When the Skies Fall - A Hogwarts Legacy Novel

ִ ࣪𖤐 Chapter Two - To Hogwarts

Within her first day of arrival in London, Elowyn learned much of the world. She quickly sold her horse for good coin to a carriage shop, and was soon after drawn instinctively to a pub. She felt a pull to go inside and was greeted by a kind elderly woman cleaning tables. Some of the other people in the pub were wearing strange clothes, and with a wink the woman identified Elowyn as one of their own, a witch on the run. Elowyn was told her "muggle" money would only get her so far in their pub, The Leaky Cauldron, but any further and she would have to go to their wizarding bank and exchange. The woman fed and assisted in getting her letter back to Hogwarts, using an owl instead of the post. Next, Elowyn travelled further to a secret alley of wonders, where she nearly got vertigo from the towering lopsided magical shops and witches and wizards running about making purchases. The magic to this place did not feel like back at home, but instead felt manufactured and manmade. She was put off, not ever feeling magic like that before.

Later, a return letter informed her the exact location and time she could find Professor Eleazar Fig, who would mentor her going forward. The owl who gave her this information was much kinder than the one outside her window.

London outside of the magical haven was do or die, it seemed. So many travellers like herself lived in overcrowded and unsanitary slums. All came due to the promise of work, but few made enough to get by. In her first full day, she gave what she could to a mother she met on the street who others passed by without a word, then some more to two young twins who she assumed were trying to pick-pocket her. As she explored, she found a further extreme gap in wealth. Socialites stepped out of their carriages to parties, and soon after, twelve year old boys swept the streets of their horse's dung. On the Thames, Elowyn found a massive port with more ships than she could have ever dreamt. Later, a shop owner told her the City and South London Railway had just opened, which she believed would bring in even more people. So much of London relied on a collective push to modernity in a way she never witnessed back home. In her world, her family relied on each other and supplemented what they could not do with simple trade.

The city quite overwhelmed Elowyn. There were plenty of words foreign to her from her experience and books, mannerisms and manners to learn she had never needed before, and a pace of life she struggled to keep up with.

The next day, she met up with the mysterious Mr. Fig. In her dreams, she had pieced him together as some duke from the Netherlands, or an explorer from the jungles of the equator. Instead, she met him back in the magical pub drinking quite heavily.

"Miss Elowyn Fox? Pleasure to meet you, Eleazar Fig." The man waved a hand. He was much more mundane than she imagined. It turns out he was simply a greyed man, with a crinkle in the corners of his eyes. A passerby would not have given him a second look, which is perhaps the goal of magical folk in the city. She had yet to run into one knowingly in her stay in London.

"Pleasure, thank you for retrieving me," Elowyn curtsied.

The two quickly became acquainted, and Mr. Fig presented her with her very first wand. It was temporary and borrowed, so it did not quite feel like a friend in the way her mother described the connection. It seemed slightly resistant to her, but at the very least did not blow anything up. They spent the rest of their week learning all the spells he could teach in the secrecy of her room.

On the evening of her anticipated departure to Hogwarts, the quaint cobblestone streets of London were bathed in the soft glow of gas lamps, flickering like her heart in anticipation. The air was filled with the murmur of evening activity, as a stately carriage bearing the Hogwarts crest came to a halt in front of her and Fig. To Elowyn's surprise, there were no horses at the front.