Paragraph 5 - 52 : Athrea

A few days later, Ann was in the Slytherin Common Room when Professor Snape walked in. Initially, Ann was not particularly moved by the sudden appearance. Nevertheless, she entered a state of panic, when she heard the rhythmic noise of Professor Snape's firm steps growing louder and louder. She raised her head, and almost flinched when seeing his greasy hair barely four feet away from her eyes. He addressed her :

Your presence is needed in the Headmaster's office. Follow me

Ann's brains were racing : maybe Professor Snape had actually detected her when she was going to the Astronomy Tower, and reported her, prompting Professor Dumbledore to envision her expulsion. Or the old wizard had guessed that she and the three others knew something about Lankan's stolen Secreti, and that they hadn't come forward when they should have : after all, Oliver Perrusi had not only robbed Hugh Lankan, he had also brewed Polyjuice. Alternatively, a member of staff could have spotted their equipment in the Arch Room, and now the administration had questions about the Intuition Potion. This didn't make the cut : Professor Snape had already extorted from Judith the confession that she had concocted an Intuition Potion, and had seemingly concluded it was innocuous. Maybe actually this theory held water : Professor Snape could have changed his mind after hearing more about the details surrounding the use of the Intuition Potion, which would explain why he was the teacher who had come to fetch her. In the meantime, they had climbed stairs out of the dungeons, and had arrived in front of the spiral staircase that led to Professor Dumbledore's office. Much to Ann's surprise, Professor Snape let her ascend alone and effortlessly - since the stairs were moving up, but Ann didn't have to walk up - towards the working space of Professor Dumbledore. On reaching the door, she paused before knocking on it. There were voices coming from her destination. She hit the door with her knuckles, and when it opened, it revealed a completely unexpected situation : Eleanor, Judith, Sigismond and Professor Dumbledore were here, but they had company, namely Mrs. Candler. Apparently, the Headmaster could read on Ann's face her bewilderment, and he explained what they were all supposed to do : hear about the discoveries that Mrs. Candler had made when investigating Akinori Milpense's object. She cut short to the interesting part :

After trying quite a few things, I got a result when dipping the snowball first in an undirected love potion then in the Pensieve. When one makes a love potion, one has to put something from themselves. For this case, though, I didn't put anything belonging to me or another person. And I was able to access memories. Not only Miss Milpense's memories, but also memories that apparently are ultimate causes of Miss Milpense's feelings. Since I used a neutralised love potion, and that I am talking about feelings, you may surmise that I found memories of teenage love. In that case, you will be sorely disappointed. I did find things related to love, but nothing quite joyful. This was a story about three people, apparently living in Japan. I guess they were all Muggle-born, since I saw no magical element in the glimpses of their lives. The very first memory of the loop is a young man and a young woman talking merrily near a river, in a city, I suppose in Japanese. I didn't understand a single word. The man was beginning a lot of sentences with something like 'Hirata-san', therefore I'd say the woman's name is Hirata-san. The next piece of family history was taking place in, you know, these traditional homes made of wood that one can find in this part of the world. Apparently, Hirata-san's parents were talking to her, and that was very upsetting to the young woman. The third episode was showing another young man, not the first one, but one that one would see later in the sequence of events. He was at his home, and he was looking at a paper, like a test. He was writing notes, in signs I couldn't decipher. The fourth burst of actions was in an examination room. There were two subsets : in subset number one, the very first young man, who had chatted happily, was taking the test, the subject of which being exactly the same as that the second young man had had before his eyes previously. In subset number two, in another place of the examination hall, the second young man was facing again the very same test. This dissolved then to another event, a wedding. Between Hirata-san and the second young man. My theory is that Hirata-san was in love with the first young man, but had to marry the second one, because the latter had been more successful at the examination, for which he had cheated, having had access to the subject before the official test. Following this, the memories where a young girl was present appeared. Probably the then-little Akinori Milpense. Hirata-san was near her, therefore I ventured the guess Hirata-san is Miss Milpense's mother. She was permanently watching her daughter with the kind of deep sorrow one can't conceit, as if the unhappy and unwanted marriage she was in had left her in distress. I posited that the young Miss Milpense was an undesired child, only conceived to please the step-parents. Nonetheless, the current behaviour of Miss Milpense is that of someone who does her best to give happiness, instead of lamenting on her fate and being resentful for the injustice that was behind her birth and that hit her during her childhood. The next memories were exactly about this. I don't know to which year at Hogwarts they correspond, because Miss Milpense, is very small, thus one can hardly tell her age from her stature. In the first set of images, she was smiling repeatedly to a Slytherin boy, who was clearly embarrassed. But in the second set of pictures, there was also superimposed talking. A Gryffindor witch was awkwardly polling Miss Milpense about her wish to date the Slytherin boy, she mentioned the name of Matthew. The Gryffindor girl was saying something along the line 'I know you like Matthew, but I like him too. I am sorry.' And Miss Milpense did something that took me aback : she took out of her pocket a circular silvery object, like a wristwatch, bewitched it, and smiling, handed it over with both hands extended to the Gryffindor student, who slowly moved both her hands forward to accept the gift symmetrically. The last memory was Miss Milpense, sitting at night in an alcove of what I think was her dormitory. There was sufficient moonlight from the neighbouring windows to see that she was, as her mother had been, sorrowful. And the last image I got from looking in the Pensieve was Miss Milpense, slightly smiling while tears were running down her cheeks

