ONE (A Prologue)
Francesca León's mother died when she was 9 years old. Before her mother's death, people used to tell the daughter how much she had inherited her mother's looks. The little girl had the same long dark pin-straight hair, paired with the same hue's piercing eyes. They shared the same full lips, and their noses adorned the same slight bump on the bridge, a feature Francesca would grow to complain about in her early teen years, much to her father's disappointment.
In her teenage form, Antonio León would think how identical Francesca's laugh was to his late wife's. And how they would make the same face whenever they were trying to understand a difficult idea, how their furrowed black eyebrows would only release when the answer to their question was solved in their heads.
Two years after her mother's death, she received her invitation to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, indicating it was her magical abilities that she had inherited from her father. Eva León had been a muggle, and for many years her daughter wondered if that was the reason why she could not have been saved. Even though her father had tried. Goodness, he had tried.
Francesca's first years at Hogwarts became a testament to the remaining parent who so dearly doted in her existence. She had been placed in Ravenclaw, the same house he had been placed in. Her father beamed when she wrote him a letter in her second year, telling him how much she excelled in Potions. The subject had been his favorite in school too.
In these same early years, Francesca would sometimes find herself in a silent daydream during the dinnertime commotion, imagining her father as a teenager, sitting on the same table, in the same Great Hall, surrounded by the same ghosts and portraits.
But when she woke up on her 14th birthday, surprised by her best friends, Gywn and Diana, with cake and muggle balloons, she cried. Not because of the elation of such gifts, but because she imagined that her mother had done it instead.
And during that same year, in Divination class, she found herself looking for signs in her tea leaves. Signs that would tell her she was meant for something great or the path she was taking was the right one for her future adventures. And sometimes, on quiet nights when everyone else had gone to bed, she would look out the Astronomy tower and see a star she hadn't noticed before. She would wonder if the star was meant to mean something if perhaps, it was meant to be there just for her to find. To tell her that, if she looked hard enough, the answers to her most profound questions would be answered in the followed patterns of constellations.
With growing age and influence, though, these questions began to fade from her mind until they became just tiny afterthoughts that she could shake off like lingering raindrops on her winter coat. By her fifth year, Francesca's mind was too busy to think about the melancholy behind her birthday or come up with reasons behind why she got mad at certain stupid things. She didn't give a second thought to the precision behind her color-coded note-taking or why she had always preferred her coffee black. She grew to not even be bothered in the times she would catch her father staring at her with glistened tears in his eyes.
When she arrived at King's Cross station, ahead to her sixth year at Hogwarts, she gave her father a quick kiss goodbye, anxious to find her friends who were already on the train waiting for her.
She had Ravenclaw gossip and Monday's classes on her mind. When she boarded the train, there was no inclination that the year that awaited her would change everything she thought she knew about herself and what her life could be. She left it to the stars to tell her.