Ramona had never felt so cold in her life. Living by a lake in Wales and going to school at Durmstrang definitely exposed her to frigid weather, but nothing could compare to the soul-chilling coldness of the Slytherin dungeon dorms.

None of the other students seemed to be shivering.
Ramona's heart was ice cold, however.

She longed for her mother.
She longed for Sigrid, and Victor.

She longed even for retched old Prof. Veslik, with his crusty, gray mustache and dark, unconventional teaching methods.

Ramona decided she would rather be at Durmstrang again at age ten and suffer the vileness of those children than be here any day.

Hours earlier, Ramona Gaunt had been sorted like a first year into Slytherin, the word her mother yelled to her moments before apparating away to who knows where. No "goodbye," no "I love you," just "Slytherin." Ramona had not known what that word had meant at the time, but as she made her way up to what was know as the Sorting Hat, she caught a glimpse of a table adorned in green and silver colors, with some of its occupants giving Ramona intimidating smirks. Slytherin.

She had pleaded with the Sorting Hat to place her in Slytherin, for her mother had warned her that she would not be safe in any other house. Ramona had a certain part to play—and being sorted into Slytherin sealed the deal.

Now newly christened Ramona snuggled into her bed, her face blotchy and her eyes puffy from silently crying through the night instead of sleeping.

She could not determine if it was day. The murky green waters of what seemed to be a lake stared back at her. The liquid seemed a shade brighter than it was when Ramona had first started to cry earlier that night, but not bright enough to be breakfast time.

She was alone in her dorm room.

There were six four-poster beds, and six porthole windows to match. The beds were lined up neatly and orderly, like they would be in an 19th-century infirmary. The sheets were white, with a dark green quilt, and a green, gray, and black plaid woolen blanket for when the nights got cooler. There were two fluffy white pillows, but nothing decorative.

Ramona would fix that. If this place had to be her new home for who knows how long, she would make sure it felt like home.

Today was the first day of school at Hogwarts. It was early morning, but even so, children of all years were bustling about common rooms, hallways, and the Great Hall, making friends and eating food.

Hogwarts did not run on a severely structured schedule like Durmstrang. Breakfast time was anytime between six in the morning to a few seconds before your first class. The food appeared at dawn and seemingly never leaves the tables, only changing to suit the different menus of lunch and dinner. At Durmstrang Institute, however, breakfast had a set time: 7 o'clock. Students were out of their beds at 6, required to dress and ready quickly, then ushered down to the meal hall at half past.

Most of the time, Ramona just slept the night at her cottage and ate breakfast there. Her mother adeptly apparated her to the school, kissed her goodbye, and was off doing whatever she did while Ramona was in classes.

Having a schedule kept Ramona's mind occupied. She always had a place to be and something to do. Her mind was not allowed to wander off and wonder what some of the teachers whispered about as Ramona passed them, or how the headmaster never looked Ramona directly in the eye, or even why, after all these years, she still heard children whispering about her "revolting" father, a man Ramona didn't even know.

Now lacking a schedule, Ramona's mind did wander and wonder.

Her mother never seemed to disembark her train of thought.

She kept thinking back to hours earlier, how her mother kissed her goodbye then abruptly disappeared, no clue as to where her destination lay.

The mere thought of her mother lead a tear down Ramona's cheek.

That was enough thinking for now. Ramona decided it was time to get out of bed, even if it was too early for breakfast. The green-blue of outside gave away no hints of the hour.

Even though it was the last possible thing she wanted to do, Ramona sat herself up, wiped the salty tears off of her face, and climbed out of her bed. She careful tucked all of her sheets back into place, artfully draping the woolen blanket over top of the quilt. It was too dark for Ramona to see anything in her room earlier, but now she could admire the dorm in the dim light.

