The Inner Eye by Pondering
Sybill Trelawney’s Inner Eye told her that her first day would be disastrous. She hoped that it would be wrong for once. As she gazed into the crystal ball she kept in her bedroom, she muttered fervently under her breath. She knew how to deal with people—her classes tomorrow should have been perfectly fine. It didn’t matter that the shapes she saw in the ball’s depth were blurry and indistinct, because her Inner Eye had already told her everything that she needed to know.
She sat back in the rotund chair and pondered dreamily. The Welcome Feast was beginning in the Great Hall, but she had no desire to leave her tower to go join the hustle and bustle of the main school. Staying up here would allow her to retain an aura of mystery, and too much mingling with the student body would cloud her Inner Eye. She breathed in the hazy scent of the incense she had lit in the corner of the room.
She could not help but be worried. If her Inner Eye was actually incorrect on what it had predicted for tomorrow, how could she rely on it anymore? If she was going to have an awful time on the first day of term, she should let it happen deliberately, then her Inner Eye would be correct after all and there would be no need for concern.
Glad to have thought up a resolution to her dilemma, Sybill Trelawney blew out the incense, extinguished the lights and climbed into the warm covers of her bed. Her accommodation at Hogwarts was quite comfortable indeed.
The next morning when she woke up, she remembered that she was going to have a horrible day. This did not faze her in the slightest however, because she would be prepared. After all, she had seen it coming. Those who wished that they could See as well as she did would most likely use the forewarning to try and avoid difficulties, but Sybill knew that was tampering with the flow of the Fates and she didn’t really want to do that.
She did not go downstairs for breakfast. Instead she had it delivered to her room by one of the kitchen’s house-elves. However, the house-elf had left before she had realised that it had given her tea instead of coffee. Sybill Trelawney did not drink tea—especially tea with tea leaves. Tea leaves had all sorts of death omens in them, and she did not want to foretell her own death.
Frowning, she set the steaming cup of tea on the table and turned to her cereal. Then she became conscious of the fact that the house-elves had not left her with any cutlery. On any other day she would ordinarily complain to the Headmaster about the sloppy job the kitchen servants were doing, but on this day, they were simply pawns of Fate.
She resigned herself to the fact that she would have to skip breakfast. People who were more skilled with the more Mundane branches of magic, such as Transfiguration, would be able to simply conjure a spoon out of thin-air. But she could not. She would leave the fancy magic tricks to the likes of Minerva McGonagall. She rose up from her chair, leaving her untouched food on the table. She opened the heavy curtains and looked out the window. It was a bright day outside, the sun shone through the windows and Sybill could feel its heat.
She gathered the crystal balls from the box underneath her bed. She had not yet finished unpacking and had not fully settled into the room. But her first class would be starting soon, and she wanted to be ready. Of course, she wondered what the point of being ready if today was going to be completely terrible. As she pondered this, the ball she was carrying slipped out of her hands and fell on top of another ball set on the floor. There was a loud crash and she saw the balls crash into each other, until her entire stock lay shattered on the floor. She was horrified. Her Inner Eye had told her that today was going to be awful, but those crystal balls had been expensive.
Trembling, she retrieved her wand from her bedside table. Now she did not care that she was meant to be having a bad day. She needed those balls to be fixed before her first class. She tried to ignore the fact that she hadn’t performed magic in a long time, and that when she had she was never any good at it anyway. “Reparo,” she muttered, pointing her wand at the shards that were littered near her feet. They gave a little shudder and hop, but fell back again in pieces. This was no good. She was going to have to look for help because she couldn’t start her lesson without the balls repaired.
Stepping around the glass, she walked through her classroom and down the ladder. She walked briskly down the staircases wondering where all her fellow staff members were. If she didn’t find one soon, she might not get back to the tower in time…
Lost in her thoughts of speculating if this would be a good thing or not, she walked headlong into a striding Professor McGonagall.
“Do watch where you’re going, Sybill,” Professor McGonagall said, sounding mildly irritated. She dusted off her robes and tried to continue moving down the corridor, but Sybill latched onto her arm, preventing her colleague’s progress.
