"Congratulations on your admission to Hogwarts. The welcome ceremony for new students will begin shortly, but before you take your seats in the Great Hall, you must first be sorted into your houses."
A small antechamber adjoining the entrance hall of Hogwarts.
The witch addressing the assembled first-years wore emerald robes and carried herself with a height and severity that commanded immediate attention. Deep lines marked her face, and her expression left no room for uncertainty. Her name was Minerva McGonagall, Deputy Headmistress of the school. She looked across the gathered students and continued in a voice that was quiet but left no word unheard.
"The Sorting Ceremony is a very important ritual. While you are at Hogwarts, the students in each house become like family to you. There are four houses in total: Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin. Each has a glorious history and has produced many distinguished witches and wizards. Throughout the year, your good conduct will earn points for your house, while rule-breaking will result in deductions. At the end of the academic year, the house with the highest score will be awarded the House Cup, a distinction of considerable prestige. Whatever house you are placed in, I hope each of you will be a credit to it."
With that, McGonagall left the room to make her preparations.
Shortly afterwards, a ghost materialised through the wall and startled most of the students into various states of alarm. Apparently such things were common in this school. Mirabelle paid it no particular attention.
Once the ghost had finished its business and drifted away, McGonagall returned and led the first-years into the Great Hall.
The hall was magnificent enough that even Mirabelle, who had grown up in a noble household, felt a small, involuntary catch of breath.
Thousands of candles floated overhead, and four long tables ran the length of the hall. Golden plates and goblets were laid at every seat, and hundreds of upperclassmen were already in place, watching the new arrivals with open curiosity.
At the far end, a fifth table ran crosswise, where Headmaster Dumbledore and the teaching staff were seated. Above everything, the ceiling was simply extraordinary. It had been enchanted to mirror the sky outside, and a deep, star-scattered night stretched overhead as though there were no ceiling at all, like standing beneath a planetarium of impossible scale.
As Mirabelle took in the sight, McGonagall set a four-legged stool before the assembled students and placed a battered, pointed wizard's hat on top of it.
It was not merely a worn hat. This was the Sorting Hat, a wilful enchanted object with the singular purpose of determining which house each student was suited to.
The brim split open like a mouth, and it proceeded to perform a song, introducing the qualities of all four houses in a manner that was simultaneously comical and strangely fantastical.
Courage and chivalry belonged in Gryffindor.
Patience and a willingness to endure hardship: Hufflepuff.
Intelligence and wit: Ravenclaw.
Cunning and a readiness to do whatever it took: Slytherin.
The song came down, in essence, to this: the house a student was assigned to reflected their nature. It meant spending one's years at Hogwarts among people whose instincts and values ran broadly parallel to one's own.
"When I call your name, come forward, sit down, and place the hat on your head. First, Abbott, Hannah!"
A blonde girl with pigtails hurried to the stool, dropped onto it, and pulled the hat over her head. A brief silence followed.
"Hufflepuff!"
Cheers and applause broke out from the Hufflepuff table. The girl, Hannah, made her way to her new housemates looking flushed and pleased.
"Bones, Susan!"
"Hufflepuff!"
"Boot, Terry!"
"Ravenclaw!"
"Brown, Lavender!"
"Gryffindor!"
"Bulstrode, Millicent!"
"Slytherin!"
Name by name, the students were called forward and sent to their tables. Each placement drew cheers and applause, and the hall settled into a warm, rolling rhythm of anticipation and celebration.
It occurred to Mirabelle, half-listening, that certain years probably skewed heavily towards particular houses depending on the personalities of the intake. The hat presumably had to manage its numbers thoughtfully.
"Beresford, Mirabelle!"
The moment her name was spoken, the noise in the hall died away as though someone had drawn a curtain across it.
Every eye turned towards the girl making her way slowly to the stool. Her footsteps were distinct and precise, each one carrying clearly through the silence.
Every movement she made was composed and unhurried, and something about the totality of it, the bearing, the stillness, the quiet authority, held the entire hall in place.
