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Cress

Cress blearily opened her eyes as the morning bells tolled signalling for all the Artemisia students to get up. Her first reaction was to bury her face in her extra-squishy pillow and wrap herself even tighter in her cosy sheets, but she settled for a groan and reluctantly sat up in bed.

As a sixth-year student, Cress got her own room in the Silver tower. And Merlin's beard, what a room! The queen-sized bed had a canopy and silver embroidery was painstakingly sewed onto the sheets. A giant moon was painted onto the ceiling in such detail Cress could make out each individual crevasse. An ornate elm desk stood in one corner with a silver candle holder and there was a mahogany chair carved in the shape of a phoenix. Silver and white curtains hung from the floor to ceiling window and there was a very comfy looking armchair beside it with a small silver candle-holder for late-night reading. There was even an adjoining bathroom just for Cress! Yes, it was a very, very nice room, but it made Cress uneasy. If there's one thing she's learnt in her sixteen years, it's that great beauty can more often than not hide something very ugly. Her guardian proved that.

Swinging her legs out of bed, Cress permitted herself a great yawn before going to open the curtains. It was a bit of a struggle, given that the curtains were tall and heavy and Cress herself was only about five feet tall, but she eventually managed it and couldn't supress the wonderous gasp that escaped her lips.

Her room overlooked a gorgeous sparkling lake that lay unnaturally, perfectly still. Fresh green grass completely surrounded the school and there was even a forest with the tallest trees Cress had ever seen.

Suddenly not feeling at all tired, Cress skipped to her wardrobe and brought out her school uniform. She threw it on as quickly as she could before digging through her trunk for a hairbrush. She dragged it roughly through her blonde locks until they finally hung straight down her back and started twisting them into an elaborate braid, tying it off with a silver ribbon for good measure. She dashed to the door and reached for the handle, ready to tear it open and practically race to the Great Hall for breakfast, but hesitated.

The words of that boy from last night still echoed in her mind: "Aces, is that all hair?" Cress knew her hair was long. It had been years since the opportunity had presented itself to cut it, and it had become something of a security blanket to Cress in the meantime. But if it was really that strange…

Stop that, Cress told herself, it's just hair! "I'm the new Minister of Magic," Cress whispered to herself, "and I'm going to officially receive my title."

Holding the fantasy firmly in her mind, Cress set her jaw and opened the door.

As Cress stepped into the Great Hall, she was hit with all the most delicious breakfast smells she'd ever experienced. Bacon, pancakes, sausages… her mouth began to water at the thought of eating it all.

Cress's mood only improved when she noticed Cinder crossing the hall to the Gold table. She ran over to say hello, but froze in her tracks as Cinder gave a firm slap to a Gold boy.

The boy immediately cried out in pain and a red-haired girl sitting next to him sniggered.

"Aces Cinder, what was that for?"
"That dumb comment from last night! Didn't you even stop to think about how mortified you made that girl?"

A grateful smile tugged itself along Cress's face as Cinder scolded the boy. She'd been worried that Cinder was only being nice to her at the sorting because Cress had been the first new student she'd met. But watching her defend Cress like this… it made her hope that she might actually have made a friend. The thought filled Cress's heart with delight. Other than her pet owl, she'd never had a real friend before. It was even better than she imagined!

"What dumb comment? What girl?"

The red-haired girl snorted and gave a horrible imitation of his voice. ""Is that all hair?""

"Come on, it was practically touching the floor! That's just ridiculously long!"

Ridiculously long? Did it really look that weird?

Cheeks burning with embarrassment, Cress quickly started to make her way to the silver table which, to Cress's dismay, was on the side of the Gold table Cinder and the other two students were talking on.

Trying to be somehow fast and quiet at the same time, Cress walked behind the chatting students with her head down and her shoulders bunched up. She was a professional assassin, and she was sneaking past the palace guards to get to her target.

"Ugh, how can you be so clueless!"

The red-haired girl abruptly threw her head back in exasperation at the boy. Unfortunately, that meant she could see Cress trying to sneak past them.

Cress waved at the girl and tried for a smile, though it probably looked more like a pained grimace, and prayed to Merlin that the girl wouldn't recognise her. No such luck.

The girl straightened and tugged on the boy's shoulder. "Hey, she's right here. Now's a good time to apologise."

Cinder turned and smiled at Cress, who managed to make her own grin a bit more natural in response. The boy turned as well, allowing Cress to see his face for the first time and… Merlin's beard.

The boy was gorgeous! His hair was brown and perfectly tousled, and his bright blue eyes sparkled with mischief. His muscular arms rested comfortably on the table and he'd probably have his feet up there too if the benches came with back-rests.

The boy grinned at Cress and gave her a quick salute.

"Hey. Sorry about the comment from last night."

"I-it's fine." Cress stuttered in response. She noticed that her cheeks felt unusually warm.

The boy held out his hand for her to shake and Cress complied. "The name's Carswell Thorne, but you can call me Thorne. Or Captain, whichever you prefer."

