However, that was when her room was full. When she ran into it today, it contained her bed, her now near-empty wardrobe, her desk (devoid of all the clutter that usually covered it) and several large boxes. Her bookcase, usually full to bursting with books on every subject under the sun, had been taken down to the van already, and the lettering on a big cardboard box in the corner informed her that her books had already been packed. Her posters of the Norwegian National Quidditch Team were rolled up in a corner, and the photographs of her friends from school were in an envelope on her bedside table.
Ariadne couldn't bring herself to even open the envelope. The sight of her friends, smiling and waving at her from the photographs would be too much to take. Ariadne had never had a best friend, but she was part of a large group of friends who all went around together, and she was equally close to all of them. To think that she would probably never see them again made her throw herself down on her bed and sob. They couldn't do this to her, couldn't take her away, not now.
Besides anything else, she was loving her studies, and doing well in them. Her favourite subject was the Dark Arts. She loved messing about with curses, jinxing her friends... Ariadne's train of thought turned to a book she had been given when she was little; 'Hogwarts; A History'. It was an enormous volume, and she had never read it from cover to cover, but one thing she had noticed stuck out vividly in her mind; Hogwarts didn't teach the Dark Arts. It only taught defence against them.
Ariadne choked down a sob in her throat. She wouldn't even be able to continue her studies in full at Hogwarts! This was getting worse by the minute. They couldn't take her dark arts away from her, it was the best subject at school, she had to carry on learning them or...
She stopped. So what? It was just another subject. She couldn't even remember why she had been getting so worked up about it. That was all it was, she reasoned with herself. Just another subject.
A loud knock on the door made her jump. 'Ariadne dear,' came her mother's voice. 'Come on darling, we need to talk.' Reluctantly, Ariadne swung herself off her bed, dried her eyes and opened the door.
When she got to the living room, she found her mother and father sitting on the sofa waiting for her. Their expressions were filled with sympathy as she sat down.
'Ariadne, we know this will be hard for you,' her father began, 'but I'm needed in London. I'm sure you'll like Hogwarts, once you get used to it, and I see nothing wrong with you coming to visit your friends here in the holidays. I just need you to support me on this.'
'I do support you Dad,' said Ariadne. 'I just wish you'd sent me an owl to tell me about this. It was a bit of a shock to come home and find half of my things in boxes.'
'I'm sorry,' Alexander said. 'How about this; when we've settled in, we'll go all round the sights of London on one of those muggle tour buses, like we used to when you were little.'
Ariadne smiled. She and her father had done this before they moved, watching all the muggle tourists, laughing at wizard tourists pretending they were muggles, fumbling with muggle cameras and pretending they knew the difference between a £5 note and a £50.
'I thought you'd like that,' Alexander grinned. 'If you look carefully from the plane tomorrow, you might see some of the sights as we fly in.'
'Tomorrow?' Ariadne was confused again. Surely they couldn't be leaving yet, not straight away. She'd only just got back from school, she hadn't got used to the idea yet. They couldn't uproot her straight away, could they? 'Please tell me you're joking.'
She looked pleadingly at her parents, but their faces told her all she needed to know. 'Fine,' she snapped, trying to keep her voice steady. 'Just uproot me, move me halfway across Europe, take me away from all my friends and don't even give me a chance to say goodbye! Just see if I care!'
She almost screamed these last words. The room shook as if it had been hit by a small earthquake. A rumbling sound came from the direction of the chimney. Suddenly, an avalanche of soot flew out of the fireplace, covering the room in thick black dust. Everything from the beige coloured carpet to the off-white curtains, including Helena's pristine white cloak and the lighter patches of Smudge's fur were blackened as soot filled the room. For the second time that day, Ariadne fled from her parents in tears.
Once in her room again, Ariadne began to berate herself in her head for losing her temper again. Her temper was a very sore spot within the family. The taxi and the chimney were nothing. When she was told she couldn't go to Hogwarts with her cousin Linzi, she had blown the roof off the house. This had required the assistance of the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad and several memory charms on muggles to fix. However, this had been without the aid of a wand. In a Norwegian museum she had been dragged to by her parents, she had made a priceless chandelier fall on the head of the ancient curate, who had told her to 'stop prodding the paintings with that funny stick thing' (she had been trying to make the figures move).
Then there was the time at the beginning of last year when she'd found out that she was too young to enter the Triwizard Tournament, having set her heart on it. She had been so angry at the refusal that she had made every single dinner plate in the hall shatter, sending food from the start of term feast flying across the room. She had nearly been expelled for that one.
Sadly it seemed that now, like all the other times, losing her temper would have no effect on her parent's decision. She would be moving to London tomorrow and there was nothing she could do about it.