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chapter zero/ 14.01.60
ONCE UPON A TIME, long ago in a hidden town just on the outskirts of north England, a family called the Hawthornes resided in a three-story home inherited from the mother's late family. The Hawthornes consisted of a father, a mother, and children, just as all fairytales seem to start off.
And just as most fairytales went, this family had more than blood running through their veins; they also possessed magic. Some sort of wizardry that their gossipy neighbors never could quite get a grasp of, no matter how much they tried to stick their noses into the Hawthorne family's personal affairs.
Some families down the road insisted that there was something odd about the Hawthornes, sure, but they could never quite put their finger on what exactly was so different about them. One woman had noticed many curious folk would visit the Hawthornes; people dressed in long, dark cloaks that covered them from head to toe—oddly-dressed people that would always enter the front door of the Hawthorne household, but never were caught leaving. Lots of the ladies down the road liked to joke that these peculiar men and women would be going through some sort of portals inside the Hawthorne's house. None of them knew how precisely accurate they were being with their jokes.
For the Hawthornes were odd, yes, but in a way of which they could open doors from many feet away, cast light from out of nowhere, change their appearance at the flick of their wrists, and even make things levitate, on certain occasions. They were wizards and witches, of course.
William Hawthorne, the father, was the only member of the family with no magic in his veins. He married his wife, Serephina, at the age of twenty-four, after meeting her in a small library on the corner of his local town square. The two fell in love immediately—'love at first sight,' they called it—and were married not soon after. Their first child came only nine months later: A girl, with hair as ashy as her mother's and eyes as hazel as her father's. Matilda, they would call her. A year later, they welcomed their second and final child—another girl, but this time with honey-blonde hair and eyes so blue they could kill, cheeks rosy and nose crooked.
Adelaide Hawthorne took the world by storm from the very day she was born. The truth of it was she had absolutely no filter on her red lips. Anything she wanted to say, she would. And that was the exact mouth that landed her a spot in Slytherin when she first went to Hogwarts. She soon discovered a group of boys in her year which called themselves the Marauders—quite a foolish thing, Adelaide thought, to name one's own group of mates—and it did not take her long to grow a distaste for the boys.
Her second year, she grew an even greater distaste for one Severus Snape after he hexxed her to be unable to open her Charms textbook—and when the Marauders took revenge into their own mischievous hands, Adelaide immediately defrosted her earlier opinion on them. In fact, she laughed with the four boys as they watched Snape attempt to tug his cloak free from a door only to rip it clean off his back, leaving him in only his thin trousers and shirt in the dead of winter.
