Metanoia • Harry Potter • Book I

Chapter 1

Our story should start with a boy. More specifically, it should start with the Boy Who Lived. It's the traditional way to start a story, with a chosen one who's fate was destined long before they were born.

But, our story does not start this way. It should have and would have, if not for the meddling of a maybe-immortal and incredibly bored being, who had nothing better to do than inspect and play with the lives of humans.

*

She sat in her chambers, strung not quite up in the heavens and not down on Earth. It was a limbo of sorts. She sat there, inspecting a long string of emerald green string with a disturbing intensity for a piece of string. She was staring at a specific part of it, where the string had frayed so thinly that it could've been considered broken if not for the single strand of cotton which kept it whole. She frowned, wondering what would happen if She just pulled the thing apart. It would be so easy, just a small shift of her fingers.

She sighed and put the string down again, selecting a different piece instead. This one was such a dark green it was almost black, except for the thin strands of other threads that had twisted their way into the string someway along the process. It was also frayed close to snapping in so many places that She wasn't surprised to see how violently the string had broken when it finally ended. 

Shaking her head slightly, She looked up to the rest of her room. It was covered in pictures and different strings from the ages. Different lifelines, all having ended eventually. She looked back at the two lifelines she'd been toying with; more specifically the bright green one.

"Such a sad life," She whispered, caressing its fragile threads. She stopped suddenly, throwing her head up and leaping to the other side of the room with ferocity as She scrambled through a basket of different lifelines, all slowing inching out of their balls of yarn. Finally, she grabbed a red one, sewn with all the shades of autumn. It was relatively short, eighteen years at most. Keziah Lilian Drake. She admired the strength of the string's colour, bright and alive. It was perfect, She thought gleefully.

Her plan wasn't exactly within guidelines but that didn't matter in the whole spectrum of the universe, She thought lightly, humming to herself as she grabbed a different ball of yarn. It was almost the same colour as the red string, if not a bit more jewel-toned. She stretched out the new ball of yarn until She had a lifeline of around eleven years or so. Working quickly, she wound the original line around the new one, running her fingers across the threads to almost fuse them. 

A new lifeline, She mused, with a smile, turning back to the green string lying on her table.

*

Keziah stood in the corridor of a small cottage, confused as hell. The last thing she could remember was putting in her earphones to listen to a Harry Potter audiobook, but now she was here. She guessed that she'd fallen asleep but why did her subconscious force her here?

From where she stood, Keziah could see a room, where pretty coloured lights reflected against the window in the door. She didn't move, still curious about where she was. The hallway was painted a mild yellow, with a bright red pram digging into her thigh. She was broken from her revelry by the door opening to reveal a young woman.

She was quite short and looked like the university students Keziah was friends with. Her dark auburn hair, the same shade as Keziah's in fact, was braided neatly down her back. The woman was holding a small bundle which Keziah realised with a start was a baby.