Hatchling outside its nest

Rose oscillated between dreaming and being awake. She swung between confused and disturbing dreams to brief moments of lucidity.
In one moment, she saw a colossal creature with the body of a man, the wings of a dragon and the head of a kraken emerge from the sea, sinking ships and islands in the process.
In the other...
“Stunning a child, Mad-Eye?! Have you finally lost it?”
A radiating man pushing back four giant demons, while being nothing but a rotting corpse on a groaning and slowly decaying machine. An angry cry against the dying of the light…
“Had to pursue them over half the country before managing to get a hold of her.”
A city eternally burning, with ash falling down to its streets instead of rain. Creatures better forgotten and born from nightmares and guilt waiting just below its skin of decay for a helpless victim.
“… better obliviate her? She shouldn’t have to remember this…. Gave us quite the fight before we separated them… The ministry will not be happy…”
A familiar white-haired woman in a hospital bed, holding an infant to her chest. Her green eyes not leaving the child’s face for a second.
A single word left her smiling lips. “Miwa.”

Rose woke up with a scream.
Where was she?
What had happened?
Where was the white-haired woman?
Where was… where was her mother?
Rose needed a few seconds to realize where she was and when she finally did it was like a punch into the guts.
She was in Dudleys second bedroom.
She had only been allowed a few times inside when Aunt Petunia had sprained her hand and needed help when cleaning it up.
Had everything just been a dream? A lonely tear dropped down her cheek.
Slowly she stood up and went to the door, when she suddenly stopped.
Why was she in Dudleys room? He would certainly never give it up without throwing a massive tantrum.
The evening sun shined through the kitchen window when Rose went down to confront the Dursleys.
She found them around the kitchen table. Dudley who was devouring a mountain of oatmeal noticed her first and glared at her angrily. Uncle Vernon only twitched slightly when he heard her closing the kitchen door, but choose to ignore her in favour of the newspaper from the morning. Only her aunt acknowledged her presence by standing up and silently placing a fourth set of dishes on the table.
Rose just stood in the doorframe staring at the scene before.
The scene was bizarre.
Yes, the Dursleys preferred to ignore her, but this was just a completely new level. And then there was aunt Petunia actually placing a plate for her instead of letting her do it herself?
Something wasn’t right.
A few seconds passed by, where Rose didn’t move a muscle and everyone on the table grow constantly more anxious.
“Stop standing there and sit down!” ordered her aunt.
Rose still didn’t move a muscle. “I just woke up in Dudley’s second bedroom.”
Dudley seemed to want to say something but then he decided otherwise.
“What is with it, girl?” bleated uncle Vernon. “You are growing to tall for that cupboard of yours and Dudders was generous.”
Bullshit! Rose wanted to scream into their faces, but she just clinched her fists. One look at Dudley’s angry face was enough to show here that he hadn’t give up his room willingly.
“Where is Cirilla?”
“Who?” Uncle Vernon cleared his throat, while intensifying his gaze at the newspaper.
“My mother.”
“Your mother is dead, girl. Perhaps you should spend less time dreaming and more time doing your chores. That lawn wont mow itself you know.” He stated, his little eyes twinkling with amusement.
“Perhaps it was one of her nightmares again dear.” Petunia suggested.
“Hrmpf, she should have outgrown such fantasies by now. Not being able to distinguish between dreams and reality, people are going to think she is crazy.”
Rose couldn’t take it anymore.
She turned around and stormed out of the kitchen.
For a second, she hesitated at the stairs but then she run upstairs into Dudley’s, no her new room.
Once she was inside, she slammed the door shut and fall down to the floor.
Tears started to warp her vision.
Was it true? Had it all been just a dream?
She should have known when she saw the woman…
The tears fall now faster. She attempted to wipe them away, when she suddenly felt something cold touching her chest.
Confused she looked under her shirt, just to find a silvery vial hanging down from a thin necklace around her neck.
Her heart stopped for a second.
Then with the desperation of a thirsty man who fears that the oasis before him will vanish into thin air, she ripped the chain from her neck.
It really was it! The pendant, Cirilla had gifted to her!
It hadn’t been a dream!
