On a street somewhere in Surrey, there was a house. It was a perfectly ordinary house. Nothing unusual about it.
Inside, however, it was a different story.
Harry Potter, age 15, was about as far from normal as it is possible to get. He looked ordinary enough. Maybe he was a bit scrawny, and there was that matter of the scar on his forehead…but there are naturally skinny people, and everyone has scars.
Looks can be deceiving.
It's not that Harry Potter was a wizard. It's not just that he was a famous wizard (the "Boy-Who-Lived"). It's not the fact that he had faced Lord Voldemort, the most terrible dark wizard of the age, and survived no less than 5 times. These things are all part of it, true, but there's something else, something that will make him even less ordinary.
Poor Harry.
In a place that is both here and not here, a tall woman dressed in simple clothes bent over a large, flat bowl and smiled. A hand tapped her shoulders and she straightened. She turned around and raised her eyebrows. "He is as much mine as he is yours, Daughter," said a tall man with a beard and eyes that seemed to both love and condemn you. "I know, Father." She sighed. "He will have a difficult life. I pity him."
"We do what we can, Daughter, we do what we can. And what we can do is considerable."
She smiled wryly. "True, but it makes me feel no better. We are not human, but we feel human emotions. If I were Brother, I'd say it 'wasn't fair'."
"And if I were Mother, I'd tell you, lovingly and gently, that 'life isn't fair'. But we're not, so let's leave that to them, shall we? Come, Daughter, we have work to do."