King’s Cross Station.
Will spotted the pillar between Platforms 9 and 10 almost immediately.
This was the entrance to Platform 9¾.
The pillar had been enchanted, and Will could easily sense the magic radiating from it, along with the fainter traces of magic carried by the wizards moving through the crowd around him.
Suitcase in hand, Will walked straight through the pillar.
Just as the books described, the platform beyond was loud and packed, steam from the train curling through the noise.
Wizards buzzed and shouted all around him.
The hiss of the engine, the churn of the crowd, animals shrieking somewhere in the chaos, all of it blurred together, and none of it agreed with Will.
He preferred quiet.
He wove through the crowd, taking in faces as he went: a round-faced boy trailing after an elderly witch, a cluster of red-haired wizards, a girl with unruly hair and slightly prominent front teeth, and of course, the thin boy with round glasses everyone already seemed to recognize.
Harry Potter.
Will walked past them all, boarded the train, and eventually found an empty compartment in the crowded carriage.
Satisfied, he sat by the window, set his suitcase on the seat beside him, pulled out a book, and settled in to read.
The book was The Secret of Curses: A Cursebreaker’s Life, written by a Hogwarts graduate who’d spent fifteen years breaking curses in Egypt.
It was part memoir, part record of everything he’d learned about curses along the way.
Will hadn’t wanted his professors to know how far into dark magic he’d already gone, so he’d left the more obvious books behind.
Even this one on curses sat right at the edge of what he considered safe to be seen carrying.
Egypt holds more curses than almost anywhere else, largely thanks to the pharaohs’ strange habits and their tangle of competing beliefs.
Egypt alone recognized four separate sun gods.
The pharaohs layered curses over their own corpses, thick enough that wizards refused to go near the mummies at all.
Strangely, several of these curses were built to target wizards specifically, and never accounted for Muggles.
Muggles later stole the bodies outright, and they went on to circulate as a kind of grim delicacy among Europe’s Muggle elite.
[You have acquired new knowledge of Curses.
Curses Experience +1]
[You have acquired new knowledge of Curses.
Curses Experience +1]
As the pages turned and the notifications kept coming, the compartment door slid open, and a young woman stepped in.
Her suitcase matched Will’s exactly, clearly bought from the same shop.
Her face was thin and finely shaped, cool and composed, and her dark blue dress made her skin look even paler by contrast.
“Is this seat taken?
I couldn’t find anywhere else.” Her voice was flat, almost bored.
Will glanced up just long enough to answer, his tone just as cool.
“Feel free.”
Then his attention dropped straight back to the book.
What could a little girl possibly offer that competed with a good curse?
Or with experience points, for that matter?
If she noticed the dismissal, she didn’t show it.
She set down her case and took the seat across from him without another word.
The compartment settled into a cold, wordless quiet.
Neither of them spoke.
Will kept reading, apparently unbothered by the company, and outside the window the train finally lurched into motion and pulled away from the platform.
The silence didn’t last long.
The door opened again, and a boy and a girl stepped through.
The girl had messy brown hair, noticeably large front teeth, and a face dusted with freckles, nothing that stood out particularly.
The boy trailing behind her was a little round in the middle, half-hidden behind her shoulder in a way that made him look thoroughly nervous.
Hermione Granger and Neville Longbottom.
“Can we sit here?
Everywhere else is full, and we don’t have much luggage,” Hermione said, slightly out of breath, clearly worn out from hauling her case down the corridor.
Only then did Will look up properly.
The moment he did, Hermione’s eyes went wide.
“Will Behrens?
What are you doing here?
Wait, does that mean you’re a wizard too?”
She had every reason to be shocked.
Will had been her classmate back in primary school, always a step ahead of her in every subject.
She’d assumed that chapter of her life was closed the day her Hogwarts letter arrived.
Running into him here was the last thing she’d expected.
“Hello, Miss Granger.” Will glanced toward the girl across from him.
“I’ve no objection to you joining us, though I suspect the young lady here might have an opinion on the matter.”
“Go ahead.” The girl’s tone stayed cool, but her eyes moved over Will with open curiosity, studying him from head to toe.
