A pale yellow parchment envelope, addressed in emerald-green ink:
To Mr. Leon Green, basking in the sun on the grassy meadow, Small Town, County Kerry, Ireland.
Leon opened the envelope, revealing its contents:
Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry
Headmaster: Albus Dumbledore
(President of the International Confederation of Wizards, Order of Merlin, First Class, Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot)
Dear Mr. Green,
We are delighted to inform you that you have been accepted to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Enclosed is a list of required equipment.
The term begins on September 1st. We await your owl with your reply by no later than July 31st.
Yours sincerely,
Minerva McGonagall
Deputy Headmistress
Scene shift, images overlapping.
Two years ago, a pair of hands unfolded a letter in a basement. Now, those same hands unfold a Hogwarts acceptance letter.
The images merge, freeze, and hold.
Time skips forward to the year Leon is set to start at Hogwarts.
Leon, a blade of grass dangling from his mouth, lounges lazily on the dry meadow, soaking up the summer sun.
The Hogwarts letter in his hand? Dropped on his head just minutes ago by an owl.
"Tom! Time to head home for dinner!"
Leon tucks the letter away, calls out to his parrot, Tom, and heads toward town.
His silhouette, taller and undeniably cooler than it was two years ago, cuts a striking figure.
He strolls into the Muggle town he's called home for years.
Every townsfolk he passes greets him with a smile. Why? His mum's a bit of a legend.
The title of "Juice, the eerily accurate tarot-reading fortune-teller" is enough to make Leon a local celebrity.
Back home, his mother, Maeve, is in her ground-floor studio, tending to a big client.
She's reading the cards for Winnie, the town's infamous "Balenciaga," who's been divorced eight times and is now seeking the month her ninth husband will appear.
Leon, not keen on climbing through a toilet to reach their wizarding residence, heads to his third-floor bedroom to pen a reply to Hogwarts.
Dear Deputy Headmistress McGonagall,
Hello!
I'm truly honored to receive your letter.
I'm Leon Green.
I never applied to a magical school, but if I can actually learn magic, I'm absolutely in!
That said, my family and I have had zero contact with the wizarding world and know nothing about it.
Could you please let me know how to purchase textbooks and other essentials, and how to get to the school? I'd be so grateful!
Looking forward to your reply.
Best wishes,
Yours sincerely,
Leon Green
What can he say? Leon's just that earnest.
Gringotts, the goblin-run bank, opens its pound-to-Galleon exchange service to Muggle-born wizards for a limited time.
Leon, with his legit Muggle ID, figures now's the time to cash in on that Hogwarts letter.
After writing, he glances up to see Tom, his parrot, riding the back of the delivery owl as it swoops in through the window.
"Squawk! Too slow! Too slow! Not thrilling! Tom wants a faster ride!"
Tom, round as a ball, rolls off the exhausted owl, who's practically rolling its eyes, and grumbles loudly.
"Quit it, Tom. You know how heavy you are compared to that owl?"
Leon grabs a handful of nuts from Tom's snack stash and feeds the much smaller owl.
"Besides, you can fly. Why bully the poor delivery bird?"
Once the owl seems to recover, Leon ties his reply to its leg. The owl bolts out the window like it's escaping a crime scene.
"Squawk! Tom's not fat! Just fluffy! Fluffy! Learned it from you, bullying birds!"
Tom, who hates being called fat, hops around in a huff.
"Bully raises a bully bird! Bully raises a bully bird!"
Tom flaps his wings, takes off, and turns his back on Leon.
"Pfft pfft pfft pfft!"
Stink bomb attack!
Leon, quick as a Snitch, waves his hand, conjuring a gust of wind.
Tom's stink bombs get blown right back at him.
"Stinky! Stinky! So stinky! Tom's not clean anymore! Squawk squawk squawk…"
Tom, covered in his own mess, zooms into the bathroom.
Leon casts a few "Scourgify" spells to clear the room of any Leoning smells before flopping onto his bed, lost in thought.
The past two years have been wild.
Two years ago, Leon never would've imagined he'd willingly track down Gellert Grindelwald in California.
You make your own path, and you've got to walk it step by step.
Thankfully, Grindelwald's been… tamed, so to speak, by Leon's influence.
They've gotten along swimmingly since.
Think of it like a magical mentor and his apprentice—or a mad scientist and his lab rat.
That's the vibe.
Leon's been learning magic from Grindelwald: Transfiguration, Human Transfiguration, advanced Fiendfyre.
And the big one: turning himself into a human wand.
This is no small feat. Across wizarding history, only a handful of witches and wizards could pull it off.
It demands mastery in Wandlore, Charms, Potions, Runes, Herbology, Biology, Transfiguration, Alchemy, Healing, Creature Modification, Human Anatomy, Dark Magic, Magical Arrays, Ancient Magic…
Basically, you need to be a genius in a dozen fields with zero weak spots.
A six-sided warrior? Not enough. You'd need to be a sixteen-sided wizarding beast.
Only someone like Grindelwald could manage it.
One slip-up, and the best-case scenario is becoming a Squib due to botched magic conduction.
Worst case? A magical meltdown that turns you into an Obscurial on the spot.
Leon initially thought turning his dominant hand into a wand would suffice.
But after Regulus's funeral, in the secret chamber beneath the ancestral tombstone, he read that letter.
Everything changed.
He had no choice but to change his mind.
The letter, written in his own handwriting, contained six words: "Human Wand" and "Basilisk."
No way he could ignore that.
On top of that, Grindelwald, for some reason, keeps insisting, "We're the same."
He's convinced Leon, like him, is a natural-born Seer with prophetic gifts.
He's hell-bent on helping Leon unlock this supposed ability.
Grindelwald even forces Leon to sleep with his head hooked up to a dream-recording device every night.
The result?
Pure social embarrassment.
Not entirely fruitless, though.
To keep Grindelwald happy, Leon picks a minor, unimportant detail from what he knows and passes it off as a "prophecy" to appease the old man.
The human wand project is a long road.
Since he's asking for Grindelwald's help, Leon figures he'd better keep the guy happy.
Days pass, and no reply from Hogwarts arrives. No professor shows up to guide the Muggle-born newbie, either.
Leon's a bit bummed.
He'd planned to procrastinate on shopping until the last possible day.
But at the crack of dawn on a Wednesday, Maeve starts banging on his door like a banshee.
"Up! Up! Get up! Now! Right now! Diagon Alley!"
Maeve tosses the Hogwarts supply list onto Leon's sleeping face.
Then she chucks Tom on top of him for good measure.
"Squawk! Ow ow ow! Maeve, you gorgeous tyrant! Violent beauty!"
Maeve, in a starry nightgown with her wand tucked behind her ear, has eyes glowing like Lumos in the middle of the night.
"Go! Go! You've got one minute! Ride Tom and get moving!"
Maeve waves her wand. "Aguamenti!"
Whoosh…
Leon rolls out of bed, dodging the water jet.
He grabs Tom, now a soggy mess, and reluctantly gets up.
"Squawk! Tom's getting a bath! Maeve, you beauty, bathe Tom!"
Tom flaps excitedly, feathers flying everywhere.
Maeve ignores them, obsessively shuffling her tarot cards and muttering, "One, two, three…"
Leon's only thought: Mum's lost it.
And so, at 3 a.m., Leon and Tom are kicked out of the house.