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PRESENT HARRY: After the Sorting... before the first meal...

Harry is sitting at a table, with other students, and dishes set out, but no food. Draco Malfoy has come to stand next to Harry.

DRACO: Well, well – Look who's back for another round.

A Legilimency effect points from Harry's eyes to Draco's.

PRESENT HARRY: I happened to look in his eyes... and I learned something... something interesting...

Close-up of Harry's face and Draco's face, facing each other, close together. A beam of Legilimency connects their eyes. Past Harry's speech takes on the color of Legilimency.

PAST HARRY: Draco Malfoy... you're afraid of me.

Draco looks back with a shocked expression.

PRESENT HARRY: Suddenly, everything about him made sense. The glance toward the Slytherin table, hoping they hadn't noticed his moment of weakness...

Draco glances towards the Slytherin gable. Zabini, Crabbe, and Goyle are all looking towards Draco. Zabini has risen from the table.

PRESENT HARRY: And when he saw that they had, the turn back to me...

Draco faces Harry with a furious expression. Harry's face is mostly concealed in shadow.

DRACO: You'll pay for this!

(hide transcript)

Legilimency.

Magic, in stories, has two semi-conflicting roles. One, it's there to be awesome, for the drama and the spectacle. And two, it's there to represent something from real life – to function as heightened reality. An individual story can exist anywhere on this spectrum. Sometimes, like in A Couple of Badass Superheroes, I write fantastic powers entirely because they're awesome and hilarious. Voldemort's Children is usually the opposite. The purpose of this magic is to talk about things that exist in real life.

The ability to intuitively judge what other people might be thinking and feeling is, after all, something that exists in real life. So Legilimency isn't really something that's new or unheard-of. But compared with its real-life counterpart, Legilimency is more powerful and more reliable... and most importantly, it has a name. So it can be a Thing in the story – an issue at stake – something that you can point to, think about, and ask questions about.

Approximate readability: 7.42 (778 characters, 162 words, 13 sentences, 4.80 characters per word, 12.46 words per sentence)