Summary: From within the intrigue and drama of Slytherin house, Harry must navigate the perils of his first year- friends, enemies, blood politics… and in the middle of it all, Lord Voldemort is hunting the Philosopher's Stone hidden in Hogwarts.

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Maybe the children of a lesser god

Part One

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There was an old, stately castle hiding in the rolling green Scottish highlands. It sat on a bluff overlooking a glassy lake. The castle had expansive, lush grounds filled with criss-crossing paths and calm trees and stone benches. The ground were surrounded by a green, dark forest- in the daytime filled with the chatter of creatures within it, while in the night it seemed too silent to be real.

A road led away from the castle, across a bridge, to a village filled with warm light. Witches and wizards walked around the village, laughing and smiling and having a worry-free time. No Dark Lords would plague them that night.

On the edge of the village, a train pulled by a steam engine stopped at the station. The yellow glare of lanterns reflected off bright red paint, and the last vestiges of its steam vanished into the night air. A large man with a yellow lantern stood waiting for students to disembark the train, and disembark they did. A couple moments of quiet, with just the train and the man, and then a crush of students pressed off the train. The large man shouted, and the smallest students made their way towards them while older students headed towards the carriages, chattering with each other and occasionally tripping over each other, maybe stepping on the underfoot first-year. The carriages waited for them, pulled only by creatures than very few of the students could see.

The carriages trundled up towards the castle as they filled, while the large man waited for all the older students to leave. Once only the twenty-nine first-year students were left- quite a small group, but then again, classes had been small the last few years- the large man led them along a path to the edge of the lake where a fleet of small boats waited.

He got them into the boats- no more than four in one boat- he waved a hand and the fleet started gliding across the lake, the boats propelling themselves.

The denizens of the lake watched the yearly progression of first-years the way they always did- mers and the squid waiting to help any unfortunate soul who fell overboard, and other things lurking, hoping for a tender morsel.

No child fell overboard, and the mers retreated to their village.

The first-year students were led into the castle, where they waited in the entrance hall. The stern-looking Professor McGonagall, with her dark hair pulled back into a bun and her square glasses pushed up to her nose, bade the students to wait.

They waited, and screamed at the ghosts, and there was a small confrontation between a surprisingly small black-haired boy and a boy with slicked-back blond hair.

Professor McGonagall returned, and retrieved the students. She led them into the Great Hall, where they all oohed over the ceiling.

The Hat was brought out, and it sang. Children were called up to be sorted.

Towards the back of the clump of first years stood a small black-haired boy and a tall ginger boy with a long nose.

"I'll kill Fred and George, I really will," he said. "Fight a troll! The fat liars."

Harry nodded, and waited for his turn, and finally Professor McGonagall called his name.

"Potter, Harry!"

Whispers filled the hall.

Is that really him?

He looks so small!

I hope he's in our House!

What are you thinking, he'll be a Gryffindor, of course he'll be…

Harry didn't think he was brave enough to be a Gryffindor. He snarked and ran, that wasn't brave, snarking and staying would be brave. He sat on the stool and let the professor set the hat on his head.

Hello. Oh, where to put you… You are a cunning one, yes, you are. You are also intelligent… Well, you could be, if given the right prompting…

Harry didn't know whether or not to be offended.

Oh, don't get offended, I'm only reading what's in your head. You could be intelligent, but you're incredibly cunning for such a young age. You should go somewhere that would nurture your cleverness, your cunning… And perhaps your ambition. But you also have the potential for great loyalty, and you're very hard working.

Please, not Slytherin, Harry thought.

Why not Slytherin?

Malfoy, Harry thought at the hat, and he also remembered what Hagrid had told him: "there wasn't a single witch or wizard who went bad that wasn't in Slytherin".

You shouldn't let one person dictate what you feel about something. You shouldn't let one person turn you from an entire group of people. Now, where was I…

Yes, you have the potential for great loyalty, and you must be somewhere that can be nurtured. And you are incredibly brave. This is a hard decision.

Just put me in Hufflepuff and be done with it, Harry begged the hat.

I'm sorry, I'm not going to just 'be done with it'. The hat sounded offended. That would be terribly irresponsible! I believe you need to go somewhere you would learn how to watch what you say. Ravenclaw and Gryffindor are out, leaving Slytherin and Hufflepuff… You would do well in Hufflepuff, but you could be great in Slytherin… The ambition is in there, it's just waiting for the right spark.

But would you find that spark in Hufflepuff or Slytherin?

Hufflepuff, Harry thought. Not Slytherin.

Be quiet. I'm thinking.

Everyone's staring at me, Harry though.

Of course. You're being Sorted. Why wouldn't they be staring at you? And I believe I've come to a decision. You will either drag the House out from the shadow it lurks in or destroy it entirely, but whichever happens, good luck be with you in "SLYTHERIN!"

Oh, no, I'm in Malfoy's House, Harry thought, and he let Professor McGonagall remove the hat from his head and walked down to his table to… a smattering of applause. Most children in the hall were dumbstruck.