Will caught the look and glanced back at her.
Her attention shifted almost immediately to Neville instead, apparently curious why he was hovering half-hidden behind Hermione.
Hermione wrestled with her suitcase, trying and failing to hoist it onto the luggage rack.
Will set his book down just long enough to draw his wand and give it a flick.
The case rose on its own and settled neatly into place, Neville’s case joining it a moment later.
All three of them stared at Will.
“You already know magic?
I mean, I’ve tried a few simple spells at home and some of them actually worked, like a glow-in-the-dark charm, though a lot of them failed too.
But how did you just do that?
You didn’t even say anything!” The words came out of Hermione in a rush.
Will had known her long enough to expect nothing less.
Her eyes landed on the book in his hands.
“Are you reading that?
‘Of all the curses in Egypt, none is more feared than the curse laid on Tutankhamun…’ I don’t remember that from anywhere.
I’ve already memorized this year’s entire syllabus, isn’t this supposed to be part of it?” She barrelled on without waiting for a reply.
Will exhaled quietly.
This was exactly how he remembered her.
The girl in the dark blue dress raised an eyebrow at the mention of a memorized syllabus.
Neville, meanwhile, looked genuinely stunned.
He struggled to remember anything for more than a day, and the idea of memorizing an entire textbook seemed almost impossible to him.
“It’s not complicated.
You just recite it in your head.
This book’s about curses, you can find it at Flourish and Blotts,” Will said, already lowering his eyes back to the page, quickly losing interest in the conversation around him.
“That’s not ‘not complicated.’ Silent casting takes real skill.
Plenty of adult wizards never manage it, even after graduating Hogwarts,” the girl across from him said.
Her interest in Will seemed to have returned, her eyes fixed on him again, though the sight of him already absorbed back in his book clearly irritated her.
“Behrens…” She repeated the name slowly, as if testing it.
“I don’t know that family.
Does either of you?”
Neville, who’d just taken a seat beside Will, careful to leave some distance so as not to disturb him, scratched his head and thought about it.
“I don’t think Gran’s ever mentioned them.
So, probably not?”
“So you two come from wizarding families?” Hermione asked.
“My whole family’s wizards, yeah.
I’m Neville, by the way.
Neville Longbottom.”
The girl nodded.
“Lestrange.
Sylvia Lestrange.
You still haven’t told us your name.”
Hermione realized she’d skipped right past introducing herself, and some of her earlier confidence slipped.
“Hermione Granger.
My parents are Muggles, so no one in my family’s ever done magic before.
We were completely shocked when the letter came.
I take it you two already know plenty of spells, then?”
There was a note of disappointment in her voice.
“Actually, I don’t know any magic at all.
Gran won’t let me practice with my wand.” Neville’s face went red, and for a moment he looked close to tears.
“I’m probably going to be the worst student in the whole school.”
“Oh.” Something in Hermione brightened slightly, though she kept it off her face.
“Well, we can figure it out together, then.”
“Honestly, you don’t need to worry so much.
Most first-years show up knowing nothing,” Sylvia said.
“Nearly everyone only bought their wand this summer, and before that most of them had never cast a single spell.”
She turned back to Hermione, any earlier judgment about her background gone from her voice.
“You’re probably one of the only Muggle-born students who’s actually learned real spells before arriving.
That’s impressive.
And you already know Mr.
Behrens, it seems.”
“We went to primary school together.
I had no idea he was a wizard until about five minutes ago.” Hermione’s confidence crept back as she spoke, though she couldn’t help noticing how closely Sylvia kept watching Will, who hadn’t so much as glanced up from his book since sitting back down.
The scene felt oddly familiar to her.
Back in school, girls had always seemed to gravitate toward Will without him ever once paying them any mind.
And true to form, he was still completely absorbed in his reading, ignoring the three of them entirely.
If anything, he made her own reputation as a bookworm look modest by comparison.
Hermione found herself wondering what exactly made him so different, so unreadable.
But Will showed no interest in joining the conversation, so she settled in to wait until he finally looked up on his own.
[Someone has grown curious about you.
Charm Experience +1]