Snow Burn

Prologue

Meet the Thompsons. With their commonly decorated home and their commonly designed personalities, they were the most common, average people who ever walked the plane of existence.

Lloyd Thompson, the father, had hair that was completely grey, thinner than the walls; and his exceeding amount of pride for being average made him completely unaverage. His stomach could barely be contained in his suit, and his moustache was so thick that one wouldn't know if he even had a mouth.

The mother was Nora Thompson. Her hair was a warm brown with subtle streaks of grey peaking out from the roots. She enjoyed watching the news through Monday to Friday, and the weekly tennis games on Saturday to Sunday, on their box television. She was slim and fit with slightly sagging fair skin.

Nora and Lloyd's son was Teddy Thompson. In their eyes, he was the perfect son, and the only descendant of their family.

The Thompsons all sat around the circular dinner table with a well-decorated linen table cloth slipping off the edges. But there was one more that wasn't at the table.

Morgan Snowbourne, Nora's nephew, was the only person in the entire house with the ability to bend the laws of reality. He could makes things float, make things shrink, make things turn into completely different objects. He could talk to snakes.

Nora and Lloyd started to neglect Morgan and his needs, even more than they were before. They didn't know what they did wrong with Snowbourne. To the extent of their knowledge, their son turned out just fine.

Even though Morgan had an incurable "illness," they never once tried to cure him. They saw it as an excuse for treating him like scum, like a slave. They would lie back in their foldable chairs while he did all the heavy work, cooking, cleaning, laundry. He was like the housemaid, the cook, and the errand boy of the entire house.

It was the first of July, a dark and rainy night with lit candles to dimly light the basement. The only source of the outside world was the small window that led to the wet, grassy ground.

Morgan's back pressed against the closet door where the light was brightest. If he was given the opportunity, he would have snuck out to look around, for his birthday. Instead, he was drawing in the unruled, undotted notebook that was left in his "room" on accident. He had been using it ever since he could remember.

"Happy birthday, Morgan" He whispered, rubbing his thumb over the drawn cake on the paper.

Suddenly, his whole room lit up. Light seeped in through the cracks between the doorframe and the closet, as if it had turned into the sun itself. Morgan jumped up in fear and pressed his back on the wall opposite to it.

The light slowly dimmed, and the door creaked open, louder than most times. He couldn't see anything in the closet other than the darkness that was always there.

He heard a step, then another, and then another. As the steps got louder, they got closer, until he could see a silhouette. The man was large, beefy, and abnormally tall. His face was long and his hands were large, as were his feet.

Morgan stood tall as the man loomed far up over his head. Even if he was scared shitless, he would never show it, even if he felt like a dwarf.

The man put his hands on his knees and bent over, shrinking down to a partially average height. The candles dimly illuminated his face, bring view to all his features and wrinkles.

"Happy birthday, Morgan!" He cheered.

The man's smile was warm, simple, yet warm. Morgan was still scared stiff. He could barely think.

"Why so tense? Come on, it's your birthday!" The man gave him a pat on his shoulder. He would have toppled over if the man didn't keep him upright.

The man sat down on the ground with a thump that seemed to shake the whole house, and the earth. It made Morgan's feet jump off the ground then back down, like a feather.

"Anyways, I think you should get some rest, don't you think? You'll want to get up early tomorrow to prepare for Hogwarts!"

Morgan frowned and pressed his hands together behind his back.

"Hogwarts?"

"Well, yer a muggle-born! I didn't exactly expect you to know everythin'" He got up and went to the closet that looked somehow different.

In some odd and twisted way, the closet was no longer a closet. The old cloaks were gone, and so was his food/water stash. Instead, there was a much more effectively illuminated hut with fantastical objects all around as decoration.

"Muggle-born?" Morgan asked, "What's a muggle-born?"

The large man turned around with a frown, mixed with sadness, yet a bit of expectancy.

"Are you, telling me, that you don't know what Hogwarts is?" He sighed.

Morgan nodded.

The man took three steps closer, and leaned in close. The dim candlelight shone between the two, illuminating their faces. It made his nose look bulbous.

"Yer' a wizard, Morgan"