Prologue - Wizard
Mara
8/1/10
The exact nature of the testing is arbitrary, of course. The subject's emotional state is the important part. Not very scientific of me, but we're in completely unknown territory. Fictomancy derives its strength from two things: Art and human emotion, two things which the western scientific method struggles to manufacture. If you have any further doubts about my methodology, I suggest that you keep them to yourself.
Like most eleven-year-olds who prefer the imaginary to the real, I was severely disappointed when I didn't get my letter to Hogwarts. Probably more disappointed than average, because unlike most eleven-year-olds, I was actually a wizard.
I figured it out when I was nine. During recess, I had a habit of wandering around the trees bordering the playground and pretending to be Harry Potter. I once tried to drag a boy I had a crush on into it (he would be Ron, of course), a mistake I would never again repeat. I'll spare you the gritty details.
On one particular occasion, I picked up a random stick, pointed it at a rock, and said the magic words. "Wingardium Leviosa!" Being a nine-year-old who had yet to learn how to differentiate fiction from reality, I was only mildly surprised when the spell actually took hold, and the rock slowly lifted from its resting place and began to hover two feet above the ground.* I glanced about to see if anyone had noticed my accomplishment, but the other children had taken to ignoring me for reasons that I hope have become obvious to you by now.
I kept my newfound discovery a secret, of course, even from my parents, for two reasons. The first reason is that (for reasons that never quite made sense to me) the Wizarding World has to be kept secret from Muggles. I was terrified that I'd blow my shot at getting into Hogwarts, which was a damn sight better than getting into middle school.
The second reason is that, in my deranged nine-year-old brain, the real and fantastical worlds ought to be kept separate for fear that somehow the former might contaminate the latter. So I resolved not to probe the boundaries, and never cast a spell again.
So when my eleventh and then twelfth birthdays came and went with no letter, I seized upon the obvious conclusion that there must be something fundamentally wrong with me, and that by casting that spell I had ruined something. No half-giant would come down to rescue me from the mundane horrors of real life. I didn't think about any alternate explanations for what had happened— I was an American, and Hogwarts was a British school, for instance, or Harry Potter was a children's book with no basis in reality, and my casting that spell was a manifestation of an altogether weirder phenomenon.
Either way, I firmly swore I would never attempt to cast another spell, and to never tell a soul what had happened. By fourteen, the pain of rejection had scabbed over, and I had thoroughly convinced myself that the incident was a product of the fevered imagination of a lonely eight-year-old girl. In hindsight, my discretion probably saved my life.
Footnotes
* At the time, it didn't strike me as particularly strange that I had successfully cast a spell with a random stick I found lying around.