Cedar and Dragon Heartstring: The Fated Wand
At 5:07 in the morning, Hailey's nose suddenly hit the bedside table. She woke with a start to find she had rolled to the edge of the bed. Fragments of her dream were like a magic circle thrown into disarray-in the first half, she had been watching wands dance flamenco at Ollivander's shop; in the second, Dumbledore's silver beard had tied her into a bow. Her father's gold pocket watch ticked in the distance, its hands running backward to spell out "Voldemort" on the dial.
"Another nightmare, miss?" Nini's high-pitched voice came through a crack in the wardrobe. The House-elf wore a crooked nightcap, and the silver tray in her hand rattled. "Last night, you hugged your pillow and shouted, 'Schrödinger's wand.' It looked as though you nearly burned a hole in it."
Hailey sat up, rubbing the reddened tip of her nose, and looked at the pile of notes by her bed. Moonlight streamed through the gauze window screen, casting weblike shadows across the parchment, just like the lines behind Dumbledore's lenses in her dream. She shivered, suddenly remembering how the torn page from the book of prophecies had twisted in the firelight.
"Please eat first." Nini thrust the silver tray into her arms. As she turned, her tail swept against the bedside table, revealing a Muggle alarm clock hidden underneath. It showed a time seventeen minutes ahead of the magic clock, a "safety time difference" Hailey had deliberately set.
The oatmeal on the breakfast table gave off the sweet fragrance of osmanthus honey. The French toast had been cut into neat diamonds, with Winnie the Pooh patterns stamped along the edges. Hailey nearly sprayed jam onto the tablecloth at her first bite-Nini had actually added peanut butter to the cream. The fusion of Chinese and Western flavors reminded her of the yuenyeung milk tea she had ordered at a Hong Kong-style café in her previous life.
"Mom, do you think the Hogwarts Kitchen has a steamer?" she asked, deliberately poking her French toast with a fork as she watched her mother add a third spoonful of lavender honey to the teapot. Mrs. Leicester wore a pale lilac dressing gown, and a moon-phase pendant swayed gently against her collarbone. Her father had made it from parts of an astrolabe, and it was said to hold twelve different soothing charms.
"Perhaps you could make one with a Transfiguration Spell?" her mother suggested with a smile, wiping peanut butter from the corner of her mouth and tracing a Scourgify on the tablecloth with her fingertip. "But remember not to try it in Professor Snape's class. I've heard he's particularly sensitive about 'unconventional uses of magic.'"
Hailey nearly choked on her oatmeal. Did her mother actually know she had secretly tucked Cantonese recipes into Advanced Potion-Making? She hurriedly looked up, only to see her father coming out of the kitchen with a coffee cup, a sly smile in his eyes behind his glasses. Clearly, the couple had seen through her "cross-dimensional cooking plan" long ago.
At 10:03 that morning, Hailey stood in the alley behind the Leaky Cauldron, the emerald magic in her palm pulsing faintly with her heartbeat. When she tapped out the entrance to Diagon Alley with her mother's old wand, the sight of the alley immediately came into view. No matter how many times she came to Diagon Alley, it was like a first love; every visit left Hailey more awestruck than the movie had.
They headed first for the Ollivander Wand Shop. Its sign looked like a piece of aged honey, with tiny Lumos spells embedded in the wood grain, giving it a warm amber glow in the sunlight.
"Oh! The Leicesters' little star!" Mr. Ollivander's voice came from the ceiling. The old man slid down a ladder, a few wood shavings caught in his silver beard. "I've been waiting ten years for you, ever since you levitated your pacifier in your crib."
Hailey froze. So her first loss of control over her magic had already been recorded? Her mother gently rested a hand on her shoulder, and warmth from a soothing charm flowed from her fingertips. Mr. Ollivander blinked and drew the first wand from a shelf. "Chestnut, Unicorn Hair, ten inches, suited to healing magic-give it a try?"
The moment the wand touched her palm, Hailey felt as though she had grasped a red-hot branding iron. The chestnut wood suddenly crackled, and sparks shot from its tip, burning a hole in a wand box nearby. Mr. Ollivander clicked his tongue twice and offered her an ebony wand. "Dragon Heartstring, nine and three-quarter inches, excels at defense against Dark Magic..."
This time, before Hailey could even take hold of it, an entire row of wands suddenly began to tremble. The ebony wand sprang away as though scalded, tracing a crooked lightning bolt in the air, and Mrs. Leicester's fingers abruptly tightened at the sight.
"Aha! I've finally found you!" Mr. Ollivander suddenly disappeared into a hidden room behind the counter. When he emerged again, he carried a long box wrapped in gold thread. "Cedar, Dragon Heartstring, eleven inches. The core came from the third rib of a red-scaled dragon from Guizhou in 1926. My grandfather traded a whole crate of Mandrake for it..."
The moment the cedar wand touched her palm, Hailey felt a warm current rush from her fingertips to her heart. Her restless magic suddenly grew docile, gathering into a miniature tornado at the wand's tip. Stranger still, she seemed to hear running water in the distance, and mist from Huangguoshu Waterfall flashed before her eyes—an image she had seen in a geography documentary in her previous life.
"A beautiful bioelectric reaction!" Mr. Ollivander pushed up the glasses that had slipped to the tip of his nose. "The cedar's healing field and the Dragon Heartstring's combat wave have formed a magical entanglement, like a magical reaction that binds a cauldron and a test tube together."
Although Mrs. Leicester was very pleased with the wand, her hand still trembled slightly as she paid for it—the wand cost as much as a Beetle in the Muggle world. Hailey, meanwhile, secretly held the wand to her ear and heard a low-frequency vibration mixed into its faint hum, much like the sound of the MRI machine in her father's laboratory.