KatieBulris
The first time Elara Meadowlight noticed Viktror Krum, she was perched in the Astronomy tower sketching the curve of the moonlight on parchment and pretending not to watch the way the Quidditch pitch swallowed shapes and sound below; the boy who came into view was all concentration and quiet, a shadow against the stadium stands, his broom an extension of his shoulders.
Elara was known for the way she turned light into language an accurate phrase scratched across the margins of her sketchbooks by a classmate who meant it as teasing and by a professor who meant it as praise. She preferred to watch the world rather than join it her pencil did for her what conversation never could, translating shivering reflections and the habits of shadow into curves and hatchings. So when the boy with the bowed shoulders appeared one evening on the Quidditch pitch, wrapped in the slow geometry of flight, she did what she always did: she drew instead of speaking, tracing the line of his broom as if it were a comet and his concentration the comet's tail.
There was nothing theatrical about him-no triumphant grin, no practiced flourish-only a singular, quiet intent that made the air around him seem thinner, as though he parted it with a broom and a purpose in equal measure.
For a week she kept to the tower and to her vantage, letting the pitch become a theatre of motion and memory on her paper. She watched him land and walk to a north nook of the stands that most students avoided, where the stone was crumbled and the ivy thick she watched him.