At 7:42 a.m., Cordelia opened her eyes right on time.
The Ice Silk sheet beneath her, handwoven by Goblins in 1920, was so slick it irritated her.
She lay on her forty-meter-wide floating bed, struck by a precise, prolonged, suffocating sense of speechlessness.
From where she lay, it would take about fifty-five steps to reach the edge.
Even Dibby, holding her morning dew at a constant thirty-eight degrees, would not dare use Apparition to appear directly beside her—
All to show that Pure-blood families could never be outdone by Muggles in sheer extravagance.
The culprits were an offhand joke from Gavin and her father, the ultimate doting dad.
A few days earlier, the two of them had been chatting about Muggle novels in the Sitting Room.
With time to kill, Gavin had told her about the absurdities of "Mary Sue fiction."
Mr. Rowle had happened to overhear part of it as he passed by. The line about "the most elite Muggle socialites waking up every day on beds dozens of meters wide" had stuck in his mind.
To Mr. Rowle, who felt he had failed his daughter, the jewel of the Rowle family, one of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, could never receive less than a Muggle in any respect.
So the next day, he turned Gavin's Mary Sue fiction into reality.
To fit the monstrosity into the room, Mr. Rowle had spent an entire day casting Undetectable Extension Charms on the bedroom.
"Even Muggles enjoy this standard of luxury. The Rowle family's Heir must have no less!"
At dinner last night, Mr. Rowle had swirled his wineglass, his eyes shining with triumphant pride.
"If the Extension Charm hadn't had its limits, Dad would have gotten you a hundred-meter bed."
Rather than hurt her father's feelings, Cordelia had swallowed her explanation and