PROLOGUE

The Journey

Two cultures and a thousand miles from you, there is a castle on a hill. In front of it lays a glistening lake and a field with six giant towers protruding out of the ground. It is a place where things float, shatter, and repair themselves, where the swish of stick rules the hearts of the students and staff, where pictures drink and lie, and some animals are only visible to those who have seen the worst of life.

This castle suffered greatly this year. A woman intent on its destruction displaced its beloved headmaster and stripped it of hope and happiness. Save a pair identical twins, this place was void of laughter, but it was not always so. Little more than twenty-seven years ago the castle withstood four friends whose laughter shook the thousand year-old building. Little more than twenty-seven years ago one brilliant girl ran wild in these halls with a a great energy that few but herself understood, and these children's lives were blanketed in the happiness that came to be taken from these hollowed grounds. Living in a dangerous time, stuck between destruction and happiness, on the verge of a terrible new era.

If you wanted to see what that was like back then, the journey would take you across the insurmountable barrier of Time, through a concrete post, onto a legendary train, and then make you wait out the ride in a small, old-fashioned compartment. After all of that, you would still have to get into a horseless carriage and ride up to a castle that appears to most to be nothing more than rubble. Once there, you would open entrance doors the size of your house. Taking a step across the threshold, the sheer size and nature of the building would strike you dumb: the large, dark, silent halls; the cold stone floor; the old, worn, and distant walls.

Even inside the castle, finding the children would be nearly impossible. The boys sit in a room that can only be reached by traversing seven flights of moving stairs (one of which is invisible), crossing four passages over (two of which are so well hidden that the caretaker does not know of them), and walking to the end of a dusty, seemingly-unused corridor. In a corner so dark that it must be unnatural, there is a door that you would overlook if I had not mentioned it. Behind that door, the four boys you seek are sitting on the floor: three reading books too large to lift without the aid of magic and the fourth pacing. In two minutes, despite having found the answer they seek in that tome, one performs the spell incorrectly and is left with a hoof as an arm for an hour. Three boys willing to go to any extent to help their friend in need.

The girl is even more challenging to discover because she would never be found in the same room, corridor, or even floor if she could help it. Her wandering spirit not content until she is the master of her surroundings.

Now you may have assumed that the boys are studious to a fault (studying Transfiguration well into the night) and stupid (performing the spell incorrectly), while the girl is in the middle of a great row that left them fuming around the castle. Though these assumptions would not be illogical, they are incorrect. The boys are learning a spell both illegal and highly deserving of that position with the law, which is why it is necessary to learn in the privacy of the night in an unnoticeable room. The girl is trying to run from emotions that are easier felt than shown.

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So here, at 3:13 in the morning, you would finally find those whom you came so far to understand. You would travel across years and oceans, history and commonsense to find these eight people because you have met the next generation and believe you need to know their history. You would look for the truth about Harry Potter, but I warn you that it is not what you expect; it is only how it was on April 17th, 1973, right after a hard rain had fallen on what looks to most to be a pile of ruins, in the third year of Voldemort's Rising, when those whose destinies would lead into myth and legend had no greater aspirations than to learn how to change into an animal and win a battle against one's own heart and the ever looming sorrow of losing a parent.