Professor Trelawney began directing everyone to pour tea into their cups.
For the first time, Sean didn't follow a professor's instructions in class. Instead, he silently turned Trelawney's words over in his mind.
A true prophecy foretold fate yet to come.
And in this story, fate was something that ran through everything from beginning to end.
After all, the whole thing had begun with that famous prophecy—and the one who had spoken it was the very professor in front of him.
So…
An ending unacknowledged. A path straying from its ordained track…
Sean's hand trembled slightly around his teacup. While everyone else gulped down their tea, a carefully preserved photograph floated out of the black satchel at his side.
He gazed at it, and the image slowly began to fade.
Headmaster Dumbledore's gray eyes stopped twinkling. Professor Snape's cold face lost all warmth. Lupin held a goblet in hand, the red liquid inside making his pale cheeks look even whiter…
Was the prophecy saying the ending could be rewritten?
Sean tucked the photograph away.
By now, most of the students had filled their cups to the brim and returned to their tables, hastily gulping down the scalding tea in two or three swallows.
Then, following Professor Trelawney's instructions, they swirled the tea leaves around a few times, drained off the last drops, and exchanged cups with one another.
"Look carefully…"
Professor Trelawney said dreamily as she drifted over to Ron's table.
"Right then," Ron said quickly, feeling the pressure, flipping open his book to pages five and six. "What do you see in my cup?"
"A bunch of wet brown stuff," Harry said right after him.
The thick, smoky perfume filling the room was making his head feel dull and sleepy.
But with Professor Trelawney hovering over them, there was no way he could actually fall asleep.
"Stretch your minds, my dears! Let your eyes go beyond the limits of the mundane!"
Trelawney's voice rang out in the dim classroom.
Harry jumped. So did all the students nervously bent over their cups.
Sean even saw Neville break another teacup.
Harry forced himself to focus.
"Right… there's a crooked cross in your cup…"
He compared it with Unfogging the Future as he spoke.
"That means you're going to suffer 'trials and suffering'—sorry about that—but there's also something that looks like a sun.
Wait… that means 'great happiness'… so you're going to suffer, but feel really happy about it…"
"They're talking complete nonsense…"
Hermione seemed especially irritated now, as if Trelawney's sudden collapse and equally sudden recovery had finally pushed her over the edge.
"I've seen loads of people like this before, near my dad's clinic…"
she muttered to Sean.
"Maybe…"
Sean replied softly.
"Oh, Harry, how can I be miserable and happy at the same time? If you ask me, you ought to get your Inner Eye checked."
Ron snickered, but Trelawney shot them a glare, and they had to fight not to laugh.
"My turn…"
Ron peered into Harry's cup, furrowing his brow with exaggerated seriousness.
"This bit sort of looks like a top hat," he said. "Maybe you're going to work at the Ministry…"
He rotated the cup.
"But from this angle, it looks more like an acorn… what does that mean?"
He checked Unfogging the Future.
"'An unexpected sum of money, a windfall.'
Brilliant. You can lend me some. And there's something else here…"
He turned the cup again.
"It looks like an animal. Yeah, if that's the head… kind of like a hippopotamus… no, a sheep…"
"Of course they can't tell the difference… they… But Sean, do you actually believe what she says?"
Ron's nonsense only made Hermione more agitated. She slapped her book down on the table and turned to Sean.
"Mmm… but maybe Ron's right."
Sean answered.
Ron was right.
Completely right.
Harry would eventually become Head of the Auror Office, and as for the windfall—Sean knew Sirius was already preparing it: the Firebolt.
At this rate… maybe Ron was the one with the gift?
"Sean… you're being really strange today."
Hermione shot him an annoyed look.
"She's gone all mystical and now she's infected you too…"
On the other side, Harry's reaction matched Hermione's perfectly. He gave a mocking laugh—only for Professor Trelawney to whirl around at once.
"My dear, let me see that."
She said it sharply to Ron and hurried over, snatching Harry's cup from his hands.
The whole class fell silent and watched.
