Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It began with a tree.

Not a tree as one might find in a forest, nor one that bent beneath wind and time—but something far older. A silver tree, incandescent and unmoving, its bark a latticework of light and fracture. Roots twisted out from beneath it like skeletal arms, coiled around bones slick with moss and memory. Above, the sky was dark—not with night, but with depth, like the inside of a cave with no end, stars suspended in slow collapse. Ash drifted downward in silence, and the river beside her flowed upward , a slick black ribbon unspooling toward the source.

Harriett stood at its center, barefoot in salt.

The world did not breathe. It listened .

She should have been afraid. Instead, she was still. Reverent. As though she had walked this place before. As though she had been born here.

The tree flickered once. A low, thrumming crack moved through its trunk like the sound of a cello string breaking. Silver bark split. Fire bled from the wound.

And the tree began to burn.

Flame licked across its limbs like ink spilled on parchment, heatless and terrible, consuming and creating all at once. The roots writhed. The sky fractured. Harriett’s breath caught—not in her throat, but in her blood .

Something was awakening.

The ground trembled beneath her. The salt circle shattered. The black river turned to smoke.

And then— She woke . Gasping.

Sweat clung to her skin like rain. Her sheets were twisted, tangled at her ankles. The window was shut, the room still and dark. For a moment she could not tell if her body had returned, or if the dream had simply changed shape.

Her heart beat—not in her chest, but everywhere. Like a drum hidden beneath the skin.

And then the pain registered.

She lifted her hand, slowly, and saw blood.

A thin line had split open across her palm, still wet, as if sliced by something precise. Below her fingers, scorched into the wood of the nightstand, was a mark she did not recognize.

Three lines. Two forked. Ancient. Familiar in the way old things are: remembered in bone, not mind.

ᛃ

She stared.

Outside, the street was silent. Privet Drive asleep.

But in her room, something watched.

Not with eyes—but with memory.

And far beneath the floorboards, beneath the carefully-laid carpets and the muggle concrete, something listened .

The rune remained on the wood long after her blood dried.

Harriett tried to scrub it out with a wet cloth, then a fingernail, then the blunt edge of a paperweight she’d once used to smash a spider on the wall. It would not lift. The grain of the wood had blackened around it, as if burned from within. Not scorched— seared , like a brand. Like it had been carved into the world, and now would not be uncarved.

She pressed her palm to it once more, half-expecting something to stir, to answer.

Nothing.

Only the sound of the wind pressing against the window, and her own breath, too loud in the silence.

She let the cloth fall to the floor. Returned to her bed. Sat with her knees pulled up beneath her shirt, chin resting atop them. Her hair hung limp over her shoulders, clinging slightly to sweat-damp skin.

The sky outside was still dark. August had not yet burned itself out, but the air was thick with that heavy, clinging kind of heat that made her skin itch. She didn’t sleep again.

She didn’t want to.

Morning was as it always was: dry toast, not enough butter, and the low drone of Vernon’s grumbling through the newspaper.

Dudley hadn’t come down yet. He was probably still nursing whatever hangover he’d crawled home with the night before. She’d heard the creak of the gate at one in the morning, the stagger of heavy footsteps across the garden stones, the quiet tsk from Petunia when she’d let him in.

She received no such kindness.

“Shut the door,” Petunia snapped, without turning from the sink. “You’re letting the heat in.”

Harriett said nothing. She did as she was told.

Vernon’s eyes flicked toward her, then quickly away. As if looking at her too long might invite consequence. Might crack something open in her that couldn’t be shut again.

She took her seat at the far end of the table. The slice of toast in front of her looked days old.

“You’re pale,” Petunia said, glancing over her shoulder, tone clipped. “Don’t go fainting again. We don’t have time for one of your fits.”

Harriett stared at her plate.

“There’s dirt under your nails,” Petunia continued, voice rising like steam. “Honestly, what do they teach you at that—”

“Nothing that concerns you,” Harriett murmured.

Vernon’s paper twitched. Petunia turned.

“You think you're clever,” she said, quiet now. “You think we don’t see what’s happening. Walking around like a ghost in your own house. Touching things that don’t belong to you. Whispering at night. It’s unnatural. I know what you are, Harriett.”

The name landed like a slap.

Not Harry. Never Harry.

Harriett. As if she were something foreign. Something brittle, breakable. Like a porcelain doll left too long in the attic—dusty, sharp around the edges, best left alone.

She looked up, then. Met her aunt’s eyes. And for the first time in months, Petunia looked away first. There was power in that. Strange, cold, unfamiliar. A small thrill in the chest. A pulse of something other .

Harriett felt it again—low in her ribs, humming just beneath the surface of her skin. A weight, not heavy, but dense . Like gravity turned inward.

She clenched her hand beneath the table, nails biting into the line still tender across her palm.

Something was waking. And it had teeth. 

The day crawled.

The Dursleys left just after noon—off to some garden party at Number Five, the sort of event where Petunia could perfect her smile and Vernon could complain about taxes with men who had no idea what they were talking about. Dudley, still nursing his hangover, stayed behind, mercifully asleep.

Harriett remained in her room, watching dust turn in the light.

The mark on her palm had faded, but not completely. A shadow of it lingered beneath the skin—like old bruising or ink washed just shy of gone. She pressed her thumb to it. The skin felt warmer there. Alive.

Below her, the house ticked and sighed with settling boards. The wind outside was still. Too still. Even in summer, there was usually the occasional car horn, the barking of dogs, the distant screech of tires from the roundabout—but today, the silence was thick. Cloying. As though the world had paused and was waiting for her to notice.

She went to the window.

The sky had gone the color of spoiled milk. Dull and flat and wrong. Not stormclouds—those moved. These hung. Fixed.

She leaned her forehead to the glass. It was strangely cool.

There was no one on the street. No children. No chatter. Even the neighbors' cat, which usually stalked the garden walls like royalty, was gone.

Harriett felt it again—that hum. Faint, like the sound of bees behind a wall. She stepped back. The room felt too small.

She crossed to the nightstand, drawn again to the scorched rune in the wood. It hadn’t faded. In fact, the edges seemed sharper now. Cleaner. As though it had finished carving itself overnight.

“Jera,” she murmured aloud, not knowing why she said it, or how her tongue shaped it so easily.

A shiver crept up her spine. The shadows in the corners of the room seemed to shift. Just slightly. Just enough. She turned sharply, but there was nothing. Still. Watching. Always watching .

She shoved the the dream, the blood, the mark into the farthest corner of her mind and slammed it shut.

Downstairs, the light had taken on a strange tone. Yellow, but not warm. Sickly. Harriett stood in the hall a long time, listening. The air felt close. She could hear the hum of the refrigerator, the tick of the thermostat. But underneath that—something else.

A low note. Felt more than heard. Like a bow being drawn across cello strings somewhere deep underground.

The kitchen window darkened. Not like a cloud passed. Like the light had simply… gone . Her chest tightened. She stepped out the front door. The air was cold .

Not just chill. Bone-deep. A sudden drop that bit into her skin and made her breath fog. Her heartbeat skittered against her ribs. The sun was still there, vaguely, but it felt like she had walked into winter.

No one else had stepped outside. Not even a curtain twitched. As if she had slipped through a crack in the world, and the street had been left behind. The street had emptied itself of sound.

Harriett stood on the walk, arms wrapped around her torso, trying to breathe in a world that had gone suddenly flat. The sky pressed too close. The air, thick with heat just hours before, now hovered at freezing. Her breath fogged before her lips and curled toward the ground like smoke from a dying wick. Nothing moved—not the hedges, not the birds, not the air itself. It was a silence too complete to be natural.

The kind of silence that followed something being unmade .

She turned, half out of instinct, half out of dread, and saw the gap between the houses—Number Seven and Number Nine. It was narrow, a passage thick with shadow and weeds, a place meant for bins and forgotten things.

From that gap, something shifted.

The first figure emerged without sound. A thing draped in robes so black they shone, their surface glistening like oil, absorbing the weak light and giving back nothing. There was no face beneath the hood. Just a shape. A hollow where presence should be. Behind it, two more slid free of the dark like creatures unwound from dream.

Dementors.

They glided toward her in perfect silence, and the cold tightened, no longer creeping but clawing —fingers up her spine, teeth in her lungs. Her breath hitched. The wound on her palm, forgotten since morning, pulsed sharp and sudden. Her legs refused to move.

She had faced them before. She had heard her mother screaming through her own mouth, had felt her soul tilt toward a void she couldn’t name. She had a wand then. She had friends then. She had hope .

Now she had only herself, and the weight of something strange building inside her ribcage like a second heartbeat.

Her mouth opened, reaching for a spell she didn’t remember how to say.

But the magic was already there.

It stirred—not as words, not as light, but as pressure. The air thickened around her, not with cold, but with resistance. Her blood thrummed, a low vibration beneath the skin, as if each beat echoed outward, testing the world. Her bones rang with it. Her spine locked. The wound on her hand stung, then glowed with faint, inner heat.

The Dementors came closer. She didn’t raise her arm. She didn’t have to.

The one in front hovered no more than a foot away, breath rattling, hands rising like claws. She felt her knees threaten to give—but the thing paused. Its ragged edges flickered, uncertain.

And then it recoiled.

Not sharply. Not with fear. But as if meeting something it could not cross.

A shimmer bloomed in the air between them, faint and colorless, like oil on water, like breath in cold. No incantation. No wand. Just her —and something ancient uncoiling from inside her veins, a hum she did not command but belonged to her nonetheless .

They backed away.

The three of them slipped soundlessly into the alley’s mouth and were gone, like mist burned off in morning.

The silence didn’t break so much as bend , loosening its grip. The air warmed. Somewhere, distantly, a car door slammed. A curtain swayed. Life returned to the world by inches.

Harriett remained still, arms still locked around herself, the ghost of the rune tingling along her wrist.

She hadn’t said a word.

Hadn’t lifted a wand.

Whatever had just answered the Dementors’ hunger had not come from Hogwarts, or from textbooks, or even from the girl she had been last year.

It had come from her blood.

​​Mrs. Figg came hobbling around the corner as if summoned, clutching a carpetbag stuffed with tins of cat food and something that might once have been a shawl. Her face was pinched and too pale, mouth drawn into the kind of line that promised blame before words had even arrived. She did not speak to Harriett at first. She only looked at her, squinting slightly as though she were trying to see through her— into her. The silence between them stretched, unnerving in its familiarity. And then, as if remembering her lines in a play she hadn’t rehearsed in years, she launched into a hurried string of half-reprimands.

“What did you do?” she hissed. “You shouldn’t be out here—not alone, not with them about. I told Dumbledore to keep an eye on you, I told him, but does anyone ever listen to poor Arabella Figg—”

Harriett barely heard her. Her ears were ringing faintly, not with sound, but with the ghost of that resonance—the pressure of something vast brushing against her skin, and then retreating. She could still feel it in her blood, in the hollows of her bones, like the aftershocks of a storm she had never seen coming. Something about the air hadn’t settled yet. It clung to her, dry and too sharp, as if the world was holding its breath again .

“I didn’t cast anything,” she said softly.

Figg blinked. “What?”

Harriett turned her eyes on her. “They stopped. But I didn’t cast anything.”

There was a pause—just long enough to register as deliberate. Mrs. Figg looked away, muttering something about Ministry sensors and Aurors and misinterpreted signatures, but the set of her shoulders had shifted. Caution, or recognition. Either way, she didn’t ask again.

The rest happened in a blur, though not the kind that accompanies fear or urgency. This was a bureaucratic blur , grey and rusted at the edges. By the time the proper officials arrived, the street had fully returned to its charade of normalcy—curtains twitching, neighbors pretending not to watch, a dog barking across the road as though it hadn’t gone deathly silent just minutes before. Harriett stood among it like an object misfiled: too visible, too strange, already catalogued in someone’s ledger.

The Ministry representatives were curt, impersonal. One wore a monocle that gleamed unnaturally in the light. Another took notes on a clipboard charmed to scroll by itself, muttering about time signatures and possible violations. She heard the words minor , unauthorized , expulsion —but they washed over her like static. No one asked if she was hurt. No one asked if she was cold. They took statements from Figg, looked at her as if she were a malfunctioning object, then disappeared with the promise of a hearing and further investigation .

Harriett returned to Number Four under the weight of too many glances and none that mattered. Petunia stood in the doorway, lips pressed together so tightly they had gone white. She said nothing as Harriett passed, and Harriett offered nothing in return.

By the time she reached her bedroom, her legs felt like they belonged to someone else. She shut the door behind her—not slammed, just firm, final—and leaned against it until the noise in her head evened out into something like thought.

The rune on the nightstand still glowed faintly, like an ember that refused to die.

She didn’t know what she had done. She only knew that it had seen her , whatever it was. That it had moved through her, not summoned but recognized.

And the world, now, felt thinner than it had that morning. Thinner than the skin of a dream just before waking.

Mundungus Fletcher showed up two days later smelling of smoke and gin, muttering curses about portkeys and wet socks, and looking exactly like someone who’d spent the better part of his life ducking into alleyways to avoid questions. He didn’t knock. Just appeared on the stoop at half past six, blinking as if he wasn’t quite sure which city he’d landed in, let alone which year.

Petunia nearly fainted.

Harriett stood behind her in the hallway, silent as the stair rail, and watched the entire thing unfold with a dull kind of detachment. Dung didn’t offer explanation so much as shrug toward it. “Urgent summons,” he said, jerking a thumb toward the street like there was a Ministry van parked behind the hydrangeas. “You’ve been requested. Need to move quick.”

Requested.

As if she were a form to be filed, a package gone missing, a misplaced piece of evidence someone was suddenly eager to collect.

Petunia said something shrill and tight-lipped about rude men and improper entrances and not at dinner, for god’s sake , but Harriett didn’t hear it. Her ears had started ringing again, that same low note she couldn’t shake, like her bones were vibrating against each other, and every word not said was just another pressure against her ribs.

She didn’t pack. There was no need. Her trunk had been sitting at the foot of her bed for a week, half-latched, the edges of her robes curled with heat from the window. She picked it up. Slid her wand into her sleeve. Took one last look at the upstairs landing, at the wallpaper peeling near the attic door, the crack in the windowpane Dudley had made in second year, the faint scent of polish and lemon cleaner and something long dead beneath it all.

Petunia stood in the doorway, arms folded like she was holding herself in place.

Neither of them said goodbye.

The portkey was a cracked saucer. The kind with gold leaf curling at the rim, chipped clean through the center. Harriett placed her finger to the broken edge, and the world gave way beneath her like a pulled thread.

The landing was rough.

She staggered on impact, the air punched out of her lungs as the dim interior of Grimmauld Place pressed itself around her like a too-small coat. Dung grunted as he landed beside her, already pulling out a flask and muttering about knees, damn knees, bloody stairs. The hallway was dark, the air dense with dust and silence. Somewhere above, a door clicked shut. A whisper scraped across floorboards.

She was not alone.

Harriett straightened, heart still pounding with the echo of travel, and took in the house. The walls seemed closer than she remembered—portraits covered in cloth, staircase narrowed, shadows sharper. There was movement, soft and quick, like someone stepping just out of view.

A woman’s voice from the parlor: “She’s here.”

Another: “Keep your voice down—”

Then silence.

The house appeared like a wound in the world—wedged between two brick facades on a street that hadn’t known its name in years. It shoved itself into place, stone grinding against stone, windows blinking open like eyes waking from a long sleep.

Harriett had never seen it before.

Mundungus gave her a half-hearted nod and disapparated before she could speak. The cold popped in his absence, leaving her alone in front of a door that looked like it might spit her back out if she knocked wrong.

Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place.

She stepped forward and it opened for her.

Not gently. Not like Hogwarts, where the magic sighed with familiarity. This was different. The door opened like a mouth and the house breathed in .

She stepped over the threshold and everything else fell away.

The air inside was thick. Dust clung to the walls like mold. The sconces on the wall flickered without warmth. Her footsteps echoed before they landed, as if the house were already remembering them. It smelled like old wood, burnt cloth, and something metallic underneath. Not quite blood. Not quite rust. But close enough.

She stood in the hall, letting her eyes adjust. A staircase curled into shadow above her. Portraits lined the walls, each one shrouded in black velvet, as if the occupants were sleeping, or hiding. A curtain twitched as she passed. Not from her hand. From something behind it.

Harriett didn’t call out.

She knew better than to announce herself in places like this.

They didn’t come out to greet her. Not properly. Tonks passed her in the hall, hair dulled to brown, expression unreadable, offering a short nod as she slipped upstairs without explanation. Kingsley gave a murmured "Potter" and nothing more. Moody looked at her sideways and adjusted his flask. No one said the words Dementor or expulsion or what the hell happened out there , but the words hung between them anyway, damp and heavy as the wallpaper.

She was halfway to the kitchen when voices broke through the silence—muffled, low, arguing in the tone of people trying not to argue.

“—not her fault, for Merlin’s sake—”

“She shouldn’t have been out there alone. You know what’s been prowling.”

“She’s fifteen .”

“I know how old she is.”

A door opened ahead of her. Light spilled into the hall.

Sirius stepped out first.

He looked different from the photographs. Taller, for one. More real. His hair hung past his collar in a way that felt careless. Not free. Just tired. His eyes met hers and held for a breath longer than they needed to.

“You look like James,” he said, not like a compliment. More like a fact that hurt to say out loud.

Harriett didn’t answer. She wasn’t sure it was a good thing.

Behind him, the kitchen stretched out low and wide, cluttered with mugs and parchment and tension. The fire snapped in the grate like it was trying to keep itself awake. Molly Weasley looked up from the stove with a kind of brisk warmth that didn’t match her mouth.

“Oh, Harriett, thank Merlin,” she said. “Come in, come in. You must be starving.”

Harriett stepped into the room. No one offered to take her coat. No one asked if she was cold.

Sirius gestured toward the long table. “Sit if you want,” he said. “Or don’t.”

Sirius sat in the far armchair, half in shadow. He looked thinner than she remembered—sharper, like something left in the cold too long. His expression softened when he saw her, just barely, but there was a tightness in his eyes she hadn’t seen before. Not grief. Something worse. Like expectation.

“I’ll make you something,” Molly continued, already bustling, already halfway through a sentence about tea and toast and growing girls needing proper meals , as if food might fix whatever had followed Harriett through the door.

“I’m fine,” Harriett said, voice flat.

Molly didn’t hear her.

The table was strewn with half-empty glasses, a rolled map of London marked with red thread, and something that looked like an unfinished report—Dementor sightings, maybe. One of the pages had her name on it. Underlined twice. Ink still wet.

No one moved to hide it. Sirius poured himself a drink. It wasn’t tea.

“You’ll be staying upstairs,” Molly said, over her shoulder. “Room’s ready. Clean sheets. Try to rest. Dumbledore will speak with you when he can.”

“Why wasn’t he there?”

Molly turned. “He’s handling things. Important things. He can’t be everywhere at once, dear.”

“I was attacked.”

“I know. But you’re safe now.”

Harriett didn’t respond. The room said nothing back.

Upstairs, the house narrowed. The walls pressed in. Her hand ran along the banister, fingers brushing splinters and old polish. Each step groaned like it resented her weight. No one followed. No one explained the layout.

She found her room by feel more than direction. The door creaked open on hinges that hadn’t moved in years.

The bed was made. The curtains were drawn. There was lavender on the nightstand. Someone had prepared this. Not for her. For the idea of her. She stood in the doorway, her trunk still clutched in one hand, and felt the house watching her.Not welcoming. Just waiting.

The room smelled of old lavender and ash.

Not smoke—ash. The difference mattered. Smoke rose. Ash lingered. It clung to the floorboards, the curtains, the edge of the desk near the window where the light had warped the wood in thin, tired lines. It filled the corners of the room like it had been waiting for something to fill the space.

She set her trunk down beside the wardrobe and crossed to the desk. The top was clean, mostly. A thick layer of polish. A single quill resting in the tray.

But when she touched it, her fingers came away gray.

Dust. Fine as flour, soft as bone meal. It coated her skin and shimmered faintly in the dying light.

She brushed it off—but it didn’t fall cleanly. It stuck. Traced the crease of her knuckles, the scar on her palm.

A shiver ran up her arm. Quick. Instinctive.

She looked down at her wrist. The skin where the rune had burned into her nightstand back in Privet Drive was smooth again—but not empty. It hadn’t scarred, exactly. It had sunk . The mark was gone, but its absence remained. Like a bell that had stopped ringing but left the air different in its wake.

She ran her thumb over the spot.

Something stirred.

Not movement. Just the sense of being seen. The feeling that the house had turned its head.

There was a crack in the floorboard near the desk. Not wide, just enough to catch the eye. She crouched, brushing aside a trail of dust with the back of her hand. The grain of the wood ran crooked there—like it had been warped by heat or pressure.

She pressed her fingers to it.

For a moment, the air seemed to still. Not go silent, exactly—but listen .

Then the sound of the house returned: the groan of beams, the quiet shift of heat in the pipes, the soft flutter of fabric against glass.

Harriett straightened slowly.

She left the window closed. Turned off the lamp. Lay on the bed without undressing. The quilt was too heavy. The pillow smelled of something dried and sweet.

The room settled around her.

But the dust remained, clinging to her hands, fine and unshakable. And in the place where the rune had been, the skin prickled like the first taste of magic before it took shape.

​​ Excerpt from Ritual and Ruin: A History of Pre-Wand Magic (Restricted Archives Edition)
compiled by Magistra Selwyn M. of the Hollow Archive

“The earth does not forget, even if we do. Blood remembers. Stone remembers. The old gods, long buried, still answer when called properly.”

Chapter III: On the Old Ways

Before wands channeled intent into Latin syllables and incantation became the preferred structure of spellcraft, magic was not cast, but lived. It did not respond to words, but to will. Not to discipline, but to devotion. The earliest forms of structured sorcery, collectively known as the Old Ways, emerged not from academic study, but from offerings made in shadow, rites performed in salt and bone, and prayers whispered into the mouths of rivers and fire.

Magic, in those days, was not considered a tool.
It was a conversation.
Between sky and seed. Between name and silence. Between the living and the dead.

The Old Ways predate both the founding of Hogwarts and the bureaucratic censure of the Ministry of Magic. Rooted in the worship and barter of the Old Gods—deities now dismissed as myth—this magic was elemental, ritualistic, and sacrificial, requiring the practitioner to give as much as they hoped to take. Practicing the Old Ways was not a matter of command. It was an act of becoming.

