Chapter Text
Freya St. James examined the beautiful iridescent white scaled surface of the dragon egg she held. Noting the opalescent shimmer of pinks, greens, purples, and blues that shifted with the light as she carefully turned it this way and that. She placed the egg gently in the velvet lined box on her desk top and began to scribble her observations furiously in her notebook. She had already taken a series of measurements utilizing both muggle and non-invasive magical methods. Had this dragon hatched she had no doubt it would have been a stunning creature if it's scales matched it's shell. It truly was a tragedy that this egg had been petrified.
Her Care of Magical Creatures instructor, Professor Seraphina Rosewood, had acquired the dead egg from an old colleague associated with the Scamander Research Center in New York and Freya lobbied for a full semester to be able to use it as the focus of her fifth year final term independent study. If she did well enough then she'd earn an automatic A for her COMC E.A.G.L.E, her findings could be published, and she'd receive letters of recommendations from her professor, the headmaster, and the research center. She spent hours with the egg every single day for weeks now doing exhaustive research on the topic- from the breed of dragon encased in the stone egg -she guessed it was an Antipodean Opaleye-, the various circumstances and events that could have resulted in it's current state, and come up with sound arguments for every possible moral and ethical angle in the debate for using such eggs in the fields of potion making and medicine.
Finding eggs like this was rare because the mother usually disposed of defective eggs immediately by burning them to ash which served two purposes. Burning the egg with it's mothers fire released it's magical energy which was able to be absorbed by it's siblings so they could become stronger and the essence of the lost would live on through it's family. The ash was then used as additional cushioning for the remaining eggs in the nest. She supposed that there was more than one defective egg in the clutch this egg came from and it was simply buried in the ashes of it's siblings, never hatched, and was forgotten.
Thus far she had been limited in the type of measurements she was allowed to take to only those that would not cause any damage to the egg as it was meant to be sent off to a museum for display purposes at the end of term. Yesterday, though, she had received a positive response to her request to temporarily remove a few of the protective enchantments so she could take scrapings of the shell for analysis with the caveat that she only take from the bottom so there would not be any visible markings to mar the publics viewing.
She had just completed her standard diagnostics and was gathering the materials she needed to take her sample. She would be conducting the process the muggle way first, so she positioned a microscope, an array of scrapers and files, and several glass slides and mediums. She donned a pair of gloves and reached into the box to remove the egg, positioning it on it's side between two velvet lined brackets so that the bottom was exposed and slightly tilted up. Her goal was to remove a single stone scale completely intact. But given that the petrified egg was several thousand years old at least, she was not sure just how delicate the shell scales would be. She hoped they would not be prone to crumble now that the stasis charms had been removed.
Freya picked up a pair of rubber tipped needle nose tweezers and a very sharp scalpel. She looked at the egg, glanced over her supplies, and took a deep breath to center herself before honing in on the scale she wished to extract.
She tried for a full hour to pry the scale from the egg to no avail. Her efforts were utterly useless having not even managed to leave a single scratch on it. At least she need not worry about causing any damage as the delicacy of the thing was no longer in question. It was practically indestructible, at least as far as she could tell by muggle means short of chucking it at the wall. Time to try some magic.
She should have stopped for the day then. According to protocol, she should have taken a detailed record of every single method and tool she used thus far with the results and any observations she made through the process. She should have turned off her muggle sound recorder, cleaned up her workspace, put away the egg in it's spell secured box, locked up the lab, and gone straight to her Head of Houses office to floo home for the holiday since she stayed an extra day past the other students to conduct her experiment. Once she got home she should have spent a few hours to transcribe her audio notes into her written records. She should have had dinner with her parents and taken a long hot shower to wash away the days failures. She should have gone to bed and woken up the next day to start wading through all the red tape she needed to get through in order to file an official request to use magical methods on the egg to acquire her sample. She should have begun writing up a detailed proposal outlining her next steps for the counsel at the research center to approve and then continued work on the endless line of potions theories spinning out from her overly creative mind.
Honestly, she probably could have turned her single term study into a lifetime career with the sheer volume of potential involved in this niche area of magical science. It baffled her that no one else in the entire wizarding world had thought to make any sort of valuable contribution. There was next to no knowledge available on the subject and what little was published was purely conjecture with zero evidence to back up some of the, frankly ridiculous, claims.
