October the thirty-first. Halloween.
The Great Hall had been transformed for the occasion, lit by countless carved jack-o'-lanterns and laden with dishes making extravagant use of pumpkin in every conceivable form. Mirabelle would have liked nothing more than to work through the feast at a leisurely pace, but today that was not an option.
The celebration would be cut short by a troll. She knew this. Which meant there was a time limit, and if she did not eat quickly, she would be waiting another year.
'Pumpkin gratin is actually rather good. Slightly unusual, but not unpleasant. Though pumpkin really finds its best expression in desserts — these pancakes, for instance, are excellent. The sweetness of the pumpkin against the soft batter is just right.'
She worked her way steadily through small portions of various dishes, assessing each one quietly. Pumpkin pie, pancakes, pudding, tart, a menu dominated by sweets, but Mirabelle found she did not mind.
A dinner of this kind was perfectly acceptable once in a while. She finished with a cup of tea to clear her palate, wiped her mouth with a napkin, and set it aside.
"You're not eating much today, are you?"
"I have days like this."
"I think she simply eats too much the rest of the time." Edith sighed, glancing from Mirabelle's slender frame to her own stomach with undisguised envy.
Since arriving at Hogwarts, she had been eating rather more than she ought to, seduced by the quality of the food, and she was fairly certain she had gained a little weight since the start of term. Mirabelle, who ate considerably more than she did, showed absolutely no change whatsoever.
"I burn off what I eat."
"Burn it off?"
"Magic may not look physically demanding, but it consumes a great deal of energy. I practise every day without exception, so the energy from food is spent almost as quickly as it arrives. Excess is far less likely than deficiency."
Magic was constructed in the mind and released through mental force. That meant casting it, even without conscious effort, placed an enormous burden on the brain, working it well beyond its ordinary threshold.
The brain's primary fuel was sugar, which explained why Mirabelle maintained a preference for sweet things, she needed to be in perfect condition at all times, and keeping her reserves stocked was simply practical. It was not, she would note, merely a matter of taste.
"There is also the fact that I simply do not gain weight easily."
"That's not fair," Edith muttered, pressing a hand to her slightly rounded stomach. She had been rationing her portions for the past several days, and the results had been underwhelming.
Before she could continue her grievances, the doors of the Great Hall burst open.
Professor Quirrell stumbled in with his turban askew and his already pale face drained to a sickly white.
He lurched towards Dumbledore's seat, caught himself against the table, and spoke in a voice that shook.
"There's a troll, in the dungeons, I thought you should know."
Having conveyed only that, and nothing further, Quirrell collapsed in a faint.
The chaos that followed was immediate and complete. Students screamed, clutched at one another, wept, or shouted things that no one could make out over the noise of everyone else.
Group panic had swept up not only the first-years but the upperclassmen as well, until the hall was a wall of noise with no clear source. In the Slytherin section, Draco was half in tears, and Edith had turned to Mirabelle with a wide-eyed, helpless expression.
Mirabelle's expression had not changed at all.
With the same unhurried composure she always carried, she raised her wand. A sharp crack of sparks cut through the noise.
Then she brought her hand down flat on the table, and the sound of it carried across the Slytherin section with enough force to make several students flinch.
She spoke quietly.
"Settle down. All of you. This is embarrassing to watch."
It was a reprimand from a student who had been enrolled for barely two months. And yet not one person found the words to answer back, not a first-year, not a seventh-year. Something in her voice made argument feel irrelevant.
Draco was the only one who attempted it, his voice still unsteady.
"B-but — there's a troll in the school—"
"And what, precisely, do you expect a creature with no weapon beyond brute strength to do?"
Mirabelle set down her wine glass with an unhurried click, and her golden eyes swept across the Slytherin table.
"There is nothing to worry about. I am here."
It was a quiet statement. There was no bluster in it, no performance. It simply was, and something in the way she said it made it feel true without explanation, as though questioning the logic would be beside the point.
"Calm down. You are ruining the dinner."
She picked up her glass and drank.
It was not vanity, and it was not a bluff. She genuinely did not consider the troll a threat worth taking seriously. And that absolute, undisguised certainty reached across the table and did something to the people sitting at it.
The panic did not disappear so much as recede, replaced by something steadier.
'It's all right. With her here, there is nothing to fear.'
That was the impression she created, without quite explaining how.
"Let me ask you something." Her gaze moved slowly along the table. "Are you pigs without fangs? Beasts without claws?" She paused. "No. You carry wands. You carry magic. You are armed in ways this creature cannot begin to comprehend."