Harry chanced a look at Ron. The other boy was looking at Harry like he had just discovered something new about him… something he didn't like.

So the dark-haired boy looked away, and sat next to an impish-featured girl with long brown hair.

The Sorting finished when Blaise Zabini joined Slytherin, and there was a brief moment of silence before Professor Dumbledore- complete with long white beard tucked in his platinum-and-gold-patterned belt and garish purple robes- stood.

"Welcome, to another year at Hogwarts," he said. "Before we eat and your minds are befuddled with the bemusing stupor of full stomachs, I have a few ground rules. There is a list of forbidden and banned objects on Mr. Filch's office door. I would suggest you review it. And a reminder that the Forbidden Forest is, in fact, Forbidden." The Professor's gaze strayed to the Gryffindor table. "And the third-floor corridor on the right-hand side is also forbidden to students this year due to renovations after a… particularly inventive student accidentally defaced the corridor when their experimentive potion exploded. That is all- let us eat!"

The Professor sat, and the dishes on the table filled with food.

Harry had never seen so much food in his life, and he quickly put a couple spoonfuls of green beans and sweet potato and mixed fruit on his plate, with a small serving of ham. Pitchers of pumpkin juice were being passed around, and after filling her plate with mostly chicken, the brunette next to him turned and faced him.

"Hello, I'm Tracey Davis," she said, and Harry nodded.

"I'm Harry Potter. But- you probably already figured that out," he replied, sighing and letting his shoulders drop.

"Well, yes, but it's always polite to let someone introduce themselves to you."

Tracey kept up a persistent chatter in Harry's ear all through the feast- she was a half-blood- her dad was of relatively young wizarding blood- "Technically a pureblood, but they won't let him register as, especially after he married mum"- and her mum a newblood- the daughter of two muggles. She had three younger siblings named Harvey, Ivy, and Hollyn, who were all apparently more trouble than they were worth. She grew up in Cornwall, in a purely magical town named Misty Shores, population twenty-seven.

After all the students were done eating, the food vanished. Further up the Slytherin table, Vincent Crabbe moaned as the food still on his plate vanished, and Malfoy fixed him with a petulant glare.

"I hope you had a delicious feast! I just have a few words before I send you on your way to bed- Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!"

The hall broke out into noise once again. The Gryffindors left first, all crushing together to leave. The Hufflepuffs left next in one big clump, and then the Ravenclaws in an orderly line.

Six Slytherin students led the rest of Slytherin from the hall. Harry watched where they led- down, mostly. He quickly committed the turns and looks of the castle to memory, and then the older students were disappearing through an arch in the wall.

The two eldest prefects held the first years back, and let the arch seal until it was just a blank wall again.

"Do you see the snake carving on that torch bracket there?" The female prefect said, pointing to said bracket. "That's how you know where our common room is. Our first password is unicorn glitter exorcism. Do not look at me like that, Angus, Iris chose the password…" The two seventh-year prefects walked in, and the eleven-year-olds followed them.

"Well, no one would guess unicorn glitter exorcism," Harry said, "and it's easy to remember."

And then they fell silent.

Directly in front of them, on the other side of chairs and tables and couches, was a huge glass wall.

On the other side of that huge glass wall, just within the range of the light from within the common room, lurked a gathering of mers.

The mers waved, some of them made motions with their hands, and then they swam off.

"Learning sign language is required for Slytherins," Angus, the seventh-year male prefect, informed them. "Also, the mers give horrible dating advice. Don't listen to them."

The eleven-year-olds nodded, and listened with rapt attention while Angus and Eryn- the other seventh-year prefect- explained how Hogwarts worked, and that if you had beef with a Slytherin, you handled it in the common room. They were then released to go to bed and told that their room lists would be in the year-level common areas.

At the very bottom of the tall spiral staircase (which on one side also looked out into the lake) was the first-year dormitory. Harry entered, found his name on a list (he was in Room B with Blaise Zabini and Theodore Nott) and then entered his room.

Theodore- a weedy boy with brown hair- and Blaise- a handsome boy with high cheekbones and shiny black hair- were already in the room, playing a game of wizard's chess. Blaise beckoned him over.

"Hello. I'm Zabini, Blaise Zabini," he said, holding his hand out. Harry shook the offered hand.

"And I'm Nott- Theodore, but just call me Jett, please," he said, and Harry nodded.

"Harry Potter," he replied, and the two boys beckoned for him to sit down.

"Theodore here-"

"Don't call me that anymore."

"Fine, Jett decided that he preferred his middle name over the honestly much more regal name his father gave him. It's almost as bad as refusing his last name, and I wouldn't want to be Jett when his father finds out."

"I'm in Hogwarts now. I can do what I want," Jett replied, sticking out his tongue.

Harry decided he liked Jett.

Jett was a little rough and a little harsh, but he was nice to Harry. He gave him tips while Harry was getting sorely defeated by Blaise, and he even continued giving him tips while they were playing each other.

He even deflected the almost-unnoticeable barbs that Blaise sent Harry's direction.

