begun sometime before I’d arrived and I was simply catching up.
“—and of course the wards would feel different, wouldn’t they, if you’d built them yourself rather than inheriting them, there’s a particular texture to self-made wards, very few people notice it, but I do, and Luna does, obviously, Luna notices everything.” He blinked at me, apparently only now registering that I hadn’t actually said anything yet.
“You’re the new neighbor.
Wonderful.
Come in, come in, mind the umbrella stand, it bites if you’re rude to it.”
I minded the umbrella stand.
The inside of the house was cluttered in the specific way that suggested genuine enthusiasm rather than carelessness — strange instruments on every surface, a printing press visible through a doorway that I found myself eyeing with real professional interest, given my own plans for one.
Xenophilius talked, essentially without pause, about the Quibbler, about Crumple-Horned Snorkacks, about a theory involving Gringotts and moon cycles that I couldn’t quite follow but found charming rather than alarming, and somewhere in the middle of it I realized, with real warmth, that I liked him precisely as much as I’d liked his daughter — someone entirely unconcerned with performing sense for other people’s comfort.
“You should let me interview you properly, sometime,” he said, as I was leaving, entirely without guile.
“New shopkeepers are always interesting, and I have a nose for the ones who’ll matter later.
You’ve got the texture of someone who’ll matter later.”
“I’ll hold you to that,” I said, and meant it more than he probably realized.
I didn’t go straight home.
I sat instead on a low stone wall a short walk from the Lovegoods’ tower, evening settling in gold and unhurried around me, turning over something Luna had said to me hours earlier that I hadn’t quite let myself examine properly at the time.
You’re not a Nargle.
Said with total, unblinking sincerity, the way you’d remark on the weather.
I’d assumed, the way I suspected most people assumed, that it was simply a child’s invented creature, harmless nonsense dressed up as fact the way children’s imaginations often were.
But Luna hadn’t struck me, in either of our two encounters so far, as a child prone to inventing things carelessly.
Everything else she’d said had turned out to carry more truth in it than its strangeness suggested — the wards, the Whisper-thorn, the quiet, curious attention she paid to things other people walked straight past.
It seemed worth actually checking, rather than assuming.
I closed my eyes and reached for the ledger.
Are Nargles real?
The price came back almost trivially small, the kind of near-nothing cost the ledger reserved for questions with simple, well-established answers, and the answer itself arrived with a faint, almost amused clarity, as though the knowledge itself found the question a little charming.
Not as a species, no — no such creature existed, catalogued or otherwise, in any serious magizoological record.
But the perception behind the word wasn’t nothing.
Children with unusually strong latent magical sensitivity sometimes described a flickering, distracting awareness at the edge of their vision — motion that wasn’t quite motion, presence that wasn’t quite anything, particularly around objects or places carrying old or unstable enchantment.
Undeveloped mage sight, essentially: a real sensory capacity, rare and almost never properly trained, misfiring in a child’s mind into something with a face and a name because that was easier to hold onto than my eyes keep catching on something I can’t explain.
I sat with that for a long moment, feeling something shift quietly into place.
Luna wasn’t imagining things.
She was seeing something real, just without the framework to understand what it actually was, and nobody around her — however much they loved her — had the knowledge to tell her otherwise.
Is the Crumple-Horned Snorkack real?
I asked next, mostly to be thorough, already fairly certain of the answer.
No.
Nothing that resembled one existed, and nothing in the ledger’s considerable knowledge suggested it ever had.
I felt a small, private pang of guilt on Xenophilius’s behalf regardless, turning over how much of his life’s work chased something that plainly wasn’t there — though I supposed a man who’d built an entire personality around chasing improbable truths was unlikely to be discouraged by one more improbability failing to pan out.
I went back to the ledger a third time, more carefully now, because this question actually mattered to me.
I want a comprehensive understanding of mage sight — the theory behind it, and a practical guide for developing or training it, whether a person is born with strong latent sensitivity or not.
The price landed considerably heavier this time, genuine and rare knowledge rather than a settled fact, but I paid it without much hesitation, already turning over what I meant to do with it.
The theory was dense and genuinely fascinating — mage sight sitting at the intersection of Charms perception-work and something closer to Divination’s more disreputable cousin, a way of perceiving the shape and residue of magic itself rather than simply casting it.
For those born with strong latent sensitivity, it apparently surfaced early, often in exactly the disorienting, half-formed way Luna experienced it, and could be trained into something clear and genuinely useful with patient practice.
For those not born with it, the knowledge described an old ritual capable of opening the capacity artificially — difficult, and not without real risk, the kind of thing I filed away under later, and only once I understand it a great deal better than I do tonight.
It struck me, reading through it, as exactly the sort of sense that would matter enormously for enchanting work eventually — being able to actually see how a working enchantment sat on an object, rather than trusting diagnostic charms alone, felt like the kind of advantage worth the risk once I’d thought it through properly.
But Luna didn’t need the ritual.
Luna needed the training half of what I’d just bought — clear, structured, patient exercises to take an already-open sense and teach it what it was looking at.
I decided, walking the rest of the way home with the evening properly closing in around me, exactly what I wanted to do with it.
Not hand her a lecture.
Not tell her, bluntly, that Nargles weren’t real and something called mage sight was — that felt like exactly the wrong way to hand a twelve-year-old back a piece of herself she’d been quietly, patiently misunderstood over for years.
I’d write it properly instead.
A real book, careful and warm, explaining what she was actually seeing in language that respected how she already thought about the world rather than correcting it.
Something to give her at Christmas, with months to get it right.
I made the note in my book that evening, right beneath the growing list of things that mattered more than they’d first appeared to.
Luna — mage sight, not Nargles.
Write her a proper book by Christmas.
Ritual to develop it in someone not born with it — mine to consider later.
Useful for enchanting work.
Go slow.
Understand it fully first.
Walking home in the early evening light, past the Weasleys’ crooked chimneys and the last visible curve of the Lovegoods’ tower, I found myself thinking that Death had been right about one thing in particular — proximity did tend to produce plot, but not, it turned out, in the way I’d braced myself for.
Not danger.
Not obligation.
Just two strange, warm, entirely unbothered families who’d decided, within a single afternoon, that I was worth feeding and worth interviewing and worth including, no questions asked beyond the ones I was happy to answer.
I thought I could get used to that.
I thought, in fact, that I already had.
Comment it and let me know.