Wishing Gone Awry

Enter Chorus

Chorus. See herein the tale

Of sisters ambitious and bold:

Twain hearts bound together as one

Through star-cross'd circumstance

And fate-twisted trials of old.

Evil that would destroy the world,

They'd stand tall to face it down.

Foolish in their confidence their trials would them drown'd.

But hope yet lives and fate they may defy,

If walls built throughout the years can only be torn down.

Acquaintances must be held close

Knit tightly soul to soul;

Or darkness may dim

The sun-lit sky

From wishing gone awry.

Hark, hark, and watch as the tale unfolds.

Lights shift to a quaint, cozy attic room. On a slightly lofted bed sit two girls. They are several years different in age, but both appear to be roughly seventeen. Both girls sport short, preppy haircuts that frame their faces fetchingly. The taller of the two has lighter brown hair with a touch of blond and blue eyes, while her sister has nearly black-brown hair with dark red highlights and chocolate eyes. In the dim artificial light the girls are reading and talking together.

"I wanna go to Hogwarts!" I complained to my older sister for the millionth time. This week.

"'K! Let's go!" Lei exclaimed cheerfully, bouncing on the foot of my bed and nearly knocking me off.

"No more sugar for you."

"But I got Magic Faerie Rings today at Wal-Mart lookie!"

Yep, that's Lei for you. You'd never guess that she's actually twenty--four years older than I am. "Cheep stuff in the toy department or quarter machine?"

"Quarter machine. 'Cause it was this big complex thing with a whole bunch of little quarter machines all together with one little money slot kinda like one of those candy vending machines and they were pretty and the stupid machine was out of Yu-Gi-Oh cards and stickers and I'd already put my quarters in and I got two because the first time I tried to get a faerie ring it wouldn't give me one and the second time it gave me two."

I blinked. "Whatever. It was a vending machine. They're just rings."

"So? Put it on!" I sighed and examined the ring Lei held out to me. It was definitely cheaply made. The simple silver-colored band had a butterfly-winged faerie on it. The wings were hardly distinguishable from the blob of the body and the seam line from the mold was still obvious. Lei's had the same faerie in a different position. Rolling my eyes in exasperation, I humored her and put it on. "Now close your eyes and wish really hard, then open your eyes and POOF!" We opened our eyes and she accompanied the "poof" with wide, sweeping arm motions. "Oh. It worked."

We both stared in shock at the landscape that we had seen so many times in our mind's eye. There were sloping lawns and a huge lake, a forbidding forest in the distance. A large castle stood squarely in our view on the crest of a hill, overlooking the lake from a rocky precipice. We were, without a doubt, at Hogwarts.