Though the Ministry has declared such practices obsolete, and Hogwarts has refused to incorporate them into sanctioned curriculum, the Old Ways have not vanished. They persist in ancient bloodlines, in the earth of old burial sites, in altars left unnamed on modern maps, and most dangerously—in the hearts of those born remembering what they should not yet know.

Such practitioners often awaken young, drawn not to wands but to circles of salt, to dreams thick with ash and names that have never been spoken aloud. They walk the path of Arcane Memory, not by choice, but by inheritance.

And the magic walks with them.

“To speak the Old Ways aloud is to risk being heard. To practice them is to remember what the world worked very hard to forget.”

Chapter Text

The house breathed differently in the morning.

Harriett woke to stillness, not silence. There was a pulse to it, faint but unmistakable, like the groaning of an old tree just beneath the bark. The air was cold in a way that didn’t match the weather—wet and weighty, tinged with metal, the scent of rust and something floral left too long in a sealed jar. She opened the door and stepped into a hallway that looked unchanged but felt… adjusted.

The sconces guttered when she passed, the flame dipping low as if ducking behind something. Her footsteps didn’t echo. The floor didn’t creak.

Something in the house was listening.

Grimmauld Place was not like Hogwarts. Hogwarts had moods, fits, a sense of grand theatricality that pulsed through stone and stair. This house was smaller. Meaner. Older in the way forgotten things were older—half-rotted, whispering in languages no one had spoken in generations.

The walls hummed.

At first she thought it was pipes. But as she paused outside the library, then again outside the closed drawing room, she realized it wasn’t mechanical at all. It was intentional . A sound that moved away from her when she stopped to hear it.

There was a long runner down the hall—faded velvet and hand-stitched lilies—that caught at her soles like it didn’t want her passing. Her fingers brushed the wall for balance, and something warm pulsed beneath the paper. She jerked back.

The house exhaled.

She made her way down the stairs slowly, past the painting of a shrouded figure whose drapery twitched as she passed, though no draft followed her. Her hand on the banister caught dust, but the kind that felt wrong , somehow. Grit that clung too tightly, that smelled faintly of wax and iron.

Kreacher was in the dining room.

He did not bow.

His eyes caught hers and held—watery, red-rimmed, but bright. Too bright. There was something sharp in them. Not contempt, not quite. Not fear either. Something older. Like memory.

Harriett stood still in the threshold. The shadows behind her reached a little farther than they should’ve. The chandelier above gave off no warmth, only flickering light, soft and low like candle-smoke.

Kreacher’s lips twitched.

“Blood-muddied girl,” he muttered. “Oh yes. Magic on her. Old magic. Wrong kind. Wrong hands.”

His fingers clenched around the handle of a pewter ladle with too much force, white knuckles gleaming against grey skin.

“Smells like salt and ash, it does. Smells like bone .”

She didn’t move.

Kreacher crept a step forward, dragging his toes across the warped floorboards. Not approaching. Orbiting. Like something watching from the rim of a ritual circle.

“Witch born wrong,” he hissed. “Magic she doesn’t know, doesn’t deserve. Hollow-woken. Hollow-marked.”

Harriett’s fingers curled at her side.

“What did you say?” she asked, quiet.

Kreacher bared his teeth.

“Magic that was buried,” he croaked. “Left behind. Sealed and silenced. Not for her. Not for Potter-spawn .”

“I’m not asking again.”

His body hunched, but not in fear. In reverence.

“You opened something,” he said. “The house felt it. The walls listened. You bled and it answered.”

She took a step in.

“I didn’t open anything,” she said.

Kreacher laughed—a short, high sound like a cracked teacup.

“Didn’t mean to, maybe. But it knows now. Knows your name. Knows your blood. Knows what you are. ”

He tilted his head. His voice dropped.

“It followed you here.”

Harriett’s heart pounded once—low, hard, not fear, but recognition.

“Followed me from where?”

Kreacher leaned in.

“From before. From the first. ”

She didn’t breathe. He opened his mouth to say more—

“What did you say?” Sirius’s voice cracked through the room like lightning across a sky that hadn’t yet darkened.

He was at the doorway, shirt half-buttoned, wand shoved into the waistband of his trousers like an afterthought. His hair was still sleep-mussed, eyes clear and sharp and angry.

Kreacher’s spine straightened like a snapped thread. He turned, stiff, silent, and bowed with all the grace of a blade being bent the wrong way.

Then he vanished. The crack echoed too long. Sirius rubbed at his jaw, slow.

“Don’t listen to him,” he muttered. “He’s been broken for decades. Says all kinds of rot.”

Harriett didn’t answer right away. Her eyes were still fixed on the empty space where Kreacher had stood, the dust in the air where his shape had just been. The air still hadn’t settled.

“He said there’s magic on me,” she said.

“He says that sort of thing to everyone he doesn’t like.”

“But he didn’t say it like that mattered,” she replied. “He said it like he knew it. Like it was familiar.”

Sirius didn’t respond immediately.

He walked past her, to the window. Flicked open the curtain. The light through the glass came in dull and gray, falling like mist across the floor.

“This house remembers things,” he said at last. “Most of them unpleasant. It makes up the rest.”

She didn’t press. There was something guarded in his posture, not defensive, exactly, but worn. Like he’d had this conversation too many times, and never gotten to the end of it.

Still, she felt the eyes in the walls. Not watching. Waiting.

They found her in the drawing room.

The door creaked open like it hadn’t been used in years. Wood against wood. A breath drawn too slowly.

Ron stepped in first. His trainers caught the edge of the rug, and he stumbled in that way he always had—long limbs, unsure footing, a boy still growing into his height like it was something borrowed. Hermione followed, careful, spine too straight. Her hands were clutched together at her waist as if she had to concentrate on keeping them still. They looked out of place in the low light—too bright, too clean. They smelled like fresh parchment and fireplaces that burned evenly, like clothes that had been washed more than once.

They looked like they’d just come from somewhere warm. Somewhere safe. Somewhere she hadn’t been.

Harriett didn’t move.

She sat curled on the window ledge, knees drawn up beneath her, head tilted back just enough that her hair brushed the stone behind her. The glass was cold at her back. The curtains had been pulled halfway closed, muting the sunlight to a thin, winter-grey glow that barely touched the floor. A book lay open in her lap, spine bent, unread.

She looked like part of the house. Not seated in it— woven into it . Still. Quiet. Older than she had any right to be.

“Hi,” Ron said after too long.

His voice didn’t quite reach her. She glanced up, gaze slow and flat.

Hermione stepped forward a pace. “We didn’t know you’d arrived yet.”

Her voice was too high. Too smooth. Like she'd rehearsed it in the hallway, like she was trying to remember which tone sounded kindest.

Harriett blinked once. “I arrived two nights ago.”

Hermione’s lips parted. Then closed. Her hands shifted—twist, release. Twist again.

Ron scratched the back of his neck. “We—we were told to wait. Dumbledore said—”

“Dumbledore said,” Harriett echoed. The words came out wrong. Not mocking. Not surprised. Just done . Like a door being closed behind her. “Of course he did.”

Hermione flinched.

The air in the room shifted.

It wasn’t cold, not exactly. But something pulled taut.

“You could’ve written,” Harriett said, softly.

Her voice didn’t rise. Didn’t shake. But the room seemed to shrink around it. Like the walls had leaned in to hear better. Even the fire in the grate had dulled, its glow falling low behind the grate like it didn’t want to interrupt.

“We wanted to,” Hermione said quickly. “We really did, but Dumbledore said it was too dangerous, and—”

“He said a lot of things, didn’t he?”

That landed harder. Clean. Precise. Sharper than she meant it to be.

Or maybe not.

Ron shifted his weight, eyes on the floor. “He said it was better if we didn’t reach out. That you were safer not knowing.”

Harriett closed her book.

It didn’t snap shut. There was no violence in the motion. Just a soft, dull thud , like the air around her had been sealed along with it.

“I wasn’t safer,” she said, rising. Her voice stayed quiet. “I was alone. Alone in that house while all of you were here. With Sirius. With each other. With answers .”

“We didn’t have answers either,” Ron said, but his voice was low. Uncertain. He still wouldn’t meet her eyes.

“But you had each other,” she said.

And that, somehow, landed worst of all.

“You had each other,” she repeated. “And I had four walls. A locked door. Silence.”

Hermione stepped forward again, reaching—not with her hands, but with her eyes, her voice.

“Harriett, please—if we could’ve done anything, we would have. We just… we thought we were helping.”

Harriett laughed. Once. Soft and breathless. No joy in it. No cruelty either. Just absence.

“You thought I needed protecting,” she said. “Like I was glass.”

Hermione swallowed. “We were trying to follow orders.”

Harriett didn’t move for a moment. Then—

“I was trying not to disappear.”

The words didn’t echo. But they stayed. They stayed in the air, in the heavy curtains, in the ash beneath the grate. They stuck like soot. None of them spoke after that.

The silence wasn’t awkward. It wasn’t new. It was something older, like the house had seen this scene play out a hundred times before and had learned how to keep still.

Harriett stepped around them.

She didn’t brush against them. Didn’t make eye contact. The book hung at her side, fingers curled loosely around its spine. She paused at the door.

“Next time,” she said, without turning, “try disobeying.”

And then she was gone. The door clicked shut behind her. Softly. Not final. But close.

Harriett found the library empty.

Not quiet—Grimmauld Place was never truly quiet—but empty enough. She slipped between the shelves, let the air press in close around her. Dust hung thick in the light from the high windows. The books here felt older than Hogwarts, older than most things. Their titles shimmered in strange ink, sometimes changing when she blinked. One hissed at her when she reached too close.

She didn’t touch it again.

She pulled a volume at random— Inheritance and Ancestry in Archaic Binding —and dropped into the armchair near the fireplace, legs tucked beneath her. The flames were low. They suited her mood.

She’d just found a passage on blood-transferred wards when the door creaked open behind her.

“Fancy seeing you here,” said a voice that was unmistakably Fred’s. Or George’s.

“Didn’t take you for the brooding-by-firelight type,” said the other.

“I’m trying something new,” Harriett said, not looking up.

“Brooding?”

“No. Avoiding people.”

There was a pause.

Then: “Fair. Terrible lot, people.”

Fred—or possibly George—rounded the armchair and dropped dramatically into the one across from her, legs slung over the side like a cat who paid rent. The other leaned against the nearest bookcase and plucked a grimoire off the shelf, flipping it open with a grimace.

“These are horrifying,” he said cheerfully. “Did you know this one tried to bite my thumb off yesterday?”

“That’s because you called it a glorified diary,” his twin said.

“It is a glorified diary.”

“It also cursed your toothbrush.”

“I wondered why my teeth felt hexed.”

Harriett blinked at them. “Why are you here?”

“We live here now,” Fred said.

“Technically squatting,” George added. “Sirius is a dreadful landlord, very hands-off.”

“No inspections. No rent. No rules.”

“No breakfast.”

“Very little supervision.”

“Prime conditions, really.”

Harriett closed her book with a small, reluctant huff of breath. Not quite a laugh. Something next to it.

The twin on the arm of the chair grinned. “That’s the sound of improvement.”

“We’ll have you smiling by Thursday,” said the other.

“Don’t bet on it.”

“Oh, we already have.”

They didn’t stay long. Just long enough to steal the cursed book, charm the fireplace to hiss insults in French whenever it was poked, and inform her in great detail of their plan to charm Percy’s prefect badge into flashing “Minister of Toe Fungus” at dinner.

Harriett didn’t say much. But when they left, the air felt lighter.

Not better. But lighter. Like someone had cracked a window, just a little.

She felt him arrive before she heard the door.

The air shifted—ever so slightly. Not colder. Not warmer. Just still , in a way that made the breath catch. Grimmauld Place grew quiet around it, like the walls knew to hold their tongues. Somewhere, far above her, a door clicked open. The creak of a stair tread, deliberate and unhurried. Measured steps.

Harriett didn’t move.

She was seated on the second-floor landing, half-curled on the window ledge with her knees tucked against her chest and a mug of tea cooling in her hands. The light through the glass was thin and distant. The sky above the square had gone milk-grey.

She heard voices downstairs—Molly, low and urgent. Sirius, sharper. A silence between them like teeth clenching. Then footsteps again, softer now. Ascending.

When Dumbledore rounded the corner at the top of the stairs, he looked precisely as he always did. Robes of midnight blue, silver beard tucked neatly to one side, eyes behind half-moon spectacles.

He didn’t meet her gaze.

“Harriett,” he said, like a nod in a formal letter. “I’m glad to see you well.”

She set the mug on the sill.

“Am I?”

A pause. Small. Calculated. He inclined his head. “I understand you’ve had a difficult few days.”

“Not really,” she said. “Only an attack. Some Ministry threats. Being left alone. Lied to. That sort of thing.”

Still, he didn’t look at her. Something prickled along her spine.

“I know you must be upset,” he said gently, “but—”

“No,” she interrupted. “I’m not upset.”

He blinked.

“I’m furious.”

The words didn’t rise in pitch. They didn’t even crack. But they settled into the space between them like a second presence, something large and unwelcome.

“I have questions,” she continued. “You knew I would.”

“Some things—”

“You put me back there. After everything. You left me with them knowing full well they hate me.”

“You were protected—”

“I was alone. ”

The silence stretched. Dumbledore studied the far wall like it held something worth translating.

She shifted forward on the ledge. Not hostile, just closer. Measured.

“I want the truth,” she said. “About Voldemort. About the blood wards. About why you locked me out of everything while everyone else got to stay here, got to know .”

His hands folded neatly in front of him. His voice, when it came, was low. Mild.

“You are not ready.”

Harriett went still. It wasn’t the words. It was what came after.

The way the air around him hardened —not physically, but energetically, like a charm meant to keep sound from echoing. Like even her own thoughts were hitting something soft and impermeable.

Something in her recoiled. Not her mind. Not her heart. Her magic.

It pulled back from him, curling like smoke drawn from an open flame. The skin on her arms prickled. The mug beside her cracked softly down the middle.

She rose to her feet slowly.

“And when will I be ready?” she asked.

Dumbledore turned toward her fully now. His expression was carefully gentle. Stern with the corners softened, the kind of grandfatherly restraint that could still sign execution orders.

“When it is time.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I can give you.”

“No,” Harriett said, “it’s the only one you want to give me.”

His silence was not surprise. It was confirmation.

When he left, he did not touch her shoulder. Did not wish her rest or peace or understanding. He simply walked away, long robes brushing the floor behind him, steps echoing in the way only his did— as though he belonged to the house more than she ever would.

She didn’t breathe until he was gone.

Didn’t realize she hadn’t. The air around her loosened. Her magic returned like something uncaged. The mug on the sill shattered cleanly into two halves. She didn’t flinch. The house didn't sleep. It waited.

Long after the hallway lights were dimmed and the last kettle clinked dry on the stove, Grimmauld Place settled into something deeper than silence. Not rest—watchfulness. A kind of stillness that made the floorboards breathe slower, the doors breathe longer between creaks. Harriett lay in bed for hours with her eyes open, the ceiling above her a dull expanse of shadow, listening to the house mutter to itself.

When she rose, the floor didn’t protest.

She moved barefoot, wandless, her breath caught behind her teeth, unsure if she was sneaking or being led. The hallway was thick with shadow. The air colder. She didn’t bother with a light. The house lit only what it wanted her to see.

She turned left instead of right. Passed the long-faded family portraits with their faces half-gone from neglect. At the landing, something shifted beneath her feet—not a sound, exactly, more like a change in the way the stair held her weight. The velvet runner brushed her ankle. The dust here was colder than it should’ve been.

And then she saw it.

A tapestry hung along the far wall, farther down than she’d ever wandered. Black family tree—she knew it by reputation, if not detail. The threads glittered faintly in the dark, names etched in gold and red and scorched black. The fabric swayed though no breeze passed.

She stepped closer. Let her fingers brush the edge.

It twitched beneath her hand.

Not sharply. Just enough to feel alive .

Behind it, the wall curved unnaturally—just slightly. A bulge where the stone shouldn’t swell. She pushed the tapestry aside. The dust billowed, years collapsing in a breath.

There it was.

A door, nearly invisible. Narrow, inset, smooth with age and neglect. No handle—only a carved bone loop embedded in the wood. Pale and porous, yellowed slightly with time. It pulsed faintly beneath her palm.

Her hand tingled. Then stung.

The mark from Privet Drive—dormant since Dumbledore’s visit—split open again along the seam. Blood welled up in a single bead. It fell without permission, striking the bone with a soft kiss.

The door opened. No creak. No protest. Just air shifting—damp, cold, old. Harriett stepped inside.

The room was barely more than a closet. No windows. No furniture. No light save for what the house allowed in behind her. The walls were stone, black-veined and veined again, like dried rivers in a corpse. Dust coated every inch, thick and unmoving.

There was only one object.

A chest, small enough to kneel beside. Oak darkened with age, bound in black iron. The lid was sealed with red wax, imprinted with a crest she had only seen once before—on a letter she wasn’t allowed to read. A rearing stag, surrounded by knotwork, the name POTTER coiled beneath in script so old it curled like smoke.

Harriett didn’t reach for it yet.

She crouched.

The wax hadn’t cracked. The seal was untouched. This chest had not been opened in decades. Possibly longer.

It had waited for her. The air buzzed faintly. Her magic stirred again—not urgent. Not hungry. Just aware. She pressed her fingers to the lid. Something inside exhaled.

Inside the chest, beneath layers of spell-thick air and dust so fine it looked like crushed bone, lay a single item.

A letter.

It rested atop black velvet that had long since lost its shine, the fabric worn to a thin nap with time, threadbare at the corners where the wood of the chest showed through. No other objects. No glittering heirlooms. No keys or rings or ancestral trinkets tucked beneath silk. Just the letter, perfectly centered, untouched.

It was sealed in wax the color of dried blood.

The crest pressed into it was not the one from Gringotts. Not the sanitized version engraved into the marble above the family vault, all clean lines and ceremonial stag. This was older. Less precise. The stag stood not proud but rearing , hooves lifted in battle, antlers caught in a crown of thorns. Beneath it curled knotwork not of English make—twisting loops and weaves like runes folded into themselves. A symbol of language that didn’t exist anymore.

The wax shimmered faintly as her shadow passed over it. Not gold. Not silver. Something stranger. The color of heat distortion.

She stared at it for a long time.

Her hands hovered. Not out of fear—though there was that, in a small shape tucked behind her ribs—but something deeper. Something older. Reverence, maybe. Or recognition.

She reached forward, then paused again. The letter felt… watchful .

Not enchanted. Not cursed. Just aware . Like it had been waiting, and now that it had been found, it refused to be opened casually.

She drew her wand—not to cast, but to steady her hand. Magic rose to meet it, coiling faintly in the air, like breath fogging a mirror. The wax pulsed once, then stilled. She pressed her thumb into the seal, and it broke with a soft crack .

The paper inside was thick. Heavy as vellum, though not quite. It folded open like skin dried tight over bone—flexible, but not forgiving.

The ink shimmered in her hand. Not black. Not blue. Just dark.

To She Who Bears the Line,

If you are reading this, the Hollow has stirred. The blood remembers. The door has opened, and you have stepped through it. This is not an accident.

Harriett read the first line twice, then again. The words were slanted, not sloppily but with purpose—like they’d been written with a hand that remembered ritual more than grammar. The strokes were deliberate. The script was unfamiliar. Not quite cursive. Not quite print. Just old.

You are the first of us to walk without a name. The blood was quieted for a time, drowned in light, in law, in the comfort of forgetting. But the Hollow does not forget. The Hollow waits. The Hollow watches.

You are being watched now.

She swallowed. The fire in the hearth outside the alcove shifted. A pop. A breath. She kept reading.

This house does not belong to you, but it remembers you. Blood calls to blood. It led you here because it recognizes what stirs in you now. That is not wand-magic. That is not school-spell or Ministry doctrine. That is the Hollow, waking.

It is not kind.

It is not easy.

It is yours.

Her fingers gripped the edge of the parchment more tightly than she meant to. The edges were softening with the heat of her skin, the magic in her blood answering what had been written long before she was born.

There was no signature. No date. No name.

Just the words. Just the weight of them.

She sat on the cold stone floor for a long time, the letter spread across her knees, the chest still open beside her.

The air in the alcove didn’t move. Not a breeze, not a draft. But it felt thicker now. Not oppressive—just full. The way libraries sometimes did, or chapels, or graveyards. Places where too much had been remembered to ever be forgotten again.

She wondered who had written the letter. What hand had scrawled those looping, heavy lines and sealed them in wax no one had touched in decades. She thought of her parents. Of James Potter’s wand and Lily’s green fire and the stories she'd been told like bedtime prayers: brave, brilliant, beloved.

But none of them had ever spoken of this.

None of them had told her that the blood might watch . That the name she bore had roots .

It wasn’t about the war. It wasn’t about Voldemort. It was older. Deeper. This wasn’t prophecy. It was inheritance .

Harriett folded the letter with slow hands and set it back inside the chest. The velvet shifted beneath it, the dust resettling like breath returning to a body. She touched the broken seal once more, let her fingers pass through the dried blood-wax.

The crest was cold now. No shimmer. No pulse. But it had answered her. And it had known her. When she stepped out of the alcove and pulled the tapestry back into place, the hallway was silent.

No creaks. No groans. Just her footsteps, slow and even, echoing in the dark. The house did not resist her. Not anymore.

Excerpt from the Private Journal of Althaea Potter, Keeper of the Third Hollow, circa 1621
Filed in Blackthorn Binding, sealed within the Potter Sanctum Vault, Page 48

“Not all doors are built to open. Some are meant to listen.”

I have always said: the House is not a structure, but a sentence. A vow made in stone, blood, and breath. The name on the deed does not make it yours. Only the blood does.

When I first walked the hallways of Black walls and Black name, I thought I had entered a tomb—too quiet, too hungry. But it knew me before I knew myself. The floorboards bent differently beneath my weight. The sconces turned to follow my hand. The dust clung to my ankles like a warning—or a welcome.

It is not our House. But it remembers the Hollow.

