Hi. My name is Kilmeny. I am mute.

Kilmeny Marigold Potter had written that a very lot in her eight years of life. She was a rather small child, growing up in a no-so-very-well-funded orphanage, but she was healthy enough. She had long, strictly straight, very dark reddish brown hair, and green eyes that 'looked like poison' according to nearly every, well, every, child in St. Hedwig's Orphanage and School for Children. She had a thin, elfin face, and a slow, sweet smile. She read her fair share, probably more, and could read and write in French, German, Chinese, Italian, and Russian. Oh, and English. She had a lot of free time without friends.

She didn't mind, though, really. That was just the way her world worked. Children did not like to be friends with people that they could not talk with, and she couldn't talk to them. She liked to read, and English-Insert-language-here dictionaries were easy to figure out. Kilmeny was good with languages, and tended to make up her own, just for the fun of it. She often thought about learning Baby Speak, but figured it was something easier done when one thought like a small child, and she tended to think like a grown-up. Still, she tried it. It didn't work out very well, though. Brand new dresses covered in puke, did not a happy Matron make. She was good at drawing, and liked to read books about psycology. She refused to read about what caused people to be mute though, she just couldn't stand reading it.

Oh, she knew it was petty of her, but she couldn't stand reading about the whys of and ways to cure people who were mute, when it was impossible for her to ever speak, thanks to getting sick when she was small and the relatives she had lived with at the time refusing to take her to a doctor. All the nerves in her throat had died, and her Auntie and Uncle were sent to jail for child endangerment and abuse. Her cousin, a pudgy blond boy, had been adopted by his Aunt Marge, who hadn't had the resources to take her in as well. So, off to St. Hedwig's it was. She did admit she was just a tad bitter about the whole thing. Okay, maybe a smidge more than a tad. Or a lot more. Bah.

Kilmeny found it rather ironic that she shared her name with a mute book charecter. Lucky her. And the bitterness arises. Bah twice. She was good at math, and liked numbers, and tended to write funny little stories about them. She matched the twelve colours in the crayon boxes up, by couples and their one child. Blue and Red have Pink, Purple and Green have Brown, Brown and Black are best friends, White, who was Yellow and Orange's kid, was in love with Pink. That sort of thing. She didn't tell much about it, because people looked at her strangely when she did. Assuming they could read her handwriting (she could read it well enough...) or understood sign language She was very, very, very horrible at sports, and Language Arts class and Maths and Science. She did not work well with her age group, and tended to hole up into books. She thought that life was a very boring thing. But, in the February of her eight year, something strange and new and very not-boring happened.

She discovered magic.

Now, Kilmeny liked to look at things very, very logically. To her at least. To most people it was pure jargon. Bah three times. She had magic, so, of course, she should use it. She had read lots of old fairytales, so she thought about probably perhaps more-likely-than-not using the magic that was in them. Too bad she didn't have a teacher, though. Oh well.

It was funny, she mused, what good could come of older girls insulting her dead parents. The girls dresses had all turned to funeral attire and they had clown make-up. Only after she was in her room had she allowed herself to think, 'I wished for them to see how I felt. Sad and on display. Oh my...' Though it shocked her that she had been able to do that, it never occured to Kimleny not to practice this strange new power of hers, and she spent a fair bit of time re-reading some of the older fairy tales, books with magic in them, and making lists of ideas to try. The final list ended up looking like this, once she had re-copied it all onto a clean sheet:

Abracadabra - create things.

Presto Chango - Change them.

Open Sesame - open things.

Just rhyming for spells might work.

Telepathy?

Wands - unlikely to work, likely just sillines.

Wish magic?

She planned on having it longer, but really, she only wanted to do a couple of things, not control the universe. Why anyone would want to deal with that much paperwork was beyond her. She was right about the magic words working, to an extent, and the rhyming worked, but she couldn't get the hang of her wish magic idea. She had done it with the older girls, so why couldn't she now? She had felt lots of emotion... but she didn't get worked up easy. So, what if a lack of emotion worked instead? How could she go about that? Maybe... meditating? Would that help? She felt sort of... connected... to something in her when she used her magic, so... maybe. She had to try it, at least.

The second Monday after she had discovered her powers, Kilmeny let out a long, slow breath. She had read up on meditation, and was trying to do it, she had been for a week and a half, but it was hard. She couldn't clear her mind for more than a few minutes, at most ten. Breathe in, and breathe out, in, and out. How strange, it was almost as if she were... floating. Rocking like she was in the sea. It was peaceful and... magical? Just how she'd always imagined real magic would be. Real magic. Real magic. Real magic. Real magic! She was connected to her magic! She opened her eyes inside her mind, if that made any sense, and looked around.

It was smooth, and the water... magic... was purpley-blue-ish, and had silvery lights dancing off the surface, like starlight. And there was an island in the centre of it, made of warm reddish-orangie sand that just by looking at made her want to curl up in it's warmth. She willed herself closer. It felt like she was swimming through honey and clouds to get there, and the pale green sky let out some wind here and there, helping her reach the island.

There was a heart-shaped box there, beneath the ... stone trees dripping what looked like pure gold and apple juice. Like the Ichor she imagined when she read Greek Mythology. Uh-huh. Strange, but nice. The box was the colour of her eyes exactly, if not a tiny bit darker. It had fine, fine red lines running around the edges like celtic knots made of fire. As she stepped closer, a faint melody made her think of puffs of different coloured smoke, and the smell of Easter Lilies, and cinnamon and brown sugar. And there was a song coming from the air around it, like a half forgotten lullaby, from when she was very small. But, her Auntie and Uncle, when she lived with them, surely they wouldn't have sung her a lullaby! She remembered being thrown into a cupboard, and dunked into cold water until she nearly drowned at their hands! So that left... her parents. Her mother. So what was it doing here? In her, for lack of a better term, magical core? It looked, or felt, like some sort of... protection?

But why would she need protecting? Surely it hadn't helped with her relatives. Had it? Would she really be dead if not for this little box? She was knealing down by it now. Kilmeny reached out a tentative hand to touch the box, and felt... whole. Happy. Like someone was watching out for and over her. But there was somethinh else. A black stain was spread across the lid, the celtic knots on it turned the colour of dried blood. It felt... not evil, but not good, either. Like something left in the dark. Or a cupboard under the stairs. Like she might... would... be if left with the Dursley family still. It felt unhappy, like a lost kid. Just knowing she was going to regret it later, she touched the stain. Just before she did so, she heard a woman's voice say, 'No Darling! No!' Too late.

She was at an orphanage, different from her own, and it was sunny outside, instead of slushy and cold. Children were running around, and playing on the grass. She waled over to the shade, and made to sit down. She couldn't feel her body anymore. Where was she? The sign said Mrs. Cole's Orphanage in London, but that orphanage had been torn down over a year ago. She had watched. It had been old and delapidated, yet this one looked more like her own, in the sense that it was clean and well-kept, if poor. "Hello."

Kilmeny jumped 'Who in the world...'

"My name's Tom, and I'm... sort of the reason you're here." How had he heard what she thought?