But she didn't do what she should have done. Despite her incredible intelligence and emotional maturity, she was still just a 16 year old girl, a fact that most of the adults in her life all to often forgot. They had gotten used to holding her to the standard of excellence that she set for herself since first year. They trusted that her usually unimpeachable judgment and calm disposition would prevail in almost any situation given her track record under pressure. They did not foresee that the pressure would build. All the little annoyances and inconveniences she put up with from her peers, her parents, her professors etc, would add up. Keeping up with all of her regular classes on top of studying for her EAGLEs, and her egg research. All the long hours, the isolation, and the lack of an outlet for her frustrations (since she had to quit quidditch to make time for her independent study this semester) would lead her to this moment.
Instead of doing what she should have done, she raised her wand and cast a very mild targeted severing charm at the scale she'd been working to remove for the last hour. Her very logical brain knew it wouldn't harm the egg given the information she had amassed during her previous tests and the time she just spent becoming intimately acquainted with the indestructible qualities of its shell. She knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that the magic she just sent at the egg was the equivalent of a soft brush of her fingers over it's surface. She knew that a hundred or more other witches and wizards had cast a thousand other spells at it since it's discovery and subsequent journey from it's excavation site in the Hollyford valley of New Zealand as it passed through various ministries, laboratories, and offices there before sailing across the Pacific ocean and going through the process all over again stateside before landing in the archive vaults of the Scamander Research Center where it sat for four years gathering dust before some chairman on the board at the Magical Nature Museum decided to drag it out for a new display. And not even as the main attraction, but rather as a bit of filler décor for a secondary or tertiary piece in the exhibit.
She knew all this, and in spite of her absolute certainty that her actions would result in nothing but perhaps her feeling a tiny bit less frustrated, she watched almost in slow motion as the soft pink light of her charm made contact with the egg and it responded with a veritable explosion of magic that rolled outward in a shockwave that threw everything around it at least twenty feet away.
For Freya, being tossed twenty feet through the air meant her head colliding with the stone wall at the far end of the classroom and losing consciousness the moment the eggs defensive magic struck her at chest level and pulsed through her body. It all happened so quickly that she didn't even have time to do more than widen her eyes as the feeling of shock at what was happening began to form in her mind.
***
The classroom wards blared alarms through the air and Seraphina Rosewood rushed into the room. She took in the destruction and the obvious radius around the egg clear of debris before finding her pupil collapsed against the back wall. She cast a simple diagnostic even as she scurried toward her charge, hitting her knees and breathing a sigh of relief as the charm informed her that Freya St. James was merely unconscious and not dead as she appeared to be, covered in lacerations and her head bleeding profusely. Professor Rosewood cast a body bind to prevent any unnecessary jostling that could aggravate the girls injuries and levitated her out of the classroom and through the empty halls to the infirmary where she was met by the headmaster and the school medi-witch.
"What has happened, Sera? The wards informed me of a rather large explosion of magical energy in the southwest quadrant." The headmaster began while she passed Freya over to be examined.
"I'm not sure, Furnell. When I arrived the classroom was in absolute shambles and Freya was knocked out cold. For a moment I thought she was dead!" She turned to the medi-witch, "How is she Alora?"
"Well she's certainly not dead." Alora replied as she studied the advanced diagnostic projected into the air above her prone patient. "She's got a rather nasty cut on her head, a concussion for sure, and several skin deep lacerations. But no broken bones and nothing she won't fully recover from. Once I heal her wounds and clean her up she'll be sore and have a headache from hades but a few potions aught to set her right." Alora pronounced as she banished the diagnostic and set to examining Freya's head wound.
"Are you sure? There was just so much blood!" Sera explained. She was clearly shaken and terrified for her student. Furnell clasped a comforting hand on his colleagues shoulder and gave a firm squeeze.
"I'm sure Alora is correct, Sera. Young Freya is in good hands. Let us go assess the classroom so we might better understand how this happened. We must be able to explain the situation to her parents and I'm sure the Scamander Center was notified as we were when the strength of the magic expelled far exceeded the limits they placed on the enchantments they set. We must be prepared to meet them all with answers." Furnell began to steer Seraphina out of the infirmary and Alora was able to focus entirely on her patient.
***
She didn't lie exactly, but Alora Vane was leaving out information in her attempt to prevent undue panic. Freya's head injury was much worse than she let on. The girl had a sizeable fracture in her skull as well as the surface cut. However it didn't bear mentioning in the moment since even as she was observing the diagnostic she cast, the scan began to change to reflect self healing magic that should not have been possible. By the time she catalogued all the other slashes and bruises and began to formulate a plan of care, the fracture had all but vanished leaving only the surface wound behind which began to stitch itself together as she watched. She was glad when the headmaster took Sera away because she certainly wouldn't be able to explain if they had noticed the child healing herself while she was unconscious.