Before it was a Black stronghold, it was threshold . A root place. A crack in the skin of the world where one of our own—Myrna, or Maeve, or another whose name is lost—bound salt into the stone and carved her blood into the lintels. The walls have not forgotten.

They never do.

This kind of magic cannot be written in Ministry ledgers. It cannot be buried under revised family trees and pureblood pomp. It lives in creaks. In the way your fingers sting when you touch the stair rail. In the hum behind closed doors.

And if you feel the house watching you— it is. But it does not watch with suspicion. It watches with memory.

You do not command the Old Ways. You stir them. You walk carefully. You bleed only when called. You do not ask the house to open—you show it that you remember. That the blood in your veins matches the rhythm in its walls.

Only then will the door appear. Only then will the letter be found. Only then will the silence answer.

Chapter Text

She didn’t open the letter again until the house was asleep.

Not just quiet— asleep . Its breathing slowed, its limbs tucked in tight, the kind of hush that settled over bones buried too deep to disturb. The kind of hush that wasn’t peace, but preservation.

Harriett waited until even the portraits had gone still. Until the last rustle of parchment in the study, the last scrape of a chair on stone, the final muted murmur of Molly’s voice through the wall had faded into dust. Only then did she unroll the letter again, sitting cross-legged on the floor of her borrowed bedroom, back against the foot of the bed, wand unlit and untouched on the blanket beside her.

The paper still felt too heavy. The ink still gleamed like it hadn’t yet dried. And the wax—the broken seal now dull and brittle—lay in two clean halves beside her, like bone fragments arranged for a rite.

She traced the lines with her eyes, not her fingers. Some part of her still wasn’t ready to touch the thing. Not again.

To She Who Bears the Line,

If your blood has brought you here, then you have already felt the change. The stir beneath the skin. The quiet remembering.

Know this: the Hollow wakes only for its own. It does not mistake its heirs.

And now that it has looked at you, you cannot be unlooked at.

There will be dreams. Fractures. Echoes. They are not metaphor. They are the beginnings of memory. Not yours alone, but the line’s. What your ancestors carried, you now carry. What they bled to seal, you may bleed to open.

The blood remembers what the mind is not yet ready to know.

Harriett paused there. Her eyes burned.

It wasn’t a beautiful letter. There was no sentiment in it, no names, no soft edging of love or hope. It was a warning, and an instruction. There was no comfort in its formality—only the sense of something handed down so many times it no longer needed to apologize for what it demanded.

She read on.

You are the first since silence was chosen. Since names were placed in vaults instead of soil. You are the first to wake without permission.

This will not go unnoticed.

They will not call you heir. They will not hand you a key. They will not teach you what was yours to begin with.

But the Hollow is older than titles. Older than vaults. Older than the Ministry.

You have been marked not by law, but by blood. And so your path is yours to take.

Below that, there was a list—not written in ink, but pressed into the parchment like it had been scorched in by wand or bone or both. A short list, only a few lines.

If the seal has broken, begin with:

The Rite of Hollowing. (One drop. One name. One silence.)

The Sanctum Vault. (Beneath Gringotts. Closed to all but Sovereign Blood.)

The Mirror and the Flame. (Do not seek it before the Rite. You are not ready.)

There were no directions. No dates. No signatures. Only a sigil, faint and half-faded into the bottom margin: the same twisted stag, but this time drawn with a crown broken across its antlers.

She didn’t speak aloud. There was no one to speak to.

But the words repeated anyway.

You are the first to wake without permission.

She folded the letter along its original creases and placed it back in the chest.

Then she closed the lid with both hands, fingers pressed into the blackened wood until the grain left lines in her skin. She did not seal it. Did not rehide it. The door behind the tapestry had opened once, and it would open again.

Something inside her had begun to hum.

Not like before—not that frantic, frightened pulse of instinct in the wake of the Dementors, not the sick heat of the curse when Voldemort’s name was said too loud. This was slower. Lower. It sang just beneath her ribs, like a drumbeat she hadn’t heard in years but somehow still remembered how to march to.

She stayed on the floor until her legs went numb.

The house didn’t ask questions.

She didn’t sleep.

The letter sat folded beneath her pillow, the corners worn soft from her fingers. Her wand remained untouched. There was no need for light. The sky beyond the window bled slowly from slate to a sickly mauve, and the room stayed dim as ever, thick with dust and thought. Grimmauld Place never brightened—not even with dawn. It held tight to the dark like a house afraid of being seen too clearly.

She sat by the fire.

Not close. Not for warmth. Just near enough that the embers whispered faintly, that the crackle of ash and coal masked the sound of her breath.

She couldn’t stop thinking about the door.

About the chest.

About why it was here .

The Potter line had no place in the Black family house. That was what she’d always been told. The two families might have crossed paths—Pureblood circles were small, after all—but James had left. Left the name, the traditions, the politics. Married a Muggle-born. Fought a war. Died for it.

Whatever legacy he’d left behind… it shouldn’t have been here. Buried in these walls, behind Black velvet and bone-handled doors.

And yet.

The house had let her in.

It had opened to her without spell, without wand, without name. Her blood had touched the door and it had breathed.

There were answers. Probably.

Buried deep in parchment, or tangled in lineage charts at Gringotts, or whispered in the older corridors of Hogwarts where no one taught anymore.

She didn’t know if she wanted them.

Because if there was Black blood in her—if the lines crossed, however faintly—then something had been hidden from her. Something deliberate. Something cut out.

Or maybe it wasn’t blood at all.

Maybe it was the magic itself.

Maybe the Potter line hadn’t needed a key because their magic had once been closer to this than the Ministry would ever allow. Maybe the old families hadn’t just intermarried—they’d bound things. Made pacts and oaths and sanctums beneath the bones of the land itself.

She didn’t know.

But the more she tried to pin the thought down, the more it slipped from her. The letter’s words echoed: The Hollow does not mistake its heirs.

She was here for a reason.

The floor creaked behind her.

Not loud. Not clumsy. Just enough to pull her from the edges of thought.

She didn’t turn.

“You always did stay up too late.”

Sirius’s voice, low and dry. No surprise in it. No reprimand either.

He stepped into the light slowly, a robe shrugged half-on, hair tousled from sleep. He looked less like a guardian and more like a ghost this way—barefoot and threadbare, moving through his childhood home like it might try to bite him if he stepped too hard.

Harriett didn’t move.

“Couldn’t sleep,” she said.

“Mm.” He crouched beside the fire, poked at the coals with a poker that had gone rusted down the shaft. “House has that effect. It remembers too much. Sometimes it forgets how to let things rest.”

She looked at him.

“Do you know what’s behind the tapestry on the second floor?”

His hand stilled.

The fire snapped once, sharp.

Sirius didn’t look up.

“Don’t go back there,” he said.

“I already have.”

That earned her a glance. Brief. Measured. A flicker of something that might’ve been concern , or recognition , or maybe just tired acceptance .

“You found it, then.”

“I don’t know what I found.”

“You’re not supposed to.”

There was silence again, the house holding its breath.

Harriett turned fully now, folding her legs beneath her on the floor. “Why is there a Potter relic in a Black house?”

Sirius didn’t answer. Not right away.

He set the poker down gently, as if even that could trigger something he didn’t want to wake.

“This house… wasn’t always loyal,” he said finally. “Not to people. Not to names. It listens to power. Old power. Blood that doesn’t lie.”

“So it opened to me.”

“It let you find what you were already carrying. ” His voice was quieter now, but heavier. “The house didn’t give you anything, Harriett. It just stopped hiding it.”

She let that sit.

The question rose again anyway: Why here? Why me? Why now?

But Sirius was already standing.

He moved to the window, drew the curtain half-closed against the dull sky. His face was unreadable in the light.

“I won’t ask what it was,” he said. “And you won’t tell me.”

Harriett watched him. “Why not?”

“Because it wasn’t for me.” He paused. “But I will ask one thing.”

She waited.

“Don’t tell anyone else. Not yet. Not until you know what it means. Not Dumbledore. Not Molly. Not Ron or Hermione.”

“Do you think they’d care?”

“I think they’d try to.” He looked at her then. Really looked. “And that’s sometimes worse.”

She nodded.

It wasn’t agreement. It was understanding.

Sirius turned toward the stairs. “Go back to your room. Sleep, if you can.”

He didn’t wait for her to follow. He left the fire burning low behind him, and she sat there until the light finally caught the edge of the seal again—two halves of wax, parted but not yet crumbled.

She rose, slow. She didn’t put the pieces back together. Some things weren’t meant to be resealed. She didn’t ask for a meeting. She made one.

Cornered him in the drawing room just after breakfast, when most of the Order was still cloistered in the back parlour or drifting toward the kitchen. The door was open. The windows, as always, shuttered against a sun that didn’t try very hard. Dumbledore stood at the hearth, back turned, hands clasped behind him like he was admiring the fire for its discipline. He didn’t look surprised to see her.

He rarely did.

“Miss Potter,” he said, without turning. “How are you this morning?”

“I need access to the Potter vaults.”

A beat. The fire crackled softly.

When he turned, his face was polite. Pleasant, even. The same careful expression he wore during start-of-term feasts and Ministry functions. A mask built of age and benevolence.

“I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

“Why?”

“Your guardianship,” he said, with that maddening calm, “has been transferred to the Order. As such, decisions concerning your assets—”

“They’re not your assets.”

His smile did not falter. But it thinned.

“They are protected on your behalf.”

“No,” she said. “They’re locked away from me.”

“Because you are not ready.”

The air didn’t shift. No dramatic swell of pressure. No tremble beneath the floorboards.

Just silence. Just her standing in the same place where her parents’ names had once been spoken with reverence, being told—again—that her own life was something to be managed, not lived.

Harriett took a step forward.

“I didn’t ask to be anyone’s heir,” she said. “But I am. That name, that legacy—it’s mine, not yours. Not the Order’s. And certainly not the Ministry’s.”

“I understand your frustration.”

“No, you don’t.”

Her voice wasn’t loud. But it cut.

“Frustration is not the word for what I’m feeling right now.”

Dumbledore watched her. Still kind. Still patient. The kind of patience that expected her to rage and fail. To prove him right by falling apart.

“I know how difficult it is,” he said softly. “To want more than you are prepared to carry.”

“And you know exactly what I’m prepared for?”

“You are fifteen.”

“I’m also the one he keeps trying to kill.”

That was the first time the smile slipped. Only for a moment. Only for a breath. But it was enough.

“You think I don’t see what you’re doing,” she said, stepping closer. “You think I don’t know what it means to be kept in the dark? To be told nothing until it’s too late to do anything but bleed for someone else’s strategy?”

“I’ve kept you alive.”

“No. I’ve kept me alive. You’ve just kept me ignorant. ”

She expected him to argue.He didn’t.

He simply said, “There are things you are not meant to carry alone.”

“And who decided that?”

“I did.”

The quiet that followed was immense.

Not silence. Stillness . The kind that came before a storm, before a crack in the glass.

Harriett’s mouth curled into something that wasn’t quite a smile.

“There it is,” she murmured.

Dumbledore blinked.

“That’s what it’s always been, hasn’t it? Not about readiness. Not about protection. Just control. As long as I’m small enough to manage, I can be shaped into whatever you need.”

“Harriett—”

“No.” Her voice was steady now. Icy in the way lakewater is just before it turns to frost. “You say you trust me. But the second I ask a question you don’t want to answer, you close the door and tell me I’ll understand when I’m older.”

He said nothing.

She let that silence stretch.

“You smile while you strip everything away. My name. My vaults. My right to know. ” Her hands shook now, but not from fear. Not from weakness. From the sheer volume of everything she had not said until now. “You buried me in that house like a relic. And now you want me to thank you for letting me rot in peace.”

Finally, finally, something flickered behind his eyes. She wasn’t sure if it was guilt. Or fury. Or recognition.

Dumbledore straightened. Not angry. Not defensive. Just formal.

“Access to the Potter vaults is denied. That is final.”

“No,” Harriett said, taking one last step toward him. Her voice dropped. “It’s not.”

She left him there, standing in the quiet draw of the firelight, hands folded neatly again, like the conversation had been civil, like it hadn’t mattered.

Like it wasn’t the moment she stopped mistaking him for a protector. 

She didn’t remember leaving the drawing room.

Didn’t remember the corridor, or the stairs, or whether anyone passed her, spoke to her, watched her go. She only knew she was moving—moving fast, moving hard, moving with a purpose that hadn’t found its name yet. Her steps struck the floor too sharply. Her breath came fast but not shallow. The house shifted as she moved through it, like it was making way, or bracing.

She didn’t stop until she reached the cold landing just beneath the attic.

The wallpaper here curled at the edges like it had tried to escape. The air was thinner. The light didn’t reach.

She slammed her shoulder into the nearest door.

It opened with a groan and she stumbled inside, into a narrow room that smelled of dry rot and centuries. She didn’t care. Her hands curled into fists at her sides. Her chest rose and fell, not with panic, not with grief. Just fire .

It wasn’t the first time she’d been told no. It wasn’t even the cruelest thing he’d said to her. It wasn’t about the vault. It wasn’t even about the lies.

It was about the way he’d smiled. Like she was a girl who’d gotten too loud at dinner. Like he pitied her for not understanding that being locked in a cage was for her own good. Like she should have thanked him.

She let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding, sharp and ragged, and the air shimmered at the edge of her vision.

Her blood was boiling. Not metaphorically. Not emotionally. Physically .

There was a hum beneath her skin—low and steady, like the sound of earth cracking beneath a glacier. Her fingers itched. Her palms burned. The wound on her hand from the letter had split open again, a thin line of blood running down the length of her wrist like ink.

She pressed her hand to the floor, just to ground herself, just to breathe—and the stone hissed.

Not from heat. From recognition.

The runes beneath her skin—not carved, not inked, just there —flickered. Her magic pulsed outward like a wave, like a scream turned inside out. It wasn’t wand-magic. It wasn’t even spellwork. It was memory. Something older. Something raw.

And it wasn’t just hers. The rage in her chest was too big for one girl. Too ancient.

Too full of names she didn’t know but felt anyway. Names unspoken. Unremembered. Potters who had bled and been buried. Potters who had burned on pyres, or vanished in wars that didn’t make it into the schoolbooks. Potters who had signed their names to pacts and promises, who had fought not for glory but for survival, who had carved protection into the bones of their homes and died with salt in their mouths and fire under their tongues.

All of them— every single one —was screaming inside her now.

And not a single one of them would’ve thanked Dumbledore for a locked door.

She was heir to that. Not the House of Light and Order and Kindness. The Hollow. Her blood remembered. Even if the world refused to.

The magic didn’t just hum now—it sang , discordant and furious. The candle on the wall blew out. The floorboards groaned. The dust on the shelves lifted into the air like it had been stirred by a sudden gust, though the windows were shut.

Her body wasn’t shaking. Her control was absolute. But the power in her wasn’t.

It moved through her like a current, not dangerous to her, but to everything else. She pressed her palm harder into the stone and exhaled.

“I am not yours,” she whispered.

Not to Dumbledore. Not to the Ministry. Not to prophecy.

“I am not your shield. I am not your key. I am not your weapon.”

The stone beneath her hand pulsed. A faint shimmer of light crawled up through the cracks in the floorboards—pale, gold-tinged ash white. Runes flickered where her blood touched the dust.

“I am not small.”

The words didn’t echo. But the house heard them.

A sharp crack split the air—something upstairs. A ward breaking. A mirror fracturing. A door slamming of its own accord. She didn’t flinch. Let them wonder what it was. Let them feel it.

She stood slowly, the blood drying on her skin like ink sealing itself into parchment. The hum was fading. Not gone. Never gone. Just waiting. Like the rest of her. She turned toward the door, calm again, the way a blade was calm in its sheath.

This wasn’t over. It had barely begun .

The next morning, Harriett found a frog in her teacup.

It blinked up at her, luminous green, and let out a burp that smelled faintly of peppermint.

She stared at it.

The frog blinked again, slowly, like it was considering its life choices.

Across the table, Fred grinned.

“Early warning system,” he said. “If the tea’s poisoned, he’ll croak.”

George leaned back in his chair, one leg hooked casually over the other. “We were going to use a rat, but they’re harder to enchant and frankly less charming.”

Harriett arched a brow, entirely unimpressed.

“It’s half seven.”

“Exactly,” Fred said, reaching for a slice of toast. “Optimal time for sabotage and emotional recovery.”

George nodded. “Morning brooding sessions are better with company.”

“I’m not brooding.”

“Of course not.”

“Never.”

“Just… seething quietly.”

“Majestically.”

Harriett reached for the frog.

It chirped indignantly and leapt into her saucer.

Fred made a small gesture and the creature vanished with a pop, leaving behind a faint trail of glitter and a faint smell of cardamom.

Harriett exhaled slowly through her nose. “Do you do this to everyone who’s having a mental breakdown?”

“Only the ones we like.”

She gave them a long, flat look.

George grinned. “You’re a tough crowd.”

Fred leaned forward, lowering his voice just slightly. “But really, Potter. You alright?”

She didn’t answer immediately. Her fingers traced the edge of the now-empty cup. The tea had gone cold. So had everything else.

“No,” she said at last. “But I’m working on it.”

Fred’s expression didn’t shift. He just nodded.

“That’s good enough for us.”

There was something steady about the way he said it. Not flippant. Not pitiful. Just fact.

They didn’t offer advice.

They didn’t ask what had happened.

They didn’t bring up the faint crack in the ceiling from last night’s magical surge, or the sudden chill that had swept the upper floors just after sunrise, or the fact that Harriett hadn’t come down for dinner the night before and someone had silenced her room.

They just handed her toast, enchanted to warm again with a tap of the knife, and filled her teacup with something that smelled like cinnamon and didn’t turn into anything.

“Tell us if anyone gets annoying,” George said, mouth full.

Fred nodded. “We’ve been working on a curse that gives you hiccups every time you say the word prophecy. ”

“Or destiny. Or chosen one. We’re flexible.”

“And if that fails, we’ve got the backup plan.”

Harriett looked at them warily. “Which is?”

George grinned.

“Absolute anarchy.”

She almost smiled.

Almost.

And that, somehow, was enough.

She waited until the house was sleeping again.

Not just still— sleeping . The kind of silence that folds itself into the corners, that drapes across banisters like a shroud, that sinks into wallpaper and sucks the warmth out of the hearthstones. The kind of silence that watches but doesn’t speak.

She lit no candles. Cast no charms.

She wrote the letter by hand, in ink thick and black enough to stain her fingers. She used no names. No titles. Only the phrase she’d seen etched into the bottom of the Potter seal in that impossible chest:

I invoke Sovereign Blood.

She wrote it three times.

Once at the top of the parchment, to be read.
Once at the bottom, beneath her signature, to be remembered.
And once along the fold— cut into the paper with the tip of her wand —to be felt.

She signed the letter not as Harriett Potter.

She signed it:

Harriett, of the Hollow Line.
Heir by Blood.
Sanctum-Seeker.

The ink dried instantly.

She folded the letter with clean, crisp edges, waxed it with the red seal she’d lifted from the chest, and pressed the half-broken Potter crest into it—fractured stag, crowned and bleeding, head raised in defiance.

There was no owl at Grimmauld that would do.

She found one in the square, perched on the wrought-iron fence near Number Eleven, eyes like coals, feathers too dark to be seen clearly in the half-light. It didn’t blink when she approached.

She held the letter out in her palm. The bird stepped forward. Took it with delicate precision.

“Deliver it to the oldest name,” she whispered. “In the oldest tongue.”

The owl nodded. Not a movement. Not a twitch. A nod. And then it was gone.

The summons came two days later. No parchment. No wax. No owl.

Just a whisper in her ear as she passed the library:

Gringotts is open. Bring no one. Speak only the truth. Come with flesh, flame, and name.

She didn’t ask how it had reached her.

She didn’t tell anyone.

They met her at the rear entrance—an iron gate hidden between two charmed columns that shimmered when she stepped between them, flickering between states like glass held over flame.

The goblin who waited was tall by his kind’s standards, with iron rings through each ear and a set of robes that shimmered blue-black at the seams. He did not speak. He did not bow.

He looked at her. Really looked. And stepped aside.

The halls beyond the public corridors of Gringotts were colder, narrower. Older. Carved not for decoration but for defense. The walls bore no torches. The light came from runes etched into the stone—glowing softly, pulsing faintly in rhythm with her steps.

They descended deeper than she thought possible. She lost count of the doors they passed. Some were bound in silver. Some in iron. One in bone. At the seventh turn, they stopped.

The goblin raised his hand to a blank stone wall. Whispered something in a language her blood recognized but her mind didn’t.

The wall opened like a mouth.

Inside: a chamber lit with no visible source. Circular. The walls etched with rings of runes, ancient and silent, thrumming so faintly they made her teeth ache.

Three goblins waited.

One stood at the center. Older than the others. Skin the color of tarnished bronze, eyes like wet obsidian. He carried no weapons, no ledgers, no chain of office.

Only a single black candle, already burning.

“You are late,” he said.

“I was never invited.”

The corners of his mouth curled slightly. Not a smile.

“The blood calls itself.”

She stepped forward. He did not stop her. Another goblin stepped to the side, revealing a stone basin carved into the floor.

“Flesh,” the eldest said.

Harriett drew the dagger from beneath her cloak. Not hers. The silver one from the chest. She held it steady, let it bite into her palm. Her blood fell into the basin, and the runes along the edge lit in answer. Not red. Not gold. A pale, ash-colored glow, like the inside of a dying fire.

“Flame.”

She lit the candle with her breath. No spell. No wand. Just will.

“Name.”

She spoke it clearly. Without apology.

“Harriett, of the Hollow Line. Heir of the bloodline Potter, sovereign-born. I claim rite to what was sealed. I do not ask. I do not beg. I invoke. ”

The silence that followed was not absence. It was respect. The goblins lowered their heads.

“You are the first of your House to invoke this clause since Iolanthe the Ash-Binder,” the eldest said. “She who walked into the vault alone and left it changed.”

Harriett said nothing. She didn’t need to. They led her from the chamber without further ceremony. And behind her, the runes faded—slowly, like they were watching her go .

Excerpt from The Hollow Lexicon: On Blood, Flame, and Sovereign Rites
attributed to Iolanthe the Ash-Binder, High Matriarch of the Hollow Line

“The wand was a gift to make magic simpler. Not safer. The Old Ways were never safe.”