"Just so you know," the red-haired girl butted in, "he's not really a captain of anything, he just thinks it sounds cool." She grinned at Cress. "I'm Scarlet by the way."

"Like the hair?" Cress blurted. This comment was met by a light-hearted chuckle and an eye-roll. "Oh yeah, I haven't heard that before"

Noticing Thorne and Scarlet looking at her expectantly, Cress realised with a jolt that they were waiting for her to introduce herself.

"Umm, I'm Crescent-err-Cress. Pleasure to meet you!"

Having successfully stumbled out the words, Cress hastily hurried to the Silver table to secure herself a seat. She'd just finished helping herself to some bacon when a loud screech drew her attention to the ceiling.

Owls were fluttering in through the Great Hall's open windows. Cress's lips parted with awe at the sheer number and variety of them. Snowy owls, great greys, screech owls, great horned owls, barn owls and several others Cress couldn't even name.

One tiny brown owl struggling with the weight of its letter, which was huge by comparison, flew over to Cress, only narrowly missing landing in her breakfast.

Grinning, Cress reached up a finger to stroke the little owl. "Hey Little Cress. What've you got for me?"

Carefully untying the letter from her owl's leg, Cress fed it a few Cheery-Owls and watched it fly off before opening the letter, which turned out to be her schedule. Cress felt a small spark of excitement that her first lesson was charms with Gold. Cress was good at charms. She hardly ever mispronounced an incantation and her nimble wrists had no trouble with the wand-movements. And maybe Thorne will be there as well…

Feeling a blush start to heat her cheeks, Cress hurriedly shover her bacon into her mouth and started buttering a piece of toast.

With the help of a prefect, Cress managed to find her charms class relatively easily, so she could breathe a sigh of relief that she wasn't late.

Professor Torin directed her to a seat in the second row and she started organising her books as she waited for the lesson to begin. Once she'd finished, Cress looked around hopefully, trying to catch a glimpse of Thorne or Scarlet. She smiled with relief when she finally did catch sight of the red-head, but her back was to Cress and she didn't have the nerve to tap her on the shoulder. As for Thorne, he was nowhere to be seen. Maybe he had an elective?

"Are you looking for someone?"

Cress almost jumped right out of her seat at the sound of the voice behind her. It was followed with a tinkling laugh.

Face burning, Cress turned in her seat to see who had spoken and… froze. She was face-to-face with the most beautiful girl she'd ever seen! She was a Silver, like Cress, with glossy dark corkscrew-curls of hair that hung just below her shoulders, drawing attention to her long neck and framing her face perfectly. She had high cheekbones and golden-brown eyes scattered mesmerizingly with emerald flecks and with smaller grey flecks around her pupils. Her full-lips were bright red and curled into a friendly and slightly amused smile. But most striking of all about the girl were her scars: three perfectly straight uniform scars that ran down from her right eye like tears, their pale appearance standing out against the girl's dark skin. But rather than detract from her beauty, the scars only seemed to… enhance it somehow.

The girl blinked and tilted her head, and only then did Cress remember that she had been asked a question.

"Oh! Uh, yes, I am actually. I met two Golds this morning and I was looking for some familiar faces."

The beautiful girl's face lit up with interest and excitement. "Ah, so you're new then?" At Cress's nod, the girl squealed quietly with delight and extended a hand for her to shake. "I'm Winter. I hope that we will get to become great friends!"

"Me too." Cress replied with a shy smile. Winter's smile grew wider and she looked as though she could have screamed in delight.

"Hey Crazy!"

Cress and Winter turned to see Scarlet grinning at them. "Try not to drag Cress into any of your insane expeditions okay? Jacin and I get in enough trouble for them and I doubt Cress wants to be saddled with a lifetime of detentions in her first year."

Winter's eyes twinkled and she bowed her head. "I will do my best Scarlet-friend, though I'm afraid I cannot make any promises."

"Alright class, quiet please." Professor Torin called out. Cress dutifully turned in her seat to face the front, determined to give the teacher her full attention.

"I'll be taking the roll now. For all our old students, I'd like to remind you that we have some new people in our class today and they may have learnt at a different pace to you or not covered the same material, so if you find that they don't know something which to you seems basic, please refrain from calling them a dumb flobberworm. Jacob Davies?"
"Present!"

"Susan Brown?"
"Present!"

"Winter Hayle-Blackburn?"

"Present."

"Scarlet Benoit?"
"Bonjour!"

"This isn't Beauxbatons Miss Benoit, please refrain from speaking French in class. Crescent Darnel?"

At the sound of her name, Cress raised her hand and quietly said, "Here." Winter tapped her on the shoulder and whispered. "Don't be shy. We are not werewolves and we will not bite you." Cress cast Winter an odd look over her shoulder, but the other girl just smiled kindly at her. Wait, had Winter been serious?