Ramona felt as if she were in a Victorian passenger ship. The floors were of dark, smooth wood planks. Wallpapered walls were—unsurprisingly—green squares paneled with silver. The ceiling, oh, the ceiling, seemed as if it were from Marie Antoinette's own bedroom. A mural of creams and off-whites, grays, greens, silvers, black, depicted a clash of magical skill. Silver sparks erupted from the end of an dark brown wand. The owner was ancient and bearded, cloathed in robes of royal blue. Merlin. His opponent, wielding an ash gray wand, had hair of scarlet that rivaled a phoenix's own feathers. Morgana le Fay.

The whole painting was fantastic to Ramona in every way. Silver-lined clouds wafted around Merlin like a protective spirit, while Morgana was armed with what seemed to be the entire avifauna of the United Kingdom.

"It wasn't always there, you know," remarked a voice. Ramona had been so preoccupied with the majesty of the painting that she neglected to pay attention of the opening and closing of the door and the footsteps that shortly followed after. "The painting."

Ramona matched the voice, a high, sweet one, such like a nightingale's song, to a high- and sweet-looking girl. She was tall, with sunny brown skin and honey brown curls. Her eyes were a light, olive type of green, spiced with flecks of gold and rays of blue. She wore a thin purple jumper under a denim dungaree dress.

"They say some student painted it, oh, three-hundred, or so, years ago. Professors still don't know about it." The girl had a lilt to her voice, something Ramona had only her once or twice in her life.

"You're from . . ."

The girl stepped forward immediately and extended her hand. "Flossie Pensbuckle, straight from Scotland." Her smile was bright. She was a good few inches taller than Ramona, and more slender. Ramona shook her hand. It wouldn't hurt to make just one friend during her time at Hogwarts. Right?

"I'm Ramona Gaunt. Do you know what time it is?"

⌘⌘⌘

If Durmstrang and Hogwarts had one thing in common, it was uniforms.

Ramona quickly remembered that she was wearing a mustard yellow jumper striped with thin white lines and battered jeans once she saw Flossie rummaging through a mahogany chest and looking victorious when she retrieved a pile of black and green. A uniform.

"Do I get one of those?" Ramona questioned. Flossie unbuttoned her dress and slipped on her black skirt decaled with—what were those—ah, dragonflies. She pulled out her purple jumper to look at it, shrugged, then yanked it off to reveal a black tank top underneath. "Look in your chest. You should have one." Ramona left Flossie to buttoning up a white long-sleeved shirt. There was a mahogany chest much like Flossie's at the foot of Ramona's bed. There was an iron keyhole. Ramona traced her finger along the intricate carvings of snakes that guarded the iron mouth.

Ramona turned to Flossie, who was slipping on a pair of black flats "Where's the ke—"

"Your wand."

Her wand.

Panic crashed over Ramona like a tsunami. Her wand. Her wand. Where was her wand? She had no memory of it after the struggle by the lake. Everything was such a blur the last night, Ramona wasn't sure she even had her wand anymore.

"Oh no . . . No, no, no, no, no, no, no." Ramona frantically began tearing her neatly made bed apart, digging under the mattress, behind the bed, under the bed, inside the mahogany chest, even.

There was no sign of her wand. Ramona though back to the events of the past night. A spell, her wand flying out of her hand, Ramona scrambling to retrieve it. Was the retrieving part real or was her brain just supplying a false sense of security?

Ramona sometimes stuck her wand inside the waistband of her underwear for safekeeping, but surely it wasn't there; she would have felt it poking into her stomach.

Sighing with resignation, Ramona ran her hands through her chestnut hair and slumped against the side of her bed. How could she be so careless? She couldn't just go off and buy a new wand. Her bond with her current wand was too strong to just throw away. Also, her mother would kill her if she found out she had lost her wand.

"This it?" said Flossie. Long, slender, and carved with what looked like a vine entwining it, Ramona's cedar wand was in the hands the tall, brown-skinned girl.

The wand's owner jumped up from her position on the floor and snatched the wand out of her roommate's grasp. She clutched the wand against her chest, thankful that it was not lost forever as she so feared.

