Teenage wizards, saving the world through magic. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Except in this series, the wizardry is voluntary. You're offered a chance at acquiring it – if you decline, the offer never reappears. If you accept, you take the oath and are expected to spend the rest of your life slowing the entropy that tears the universe apart.
We first get to know Dairine as she describes herself at three years old. Her older sister Nita, at five years old, had come home crying from her first day at Kindergarten, and Dairine decided, “the world was a dangerous place if you didn’t know things, a place that would make you unhappy if it could.” Because of this realization, Dairine is determined to know things – and to this end, she is reading encyclopedias by age five and was only prevented from skipping grades in school due to her parents’ reluctance. In fact, Dairine reads so much that she’s read everything in the local library’s collection. She explains that,
“Nita was already being allowed to go into New York City alone. In a few years, Dairine would, too. She thought constantly of the New York Public Library, of the eight million books that the White Lions guarded: rare manuscripts, books as old as printing, or older. It would take even Dairine a while to get through eight million books. She longed to get started.”
Devouring books, an insatiable desire to know things – they’re both absolute trademarks of Ravenclaw.
In fact, Dairine discovers wizardry because she notices as she watches Nita, things go unexplained – “odd words muttered to empty air, after which lost things abruptly became found, or stuck things came loose,” and Dairine realizes with a start, her sister knows something she doesn’t. Dairine finally catches her at a time when Nita has to explain that the mysterious happenings are due to wizardry. As Dairine has been fascinated by Star Wars for some time now, to find that everything she had longed for – “wizard’s manuals, oaths, wizardry, spells, quests, terrible dangers beyond the world, great powers that moved unseen and unsuspected through the surface of everyday existence and every now and then broke the surface” truly existed, she had a burning desire to learn these things, just as Nita had. Dairine’s first instinct upon exploring her manual is to find Darth Vader, and she is almost embarrassed to admit to her manual that she wants to go “somewhere I can do something. Something big. Something that matters.”
Unmistakably intelligent, passionately determined to learn, Dairine simply belongs in Ravenclaw.