On Sovereign Blood and the Rite of Naming

To walk beneath the earth with fire and name is not to claim power, but to return it. Blood remembers what tongues forget. And when the blood speaks in its true voice—without wand, without oath, without witness—it is heard by stone, by ash, by flame.

These are the rites no one teaches. Because they are not meant to be taught. They are meant to be found.

Sovereign Blood is not a status. It is a condition. A resonance. When the name is older than the vault that bears it—when it walks unsealed, unblessed, unclaimed—it becomes dangerous. Not to others. But to silence .

And silence is what they fear most.

A Sovereign may not be crowned. But the earth knows them. The walls shift when they pass. The seals bend. The keys hum. Because what was buried was never meant to stay hidden. It was only waiting for the blood to remember.

There are three signs the Hollow has accepted your breath:

1. The rune awakens—not written, not etched, but burned into the breath between heartbeats.
2. The stone listens—not obedient, but attentive, weighing your presence against your name.
3. The flame answers—not with light, but with hunger.

If these have occurred, the first rite is no longer invitation. It is summons . You must come with:

• Flesh to mark your intention.
• Flame to open the unseen.
• Name to anchor the blood’s voice in time.

Do not come with questions. Do not come for answers. Come because you cannot do otherwise. If the door opens, you were already expected. If the vault speaks, it will not lie. And if the Hollow accepts you—

You will never be alone again.

“The world will call it madness. The Ministry will call it heresy. But the stone will call it by name.”

Chapter Text

The cart was unlike any she had ridden before.

It wasn’t the same skeletal rail-track that tourists and Ministry auditors rattled through, screaming as their hair whipped back in the wind. This one was slower. Older. A polished thing of black iron and quiet joints, the runes along its side too deep to be decorative. They pulsed faintly when she stepped in, and the goblin to her left—his robes embroidered with thread the color of ash and bone—gave no command aloud. The cart simply began to move.

Not with a jolt. Not with speed. Just motion.

The first corridor passed quickly—torches flickering, wards humming faintly overhead, the same utilitarian stone that marked the upper levels of Gringotts where coin and certificate were kept locked in fire and steel.

But soon the light changed.

The walls grew darker. Not black, but deep brown streaked with green, as though the stone itself remembered moss. The torches thinned. The sound of other carts vanished. They were descending through a tunnel meant for no one else.

Harriett could feel it in her teeth.

The silence wasn’t empty. It was watchful. As if they were being expected .

The air grew colder with each turning. Not damp—dry. Dehydrated, stripped of water by centuries of flame and enchantment. It tasted like dust left in the sun too long. Like parchment. Like bone left to cure.

They passed a door carved entirely from obsidian. There were no handles. Just glyphs etched in Gobbledegook, pulsing with light that had never seen the surface.

Two goblins stood watch, heads lowered. Their mouths moved soundlessly, lips forming patterns too precise to be language. Harriett didn’t need to hear the words to understand they were chanting .

It wasn’t worship.

It was remembrance .

She pressed her back against the cart’s cool edge, watching them pass. Their eyes never lifted, but she felt something reach toward her—just a thread, just a breath. A whisper through the metal that tasted like warning.

They descended further.

The tunnel narrowed.

The curve of the track began to slope in a way that made her stomach press against her spine—not from motion, but from proximity . As though they were entering a space where gravity wasn’t entirely the same, where distance and depth began to bend around magic older than geometry.

The torches had stopped altogether. Now the walls glowed with veins of something not quite crystal—pale green, warm to the eye but not to the skin. The light flickered when she breathed.

The goblin beside her did not speak. Had not spoken since the chamber. He simply sat, eyes forward, one long-fingered hand resting on the hilt of a dagger that looked far more ceremonial than useful. She didn’t ask his name. Didn’t want to know it. They weren’t allies. He was a keeper .

And she was something being returned.

The cart passed a gate wrought in twisted silver and blackstone. As they passed beneath it, Harriett felt something scrape along the edge of her magic—not cruelly. Not even painfully. Just a reminder.

You are not what you were when you entered.

She exhaled, slow.

The letter had said flesh, flame, and name. She had given all three. But the letter hadn’t said what waited beyond them.

The descent grew quiet again.

The air here had no sound.

No echo.

Just the soft hum of the cart’s enchanted wheel against a track carved before the language she spoke had ever been born.

The goblin finally turned his head, the motion smooth and precise. “You may feel disorientation upon arrival,” he said.

His voice was dry, flat.

“Define disorientation.”

He didn’t blink.

“You are entering a vault that was never meant to be opened without ritual. There will be friction.”

“From what?”

“From everything .”

And then the cart slowed.

Not stopped.

Slowed.

And in the dim ahead, something opened .

The cart stopped with no sound.

Not a shudder, not a jerk. Just a stilling of motion, like a breath exhaled into stone. The tunnel ahead ended in a wall of smooth obsidian, unmarked, unwelcome, seemingly whole. For a moment Harriett thought this might be it—that the Hollow had changed its mind, that whatever rite she had unknowingly begun would be left unfinished, incomplete, sealed again behind myth and mistake.

But then her hand burned.

Not sharply. Not with pain. Just a steady, rising heat beneath the skin of her palm, where the rune had first split her flesh weeks ago. The mark was no longer visible, but her blood remembered.

The goblin gestured toward the wall. “It will know you,” he said.

That was all.

She stepped down from the cart. The stone beneath her feet was smooth as glass, and cold in a way that felt deliberate. She reached out with her left hand—her marked hand—and laid her fingers against the obsidian.

It rippled.

Like water struck by a breath.

The surface shimmered once, and then split—cleanly, precisely, a vertical seam opening like an eye blinking back to consciousness.

What lay beyond was not a vault.

It was a sanctuary .

The chamber was circular. The walls carved entirely from obsidian, veined with threads of something paler, like quartz lit from within. Ghostly blue flames hovered in sconces carved directly into the stone—no smoke, no scent, just light that touched nothing but made everything visible.

It was colder here.

But not lifeless.

It was the cold of still air, of waiting. The chill of a hand placed gently on a tomb, not a warning, but reverence.

Harriett stepped forward.

The door sealed behind her without sound.

In the center of the room stood a pedestal carved from something bone-white and fibrous, less like stone and more like the fossilized memory of trees. Resting atop it: a grimoire bound in what might have once been hide, its surface veined like stone beneath skin. It pulsed faintly when she looked at it—subtle, rhythmic, not unlike a heartbeat slowed with age. She didn’t touch it.

Not yet.

To the right, a long shelf carved into the wall bore ceremonial tools, each resting in its own fitted groove: a dagger of carved silver, the hilt etched in old runes that pulsed softly when her eyes passed over them; a bowl of black volcanic glass, wide and shallow, flecked with iridescent fragments like crushed stars; a sealed urn capped in gold, darker at the edges with time. The inscription at its base had not faded:

Ashes of Elinor, First Witch of the Hollow

Harriett stared at the name.

She did not know who Elinor was.

But something in her bones did .

A pressure behind her eyes. A weight at the base of her spine. A flicker in the blood that made her breath catch— This is yours , the feeling said. She is yours.

Further along the wall were scrolls, tied with red twine and stacked with geometric precision. Each was labeled in long-forgotten script, the ink dense and iron-dark. Some bore names. Others only dates, or sigils. One had no writing at all—just the outline of a hand burned into the vellum.

But it was the mirror that caught her.

Tucked into a niche in the far wall, its frame was wrought from twisted metal and horn, sealed with wax and gold filigree. It was not tall. Barely wider than her shoulders. She stepped in front of it and did not see herself.

She saw memory.

Flickers, like candlelight through water:

A woman standing in a salt circle, chanting in a language Harriett did not know but understood. A child marking a ward into a tree with her own blood. A man—black-robed, bare-footed, wandless—kneeling beside a tomb and whispering to it. A girl with Harriett’s eyes pressing her hand into a hollow in the stone.

The images came and went, fast and fluid. Not visions. Not dreams.

Remembrance.

The mirror was not for vanity. It was for inheritance.

She stepped back, stomach tight with something she couldn’t name. Grief, maybe, but too ancient to be hers. Awe, perhaps, but threaded with anger.

And then the flame nearest her flared—just once.

Blue turned briefly white.

And the words came, not aloud, not written, but within :

The House of Potter is not a name.

It is a ward.

It is a seal.

It is a gate.

They were never just kind-hearted Gryffindors, she heard. Not just political allies, not just clever rebels or noble sacrifices.

They had been Gatekeepers .

A line of magical wardens, charged not with conquest, but with containment. With memory . With the binding of old things, the closing of dangerous ones. With walking beside death and keeping its tally. Their hands wrote sigils across uncharted land, their bones were buried beneath wards no one remembered to renew. They did not seek fame. They did not pass down stories.

They passed down oaths. Wards woven from starlight and sacrifice. Deathless knowledge inherited through dreams and fire. Relics never meant to be found by unworthy hands.

The world had forgotten what they were.

But the Hollow hadn’t.

And neither had she.

She turned back to the grimoire.

It had begun to hum.

She stepped toward the pedestal with the deliberate quiet of ritual.

Not reverence—not fear—but the stillness of understanding. Her feet made no sound on the stone. The obsidian beneath her soles had gone warm, as if the room had begun to remember her, piece by piece. The flamelight didn’t flicker. Even the mirror behind her, now dimmed, did not reflect her passage. The air held its breath.

The grimoire waited.

Its cover looked like skin dried taut over bone, but darker, veined like stone left too long under pressure. It was bound in what might once have been sinew, stretched and lacquered and pressed into something too old to call leather. No title marked the cover. No name. Only a circle of scorched runes, faintly glowing, faintly listening.

It was not chained. It was not locked. But it would not open. Not without price.

Harriett stood over it, pulse low in her throat, the faint throb of her own heartbeat suddenly louder in her ears. The humming wasn’t sound, not exactly. More sensation. A tuning-fork’s echo against the inside of her ribcage. It was calling to her—not like a voice, but like gravity. Not insistence. Permission.

Her hand moved before her mind did.

She reached for the silver dagger laid beside the pedestal. The runes along its hilt flared faintly at her touch, glowing with that ash-colored light she was beginning to recognize not as color, but intent. She turned it in her palm once. Its edge was clean. It didn’t feel like a weapon. It felt like punctuation.

She pressed the blade to her palm without ceremony.

The pain was immediate but manageable. A single line of red, drawn deliberately across the same skin that had burned in Privet Drive. Blood welled slowly—thicker than it should have been. Darker. There was a scent to it, she realized distantly. Not iron. Not copper. Something older. Like wet earth after lightning.

She turned her hand over the book.

And let it fall.

The first drop struck the rune in the center.

The second was swallowed.

The third—the book breathed.

A slow, shifting exhale.

The cover flexed—not entirely physically, not entirely in her sight, but somewhere just beyond her senses, like it had uncoiled from a thousand-year slumber. The runes rippled across its surface. The spine pulsed. The skin of it shifted in place, almost fluid. Not softening— awakening.

The blood didn’t stain.

It vanished.

Taken.

Harriett stepped back.

Not in fear. In understanding.

The grimoire began to hum in full.

A deep resonance, not vocal but bodily. Her blood answered it. Her ribs answered it. Something at the base of her skull—the hollow where dream and memory blurred— answered it.

And then the book opened. Not abruptly. Not obediently.

It simply… unfolded .

The pages were not parchment. Not paper.

They were thin sheets of pressed something—not flesh, not stone, not metal, but a layered, fibrous material that felt alive even from a distance. She could feel the heat it had once known, the ash pressed into its making. The ink glowed as though written in the remains of flame. The script curved in a way that hurt the eye if looked at too directly—glyphs shifting slightly with each breath, as though still making decisions about who they were and how they wished to be seen. Not mistranslated— unfinished , like a prophecy that reshapes itself the longer you dare to read.

She stepped forward. The runes on the open page rearranged themselves. And spoke. Not aloud. Not in her head. Somewhere else. Somewhere deeper.

You have bled.
You have called.
You have been named.

Harriett swallowed. The silence around her had gone thick, weighted—not oppressive, not hostile, but dense with recognition. It was not the cold of stone. It was the cold of being seen completely, and found worthy.

The words continued—scrawled in blood that hadn’t dried, in strokes that flared faintly with each beat of her pulse.

This is the grimoire of the Hollow Line.
It will open to no thief.
It will burn in the hands of a stranger.
It will only speak to its own.

Harriett’s eyes scanned the page, half afraid to blink. The lines of text crawled downward like they were growing , drawn forward by her proximity, fed by her blood. She turned the page. More runes.

A diagram of a ward she didn’t recognize, drawn in a triple circle of binding salt. Beneath it: three words, written in a red darker than blood.

Remember. Refuse. Rewrite.

It didn’t feel like instruction. It felt like commandment.

She turned again.

A map. But not of land. Of lineage . Names she’d never heard—some scratched out, others circled in delicate gold leaf. A tree without branches, just a single root coiled around a symbol she didn’t know. The root pulsed faintly, almost imperceptibly. At its center:

Elinor.

And beneath it—

Ignotus.

Not in myth. Not in metaphor. But in rite. Harriett exhaled. The Potters were not simply descended. They were marked. Not by fate. Not by prophecy. But by function.

A bloodline bound by vow, not blood alone. Inherited duty. Legacy as seal. They had not defied death. They had walked beside it. Escorted it. Spoken with it as an equal. When death asked its price, they had paid it—willingly, again and again. Not to conquer. Not to survive. But to protect.

Because that was what the Potters were.

Keepers.

Not warriors. Not kings. Not gods.

Wards incarnate.

They did not chase glory. They bound it . They buried it. They ensured it did not rise again.

Where the House of Black worshipped stars and void, sought power in what glittered at a distance, the House of Potter was older still. They bowed not to celestial chaos, but to the in-between.

They were devoted to thresholds.

The place between worlds, between breath and silence, between life and death, safety and ruin. That liminal place where no banner flew and no spell could hold—but where something must always stand guard .

That was their magic.

Not destructive, but anchoring.

Magic that held .
Magic that sealed .
Magic that remembered.

Relics of fire and oath, passed hand to hand in silence.

A history scrubbed away by generations who preferred the Potters kind-hearted and clean—a nice name to align with, to marry into, to send thank-you notes at holidays. But that was a mask.

A lie. This legacy had teeth. And Harriett could feel them .

No wonder Dumbledore wanted her kept small. No wonder the vault had waited until her blood called it open. She was not meant to be a soldier. She was meant to be a gate. And now, the gate had opened.

The grimoire turned another page without her touching it. Her blood soaked into the margin like ink to vellum. The ink flared once—blinding—
and then dimmed. The runes whispered:

What is buried, burns.
What is sealed, waits.
What is yours, is awakening.

Behind her, the flames in the sconces rose to full height. The chamber pulsed once, low and slow and final . A heartbeat the size of memory. Behind her, the goblin finally spoke.

“You’ve accepted the inheritance.”

Harriett did not turn.

“I didn’t say anything.”

He stepped forward, just enough that she caught his reflection in the glass edge of the obsidian.

“You bled on the book,” he said. “You opened the path. There is no closing it now.”

She didn’t answer. Didn’t argue.

She closed the grimoire slowly, reverently. Its cover had changed again. Now the rune on its front matched the one burned into the wood beside her bed. It hadn’t copied her.

She had copied it.

When she turned back to the vault, the mirror behind her no longer showed flickers. Only her. Still, quiet, small. But not alone. The ghosts had stepped forward. They stood behind her reflection like sentinels, or sisters.

She turned away before she could see their faces.

She apparated into the front hall of Grimmauld Place without a sound.

The wards let her through like water parting around a hand. No resistance. No protest. No delay. The chill in the air wrapped around her like velvet—cold, yes, but not unkind. The floor beneath her boots groaned softly, more echo than complaint, the old wood shifting just enough to say: I know you. I remember your tread.

Grimmauld Place did not greet her with light.

It welcomed her in shadows.

The sconces flickered once and stilled. The chandelier above remained unlit, but the dust clinging to its iron arms glittered faintly as she passed. Something in the silence shifted—closer to breath than to sound. The house exhaled around her. Or perhaps it listened.

Harriett stood still in the doorway, her cloak still heavy with vault air, eyes adjusting to the familiar dim. There was no one waiting. No sound of the kitchen. No shuffle of Sirius in the hall. The portrait of Walburga Black remained shrouded behind its velvet curtain.

But the air knew her.

She felt it in her chest. In the hollow of her ribs, where the grimoire’s hum still lingered like a second heartbeat. She had left this house with nothing. Returned with a bloodline singing through her veins.

Something in her had changed. Something in the house noticed.

From the far end of the corridor came a rustle—quiet, light, like slippered feet on silk. She didn’t turn. She didn’t need to.

Kreacher appeared a moment later, emerging from the shadows as if he had been waiting there all along.

He did not scowl. He did not mutter. He looked at her.

His eyes were sharper tonight, less rheumy, their pale whites tinged with something clear, something steady. They traveled from her face to her hands, where a trace of dried blood still clung to the cuff of her sleeve. His gaze lingered there, and then rose again.

“Kreacher sees her now,” he said, low and rough and full of something she could not name. “The hollow-wrought. The line awakened.”

Harriett said nothing. There was nothing to say.

Kreacher bowed.

Not stiffly. Not sarcastically. A slow, deep bend from the spine, his chin touching his chest, his hands splayed at his sides. Not to a girl. Not to a name. To an heir.

He said no more. He slipped away like breath dissolving into mist, his absence leaving the corridor somehow warmer .

Harriett moved slowly up the stairs.

She didn’t rush. The banister did not catch her wrist. The runner did not snag her soles. The house opened its silence around her like a womb—sheltering, dark, expectant. The portraits along the walls didn’t whisper. Even the walls, always groaning in protest, held their tongue.

When she passed the portrait of Walburga Black, the curtains twitched.

And then opened.

No scream. No shriek. No bile-laced fury.

Walburga Black gazed down at her with sharp eyes that no longer looked fully human. Her painted hair was pinned in the old style, her robes heavy with stitched constellations. But her mouth did not move. Not at first.

Then—softly, almost too quiet to catch—

“You are not what I expected.”

Harriett turned her head. Neither spoke for a long moment. Then Walburga smiled—not cruel, not mad. Small. Pleased.

“I remember when the House of Black was still a house of thresholds. When we warded borders with bone and starlight. When we spoke to what slept beneath the floor. Before we made idols of blood alone.”

Harriett tilted her head.

“You think this was once yours?” she asked.

The portrait’s smile widened, just enough to show teeth.

“I think we are more entangled than you were allowed to know.”

A flicker of motion in the background— another painting watching . Another woman, unlabelled, her face half-lost in soot and crackling varnish. She raised her hand in greeting. Harriett did not know her name.

But she bowed. The curtains drew themselves closed. And Harriett kept climbing.

By the time she reached her room, the fire had lit itself. Her sheets had been turned back. The scent of chamomile and lavender curled in the air, faint and wild, like something grown behind a grave.

She did not weep. She did not speak.

She set the grimoire on the desk with both hands, and it curled slightly in place, like it was nestling in.

Outside, the house settled. The wards folded. The bones beneath the floor exhaled.

Welcome home , said the dark.

And this time, Harriett believed it.

Excerpt from The Threshold Codex
Vault-Sealed Scroll, Third Circle of the Hollow Line

“To open the door is not to pass through it. It is to become it.”

On Descent and the Gate-Flesh

There is no vault without memory.

The further one descends, the more the bones of the earth begin to whisper. Not in words—but in vibration. In resonance. In the hollow pitch of names never spoken aloud. When the torchlight fades and the runes turn inward, you are no longer among the living. You are among the remembered.

The sanctum is not a vault. It is a witness . It holds no treasure. Only proof . That you came. That you bled. That you did not ask politely but were recognized as necessary.

There are three markers that the Hollow has turned its face toward you:

1. The stone will hum beneath your feet, the old rhythm of the line striking up through your bones. Do not dance to it. Listen. Let it carve your gait.
2. The mirror will not reflect. It is not for ego. It is not for appearance. It is the water in which your inheritance drowns or swims.
3. The book will breathe. Not on its own. Not for strangers. Only when the line remembers itself.

There is no path more dangerous than the one that accepts you.

If the grimoire opens, you are no longer merely a child of your House. You are the vessel of its binding oath .

This is what it means to descend:

• To leave behind the surface magic of wand and whim.
• To unmake yourself as student, soldier, chosen.
• To let your blood remember what your name was meant to carry.

For we were never keepers of gold.

We were keepers of closure . What was sealed in fire, we marked in salt. What rose with shadow, we bound in lightless circles. We did not raise banners. We did not seek crowns. We stood in doorways others feared to name.

The world will not thank you. The world will not even notice. But the stone will. The silence will. And when your bones are dust, it will be your name the Hollow whispers next.

“You are not heir. You are hinge. You are not wielder. You are ward.”

Chapter Text

The morning she left for Hogwarts, the sky hung low and colorless, caught between blue and smoke. The windows of Grimmauld Place looked out on a street not yet awake, but the house had already begun to stir. Doors creaked in distant halls. A kettle hissed. Somewhere, a portrait muttered in its sleep.

Harriett sat curled on the worn divan in the drawing room, cloaked but ungloved, the edges of her sleeves still smudged faintly with ash from the vault. The grimoire was in her trunk now—wrapped in linen, sealed with runes, tucked between robes and ritual salt like just another textbook. But she could feel it even now, humming faintly at the base of her spine.

Her hand was bandaged. The blood had dried, but the mark had not left her. It would never leave her again.

Sirius leaned against the mantle, mug in hand, hair still damp from the sink. He wasn’t dressed like someone going to a train platform. He wasn’t dressed like someone staying behind, either. His collar was crooked, his boots unlaced. He looked like he might vanish and reappear as smoke. She hadn’t asked where he’d been the night before.

He hadn’t asked what she’d brought back.

“So,” he said finally, after the silence had curled a little too long between them. “Excited to return to the madhouse?”

Harriett didn’t answer right away. Her eyes drifted to the fireplace. The logs had gone out. Only a few dull embers remained, stubborn in the grate.

“I don’t think I’m going back,” she said.

Sirius blinked.

“Pretty sure the train disagrees with you.”

She shook her head. “Not like that. I mean—I’ll be there. In the halls. In the classes. But I’m not going back. Not as I was.”

