Hermione returned to Snape's class, confident that her face wasn't portraying any amount of unease. How Fred and George convinced her to accept their deal – albeit its ludicrous conditions – she still couldn't fully comprehend. The twin Slytherins certainly were nothing like Ron: the nervous-eyed runt who stumbled over his own words if not his shoelaces. Both were two smooth-talking halves of a raring businessman, and if it weren't for the red hair Hermione would have been highly skeptical of the chance of them being related to Ron.

"Ah, welcome back, Hermione," Harry said as she joined him and Ron back at the table. "You won't believe what happened while you were gone: Neville and Seamus's potion went haywire, burning a hole through some of the other students' shoes. Neville had to be taken to the hospital wing, he'd been left with at least a dozen boils!"

"Goodness," she hissed. "Poor thing. Well…how is the potion coming along, Weasley?"

Ron's orange eyebrows were furrowed in frustration as he did his best to decipher the concoction's ingredients from the basic edition of the potions book. "Um…let's see: add a petrified batwing to the potion once it is at a low simmer."

At that, Hermione observed the beaker over the burner. "The heat of the flame is a tad too high. It's practically boiling. If it isn't simmering at a leveled temperature the batwing's contents will disintegrate before its effect can dilute the mixture."

Sweet, naïve Harry couldn't hope to understand Hermione's convoluted input, so he just nodded in agreement, taking her word for it. Ron sent daggers of irritation from his eyes to the back of Hermione's head, irked once more by the Slytherin girl's excess intellect.

Hermione focused on the assignment, able to sense Ron's returning disdain, but smoothly ignoring it.

Potions concluded, and the students all filed out of Snape's classroom. Ron cordially bid a warm farewell to Harry before setting off to his next class – to Hermione he said nothing.

"I get the feeling Weasley doesn't like me very well," Hermione said, watching Ron walk off.

"Be grateful it's a student and not a teacher you aren't liked by," Harry comfortingly jeered, though he did not grin.

Hermione wanted to ask exactly why Professor Snape didn't like Harry, but that was most likely a question he himself knew not the answer to. Instead, she asked what class he was heading to next.

"Wizarding World Literature," he replied. "I believe it's in a classroom deeper in the dungeons."

The class Terence mentioned to me, she recalled. Only then did she remember that she herself had the very same class. "That's my next class, too! A friend – well, potential friend – told me that it was very well liked. Also that the teacher's name was Professor Poe."

"Maybe it will be a pleasant enough class to take our minds off of drearier thoughts," he said hopefully. Hermione silently shared the same hope as they walked through the caliginous corridors of the dungeons.

"So what was your life like before you arrived at Hogwarts?" Hermione asked, wanting to get to know the Boy Who Lived better through well-balanced conversation. Obviously there had to be more to him than just his glamorous title. "As I've said before: my parents aren't magic. My parents are both dentists who work in Muggle communities. They're still adjusting to the knowledge of my being a witch, along with the unforeseen introduction to the world of magic itself!"

"I guess you could say I share the same emotions as your parents," Harry said weakly. "My family never once brought up my parents being magical. I think they wanted to smother any chance of me becoming a wizard by severing any ties to magical world before they could ever be made."

Hermione was overtaken by outraged astonishment. "Why on earth would they do that?"

Harry sighed. "My aunt and her family hated anything magical. She was my mother's sister, but while everyone saw her as a blessing my aunt only saw her as a freak."

Harry then hoped Hermione wouldn't ask about his home life and ultimately have to tell her about their cruel treatment and how they made him sleep in a spider-infested cupboard under the stairs.

"How awful," Hermione gasped.

Mercifully, they had reached the destination that was Professor Poe's classroom. "Yes…but it's class time! Sad talk later!"

Ever observant, Hermione could tell that Harry's terse ending of the conversation was a countermeasure to keep from venturing into more sensitive territory of his life outside of Hogwarts, and she chose to respect his privacy by not pressing.

Both she and Harry were completely awestruck as they took in the cemetery-themed architecture of Wizarding World Literature's classroom. The room had no windows, blue flames brightly flickering in Victorian-styled lamps lining the stone walls serving as the sole source of light. The floor of the classroom was a bleak design of cobblestones, and, in place of a door, a tall, majestic iron gate bound in thick chains was positioned at the classroom's threshold. Above the gate/entrance was a marble platform, ominously perched upon it an inimical sculpture of a raven that would emit a despairing caw from its stony beak, signaling either the commencing or end of class.

At the front of the drearily elegant classroom before a trio of large―and chillingly ill-fated―portraits hung on the wall, provided a good outlook of the young occupants of the room. Their ornate, gothic frames were the only visible extents of their congruity. The center portrait was of a hazy-eyed, alabaster woman in a flowing lavender garment standing outside a sepulcher, her ghostlike beauty entrancing as she stood before the shore, clouds swirling hopelessly gray above her, and the auburn ringlets of her hair swaying against her face in an unheard breeze. The square, black plaque below the portrait identified the outlandish belle in bold, white letters as ANNABEL LEE.

The portrait neighboring her was of a meager old man in bed, decrepit in body, but his severely unnerving vulture's eye, one that many students had claimed to have felt conflagrant upon their persons even after they'd left Professor Poe's classroom, glowered from the portrait. The other half of his face shrouded in shadow, the old man's eye seemed to rotate to every student, malign and scrutinizing them all with a gaze that would take residence in their most lurid dreams for a good week, or so. The plaque underneath it read THE OLD MAN OF TELL-TALE HEART.

The third portrait was of a tombstone decorated with a pile of discordantly vibrant lilies, the crescent moon beaming through the nighttime sky upon it. The name engraved upon the tombstone read Lenore, no perceivable surname present. You'd have to be studying the portrait quite meticulously to notice, but every few minutes, a flash of white would transform the portrait's scenery. The sky would be dyed a seductive scarlet, the silhouette of a raven with glowing white eyes perched atop the tombstone visible, and the white lilies withered and black atop the grave's soil. The tombstone would become riddled with unsightly cracks and overgrown with thorny brambles, dead leaves blowing in its vicinity. Lenore would be replaced by NEVERMORE. The portrait's plaque read THE RAVEN.

As Terence had mentioned, the class was taught by another ghost. And there he was, writing upon a parchment with black-feather quill at his desk before the aligned tables of his classroom. His eyes – dark and mournful as two bottomless graves – looked up upon his sensing the arrival of the first two students.

His voice was dry with ennui as he spoke, "Welcome, children, you're both the firsts. I pray you both possess minds seeking a path leading opposite the desolate path to illiteracy."

Hermione felt as though she could've fainted. Wizarding World Literature was taught by the ghost of the American poet Edgar Allan Poe?!