(Fall, 1985, Atterberry Ranch, Ireland)

Warmth.

Nice cosy warmth.

That's all there was.

Few times there was shaking, I didn't know what that was about.

It had only happened a few times ever, but it was worrying. At least I thought it might be, I didn't really know.

I think things used to be larger and colder. Definitely colder at one point, but not in a long long time. I remembered wiggling a long time ago, so it was more recent than a long long time ago.

More recent? Why did I have a sense of time? This thinking thing was very new. Just a short bit ago things were so simple, just me and the cosiness. Now I had this odd sense of past and present. I missed wiggling.

I wanted to wiggle, but I couldn't.

I felt bad. I had never felt this bad before. Back when it was cold I might have felt bad, but that was before the feelings, like cosy or bad, were things. Thus this was most certainly the worst.

I could wiggle when I tried to wiggle, and that was the worst.

Maybe if I waited more it would go back and get bigger, then I could wiggle again. That would be nice. Wait no, that would be terrible! If it went backwards it would get bigger until it was cold again, and that would be way worse than not being able to wiggle.

I needed to come up with a better idea.

What if I just… tried to wiggle, but harder?

Yeah, that could work.

So I gave my biggest wiggle. A wiggle that, if not for how small it was, would have been the wiggliest wiggle to ever happen. But it wasn't. There was no room to wiggle, yet all that energy had to go somewhere. With A great and terrible motion everything shook, as all the wiggle energy turned into wobble energy! I absolutely stunned, as I rested there, feeling the wobble. It was like a wiggle, but instead of just me wiggling it was the whole world wiggling with me inside of it! In a word it was exhilarating, and I couldn't wait to cause more wobbles.

So I didn't wait. A few moments after the wobbles slowed a stop, I recollected my strength, and once again tried to wiggle with all my might.

And the world wobbled once more. It was fantastical! Just by thinking I came up with a solution to my no wiggling problem, and these wobbles were most certainly better then those wiggles! This thinking thing may be new and confusing, but I most certainly liked it. I was going to make sure to do lots of thinking in the future.

So that's what I did. I thought many thoughts about why wobbles were more exhilarating than wiggles,but wiggles still would be nice. I also did lots of wobbling. I wobbled forwards and I wobbled backwards. I could wobble a little to the sides, but not much. All those amazing new discoveries were made using the application of thinking. It was most certainly my greatest invention!

I spent a few short long times wobbling and thinking, sometimes I would observe several slight wobbles come from below over the course of a short time. The most recent time I wobbled back. When I did the slight tremors got larger. Suddenly everything jostled, I tried counter wobbling to fight this shaking, and it seemed to work. Instead of jostling there was now a gentle up and down wobble, which I didn't even know could happen. I think I liked this up/down wobble the most.

Eventually after a short time of up/down wobble, there was a final larger yet slow down motion and the wobbling stopped. After that a few tremors happened, each with less wobble energy than the last.

Wow, what a phenomenal experience. The next time there were slight tremors I would definitely wobble back again.

With that exciting experience over with I got back to my own wobbles, but something was different. It wasn't immediately noticeable but something wasn't quite right. It was almost like it was less cosy.

After a short time of examination I came to the conclusion that it was definitely getting less cosy, and I probably knew why. Clearly the tremors that caused the up/down wobbles had reversed the cosiness, and at this rate it would be cold again. If I didn't want it to be cold again I would need to reverse the cooling to make it double reversed. There was just one problem… I had know idea what caused the tremoring. I knew that it happened at least twice per short long time, but it just happened so it would be a while before it happened again, and by then it might already be cold.

With nothing better to do, I waited. Here and there I would wobble to entertain myself, but mostly I just did nothing as it slowly got colder.

Eventually after a shorter wait than I expected the tremors happened again, and just like last time a wobbled back… but nothing happened.

I waited with great anticipation for something, anything, to happen. There was a single soft tremor, then nothing. Silence.

I wobbled more. Harder this time, because maybe the first wobble wasn't enough. It was cold now, freezing cold stone surrounded me in all directions, trapping me. With all my strength I tried to do something, I didn't know what I just needed to cause some sort of change. Anything I could do to make it more bearable, less suffocating.

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I tried wiggling, wobbling, thinking as hard as I could, but none of it worked! In desperation I lashed out at the world, angry that I couldn't control something so small, couldn't force it to be cosy.

With a screeching crack the world itself was split open, leaving a blazing, leaking, hole in reality. I observed the hole intently. It was bright, blindingly so. And its mere presence burned my skin. It was cold, but it felt less so than the walls of the world still around me.

Looking at the hole with eyes I didn't have filled me with a sense of looming dread, I now knew that what had been done could not be undone. When I had made the hole I had done something I had never done before. I became rigid. Hard, like the stone around me. To do hard things I need to be harder, to have physical rigidity that I could leverage.

I wanted to explore this gash that I had created in the walls of my world, but I knew as I was now I couldn't. When I first made the hole I had used a series of spikes to rend the hole into existence, to traverse the hole I used something similar. I created a membrane that was soft yet strong and flexible around my body to protect myself from the burning air, and sprouting from that main body were several long and spindly limbs that were covered in a thick and hard exoskeleton. I didn't know it at the time, but I looked like a radially symmetrical spider with a grey skinned fleshy centre and a continuously changing number of legs.

With my newly formed legs, that I didn't even know I could make all of five minutes ago, I reached towards the hole tentatively.

I threaded several legs through the hole and latched onto the edges on the other side. With a heave of effort, I pulled myself through the hole, and onto the other side. As I flopped sideways onto the floor, I looked around the room, forming eyes on my body and surfing them across my skin.