"Where'd you find it?" Ramona asked Flossie. The other girl pointed to a spot on the floor beside a lovingly weathered tweed duffle bag. "Oh, thank goodness. I forgot I brought my clothes with me." Thankfully, Ramona was not stuck with her yellow jumper and denim pants for the rest of her time at Hogwarts.

Quickly, Ramona opened her chest with her wand and found articles of a uniform: a robe, and a strange pointy hat that she had seen the First Years wearing at dinner.
No shoes, no jumpers, no stockings.

Accessories would be left to Ramona's imagination. Lovely. Ramona could at least have some fun with her wardrobe.

After sorting through her bag, Ramona found a pleated plaid skirt with stripes of green, gray, and purple and a pair of Mary Jane heels. She vaguely remembered wearing the shoes to a friend's birthday party. She felt positively rebellious, as shoes such as hers would never be acceptable at Durmstrang.

The perfect touch to her first day's outfit.

She threw on a dark green jumper and her robe and walked over to a body-length mirror at the other end of the dorm room. Her outfit was immaculate, her hair, however . . .

Lanky and tangled, her hair hung around her shoulders. A brush would be helpful. A headband and a hair tie would be downright miraculous. Digging around in her bag, Ramona found some black satin ribbon. This would have to do.

Using her hands as a comb, Ramona tried her best to neatly tuck her hair into a high pony tail. Her hair needed a shampooing, but she clearly had no time to shower that morning. She slowly and steadily tied the ribbon around her clump of hair, working hard not to let her grip falter, lest she start all over again.

Six minutes later, her arms were tired, but her hair was pulled away from her face in a hairstyle that—Ramona hoped—screamed "polished and put-together."

She hoped.

Now, there was something that would pull her entire image together . . . Something she had seen gracing the lips of girls at Durmstrang.

Lipstick.

Unfortunately, Ramona did not own much makeup, especially no dark lipsticks. It was in style, but Ramona never cared to fit in with the popular Durmstrang crowd. They were friendly to each other, but not friends.

Ramona really did not want to be a bother to Flossie, considering they had just met minutes before, but . . . She needed that lipstick.

"Erm," Ramona began, trying to casually sit on her bed, "Flossie, was it?" The tall girl quirked her eyebrow in Ramona's direction. "Do you happen to have any lipstick?"

Oh, yes. Flossie had lots of lipstick.

⌘⌘⌘

After having Flossie—who Ramona determined had to be some sort of guardian angel—help her decide on a dark, purple-brown burgundy, Ramona was introduced to some more of her fellow Slytherins.

"What happened to that snake from last night?" Flossie asked, packing her lipsticks back into their bag. "You don't seem so venomous to me."

Right. Ramona had an image to keep up, and she had been doing a poor job of it this morning. She hated the feeling she got deep in her stomach when she acted vile, and she always remembered the vow she made when she was ten. How could she not? It haunted her.

Ramona, a small girl with only a decade's worth of knowledge, sitting on the floor in a cold Durmstrang bathroom, crying. She had just been berated harshly by some older children. About her father. Always about her father.

Wiping away the tears, trying not to shake—failing not to shake, Ramona made a vow. She would always, no matter the circumstances, be kind. Because, in a bout of wisdom beyond her years, she believed that even when kindness what not deserved, it was needed.

Ramona's heart ached as she replied to Flossie, a sour tinge to her voice. "I haven't been given a reason to act venomously, yet. We'll see how the rest of the day goes."

Alright, Ramona told herself. That wasn't too hard.

"Right. Well, why don't you come meet the rest of the crew. They should be up by now. If not, you can help me yell at them."

The tall girl led Ramona and all of her belongings (she discovered her robe had pockets—there she placed her wand, freeing her arms for the schoolbooks she found stacked beside Ramona's clothes chest) out of the green-lit room and into another, relatively brighter room, whose light was also tinted the house color.

