Guest #1, ro781727: As far as Hazel could see, there was no mermaid in the pool when she waded into the water. Which, considering a previous encounter, should make you wonder just what she really saw…

Winlyn: She's bumping against a real truth of magic when it comes to natural materials, but she made a few assumptions early on that are skewing her conclusions. Don't worry, somebody with more knowledge of what she's doing will straighten her out soon enough.

Silent. Storm: You're correct, the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad is a thing in canon. The problem is that it's not clear just what their job really is. We know they were called out when Harry blew up Marge, but we never hear about them any other time. My personal conclusion, then, is that like the Obliviators (with whom they share a department) they don't go out to every magical event in the Muggle world but rather only get called out when something is so obvious that the average Muggle would notice it. Hazel normally stays out of sight, but I wouldn't be surprised if word about a janitor talking about an appearing-and-disappearing girl makes it to their ears.

"Wow, making a bottomless bag is so easy!": Heh heh heh. Not quite. I'll get more into it later (it's actually a fairly major plot point), but for now suffice it to say that Hazel wouldn't have had such success had she found a canvas backpack or used one of the leather purses. In fact, I will go as far as revealing that she didn't CAST anything...

Chapter 11
The Hill

Her belly flat against the grass, Hazel switched her gaze repeatedly from the red sun hanging low on the horizon to the circle formed on the ground by a ring of standing stones. She was still a hundred meters or so away from the stones, and between the distance and laying on the ground and being covered by her ignore-me smoke, she was reasonably confident that she could not be seen. Unseen was how she wanted to be until after nightfall.

She knew she was probably being paranoid, but this was Elva Hill! A place where fairies were said to gather. There was no way she was drawing attention to herself until she knew there were not going to be creatures like the red cap that wanted to eat her guts and grind her bones for bread. At least on the flip side, she was so small that if giants truly existed they should not see her unless she really wanted.

The sun sank out of sight, and soon shadow covered the world. Still Hazel waited, but despite her patience nothing was happening. It was quiet as a grave all around.

Maybe I'm worried about nothing, she wondered. Morgan had no answer for her, and she glanced over to find him sitting on her satchel, puffed up and letting out a cute little birdy snore. Despite herself she found a smile on her face, so shaking her head she returned her attention to the stone circle.

An hour passed. Two. Nothing happened.

Now I feel dumb. Pushing herself up from the ground, she used her magic hand to lift Morgan onto her shoulder and pick up her bag. Her friend woke up just enough to sidle closer to the warmth of her neck, and she started walking towards the stones. Maybe that was the problem? She had not exactly had a lot of luck with stone circles, as Stonehenge clearly attested. Even the stones in Shervage Wood, though connected to magic in the story they told, were made by regular humans…

…What was glowing in the center of that circle?

Hazel took a quick step back, suddenly worried that she might not have been patient enough.

The light instantly winked out again.

A step forward, the glowing something or other returned to the circle. A step back, it was gone. She repeated the movements a few more times before she had to accept that whatever this thing was, it was only appearing when she got within a certain distance. Her legs tense and ready to jump her out to anywhere else, she slowly walked closer and closer.

She halfway expected that the shorter the distance, the brighter it would become. What happened instead was that the colored blur became crisper and more detailed. She stopped at the edge of the stone circle and stared.

Hanging in the air was a… She had no words to describe it. A crack? Yes, a crack or a squiggle, glowing a faintly off-yellow and spinning slowly as it floated there. While it was turning, the individual lines that created it shifted or lengthened or shortened, changing the design from moment to moment but not the overall shape. She had never seen anything like this, nor had she even heard or read of it. What in the world was it?

And why had no one ever mentioned this thing existing before? This was not like the stone circle in Shervage Wood, which was out in the middle of the woods where people were unlikely to go. Elva Hill was a well-known landmark with regular visitors. Surely someone had seen it before her!

Closing her left eye, she examined it more thoroughly. Her lens made it easier for her to see things close up, so maybe if she only looked at this thing with that eye, she might find an additional clue. Sadly all it did was make the edges of the crack a bit more crisp, not as fuzzy.

Opening both eyes made the crack go blurry for a second, and a suspicion bloomed in her mind. Could it be that simple? Unsure just what she was hoping for, she closed her right eye this time.

The crack vanished.

