Chapter 2: A new beginning
A six year old girl with tangled and messy short black hair cut and green eyes crawled out of her cupboard in response to the shouts of her aunt. She stood and futilely tried to brush off the cobwebs on her clothes and finger comb her hair, then made her way to the kitchen. She privately thought that the spiders must have magic or something to produce that amount of webs despite the weekly cleaning of her room. "Girl, hurry up!" a large man, her Uncle Vernon, shouted. There was a lot of shouting in the Dursley household, except from the girl herself. The morning and the day preceded as normal, with Willow making breakfast under her Aunt's sharp supervision, then walking to school, hiding in the library when possible, and trying her best to avoid Dudley, her fat and spoiled bully of a cousin. However, during lunch when she could not hide in the library, somehow Willow ended up on the roof of the school while running from Dudley and his gang of friends. She was able to climb down quickly, and thought no one had seen. This also made her think, maybe magic did exist, and those odd things that happened around her actually were her fault. When she got home Willow stuffed her backpack in the cupboard, changing into her dirtiest clothes, and preceded to do the chores.
When her Uncle Vernon got home he was furious, he said he got a phone call while at work about her being on the roof, and immediately started shouting at her incoherently, even as his face turned an alarming shade of red and his fists windmilled in emphasis to his shouts. Although odd things had happened in the past, and Willow had been blamed, when her Uncle Vernon started hitting her she was shocked. Although the Dursleys had made it clear they hated her through their words and by denying her toys, decent clothes, a proper room, and sometimes food, she had only been spanked or cuffed in the past, not this brutal beating. When Vernon finally left her in her cupboard, Willow decided to run away, even an orphanage or living on the streets was better than this, if Vernon was going to start beating her.
As she painfully crept out of her cupboard, Willow desperately wished she were better suited for living on her own, she knew now that magic probably did exist, and hoped that it would help her now. She needed to be able to hide, to survive the coming cold of winter without any more clothes than she had on. Although she had considered stealing more clothes and supplies, Willow hurt so much it would take a long time, and Vernon or her Aunt Petunia might wake up and lock her in again. As she concentrated on wishing while walking out the door, she felt herself changing, as the world got a bit bigger around her and seemingly less dark. When she looked down at herself, she realized she was some sort of large cat, and her jewel and necklace that she had always worn had changed into a collar. This was way beyond what she had hoped, although she doubted she could really hide well in this form, she was not a house cat, she looked somewhat like a tiger she had seen in a book once, only her fur was mostly pale-Grey, almost white. Still, there was no doubt that she could withstand the cold in this form, all she needed to do was get out of the city lest she be mistaken as an escaped animal from the zoo.