The air in Ollivanders had been thick with the weight of destiny, a silence punctuated by the shocking pronouncements of Elder wood and Thunderbird feather. Stepping back out into the cacophonous vibrancy of Diagon Alley was like surfacing from a deep, ancient sea. The sunlight seemed brighter, the chatter of the crowd sharper. Harry was looking at her, his green eyes wide behind his mended glasses, a new and profound awe replacing his earlier bewilderment. He had just been told his own wand was the brother to a dark lord's, a heavy burden to bear, yet the revelation about Ariana's un-made wand seemed to have eclipsed even that. It was something else entirely—not a dark history, but a future of untold, unprecedented power.
Hagrid, for his part, seemed to be struggling to reconcile the quiet, beautiful girl beside him with the earth-shattering potential Ollivander had described. He cleared his throat, the sound a low rumble, and consulted his list, a gesture of someone desperately seeking normalcy in the face of the extraordinary.
"Right," he boomed, his voice a little strained. "Well. That's that, then. All that's left on yer lists is… a pet! Yeh can have an owl, or a cat, or a toad." He seemed to brighten at the thought of this simple, straightforward task. "Let's get that done, eh? Best place for it is the Magical Menagerie."
He led them down the winding cobbled street to a shop that was, to put it mildly, a sensory assault. The Magical Menagerie was crammed, noisy, and pungent. The air was thick with the mingled smells of damp fur, sawdust, and something vaguely sulfurous. A cacophony of hoots, squeaks, hisses, and croaks filled the space, emanating from dozens of cages stacked from floor to ceiling. A pair of enormous purple toads were lazily catching flies with their long tongues near the entrance, and a cage of Flobberworms sat looking profoundly uninteresting.
Harry was immediately drawn to the owls, his face lighting up with a pure, boyish delight that Ariana found herself smiling at. It was a relief to see him look like a child, not a burdened hero. He moved towards a section of the shop where magnificent owls of every size and colour—snowy, barn, tawny, eagle—were perched, regarding the customers with wise, swivelling heads.
Ariana, however, felt a different pull. The ambient magic she sensed in Diagon Alley was a chaotic symphony, but here in the menagerie, it was a discordant mess of countless small, buzzing lifeforces.
Yet, through the noise, she felt a single, clear note. It was a sliver of magic, quiet and cool and deep, like a pool of still water in a dark cave. It was completely different from the warm, wild magic of Hagrid, the latent, lightning-in-a-bottle power of Harry, or her own placid, oceanic depths.
This was something else. Something… void-like. She followed the feeling, her steps silent and fluid as she navigated the cramped aisles. She passed the cages of crups yapping with their forked tails, the iridescent fire crabs, and the chattering ginger cats. The pull led her to a quiet, shadowed corner at the very back of the shop.
There, in a small, simple cage, sat a cat. It was tiny, barely more than a kitten, and utterly,
completely black. Its fur was short and sleek, seeming to drink the light around it, leaving it looking like a perfect, cat-shaped hole in reality. Most black cats had a hint of tabby striping in bright light, or a touch of brown. This one did not. It was the colour of midnight in a moonless sky.
As she approached, the cat looked up. Its eyes were the most startling feature. They were not green or yellow, the typical colours for a black cat. They were a deep, luminous violet, the colour of a twilight sky just after the sun has vanished. There was an intelligence in that gaze, a knowing stillness that was profoundly unnerving and deeply compelling.
The quiet hum of magic she'd been tracking pulsed from the small creature. It felt ancient, patient, and powerful in a way that had nothing to do with size or aggression.
While her own magic was a vast, woven tapestry of energy, this cat's was a perfect, contained vacuum, a point of pure potential.
"Hello there," Ariana whispered. She unlatched the cage door and reached in slowly. The cat didn't hiss or back away. It watched her hand approach with its incredible violet eyes, then it leaned forward and pressed its head firmly into her palm. A purr started, but it wasn't a normal sound. It was a low, resonant vibration that seemed to hum not in the air, but directly inside her own magical core. Her placid inner sea of magic stirred, rippling in response to the cat's touch, a perfect harmony of presence and absence. They fit.
The shopkeeper, a harried-looking witch with spectacles perched on the end of her nose, bustled over. "Oh! Be careful with that one, dear. She's a strange one. Hasn't taken to anyone. Just sits there. Doesn't even eat much."
"I'll take her," Ariana said, her voice leaving no room for discussion. She gently lifted the small cat from the cage. It was light as a feather but felt… substantial, as if it weighed more than mere flesh and bone. It immediately curled up in the crook of her arm, tucking its head under her chin, its strange purr a constant, soothing vibration against her skin.
"What will you name her?" Harry asked. He had returned, a magnificent snowy owl perched regally
on his arm. The owl was beautiful, a creature of stark white purity, and the joy on Harry's face was a sight to behold. He had found a friend, a connection to this new world.
Ariana looked down at the void-black fur of the creature nestled against her. "Midnight," she said. It was the only name that felt right.
Hagrid paid for both pets, looking immensely pleased with Harry's choice, and only slightly bewildered by Ariana's. A snowy owl was a fine, respectable wizarding pet. The tiny, unnervingly still black cat was another enigma to add to the growing list associated with Miss Dumbledore.