Her right eye opened up again, and when the anomalous rip in the world itself returned her hand lifted up to the frame strapped to her head and more specifically to the faintly purple lens set within it. The lens she received by trading the lens from her old glasses with… something. A spirit or fairy or something else entirely.

That thought caught up with the rest of her mind, and she took several hasty steps away from the circle. She could only see this with a magical lens, which meant it was very magical. Maybe she was wrong, and she hoped she was, but she feared that this answered a question she could have happily gone her entire life without getting answered.

Beneath Glastonbury Tor, a magician from long ago had sealed the road to the Greenwild. Clearly he did not get around to closing the doors to all the other Otherworlds.

Hazel's hand rose to hover protectively over Morgan's sleeping body, and with a jump she vanished from Cockermouth and reappeared in the pet store where she made her bag. Whatever monstrous fae slept near Elva Hill, it could continue napping. She wanted nothing to do with it.

Heart slowing down now that she was a week's walk away, she sat down on a small table off to the side of the glass doors. That's the last place on my list, she realized after a few minutes. All the potentially magical sites in England she found scouring the books in the library in Greater Whinging, she had visited. Four months spent on the road, and she was no closer to finding another magical person.

…What was she going to do now?

I don't have anything else to do. Sure, I could go back to Tintagel and swim through the cold water, but that was something I wanted to wait to do until the summer, and even if I did that, I still wouldn't have anything after. I had hoped to find something that pointed me to other druids, even just the tiniest hint, but there was nothing. Even if I'm right and there are other people like me who have powers but don't have a dedicated meeting place, I still wouldn't be able to find them. I don't know how many there are in England, let alone anywhere else.

There has to be something! Somebody had to have written something down. Museums and stuff have books from hundreds of years ago, and people stopped believing in magic not that long ago. There just… there can't be nothing left.

She sighed and let her head fall against the wall behind her. Maybe I'm just not looking in the right places? I don't know where else I would look, but I haven't found anything, so it's possible. Likely, even.

Running through her memories of the various fairy tales and folklore stories she had read over the months, she tried to think of where else she could search. Wales and Scotland had similar stories to England, but if she found nothing here, what were the chances she would get lucky there? Ireland she had already ruled out, both because she did not want to run into the fae that infested the island and because she did not want to run into the IRA. That was the British Isles covered, which meant she would need to look farther afield.

The Continent, then.

France isn't too far away. I could catch a ferry from… I think it's Dover? Her face scrunched up. I think so, anyway. Some fairy tales come from France, after all, and it's next to Germany. The Brothers Grimm definitely had a lot of witches and magical beasties in their stories. I don't know any French, which will be a problem, but maybe I could pick up a dictionary or something?

…Not to mention, it would be a lot warmer than here.

She pulled off her satchel, waking up Morgan in the process, and started pulling things out. That was the one downside of this magical bag: she could stuff whatever she wanted into it, but to get to anything specific she had to take out everything that was on top of it. Finally she found a wad of paper, and removing the elastic bands she unfolded her various maps of England.

France was close to Dover, she confirmed after a quick look, so that would be the first place to check. Was there anywhere she had been that was nearby, somewhere she could jump to and shorten just how far she had to walk?

A laugh escaped her when she looked at all the circles she had drawn depicting the sites she wanted to visit. The closest potential magical site was Stonehenge, which meant the place she should go to start her walk was actually Greater Whinging of all places! She shook her head and started packing everything back up into her bag. This was also a good time to check on Stonehenge again now that she knew her lens could reveal the gates to Otherworlds. She had to know if something like that had been there the first time she visited. A jump—

—landed her in the ancient stone circle. She looked around. No crack or ripple, no spirits, just the stones themselves. There really was nothing magical here—

—so she reappeared outside the library in Greater Whinging. Hitching her bag on her shoulder, she breathed out her ignore-me smoke and started walking eastward. She barely got fifteen feet before a car backfired loudly in the alley on the other side of the library, making her jump in sudden surprise. She turned around to give the unseen car a glare at scaring her.

It was only because she was looking that way that she saw two men stepping out from the alley.

Hazel blinked a couple of times and stared. She had to be dreaming because the alternative was that two grown men were standing in front of the Little Whinging library wearing bathrobes and bright blue capes. Maybe they were homeless, and that was why they were wearing such things? A longer glance, and she shook her head. The robes did not look worn out or patched up, and the capes looked identical. These were not things they had picked up from a charity bin and wore because they had nothing else.

She had thought it a few times before, and she would think it again: grown-ups were weird.