With trembling hand Rose moved the thin chain aside and placed the small vial on her hand. Just like before the pendant started to move on its own, but other than back then it didn’t just twitch into a new direction.
No, it started to rotate!
With big eyes Rose stared at the gyrating pendant.
Faster and faster did it spin, until Rose stopped it by clinching her hand.
Why didn’t it show er where her mother was? It had worked before in the living room. Perhaps it was broken?
Rose didn’t know a thing about magic, so she couldn’t saw if that was the case.
Still… She pressed the necklace to her heart. If the pendant was real, if magi was real, then so had to be her encounter with her mother.
Smiling did she close her eyes, trying to remember how it felt like to be hold, to know that someone cared deeply for her.
She had felt safe, protected, as if she would always have someone at her side who would accept and be with her.
She felt… loved.
It was the best feeling she ever had. Nothing came close to it.
“Come back soon.” She whispered longingly.

But Cirilla didn’t come back.
A week had passed and Rose was starting to get anginous.
Cirilla existed, no matter what the Dursleys said. She had the pendant to prove this to herself.
But why wasn’t she coming back?
Could it be that she decided that Rose wasn’t worth it?
Rose felt a pit opening up in her stomach.
The Dursleys had always made sure that she knew what kind of burden she was to them.
What if her mother had come to the same conclusion?
Hadn’t she said something about not being able to keep Rose with her when she left her as a baby?
If she thought that Rose might be a burden, she certainly proved her right when the robbed men attacked.
Oh god, this had to be it.
The mere idea caused her to feel ill.
She had shown Cirilla how useless she was!
But… but perhaps it wasn’t too late!
She could be useful! She could cook and do the laundry! And she could learn new tasks fast!
She just had to find her mother and prove herself!
Just how to find her? The magic pendant was broken, it just spinned endlessly.
How did one repair a magi pendant?
Before her eyes the attack of the robbed figures happened again.
She always started to tremble when she thought about them.
It had happened so fast that she had been frozen by fear back then and even now she wished she could hide away from the scary men with their wooden sticks.
Was that magic? They had just swung their sticks and these red beams had shot out of them.
She rubbed her chest were that lightning bolt had hit her. She never had felt such pain before.
Previously she had believed uncle Vernon that there was no such thing like magic, but Cirilla had told her that he was wrong. And after seeing these men attacking them, she definitely knew who she believed more.
Magic was surely scary! Did she really wanted to have anything to do with that?
Though, it was through magic that Cirilla had found her.
And this green light when they suddenly appeared in that forest. Was that magic too?
Was her mother using magic like those that had hunted them?
And when her mother was magical, perhaps so was she herself?

“But how does one use magic?”
It was this thought that had been with Rose for most of the following week.
As result her teachers had actually reprimanded her of dreaming in class and aunt Petunia had become quite the bit angry when discovering that Rose had stopped finishing her chores at fast as possible.
Didn’t matter though. Rose was a child on a mission.
To figure out how to repair the magic pendant!
But while Rose was determent and ready to pursue her goal with a persistency that would have shocked child-psychologist, she suffered a great lack of information’s.
At the beginning she attempted to learns the required information’s from the school library. In the past the information’s she got from the lexicons or encyclopaedias were enough to let her stand out in class and had left her in the believe that if she needed to learn something new, she just had to find it in the small collection of books her school offered the children.
This was soon proven wrong. Rose had to face the fact that the school library consistent in the first line out of storybooks that were meant to help students to develop their reading competence and a few encyclopaedias to satisfy the random curious child and offer the older student’s material for school projects.
Disappointed she turned to a teacher, who praised her desire for more academic material and told her that Little Whinging actually had a public library and that in the third year they would actually make an excursion with her class.
Normally Rose would have been totally amazed about this, she after all loved books, but that would have been the Rose from last week.
The Rose from today was annoyed if anything. Asking if she could hang along when they took the third year got her denied.
Instead, the teacher told her to ask her aunt or uncle to take her there, surely, they would be delighted about their nieces wish for learning.
Rose didn’t even bother to try.
No, if Rose wanted to go to the library she had to go there alone.
Luckily finding the library didn't turn out to be too difficult.
Instead of hiding at the school library until the teachers throw her out, she left together with the other children after school and went to the centrum of the little town.