Alora did not need to cast a single spell other than a scourgify to clear the blood away and the occasional diagnostic to monitor the healing progress. Still, she retrieved several potions from her stores just in case. There was a Blood Replinisher, a Dreamless Sleep, some Essence of Dittany, Bruise Paste, a headache draught, and also a Concussion Concoction (which she had plenty of given the number of quidditch players that came in with head injuries every year). She lined up the labeled vials and bottles neatly on the bedside table and pulled up a chair to sit beside her patient and watch over her. She diligently documented the self healing process in her patients private and warded chart and when it appeared to be complete she checked her over once again and was more than satisfied, though thoroughly baffled, with what she found.
***
Furnell and Seraphina hurried through the castle to the ruined classroom and when they got there the Headmaster entered first. He cast a series of spells to detect any potentially harmful energies that might remain after such a forceful expulsion of magic, and content that nothing within would hurt them, the castle, or the egg he carefully picked his way through the carnage toward the egg which seemed to be at the epicenter of the damage. There was a hum in the air, and what appeared to be a fine layer of magical residue over everything in the room. The egg itself, which he had the pleasure of inspecting upon its arrival at the school and which once appeared to shimmer dully, was now far more vibrant in its array of shifting colors.
"Fascinating." He murmured. With his hands clasped behind his back, he bent to get a closer look. Seraphina poked her head through the doorway and seeing that Furnell was unharmed moved to join him.
"Gracious! Do you think the egg did all this?" She asked. "I don't understand how that could be possible. It's completely petrified! Do you know how long it takes for an object to turn to stone like this? Thousands of years, Furnell! They ran a full battery of tests when it was first discovered and came up with absolutely zero magical signature. What on earth could Freya have done to have provoked such a reaction after it being dead for all that time?" Sera was oscillating rather quickly between confusion and excitement at how this could have happened and what it could mean if indeed the egg did somehow contain such magic, concern for her student, anger that her charge was hurt at all but also could have caused a major issue with the castles structural integrity as well as damaged an artifact worth over a million dragots (probably at least ten times more now that it was practically pulsing with energy), and overall shock. Her mind was whirling and Furnell could tell she was very close to panic given the way she was prattling on and spouting out a hundred different theories a mile a minute. He straightened and began cleaning the room. He cast spells to vanish the char on the stone, mend broken furniture, and banish anything that he felt wasn't worth charming or transfiguring back, like the several dozen glass test tubes and beakers that were pulverized in the blast and now lay currently scattered over the floor like so much sparkling sand.
"I'm not sure what happened here, Sera. It seems we will not know until Miss St. James wakes up and can tell us her version of the events that unfolded here. As for now it has become painfully obvious to me that she is indeed very lucky to be alive." Furnell spoke, during the pause in Sera's speech that was necessary for her to breathe, as he examined the wards on the room and set to reinforcing them here and there. It seemed to him that young Freya should have sustained immensely more damage to her person than what she miraculously came away with. "How long did it take you to get here after the alarm wards sounded?" He asked.
His colleague was brought up short by the question which interrupted her renewed tirade halfway through a sentence about how she had somehow failed as a professor to protect her student from harm, which in Furnell's opinion was completely ridiculous given that no one could have anticipated anything even remotely like this ever happening. It was so far outside the realm of possibility, even for magical standards, that it was absurd.
"It's five minutes to get here from my quarters, which is where I was grading papers when I felt my personal protective enchantments on the lab were broken and the alarm wards were triggered. I had them arranged so that I could tell the severity of any number of potential accidents. For example if Miss St. James had simply cut her hand, the alarms would register as a low buzzing sound in my mind. I'm sure you can understand my concern then when they started waling so loudly I was rendered practically deaf to all else." She explained.
"Yes, the castle was quite adamant that something was wrong and I should attend to it immediately. This old building can be very pushy when she wants to be, you know." He replied. She nodded vaguely, taking in the room that looked almost as good as new. "Well now! I do believe I should summon Freya's parents. Would you send an owl to the research center?"
"And what exactly am I supposed to tell them Furnell?! 'Oh hello, your million dragot petrified dragon egg only caused a minor explosion that nearly blew an entire classroom to smithereens and killed a student in the process, but not to worry it's perfectly safe and intact. No need to send anyone out this way!' I mean really Headmaster, I don't think they'll be satisfied with that!" She admonished.
"Alright Seraphina, don't fret. You send for the parents and I'll take care of the rest." He replied before sweeping away in a billow of robes and leaving her to stand alone in the center of the room completely aghast. She crossed her arms and dropped her head back to stare at the ceiling muttering about frustrating wizards before centering herself with a deep breath and heading toward her office to floo call Matthew and Claire St. James.