Disclaimer: The Harry Potter Universe belongs to Warner Brothers, Scholastic, Bloomsbury, and J.K. Rowling.
Prologue
At Hogwarts, all students are taught Astronomy until at least the fifth year. Most alumni of our prestigious school of magic will tell anyone who asks that it did very little to further their chosen career of study and that how exactly it relates to magic is a mystery that not even the Department of Mysteries has been able to solve. To many, Astronomy was a useless topic.
But if you heard that response, you were most definitely not talking to my father.
Though he had to agree that Astronomy wasn't useful for his job and it was still a mystery as to how it aided in magic, he would certainly never call the stars useless to him. In fact, he often preached that the positions of stars and planets in the moment of a person's birth could determine what they were in life. There was no such thing as free will in his mind, everything had been predetermined by the universe whether they liked it or not.
He often said that, but little else on the topic.
At the tender age of seven, curious as a child can be, I approached him about what the stars had said of me on the day of my birth. With wide-eyes and a curious grin, I hoped all would be revealed of my past, present and future; but honestly at that age my largest hope was for a unicorn for my birthday.
My father glanced down at the eyes and smile that normally got whatever they wanted, and smiled back at me. He contemplated seriously for a few moments, perhaps gauging in his mind how much his little seven-year-old girl could take while I bounced on the balls of my feet anxiously waiting for some response from him.
At long last he sighed and only said, "The stars tell me that you were born under the sign of water, my dear."
I almost expected a bucket of clear liquid to come crashing down upon my head once he spoke, and I don't think my eyes left the ceiling for over an hour as I waited for the water I was supposedly born beneath to come down. At seven, I didn't understand what he meant.
And even now I am still discovering what it means to be water.
A/N: This idea has been a plot bunny that's been hopping around for ages and I guess it finally hopped itself into a reality because I've had this prologue written for a long time but I didn't know where the first chapter was going until just a couple of days ago and I was compelled to write it down.
This is partially inspired by some of my previous work which was completed long ago but has since been deleted from the Internet and is now irrelevant with all the books being published. I always wrote with one character in mind, and this was an experiment in telling the same story through another set of eyes.
The other inspiration for this was Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden, which I read while on vacation last year (2009). That was what got me thinking about element signs and how it fit the characters really well. That was a big inspiration as well, which I must acknowledge.
I'm not always big on first person perspective, but I find it works better in some situations and this is one of them. And I'm wondering if anyone can guess who this character is just from this passage.
The first chapter is close to done, so hopefully I'll have that soon too. Hope you enjoy.