The Other Black - Book 7

Chapter 1 - In Memorandum

Two figures approached a large expansive house. It was not entirely clear who they were, but they were clearly both male. One was taller than the other. The two figures entered a room with a long table, filled with other figures, just as equally vague. None of them seemed to have faces, and yet it was rather evident that there was some sort of conversation happening, although it was completely silent.

One of the figures seemed to look up, and another feature of the room only just then became visible: a body, the figure apparently a woman, slowly revolving above the table.

The meeting of the near-formless figures concluded with the captive woman figure, apparently coming to life then with a bolt of green light from the figure at the head of the table, the woman fell silent... dead.

A snake, which had been slithering along the floor around the table, then leapt up, and a million miles away, a black-haired girl sat bolt upright in bed, one name circling her head: Charity Burbage, Muggle Studies teacher.

***

Aurora looked around. It was still rather dark. One could hardly see anything in the girl's room. After the dream, Aurora knew she wouldn't be getting any more sleep, so she picked up her wand from her dresser -- she was hardly ever without it -- and made her way to the first floor of her house to find some sort of snack and drink. She found a granola bar and filled a glass with water, then made her way back upstairs to start the task that she had been dreading to do all summer: empty out the trunk that she had kept mostly full for the past six years of her life.

Out came the school textbooks, the glass vials (many of which she had to repair) full of various potion materials, broken quills and old inkwells, an old badge from fourth year that flickered between SUPPORT CEDRIC DIGGORY and POTTER STINKS... All manner of things came out of that trunk and went to some corner of the already-full room.

She then turned to the mess she had just created, and with a wave of her wand, folded some clothes into a backpack, while school robes were folded into a pile on top of her dresser. Her school textbooks went onto her bookshelf, and she placed her potion-making ingredients, a few Muggle books in case she wanted to read as well as some other wizarding books went into the bag, and a good handful of photographs, all depicting either her wizarding family and her Muggle family went in as well.

With that wave of her wand, her room had been cleaned as well; things that weren't in the bag were stacked neatly in her dresser and on her bookshelf, save for a small pile of newspapers sitting on her desk and a small cage holding her owl Cooper.

Aurora walked over to the desk, which sat in front of the window, and looked out. She could just barely see a figure getting off of his bed in the house across the way. This boy was Harry Potter, a friend of hers since childhood, and now they were setting off on what would be about the most challenging year of their lives.

Aurora's eyes fell on a paper that had been set aside from the rest and read the dog-eared page of the paper.

ALBUS DUMBLEDORE REMEMBERED

By Elphias Doge

I met Albus Dumbledore at the age of eleven, on our first day at Hogwarts. Our mutual attraction was undoubtedly due to the fact that we both felt ourselves to be outsiders. I had contracted dragon pox shortly before arriving at school, and while I was no longer contagious, my pock-marked visage and greenish hue did not encourage many to approach me. For his part, Albus had arrived at Hogwarts under the burden of unwanted notoriety. Scarcely a year previously, his father, Percival, had been convicted of a savage and well-publicized attack upon three young Muggles.

Albus never attempted to deny that his father (who was to die in Azkaban) had committed this crime; on the contrary, when I plucked up courage to ask him, he assured me that he knew his father to be guilty. Beyond that, Dumbledore refused to speak of the sad business, though many attempted to make him do so. Some, indeed, were disposed to praise his father's action and assumed that Albus too was a Muggle-hater. They could not have been more mistaken: As anybody who knew Albus would attest, he never revealed the remotest anti-Muggle tendency. Indeed, his determined support for Muggle rights gained him many enemies in subsequent years.