When people were seized by great fear, they reached for something to anchor themselves. They looked for someone to trust, someone whose certainty could become their own.
Mirabelle had recognised this clearly and was filling that space with deliberate, calculated precision. Fear and the removal of fear, these were the levers by which people were moved.
"What is so frightening about a troll? What is there, really, to be afraid of? It is a large target and nothing more. You are not so weak as to let something like that make you feel small in your own school."
The Slytherin students were on their feet.
That was right, what was a troll? What was exceptional about a creature that was merely strong? They had Disarming spells. Paralysis spells. Magic as a weapon and a shield. There was no reason for fear. More than that: this was their school, and they would not be made to cower in it.
"Prefects, take the younger students who cannot fight back to the dormitories. Upperclassmen who can hold their own, with me. We end this quickly."
"Do you know where the trolls are?"
"It was said to be underground. There is likely no one down there, but there may be. We move now."
The group that formed was composed primarily of older Slytherin students, every one of them holding their wand. The fear had gone entirely.
In its place was something that felt, to each of them, like certainty the clean and uncomplicated certainty of people who believed they were making the right choice and following the right person.
The teachers were caught entirely off-guard. Several attempted to intervene. Dumbledore himself sent up a shower of firecrackers, but the Slytherin students did not break formation. Their commander tonight was not a teacher or a prefect. For this moment alone, it was the small golden girl at their head.
Her eyes gleamed with cold, quiet satisfaction. She gave her command.
"Show me what a wizard is capable of."
The upperclassmen moved out of the hall like soldiers following an officer. No hesitation, no second thoughts. The dungeons lay ahead of them, and somewhere in them was a single, witless troll that had wandered into the wrong castle.
McGonagall watched them go and swallowed quietly.
'What extraordinary presence. What leadership in a first-year student. She silenced the entire Slytherin table with a handful of words.'
The talent itself was frankly alarming. And yet it was also, potentially, something else.
She turned to address the remaining students before the hall could descend into confusion again.
"Prefects! Return your students to their dormitories immediately!"
The prefects moved at once. The students began to filter out in clusters, guided back towards their common rooms.
No one noticed that Mirabelle was not among them.
========
"...This is almost too easy."
After watching the last of the Hogwarts students disappear towards their dormitories, Mirabelle murmured to herself in the empty corridor.
She had no intention of going back to the dungeons. She had incited the Slytherin students for one reason only: to draw the teachers' attention. The entire display had been a diversion, nothing more.
"Now. The Restricted Section, before anyone thinks to look."
Her objective was simple. She intended to take the books she needed from the shelves ordinarily closed to students and leave without being seen.
She moved through the corridors towards the library as though she had every right to be there, stepped inside, and crossed directly to the restricted shelves.
"Now, where is it?"
She searched methodically, moving along the forbidden section. She could not afford to pull the wrong volume; some of them screamed when handled. A screaming book at this particular moment would force a retreat, and she had no patience for that.
Fortunately, what she was looking for was found quickly. She took it from the shelf with a faint, satisfied smile and leafed through it to confirm it was genuine.
"...Yes. This is it."
Once this was in her possession, she had no further use for the library tonight. Mirabelle left under a Disillusionment Charm, the book tucked away, and made for the dungeons.
If her timing was correct, the Slytherin upperclassmen should be engaging the troll in the girls' bathroom around now.
=======
The bathroom had become a battlefield.
The Slytherin upperclassmen were holding their ground well, casting in coordinated pairs, one attacking, one covering, protecting one another's backs with the practiced efficiency of people who had, in the past two months, come to trust each other.
"Gryffindor student, get clear while you can! Go, now, while we hold it!"
Someone grabbed Hermione Granger by the hand. She had been pressed against the far wall, trembling, and the Slytherin student pulling her towards the door was trying to move a paralysed girl through a room with an active troll in it.
The troll turned. It raised its club.
Harry Potter landed on its head.
He must have come in through the window, or the door, or simply appeared — it hardly mattered.
"Run, Hermione!"
She ran. The troll shook Harry loose, knocked Ron Weasley aside when he stepped in to stop it, and followed her out through the door. Worse still, there were other female students in the corridor outside.
"It's through the door, move, everyone move—!"
Harry's shout came from inside the bathroom. The Slytherin students scrambled to redirect, but the troll was already raising its club at the girl nearest to it.
The club came down.
