A/N: Hey-o! So this week was dizzyingly productive. I'm getting ready for a trip and need to do a lot so I don't fall behind in anything...

Anywhoo, I wrote this story for QLFC round 6. We were given genres that weren't too common in da fandom. I choose fantasy because I'm insane! Almost literally! I managed (unlike last week, which was a bust) to write something that makes me so incredible happy. Apparently, and I do quote this from my dear mentor/friend Cordelia, I wrote "a cheeky nod to what fantasy means in HP [Harry Potter]". I really like that description it makes me kinda feel like I'm a journalist who writes the cheeky side of the news where its true, and I get to sleep with the hot guy (no qualms there!)

Okay, that go weird. But on serious note. Thank you guys so much for reading especially to those who think that this story is pretty great like i do (even though it took until like three a.m to write after so many terrible, terrible ideas) I really appreciate it. Which I don't say very often...thank y'all.

Hoots,

Owl

P.S. word count for the story is 1,207. Kinda short, but whatevs.


Magic is the song between body and mind, the dance between heart and soul. It sets the world aglow to keep out the demons. It holds the secrets of the dark times and harps the tunes of the bright.

It must be Tuesday, I mused, kicking a piece of chipped rock with the toe of my shoe. I picked it up and threw it down the hallway, listening as the sound of it hitting its brethren reached my ears. I pushed back a strand of blonde hair, watching the scenery as the others stared at me. I get very poetic on Tuesdays.

Magic, as I have been told, is the energy around us. The push and pull that keeps all humans together, even if we don't notice it. Magic makes up what we cannot explain. It's in everything. Magic is us.

We are wizards and witches, all of mankind. Every one of us has magic in their spirit. Others just hold on to it until they die or just wither out of existence. At least, that's what mother told me-her exact words. She said a lot of beautiful things and maybe that's why I attended Hogwarts-to see them.

Or maybe it's Thursdays. Mother's spirit edges more into mine on Thursdays.

She, my mother, wanted to see a world that had magic busting at the seams, where muggles walked amongst wizards with magic in their hearts and thrummed with auras of light. There would be a cacophony of jubilance neverending in the spirit of true harmony between such different but similar people. It would be a world my mother would love to see, if she were still alive.

In that world, the desolation before me wouldn't exist. Death would wait at its gate, guiltily, like a dog who had been caught eating the pudding at Sunday dinner. The world would just spin on and on and on, never stopping in moments like this with walls of the castle crumbling down and cracking against trees or landing on the scars of war.

This world was terrible and full of things I never wished to see. More deaths than I knew were possible. Most of all, it held the empty screams of dying children, of mothers, of sisters and brothers. This was, too, a kind of magic. The darkest, most evil magic. When this magic was leashed on the world, it took too much time to heal it. Not like the magic of found memories or babbling brooks, this magic was the ruin of wizards, the loss of thousands. Even muggles suffered along with us; they were beside us in a cruel sort of irony to my mother's thoughts of beauty and kindness.

Maybe that's why others bottled up their magic or sell it in bounds of useless paper or the songs that never last in our ears; they all feared the worst of themselves coming out. Some deep in their subconscious, they knew, that if magic were take on this world, it would be destroyed, much like the castle around me, its halls alive with bodies but filled with the hollow echoes, as though everyone who walked past knew that something horrifying happened just there, or over by that window, or on the the stairs just beyond.

It could be Friday; Friday is always so dark in my mind's world.

It's a scary thought; all of the dreams that my mother believed in so freely, being so dead truly. A world full of light would have the consequence of darkness. That's why there are shadows in the day and the stars and moon at night-to balance the world teetering on a ballerina's pointe shoes-the endless dance of mind and body, heart and spirit, of this world and the world just behind it. There is a constant pull and push of energy through the world… I can feel it, if I really try.

Listening harder, I can even hear the magic of thousands of generations of wizards and witches marching through the halls, gossiping and casting spells. I'm sure no one around me can feel its constants or the wane and rush of magic coming it back into me as the thousands of years of magic is broken by the whispers of students pointing at me as I stare at a fixed point in the endless space.

No-I shake my head-I will not stand for this destruction. Mother would have never liked for me to dwell on such things for too long lest my aura becomes so dark that it would take weeks to turn light again. There is no chance I would let that happen to me-to let darkness openly enter my soul.

I stand, facing what once was beautiful, and focused on the light at the corners of the image: students were carrying others to safety, more were rebuilding or clearing away rubble, and there was Hagrid and his dog playing with the younger children, who were curious of what the school would teach them and scared of the destruction. There were little bubbles of light spreading across the dark aura of souls still yet released from life. It was, in itself, far more beautiful than the sky that now always seemed to darken when I looked up for blue or the nargles that swarmed the castle towers never letting me rest. This was happier, lighter, than my own typically fantastical thoughts.

It must be Saturday then, nothing seemed right on Saturday… where did my sock go?

Magic wasn't flowing in it the way it used too so long ago, it seemed, and wasn't close to my mother's dreams of the way it could be. One day, magic will be free of its conscious bond; I'm sure of it. If such hope as I see before me could exist in this tiny part of the world, it could exist anywhere. Yes, the world was brighter; the sun was peeking in from a loft window in the clouds.

"Luna!" the familiar, yet far off girl shouted somewhere behind me-Ginny, it would seem, with her curly, ginger hair tousled by the yawning wind and an aura of punctuated relief. "Quit daydreaming and hurry up! We're going to be late for class, and you know how Hermione hates that-you'd think she was the bloody teacher." She gripped my arm and began to lead me to our next class.

"What day is it?" I glanced up at the sky, finding the sun for the first time in months. Other students were noticing as well, pointing and laughing lightly before continuing on with their lives.

"Tuesday!" Ginny yelled, echoing through the halls, though the others barely batted an eye now that this ordeal had been going on for the past months. "It's Tuesday. How the bloody hell do you forget what day it is?"

"Hmmm…" I looked over at her tomato red face. "Sometimes I just forget when I think too long. It seems I get lost in my own little fantasy world." Ginny harrumphed at this, whether to agree or to express more anger I couldn't determine, but she had seemed to have calmed down into the steady pace of our Tuesday routine.