“I need help,” she said desperately, tugging on the sleeve of McGonagall’s emerald coloured robes.
“Oh?” McGonagall asked, her mouth thinning. “How might I be able to assist you, Sybill?”
“I have inadvertently destroyed my stock of crystal balls and I need help repairing them.”
McGonagall’s nostrils flared although Sybill did not see this. “And what is preventing you from mending them yourself?”
“I cannot,” Sybill told her, hoping that the Transfiguration teacher did not find her useless or pathetic. “My Inner Eye warned me that things would go wrong today.”
McGonagall snorted, and Sybill was momentarily amazed by the undignified noise emitting from her colleague.
“My Inner Eye has never been wrong before!” Sybill exclaimed.
McGonagall looked at her strangely. “Is that so?” she asked, gathering her cloak around her.
“Well, it seems to be right today,” Sybill replied helplessly.
With a small sigh, McGonagall drew her wand and followed Sybill up to the towers in which she resided. When they reached the room where the crystal balls lay shattered on the floor, the formidable Deputy Headmistress’s mouth twitched into a smile.
“Oh dear. This is a mess.”
Sybill nodded silently, unsure if she should say anything. Instead, she adjusted the way her shawl fell around her neck.
“Reparo.” With McGonagall’s incantation, the shards of glass jumped back into place, piecing together numerous unbroken crystal balls. Smiling, she tucked her wand back into the depths of her robes.
“You know, this reminds me of my first day,” McGonagall said.
Sybill’s eyes widened, growing amazingly large behind her magnifying spectacles. “You gaze in Transfiguration?” she asked wondrously.
McGonagall’s eyes flashed, and for a moment Sybill feared that she had angered her fellow staff member. However, when she spoke, her voice was surprisingly calm. “No,” McGonagall said, “we do not. What I was going to say is that on my first day is that one of my students accidentally transfigured his entire head to that of a wolf’s. It was not what we were actually studying at the time, but I could not figure out what had gone wrong because all the student could do was bark and howl.
“I panicked, wondering what would happen if he had become stuck that way. I ran up to the Headmaster’s office, where he very kindly helped me with my problem, even though it was revealed that the counter charm was very simple and that I knew it all along.”
Sybill still felt a bit shaky, but slightly relieved. Maybe her teaching career would not be as horrible as she had feared.
McGonagall looked at her watch. “I must be going soon, lessons will be starting shortly.”
Sybill nodded as she tried to rearrange the crystal balls. “If you ever want me to predict your future for you—”
“That would be quite unnecessary,” McGonagall interrupted.
Sybill could not help but feel slightly rejected. Then she reminded herself that it did not matter if Minerva McGonagall did not want her future read for her anyway. There would be plenty of people at Hogwarts—teachers and students alike—that would allow her to gaze for them. She had the distinct impression that the Transfiguration Professor did not like Divination. McGonagall’s aura of disbelief would not allow the crystals to fully gaze into her future anyway.
Sybill carefully transported the now repaired crystal balls into the classroom, setting two balls down at every table. Her first class should be coming any moment now. She settled down in a chair to wait.
Ten minutes passed, and no-one turned up. She was starting to get a bit worried, and it really was quite warm and stuffy in this little tower room. Surely if she took a little nap, one of the students would nudge her awake when they came. She opened the window and a light breeze sifted through it, making her even drowsier and she closed her eyes.
When she opened her eyes after what seemed to be only a few seconds, there seemed to have been a zoo of wild animals let loose in her classroom. She rubbed her eyes, hoping that she wasn’t having some sort of vision. Then it started to dawn on her—it was her students who were causing all the mess, making all the noise. She wondered how she had managed to sleep through it.
She started speaking in a low, mysterious voice. “I’m—“
The classroom fell silent as everyone stopped moving and tried to pretend that they had not recently been causing trouble. In an attempt to sit down, one boy elbowed the crystal ball on his table, causing it to fall on the floor, where it smashed into many infinitesimal pieces. The class giggled nervously, expecting their new professor to rage at them and give them all detention. But Sybill just smiled.
“The Inner Eye gave me forewarning that today would be a horrible day—and it was right.”