A/N – Hello, dearest reader. My name is Mage, and I'm glad that you've chosen to read my newest fanfiction, The Darkest Arts. Please leave a review if you enjoy reading this! I'd love to see what you think.
Disclaimer – I don't own Harry Potter or The Bartimaeus Trilogy. I only own my interpretation of both and the plot of this fanfiction.
Enjoy!
Prologue
The events leading up to this particular moment were unnervingly familiar to the headmaster; they had only reinforced his belief that this visit was worthy of his time when a simple letter would have sufficed. He heard a soft humming coming from inside the room he stood before. It abruptly stopped when the owner of the orphanage turned the doorknob. This was immediately followed by a frantic rush of activity as the door swung open. Things were slid across the old floorboards, and the springs to the bed creaked.
And then he was looking at a young girl, the same age as the boy had been when they had first met.
She was sitting on the small bed that took up the majority of the room, her legs remaining motionless as they dangled over its side. She turned to look him with dark blue eyes that looked both broken alive. They had the same defiance that his had once had; the girl with the black braid wanted to turn against the world and the rules that it had pushed onto her.
"Alice?" the woman asked. "You've got a visitor. His name is Professor Dumbledore. He's come to tell you – well, I'll let him do it." She promptly turned and left the room, almost as if she was terrified of the small child sitting calmly on the bed.
The door closed behind him. There was an unnatural silence as she watched him.
"How do you do, Alice?" He walked over to the girl and held out his hand. "I am Professor Dumbledore."
The girl paled. With shaking fingers and a surprisingly firm grip, she shook his hand. Then her own hand returned to her side. Her eyes had lost the fires previously burning within them.
Now she just seemed scared.
"Is being a professor being like a doctor? Did Miss Amber get you to come to...to check on me?"
The questions that had once been brought forth as accusations were instead being directed to him as exactly what they sounded like: questions. They held a fear that the boy had lacked.
He shook his head and smiled at the girl. The fear vanished almost as quickly as it had appeared; it had reassured her that things were going to be alright. "No, no. I'm the headmaster at a school called Hogwarts. I have come to offer you a place at my school – your new school, if you would like to come."
Her eyes briefly lit up, only to die back down minutes later. Her gaze dropped to the lap, and she wrung her hands together. "But I'm not anything special." She glanced down even further, staring at something underneath the bed. "I'm just strange."
Before he could say anything else, she jumped off the bed. She crouched down and peered underneath it. She grabbed something and quickly pulled it out. It was an action figure. Among the dirty and cramped room, the pristine toy looked out of place. The design of it was an older one, but it looked as if it had just come out of the package.
She stood back up and held it out to him.
"It wasn't like that when I found it," she promptly informed him. "One of the boys was kicking the parts of it around; they found it in the dumpster. It was covered in grime and dirt. The paint was falling off. I do that a lot – I fix things."
He grabbed it out of her hands and set it down next to him on the bed. "Hogwarts is a school of magic. It's a school for people with special abilities."
There was a tense silence. She had frozen, her face expressionless, but her eyes flickering back and forth between the toy and the headmaster, as though she was trying to determine if she had correctly understood what he had said.
"Magic?" she repeated in a whisper.
"That's right," said Dumbledore.
She took a quick, deep breath, her eyes wide and her face flushed with excitement. "Thank you so much, Professor Dumbledore, for letting me go to your school," she gratefully said. Her movements and words were filled with an energy that had not been there prior to his reply. "I've never gotten to meet other people like me before!"