The girl slowly raised her hand.
She caught it.
A stunned, collective silence.
A girl of perhaps one hundred and thirty-five centimetres had stopped the club of a four-metre troll with one hand.
The troll stared at her, visibly confused, and shifted to a two-handed grip, bearing down with its full strength.
The club did not move.
From the outside, it was incomprehensible. What had actually happened was this: Mirabelle had performed a silent, wandless casting of Spongify, the charm that softened and weakened a target object, reducing the troll's club and the force behind it to something no more dangerous than a cushion.
The troll was still enormous. It was simply, for the moment, entirely powerless.
"Hmph."
She released the club, jumped lightly, grabbed the troll by the head, and drove it into the floor.
Descendo.
A spell to force objects sharply downward. The impact cracked the stone. The troll lifted its head, dazed and struggling to focus, and received a sharp upward kick to the jaw.
Rictusempra
not the laughing curse of the books, but the variant used in practice, the one that sent its target airborne. The troll left the floor, carried backwards in a wide arc, and hit the ground rolling. It came to rest several metres away in a crumpled heap.
Mirabelle crossed to it and placed her foot on its head.
Every one of these spells had been performed without a word and without a wand.
"Well, then. Are you proud of your strength?"
The troll swung its arms and thrashed its legs, straining upwards. Nothing connected. The girl standing on its head was less than half its height, and it could not move her.
This was the most unambiguous possible articulation of the gap between them. The strong trampled on the weak, and the weak were not even permitted to resist. Mirabelle allowed it to struggle for a while longer, then seized it by the head and hauled it upright to eye level.
"G-gob..."
"Interesting. Even something as primitive as this can experience fear."
The troll was shaking. Its one advantage , the only thing it had ever had, was its physical strength, and that had been neutralised completely. Even a creature this simple understood what it meant when it could not fight back. The predator and the prey had inverted, and the troll had understood which it was.
Every trace of aggression had gone out of it.
'Time to finish this,' Mirabelle decided, and set it down.
"You know what to do."
"...Gob. Gob."
The troll did not attack her. Given the opportunity to stand, it did not stand. Instead it sank to its knees and, in a gesture that silenced everyone watching, pressed its tongue to the floor and began to lick Mirabelle's shoes clean.
The Slytherin students stared.
This was not the image of a defeated monster. It was the image of total, abject surrender, something that had been reduced so completely that it could only offer submission. The winner and the loser were on full display, and no one in the corridor had any doubt which was which.
The effect on the Slytherin students was electric. This was not merely victory. This was dominance, in the clearest possible terms. Slytherin students were, by nature, drawn to the concept of the chosen, the deserving, the superior, and what Mirabelle had just demonstrated spoke directly to that instinct with unmistakable force.
She turned to address them.
"The teachers will handle the rest from here. We should go before anyone receives a deduction."
No one objected. Not a single voice was raised. The Slytherin students who had just fought a mountain troll in their school corridors turned, without argument, and walked back towards their dormitory at the word of a girl who had been at Hogwarts for two months.
Mirabelle was about to follow when a voice stopped her.
"M-Mirabelle Beresford, right?"
She turned. Harry Potter was in the doorway of the bathroom, Ron slightly behind him, both of them looking as though they had not entirely processed what they had just witnessed.
"Yes. We have seen each other in classes, but this is our first proper conversation since before term started. I hope you are well, Harry Potter."
Her tone was easy, almost conversational. Harry, for his part, was not at ease. Mirabelle had, from the moment he first met her, occupied a different and more unsettling category than Malfoy. What he had just seen had not changed that, if anything, it had made it considerably worse.
"Um, well, thank you. For helping—"
"No need. I did not do it for you."
She had already turned away.
"It would be inconvenient if a teacher found me here. I will leave now. As for the troll, feel free to take credit for it."
She walked around the corner.
Harry followed at once, but when he reached it there was nothing, no corridor she could have cleared in time, no doorway she could have slipped through. She had simply vanished, as cleanly as if she had never been there.
He stood in the empty corridor for a long moment.
On that night, Harry Potter was left with the distinct and unshakeable impression that Mirabelle Beresford was something he did not fully understand, and that understanding her fully might not be something he wanted.
++++++++
Rictusempra
A spell with different effects in the original novels and the film adaptations. In the novels it causes uncontrollable laughter. In the films, for reasons no one has adequately explained, it instead sends the target flying through the air at considerable force. The latter is the version Mirabelle used.