What was this? Why had everyone gone quiet? The same question moved through the crowd, but nobody could find the words to ask it aloud. They were simply held, suspended, by something that emanated from her and could not quite be named.
McGonagall swallowed quietly.
She was simply walking to a stool. So why did watching it feel like an act of weight?
Surely this was not the kind of atmosphere a first-year student produced.
And yet, she knew it happened occasionally. There were students who carried something beyond the ordinary, some quality that might be called charisma. She had seen it before, in rare cases. In one case, in particular —
"...!"
"Headmaster Dumbledore? Are you quite all right?"
McGonagall was not alone in thinking of him.
Dumbledore had leaned forward almost without realising it, his gaze fixed on the girl. To be precise, he was not seeing her, he was seeing, overlaid upon her, a scene from fifty years ago.
This was not her. She bore no resemblance in blood or origin. She was an entirely different person in every measurable way.
And yet. The chill that moved through Dumbledore was unmistakable. He had glimpsed, through this girl, the shadow of that worst of all wizards.
He wanted to believe it was nothing, some trick of light or a tired mind.
He could not quite make himself believe it.
'This is madness. To see the likeness of Tom Riddle, of Voldemort — in a girl like this...!'
In the hall, wrapped in its unnatural silence, Mirabelle sat down on the stool and placed the hat on her head.
It was only a stool. A plain, unremarkable wooden stool, the kind found in any schoolroom.
But for just a fraction of a second, every person who watched her sit down saw a throne.
Even the act of sitting carried the quality of a coronation.
'...What... what is this...'
The Sorting Hat spoke in a voice filled with something close to anguish, audible only to Mirabelle herself.
It was suffering. There was no other word for it. This was something entirely without precedent in its centuries of existence.
'I cannot read her thoughts at all...!'
The barrier was not a learned technique. It had nothing to do with Occlumency, and Occlumency would not have stopped it regardless, the hat could see through trained mental defences without difficulty.
This was something else entirely: the wall constructed by Mirabelle's own self-regard, enormous and absolute, a refusal not willed but structural to open herself to anyone or anything outside herself.
A fortress built not from discipline but from the sheer, immovable weight of her pride.
Through it, the hat could see nothing. Nothing at all, except that this girl trusted herself more completely than any student in its long history of students.
'And her talent, what on earth —'
That was the second problem, and arguably the worse of the two.
The hat had always been able to assess a student's gifts, even when it could not read their thoughts directly.
It identified aptitudes, named potential, and placed each student accordingly. That was its purpose and function, and it had never failed in it.
With Mirabelle, it could not even begin.
The word "genius" was not equal to what it was encountering. There were no depths it could locate, no limits it could find. It was as though the hat had walked up to a wall so vast it vanished into the sky on all sides, with no way to measure or traverse it.
The beautiful girl sitting beneath it, wearing its brim like something she had long outgrown, the hat could only conclude that she was something other than what it was built to assess. Something monstrous, perhaps, in the oldest sense of the word.
More than perhaps. This girl was undoubtedly a monster.
'A genius without precedent.'
"...S... Slytherin..."
The hat reached its conclusion without having measured her in any meaningful way. The only quality it had managed to identify at all was a pride so enormous it had defied even the hat's centuries of experience. From that alone, perhaps, the answer had been inevitable.
The result was precisely what Mirabelle had anticipated. Uninteresting, but expected. A hat could not possibly tell her anything she did not already know.
She had been certain of that from the outset, and the hat had proved her right.
She took it off with a mildly bored expression, dropped it back onto the stool, and made her way to the Slytherin table.
No cheer went up. The hall remained locked in its strange, suspended quiet.
As she settled into her seat and took in the row of Slytherin upperclassmen staring silently at her, Mirabelle smiled, a particular kind of smile, assured and faintly dangerous.
"What's the matter, seniors? Aren't you going to welcome me?"
"Ah — I — sorry —"
"I'm only teasing. I'll be relying on you from now on. Let's get along."
She reached for the nearest goblet. Before she had even settled her grip on it, the third-year student closest to her had already seized a bottle and filled it, smoothly and without hesitation, as though it were the most natural course of action.