Professor Torin opened his mouth to call out the next name when the door suddenly flew open with a bang and a boy charged in. Cress stiffened and her face heated up. It was Thorne.

Professor Torin frowned at the panting Gold standing in the middle of the classroom. "You're late." Thorne just grinned and raised an eyebrow. "Has my name been called yet?"

The teacher just glared at him, saying nothing. "Then I'm not late!"

Having won the argument, Thorne made his way to the rows of seats with a certain swagger and plonked himself down in his chair. Which happened to be the one next to Cress.

Professor Torin sighed and wrote something down on the roll. "Since it's the first day of school, I'll let you off this time Thorne, but next time is an automatic detention, whether your name's been called or not!"

As Professor Torin finished the roll, Cress couldn't help stealing glances at Thorne. He had his feet on the desk and his hands resting behind his head. He hadn't bothered to organise his books when he arrived, settling for just dumping them on the desk in a messy heap. He was disorganised, rebellious, unashamed and confident, in short, everything Cress wasn't. And she admired him hugely for it.

"Alright class," Cress snapped her attention hurriedly back to Professor Torin as he addressed them. "Our first charms lesson of the year will be turning vinegar into wine. Please note, that although this spell does transform something, it isn't classified as a transfiguration spell. Now, I know we've all just got back from the holidays and are still getting used to the new school routine, so for this lesson we'll just be studying the theory and process of the charm. You will practice the charm in a practical sense as homework. You may begin."

Cress obediently opened her spell book to the page on turning vinegar into wine and started reading, even though she already knew the incantation, wand-movement, theory and even history of the spell by heart.

Artemisia was the first wizarding school Cress had ever attended, and her home-schooling had been rudimentary at best, where her guardian mostly just wrote some stuff on a chalkboard and snapped at Cress to copy it down. Ironically, her guardian was an actual teacher and seemed to put a lot more effort into her paying job than Cress's education. But her guardian had supplied her with plenty of magic books that offered varying grades of difficulty. Some of them even contained snippets of Dark Magic, which had disturbed Cress greatly upon realising it. Those books had become Cress's windows to the outside world, a glimpse into what it would really mean to be a witch. She'd poured over them tirelessly, especially when she found out that she would be attending a proper wizarding school at last, reviewing OWL level spells that she'd learnt at the age of twelve and even going so far as to learn a few NEWT spells. So turning vinegar into wine? She could do that before she turned thirteen.

"Hey long-hair! Mind keeping your mouth shut? Some of us want to get some work done!"

Cress cringed away from the glaring Gold boy in front of her who had spoken and fingered her braid self-consciously. She knew exactly why he was complaining. She'd been singing again. It was a habit she'd fallen into over the years. Singing while she studied (or did anything really) helped her relax into the action. She's done it so much, that she had a tendency to do it without realising, such as now.

"Sorry." She mumbled quietly. The boy just snorted and turned back to his book. That probably would have been the end of it, if Thorne hadn't reached out a hand and tapped him on the shoulder.

The boy's head snapped around to face them again. "What?" he snarled, annoyance dripping from his voice.

Cress gulped in the face of his anger, but Thorne, unfazed, simply frowned at him. "Yeesh, someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning."

"Get to the point Carswell." The boy spat.

Thorne leaned forward on his desk and matched the boy's glare with one of his own. "First off, her name isn't "long-hair", it's Cress. Second of all, there's no need to be a jerk to her just because she likes singing."

"What, I'm not entitled to be annoyed that she's interrupting my work?"

"What you're not entitled to be is a complete moron to her! But if all you want is peace and quiet…" Thorne's hand strayed to his desk to pick up his wand, "I'll be more than happy to remove the biggest noise-maker in the room."

Cress felt her throat tighten with fear. Was Thorne going to cast a spell on her?

But instead of pointing the wand at her, Thorne aimed his wand squarely at the boy. "Langlock."

The boy's expression turned startled and he opened his mouth, but all that came out was a bunch of weird incoherent whines.

Thorne put his wand back onto the surface of the desk and grinned at Cress. "That jinx sticks its victim's tongue to the roof of their mouth. You can sing all you want now."

Cress stared at him, her eyes wide and, she knew, filled with awe and gratitude.

"Thank you." She breathed, "But… wouldn't it disturb your work."

Thorne chuckled. "Trust me, that guy was the only one who found your singing annoying. You have a beautiful voice."

He smiled at Cress one last time before going back to doodling on the pages of his textbook. Cress tried to redirect her focus to her work, but all she could think about was the blue-eyed boy who had just defended her and told her he liked her voice. The boy who, Cress realised, was a hero.

A/N: No, the Gold boy wasn't Jacin, just thought I'd clarify that real quick. Other than that, Cress was in the spotlight! And not only that, but we met Winter, Scarlet and even Torin to boot! What did you guys think of the Artemisia dorms? Can you spot what kind of ornament I left out? But most of all, what did you guys think of Cresswell meeting? Please review!