Ilvermorny Year One: The Lost Witch

The First Letter

It was a hot August day. The Waller Creek Journal, a flimsy daily newspaper that circulated to the few hundred citizens of Waller Creek, Mississippi, had declared it the hottest day in the last 100 years. So hot in fact, the mailman realized halfway through his route that the envelopes were unsealing themselves under the direct heat. A heat so intense that all the stores closed their doors as their refrigerators and freezers could not operate. Humidity levels so high that the adults hovered around the air conditioning vents of their offices and children all were absent from the streets as their parents feared they might be hit a with a heat stroke by even attempting a bike ride. Everyone everywhere was avoiding the unavoidable sweat, the intolerable humidity and of course, the big blaring sun. But then, there was Miles Cassidy.

Miles felt no heat. He dropped not one drop of sweat. You see, Miles had escaped the heat. Quite an amazing feat of a boy no older than 10, well "almost 11" as he would say. How did he do this? The same way he escaped everything "not so good" as he would put it, at the library. Every day. Every single day. Miles found his way to the Quentin L. Roosevelt Community Library, named for a very distant relative of Theodore Roosevelt who apparently attributed a great deal to Waller Creek's founding sometime in the 1800's. Once there, Miles walks past the endless volumes of encyclopedias, historical texts, and other books libraries are required to have, and straight to his happy place, the fiction section. To be more specific, Miles loved the fantasy stories. He would sit for hours and hours, almost to the library's closing, reading tales of dragons, talking trees and flying beasts.

Miss. Sallie Sweeting, the librarian and probably Miles favorite person in the world, had introduced him to the section when he grew tired of the tattered generic tales his school provided. Upon handing him the first magical story, Miles questioned "What's so special about these books?" Miss Sweeting explained to him that the books came from people with big imaginations, like Miles, and that they told stories of anything and everything. Like a fish, Miles was hooked. He usually being the librarian's only patron, besides old Mrs. Hammish, who only came in to check her email once a week, Miss Sweeting and Miles grew very close. She also became an unintentional ear to Miles home problems, which he vented about in between the chapters of his favorite book, "The Dragon King of Malthazar"

Miles was the youngest child of Wanda Cassidy, a hard working single mother of two who was very strict and did not condone any reading of secular texts among many other things. His 17-year-old brother, Trey, was quite the tinkerer, despite his limited education. Trey continuously got into trouble for taking things apart and putting them back together in his own way. It started small but eventually resulted in him rewiring the school's bell system, thus creating chaos within the school and getting Trey asked to leave, permanently. Trey now spent his day knocking on their mother's old car, in hopes that it will start back running and she can stop asking for rides to work, as she saw the act as "desperate"

Feeling like an outcast amongst his family, Miles considered the library his home. He ate there. He slept there. And now that school was out for the summer, he spent all his time there. Miss Sweeting would often watch Miles as he read and wish she could do more to help him. She hoped that he, like many of the heroes he read about every day, would have his turning point. Have his day of reckoning. That he would experience the day that would change his life. A librarian can dream ...can't she?

The sun set on Waller County's hottest day and Miss Sweeting began her closing ritual, which included finding Miles and making him go home. She flipped off light switch after light switch and check shelf after shelf, all the time making her way to Miles' corner of the library. As she approached she noticed something rather...odd. Miss Sweeting would usually find Miles holding his book up to a nearby window, reading by the light cast by the nearby streetlight. But tonight she found Miles sitting on the ground, reading the Dragon King, for the millionth time but the fluorescent light above his head was still lit, despite all the others in the entire library being off. Miss Sweeting stood in awe of the electrical mystery.