Ellemir observes the Black Lake nearby, without seeing it.

She is sitting under a big tree with her back against the trunk and opened on her knees an album full of drawings. A pencil Muggle, not those "Self-Drawing" supplied to the school, lying forgotten in her hand and on the sheet below you can see through a draft portrait: friends playing and laughing together. The transposition on paper of one of her deepest desires.

The last few weeks have been unexpectedly heavy, also because of the growing mental exhaustion due to the continuous attacks that the girl suffers from the Death Eaters: almost every day and every night they are trying to force her mind to make her their puppet.

Ellemir would have never thought, when the Headmistress warned about the enmity which she would be covered by the students of the school, that it would hit so much.
She continues to berate herself for being a bit shallow in considering it as unimportant and for having overstated herself.

The truth is that never, in her whole life, she was immersed in the "normal" life and she never shared spaces and activities with boys and girls more or less her age.
Now, during these first few days of school, looking at the various groups who enjoy the sun in late September during a break in classes, Ellemir tests unexpectedly envy and desire to be part of it.
So any hostile gesture against her hurts even more.

Ellemir closes her eyes wearily, thinking the incident a few days before.

She is coming down the stairs to get out of the castle, when a group of Ravenclaw girls passes by, surpassing her but being careful to stay away.
From how they look sideways is obvious who is the subject of their conversations. At one point one of the girls falls a book which stops not far from Ellemir. Without thinking, she picks it up and walks towards the small group to give it back to the owner. While she advances, the schoolgirls fall back watching Ellemir like a monster, then they turn around and go away in a gallop, leaving Ellemir there, in the middle of the atrium, with the book in her hands and in her ears the beginning of the sentence one of them is saying to the owner "You do not have to take the book, maybe she did over it some dark magic ...".

Ellemir realizes that the episode itself is nonsense, but is in addition to many other successes before and after, and all together they weigh like boulders in the heart.

Absentmindedly she rubs her arms. It always hurt, now that the attacks of the Death Eaters are almost endless. She realizes that she has little time to complete her mission; soon she will need all her energy to finish what she started that night out of control of his uncle.

Accomplice the warm air and the peace of the garden, for the first time Ellemir allows herself to think back on all the way which brought her this far.