Chapter 31: Beside
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His eyes met Harry and true enough, there was no anger in them.
Harry finally gave up fumbling around looking for anything to help and sat down on the grass beside the man, sobs wracking through his tiny body.
"Harry. How old are you?"
"10. I'll be 11 next week."
"I have a son your age."
"Hmm?" Harry said. His tears still hadn't stopped.
"Do you know what Hogwarts is?"
Harry shook his head. He'd heard that word before from some of the patrons at Leaky Cauldron, but he didn't know more than that.
"No? You must be muggleborn then. Well, it's a school for magic. The best there is. Judging by what you did to fix my wound, you'll easily be able to get in.
I want you to do something for me when you get there. There is a letter in my left pocket. Wrote it a while ago. Find my son, will you Harry? Get it to him." He paused to take another breath.
"And listen to me Harry. Don't beat yourself up about me alright? You always have the right to protect yourself.
The worst thing you could do after today is to spend your life wallowing in guilt for doing just that. Promise me that you will live Harry and that you will live well."
"I promise," Harry said, and his voice didn't waver despite the sobs that were wrecking through his body.
They sat side by side for a while. There were no words that needed to be said.
"It's a beautiful morning." John finally said, lost in the tranquil peace of the moment.
"It is," Harry replied, and when he looked back at him, John's eyes were vacant. He had passed on.
And as Harry watched, his body slowly dissolved into a gentle golden mist that floated away on the summer morning breeze of the forest, leaving behind only a grey jacket the color of the beta wolf's skin and a letter wrapped in a yellowing envelope.
Made sure to highlight a few flaws of Harry in this chapter. Greed and Impatience. Both of those keep making him use up his stat points faster than he should.
My old readers would know that the Game isn't exactly a benevolent thing in this story. Harry is in constant danger of getting corrupted by it, and the more flaws of his I showcase, the more you as a reader will see the significance of that Mystery-Man's words about addicting Harry to the power in the first chapter.
Also, glad many of you liked the touch I added to Vance and Carrow's relationship last chapter. It's a setup for a plot thread I'll be continuing later in the story. As always, let me know what you thought.
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Book-I:Diagonal Adventures
Chapter 5:
"In a small locked tower, never visited by any student at Hogwarts, sits an ancient book that has not been touched by human hands since the four founders placed it there on completion of the castle.
Beside the book, which is bound in peeling black dragon-hide, stands a small silver inkpot and from this protrudes a long, faded quill.
These are the Quill of Acceptance and the Book of Admittance and they constitute the only process by which students are selected for Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
If anybody understands what powerful and long-lasting magic causes this book and quill to behave as they do, they have never confessed to it, doubtless because it saves the staff tedious explanations to parents who are furious that their children have not been selected for Hogwarts.
The Book and Quill's decision is taken as final and no child has ever been admitted whose name has not first been inscribed on the book's yellowing pages.
At the precise moment that a child first exhibits signs of magic, the Quill, which is believed to have been taken from an Augurey, floats up out of its inkpot and attempts to inscribe the name of that child upon the pages of the Book.
Augurey feathers are known to repel ink and the inkpot is empty; nobody has ever managed to analyze precisely what the silvery fluid flowing from the enchanted Quill is.
Those few who have observed the process agree that the Quill might be judged more lenient than the Book.
A mere whiff of magic suffices for the Quill. The Book, however, will often snap shut, refusing to be written upon until it receives sufficiently dramatic evidence of magical ability.
In fact, the Book's sternness has a purpose: its track record in keeping Squibs out of Hogwarts is perfect.
Non-magic children born to witches and wizards occasionally have some small, residual aura of magic about them due to their parents, but once their parents' magic has worn off them it becomes clear that they will never have the ability to perform spells.
The Quill's sensitivity, coupled with the Book's implacability, have never yet made a mistake. - R. Joanne"
Minerva McGonagall was having a perfectly fine day. The article she was reading about the process of admissions was a well detailed and well researched one, and although not entirely accurate, got a lot of the important parts right.
She sipped absently at her scotch as she turned to look at one of her personal enchanted quills go to work on a stack of parchment as it wrote down the last of the letters to the accepted students for the year.
It was magically connected to the Book of Admittance, using its magic to jot down their names and their addresses down to the last detail onto the envelope.
The quill had been responsible for a lot of muggleborn rejections every year for quite a while, since most of them found it strange and creepy how accurately the letters knew their location. But the quill resisted any attempts at modification. It was a stickler for its own rules.
So McGonagall routinely went through and erased most of the personal details that the quill may have written down.
It wasn't part of her job, but she did it out of a sense of duty to those muggleborn magicals that deserved a chance at harnessing their abilities and having a future in a place where they belonged.
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