Little Whinging was not a very big town and most of the important stores or facilities were in one area so Rose thought this to be a good place to start her search.
And thanks to the Dursley never teaching Rose to be warry of strangers, she simply asked every passant she came across until one was friendly enough to show her the way instead of asking where her parents were.
To Roses surprise she had already driven past the building several times when Aunt Petunia needed her help carrying groceries.
A low brick building opposite the towns church was her destination
Sadly, the library of Little Whinging turned sadly out not to be the treasure chest of knowledge Rose had it hoped to be.
In the first place it contained a big number of novels instead of non-fictional books and as such the friendly, but sceptical looking librarian, showed her their small collection of fantasy novels when she asked for books about magic.
And while Rose normally enjoyed storybooks quite often in this case, she felt more annoyed about the smiling man insisting that these were the only books about magic they had.
It took Rose three consecutive visits after school to find two books that at least looked promising.
One was a thick book about astrology, the art of reading your future through the interpretation of the stars.
Rose decided to ignore this book for now. A part of her feared that she may never find her mother again and if this was the case, she didn’t want to know about it.
The other book, or better booklet, was a manual about opening your chakras and cultivate your inner energy.
At first Rose ignored this book and continued her search.
Chakras and inner energy were foreign words for her and as such she did continue her search at first.
Only when this proved fruitless -and when the librarian reprimanded her for putting an esoteric book back into the gardening section which caused her to learn the meaning behind the word esoteric- did she actually tried to read the book.
At the beginning she was unsure how to treat the idea of chakras or inner energy.
It didn’t really mentioned magic, besides the introduction chapter, where it was called the magical-tradition from the east and there it seemed more like an artistic choice of words.
But she had nothing better to go of for now and the idea of using some kind inner energy every living thing had for magic didn’t seem that unbelievable to what she knew now.
Without any better material and being unwilling to simply give up, Rose decided to follow the directions of the manual in hope of getting with it somewhere.
Lacking a library pass she copied some of the meditation exercises that were described into her school notebook.
As soon as she got home and cooked dinner, she immediately went up to her room and tried herself at meditating.
Her success at this was… lacking.
Meditating wasn’t that easy at it turned out.
Constantly her thoughts were wandering of or little things kept distracting her.
For the first time in her life Rose felt true frustration.
How did she expected to figure out this magic stuff if she couldn’t concentrate for a few minutes on one thing? If she couldn’t do that much, she truly didn’t deserve meeting Cirilla again.
So, she doubled down.
Instead of sleeping she tried to continue her meditation exercise until she falls asleep.
Despite her former love for school, she started to ignore the lessons and attempted to go through the mental exercises, causing her teachers to become worried about her degrading performance.
The first time she got any results at all happened over a week after her starting her practise.
Not that she had any memories about it.
But apparently, she falls in a trance in class and suddenly spoke with the voice of her teacher’s dead grandfather.
Said teacher didn’t take this very well.
In fact, she freaked out and refused to be in the same room as her former favourite student.
Rose of course had been pretty shocked about this too.
Especially since she lacked any memory about it and only really learnt what had happened when aunt Petunia and her were ordered to meet up with the principal.
The following punishment of temporary suspension from the school was nothing compared to the one the Dursleys inflected on her.
Uncle Vernon dragged her at her hair to her room, throw her inside and locked the door.
It took them almost two days to remember that their niece had to eat and use the bathroom before they let her out again for a short moment.
But even then, they gave her just enough that she wouldn’t die from hunger or thirst before she was thrown back inside.
Uncle Vernon made sure that Rose knew that this would continue for the rest of the month until her suspension from school ended.
For Rose this was a terrible time.
The constant hunger and thirst took a mental tool on her.
To distract herself she continued her effort at meditation, bolstered by the fact that she had done something, that somehow, she had succeeded before.
Motivated that there was still a chance for her to meet her mother again.

In the second week of her involuntary seclusion, it happened.
She had become almost obsessive in her persuasion. Even ignored once her aunt when she had given her a piece of bread to eat, the first and only meal for the day.
By now focussing wasn’t Roses problem anymore.
No, Rose had gained what could only be described as a form of hyperfocus.
