—TRAILER BY THEFALLOFARTEMIS

  My mother always warned me to never play with fire. She said it was a game with only one certain winner, and that I would end up getting hurt no matter what.

  She wasn't wrong of course, I found that out the hard way when at age thirteen I got too close and came away with two badly burnt palms. Though they healed over time, the emotional scars from that day never left, and I never went near the fire again.

  The truth was it wasn't the fire itself that fascinated me, it was the soft whispers of smoke that spiralled from the coals like secrets to the sky.
  —But where there was smoke, there was fire.

  It wasn't always bad as my mother had said, it couldn't be, I thought, staring up at the great billows of blackness that roared from the train to Hogwarts as it screeched to a halt before platform 9¾.
  My fingers tightened around Percy's cage and I took one last breath of the dank London air, allowing my self a moment to savour the final scents of leather, metal and burning before I threw myself into a new life.

  I couldn't help but notice everyone else at the platform, the mothers waving one last tearful goodbye to their children as they disappeared into the carriages.
  The fathers stood solemnly, austere as the stone they stood upon, nodding farewell to their purebred sons, the unspoken words echoing between them of promises to achieve. Make us proud.

  It made me wonder, if mother could see me now? Would she be proud?

  I hated that even now, years later, I couldn't think of her without thinking of him. It made something hot rise within my chest at just the thought.
  —Something red, something raging, something distinctly violent.

  Enough. I buried the acrid feeling deep, along with any semblance of thought. Letting the pressing jest of the other students suffocate all my woes as I stepped onto the train.