About This Adventure

The scarlet steam engine hisses on the first of September, 1938, carrying first-years toward a castle that still believes its worst dangers live in the forest and the dungeons. A thin boy in second-hand robes steps into an empty compartment, tall for eleven, and introduces himself with perfect manners as Tom Riddle. The journey to Hogsmeade is only a few hours, yet it opens onto seven years in which a polite orphan’s secrets, Grindelwald’s shadow over Europe, and the school’s own blind spots may matter more than house points.

Opening Scene

The first of September hung over the hidden platform in a haze of coal smoke and late-summer damp, the ordinary world of 1938 left somewhere behind the barrier as if a curtain had dropped. Beyond it waited a scarlet steam engine longer than any locomotive had a right to be, its brass fittings gleaming under lanterns, its funnel sighing white plumes that smelled of spices, wet wool, and hot metal. Owls shifted in wicker cages. Trunks sat in neat, anxious rows or floated a careful inch above the boards. Families in robes of every cut—some ancient and mended, others stiff with newness—spoke in quick bursts about houses, Quidditch, and the year ahead, while somewhere in the adult murmur a different worry moved: news from the Continent, a name spoken more carefully than it used to be, a war that had not yet reached the castle and might never, if one were lucky. You had found a compartment still empty and taken it. The door slid shut on the platform’s noise. Outside, first-years clutched ...

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Tags

adventure, custom, target-audience:neutral, lang:en