"Think our perp's around here still?" the shorter of the men asked, looking around at the empty streets. "I'm getting tired of the wild goose chase. Though I can't see why she'd come here of all places. Nothing worth seeing."

Despite herself, Hazel nodded her head in agreement with the oddball man. Greater Whinging might be bigger than Little Whinging, but from her experience in the town, there was nothing 'great' about it.

The tall man grunted. "Probably not. Mudblood bitch has been Apparating all over the country for the last couple of months. The boss wanted us to bring her to the Ministry, but the Muggle-lovers higher up would probably let her go with a slap on the hand and a pat on the head. Be better to Obliviate her entirely and be done with it."

A shiver ran down her spine at the sound of that word and the viciousness with which the man thought it. Admittedly, she did not know what it was, but the sound of it was much too close to 'oblivion' and 'obliterate' for her peace of mind. She knew what those words meant.

Spinning on one heel, she walked briskly away and left the bathrobe-wearers to their conversation about 'Mudblood' and 'Apparating', whatever those were. She did take a moment to spare a quick wish that whoever these guys were after would stay safe, however. She would not want to be hunted by men this dangerous. But at the end of the day, there was nothing she could do about it, and she had her own tasks. She wanted to get to Dover as soon as possible.

A loud horn screeched as the ferry came to a stop at the dock, and Hazel was one of the first ones hopping off the boat. Dodging around a few people, none of whom could see through her smoke, she walked away from the coast and into the city of Calais. She was in an entirely different country, lost among people who spoke a different language…

And aside from minor differences in the buildings, she could be excused for thinking she never left jolly old England. She might not be able to make heads or tails of the words they spoke or the signs hanging over the roads, but their thoughts still came thorugh loud and clear. All these people had the same worries and petty concerns as the random passerbys of Bristol or Greater Whinging.

She stepped off of the main roads and into a little alleyway, then with one jump—

—she sat on top of a building on the other side of the street. Morgan hopped off her shoulder onto the peaked roof, glancing around in surprise. She did not normally take him up to the kinds of places where he could fly on his own.

Never thought you'd see another country, did you?, she asked him. Then again, I suppose from your perspective all countries are just the same. The only difference is whether there are a bunch of people around or not.

Feel free to go exploring if you want. She waved for him to take off. I'll just be sitting here. I have a couple of things I want to try, then we'll look for someplace to stay for a while.

Closing her eyes, she let the idle thoughts of the city wash over her. She had learned not a word of French in Little Whinging, and while she had made some efforts to rectify that in the last few days, she had hopes that she had figured out an easier way. If she listened to a bunch of people with her mind-reading for a while, would it be possible for her just to… absorb the local language? She had never tried anything like this, but she had never had reason to do so, either.

The thoughts of hundreds of people filled her head, the words losing all meaning and turning into an awful mishmash of nonsense. She was able to subject herself to only ten minutes of this before she shook her head and did whatever the telepathic equivalent of plugging up her own ears was.

That was not going to work.

Maybe it was just too many people all at once? Hazel rolled over onto her belly and closed her right eye so she could see better out of her left. One man stood out for being almost the same size around as Uncle Vernon and yelling at someone through a large brick of a mobile phone. She grimaced; she could easily remember her uncle being inordinately proud of his first mobile phone until one morning when he could not hear anything out of it except squealing. He had blamed her for it failing even though she knew she had rarely so much as looked at it, let alone tried to sabotage it. The way he was shouting, he was cut from much the same cloth.

She did not think learning French from somebody would take away their own knowledge of the language, but if it did… she might feel a little less guilty knowing she was muting Uncle Vernon's duplicate?

Blocking out the thoughts of everyone else as best as she could, she focused on him. "How could Marguerite be this stupid?" she heard as his thoughts came to her. "The appointment was written right there on the calendar! I swear, if she wasn't so hot bent over my desk I would fire her right now…"

A shudder ran through her at the brief glimpses of the mental images waiting for her just below the surface of his thoughts. This was why she did not try to focus on other people's thoughts like this, sometimes pictures slipped over along with words.

Grown-ups were gross.

More importantly, once again she could tell no difference between his thoughts and the thoughts of British people except for a light accent on the words. That was nice on the one hand; she would not have to worry about not being able to understand the people here. On the other, the easy way of learning French was right out.