Trelawney stared into the cup, turning it slowly counterclockwise.
"An eagle… my dear, you have a deadly enemy."
"That's common knowledge."
Hermione said it loudly enough for everyone to hear.
Trelawney glared at her.
"It is," Hermione said. "Everyone knows about Harry and You-Know-Who."
Harry and Ron stared at her in shock—and admiration.
They had never heard Hermione speak to a teacher like that before.
Professor Trelawney didn't answer.
She lowered those enormous eyes again and studied Harry's cup once more, continuing to turn it this way and that.
"A club… an attack. Dear me, dear me, this is not a pleasant cup at all…"
The Whomping Willow…? Sean wasn't sure whether he was reading too much into it.
But the centaur who had taught him had once said there were no coincidences in prophecy magic.
"I thought it was a top hat."
Ron said uneasily.
"A skull… danger lies in your path, my dear…"
Everyone stared blankly at Professor Trelawney. Then she rotated the cup again, gasped sharply, and let out a scream.
Another crash of breaking china rang out.
Neville had shattered his third cup.
Professor Trelawney dropped into an empty armchair, one glittering hand pressed to her chest, her eyes closed.
"My poor child—my poor dear child—no—better not say it—do not ask me…"
"What is it, Professor?"
Dean Thomas asked immediately.
Everyone rose and gathered slowly around Harry and Ron's table, crowding close to Trelawney's chair and peering down into Harry's cup.
"My dear," Professor Trelawney said, suddenly opening her enormous eyes, "you have the Grim."
"What?" Harry asked.
It was obvious he wasn't the only one who didn't understand.
Dean Thomas gave him a shrug. Lavender Brown looked baffled. But nearly everyone else clapped a hand over their mouths in horror.
"The Grim, my dear, the Grim!"
Professor Trelawney cried. She seemed genuinely astonished that Harry didn't know what she meant.
"The huge spectral dog that haunts churchyards! My dear child, it is an omen—the worst of all omens—the omen of death!"
Harry's heart clenched.
The dog on the cover of that book in Flourish and Blotts—Death Omens—Lavender Brown had put her hand over her mouth too.
Everyone was staring at Harry, except Hermione. She had gotten to her feet and walked around behind Trelawney's chair.
"I don't think that looks like the Grim at all,"
she said coolly.
Trelawney looked Hermione over, her dislike becoming more obvious by the second.
"Forgive me for saying so, my dear, but I perceive that your aura is very small. You have very little sensitivity to the future."
Behind them, Seamus Finnigan tilted his head from one side to the other.
"From this angle, it does look like the Grim," he said, narrowing his eyes nearly shut, "but from over here, it looks more like a donkey."
He leaned his head to the left as he said it.
"Can somebody please decide whether I'm going to die or not?"
Harry suddenly snapped, startling even himself.
At once, no one seemed willing to look him in the eye.
Harry looked desperately from face to face, hoping someone would tell him something—anything.
"Prophecy magic is not an exact form of magic…"
A voice came quietly from the corner.
Hermione looked up, surprised and relieved to hear Sean speaking.
"What?"
Harry's voice was hoarse.
"Everyone dies, Harry."
For once, Sean was actually making a joke.
"Oh. Right."
Harry felt like his soul had finally found its way back into his body.
But the other students still looked miserable.
Professor Trelawney had already made at least one accurate prediction that lesson, and most of the class had been infected by the strange, ominous atmosphere.
"Child, how did I not notice you before…"
Professor Trelawney turned toward Sean. Her already large eyes looked even more unnerving behind her glasses.
"You've studied part of this before. No—not you. Your teacher… a wizard who was not a wizard…"
"What does that even mean, 'a wizard who was not a wizard'?"
Hermione demanded loudly.
She had had enough. A professor who spent the entire lesson talking nonsense was bad enough—this was too much.
"Hermione…"
Sean gently tried to calm her.
"Before I took your class, my own Divination teacher once told me:
Nothing is ever entirely exact. Even the majestic courses of the heavenly bodies already contain error by the time they are observed from the ground.