It was then that I noticed that I wasn't the only thing here, there was a giant. It had four limbs, each much larger and thicker than mine. I could tell that two were clearly for propulsion, but the other two simply hung by the giant's sides. It took a careful step towards me, sending a slight tremor through the ground.

I pulled my legs back into my body, before reforming them in a way that left me upright with my many legs splayed outwards. Bending my radially symmetrical spider-like legs at their knees into what might have been describable as a crouch, I pushed against the carpete that my egg had rested on. With needle-like feet, I wobbled with a lack of balance as I tried to stand.

As I started to fall backwards, the giant reached out with one of its hands, catching me before I could hit the floor again. Not that hitting the floor would hurt, there was a carpet, and I was only a dozen centimetres off the ground in the first place.

After bracing me with its other hand, the giant used both hands to lift me up. With me secured it walked a few steps backwards— resulting in a slight up/down motion—, before gently sitting back onto the plush leather chair that it had been sitting on. As I squirmed lightly in its grasp, it brought me level with its face. I was met with blue eyes and an enormous mouth filled with gleaming teeth, both surrounded by a curtain of shining gold.

As I looked at the giant's face, I started connecting dots in my mind; the tremor it caused in the floor with every step, the shaking of my body as it secured me in its grip, the vertical wobble I felt in its grasp as it walked. But most importantly, the gentle warmth of her hands, and the radiant smile on her face. All of it came together as a thought formed in my head.

With a spindly limb I reached out for the face of my mother, and she couldn't be happier.

⋇⋆✦⋆⋇

Astrid Atterberry couldn't be happier. After years of blood, sweat, and tears she had finally done it. She had created life. An entirely new species of magical creature.

For the past 12 years she had been cooped up on her ranch isolated from much of society. She still got the paper of course. The ranch may have been warded to high hell and back a dozen times over, but that didn't mean she couldn't receive owl mail. Better to be a tortoise than a rock.

Originally she had fled to her ranch as a necessity. Back in ‘71 her family was attacked by death eaters. As muggles, her parents were completely defenceless when half a dozen wizards blasted down their doors.

She knew, at least intellectually, that it wasn't her fault. But she could have seen it coming, if she had just paid more attention. At the time she just blended in with the crowds and never had to deal with more than some relatively minor harassment. She lost contact with a few friends here and there, but that was just part of life, doubly so in magical society.

After the loss of her parents she looked a little bit harder for those friends of hers. In the end it seemed that about two thirds were either in hiding or dead— hard to tell, as both options have them just up and vanish—, and the remaining third decided that they couldn't ‘associate with a mudblood’ anymore.

It only got worse from there. She spent a couple of years fluttering in and out of hiding, until eventually, in 1973, she packed her things and ran off to the edges of the Irish Fae Wilds. She did occasionally leave, but her ranch had most of everything she needed.

And so for the past 12 years she lived here, on her ranch. Rarely she would come to acquire new magic creatures, which she housed. From when she was a little girl and had first heard of them Astrid was inundated with the concept. At some point she had come up with the idea of becoming a magizoologist inorder to find the most magical of the magical creatures.

At some point she had asked her professor, and she learned the disappointing truth.

As she already knew, magical creatures were ranked on a scale of one to five. Rank one held creatures like flobberworms, and rank five held creatures like dragons. But what she learned that day was that supposedly those rankings were based off of the most magical creature of them all… wizards. It was quite disheartening to hear for a young Astrid.

A rank five magical creature was at its peak… handleable by a wizard with the right training. Not ‘threatening’, not even ‘challenging’, handleable. Never mind that few wizards had ever reached the heights needed to witch slap an elder-dragon into submission, the fact that one mage could out do a force of nature grated on her.

Then a silly little idea popped into her head. It was childish, she knew it was, but it was her dream.

To make a more magical creature.

It had been done before, many magical creatures were descended from the experiments of yore. It was just incredibly illegal. But 12 years ago she completely— mostly— isolated herself from the rest of wizarding society, and with that came a complete isolation from the law.

With nobody to stop her she had achieved her dream. She had made her greatest creation, her magnum opus.

It looked like a dragon egg, but its patterns were all off. Instead of jagged scales and ridges, the egg looked as if its carvings were depicting water. All flowing lines and almost flowery patterns. After a few months of incubation the egg had started shaking itself. She knew that it was ready to hatch, but given its… flexibility she would probably have to encourage it to leave its shell. She took the egg from the incubator and moved it onto a special fireproof rug on the floor of its new hatchery. Knowing that it would take a while for the egg to cool down, she attended to a few house chores.

The moment she arrived back at the hatchery and sat in the armchair she had brought into the room earlier, the egg started shaking. At first it was gentle, but it soon escalated into a manic wobbling. Eventually after a few minutes the wobble died down but the egg was still unscathed.

For a moment the room was completely silent as Astrid held her breath, then the sound of stone breaking cracked throughout the room. Three spikes slightly darker than the granite grey around them had punched through the egg, sending a small spray of shrapnel into the room. That was fine, Astrid had wards for that in place already.

She stood from her seat at the same time the creature, her creature, flopped itself out of its shell. It wasn't very graceful, but nothing ever entered the world gracefully. She took a tentative step forward, crouching down at the same time her new little friend stood up. It was just a bit too much for the newborn. She gently caught the tiny feller on its way down, before picking it up with both her hands and sitting backwards into her armchair. Astrid lifted her hands, bringing her magnum opus up to her face.

In the eyes of most wizards and witches, it would be viewed as an abomination. A splice of a dozen magical creatures, each more deadly than the last. A shape-shifter the likes of which had never been seen. A freak beyond nature with all the magic the world had to offer.

But as her child reached a fragile little limb toward her face, Astrid couldn't help but see them as the most beautiful, most adorable, cutest thing she had ever laid her eyes upon.

And she couldn't be happier.