I could have gone a lifetime without knowing, without believing. My life could have been simple, safe, happy, unspectacular...boring. Born a witch in an otherwise non magic family I would quickly learn that I was destined for something more than to grow up and become a house wife or school teacher like my grandmother and mother before me. And so, on my nineteenth birthday I found myself standing in the rubble of a fallen building, surrounded by the screams and flashes of light of the battle that raged around me. Lightheaded from blood loss and smoke, fueled with adrenaline and cold fury, I found that candles and birthday gifts were the farthest thing from my mind.
This was never the life that my parents had imagined for me, nor that I had imagined for myself, young as I had been when I had first discovered what I was capable of. Back then magic had been purely wonderous, good, enchanting, despite what my sister already saw in the tricks that I did. I didn't understand then, and surely wouldn't for quite some time that there was so much more to it than what my childish brain was capable of imagining. For this was a way of life, and every way of life will at one time or another come under attack and need to be defended, or else perish. Had I been born a mere generation or two earlier than perhaps the wonder and discovery would have lasted longer as I became comfortable in my new life. But from the day I stepped foot in Hogwarts, wide eyed and naive, my head full of the stories that my friend had told me of the world from which he had come and that I now belonged I could sense that I was different.
It was a subtle difference at first, something insubstantial that no normal eleven year old has the knowledge or ability to grasp, but as the years passed and the dark arts and Voldemort himself began to gain power and followers beyond the walls of the school, there was something that was growing inside the castle as well.
Of all the bad things that I had to say about James Potter when we were at school together, the one thing I couldn't help but notice was his pure, unadulterated hatred of the dark arts. Childish pranks on the Slytherins turned to out and out war as we reached our final years at school and it was this absolute intolerance for evil that made Dumbledore trust him so firmly and award him head boy, for as this position had once meant little more than who had the best grades in the school it had become political, a real stand in defense of the school and what it stood for.
My nineteenth birthday came to an end as I threw myself behind the remains of a brick wall to avoid a killing curse that was sent my way by the death eater I had been dueling.