The Horizon

Chapter Two

We all climb out of the carriage quickly and make our way up the path and into the castle. I take in a deep breath of air, relishing in the familiarity of the scents. Hogwarts has always smelled the same, except for the Christmas season. Typically, it has a very earthy aroma with an undertone of some kind of dried fruit that I've never been able to decipher.

Sadly, we all have to watch the first-year sorting ceremony, it's never interesting, and always accompanied by a much too long speech by Dumbledore and whoever the hell our new Defence Against the Dark Arts Professor is.

It's a long walk into the Great Hall, made even more tedious by the amount of my peers who have apparently never learned how to walk fast in their lives. I look at my friends beside me and find a similar distaste among their expressions, annoyed by all in typical fashion.

I pull my robe tighter around me as a draft creeps across my skin. Uniform culture has drastically changed as Hogwarts has continued to teach throughout the years. In these more modern times, our uniform has been decreased into a dress code, except for special occasions.

On days such as today, the special occasions aforementioned, we wear our smart, uniformed clothing. Black trousers or skirts, depending on what you feel comfortable in, a white button-up top with every button fastened, tights if your skin is exposed, house ties, and then our house robes over top all of that. For shoes, we can wear whatever we like as long as they fully cover us. Our administration doesn't care about how we do our hair or piercings, so long as it's 'school appropriate,' though I'm unsure what basis they judge that on.

Most students in the older years choose to wear their usual clothing on the train ride and then change just before we get to the station, my friend group being no exception. We are all changed into this occasioned uniform, Pansy the only one of us who opted for a skirt, the rest of us wearing trousers.

The scents of Hogwarts hit me harder as we all migrate into the Great Hall. This time, it's accompanied by the smells of cooking, still done with House Elves regardless of their recent presenting of clothing. They now work for pay, thanks to a group of Ministry protestors who were adamant on the tradition of house elf abuse ending. After two weeks of showing up to the Ministry of Magic every day, lawmakers agreed to hear them. After a forty-seven hour long hearing, which lasted over a period of nine days, a new law was put in place that outlawed unfair and cruel treatment toward house elves, and set a standard for how they would be rightfully compensated in all future work.

Looking over at Pansy, I see her adjust the Slytherin house tie, making it sit looser around her neck, less suffocating that way. I copy her movement and find breathing slightly less difficult. Theo and Draco talk to one another with Blaise listening in. Draco is discussing the courses he's decided to take on for the year with Theo interrupting him every few words with either a sigh or a grunt. He's a rather smart wizard, though he only applies himself to the subject when he finds it to be of great interest to him. His favourite courses in years past being Defence Against the Dark Arts and Charms class, both of which he excels in Though in the courses he deemed uninteresting, he barely scraped by. History of Magic and Transfiguration were not his favourite topics of discussion.

"Which additional courses did you choose?" Blaise asks, turning away from Theo's grumbling to talk to me.

We had chosen our courses at the end of last year. O.W.L.'s are, as described by nearly every professor, much more difficult than what we have encountered thus far at Hogwarts. "I settled on two of them, Arithmancy and Ancient Runes."

Blaise lets out a quick sigh, "Good luck with that," he says, laughing. "I've heard the Professor is mental with homework. A sixth year told me that last year they took off house points if an assignment was even a point under acceptable."