No one had asked him to. He had no obligation to do so. If anything, as an upperclassman, the courtesy ought to have run the other way. And yet he had poured without a moment's thought, and she had accepted it without acknowledgement, as though both things were simply correct.
The entire Slytherin table watched this exchange and arrived at the same quiet conclusion.
'An extraordinary new student has arrived.'
With the Sorting concluded, the welcome feast began.
Harry and the others were sorted exactly as Mirabelle had expected, which needed no further reflection on her part.
The long tables filled with food, and students ate with the uninhibited appetite that came from a long journey and the excitement of arrival. Several dishes were set before Mirabelle, and she helped herself to the roast beef, which caught her attention immediately.
She did not, on the whole, care for British food. It was an honest position, if not a politic one. But roast beef occupied a different category entirely. It was, in her view, the single dish British cuisine could present to the world without apology.
She began with a Yorkshire pudding, spooning gravy over it and eating it without ceremony. Then came the beef itself, carrying a satisfying resistance against the teeth, releasing its flavour steadily as she chewed, rich and deep, the taste of good meat properly prepared.
'Roast beef is non-negotiable. Though it is rather ironic that it is also said to have contributed to the overall stagnation of British culinary culture...'
Among the dishes further along the table, something caught her eye. She helped herself to a portion and inspected it.
It was omurice. At first glance it sat unremarkably among the Western dishes, but it was, in fact, a Japanese creation, the product of Japanese cooks imagining Western food from a distance and arriving at something entirely their own. A "Western-style Japanese dish," in essence, and not something commonly encountered outside Japan.
She broke the soft-cooked egg and let the cream sauce run through it, then took a spoonful together with the chicken rice beneath.
The egg's creaminess and the sauce's depth folded around the rice perfectly, each element amplifying the others. Mirabelle's conviction was that this layering of complementary flavours was the true spirit of Japanese cuisine: a harmony that no single ingredient could produce alone, a duet in which each element made the other more than it would have been.
That such a thing had been arrived at purely through imagination, through a vision of somewhere the cook had likely never been, was genuinely astonishing.
'Hmm... yes, this is quite good. Setting aside the influence of past-life memories entirely, this is a flavour I would choose again. Sushi and tempura remain elusive for now, but once I have properly established myself in the British wizarding world, I intend to make Japanese cuisine far more available.'
Mirabelle ate with quiet, unhurried contentment and nodded to herself at intervals.
The meal was a success. She finished her wine, wiped her mouth with a napkin, and set her glass down.
The girl beside her spoke up with some hesitation.
She was lively-looking, with short light brown hair and blue eyes. Her features were unremarkable in themselves, with real effort they might have been made striking, but without effort they would never be more than forgettable.
"Excuse me, you. During the Sorting Ceremony, you had this incredible... presence about you. An aura, almost. Are you from a notable family? Like Harry Potter? Oh, I'm Edith Rynagle. My family has been pure-blooded for three generations."
"...Special, I suppose, is one way to put it. The Beresford family is a pure-blooded line descended from nobility, with a lineage stretching back over fifteen generations. Children of this family are trained in everything from a very young age. Whatever dignity or refinement you noticed in my manner is the product of that."
The Beresfords were a family of considerable standing in the British wizarding world, their name carrying weight even alongside the Blacks.
They had maintained a rigid pure-blood tradition across the generations, and the methods by which they perpetuated it were correspondingly ruthless.
Each generation, as many children as possible were produced, historically, never fewer than five, and all of them were subjected to a relentlessly demanding upbringing in the name of producing excellence.
From among them, the single most talented child was selected as heir. The rest were reduced to the role of servants within the household. Only the superior line would be carried forward; the others were set aside.
The chosen heir was then trained further in leadership and the management of power, and was expected to win, in every context, without exception.
The current head of the family, Mirabelle's father Heathcote Beresford, was a man who had thoroughly internalised this philosophy. He was a skilled Auror, but his methods in that role were not clean ones.
