The Gathering: The New Order of Merlin Book 1

61. The Book of Admittance

  Albus looked down from his tower upon the courtyard below, where two children released extraordinary winter magic without the help of wands. He planned to go down there once they left to see in detail what they had done.

Back in the summer, when he recommended for Minerva to bring them to Hogwarts, he expected child prodigies. Getting to know them was supposed to be one of his pre-retirement treats. Now, however, he had a hunch that the twins were much more than what met the eye. Their wandless magic was without precedent. Unless...

He left his office and climbed the stairs to the small room which was home to the Book of Admittance. No one alive fully understood the magic it was imbued with. The Quill of Acceptance had no ink, and yet it could write. Pages magically added themselves as needed, and there were thousands of them by now. What was understood was that the Book considered the population within a certain radius (although that radius seemed to change to an unknown pattern), which included Northern and Western Europe, and recorded names of children who exhibited magical abilities.

On the day when he'd received Minerva's letter, Albus came here, curious why the twins never got their invitations, and he found the Book and the Quill in an odd sort of argument. The Book snapped shut, and the Quill tickled it to get it to open. The Book withstood the torture for as long as it could, but eventually, it gave in and allowed the Quill to write:

Elsa,

Jack,

And in the most peculiar fashion, it did not list their last names.

The Book and the Quill were the gatekeepers. No child had ever been admitted to Hogwarts whose name was not in the Book, and Albus had always thought that the child's name was inscribed by the Quill of Acceptance on the first occasion when the child used magic. Yet the twins' names did not appear in the book until the day when Minerva had found them. Maybe his understanding of how the Book worked was inaccurate?

Dumbledore approached the ancient book, flipped the pages by magic all the way to the list of the very first students that attended this school. He landed on page five, where one of the names was:

Merlin,

The quill wrote his name when the Founders were still alive and teaching at the school. Merlin was around five hundred years old then. Albus deduced that the name was written when Merlin decided to attend the school. Just like with the twins, the Quill and the Book made an exception for him. These magic objects understood the connection between the twins with the immortal sorcerer better than Albus did.

Albus remembered back to his youth when he'd met Merlin and asked him to teach him Old Religion spells. No matter how hard he tried, Albus could not make them work.

"Don't beat yourself up," Merlin had tried to console him. "Nowadays, I rarely ever find anyone who's born with the ability. It's worse than looking for a needle in a haystack, Albus. It's more like finding one specific snowflake in a blizzard."

Merlin had to have recognized something in the twins as well since he chose to teach them Old Religion, but did he fully understand that there was something larger at play here? The twins weren't what they seemed. Albus was glad to know what hid underneath the nonthreatening facade that Merlin presented, but what powers hid inside these children? More so, what hid within their hearts?