Blaise was… okay. He was smooth and reminded Harry of melted chocolate in how he moved and talked. Not melted chocolate as in chocolate-bar-left-on-asphalt-all-summer-day melted, but melted as in melted-on-purpose-for-a-recipe melted.

After several rounds of chess, the boys prepared for bed. Harry's bed was next to the glass window that looked out into the lake. It was bigger, so much bigger than anything he had ever slept on, and softer, and more comfortable, and Harry curled up contently in the thick, fuzzy green blankets…

And failed to sleep.

He was too comfortable.

He tossed and turned, trying to get to sleep, until sometime- it had to've been hours!- he finally fell asleep.

Just in time, it seemed, for him to get up again.

He crawled out of bed, before either Jett or Blaise were stirring, and readied for the day. He pulled on his school robes and left.

It was Friday, but he didn't have class since literally what would be the point. Classes would start the next Monday, and in the meantime, Harry would learn the layout of the castle.

There was a handful of older students up in the common room playing a card game as he left, and one of them gave him a puzzled look. Harry just shrugged at them and left, heading out the way he remembered.

The corridors were the next best thing to abandoned, and Harry's footsteps bounced off the stone walls. They weren't loud, but he quietly cursed the floppy, over-sized, duct-taped trainers that kept him from being able to walk as quietly as he would wish to. Magical flames crackled on torches, ever-burning and never to go out. A long-haired white cat walked past him, and the occasional portrait that low in the dungeons waved at him. At one point he walked past a portrait of a fruit bowl and a stack of barrels (was that a badger on one of them? Best remember that, just in case) and then he ascended the stairs into the entrance hall. The doors to the Great Hall were wide open, and there was an assortment of students already there- mostly Ravenclaws, with some of the early-rising Hufflepuffs and Slytherins, and a scattered handful of Gryffindors that were nodding off into their food and yawning and occasionally grunting out what might have been attempts at communicating.

Harry slid into the spot at the end of the Slytherin table closest to the doors of the Great Hall. He dished some porridge into his bowl, stirred in some cinnamon and brown sugar, and poured himself a goblet of milk from the nearby pitcher of milk. He drank some sips of his milk while waiting for his porridge to cool, and he glanced around the hall.

There were a few people watching him, he saw. A couple of the more lucid Gryffindors, and some of the older Slytherins. A third year with long dark hair and pale, creamy skin, in particular, was staring at him while she ate her fruit.

Harry glanced at another girl- one with black hair- as she walked towards him.

"Don't mind Anemone," she said, smiling at him, a flash of white teeth against tawny-bronze skin. "She's always staring at someone for some reason or another."

Harry nodded, and then noticed her eyes.

They were the blue of a cloudless, sunny autumn sky- the kind where the heavens above went on towards the horizon for ever and ever.

They stood out bright and clear against her skin.

And then she was walking away, and he was watching her take a seat next to the creamy-skinned girl- Anemone, he amended. The two girls laughed together, and sat with their sides pressed against each other.

Harry jumped when Tracey and Jett sat down next to him.

"I was worried when you weren't there when I got up," Jett said, and Harry stared at him.

"You were?" he asked, and Jett nodded.

"Yeah. It's no secret… There are a lot of students in Slytherin who don't like you," he replied.

Harry nodded.

"They're upset you're the reason their Dark Lord fell," Tracey added, putting scrambled eggs and bacon on her plate with enthusiasm and accidentally dumping some eggs into Harry's porridge. "Oops, sorry. Are you one of those that doesn't like your foods touching? Ivy hates it when even the smallest smidgen of gravy gets on her beans."

"No, it's fine," Harry replied, but Tracey used her clean spoon to fish the egg out of his porridge and drop it onto her plate. Jett was much more calmly adding fruit to his honeyed porridge.

"Anyways, how did you get up here without help? We had to ask Calista Summerbell for help," he said, and Harry shrugged.

"I just remembered the way," he replied, and Jett pointed his spoon at Harry.

"We need to stick with this one," he told Tracey, and she nodded enthusiastically.

"What are you going to do today?" Tracey asked the two boys through a mouthful of eggs. Jett winced.

"Don't talk with your mouth full; it's gross," he said. "And I have no idea."

"I was going to go walk around the school," Harry added, pushing his emptied bowl away from him.

"Ooh, can we come with you? Get a head start on all the other first years, maybe find some cool room to be a secret base," Tracey asked, and Harry shrugged.

"Sure," he replied, and Tracey grinned and inhaled her food at a faster rate while Jett just watched in dismay.

"She's hopeless," he moaned.

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First chapter of the rewritten Tiny Tourmaline Stars. It's going to be taking a different direction from the original, and this time I'm going to update as I write- although, if I finish multiple chapters in one day, I'll take some time between posting them.

I'm mostly going to be plantsing this. I have some anchoring plot points that won't change, but the space between them is nebulous. If you have anything you want to see in the story, drop a review or a PM, but I won't guarantee it will make it in. I'd also like to hear what sorts of things you don't like seeing in this kind of story, too.

With much love,

Kit