When he determined a conviction was warranted, it was delivered regardless of whether the evidence was sound. Where evidence was absent, it was fabricated. Where fabrication was difficult, money changed hands.
A family that had won, generation after generation, leaving a trail of unacknowledged suffering behind every victory.
That was the Beresford family.
"I wonder, then, are the Beresfords superior to the Malfoys?"
"In terms of lineage and history, we are. Our line is longer."
"That sounds like you're saying the family comparison favours you, but implying the individual comparison does as well."
Mirabelle responded to the observation with a steady, slightly defiant smile, as though the answer were too obvious to require any particular weight.
"When it comes to individuals, I win without question. That spoiled boy does not come close."
"Wow... Mirabelle, are you perhaps extremely confident in yourself?"
Edith asked this with visible perspiration, watching the girl who had stated it with complete composure. Mirabelle replied pleasantly.
"Not confidence. An honest assessment."
Hearing that, Edith arrived at a firm conclusion.
This young lady was extraordinarily conceited, and that certainty, it seemed, was the very thing that made her formidable.
Before their exchange could continue, a ghost drifted silently up through the table and surveyed the first-years with hollow, vacant eyes.
He was gaunt and drenched in what appeared to be blood, and he addressed the new Slytherins in the manner of someone who considered himself owed attention.
"Listen carefully, Slytherin first-years. Slytherin has won the House Cup for six consecutive years. This achievement belongs to the work of your seniors. Whether we seize that glory in a seventh year or see our record ended, that rests with you. Personally, I expect you to aim for the cup."
Half-attending to the Bloody Baron's address, Mirabelle scooped up a spoonful of vanilla ice cream and placed it in her mouth.
The cold hit first, immediate and clean, followed by a sweetness that dissolved slowly across her tongue. She let it sit for a moment before swallowing. The sharp chill that settled through her was a pleasure in itself, the particular and irreplaceable reward of eating something properly cold.
'There's always room for dessert,' as someone had once observed. Whoever it was had put the matter precisely. Even now, genuinely full, she felt with complete certainty that she could eat more.
"Mirabelle, is there any subject you're looking forward to? I'm most excited about flying. There's something romantic about being able to move freely through the sky, isn't there?"
"Nothing in particular appeals to me strongly, but Potions does interest me somewhat. Neither of my parents were specialists in it, so I never had the opportunity to learn it properly."
She set down her spoon and concluded her meal. There were other desserts she could have continued with, but there would be other evenings. She would be here, quietly, for the next four years. Opportunities would not be scarce.
Afterwards, the feast wound down, and Dumbledore rose to deliver his opening instructions. The Forbidden Forest was out of bounds.
Magic was not to be used in the corridors. Students wishing to try out for Quidditch were to contact Madam Hooch, though this applied to second-years and above, and was therefore not yet relevant.
And should anyone wish to avoid a painful death, they were advised to stay well away from the corridor on the right-hand side of the third floor.
Finally, the entire school sang the school song, in the somewhat chaotic fashion that resulted from every student choosing a different tune simultaneously. Then the prefects led their respective houses towards the dormitories.
As Mirabelle descended the stone steps towards the Slytherin common room, her thoughts had already moved past the subjects on offer, past the teachers she had yet to meet, past every ordinary concern of a first-year's first night.
They had settled, with quiet and focused intent, on a single question.
How to outmanoeuvre Dumbledore and acquire the Philosopher's Stone.
+++++++
This chapter covered three things: Mirabelle's arrival at Hogwarts, her Sorting, and her making her first acquaintance.
Our original character, Miss Edith Rynagle, is a Slytherin student, but she is, at her core, a sensible person. Since the main character, Mirabelle, is rather unhinged, we needed someone whose perspective sits a little closer to the reader's. That said, she is still a Slytherin, so a certain degree of Gryffindor-scepticism is built into her character.
Whether, when Mirabelle eventually becomes hostile to the wizarding world, Edith will stand at her side as a second-in-command or oppose her alongside Harry, that question remains open for now.
Mirabelle is also genuinely and deeply motivated by good food.