The six of them waited silently during a dozen of seconds for this new set of informations to sink in. Then, Professor Dumbledore spoke :

Let me complement this. Miss Milpense put her feelings in the objects she was giving as presents. She inherited melancholy, or acquired it though living within it. And by adding elements of a love potion to this feeling which derives from lack of love, one supplements the sorrow with the missing element, an absence that initially prevented the object from being whole and helpful

Mrs. Candler waited a few seconds, possibly to give the impression she wanted to allow the four students to contemplate the words of the person who could reward them the most or expel them. Then, she went on :

Professor, maybe I could have a little chat in private with my son

Professor Dumbledore answered :

Once you are back down the staircase, yes. I hope I didn't frighten Miss Aves, Miss Parry, Miss Magarthy and Mr. Candler by summoning them. They can now go back to their dormitories

The door opened magically, and Mrs. Candler was first to exit the office to step on the spiral staircase. Then, one by one, Sigismond, Ann, Eleanor and Judith in this order joined Mrs. Candler at the bottom of the staircase. Sigismond's mother had another surprise for the four friends : she had skipped interesting elements of her investigation, and they would soon understand why. There was a lot more to Miss Milpense's story. To begin with, Mrs. Candler hadn't had the idea of dipping the snowball in the love potion out of luck or trial and error. When she first attempted things on the Muggle decoration, she used in quick succession 'Fusio', then a similar spell, that could have conversely allowed herself to be absorbed by the object, and to finish, she had dipped the snowball in the Pensieve, but without the love potion. And she had seen only one memory, that formed the basis for her later research : Akinori Milpense, with the Sorting Hat on her head, the latter telling her she wouldn't fit in any of the four Houses. This happened sometimes, and the magic Hat's policy was, whenever this occurred, to let students pick their House, and tell them they would be concurrently and secretly listed as members of the fifth House, Athrea, which was the name of the first student, about a thousand years ago, whom the Sorting Hat had not managed to sort adequately for the same reasons. Akinori took a few seconds, then told in a little voice to the Hat

Gambattetai kara, Hufflepuff onegai shimasu

She was therefore officially sorted in Hufflepuff. Mrs. Candler was then stuck in this memory for about twenty minutes, and had worried at one time she might end up trapped in it forever. Despite this pending risk, once out of the memory, she had repeated the process, hoping to see more events, but it was still the same, and the delay needed to exit it also. Sigismond's mother knew from that point on that the snowball was able to interact with the Pensieve, and she imagined that, with a bit of help, it would yield better results. Thus, she embarked on a research on identical anecdotes from Hogwarts students throughout the school's life. There were a few esoteric books in which descriptions equivalent to what had happened to Akinori Milpense could be found. For a handful of students, who had been officiously sorted in Athrea, there were biographies. And first of all, there was a short note somewhere about the student named Athrea, who had lived a thousand years ago : this was a young witch who was a Muggle-born from a noble family. One common point between the detailed biographies was obvious : the students sorted in Athrea had been undesired, unchosen children. Another salient point was that their experiences with love potions were very different from those of usual wizards and witches : instead of just bringing towards them the people who had drunk their potion, it was also making their parents come back to them and try to improve relationships with their unwanted child, at least while the potion was having effects. This prompted Mrs. Candler to dip the snowball in the neutral love potion before dropping it into the Pensieve. Thanks to the numerous additional memories, she was able to posit that Akinori Milpense had also been an undesired child. This would make sense with the original student's case : in noble families, a thousand years ago, people were married to strengthen ownership of vast fiefdoms, and had no say about their spouse for this reason. As a result, there were very few marriages celebrated out of love in these families, and the children borne by the woman were only the consequence of the pressure on the newlyweds to give a heir, if possible a male heir, who could inherit the territories of their father together with those brought to the couple through the mother's dowry. The last element that Mrs. Candler set forth was the most important, though : the sacrifice made by Akinori Milpense by accepting that the Gryffindor witch would be the one who would date the Slytherin boy they both loved, had likely produced powerful magic that could undo any injustice. For, instead of trying to exact revenge from an unfairly sad childhood, brought about by a broken romance, Akinori Milpense had renounced to her own legitimate right to find love with the boy she liked. By feeling mixed sadness, for having given up, and happiness, for having allowed somebody else to experience profound happiness, she had endowed the wristwatch-like object with power she hadn't expected to transfer to it. Mrs. Candler added she hadn't told this part of the story to Professor Dumbledore, because she didn't think a man who had apparently never met love could understand this feeling's magical powers, and would have seen this hypothesis as the result of a typical female mawkishness. She then wished them a good evening, turned around, and departed.