Sirius exhaled through his nose. Sat down across from her, his cup balanced carefully on his knee.

“Did something happen?” he asked.

She gave him a look.

The corner of his mouth twitched. “Right. Stupid question.”

A pause.

Then—

“Do you want to tell me?”

“No,” Harriett said softly. “But I might. Eventually.”

He nodded like that was the only answer he could respect.

The light through the window edged toward gold. Dust danced in it.

Sirius leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “The first time I realized I couldn’t trust the people who raised me,” he said, “I didn’t scream. I didn’t throw anything. I just— stopped being there. I still went home. I still sat at the table. But something else in me went quiet. And it never came back.”

Harriett watched the way his hands curled.

“Something like that,” she said.

He looked at her. Really looked. Then reached into his pocket and pulled out something small—a coin, worn nearly smooth, with a sigil carved into it that flickered faintly in the dim.

“What is it?”

“An old token,” he said. “Passed to me when I turned seventeen. From a cousin I didn’t get to keep. It opens nothing. It pays for nothing. But it remembers.”

She didn’t ask what it remembered.

He handed it to her anyway.

The door creaked open.

Footsteps.

Voices.

And then the noise began—Molly bustling into the room with a scarf in one hand and a sandwich in the other, Ron stumbling after her with his trunk half-dragged, Hermione trying to check everyone’s schedules, and George and Fred making a production out of levitating their luggage in tight, dizzying orbits around Ginny’s head.

“Train leaves in thirty-five minutes!” Molly called, already tightening her shawl around her shoulders. “Shoes on! Wands secured! No time for dawdling—oh, Harriett, eat something, would you?”

The quiet between her and Sirius folded closed like a book snapped shut.

She stood.

Pocketed the coin.

Shouldered her trunk.

Sirius didn’t say goodbye.

But as she passed him in the hall, his hand brushed her shoulder once, firm and warm.

“I see you,” he said, low.

That was enough.

The train groaned beneath her feet as it pulled from the platform, the wheels dragging heavy against the metal like they didn’t want to leave either.

Harriett stood in the corridor just outside the compartment where Ron and Hermione had claimed seats for the three of them—like it would be as simple as that, again. As if nothing had happened. As if trust were a pocket-sized thing you could lose and recover without consequence.

Ron fidgeted with the cuff of his jumper, already half-sweaty from the rush. He didn’t meet her eyes. Hermione was talking—soft, fast, oversmiling.

“There’s a prefect meeting, we’ve got to go—it’ll be just an hour, maybe less, really, and then we’ll be back. You can grab us a spot, alright?”

Harriett nodded once.

It wasn’t agreement.

It was permission .

They both looked faintly relieved. Like a door had been cracked open and they could slip out before it slammed. Ron muttered something about robes. Hermione touched her shoulder with a hand so light it barely registered, and then they were gone—vanishing up the corridor with the slow guilt of people who knew they’d been forgiven too easily.

Harriett didn’t watch them leave.

She stood for a moment longer, letting the sway of the train press against her bones. Her reflection in the window looked the same, but her magic pulsed low at her throat, coiled and quiet. It hadn’t liked that exchange. It hadn’t liked the carefulness, the way they’d talked around her like she might shatter if touched too firmly. Her magic didn’t want apologies.

It wanted truth.

She took a slow breath and turned away from the glass.

Half the compartments were already full. She passed Lavender and Parvati curled up with glossy magazines, a pack of third-years trading Chocolate Frog cards, two Slytherins she didn’t know trying very hard not to acknowledge her presence. She ignored them all.

Then—

A snort of laughter.

Fred’s voice, rich with mock solemnity: “I, for one, think Percy would make an excellent werewolf. He already howls every time we open a window.”

George laughed, hilariously similar to a fox’s cry, “And he’s allergic to silver. Or was that responsibility?”

“You’re both wrong. He’s clearly a mooncalf in a tragic disguise.” Luna replied calmly. 

Harriett stopped outside the door.

Inside, Luna sat cross-legged on one of the benches, her wand tucked behind her ear like a pencil. Neville was beside her, already red-faced from whatever had just been said. George and Fred occupied the other side like twin monarchs surveying their court of mischief. There was space beside them.

Fred looked up. His grin widened, but not mockingly.

“Potter,” he said, like it was an invitation.

George scooted over without comment. Harriett slid the door open and stepped inside.

No one asked where Ron and Hermione were. No one asked how she was. No one said are you alright in that soft, papery voice she was starting to associate with people who hadn’t really looked at her.

Luna offered her a folded copy of The Quibbler , scrawled over with what appeared to be defensive rune annotations. Neville gave her half a Cauldron Cake without speaking. George passed her a fizzing flask of something green and probably illegal.

For a long minute, they said nothing. The train clacked beneath them. The tension in her shoulders began to ease. Not vanish. Not melt. But shift , like armor settling into place rather than weighing her down.

Luna was humming something off-key. Fred was transfiguring a pair of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans into bouncing cubes. George asked, out of nowhere, “Do you think ghosts can get seasick?”

Harriett blinked.

“No?”

“I think they can,” he said seriously. “Moaning Myrtle’s always moaning. Could be maritime.”

“I thought that was because she was murdered,” Neville offered.

Luna nodded sagely. “Emotional seasickness.”

Harriett let out a breath that almost sounded like a laugh.

The warmth of it startled her.

She hadn’t smiled—really smiled—in weeks. Months, maybe. She had clenched her jaw through blood rites and screamed only in dreams. She had cracked open the legacy of her family and bled into stone for its memory. And here she was, in a compartment with two chaos agents, a girl who believed in Nargles, and a boy who still got nervous around tea kettles—and for the first time in a long time, she didn’t feel like a blade.

She felt like a person .

Fred leaned back, stretched his arms overhead, and said, “Glad you sat with us. You look like you needed it.”

“I didn’t,” she said, because it was easier.

Luna looked at her, dreamy-eyed and unbothered.

“Yes, you did.”

Harriett looked out the window. The countryside rolled past like water running in reverse, green and gold and softly blurred.

Maybe she had. Maybe this was what the Hollow had meant when it whispered you are not alone. Not ceremony. Not blood.

Choice.

The Great Hall glittered with golden light and the illusion of ease.

Above, the enchanted ceiling rolled with the last streaks of twilight—clouds dragged thin as gauze across a deep blue sky. Candles floated overhead in their usual orbits, their flames steady and tame. Platters were beginning to appear one by one, heavy with roast meats and sugared vegetables, but the smell of them made Harriett’s stomach turn.

It wasn’t that she wasn’t hungry. It was that she couldn’t pretend to be.

The Gryffindor table stretched out before her like a line she didn’t want to cross. Ron was already there, halfway through a conversation with Seamus and Dean, his voice too loud for someone who hadn’t said a word to her since they boarded the train. Hermione sat beside him, eyes flicking to Harriett every few minutes with the same nervous flicker as someone checking the sky for rain—hoping it wouldn’t, but expecting it might. There was an empty space left beside them.

A trap, not an invitation.

Harriett didn’t slow. She passed them without pausing, without speaking. She felt Hermione’s gaze track her for several steps, felt Ron stiffen just slightly, but neither called out. Neither followed. And that was answer enough.

Further down the table, Fred spotted her first. He raised a goblet in lazy salute and nudged George with the back of his hand. George slid over with practiced ease, clearing space without fuss or commentary. Neville, already red-faced from the attention of a nearby fourth-year asking about Mimbulus mimbletonia, brightened visibly when she approached.

Harriett sat down beside him. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.

Across the room, she could feel the weight of Dumbledore’s gaze. It wasn’t constant. It moved—slid over the Slytherin table, lingered on the returning seventh-years, turned toward the staff—but always circled back. Watching her in the way one might watch an altar they’ve sealed too well. Not regretful. Just... expectant.

She didn’t look up. Not until he rose from his seat.

The room dimmed slightly as the Headmaster stood. His robes were purple tonight, threaded with a shimmer like crushed lilac, his beard lit at the edges by the candlelight. He smiled down at them all like a grandfather might—warm, benevolent, unreadable.

His speech was short. It always was when things were about to get worse. A welcome to first years. A reminder about the Forbidden Forest. A few cheery words about unity and vigilance and the power of love.

She felt them like sugar poured over rot. When the applause began, she didn’t move. Neither did Fred. The twins had long since learned when not to clap. Neville gave a polite tap of his hands against the table and then dropped them quickly, as if embarrassed.

Across the aisle, a few Ravenclaws had turned to glance at her. Not sneering. Not whispering. Just watching. Cho Chang met her gaze briefly. Her brow furrowed. Then she looked away. Harriett said nothing.

Her hands remained folded in her lap. The grimoire’s presence ghosted against her ribs, tucked between spellbooks in the satchel at her feet. It was not open. But it was listening .

“Try the roast chicken,” George said after a moment. “It’s unnervingly good tonight. We suspect a new house-elf. Possibly possessed.”

“Possibly just competent,” Fred added. “Which would be worse, honestly. Expectations, you see.”

Neville stifled a laugh into his pumpkin juice. Harriett picked up her fork. The food tasted exactly as she remembered it—but none of it sat right. It was all too warm. Too rich. Too intentional . As if someone had tried too hard to recreate a childhood comfort she’d never actually had.

She ate in slow, mechanical bites. Around her, the conversation turned to class schedules, rumors about the new Defense professor (a witch from the Isles, quiet and scarred), and an explosion in the Herbology greenhouses that had turned four Hufflepuffs faintly lavender.

Harriett nodded when spoken to. Gave small answers. Even smiled, once or twice. But she could feel the distance like a second skin—an invisible ward between her and the world she’d once known how to belong to.

When dessert appeared—golden tarts blooming with late-summer berries, puddings swirled with cream and nutmeg, dense chocolate confections that steamed slightly in the candlelight—Harriett pushed her plate aside.

She did it gently. Without drama. Without ceremony.

The fork made a soft sound as she set it down beside her plate. The silver was heavier than she remembered. Everything in this hall was. The ceiling. The air. The eyes that glanced past her, then away.

She sat with her hands folded loosely in her lap and watched the others eat.

The chatter around her rose and fell like tidewater—steady, rhythmic, the slow tide of students slipping back into familiar roles and well-worn friendships. Laughter sparked in pockets. A sixth-year sneezed butterbeer across the table. Someone down the way was trying to enchant a spoon to stir itself. Fred and George were comparing notes on who might die first in Divination. Neville leaned over now and then to offer polite observations no one really heard, and Luna hummed a tune that didn’t match the one the ghosts were singing.

It should have been comforting. And for a moment, she let herself pretend it was.

But beneath the warmth and clatter and candlelight, something else churned. Something quieter. More fundamental. Not dread. Not grief. Just… displacement .

A subtle, precise ache, like stepping into a room you once loved only to find all the furniture rearranged. The shape of it was the same. The bones. The name. But nothing sat where it used to. The corners felt wrong. The warmth no longer reached the floor.

She had spent five years learning how to fit here. To sit at this table and laugh with these people, to share a bench with Ron and a plan with Hermione, to trust in the simple rhythm of school and house and home. But somewhere along the way— maybe the moment the rune burned into the wood beside her bed, maybe earlier, maybe always —that rhythm had stopped carrying her.

She didn’t miss Ron.

Not really.

She didn’t miss Hermione either.

What she mourned was something smaller, more private: the soft shape of their absence, and the echo of who they’d once been to her. Before silence settled between them. Before safety became more important than honesty. Before Dumbledore’s careful, kind-edged manipulations made them pliable enough to keep her in place.

They hadn’t betrayed her. Not exactly. They had just listened to someone else more than they listened to her . And that, she’d learned, was enough to break things beyond repair. 

She stared down at the untouched tart on her plate. The berries glistened like polished stones, too ripe, too red. She had no appetite for sweetness tonight.

Beside her, Fred leaned in. He didn’t crowd her. Didn’t nudge or jostle or speak too loudly. He just tilted his body a little, lowered his voice to a conspiratorial murmur that didn’t demand a reply.

“You know,” he said, “if you ever want to vanish between classes and leave chaos in your place, we’re very good at that.”

Harriett turned her head to look at him. Not sharply. Just enough for her eyes to find his. Her expression didn’t change. She didn’t smile. But something behind her gaze shifted—like a door unlocking, not opening.

Across the table, George leaned forward on his elbows, a slow grin curling the corner of his mouth.

“Or,” he added, “if you just need a place to breathe. We’re good at that too.”

There was no edge to his voice. No pity. Just something still and sure, like they’d seen something in her she hadn’t yet named.

Harriett didn’t thank them.

She didn’t know how. The words didn’t fit right in her mouth anymore—not when they were supposed to carry the weight of years, of longing, of what it meant to be quietly chosen by people who expected nothing in return.

So instead, she looked back at her plate. Pushed it further away. Sat a little straighter. And stayed.

The first-years were long gone by the time the feast was called to an end. Most of the Hall had emptied out—professors trailing toward their chambers, prefects herding dazed students into lines. Ron and Hermione had left with the crowd, drifting out without looking back. Harriett hadn’t noticed when.

But she noticed this .

Fred and George didn’t move until she did.

Neville offered her a hand when she rose—uncertain, a little awkward, but solid—and Luna walked just behind them, humming a dirge that didn’t quite match her light-footed grace.

Harriett walked out of the Great Hall not alone, but unsure . And that, for the first time in a long time, felt like enough.

Not certainty. Not forgiveness. Just the quiet beginning of something else. Something real.

The cloak moved like it remembered her.

It had always been light. Silken. Cool to the touch. But now it listened. The fabric shifted with her breath, tightening when she tensed, loosening when she stilled. It no longer hung passively over her shoulders—it watched with her. When she walked, it swayed just ahead of her toes, guiding her steps away from the creaky floorboards in the fourth corridor. When Filch passed her by near the Great Hall, it fluttered just slightly at the hem—like a warning.

Harriett didn’t know if it was the blood or the book that had changed it.
Maybe both.
Maybe neither.
Maybe it had been waiting all along.

She slipped through the castle like smoke. Silent. Half-there. The stars watched her through the narrow slit windows, and the stone arches held their breath. She passed no one. Heard nothing. The air in the upper halls was colder than she remembered—cleaner, somehow. The dust didn’t stir when she passed, but it noticed.

It took her longer than she expected to find the tower.

It was one of the old astronomy spires, half-collapsed and long sealed off for "student safety," though the truth was simpler: the school had stopped needing it. No classes led here. No foot traffic. Only long-forgotten storage charms and the quiet residue of old nights.

She broke the ward with a flick of her wand and a murmur of something she didn’t remember learning.

The door sighed open.

Inside, the air was sharp and dry, the kind that stole the warmth from your lungs. The ceiling was open to the sky, the stones at the top sheared away by time or lightning or both. Moonlight poured in, painting the broken floor with light like frost. She walked to the center. Sat cross-legged on the cold stone.

And opened the grimoire.

It was already humming.

Not loudly. Just enough that her teeth buzzed slightly when her fingers passed over its surface. She didn’t need to coax it. Didn’t need a spell.

She reached into her pocket and pulled the bone-handled dagger.

Her palm opened easily under the edge—an old cut, reopened. The blood welled slow, darker now, like it had thickened with memory.

She let a single drop fall onto the page.

The text flared.

Not light— presence . The glyphs unfurled like wings. The ink restructured itself, shifting forms as if remembering how to speak to her. Language folded over language, lines rearranging until she could read them not with her eyes but with her magic .

First Rite of the Hollow Line
Warding Circle of Bone and Salt

Below that, the instructions appeared, curling like smoke across the page.

Materials:

– Salt, unblessed. Not cleansed. It must remember the sea.
– Ash, from the bones of a family fire. Burnt willingly. Offered freely.
– Bone dust. Ancestral. Claimed, not taken.
– Blood. Yours. Only yours.

She breathed in.

The weight of it settled into her hands—not heavy, but grounding. There was no flash, no surge of power. Just quiet . Just instruction. Just remembrance .

From the small pouch around her neck—stitched from a square of her mother’s robe, lined with the linen she had taken from the vault—she withdrew what she needed.

Salt from the urn of Elinor’s ashes, taken in a pinch and stored with care. Bone dust ground beneath the full moon. Ash from the fireplace at Grimmauld Place, scraped from the logs that had burned the night she read the letter.

Her own blood, fresh and silent.

She drew the circle with reverence.

First, the salt—spiraled wide, encircling her and the book, each grain placed carefully, without breath. Then the bone dust, cast at the four cardinal points. Then the ash, forming a sigil at the center—a shape she did not know, but her hand remembered.

She pressed her bloody palm to the center.

The circle did not flare.

It settled .

The air inside the tower changed. Thickened. The light shifted. The stars looked further away.

The grimoire turned a page.

This is not protection from harm.
This is the ward of truth.

Inside this circle, nothing may lie—not even memory.

Harriett sat back slowly, careful not to disturb the circle with her heel.

Her hand still stung—not sharply, not with pain, but with presence. The wound had already begun to close, a slow weeping line across the palm, sticky with half-dried blood and fine grains of salt. But it wasn’t the cut that held her attention. It was the air.

It had changed. Not cooled. Not warmed. Just… tightened.

The ward wrapped around her like a second skin, invisible and complete. Not a barrier. Not a wall. A vessel. A held breath. The edge of the circle shimmered faintly in the dark, not with light, but with boundary —a quiet insistence that something old had been called, and something older had answered.

The wind didn’t reach her here.

She could hear it, still—soft and whispering through the shattered crown of the tower, the dry rush of it against ancient stone—but inside the ward, nothing moved. Not a breeze. Not a flicker of dust. Even the moonlight seemed caught, suspended mid-fall, silver frozen just shy of the curve of her shoulder. Time had not stopped, but it had slowed , settling around her like water cooled into ice.

And in the stillness, she felt it. A shift. Small. Subtle. Just beneath the breastbone, just above the ache of exhaustion. Not relief. Not comfort. Just… movement .

Like something inside her had turned its head. Like something that had been bracing for too long had finally exhaled. It wasn’t peace. It wasn’t healing. But it was truth . And that, tonight, was enough.

She let her gaze drop to her hand. The blood had begun to dry in delicate rivulets across her skin, dark as garnet in the pale light. And in the center of her palm, the rune—old as grief, old as her name—had shifted.

Not a full change. Just a line. A curve where there had been none before, coiling gently beneath the base of the sigil like a seed unfurling underground. A mark she hadn’t carved. A shape she hadn’t known how to make.

The grimoire sat open at her feet, its pages undisturbed by wind or time. It hadn’t turned another leaf, hadn’t demanded anything further. But it pulsed, faintly—once, like the beat of a distant drum.

More will come, it seemed to say.

You are not finished.

But for now, it was quiet.

And so was she.

Harriett stayed a moment longer, unmoving, letting the silence hold her the way nothing else had in weeks. Her magic no longer snarled at the edge of her skin. It rested. It watched.

She closed her eyes.

And when she opened them again, she began to unravel the circle.

Not with a word. Not with a wand.

Just breath.

She reached out with the same hand that had marked the spell, fingers steady despite the tremor working its way down her wrist. The salt was the first to fall, scattered grain by grain with the gentleness of snowfall. Each flake vanished into the stone as if it had never been there at all.

The ash followed—drawn up by the quiet wind that had waited patiently outside the circle’s bounds. It stirred the dust without touching her, carrying it upward in a slow spiral through the broken ceiling, back toward the sky it had once belonged to.

And the bone dust—

The bone dust did not move.

It sank .

Into the cracks of the tower floor, into the seams of the stone, as if it had found home again. As if it had never wanted to be carried in a pouch at all.

When it was done, the circle was gone.

But the space still remembered it.

She gathered the grimoire with both hands, careful not to press too hard against its cover. It had stopped humming, but the pages still held warmth. It felt—not heavy, but aware , as if it too had been changed by the rite.

She wrapped it in the linen cloth and stowed it in her satchel. The straps closed with a soft click .

Then she reached for the cloak.

It slipped over her shoulders like ink poured into water. The fabric found its shape around her body, cupping her edges, blurring her outline until she was only movement, only breath. It no longer felt like a garment. It felt like a shadow that had remembered its purpose.

She stepped to the edge of the tower.

Looked up once at the sky—black now, fully, the moon obscured behind a drift of clouds. Stars like bone chips scattered across velvet. Her fingers itched to trace a ward into the air, to mark this moment, this silence, but she resisted.

Some spells were better left unwritten. 

She turned. And slipped back into the dark. The castle did not stir as she passed. Not because it didn’t notice. But because it approved .

GRIMOIRE OF THE HOLLOW LINE
Rite of Thresholds, Entry VII

Name of Rite : The Circle of Salt and Bone
Classification : Foundational Wardwork – Truthbinding
Grade : Initiate
Time of Casting : Between last light and moonrise
Location : Any consecrated silence. Abandoned towers. Root-deep chambers. Places the wind does not stir.
Purpose : Not to protect the body. But to hold the truth. To seal the self within a space that does not lie.

To Begin
You must be alone. You must be unwatched. You must have remembered what was forgotten.

The Circle does not keep harm out. It keeps pretense in check.

Necessary Materials :

• Salt, raw and unblessed. It must have touched sea and sun and grief.
• Ash, gathered from a family fire. Not inherited. Burned by your own hand.
• Bone Dust, ancestral. Claimed through reverence, not theft.
• Blood, fresh and whole. Your own. From the hand that will shape the rite.

Instructions

1. Draw the Circle
   With salt first. Spiral sunwise. Speak nothing. Let each grain fall with intent. The path must not break.
2. Mark the Four Corners
   North, South, East, West—trace each in bone. One pinch. One breath. Let the air accept it.
3. Center the Self
   Sit within. Knees bent or cross-legged. Stillness is not required—but silence is.
4. Place the Ash
   At the center, draw the rune of your line. Not from memory. From instinct. Your hand will remember what you do not.
5. Seal with Blood
   Slice your palm with the dagger that bears a memory. Let the blood fall into the rune, and press your palm flat against it.

What Follows

The circle will not shine. The air will not spark. There will be no show of power. Only truth .

Your magic will shift—not louder, not greater, but clearer. The world beyond the circle may forget you. You will not.

Remain until the breath beneath your ribs no longer feels borrowed.

When you leave the circle, leave the shape behind. The stone will remember it for you.

