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The Hallow Sisters.

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Little Esmerelda Hallow loved spending time with her sisters, Ethel and Sybil (or Ethie and Sybie, as she nicknamed them) and they loved spending time with her, and they all had contrasting personalities; where Esmerelda was outgoing and a little bit shy she was extremely smart and dedicated to her siblings. Ethel was more stubborn but she had a good heart. Sybil was the more timid of the siblings, not helped by the fact their mother, in an act that frankly befuddled Esmerelda and she had lived with it ever since as she had reached the age where she would find herself being taught the wonders and the mysteries of magic, and potion making as both were vitally important for learning on the Cackles Academy Entrance Exam, found herself being taught by a tutor.

Their mother, Ursula Hallow, being immensely busy with the family businesses that were owned and maintained by the Hallow family over the generations and being an important member of the Magic Council itself, had some kind of excuse prepared to not bother teaching any of her daughters how potions worked.

At least that was how Esmerelda had viewed it, although by then she had become immensely cynical after seeing that her parents didn't really like spending time with them. But even Esmerelda Hallow would begin to see, and this would come when all three girls were older and wiser, especially Ethel after how many mistakes the girl had made throughout her school career at Cackles Academy, that if it wasn't vital for their branch of the family line to have a child (or children) to ensure the survival of the family bloodline and lineage, then they would never have bothered to have kids.

Ever.

It was part of the magical tradition for witches and wizards to learn magic from their parents, it was designed to be a bond formed between mother and daughter, father and son. It harked back to the days when the magical world was less organised than it was today. In the time around Merlin, Nimueh, Morgause, and Morgana, the witching world was loosely governed, but several things had come out of it. Among them was the tradition that family would be responsible for teaching their offspring the wonders of magic, and that tradition saw no signs of being done away with. It was simply unimaginable for it to happen.

Sometimes witches, who had sisters, aunts and grandmothers who were part of a coven, would work with the other witches and learn magic from them, which diversified their magical knowledge.

But in this modern day, while covens existed it was rare for them to go that route, but not impossible. The Hallows were part of many covens, some of them had founded many of them over the centuries.

And yet Esmerelda, who had known and had been told by her grandparents that her mother would one day work with her to teach her potions. It never happened. Instead, Esmerelda was foisted off on their grandmother and several aunts, who were part of covens. Esme, innocent at the time, had been stunned by the surprise and even outright rage shown by the coven witches, who showed her so many different techniques of potion-making and even some advice about magic, more or less teaching her everything that she knew while encouraging her to develop magic on her own, but it wasn't until later she would learn her mother had deliberately flouted the Witches Code and magical tradition by caring more for her career prospects than the future of her family.

It simply was not done.

If Ethel had expected her mother, who was already outright ignoring her and was making the younger girl act out a bit, expected Ursula to sit down and teach her magic, she was in for a shock. She threw a temper tantrum when she discovered her mother had no intention or interest in showing her how potions worked, or even how to make them. Like Esmerelda, she was given a tutor and her grandmother, and likewise, she learnt from the coven and learnt the same things.

Sybil….

Ursula and Triton Hallow both saw how powerful their elder daughters were becoming and in their infinite lack of wisdom, both of them decided to limit how much potions and magic worked. It never really made much sense to any of the sisters, but they took the time and the trouble to teach Sybil everything that they knew, and it worked. Their parents underestimated them. Later, Esmerelda and Ethel, when she stopped trying to attract her parents' attention, would speculate on why this was, and guessed that Ursula and Triton simply did not want it getting out they had broken with magical customs.

It wasn't entirely a stretch, as both were ruthless, and self-righteous enough in their own narrow views of the world to care for their images than to learn from their mistakes.

Sybil hated being tutored as the woman was cruel and vindictive, and poor Sybil, who was already timid, was made even more scared, and it was a fight and a half for Esmerelda to clean up the mess. But potions would never be Sybil's favourite topic.

And yet, although the siblings didn't realise it yet, there was a strong connection between them all, but as children, they had no idea or concept of how strong this connection went, nor even how far it went.

But it was there, and over the years this connection ran deeper and went further than either girl imagined it would. In the summer before Ethel's first year at Cackles, Esmerelda and the girls took a photo of themselves. They joined together and they found themselves triggering the camera spell, snapping the picture, the spell not only doubled in power, but they received three pictures to cancel out any magical surge or backlash.

Oh, they'd come up with numerous theories about the cause, but Sybil innocently guessed that their love for one another meant they all wanted a photograph each.

Neither of her elder sisters refuted that, but they didn't know they'd get the answer later in their lives.