“There, look." "Where." "Next to the tall kid with the red hair." "The one wearing the glasses and the blond haired girl." "Did you see his face? Or her tiara?" "Did you see his scar?" Whispers followed Harry and I from the moment we left our dormitories the next day. People lining up outside classrooms stood on tiptoe to get a look at us, or doubled back to pass us in the corridors again, staring. Harry looked uncomfortable with all the stares.
There were a hundred and forty-two staircases at Hogwarts: wide, sweeping ones; narrow, rickety ones; some that led somewhere different on a Friday; some with a vanishing step halfway up that you had to remember to jump. Then there were doors that wouldn't open unless you asked politely, or tickled them in exactly the right place, and doors that weren't really doors at all, but solid walls just pretending.
It was also very hard to remember where anything was, because it all seemed to move around a lot. The people in the portraits kept going to visit each other, and I knew for a fact that the coats of armor could walk.
The ghosts didn't help, either. It was always a nasty shock when one of them glided suddenly through a door you were trying to open. Nearly Headless Nick was always happy to point new Gryffindors in the right direction, but Peeves the Poltergeist was worth two locked doors and a trick staircase if you met him when you were late for class. He would drop wastepaper baskets on your head, pull rugs from under your feet, pelt you with bits of chalk, or sneak up behind you, invisible, grab your nose, and screech, "GOT YOUR CONK!" The only one he directed in the correct location was me. He had liked me ever since my first visit to Hogwarts, when I was about four, where I aided him in throwing large water balloons at the Slytherins.
Even worse than Peeves, if that was possible, was the caretaker, Argus Filch. Harry and Ron managed to get on the wrong side of him on their very first morning. I was with them, of course, but he hesitated in yelling at me. I believe the thought of me running to my grandfather stopped him from punishing me, but he showed no hesitance in yelling at my two friends.
Filch found us trying to force our way through a door that unluckily turned out to be the entrance to the out-of-bounds corridor on the third floor. He wouldn't believe we were lost, but he simply ignored fact that I too was trying to open the door. He was sure Harry and Ron had lead me there to suffer the painful death that my grandfather had warned us of and was threatening to lock Ron and Harry in the dungeons. He ignored all of my attempts to convince him of the truth, but thankfully we were rescued by Professor Quirrell, who was passing.
Filch owned a cat called Mrs. Norris, a scrawny, dust-colored creature with bulging, lamp like eyes just like Filch's. She patrolled the corridors alone. Break a rule in front of her, put just one toe out of line, and she'd whisk off for Filch, who'd appear, wheezing, two seconds later. Filch knew the secret passageways of the school better than anyone (except perhaps the Weasley twins) and could pop up as suddenly as any of the ghosts. We along with all the students hated him, and it was the dearest ambition of mine to give Mrs. Norris a good kick. Although I love animals and hate animal abuse, I would make an exception for her.
And then, once you had managed to find them, there were the classes themselves. Although I had been to the castle before, I had never been to the classrooms only my grandfather’s office and a few other places. There was a lot more to magic, as I quickly found out, than waving your wand and saying a few funny words. It was much harder than my winx powers, which required only practice to master. I found practice didn’t help much if you did not say the spell correctly, and one miss pronunciation could set fire to someone’s eyebrows or turn someone’s head into a pumpkin.
We had to study the night skies through their telescopes every Wednesday at midnight and learn the names of different stars and the movements of the planets. Three times a week we went out to the greenhouses behind the castle to study Herbology, with a dumpy little witch called Professor Sprout, where we learned how to take care of all the strange plants and fungi, and found out what they were used for.
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Dumbledore's half-blood grand-daughter: Year One
FanfictionPrincess Taylor is half witch and half winx. All her life she has learned to control her winx powers but now at 11 years old she will journey to Hogwarts school of Witchcraft and Wizardry, were her grandfather is headmaster, to learn to be a witch...
