I have always known that I am the best. My father told me so nearly every day, especially when he was teaching me. My mother was never there to contribute her own thoughts, as she died when I was around two, from the plague. Even wizards can't resist it.
I have never gone to school with the other children of the town. In fact, I really didn't even live in the town. My father and I, along with my sister Senna (one year younger than me) and my brother Sirius (four years older) lived in a huge manor-type house in the marshes east of the village. To this day, I don't know how my father managed to keep the house and his children safe—it was a dangerous region, and after my mother died he was left with four children under the age of eight.
Oh, I see. I've forgotten about Saxon, my eldest brother. He was my mother and father's firstborn, a year older than Sirius. He died just two months after my mother, also of the plague. He would have been eight years old in about a week.
I can only imagine how that loss devastated my father, so soon after the death of his wife. We were only lucky that none of the rest of us fell ill or injured ourselves some other way. I suppose our isolation from the village helped, and my father's extraordinary power—it may even have been stronger than my own at its peak. But even so, with a one-year-old daughter and a two-year-old son, and a six-year-old son as well, he was lucky none of his other children died. Most families around that time had ten or twelve children, and only two or three would live into their twenties. My father had four, and three lived.
Just before each of his children turned five years old, my father would go out of the marsh, through the village, and into the woods on the other side. There, he would make an offering to a fine old tree and carefully sever a straight twig from a branch, ten or twelve inches long and perhaps three-quarters of an inch wide. He would reverently bring this back home, take the best feather he could find from Sebastien (the family owl, who carried whatever letters we saw fit to send—he was replaced by another owl, Selene, when he died. Senna's feather was from Selene; all the rest of them were Sebastien's.) and then combine the feather and wood to form a beautiful, polished, and fully functional wand. I've heard there were marketplaces where wands could be bought, but my father preferred his own handiwork to anyone else's.
On the child's fifth birthday, he or she was presented with the wand. That same day, he or she would have an individual lesson with our father about magic and how to control it. After the first day, the child would join any older siblings in the regular daily lessons.
I was a fast learner. I could make colored sparks shoot from my wand with a casual wave after only a week, and transfigure small objects in about a month. I soon caught up to Sirius, and then passed him in ability.
My father worked us hard, especially Siri, who just couldn't seem to get the hang of the incantations I grasped with a half-hour's work. And this, I suppose, is the reason my father always told me I was the best of all the wizards he knew—I was pure-blooded, ruling out many of his associates and indeed most of the other wizards and witches in the world, and certainly better than my brother, in my father's eyes at least.
He pushed Siri farther than even my magical limits were, trying to force him to break through the sort of mental barrier he imagined must be holding him back. But to me he gave nothing but praise.
My brother ran away from the manor when he was sixteen. Two years later, we received a marriage announcement, which informed us that Sirius was now married to a girl from a nearby village, about a day's ride away on a horse. Sirius's bride was Alanna Potter, and she was quite pretty judging from the small portrait Siri sent with the announcement. It showed him and a slender red-haired, green-eyed woman, dressed in a full-length blue dress in the fashion of the day. Siri also sent a note—"No, she's not a witch. I sever my ties." It was signed Sirius Potter.
My father flew into a terrible rage when we received this message. He burned the marriage announcement, the portrait, and the note, and proceeded to remove Sirius from all the family records. Even the family record-book, of all births, marriages, and deaths of our family, which could not be erased—my father got around this simply by scribing that my brother had died that day. And in a way I suppose he had.
So I became the heir of the family Slytherin. I, the youngest brother. In a way it seemed like fate—that I was meant for greatness.