Prologue

My name is Mona Opal Torin, born to Gerald and Estelle Torin on March 22nd, 1960. Growing up, I'd had a pretty average childhood; I lived with my parents and older sister by three years, Noelle, on a coastal village in North Devon called Clovelly – which was basically in the middle of nowhere – where my parents owned a seaside pub. My mum was originally from Brittany in France yet had moved to London for business school where she met by dad and they fell in love, they also shared the dream of opening they're own pub, so they moved to Clovelly and the rest was history. They had my sister when they were 27 and me when they were 30, completing our family.

Noelle had always been the smarter one of the two of us, she nearly always had her head buried in a book and when she didn't she was busy volunteering or something, really the epitome of the 'golden child'. I remember being relieved when she moved up to secondary school as it meant that she had to travel into the closest town (which was still an hour away) every day, meaning I wasn't in her shadow as much. My closest friend at primary, and still one of my best friends to this day, was Rochelle 'Shelly' Marshall. Shelly and I were smart, but less academically inclined and easily distracted by other things. Shelly had a deep love for football, and I had a passion for music and languages (as I was fluent in English and French and badly wanted to travel the world); we also both enjoyed ignoring our work and gossiping about the rumours that circulated our village.

It was at the age of 8 that I figured I was different than the other children at school. Shelly and I had been caught not doing our work so we had been separated and given detention, and on top of that my parents had a go at me for not taking school seriously enough and that I should be more like my sister that I got so angry I ended up smashing a nearby window with my emotions – my parents tried to find a logical explanation for what happened but I knew that it had been something to do with me. In the summer before I was supposed to go to secondary school, I got my answer to what was so different about me: I was a witch. We had been visited by a woman, Greta Fawley, in the July of 1971, told me and my parents that she was a representative for the Ministry of Magic and that I was a witch and to be shipped off to some school called Hogwarts in Scotland. Well, obviously my parents were shocked and a bit in denial, but after a few days they came around to the idea of having a witch in the family, especially once we took a trip to Diagon Alley with Greta and they saw first-hand what the wizarding world was like. That day had been amazing, I was so enthralled that I got to be a part of this wonderful world and finally felt like a proper witch when I got to buy my wand from Ollivanders – a beautiful, light ash wood wand, 9½ inches, with a dragon heartstring core and had intricate carving at the bottom. That was also the day I got my grumpy screech owl, Jagger (after Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones), who I love to death.

The worst thing about being a witch and going to Hogwarts was that I had to leave my close-knit community, and even worse Shelly, behind. We had told everyone that I had gotten a fully paid language scholarship to a boarding school in Scotland, which most people found weird as if one of the Torin sisters got a scholarship it surely would have been my sister, but no one questioned it too much. Saying goodbye to Shelly that first year was one of the hardest things I had to do, she was my best friend and I was terrified of going to a new school without her by my side. What if no one liked me because I wasn't an authentic witch? When I actually got to Platform 9¾ and onto the Hogwarts Express I realised I had nothing to worry about though. On the train journey I had sat in the same compartment as Marcy Sawyer, a fellow muggleborn, and Remus Lupin, a pureblood. We all shared childhood stories and bonded over our journey to Hogwarts and agreed to stay friends no matter where we were sorted. This did stay true, Remus had been sorted into Gryffindor, Marcy into Ravenclaw and I had been sorted into Hufflepuff (which people said was a house of 'duffers' but after meeting my housemates I completely disagreed with).

Marcy had become one of my best friends, she wasn't your usual Ravenclaw and reminded me a lot of Shelly, she found homework boring and instead worked obsessively hard on what interested her, which was quidditch. Over the first year our pair expanded to include Matty Selwyn, a fellow Hufflepuff and Irish pureblood who was completely mad and had the best sense of humour; Krista O'Hara, a half blood Slytherin who had been shunned by the girls in her dorm for her blood status and shyness, however once she joined our group had blossomed into a confident and creative person; and rounding off our group was Eli Dalton who Krista brought introduced to the group near the end of first year. Eli, also in Slytherin but a pureblood, had started to be bullied by his housemates after they found out he was gay; however after a year of insults he grew a tired of the insults and didn't let them bother him anymore, his sarcasm and ambitious personality shining through instead. So that was my group of best friends, and even though we started out as a bit of a mishmash of outcasts, we ended up becoming quite popular over the years, maybe not as popular as the marauders but we were still up there.

Oh yeah, Remus Lupin, even though we weren't tied at the hip like I was with Marcy and Krista, we maintained our pact of being friends despite being sorted into different houses. He had a really strong bond with the guys he shared his dorm with and hang out with them, but we still said pleasantries to each other in the hallways, sometimes shared notes with each other from classes that we shared, all that kinda stuff. Remus being Remus, it was usually him sharing his notes with me as I tended not to be as alert with writing down everything in classes, however I did have a passion for Astrology which was the one class that I helped him with sometimes. Apart from that, we didn't interact too much, but I didn't know that was about to change.

Right, enough with the long exposition about my life and time to get to the point of this story, which starts during the last week of summer in 1976, just before I'm about to start my sixth year at Hogwarts and enter my NEWT years, which I was not looking to forward to.