Cautionary Note
This rite may leave impressions . Memory will cling to the place of casting. Do not repeat in spaces you wish to remain empty. Some thresholds, once crossed, remember how your blood felt. Some will call you back.

Fragment from the Ash Binder’s Journal :

“I sat beneath the ruined spire, circle drawn in silence. My bones knew the shape of it before I did. And when I bled into the ash, the Hollow whispered: You have returned to yourself.”

Chapter Text

The Transfiguration classroom smelled of chalk and stone, the faint bite of scorched air lingering just beneath the surface. The windows had been flung open to let in what remained of the early autumn breeze, and the light poured in at an angle that made the polished desks gleam like water under moonlight.

Harriett sat near the back, her wand resting parallel to the edge of her textbook, her satchel tucked neatly beneath her chair. She hadn’t spoken much since entering the room. She hadn’t needed to. The others filled the space easily—Hermione scribbling furious notes before class had even begun, Ron murmuring half-formed jokes to Dean that faded when she walked past. There was an empty seat beside her. She didn’t mind.

Professor McGonagall stood at the front, robes sharp, eyes sharper. Her presence still carved the room into order like a blade. She didn’t waste time on preambles.

“Today,” she said, “we begin Elemental Morphics—Transfiguration applied to raw magical forces.”

She flicked her wand once. The desk before her shivered, then reshaped itself into a perfect sphere of water, suspended and shimmering in midair. There was a collective inhale across the class. McGonagall gave them a moment.

Then, “You will attempt to do the same. You will fail, most of you. That is not an insult. It is a promise.”

Harriett watched the sphere rotate. It reminded her of something. A rune. A ward. The inner curve of a circle drawn in ash. She didn’t hesitate. When McGonagall signaled for them to begin, Harriett lifted her wand in one clean, practiced motion.

Concentrate. Strip the object. Find the shape beneath the shape. Will it fluid. Will it free.

The spell came to her not as words, but as intention . The wood of her desk creaked. And then, with a quiet snap of displaced air, it collapsed inward—refolded— became . A sphere of water hovered where the edge of her parchment had once been, faintly rippling in place.

She held the shape for a full ten seconds before releasing it.

The water collapsed back into itself with a soft splash that wet only her sleeve. The room had gone quiet. McGonagall stepped forward. Her gaze swept the classroom—students still fumbling, objects half-shifting into mud, a shoe, a melting brick—and came to rest on Harriett.

She didn’t smile. But the corner of her mouth twitched. Just once.

“Well done, Miss Potter,” she said, crisp and composed. “Ten points to Gryffindor.”

Harriett nodded. Not smug. Not shy. Just… steady.

It happened again. And again. She performed the transfiguration three more times before most students could complete it once. By the halfway point of the lesson, McGonagall no longer watched her, but allowed her space.

“Take the next chapter early,” she said quietly, passing a slip of parchment across Harriett’s desk. “Practice the transformation of flame. Do not burn the castle.”

There was something like warmth in her voice.

Harriett cracked open her book, wand resting between her fingers. She had always liked Transfiguration. Not because it was easy, but because it had rules. Because it asked her to know something before she changed it. Because the magic respected its materials.

She cast twice more before the bell rang.

The class ended in a rush of parchment and chairs scraping the stone. Ron and Hermione left together. Neville waved goodbye from the door. Harriett stayed seated, letting the crowd drain around her.

McGonagall straightened her stack of notes, murmuring a brief preservation charm over them. The silence that followed was not awkward. Just quiet.

Harriett stood.

“Professor,” she said. “May I ask something?”

McGonagall looked up. Harriett held her gaze.

“I’d like a pass to the Restricted Section. For research.”

The older witch’s expression didn’t shift.

“May I ask what you’re researching?”

Harriett paused. Considered her words.

“Lineage magic,” she said. “Wards. Inheritance rites. Old blood practices. I’m not looking for power. I’m looking for memory. ”

McGonagall was silent for a long time. Then she turned to her drawer and drew out a slip. Signed it. She handed it over without comment. Harriett took it with steady fingers. And for a moment, as she turned to leave, McGonagall said, “Miss Potter.”

She looked back.

“There are some paths,” McGonagall said, voice low, “that professors cannot guide you through. That does not mean you must walk them alone.”

Harriett nodded once. Then left.

The note in her hand felt warmer than parchment had any right to be.

The Restricted Section was colder than she remembered.

Not physically, not in a way that prickled the skin or bit at her fingers, but in the way old places are cold—where air has settled for centuries, thickened by secrets and spell-dust, disturbed only by the rare hand that knew what it was reaching for. The torches lining the shelves flickered low, their flames still and low-set like watchful eyes. She moved past them slowly, careful not to brush the spines that had grown brittle with age or saturated with so much lingering magic they felt half-conscious.

Madam Pince had given her a glance sharp enough to draw blood when she handed over the pass. Harriett hadn’t spoken a word. She had simply unrolled the slip, pressed the professor’s signature forward with fingers that did not tremble, and walked past the desk without waiting for a warning. Pince hadn't stopped her. Some things, even guardians of books know better than to bar.

She stepped into the deeper stacks, where the floorboards no longer creaked and the air grew thick with the weight of forgotten ink. These books did not beg to be opened. They did not glitter with lure or promise. They waited . Bound in dragonhide, sealed in wax, veined with silver thread that shimmered faintly in the low light—they pulsed like living things. Harriett moved through them with the care of someone walking through a forest older than language.

She wasn’t looking for power. Not in the way most who came here were.

She wasn’t seeking weapons. She wasn’t interested in curses or conjuration, or the sordid little fascinations of the half-mad spellwrights whose names had been scratched out of every official record but still breathed from between these pages. She wanted origin . She wanted the before. The root beneath the spell. The name beneath the name.

She wanted to know what made blood sing.

The grimoire in her satchel had gone quiet now—not dead, just resting. Its weight was steady against her hip, like a sleeping animal. She kept one hand on it as she read, thumb trailing the spine with every slow breath. She didn’t pull more than one book at a time. She let them find her.

The first three were useless—esoteric ramblings about ancestral dilution, pureblood decay, the magical consequences of intermarriage too far from “sanctioned lines.” She skimmed them with a flat expression, not even bothering to tuck them back neatly on the shelf. They were bones without marrow. Noise without song.

It wasn’t until the fourth—thin, badly bound, pages scorched and half-illegible—that she found what she hadn’t known she was waiting for.

The title on the spine was flaking with age and almost the same color as the dirty brown cover of the book: Concordia Obscura: A Comparative Study of Pre-Ministerial Magic .

She opened the book carefully. It coughed soot across her hands.

The first few pages were fragments—ink dissolved by fire, names lost in singed margins. But beneath the destruction, in looping, archaic script that made her eyes ache to follow, there was a heading:

On the Hollowborn, and Those Who Came Before the Wand

Her breath caught, just once. Not from surprise. From recognition. She read the next lines slowly, each word sinking in like a stone dropped into deep water:

There were witches once who spoke not through spell or wand, but through marrow. Their magic ran through blood and burial, through names carved in bone and oaths spoken over graves. They did not cast. They remembered.

They were not schooled. They were rooted . She turned the page.

The next was worse—burned nearly to nothing. Only one passage survived, pressed against the edge of the margin in a hand that trembled even as it wrote:

Hollowborn. Not born without soul, as the name suggests—but born with too many. Carriers of ancestral magic—alive with all the lives that came before. They do not learn the craft. They are born to it, but they must choose whether to awaken it. For the cost is not light. Memory is not gentle. And the blood does not lie.

Harriett sat back on her heels. The stone floor pressed cold through her robes. Her fingers were stained with ash. She reread the line again and again, lips unmoving, but mouth tasting every word.

The blood does not lie.

Not prophecy. Not fate. Not a chosen one. A vessel .

Her heart beat too fast. Her hands too still. She let the book rest open in her lap and closed her eyes for a moment, just long enough to feel the air shift again. Not dramatically. Not cruelly. Just a faint stirring in the silence around her. A whisper, barely heard, but known.

The magic in the room had noticed her.

Not as a student. As kin.

The library had thinned by evening.

Most of the students had drifted back to their dormitories or into the common rooms where fires burned soft and warm and forgettable. Only a few silhouettes lingered between the stacks—Ravenclaws with too many essays, Hufflepuffs with gentle voices murmuring over shared notes, one or two seventh-years trading whispered Hexcraft under the window alcoves.

Harriett remained at her table in the farthest corner, where the torchlight didn’t quite reach and the shadows pooled long between the stone pillars. The burned book lay closed before her, wrapped in linen now, resting on top of her grimoire like a secret tucked beneath an older, greater one.

She had not touched either in half an hour.

Instead, she sat with her chin resting lightly against her palm, watching the candle at her side drip wax in slow, deliberate strokes down the iron holder. She felt full—not with answers, but with weight. The kind that settles at the base of the ribs, warm and taut. Not unwelcome.

The chair across from her creaked.

Luna Lovegood sat down without preamble, her satchel spilling open beside her, a sprig of something thorned sticking out from under a loose bundle of notes. She was barefoot, her tie askew, and there was glitter on her collar that hadn’t been there this morning. She smiled.

Harriett blinked. “Luna.”

“I brought you a sweet,” Luna said, placing a wrapped toffee beside the books. “It’s not from Honeydukes. The wrapping lies. But I think the caramel inside is honest.”

Harriett didn’t touch it. But she didn’t move it away, either. They sat in silence for a while. Then Luna tilted her head, her gaze soft and entirely direct.

“You’ve opened the book that breathes, haven’t you?”

It wasn’t a question. Harriett didn’t answer at first. She looked at Luna carefully, trying to measure whether it was safe to pretend. Whether she needed to. Luna’s gaze didn’t waver.

Harriett exhaled. “Yes.”

Luna nodded, as if she’d just confirmed something she’d known since breakfast.

“I thought so,” she said. “You’ve been walking differently. Like your bones are listening to something the rest of you hasn’t caught up with yet.”

Harriett didn’t quite know what to say to that.

Luna reached across the table—not to touch her, but to brush one fingertip against the cover of the burned book, still wrapped. Her hand hovered for a moment over the spine, reverent.

“Is it heavy?” she asked, voice quieter now. “The remembering?”

Harriett hesitated.

Then, “Yes. But not in the way I thought it would be.”

“Like falling?”

“Like sinking. ”

Luna nodded again, this time slowly. “That’s how the Hollow works. It doesn’t pull. It waits. And if you go deep enough, it doesn’t let you come back with the same name.”

Harriett felt something tighten at her throat.

“You know about it.”

“I know of it.” Luna leaned back slightly in her chair, eyes drifting toward the ceiling, where the candlelight had cast shadows into the shape of branches. “My mother once told me about the witches who kept their names in bones instead of in books. The ones who didn’t need a wand to be dangerous. The ones who asked the earth for permission, not power.”

“I found a page that called them Hollowborn.”

Luna’s smile softened. “That’s one name.”

She didn’t elaborate.

Harriett didn’t press.

Outside the window, the night was deepening. The stars had begun to crowd the sky in earnest, not bright, but sharp . Like salt scattered across ink.

“You’re walking toward the roots now,” Luna said, dreamlike. “The tree’s burning, and you’re walking down into the dark to see what’s left below it.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means the fruit was never the point.”

Harriett blinked slowly. “And the fire?”

Luna looked at her then—not away, not past, but through . Something clear and luminous in her eyes.

“It’s not trying to destroy the tree. It’s trying to wake it up.”

They were quiet for a while after that.

Harriett turned the toffee over in her hand. The wrapper crinkled softly, but the sound was distant. Everything around her had begun to feel just slightly unreal—like a painting, or a memory half-sketched. But Luna was sharp-edged and real , more present than anyone had been in days.

“You’re not afraid of me,” Harriett said eventually.

Luna tilted her head again. “Should I be?”

“I’m not… the same.”

“I know,” Luna said gently. “Neither is the moon, but we don’t ask it to stay still.”

Harriett laughed, once—quiet and sudden, the sound catching in her throat like a forgotten song. It wasn’t sharp. It didn’t rise. It simply slipped out of her chest like it had been waiting for her to stop holding her breath. The sound felt foreign in her mouth, but not unwelcome. Not wrong. Just unexpected, like sunlight in a room that had been shuttered for too long.

Luna didn’t smile at the sound. She just looked pleased, in the way wild things look pleased—quietly, knowingly, without needing to be acknowledged.

Harriett’s gaze drifted down, fingers brushing the edges of the two books before her—their spines warm against the cool grain of the table, their weight anchoring rather than pressing. The grimoire rested beneath her palm like it belonged there, like it had always been meant to fit the curve of her hand, the hollows of her fingers. The burned volume, still wrapped in its linen shroud, exhaled a soft warmth that pulsed faintly through the fabric. It smelled like ash and old magic. It smelled like something that had waited a long time to be touched again.

The weight in her chest hadn’t gone. It sat there still, low and coiled and dense as riverstone. But something in it had shifted. Where it had once pressed outward—constricting, consuming, demanding—it now sat steady. Present, but not cruel. The kind of weight that reminded you that you existed. That there was something beneath your ribs worth carrying.

It felt, suddenly, less like a burden. More like a door. Not yet opened. Not yet understood. But there —solid, strange, and hers.

Luna stood without announcement, the wooden legs of her chair scraping gently against the stone. She gathered her satchel, slung it over one shoulder with a practiced sweep, and paused beside the table—not to say goodbye, not to offer any final reassurance, but to speak something that felt like an echo of an older tongue.

“Don’t follow the path they gave you,” she said, her voice low and certain, a thread woven through the hush of the library. “Follow the one that hums beneath your feet.”

And then she was gone. Not abruptly. Not like a ghost. Just… gone .

Harriett didn’t move for a long time after.

The candle beside her had burned low, its wax puddling over the iron base in thick drips that hardened as they cooled. The library had thinned even further. Somewhere nearby, pages turned, a quill scratched gently, a breath caught in someone else’s chest—but all of that felt far away. Distant. Behind glass.

She sat with her fingers resting lightly on the edge of the grimoire, her other hand still curled slightly in her lap, warm from where Luna’s presence had filled the space beside her. She did not reopen the book. She did not lift her wand. She did not search the next shelf, or scribble down any urgent question, or try to force the quiet to mean something.

She simply was .

And for the first time since the Hollow whispered her name beneath the ash and the salt—for the first time since the rune had burned itself into her desk and the magic in her blood had begun to wake—she let herself rest.

Not in sleep. Not in surrender. Just rest.

Still. Whole. Becoming.

She found him waiting for her outside the library.

Leaning against the stone archway just beyond the torchlight, robes the color of faded indigo, hands folded neatly in front of him like a priest about to deliver a sermon. The corridor was quiet—too quiet. The portraits along the walls had dimmed their presence, candle flames burning a little lower, footsteps gone from the distant staircases.

It wasn’t a trap.

But it was staged.

She knew the moment she saw him that he had been waiting.

“Harriett,” he said, gentle. “A moment?”

She didn’t slow.

Not at first.

She passed beneath the arch, spine straight, boots soundless on the stone floor. He didn’t stop her. He never did. Just let his voice curl behind her like smoke.

“I worry for you,” he said.

That made her pause.

She turned, only slightly, just enough to meet his eyes.

The candlelight made him look older. Not weary— practiced . Like someone who knew exactly how much sorrow to show. Exactly how much distance to keep to appear humble.

“I’m fine,” she said, voice even.

“You haven’t come to me,” he continued, stepping forward. “Not since the term began. That’s unlike you.”

“I’ve been busy.”

“With what, may I ask?”

She didn’t answer.

He studied her then—really studied her, the way he used to when he was deciding whether or not to share something important. The way a man might study a vault before picking the lock.

Harriett folded her arms—not defensively, not out of fear, but like a door closing. Her posture straightened, spine tall and cold as iron, and though she didn’t shift her stance, the space around her changed. Subtly. Like a boundary had been drawn, invisible but absolute. Dumbledore noticed. She could see it in the way his gaze flickered, just once, to the tight line of her jaw.

He softened his tone further, spinning it into something warm, something coaxing. The voice of someone who had made a life of calming storms, of taming fire. Silk over steel.

“I’d like to know how you are, truly,” he said, his hands clasped gently before him. “If you’re—angry. With me.”

That made her mouth twist—not into a smile, but into something sharper. A reaction that wasn’t amusement, but the ghost of disbelief. She didn’t laugh. She didn’t mock. She only looked at him like he’d offered her a cracked mirror and asked her to pretend it was whole.

“Do you want me to say I’m not?” she asked, voice quiet, deliberate.

There was no heat in it. No raised tone. But her words held weight. Each one dropped into the space between them like a stone into still water.

His expression didn’t change. But she saw the pause.

The stillness behind his eyes—the flicker of calculation, quickly buried beneath that gentle, aging mask. He always wore that face when he was disappointed. Or when he was preparing to be.

“I want the truth,” he said at last, and it came dressed in regret. Almost tender. Almost sad.

Harriett’s eyes didn’t narrow. They didn’t need to.

“No,” she said. “You want the version of the truth that lets you sleep at night.”

She watched him exhale. Not loudly. But it was there—the smallest disruption in his breath, the brief hesitation in his shoulders. His breath caught—not enough to be noticed by anyone less familiar. But she saw it. Felt it.

She had struck home. There was no pleasure in it. Just confirmation . A proof. A clarity.

He stepped toward her then, his movement unhurried, calibrated for care. The way one might approach a startled animal or a grieving friend. His footsteps echoed softly in the stone corridor, the sound of polished leather against a floor that had seen generations of choices made in shadows. His hand lifted—not in command, not in threat, but in quiet reassurance.

The gesture of a teacher. A guardian. A man who had once placed himself between her and the world.

But Harriett did not move. She didn’t need to. Her magic did it for her.

It surged without a word, without a wand, without even a conscious call. It rose beneath her skin like ice threading through glass, not sudden, but inexorable. The temperature didn’t drop. The air didn’t rush. But it thickened .

Pressure coalesced in the space between them, heavy as a held breath before a storm breaks, electric with silence. The corridor dimmed. The torches overhead flickered—not extinguished, but unsteady , as though second-guessing their right to burn here.

And the shadows— They shifted . Not lengthened, not deepened. They watched. The moment froze.

Dumbledore’s hand stopped inches from her shoulder. His fingers hung in the air like a spell mid-cast, as though he had touched something invisible and ancient that did not belong to him.

He didn’t speak. For the first time in her memory, he didn’t know what to say.

And in the hush that followed, Harriett didn’t flinch. Didn’t tremble. She simply stared back at him, eyes steady, shoulders still.

He lowered his hand slowly, like a man retreating from the threshold of something vast and unspoken. Something that might remember him, if he wasn’t careful. There was a pause. The kind that doesn’t ask to be filled. Then he spoke, quiet again, as if acknowledging something for the first time.

“Where are you going?”

His voice was soft, but no longer smooth. There was no silk in it now. Just the dry rasp of someone hoping the answer would not be what they feared.

Harriett met his gaze, and held it.

She didn’t raise her chin. She didn’t strike.

She simply said, “Forward.”

And then she turned and left.

She didn’t hurry. Her footsteps were measured. Calm. Unafraid. She did not look over her shoulder. She did not wait for permission. And though she could feel him watching her go—could feel the way the silence stretched and held around him—he didn’t stop her.

He didn’t call her name again.

The torches flared back to life as she passed, but they did not return to warmth.

Behind her, the corridor remained quiet.

The kind of quiet that follows a closing door.

The kind of quiet that means something has changed, and will not change back.

Excerpt from Concordia Obscura: A Comparative Study of Pre-Ministerial Magic (4th Ed., Restricted Circulation, 1785)
by Tullius Grimsbane, Artium Magicae, St. Thane’s College for the Esoteric and Buried

“The Old Gods are not so much prayed to as they are avoided, appeased, or—when need demands—spoken to in careful, blood-bound terms. Their temples were not temples, but thresholds: tree roots, barrow halls, ancestral vaults. It is a mistake of modern magical philosophy to assume they were ever anthropomorphized in the way wizards like to imagine gods should be. They were not human. They were not just. But they remembered. And they bargained.”

CHAPTER VII

On the Old Gods and the Hollow Houses

Long before the codification of wand law, before the rise of centralized magical governance, there existed an older system of order—neither divine nor entirely moral, but deeply reciprocal . This system was bound to the Old Gods: elemental, ancestral, and unknowable entities recognized by the ancient families and bloodlines that later seeded the great Houses of Britain.

The Old Gods were not worshipped in the modern religious sense. They were acknowledged . Fed . Feared . They were spirits of threshold and transformation, embodiments of natural laws twisted into forms the mortal mind could barely hold.

Each noble line once bore its own patron. Some retain the echoes still, though few acknowledge it publicly. To call upon these names is to invoke a debt older than ministry, wand, or prophecy.

Notable Figures

• Mnethra, The Weeper in Bone
  A goddess not of death itself, but of the grief that follows it. Mnethra governs funerary magic, ancestral rites, and bloodline memory. She is often associated with the Houses that practice Hollowwork—particularly the Potters and the lesser-known Seers of Old Rowan. Her rites involve silence, salt, and offerings of bone. She is not kind, but she is just. To invoke her is to open oneself to remembering.
• The Hollow King
  A stag-crowned figure said to rule the in-between: the untamed woods, the forgotten dead, the raw edge of wild magic. He is sacrifice and sovereignty entwined. Those who walk the Hollow Path often dream of antlers, of ash trees, of white fire. His most loyal adherents were believed to be the ancient Peverells—his is the crown beneath their grave dust.
• Tharn, The Drowned God
  Keeper of lost names and unspoken truths. He is the god of what is buried, what is withheld. His rites are performed in ink and water, often in secrecy, and his followers are bound by vow never to speak his name unless submerged. A favorite of the Blacks during their shadowbinding era, before their descent into blood purity dogma.
• Velaria, The Faceless
  Masked and without form, Velaria is said to rule over oaths, illusions, and silence. She is neither malevolent nor benevolent—she listens. When her name is spoken, she appears not in body, but in silence thick enough to seal a room. Her presence is felt most in broken promises and truths held too long.

Important Note: The Ministry does not endorse invocation of Old Powers for sanctioned spellwork. Several such rituals have been deemed Class-4 Magical Tetherings under the Revised Ethics Act (1782). This text is provided for academic context only.

