As Isolde rolled the leaf of the Mandrake around her mouth she considered what had lead her to try to attempt to become an Animagus. She was blessed to have one of the greatest Transfiguration ever teachers to instruct her, Headmaster McGonagall was bar none. It seemed only natural that with her talent in Transfiguration, Isolde wanted to pursue her chosen course of magic to higher levels.
Isolde was still trying to prove herself.
She had been chosen by the Puca, a creature of mischief that was just as likely to be malevolent as it was to be benevolent. Most witches and wizards who found themselves confronted with a Puca deemed it evil immediately and the Puca would act upon this. It was in the magical creature’s nature to sow chaos. So it came to most as a great surprise when Gideon, her father, had taken in their Puca when his brood were but children.
Her mother had been all for it, Alison had been a professor of Celtic Mythology up until the previous year, and she delighted in having her own “faerie” in the house. (Isolde’s mother had always been a strange bird.) The Puca was a source of boy delight and misery to the Sweetwaters. He had taken on their three children as if they were their own, delighting in raising the youngest of the three to follow in his footsteps.
He had been a friend and guardian to Isolde her whole life. Steering her in the direction of transformations, his own self as a model. So it was to him that the young witch confided that she was taking the first steps to becoming an Animagus just this past summer.
“You will be like me,” he deemed. His luminously yellow eyes, with their pupils slit sideways like a goat’s, glittered almost madly. The Puca opened his great maw as if it were only loosely hinged and let out an unsettling cackle of mirth. His long and pointed teeth glistened, strikingly white against the poisonous purple of his great big tongue.
“You know you are mine in your heart, girl, for I loved you above either of your siblings. I gifted you alone with but an essence of my magic to guide your own.” His maw curled into a terrible grin at this. Nothing in the Puca’s face was natural. The Puca wore his favorite form; a visage akin to a large and shaggy black dog, (he was always black), with a long and mournful face. His dog was imperfect, however, for not only were his eyes wrong, but his paws were over large and what should have been an elegant flag of a tail was more of a rabbit’s tuft.
“We used to have such fun, didn’t we, sweet child?” The Puca lamented. “Remember all the mischief we caused? You were my charge and I kept you safe, why once I was the very face of your happiest memories. Do you not remember how proud you were to show me that glistening white dog?” The Puca had a way of looking right through you, Isolde had remembered how his eyes had pierced her.
She had given something of a half answer to the creature who had guided her as a youth. She was proud of her Koi, proud of the way it floated through the air, dancing like the ones in her office. The Puca placed one of his oversized paws over Isolde’s hands. “I tell you this, because I care for you, you will wear a skin like my own… A Setter, I think they call them.”
The thought had been haunting her since her last conversation with the Puca. She knew no witch of wizard truly knew what form their animagus would take until they had completed the ritual, but Isolde was sure there was some truth to the Puca’s statement. A creature that spent its whole life shifting from one form to another surely must have some inkling as to what form her heart wore.
Isolde banished the memories and that particular train of thought, she had a class to prepare for. Her students were progressing quite nicely and Valentine’s day was just around the corner, perhaps they were due for a treat.