Their arms now full—Hagrid carrying most of the parcels, Harry his owl cage, and Ariana cradling Midnight—their final destination was the bookshop. Flourish and Blotts was a haven. The scent of old paper and leather-bound ink was a balm after the chaos of the menagerie. Books were stacked to the ceiling on groaning shelves, in teetering piles on the floor, and behind glass cases.
It was a treasure trove, and the architect-scholar within Ariana felt a deep sense of coming home.
They gathered the required first-year texts with relative ease: The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 1, A Beginner's Guide to Transfiguration, One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi. Harry looked at the titles with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. For him, they were gateways to a world he never knew existed. For Ariana, they were refreshers, the basic building blocks of a system she was already beginning to understand on a far more intuitive level.
Once they had the required stack, Harry and Hagrid assumed they were finished. But Ariana did not move towards the counter. Instead, her gaze swept over the towering shelves, her eyes scanning titles with a focused intensity.
"Is there somethin' else yeh need, Ariana?" Hagrid asked, shifting a precarious pile of cauldrons in his arms.
"Yes," she said, her attention fixed on a dusty, shadowed section of the store labelled 'Theoretical and Abstract Arcana'. "The list is for what we are required to learn. I am more interested in understanding why we are required to learn it."
Leaving Hagrid and Harry near the front of the store, she navigated the labyrinthine aisles with a sure-footedness that suggested she knew exactly what she was looking for. Midnight remained asleep in her arm, a small, dark patch of absolute stillness.
Ariana's fingers, long and delicate, trailed along the spines of ancient, heavy tomes. The knowledge she possessed from her past life was a map, but it was a map of events, of people and their actions. It was not a map of the fundamental laws of this universe. Her innate ability to weave magic felt like speaking a language she was born knowing, but she had no knowledge of its grammar, its syntax, its deep etymological roots. She needed the grammar.
She pulled out a thick, dense book bound in dark blue leather: Axioms of Arcanum: From Will to Reality. Its pages felt heavy with complex thought. She found another, smaller volume called The Unifying Principles of Intent, which seemed to discuss the very nature of a witch or wizard's will as the catalyst for all magical effects. These were the books on theory she craved. They would provide the framework for the instinct she already possessed.
Then, her eyes landed on a title that made the architect's soul inside her sing. It was a slim, elegant book with a silver-embossed cover depicting a hand shaping a swirling cloud of energy into a solid object. The title was Weaving the World: A Primer on Foundational Creation. Beside it was a more advanced-looking text, The Art of Artifice: An Introduction to Magical Construction.
This was it. Not just Transfiguration, which was the art of changing one thing into another, but creation. The art of bringing something into existence from nothing but will and magic. It was the magical equivalent of architecture, of taking a concept, a blueprint in the mind, and making it manifest. It was a branch of magic that was barely touched upon in the original stories, considered incredibly advanced and difficult. To Ariana, it felt like the most natural thing in the world. It was what she did, on a small scale, when she encouraged a flower to grow or warmed a cup of tea. She was weaving new states of being.
She gathered the four extra books and returned to the front of the shop. Hagrid's eyes widened when he saw the additional, heavy volumes.
"Blimey, Ariana," he said, his brow furrowed. "Those look a bit… advanced. Are yeh sure about that? First year's gonna be busy enough as it is."
Ariana met his concerned gaze with her usual, unshakeable calm. "Professor McGonagall
mentioned that my connection to magic was unusual, Mr. Hagrid," she said, her voice soft but her reasoning impeccable. "I don't just want to learn how to do spells. I want to understand the 'how' and the 'why' behind them. If my magic works differently, then I need to understand the principles, not just the practice." She paused, then added, "It's just for my own curiosity. I enjoy reading."
Her explanation was so mature, so perfectly reasonable, that Hagrid found he had no counterargument. He looked from the serious, intelligent girl to the stack of esoteric books, then back again. He remembered Ollivander's words about her magic, about how it was what she was.
Perhaps she really did need these.
"A Dumbledore, through and through," he muttered, shaking his head in fond bewilderment. "Thirst for knowledge, the lot of 'em. Albus is the same. Always with his nose in a book." He seemed to accept her reasoning completely, his comparison to the current Headmaster the highest form of praise he could offer.
He paid for the books, adding them to their now mountainous collection of supplies. As they finally left Flourish and Blotts, stepping back into the dwindling afternoon light of the Alley, Ariana felt a profound sense of completeness.
In one arm, she held a creature that was a quiet echo of the void, a silent, magical anchor. In her other, she held books that contained the foundational secrets of the universe she now inhabited.
She had her school robes, her supplies, and the promise of a wand forged from legend and storm. She glanced at Harry, who was gazing at his snowy owl with a look of pure, unadulterated happiness. He had his first-ever birthday present, his first real friend. He was on the path the world had laid for him.
Ariana, however, was on a path of her own making. She held the tools not just to survive in this world, but to understand it, to shape it. The quiet confidence she had cultivated in the orphanage solidified into something harder, something more certain. She was no longer just a transmigrated soul trying to adapt. She was a scholar, a weaver, an architect of her own destiny. And she was ready to begin construction.