So prophecy magic is never especially precise…"
Just like the "Grim" just now.
Did Harry have the Grim hanging over him?
Maybe he did. Harry would willingly walk to his own death in the end. Strictly speaking, Harry would actually die once.
And yet prophecy was always vague—just like the prophecy Sean's centaur teacher had once made:
—Harry would die in the Forbidden Forest.
But the centaur had wrongly assumed that meant at once. He hadn't foreseen that it would happen five years later.
That was the inexact nature of prophecy.
"You had another Divination teacher?"
Hermione asked in a low, stunned voice.
She had never imagined Sean would take a subject like this—what she considered a fraud of a subject—twice.
"A centaur teacher… He asked me not to say his name if possible,"
Sean said quietly.
"You had a centaur teacher?! How could Headmaster Dumbledore possibly agree to let you go into the Forbidden Forest—"
Hermione knew it. She knew the young wizard had not been doing anything remotely sensible in there.
Last time she'd even seen him flying around on some magical creature.
"Oh… you there… Green, come closer…"
Professor Trelawney suddenly called out.
She stared at Sean with those round, gleaming eyes, making all the surrounding students deeply uneasy.
"How did I not notice you before? I must have fainted… Look!"
Professor Trelawney repeated herself, her voice suddenly rising several octaves. She made a gesture over Sean's forehead with one hand.
"Your Inner Eye is about to open… That is a gift possessed by only a few…
I think that will be all for today,"
she said in a thick, dreamy voice.
"Yes… I've found him. Everyone else, pack up your things…"
Sean turned over Trelawney's abrupt second prophecy in his mind.
As for the others, they silently returned their teacups, packed away their books, and closed their bags.
"What's an 'Inner Eye'?"
Ron leaned toward Sean and asked.
But with Hermione sitting between them, it made it look like Ron was asking her instead.
"Don't. Know."
Hermione stomped noisily down the ladder.
"Oh, and before we meet again,"
Professor Trelawney said weakly, glancing at Hermione,
"good luck to you all.
Oh, my dear—"
She pointed at Neville.
"You will be late for our next class, so you must work especially hard to catch up."
And so the young wizards all climbed back down Trelawney's ladder in silence, wound their way down the spiral stairs, and headed off to Professor McGonagall's Transfiguration class.
Sean came last, several paces behind the others and a little behind Hermione, who was marching along ahead with hard, angry footsteps.
"Don't tell me you believe her too…"
Hermione said, biting her lip.
"Prophecy isn't a very precise magic."
Sean smiled faintly.
Hermione gave a small huff and walked into McGonagall's classroom.
Sean chose a seat toward the back and noticed Harry, sitting two seats away, start to tense up.
The other students kept sneaking glances at him, as though he might keel over and die at any second.
Professor McGonagall was explaining Animagi—wizards who could turn into animals. Sean listened with full attention, but Harry barely heard a word.
McGonagall transformed into a tabby cat in front of the class, with markings around her eyes that looked like spectacles. Sean didn't take his eyes off her for a second, but Harry had no mind for it at all.
"Well now, what is wrong with all of you today?"
Professor McGonagall said as she transformed back into herself.
"It is no great feat, but it is the first time my Transfiguration has failed to win a round of applause."
Everyone turned to look at Harry again, then at Sean.
No one said anything.
Then Hermione raised her hand.
"Professor, we just had our first Divination lesson. We were reading tea leaves, and it turned out—"
"Ah. I see."
Professor McGonagall frowned.
"There's no need to say another word, Miss Granger. Tell me—which one of you is supposed to die this year?"
Everyone stared at her in shock.
Then they all looked at Harry—and then at Sean.
Harry made sense, but Sean…?
The younger students suddenly found themselves wondering whether Mr. Green's forehead was going to sprout a third eye.
Professor McGonagall looked at Harry with something close to pity.
Then, when she noticed the students looking toward Sean as well, all expression abruptly vanished from her face.
~~~
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