Hazel sighed and patted the bag slung across her body. She had prepared for this, and that was why there was an English-to-French dictionary stowed away in her satchel thanks to the library in Bristol. She had no illusions of learning French in a week or two, but so long as she could understand what people said and pantomimed well enough, she should be able to get her meaning across while she learned some of the words.

Morgan had not left his previous spot and instead was just staring at her, so she pushed herself back up. Don't want to leave me alone, do you, she asked her friend. His only response was to hop onto her waiting palm, and she gently deposited him back on her shoulder. Okay then. We can spend a day or two just looking at the sights, then we'll research where we can go that maybe has more answers for us than England did.

For the second time in the span of just a few days, Hazel heard a horn blast as she rode a vehicle. This was no ferry, though; it was a train. Specifically it was a train that ran on the route between Calais and a town called Compiègne. She knew nothing about the town itself, but what she had discovered from looking over maps of the country was that it was just outside a good-sized forest of the same name.

The forest was not as large as the Avesnois National Park near the border of Belgium, but what the maps seemed to show was that there were a number of towns scattered throughout the Park. Compiègne Forest did not have such a large human presence, which made it more attractive in her eyes. She had no idea if something like French druids had existed in the past or if that was a purely British tradition, but if they existed, a forest like this that had remained unsettled would be perfect for them. As such it was here that she would start her search.

Not to mention, Compiègne was a large enough town to get what she needed to survive, and if they did not have something, Paris was only a couple of days' walk.

The train was passing the edge of the forest now, so with a risky hop she teleported from her hiding spot at the juncture between a pair of train cars to the tree line. She gave the train a wave, even though she knew the conductor could not see her and likely would not have appreciated her stealing a ride if he could, and started walking deeper into the massive oaks. There was little chance she could make it all the way to the center of the forest, but her hope was to find a landmark as deep within as she could and teleport back first thing in the morning. It was a big forest, but with enough time she could search the entire thing.

On the plus side, she did not go to school anymore, which meant she had all the time in the world!

The sun had already been on its way down when she hopped onto the train, and soon enough the last rays of daylight were gone. Still she continued wandering, the darkness of the closely growing trees driven back only by her electric torch and what little light coming from the full moon overhead could break through the leaves. Branches creaked all around, and no matter how hard she ignored it she could not get rid of the feeling that she was being watched.

Another creak from behind her, and Hazel stopped to take a deep breath and chide herself. She had walked through plenty of little groves and patches of trees in the dark over the last few months, and besides being larger and foreign this forest was no different. She could leave now, returning to either the abandoned building in the outskirts of Calais she had used for the last couple of days or even somewhere in Britain and coming back when it was daylight again, but all the trees looked so much alike that she would have to jump back to the edge of the forest and start her search from square one. She had spent probably two hours walking around in here already, and that was progress she did not want to lose—

A loud howl came from her right, and her torch beam whipped over in that direction. Okay, wolves were not something I dealt with in England, she admitted to herself. Maybe heading back for the night and starting over first thing in the morning isn't the worst plan I've ever had.

The cracking of sticks came from the same direction as the howl and shifted from her side to in front of her. She kept the beam of light focused on the source of the sound, so she was able to see what finally stepped out from between the trees. The light landed squarely on it, and the splotch of brightness quivered and danced as her hand started shaking.

This was no wolf. It was something out of a nightmare.

The creature walked on all fours, but not like an animal. Its legs were too long and too thin, almost skeletal, and its back was twisted and hunched in order to keep its front paws on the ground. A couple of times its paws lifted off the ground entirely, almost as if it were trying to walk on two legs like a person. Ribs visibly poked out from its side and flexed with its heavy panting. Its skin was a sickly grey, and its hair was thin and sparse except where it had concentrated on the upper back, reaching up its neck to its head and the long ears on top. That head swung to look at her, the one part of the body that was at all similar to the wolf it sounded like, and it opened its mouth to let a pink tongue hang out among sharp yellowed teeth.

She swallowed thickly. Maybe it was like the hellhound in Wistman's Wood, scary-looking but not really dangerous? Maybe? Nice doggy, she told it, her empty hand rising in a warding gesture.

The monster stared at her for a moment longer, then it opened its mouth wide and roared.

And then it started running right at her.

The reasoning Hazel went to France probably seems a little weak, but while the original plan made more sense, it was also needlessly dark. Morgan needs to LIVE, dammit!

And I know I said she would meet other characters, but I promise it's happening next chapter!

Silently Watches out.