In third-year halls, their paths first crossed,
A Raven boy, a Blonde girl lost.
"Stay out of my way," she warned with a glare,
But something lingered in the frosty air.
Crimson with his scar and fame,
Emerald with her secrets untamed.
Two worlds ap...
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Defence Against the Dark Arts had become most people's favourite class in no time. Only Draco Malfoy and his gang of Slytherins had anything bad to say about Professor Lupin. "Look at the state of his robes," Malfoy would roar as Professor Lupin passed. "He dresses like our old house elf."
But no one else cared that Professor Lupin's robes were patched and frayed. His next few lessons were just as interesting as the first. After Boggarts, they studied Red Caps, nasty little goblin-like creatures that lurked wherever there had been bloodshed: in the dungeons of castles and the potholes of deserted battlefields, waiting to bludgeon those who had gotten lost. From Red Caps they moved on to Kappas, creepy. water-dwellers that looked like scaly monkeys, with webbed hands itching to strangle unwitting waders in their ponds.
Harry was growing to dread the hours he spent in Professor Trelawney's stifling tower room, deciphering lopsided shapes and symbols, trying to ignore the way Professor Trelawney's enormous eyes filled with tears every time she looked at him. He couldn't like Professor Trelawney, even though many of the class treated her with respect bordering on reverence. Parvati Patil and Lavender Brown had taken to haunting Professor Trelawney's tower room at lunchtime. They always returned with annoyingly superior looks, as though they knew things the others didn't. They had also started using hushed voices whenever they spoke to Harry, as though he were on his deathbed.
Aria also loathed the subject and vowed to drop it immediately. The scrutinizing look Trelawney would give her every time she failed to read her tea leaf omens wrong was becoming far too intolerable.
Nobody liked Care of Magical Creatures, which had become extremely dull after the action-packed first class. Hagrid seemed to have lost his confidence. They were now spending lesson after lesson learning how to look after flobberworms, which had to be some of the most boring creatures in existence. "Why would anyone bother looking after them?" said Ron, after yet another hour of poking shredded lettuce down the flobberworms' throats.
At the start of October, however, Aria had something else to occupy her, something so enjoyable that it made up for her unsatisfactory classes. The Quidditch season was approaching, and Blaise had convinced her to try out for the Slytherin Quidditch team with him.
So here she was on a bright sunny Saturday morning, waiting in a crowd of something about thirty people to try out for chaser.
There were seven people on a Quidditch team: three Chasers, whose job it was to score goals by putting the Quaffle (a red, soccer-sized ball) through one of the fifty-foot-high hoops at each end of the field; two Beaters, who were equipped with heavy bats to repel the Bludgers (two heavy black balls that zoomed around trying to attack the players); a Keeper, who defended the goal posts, and the Seeker, who had the hardest job of all, that of catching the Golden Snitch, a tiny, winged, walnut-sized ball, whose capture ended the game and earned the Seeker's team an extra one hundred and fifty points.