There were five people in the room. None of them were awake.

Two figures, a boy and a girl, both possessing the same long, dark locks, were sprawled on some bean bags near the unlit fireplace (a grand thing of black marble, carved with serpents). "Why didn't you all sleep in your dorms?" Ramona questioned.

"We snuck in some fire whiskey for a back-to-school celebration. I suppose we all kind of passed out around one. You ever tried fire whiskey?"

Ramona scoffed, looking around at her fellow Slytherin, all dressed in the street clothes they arrived in the night before. "I'm not stupid enough to."

"There we go!" Flossie exclaimed, "there's the venom!" She stepped over an outstretched hand and walked around to face a black velvet couch whose sole occupant was a brunette boy who was incidentally spooning the culprit bottle of fire whiskey, since been emptied, presumably by its captor. She punched him in the arm. He merely moaned. Flossie began to shake him back and forth. "Keegan, you daft idiot, wake up!"
After the shaking failed to wake him, she moved his body so that he was sitting up against the couch, held him steady, and slapped him across the face.

Keegan dropped the empty bottle of fire whiskey.

"Lord have mercy, Flossie, wha's a'matter with you?" He tenderly stroked his bright red cheek.

"Go get dressed Keegan. And hurry, too, or we'll miss breakfast and be late for class."

Flossie then moved over to the pile of fluffy bean bags.

"How were you not caught?" Ramona questioned.

Flossie chuckled, then pulled the bean bags out from under the sleeping students. "Because those," she gestured to the teenagers now on the floor, "are our sixth year prefects. All the other prefects don't care if we act like fools inside the common room, as long as we don't act like fools outside the common room." The two raven-haired students simultaneously shot daggers at Flossie before parting ways into their separate dorm rooms to get ready for the day.

"Those were our prefects?" Ramona adjusted her books in her arms, getting impatient. She was hungry.

Flossie ran a hand through her curls. "Yep. Lilith and Lucifer," she snickered. "Don't tell them I said that. They're Larissa and Lars Larkin. Really very nice," Flossie tried to explain. "They can be. Nice, that is. Very nice."

"Are their personalities as drab as their names?" Ramona inquiried. She felt bad. She was sure they had fine personalities. It felt wrong to her to make jabs at people behind their backs.

"About as drab as soggy cardboard," Flossie answered.

Ramona, acting on her hunger and impatience, headed for the door. She had not stayed for dinner the night before, so she was willing to eat a unicorn if the opportunity arose.

"You're leaving?" Flossie was attempting to awaken a blonde girl who was curled in a ball like a cat. Ramona nodded. "You don't want to meet the others?" If Ramona could recall correctly, there hadn't been much meeting the others. They had just been awoken and ushered off to get dressed. At least she knew their names.

"No," she said bluntly. "Rather not. I'm just going to find my way to the food." She adjusted her books once more, this time, balancing all of them onto one arm, and reached for the iron door handle.

"You don't have to bring your books with you. You can come back for them."

Ramona leaned against the black door. She wrinkled her nose up and looked around the common room in what she hoped was disdain. "I'd rather not step foot into this room until I have to tonight. Good day." Ramona opened the black door, stepped out of the common room, and made her way out of the dungeon.

⌘⌘⌘

Hey, hey, hey, everybody!!

How is everyone doing?

I whipped this chapter out pretty fast, but please don't expect too, too much from me in the future. I'm about to get really busy.

What do you think of Flossie?

This chapter is about 1000 words longer than the last one! Wow!

Anyway, I hope you guys are enjoying the story so far!

A little announcement:
I'm judging the fantasy genre in SpilledTheTea 's Tea Awards Contest, and we still need a lot of entries to get started! And don't worry, if you're not writing a fantasy book, there are a tooonnnnnn of other genres still open!

Love you guys! :)

Don't forget to vote, comment, and share with your friends if you feel that Slither is worthy! ;)

~ Maeve