Instead of struggling to fall into trance or to concentrate while meditating she saw the problem now with a lack of helpful directions in form of her incomplete notes from the library.
Not letting go of her target she started to experiment like the crazy scientist in Dudley’s cartoons would do.
Trying different mental images, breathing techniques and many different variations of the meditation she had tried to figure something out to trigger what had happened to her in the classroom in some kind of controlled fashion.
To keep up with what brought positive results she started to keep a journal of her experiments in form of a big leather clad notebook she had found in the furthest corner of Dudley’s old wardrobe.
At some point the Dursleys had been convinced that Dudley would turn out to be some genius and had gifted him some fit for collage study material, like a thick notebook.
Of course, Dudley had no motivation of attempting to prove his parents right and just thrown most of it in his second bedroom to the toys he didn’t play with anymore for one reason or the other but still didn’t wanted Rose to have.
Now it laid open on Roses lap, the open pages covered in a small script with many corrections and additions, while Rose had her eyes closed in deep concentration.
She had sat in this position for two hours.
Breathing in a slow but constant rhythm she had tried to feel her inner energy, just like the book had claimed she would be able to.
So far, she never had felt anything besides her feet falling asleep, or her back starting to hurt from sitting.
But suddenly something changed. Suddenly she felt a small prickling all over her body.
It was like when she dusted the television when it was still running und she felt the static energy on it.
It was similar, but different… because this prickling came from inside her!
With a gasp Rose ripped the eyes open, just to froze when her gaze landed on her hands.
A greenish fog had started to sic out of them.
She had done it!
She jumped up; eyes still focused on the aura surrounding her hands.
A little cry of joy escaped her before she regained control over herself.
After waiting a few seconds to make sure that the Dursleys hadn’t heard her outcry, she sat down again.
With a few calming breaths she suppressed her enthusiasm.
She had needed four weeks to reach this point. She was obviously too slow!
She had not even figured out if this could help her to do magic, not to speak of repairing the pendant!
Rereading her notes, she added a few lines, before closing her eyes again.
She had to try find that feeling again…
It took her a short while, but somehow, she found the prickling feeling sooner than before.
This time she stayed focused, trying to move it around her body.
After a few attempts she soon succeeded at letting a part of the prickling move from her chest to her arm and finally to her hand.
Quickly she realized that she had to be careful with it less the prickling feeling could become actually quite a bit painful.
“One has to keep everything balanced and harmonic, not moving too much at once or too sudden. Keeping balance at the chakras, just like the book has claimed.” She realized while concentrating on the energy in her hand.
Curiously what to do with it she tried to compress it just as she had before moved it.
The prickling become more intensive but didn’t painful. In fact, so she recognized after a few seconds, it was less bothersome than before.
But how was she meant to do something with this?
Sighting Rose let her control of the energy go, planning to try next with the pendant again.
A loud bang ripped her from the bed and slammed her in the wardrobe behind her, the last thing she heard was its wood cracking before everything went dark.
When she woke up again, she looked into the angry face Vernon Dursley as he screamed into her face.
What he said never registered in Rose mind, she just stared at the devastation that was around her as she painfully stood up.
She had broken through the wooden wardrobe behind her, but as she looked at the broken window or the cracked stone wall with its falling plaster, she realized that she could have been happy to not have gotten any broken bones.
Had this been her?!
At this point uncle Vernon had stopped screaming at her and pushed the fearful looking Petunia and Dudley out of the doorframe.
Still a bit besides her she watched as he slammed the door close, causing parts of its now cracked and splintered form to fall down to the floor.
With a slightly dizzy head Rose started to collect pieces of debry and wood from the floor. Piling them up in a corner to be thrown out later.
Not all furniture had been at unlucky as the wardrobe. Her bed was still standing in one piece, though it was creaking terrible now.
Picking up her journal she looked at the open page, with her last entries.
Slowly a grin started to spread above her face as she looked up at the chaos still surrounding her.
It was real, there was no doubt left!
Real magic! Her magic!
Crawling under her bed she pulled a single loose board open.
Inside it she hid her biggest treasures before the Dursleys.
There wasn’t much inside, just a few drawings and a certain silvery pendant she pulled out now.
Holding it in her hand she observed how it started to spin like crazy in her hand.
“Soon:”