Aurora Sinistra – Professor of Astronomy
The first thing she noticed when she stepped off of the train that first year was the sky. Gone was the smog and clouds that so often covered London – there was rather a great dark blanket of blue sprinkled with what looked like diamonds. At age eleven Aurora Sinistra could finally see the stars.
Hogwarts had been her dream for years. Ever since she was three years old and her parents first explained the reason why what occurred within the house stayed within the house, Aurora had tried to learn all she could about the school she was to attend. Each birthday she received a stack of new books – Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, A History of Magic, and, her personal favorite, Hogwarts: A History. And she read them until they were loose in their bindings and pages were falling out. Mum and Dad asked her over and over if she wanted to try primary school but Aurora preferred learning at home. She had neighborhood friends, of course, but she lived and breathed for the day when she would board the Hogwarts Express that would take her north to Hogwarts.
Finally that day had come. And Aurora could finally see the stars.
She barely noticed Hagrid's greeting or the boat ride across the lake or the excited whispers of the other first-years. She was focused on the sky. But her eyes widened when she saw the ceiling of the Great Hall, thinking at first she was still outdoors. The ceiling perfectly matched the positions of the stars outside, and she could have gazed upward for hours. But soon her attention was drawn to the front of the hall, where a man with a long white beard and twinkling blue eyes was placing a hat upon a stool. Name after name was called, and soon it was her own turn to be sorted.
It was a bit unnerving to sit in front of a few hundred people with a big black hat covering your head. But Aurora had never been one to be easily frightened. So when the hat upon her head boomed out "Ravenclaw" after a few short seconds she hopped primly down from the stool, handed the hat to Luke Stempson, and found an empty seat at the Ravenclaw table.
Ravenclaw. House of the wise and the curious, the blue and bronze, the eagle and the Grey Lady. Aurora had read all of that in her books and was proud of her placement, but nothing had prepared her for the sight of the common room. For there, in the westward-facing tower, was yet another ceiling of stars and a ring of windows through which the night sky showed its silky skin.
It was those stars that Aurora grew to love. The stars outside the castle walls and the stars within. Going home over the summer was the worst of it, because she never got to see Hercules with his sword or Aquila's outspread wings or the long tail of Scorpius. If any of her fellow students ever had questions during a late-night cram session, they always knew that they could find Aurora up in the Astronomy Tower. And sometimes, when no one was watching, she would open the heavy door at the top of the tower and sit out on the ramparts as Venus rose up into the sky in the early morning.
And when it was cloudy, there were always the ceilings. Though the Great Hall would often mimic the outdoor weather, the common room's ceiling always showed the stars as they were if they could be seen. She would lay on the floor and stare up, memorizing the curve of Pegasus's wing and the direction of Cygnus's flight. She was never insulted for her love of the cosmos, for Ravenclaw students recognized in each other the passionate desire for things outside of themselves, the yearning for something bigger.
Aurora's stars were never used for divination. No, her stars told stories. Stories of heroes and villains, stories of wars and hope. Stories that had lived for generations, which had not faded with time or grown old with those they immortalized. They were flames placed for a reason, flames placed to give a sense of wonder and a sense of hope to those who were constantly drawn to their light.
Soon hope was needed more than ever before. Rumors of Voldemort's Death Eaters grew stronger and stronger as Aurora's years at Hogwarts progressed. Being supporters of Muggles, Mum and Dad decided that it would be safest for her to stay in school, and they were probably more right than they knew. During summers the Sinistras would travel, staying in New York City for a few summers with some of Mum's old friends from college, and visiting relatives on the Continent other summers. They never said anything about the war, but Aurora knew that one by one many of her parents' friends were being killed by followers of the Dark Lord and that Mum and Dad were doing their best to stay safe. Some nights they would sit in the kitchen of whatever house they were staying in, planning escape routes they hoped would never be used, and years later Mum showed Aurora a scrapbook of the friends that had been lost during the first Rise. Tears streaming down her face, Mum had shaken her head, saying "'Rora, I thought then that the world was ending. Now that it's over, that He's over, I can hardly move on. I never realized that the day might come when I wouldn't have to be afraid anymore."
It was easy to be afraid back then. And Aurora always knew that that was one of the reasons He had so much power. So she forced herself to be strong. She watched Lily Evans and James Potter finish the year ahead of her and knew that they were two Hogwarts students who would use their knowledge to fight Voldemort as hard as they could. And she and several Ravenclaws would huddle together in the common room once a month, beneath the watchful stars, to discuss ways that they could form their own subtle resistance. And she never cried. Not even at the horrible news of James and Lily's deaths, not even at the wonderful news that the Dark Lord had disappeared when he tried to kill their son
When she finished school it was really no surprise that Dumbledore asked her to stay on as Astronomy professor. The youngest professor Hogwarts had had for years, it was hard to teach the first few years. Students came to school filled with nightmares of horrible acts, and when the Dark Lord was finally defeated it still took months and months to calm and comfort the children. She was still nearly a child herself.
But she could always look to the stars. Not for guidance, not really. But for light. The stars never lost their light, not even in the green glare of the Dark Mark. The Ravenclaw ceiling kept its deep blue and bronze all through the darkness of those years. The Great Hall never became a place of fear. And outside the castle the constellations always continued on their way, tracing their ancient paths into velvet.
It was the stars of Hogwarts that kept the light in her eyes. And one morning, nearly twenty years after first gazing up at the sky above the castle, Aurora Sinistra watched the Morning Star pass once more across the sky of the rising sun and cried. And the stars would keep on shining.
In these halls, she could see the light.