“When wizards forgot the gods, the gods did not forget them. They only went quiet, waiting for the blood to call them home again.”
— Fragment recovered from the Cauldron Moor Burial Tablets, c. 1100 A.D.

Chapter Text

The castle was loud with false joy.

Pumpkins floated over the tables in unnatural cheer, carved into grinning mockeries of harvest and hollow. Bats wheeled overhead in charmed patterns, and flickering lights in cauldrons lit the Great Hall in amber and flame. The feast was loud, the laughter louder. Someone in Hufflepuff set off a swarm of candied wasps and was given detention to delighted applause.

And through it all, no one remembered her.

Not even Ron. Not even Hermione. Not even the Headmaster, who had once gifted her a cloak and a destiny in the same breath.

It wasn’t that she wanted cake. Or candles. Or song.

She hadn’t even been born in October. Her birthday was in July, long buried beneath heat haze and awkward dinners and cards signed in tight, dutiful handwriting. No one had ever made much of it, not really.

But this day, this night— This had always felt like something more. Not a birthday. Not by name. But the day she’d come back.

And this year, it was the silence that stung. The absence of it. The deliberate forgetting. Not just of what the day meant—but of what she had survived.

No one spoke of it. Not Ron. Not Hermione. Not Dumbledore. Not anyone.

As if the night her parents died—the night she died and was unmade and returned, salt-rinsed and burning—was just another day to be charmed and bantered through. As if her story had started at the scar and not the scream.

Like her name had been sanded from the stone, and everyone agreed not to notice. Everyone but Dobby.

She found the cake tucked under her pillow when she returned from the library that afternoon—small, lopsided, iced in careful loops of green and gold sugar. It had her name on it, misspelled but deliberate. In the corner, barely visible, a single rune drawn in jam: ᛃ .

Not a birthday cake. Something else. An acknowledgment.

A quiet, messy offering to the girl who had not been born today, but who had come back changed. She traced it with one finger and did not cry.

The slice she ate was too sweet. The rest she wrapped in cloth and placed on her desk beside the grimoire, which pulsed faintly under the stack of warding scrolls like it was aware of the day. Aware of what tonight was.

Because tonight wasn’t just Hallowe’en. It was the night she died .

She had died once, eleven years ago, on this very night—cradled in her mother’s arms, soaked in blood and green fire. Her life had stopped and started in the same moment. A heartbeat held between breath and scream. It had always felt distant, that truth. Something written about her, not within her.

But now— Now the memory lived in her bones.

Her blood remembered the tearing. The ward breaking. The spell that should have destroyed her and the name that had pulled her back. This was not her birthday. Not truly. But it was the night the world had first tried to unmake her.

And she had refused. That , the Hollow understood. That was enough.

The library was nearly empty by the time she returned.

The torches had been dimmed. The corners had filled with shadow. Somewhere in the far stacks, a student shuffled parchment and yawned, but otherwise, it was quiet. Harriett took her seat at her usual table. She did not open a textbook. She did not light a candle.

She opened the grimoire. It responded at once.

The page unfurled beneath her fingers like breath across flame. The ink flared, the glyphs curling outward to form a single word across the top of the new leaf.

Hollowing.

She read the instructions slowly, carefully. The rite was not long. But it was precise. Salt. Bone. Blood. Ash. A line drawn with a dagger not to wound but to mark . A name spoken aloud—not the one given, but the one chosen . And above all else: a day of return. A day of becoming . Not birth. Becoming.

She had not been born on this night. But she had come back . And that, the book said, was enough. The Hollow did not ask for birth certificates. It asked for truth .

Harriett closed the book slowly. Her hand rested on the cover. She did not move for a long time.

Outside, the wind howled against the windows. The laughter in the Great Hall had quieted to a dull roar, far off, like a dream she wasn’t invited into. The castle breathed around her—ancient, watching, waiting.

She reached into her satchel. Drew out the wrapped bundle of ritual tools. And stood.

She didn’t take the direct path.

Too many people still lingering from the feast, voices echoing through the stone like the laughter of ghosts who didn’t know they were dead. Instead, she slipped through the edge of the Forbidden Forest where the trees grew close enough to press breath from her lungs, then circled back toward the Whomping Willow from the east, where the ground dipped low and the wind couldn’t quite find her.

The tree loomed ahead, branches still, as if sleeping.

But it wasn’t asleep.

It knew she was coming.

The roots trembled faintly beneath her boots—not with warning, but recognition . The limbs did not swing. The branches did not lash. She stepped into the circle of its shadow without hesitation, and the bark split with a sound like breath held too long.

A seam opened at the base of the trunk. Not visible, not dramatic—just a hollow parting in the knotted roots, slick with moss and memory.

Harriett slipped inside.

The descent was slow, the stone slick and alive beneath her palms, shaped not by tools but by will. She felt her way down the narrow passage, the air growing cooler with every step, the smell of loam and something older rising around her like fog.

At the bottom, the space widened.

It wasn’t a chamber so much as a womb —a room of living stone, formed from the tangled roots of the ancient tree above. The ceiling bowed low, cradled by thick coils of petrified wood. The walls shimmered faintly in the torchlight she conjured, etched in runes that pulsed beneath layers of lichen and time.

This was not a place for discovery.

It was a place for remembrance.

At the center sat a shallow bowl of carved granite, nestled into the roots like it had grown there. It was stained at the base with old magic—gray where salt had dried, red where blood had once been given freely. A branch lay beside it, delicate and silver-pale, long dried but unrotted. It hummed faintly, like a tuning fork strung across decades.

She stepped toward the altar space with measured quiet, each footfall softened by the moss-lined earth beneath her, the still air pressing gently against her skin like the breath of something waiting. There was no urgency in her movement, no fear, only the sense of something vast coiling in the air—expectant but unspoken, like a room that had been empty for a very long time and was not empty anymore.

She didn’t need to ask what this place was.

There were no signs to read, no names carved into the stone, no instructions offered in the runes etched faintly along the curved roots overhead, but the recognition that bloomed in her chest was immediate, and it did not come from knowledge she had earned. It came from something older, something carried in her blood, in the marrow of her bones and the edges of her breath—deep, instinctive knowing that this was a place built for remembrance, for return, not with fanfare but with silence, not for worship but for witnessing.

This wasn’t just a chamber.

It was a threshold.

A space meant not for discovery but for becoming—a place carved out of root and stone and memory, waiting with the patient stillness of something that had known it would be needed again.

The Potters had come here once.

Not the ones remembered in gold-framed photographs, not the smiling names engraved on Ministry plaques, not the war heroes rendered palatable by time and retellings, but the older ones, the real ones, the ones who never asked to be seen because they had never needed to be. The ones who worked beneath notice—who did not blaze but bound, who sealed things in salt and silence and kept vigil at the edge of the world. They hadn’t raised wands for glory. They had whispered spells that held shut doors no one else dared to name, and they had paid for that quiet magic with blood and bone and remembrance, over and over again, until even the earth had learned their names.

The runes carved into the roots did not glow.

The tree above her did not shift or creak.

But the silence around her thickened, and something beneath her ribs, something at the center of her breath, curled inward and went still—as if the space itself were turning to listen, as if the Hollow had tilted slightly to see her.

The grimoire, tucked at her side and wrapped in linen, gave a faint pulse—barely more than a hum, not audible but felt. It had not spoken since she stepped into the chamber, but its presence was warm now, steady against her hip, not insistent but attentive, as though it too understood that this was not a place for instruction. This was a place for acknowledgment.

She sank slowly to her knees before the granite bowl set into the earth, her robes whispering against the stone, her palms bracing on either side of the basin. The bowl was carved directly from the root-veined floor, rough but shaped with clear purpose, its inside dark with the stains of old offerings—ash crusted into the curve, red-brown at the center where blood had been pressed into its grain long ago. It was not beautiful, not clean. But it was true, and truth, here, mattered more than purity ever could.

Beside it, resting against a low cradle of stone, was a dried branch of silvered wood, not the burnished kind cast from metal, but something once living, bleached by time and threaded through with veins of dull light that shimmered faintly in her periphery. It was too delicate to have lasted centuries, and yet it had. It looked neither brittle nor strong—just enduring, as though time had passed around it rather than through it.

When she looked at it, it shimmered faintly in the dark, not glowing but pulsing with something deeper than light. It did not invite her to pick it up. It did not warn her away. It simply acknowledged her with its stillness, a quiet gesture of recognition, as if to say: You are seen.

Above her, the Whomping Willow remained silent. The great branches did not stir. The coiled trunk above the passage remained unmoving, unmoved. But in the air around her, there was a shift—not sound, not scent, not light, but a kind of pressure in the soil, in the roots, in the air itself. Something older than magic. Something that had never needed wands or words.

It wasn’t speech. It wasn’t thought.

It was presence.

And it carried a single instruction, not spoken, not forced, but felt, in the deep places where memory lives.

Begin.

She moved without rush, without hesitation, the gestures not rehearsed but remembered , as though her body had waited years for this precise rhythm, this sequence of motion carved not from instruction but from inheritance. The grimoire, though closed and silent beside her, had already given her what she needed; its knowledge had settled in her blood, coiled beneath her skin, embedded itself in the memory of her muscles.

The first step was blood.

Her hand did not tremble as she drew the dagger from its wrapping—a thin blade of silver, simple and cold, etched with runes so fine they looked like hairline cracks in light. She turned her palm upward, felt the pulse beneath her skin like a drumbeat counting down, and then, in one smooth motion, she drew the blade across the flesh just below the base of her fingers. It wasn’t deep, but it was precise, and the blood came immediately—dark, slow, thick with something older than life.

She let it drip into the bowl.

One drop, then another, then another—until the basin had enough to stain the stone at its base, until the air tasted like iron and smoke and salt. The cut stung, but not in a way that called for flinching. It was a pain with purpose. A gate, not a wound.

Next was the tea.

She reached into the linen pouch at her side and withdrew a small tin of coarse, grey herb—sea-thistle, ashroot, dried rowan bark—dried beneath a waning moon and mixed with grains of coarse salt. The smell was sharp and bitter, clean in a way that wasn’t pleasant but honest . She poured a palmful into the stone cup, then added water drawn from the ritual flask—spring-fed, gathered under eclipse, untouched by wand or word.

She did not boil it.

There was no fire here, not in the way others would understand.

Instead, she held her bloodied palm over the liquid, let another drop fall into it, and whispered the binding rune beneath her breath—not a spell, not an incantation, but a reminder . The bowl responded. The water began to steam. The herbs darkened. The scent deepened.

She drank it in three gulps, the bitterness flooding her mouth, burning down her throat in slow waves that didn’t scald but marked . The tea tasted like salt and soil and something that didn’t have a name in English. It settled in her stomach like memory.

She did not flinch. The branch came next.

The silvered wood still pulsed faintly in her hand, cool and light but unyielding. She laid it gently in the bowl, atop the last smear of blood, and touched her cut fingers to its bark. The rune flared. Just once. A pulse of light without color. A breath in the dark. Then the branch began to blacken—not in flame, but in removal , like it was being erased from the world rather than consumed. It didn’t smoke. It didn’t crackle. It simply ceased, piece by piece, until nothing remained but a smear of fine silver ash curled into the basin’s curve.

The moment held. The bowl, now dark and filled with her blood, her salt, her offering, seemed to hum just beneath sound. The roots overhead tightened slightly—not in threat, but in attention .

Harriett sat back on her knees.

Her breath came slower now. The shadows pressed closer, not darker but denser , like the air around her had begun to fold inward. The stone felt warmer beneath her hands. The grimoire throbbed faintly against her hip. And then she began to speak.

Not in English. Not in Latin. Not in any tongue that had been spoken aloud in centuries.

She spoke the names.

Not just the names she had inherited, but the order of them, the line of them—her lineage peeled backward like bark, each syllable heavier than the last. Her voice did not shake. She spoke with her eyes half-closed, not in trance but in focus , the kind of focus that only came when the body finally stopped resisting its own truth.

“Harriett,” she began, “daughter of James, son of Fleamont, son of Euphemia, daughter of…”

The names continued, each one dragging more silence into the room, each one a stone dropped down the well of her bloodline. Some were names she had seen in family records, others she knew only because they rose to her lips without prompting, as if dredged from the bone-deep memory the Hollow had begun to stir.

“… child of Elinor, who first opened the circle…”

And then, when the final name passed her lips—no louder than the first, but heavier, final, absolute—there was a shift .

Not in the chamber. Not in the roots. But in her .

The air seemed to slide sideways. The silence thickened to the point of weight. Her blood slowed, then surged. Her pulse pressed against the roof of her mouth. And all at once, she was no longer only kneeling in the chamber beneath the Willow—she was kneeling at every threshold her ancestors had carved. She was in the salt circle of the first Hollow. She was at the gate. She was in the dark between worlds.

She had not been summoned. She had called herself. And the Hollow, at last, answered.

The silence did not break so much as deepen.

The chamber seemed to draw itself inward, folding like the petals of a closing flower, shadows collapsing into each other until shape and space became indistinct. The stone beneath her knees no longer felt like stone, but like something more ancient—denser, laced with memory and breath, like it had not been carved or placed, but grown in response to the ritual now unfolding upon it.

The air changed first.

It thickened, not with heat or cold, but with weight—a pressing stillness that gathered in her lungs and settled behind her eyes, not painful, but vast. Her limbs felt distant, not paralyzed, but no longer entirely hers. The boundaries of her body blurred at the edges, as if the skin no longer marked where she ended. Her breath slowed. Her heartbeat quieted. Her blood stilled.

And the ash began to fall.

But not from above.

It rose from the bowl in a slow, steady spiral—upward, not downward, against the logic of the world, like the Hollow had chosen its own direction for gravity and made no apologies for it. The ash did not drift or scatter; it climbed , coiling into the air in long threads of pale gray, too fine to be smoke, too precise to be dust. It shimmered faintly, touched by some light that did not come from torch or moon or spell.

It did not burn.

It remembered.

Harriett watched as the ash rose and the air parted around it, the shadows thinning at the center of the room like curtains drawn back from a stage. Something shimmered in that space—not a shape at first, but a presence, warm and humming and familiar , though not in the way of photographs or bedtime stories. This was not the familiarity of memory.

This was blood.

The figure stepped forward slowly, not out of the dark, but out of the space between things—between breath and bone, between past and present, between the heartbeat that came before and the one that followed. Her robes were not the vibrant red Harriett remembered from childhood tales, not the casual denim of the photographs hidden in the bottom of her trunk. They were gray—deep, endless, ceremonial gray, the kind of color found only in stone sanctuaries and grave ash, edged in faint embroidery of bone-white thread.

She moved like she belonged here. Like she had never left.

Her face was not unchanged, but it was whole . There were no signs of fear, no shadows of the end that had been forced upon her. Her features were sharp, elegant, marked by fire—not the fire of war or rage, but the deeper fire of endurance, of wisdom drawn from silence. Her eyes—those eyes Harriett had seen in the mirror her whole life—shone not with tears, but with something older. Something that burned slowly and never went out.

Harriett did not cry.

She could not.

There was no room in her body for anything but breath.

The woman stepped closer until they stood only a few feet apart, the ash still winding between them like a veil. She did not reach for Harriett. She did not kneel. She only looked, and the weight of that gaze pressed down like a hand on her shoulder—not heavy, not harsh, but steady , anchoring her to the moment.

Then she spoke. Her voice did not echo. It did not thunder. It folded into the chamber like it had always belonged there, like it had been waiting to be remembered.

“You are not a weapon.”

The words struck like a bell rung deep underground—resonant, slow to fade, too large to feel all at once.

“You are not their shield.”

Each syllable curled around her ribs, low and quiet and true. Harriett felt them root inside her, not as instructions, not as comfort, but as fact , etched in something deeper than language.

“You were not made to be anyone’s savior but your own.”

The last sentence landed like breath finally drawn after being held too long.

The woman—her mother, but not Lily , not the soft-smiled girl in the photograph but the witch , the keeper, the Hollow-daughter—held her gaze a moment longer, then reached out, not to touch, but to bless , palm hovering inches above Harriett’s chest.

A warmth bloomed beneath her sternum. Not heat. Not light.

Just being .

As if, for the first time in her life, something in her had been seen entirely—and had not been asked to change.

Harriett exhaled. And the ash unraveled.

The chamber brightened, not with light, but with release , the shadows easing back into their corners, the roots softening overhead. The weight lifted. The pressure ebbed. Her limbs returned. Her breath found rhythm again.

The vision was gone. But the echo of it remained in her bones. She did not collapse. She did not tremble.

She simply sat there for a long while, surrounded by silence that was no longer empty, and let herself begin to believe that this—this rite, this inheritance, this truth—had never been about power.

It had always been about freedom .

The world went soft at the edges.

Not like sleep, not like a blow or a spell, but like the gentle fading of breath after a long-held note. The kind of stillness that followed ritual—not a collapse, but a release . A folding inward. A letting go of form.

Harriett didn’t fall so much as drift , the weight of her body gone distant as her knees slipped sideways against the stone, the last curl of ash unraveling from her hair like smoke exhaled from deep within the bones of the earth. The chamber tilted. The roots blurred. The sound in her ears became muffled and strange, not absent, but altered—like listening through heavy water.

Her body did not hurt. It simply wasn’t . And then— Blackness. But not absence. Not void.

The dark she fell into was not empty. It pulsed with low, wordless rhythm, the kind that exists in womb and grave and the space between spells. Her thoughts dimmed. Her limbs vanished. And in their place: quiet. Weightless. Utterly still.

When she woke, the world was slow to return.

Her breath came first—shallow, dry, carrying the taste of blood and salt and something metallic that did not belong to any one thing, but to all things. Then the stone beneath her, pressing up against the curve of her spine, hard but not cold, familiar now, like a hand she had learned to lean into.

Her eyes opened to the ceiling of roots above, unchanged.

But everything had changed.

She sat up slowly, careful not to jolt the stillness clinging to her skin like mist. Her limbs were sluggish, not from exhaustion, but from depth. It felt as though she had returned from very far away—not from distance, but from within . The kind of far that leaves echoes in the lungs.

Her left hand ached faintly, the same kind of ache that comes after blood is offered, not taken.

She turned it palm-up. The cut had closed, clean and bloodless. And just above it, coiled faint and fine into the skin at the edge of her wrist, was a mark. A rune.

Not burned. Not tattooed. Not scarred. But written.

A single line of ancestral script, shaped like the one from her dream—the branch and the hook, the half-bone, half-root—etched in a shade just darker than her skin, like the ink of magic pressed into flesh rather than painted on top of it. It glowed faintly, not with light, but with meaning.

She touched it with her thumb. It pulsed once, slow and warm, like something that had always been there, waiting to be named.

She did not weep. But something inside her stilled. Not the quiet of exhaustion. Not numbness. It was her magic . Quieter now.

Not because it had lessened, but because it no longer needed to clamor. No longer needed to rise sharp against her will or twist like stormwinds in her throat. It had gone deeper . It hummed now beneath the surface, coiled like a tide held just before release, steady and knowing.

She rose to her feet slowly, and as she did, the roots above her groaned faintly—not in protest, but in acknowledgment. The air tasted different now, touched with ash and salt, with something sweet and old and bitter beneath it, like the first breath taken after waking in a house you didn’t know remembered your name.

She looked at the bowl. Empty. Clean. The branch was gone. But the chamber was not.

It was not the same as before. Not sealed. Not dead. It felt open now—unwound. Its purpose fulfilled, but not exhausted. She knew she could return. That she would .

She pressed one hand to the stone beside the bowl.

Thank you, she did not say aloud. But the salt in the wall sang back anyway. Not with words. With memory. With recognition.

She walked out of the chamber with no torch, needing no light. The tree above did not resist her. The passage unwound like a ribbon being drawn through a ring. And when she emerged into the night, the moon was high and thin, and the wind touched her skin with something almost like reverence.

Her body was tired. But she had never felt more whole.

There were whispers in the grass beneath her feet, in the stone of the castle wall beyond the tree line. The air between her fingers vibrated faintly, just beneath perception. And when she breathed, the breath tasted not just of autumn, but of blood and bone and belonging.

She had not been made a weapon. She had not been reforged as anyone’s shield. She had been hollowed . And in that hollow, she had made space for herself .

Not saved. Not chosen. Not given.

Claimed.

GRIMOIRE OF THE HOLLOW LINE
Rite XII: The Hollowing

Name of Rite : The Hollowing
Classification : Bloodline Anchoring – Rite of Becoming
Seasonal Alignment : Samhain (Hallowe’en), Night of Unmaking
Purpose : To reclaim the moment of return. To mark the crossing not of birth, but of refusal. The Hollowing is not a beginning. It is an anchoring. This rite calls not the name given, but the self chosen —the one who came back.

Materials Required :

• Blood, freshly given. Your own. From the hand that remembers.
• Ash, from sacred wood, burned for this purpose or borne from legacy flame.
• Ritual Branch, silver-veined or sanctified by age. Should not crack when burned.
• Hollow Bowl, carved from living root or grave stone. Must bear the stain of memory.
• Tea of Return, steeped from herb and salt. Must contain blood, must contain ash.
• Name, not the one written in birth, but the one claimed in defiance. Spoken aloud, unflinching.

Instructions :

1. Enter a chamber of memory: A place where root and stone still hold the breath of those who came before. It should not be new. It should not be known. It must wait for you.
2. Prepare the basin: Lay the Hollow Bowl at the center. Place the ritual branch beside it. Ash must be near. Keep the tea and your blade close.
3. Begin with blood: Open the palm. Let it fall into the bowl. Not in violence. In offering.
4. Brew the tea: Salt, ashroot, sea-thistle, bark. Mix with water and blood. Do not boil. Let the blood remember the heat. Drink in three parts. Let each swallow name you again.
5. Burn the branch: Place it in the bowl atop the last drop. Do not light it. Let the Hollow take it. If the ash rises, the rite has begun.
6. Speak the Line: Not in pride. In truth. Begin with your name. Unspool backward. Name those whose blood made the bowl. Name those buried beneath your breath. End with the First.
7. Witness: Do not kneel. Do not bow. Wait. When the ash coils upward, do not breathe it in. Let it form. Let what waits in the hollow step forward. Speak nothing. Be nothing. Let the Hollow speak through you.

What You May See :

• A guardian of the line.
• The shape of your own return.
• Memory in rootform.
• Your own defiance, given voice.

Effect of Rite :
The Hollow will accept you. It will no longer watch from the edges. It will recognize your name not as a burden, but as a boundary. Your magic will soften at the edges. It will stop screaming.
If performed properly, you will emerge hollowed—but not empty. You will be yours .

Mark of Completion :
A rune may surface where the cut was made. It is not a scar. It is a remembering. It cannot be removed.

Note from the Line of Elinor :

“We are not born. We return. Each time, a little louder. Each time, a little less willing to forget. The Hollow does not reward obedience. It rewards truth.”

Chapter Text

She woke to silence that was too complete.

Not the ordinary hush of a sleeping dormitory, where breath and rustle and the occasional midnight murmur stitched the space between beds into something human and warm—but something heavier, older, a stillness that pressed along the inside of her ribs like ash settling after fire, delicate but absolute. The velvet drapes around her four-poster were drawn shut, the fabric thick and dark enough to blot out the dawn, but she felt the sun as a ghost against her skin, its warmth refusing to land, unable to breach the veil of something she had not yet named. Her body, at first, did not feel like hers—not because it ached, not because it hurt, but because it remembered too much. As if her bones had gone deep in the night and come back changed.

She lay very still, the sheets tangled loosely around her hips, one arm stretched above her head, the other curled tight to her chest where the wound had been. She didn’t open her eyes. Not yet. The air in the room tasted different, drier, sharper, as if the fire in the grate had burned something sacred to embers and then been left to smolder for hours. She breathed it in like she might learn something from the smoke.

Her fingers tingled faintly.

Not pins-and-needles—no, this was deeper, stranger, as though the space beneath her skin had begun to hum with something low and elemental, a magic that had stopped asking permission and had instead begun to inhabit her. She moved her hand slowly, lifting it to hover just above her chest, the way one might hold a flame to a mirror. The cut had closed. She had known it would. But where the blood had once risen—thick, dark, deliberate—there was now a mark. Not a scar, not quite. More like the faint echo of a rune, pressed into the skin in lines so fine they barely broke the surface. It shimmered when she breathed.

She opened her eyes.

The dormitory remained cloaked in its illusion of ordinary—curtains drawn, cloaks draped over trunks, parchment curling on bedside tables, a pair of trainers slumped in the corner like they had been discarded mid-flight. Lavender snored softly behind her curtain. Parvati rolled over, exhaling a faint, contented sound. A draft fluttered against the edge of Harriett’s own canopy, but did not enter.

She pushed the drapes back slowly.

The light from the windows cut across the room in gold-edged slices, illuminating dust motes that hung in the air with a strange, quiet reverence. When Harriett swung her legs over the side of the bed, the cold found her ankles immediately, but she didn’t shiver. The floor was chill against her bare feet, but not unkind. She crossed the room without lighting her wand.

The mirror above the dresser had fogged.

Not fully, not like breath had touched it—but in streaks, pale lines curling outward from the frame like frost on glass, delicate and spiraled, as though something inside the mirror had tried to write its name and then forgotten the letters. Harriett stared at it. Her reflection was there—dimmer than it should have been, edged with shadow—but it did not move when she did. For a moment, she thought it might smile.

She looked away first.

The washbasin water was cooler than expected. Her hands shook only once when she cupped it to her face. When she pulled the towel free, her fingertips caught on something—thread, she thought at first, but no. It was the faint glimmer of another rune, this one tucked along the inside of her forearm, visible only in the low light. She didn’t trace it. She already knew what it would feel like. Not scar, not skin. Something else. Something placed .

The castle was awake when she stepped into the corridor.

Not with sound—not yet—but with something deeper, older. The stones beneath her feet no longer whispered nonsense when she walked barefoot through them. They watched . The wall sconces lit themselves without her asking, not all at once but in measured sequence, as if pacing her steps. The portrait at the end of the hallway, usually dozing this early, opened both eyes and tilted its head—not curious, not annoyed, just aware.

Harriett did not speak.

She descended the stairs alone, one hand trailing along the bannister, the other still wrapped in a sleeve that now hid something that had never been meant to be seen by the likes of this place, this school, this war. The stairwell shuddered faintly beneath her heel when she stepped onto the third floor landing—but not in protest. It shifted, slowly, surely, bending toward the corridor before she thought to turn.

The castle had always been alive. She knew that. But this was something else.

Not friendliness. Not hostility. Recognition.

Like it had caught her scent in the air and remembered a name it hadn’t spoken in a hundred years.

She was halfway to the library before she realized she hadn’t brought a wand.

And she hadn’t needed one.

The classroom had never felt smaller.

Charms was held in the west wing tower, a tall and drafty room with arched windows and a ceiling that creaked in bad weather, though today it was only just grey, only just chill, and Professor Flitwick’s voice, as ever, was bright with precision and good cheer. They were practicing Finite variations—simple spell reversals, controlled nullification, the kind of work that should have been crisp and clean and quietly forgettable.

Harriett was paired with Ernie Macmillan, whose sleeves were already damp with nervousness, though he smiled gamely as he raised his wand, recited the charm, and watched a small puff of smoke evaporate from the practice cushion between them. His magic was orderly, plodding, the way of someone raised in the church of good marks and family dinners. She thought, once, she might’ve envied that.

“Your turn,” he said, and stepped back with the polite readiness of someone preparing to witness mediocrity.

Harriett raised her wand.

She didn’t even speak the incantation aloud. The word hovered on the edge of breath, unshaped, and the wand responded before she meant it to. Her magic surged through the tip like a draft down a chimney, hunger coiled and half-smiling, and the spell unraveled with a sound like a thread snapping too close to the ear. The practice cushion didn’t vanish. It imploded—no fire, no smoke, just silence and pressure and then the hiss-crack of glass behind them as the nearest window fractured from the center, spiderweb lines radiating outward like veins of frost in bone.

Gasps echoed across the classroom. Someone dropped a quill. Lavender Brown squeaked audibly.

Harriett blinked.

Her wand hand stung.

Across the room, Professor Flitwick had straightened on his stack of books, his expression flickering between surprise and concern, like someone searching a spellbook for a mistake that wasn’t there.

“I—I didn’t mean to—” Harriett started, but her voice felt caught behind her teeth. Not shame. Not fear. Something else.

Ernie stared at the window. “That wasn’t Finite,” he said, not accusingly, but almost reverently. “That was—something else.”

Harriett turned her palm up slightly. The sigil from the ritual still itched beneath the skin, faint but warm, like an ember under damp cloth. Her wand hadn’t flared. Her voice hadn’t risen. The spell had simply… answered.

“I’ll fix it,” she said, and moved toward the broken window, though Flitwick stopped her with a quiet wave.

“No harm done, Miss Potter. Just a warding backlash, perhaps.” His eyes lingered on her wand hand. “We’ll have Madam Pomfrey look at that if it gets worse.”

She nodded. Returned to her desk. But even as the lesson resumed, as practice spells resumed their neat spirals and minor charms were traded like polite greetings, Harriett felt her magic watching. Not waiting. Watching.

It wasn’t until Defense that it made itself known.

They were partnered again—rotations today, Professor Ackerly pacing between the pairs like a hawk with an auror’s scowl. This time, Harriett stood across from Anthony Goldstein, who nodded at her politely, wand already at the ready. They had practiced shield charms together before, clean work, cooperative. He wasn’t flashy like Ginny, but he was quick, and he had good control.

“Just a basic hex,” he said. “I’ll go light.”

She nodded. Raised her wand.

The spell came fast—colorless, neat, the standard Disarming variant they’d drilled into muscle memory over the past month. Harriett moved to cast Protego—but something inside her shifted before the word could even form. Her magic leapt ahead of her, silent and sure, and the shield that formed was not transparent, not clean-edged, not standard.

It was smoke.

It billowed in front of her like a shroud being torn from the void, edges curling like pages catching fire in reverse, and when the hex hit it, the shield didn’t repel.

It consumed.

The spell vanished into the smoke with a shudder, and the shield held a breath longer, flickering faintly before collapsing in on itself like a sigh.

The silence that followed was absolute.

Anthony lowered his wand, very slowly. “Was that—was that the Warding variant we learned last term?”

“No,” Harriett said. “It wasn’t.”

Professor Ackerly approached with the caution of someone trying not to startle a sleeping wolf. “Miss Potter?”

She didn’t answer right away. Her wand pulsed in her hand. Not painfully, just insistently, like it wanted to be used again. The magic in her blood buzzed like a hive half-woken, all wings and sting and no sound. She could feel it—behind her ribs, in the pads of her fingers. Her magic wasn’t waiting for permission anymore.

“I didn’t cast a shield,” she said, slowly. “I thought about it. But my magic didn’t wait.”

Ackerly watched her for a long moment, then nodded once. “You may sit this one out.”

She didn’t argue. She didn’t stay. She stepped back and sat near the window, where the stone was cool against her spine and the light could catch the curve of her hand when she tilted it just so. The sigil glimmered faintly, hidden from most eyes, but undeniable now. Her magic pulsed like breath.

Behind her, Anthony resumed with someone else.

Behind her, the castle whispered.

Harriett did not flinch. She only watched as a dust mote passed through a beam of light and did not fall. The wind outside howled without moving the trees. A student cast Lumos and the tip of their wand flickered twice before deciding to obey.

Magic, she realized, was not a force.

It was a creature.

And hers was hungry.

The common room was unusually quiet for a Tuesday.

A fire cracked low in the hearth. Someone in the corner was weeping over Arithmancy. A game of Gobstones had ended in minor curses and minorer burns. And Harriett—bone-tired, rune-marked, and carrying the faint scent of old ash wherever she went—was halfway through a cup of tea that had gone cold in her hands.

Fred Weasley appeared without warning.

Not entered. Appeared . Like a summoning gone wrong.

“Potter,” he said, flopping onto the cushion beside her with the grace of a cat and the emotional restraint of a meteor. “We need your assistance.”

She blinked at him, slow and suspicious. “With what.”

“Justice,” he replied solemnly.

George emerged from behind the armchair like an afterthought. His hair was wet. His expression was grim. “And also shampoo.”

Harriett sighed. “What did you do.”

“We, dear Harriett,” Fred said, producing a half-melted comb from his sleeve, “attempted to test a new line of glamor charms on ourselves. With, shall we say, mixed results.”

“We,” George echoed bitterly, “being me , and ourselves being me again .”

Fred waved a hand. “Minor details.”

George pointed at his head. “My hair is blue.”

Harriett tilted her head. “It’s not bad .”

“It’s also humming,” he said.

She squinted. It was.

“Technically a success,” Fred mused.

“You hexed my shampoo bottle.”

“It was for science!”

Harriett took another sip of cold tea and tried not to laugh. She failed.

Fred looked smug. “She smiled. Mark it. Document it. Frame it in gold.”

George huffed, hair now visibly twitching at the temples. “You’re not helping.”

“I wasn’t trying to.”

Harriett set down her cup. “Give me the bottle.”

George retrieved it from the folds of his robes. It was vibrating faintly.

She turned it in her hand, muttered a spell she hadn’t learned from any Hogwarts curriculum, and tapped the base with two fingers.

The shampoo sighed. Then deflated. Then turned an ordinary, non-threatening beige.

George blinked. “You—you fixed it?”

Fred stared. “What was that?”

“A home remedy,” Harriett said, deadpan.

Fred narrowed his eyes. “You’ve changed.”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s the point.”

There was a moment of quiet contemplation. Then George patted her on the shoulder, solemnly.

“If you ever decide to overthrow the school,” he said, “we’re in.”

Fred raised a fist. “Viva la revolution.”

And with that, they vanished into the stairwell, muttering plans about magical hair dye and improvised crown jewels. Harriett sat back, the ghost of a smile still curling at the edges of her mouth. Her tea was still cold. Her magic still ached in her blood.

But the common room, for once, didn’t feel so heavy. 

The mirror didn’t move at first.

It caught her only on the second glance, the kind of flicker one might blame on candlelight or fatigue—the shimmer of a reflection not quite aligned, something out of joint in the silvered glass. Harriett stood in the hallway just outside the third-floor lavatory, a shortcut she'd taken a hundred times before. Her hair was damp from the misting rain that had crept in through a cracked window, her collar pulled up against the draft. She was alone. Or had been.

The first time she saw it, the figure was just a shadow.

A blur in the corner of the mirror where no one stood. Not Myrtle—not the soggy wail of unfinished adolescence that haunted the pipes. Not Peeves. Not a trick of the light. It was taller than she was. Still. Wrapped in something dark and old.

She blinked. Looked again.

Nothing.

She pressed on.

But it stayed with her.

She caught it again in the glass at the end of the corridor—a shimmer of a robe that dragged too long for the ground, a pale edge of something where the air should have been empty. She told herself it was stress. Residue from the ritual. A trick of exhaustion wrapped in the shape of a thought she hadn’t dared name.

By the time she reached the library, the sky outside had darkened into the deep blue of candlelit dusk. Students were scattered between tables, parchment unfurled and complaints thick in the air. She dropped her satchel beside her usual chair. Unwrapped the grimoire, careful not to let the linen slip in public view. She hadn’t meant to study tonight. Not truly. She just didn’t know where else to go.

Ron dropped into the chair beside her with a huff and the telltale sound of someone too tired to pretend they weren’t putting off a Potions essay.

“You look awful,” he said conversationally.

Harriett didn’t look up, she was too tired to deal with her anger towards Ron currently. “Thanks.”

He rummaged around his bag, pulled out an inkwell that immediately tipped sideways on the table, leaking a slow line of gold-tinged ink.

Hermione arrived seconds later, already frowning. “Did you sleep last night? You look—well—”

Harriett met her eyes. “Don’t say pale. I’m always pale.”

Hermione hesitated. “Then… haunted.”

“That’s worse.”

“You’ve been… distracted.”

“I’m fine.”

“You barely said a word in Defense today. Not that Ackerly noticed.”

“Still fine.”

Ron chimed in, chewing the cap of his quill. “You’ve been staring off more than usual. More than, like, ‘Potter with a dramatic weight of destiny’ usual. Noticed that?”

“I’m just tired,” she said.

But even as she said it, the shadow reappeared.

It stood between shelves—three rows over, behind the alchemical indexes. Too still to be a student. Too tall for a child. It wore robes that looked sewn from stormlight, folds heavy with time. No face. No breath. Just presence.

It didn’t move.

Harriett’s breath caught, but she forced herself to turn back to her friends. “I think I’m going to stay here a bit longer,” she said. “You two go ahead.”

Hermione didn’t argue, which was proof enough that she didn’t believe her.

Once they were gone, the library grew quieter. The sound of quills softened. The whispers thinned. Even Madam Pince’s pacing faded like moth wings against stone.

The figure was still there.

She rose from her chair. Moved through the rows like someone remembering a half-finished dream, every footstep too soft to echo. When she reached the aisle—row twenty-three, obscure reference texts and genealogical scrolls—it was gone.

But the air had changed.

She reached out, fingertips grazing the spines of the oldest books. They were warm beneath the dust. Humming faintly. And when she whispered—not loudly, not intentionally, just a thought shaped into breath—

“Ashes remember…”

The voice answered.

Low. Female. Neither young nor old. Like leaves burned down to marrow and given back the shape of speech.

“Yes.”

Harriett froze.

She turned—slowly—half expecting an illusion, a prank, a dream she’d walked into half-asleep. But behind her stood the figure now fully shaped: not translucent like a Hogwarts ghost, not flickering like a projection, but something else. Something older. Rooted. Present.

The robes were plain, undyed wool wrapped in layered drape, but the sleeves were long and marked with stitched sigils, black thread against grey. Her hair was pulled back—not neatly, not with vanity, but with purpose, as if it might otherwise tangle in wards or catch flame mid-rite.

Her eyes were blank. Not white, not hollow—just beyond. As though she saw through time and had already passed beyond the need to be seen back.

Harriett opened her mouth.

No sound came.

The woman—spirit? ghost?—tilted her head slightly, in a motion that wasn’t quite human.

“You hear us now,” she said.

“Us?”

“There are more.”

Harriett’s voice, when it returned, was soft and cracked like thin ice. “What are you?”

But the woman only said: “You bled. The seal broke. The wards remember.”

Harriett took a step back.

The spirit did not follow. Did not fade. Simply waited.

And then—

“Ask what you wish,” she said, “but do not forget what you are.”

The lights above them dimmed. A book near the edge of the shelf flickered—glow-inlaid text bleeding into warmth before settling again.

Harriett turned away.

Not in fear. Not even in denial.

In understanding.

Because she knew what would happen if she stayed longer. If she answered. If she reached toward what was already reaching back.

When she looked over her shoulder again, the woman was gone.

But the smell of ash remained.

And in her palm, the sigil burned faintly—not pain. Not warning. Just presence.

She didn’t go back to Gryffindor Tower.

There were too many eyes there. Too much breath in the stairwells, too much noise woven into the curtains and hearthstones, too many voices that asked if she was tired or hungry or lonely, voices that wanted her to be soft and salvageable and not something growing sharp at the edges. She slipped out before curfew, under her cloak and beneath the seams of the hour, ghost-quiet in the halls. The castle, thankfully, was in one of its better moods—doors creaked open just a fraction wider than usual, the portraits too sleepy or too startled to call her name.

The library was locked, of course. But the wards didn’t stop her. They should have. They didn’t.

Her hand brushed the brass handle and the enchantments folded back like frost under breath—quiet, unwilling, but obedient. Something in her blood had changed, and the school had noticed. The lock clicked once. The doors opened half a step. The silence inside curled thick with dust and ink.

She stepped into the dark.

No torches lit. No lanterns. Just the faint greenish gleam of moonlight filtering through stained glass, catching the dust like suspended breath. The library was empty—but not vacant. It felt watched. Not by Pince. Not by portraits. By the books themselves.

Harriett paused, one hand still on the doorframe, listening to the way the shelves exhaled.

She didn’t know exactly what she was looking for.

Ghosts that weren’t ghosts. Blood-spirits. Bonefire remnants. Ancestors who whispered in mirror-silver and left soot in their wake. She didn’t know what they were called—but the grimoire had stirred when she’d seen them. That meant they had a name. And names could be found. Carved into margins. Forgotten between lines. Whispered through bindings.

So she went searching. Not with a wand. Not with the indexes.

She walked the aisles with her palm against the wood, skin just brushing the spine of each tome as she passed. The warmth was immediate. Some books curled inward, went still—disinterested, disapproving. But others… Others stirred.

One growled softly in its chain. Another buzzed like a half-snatched word caught between runes. A third grew cold under her hand. Then hot. Then cold again.

It wasn’t until she passed a narrow shelf tucked into the wall behind the Arithmantic Atlases—a place most students never went, thick with cobwebs and ignored by even the most desperate seventh-years—that something moved .

A single book shifted sideways. Not fell. Not slid. Moved. Its spine nudged outward like a breath drawn slowly. Just enough to catch her eye. She turned.

It wasn’t much to look at—small, slim, leather cracked and grey with age. The kind of book you’d overlook in favor of something gilded or grim. No title. No author. Only a rune pressed into its front: a looped sigil shaped like an eye half-closed in sleep.

Her blood pulsed. She reached out.

The moment her fingertips touched the cover, the binding hummed . Not aloud. Not in her ears. In her bones. The way wind hums in the hollows of ruins, the way the sea sings through the ribs of something long-sunken. The cover grew warm, then cold, then warm again—an echo of something familiar, like the magic was tasting her before it answered.

The book opened on its own.

Pages whispered apart like dry leaves, and stopped at a section near the center. The ink was dark red—not dried blood, not quite, but close enough to remember it. The script curved low and sharp across the page in a language she’d never seen. And yet—

She could read it.

Not easily. Not aloud. But somewhere beneath sight and sound, her blood understood . The runes rearranged themselves as she stared, the page unfolding meaning not in words but shapes . Not language. Lineage.

Ash-marks.
The dead who do not pass but root.
Blood-bound shades drawn from ancestral bone.
They are not summoned. They arrive.
They follow those who have opened the Hollow.
Not to guide. Not to warn. To witness.

Harriett’s breath caught.

Another passage revealed itself beneath, surfacing like something dredged from deep water:

Only those who have offered salt, blood, and name may see them. Only those who are remembered by the dead may be seen in return.

There was no author. No title. No date. Just the page. Just the truth.

The book did not turn again. The ink began to fade almost immediately, the runes retreating into blank vellum as if they had never been there at all. When she blinked, they were gone.

The hum in her palm lingered. She closed the book carefully. Placed it back on the shelf with both hands. And this time, the shelves breathed differently when she passed—softer. Open. As if they knew her now. As if they, too, were waiting for what she would become.

✦ EXCERPT // GRIMOIRE ENTRY // THE FIRST HUNGER

Designate: Post-Rite Integration

Classification: Bloodbound Transmutation — Ash-Marked Inheritance

Codex Reference: Hollow Line, Variant Sigil Bloom

Receipt of Magic Logged Upon: Waking, Unanchored Hour, Sun Withheld

TRANSCRIPTION:

Subject: Harriett James Potter
Status: Initiated / Hollow-Aware / Ash-Touched
Witnessed By: The Warded Bones / The Silence Between / Mirror-Fog
Mark Activation: Sigil beneath flesh; subsurface shimmer only visible under unwitnessed flame (candle, hearth, moon). Manifestation aligned with Phase I completion of Rite of the Hollowing.

Notable Symptoms:

• Spectral Awareness Initiation: Subject perceives residual echoes through mirrorlight and shadow-glass. Ghostforms not registered on known Hogwarts spectral ledger. Voiceprint returned: “Ashes remember.”
• Runic Emergence: Passive glyph formation beneath skin, visible in liminal conditions (steam, mist, fog-glass, dream). Not self-inscribed. Pattern language consistent with lost ward-circles of Elinor.
• Magic Manifestation (Unbridled):
• Charms Class: Subject's spell (intended Finite) bypassed conscious restraint; resulted in object collapse and ancillary fracture (glass, west tower).
• Defense Class: Subject’s Protego expressed as absorption construct—smokeform ward. Nullified external hex through magical digestion. No incantation required.
• Energetic Profile: Described by peers as “quieter,” “hungrier,” and “watching.” Internal harmony destabilized but elevated. Subject describes sensation of magic as "awake without waiting."

Behavioral Markers:

• Avoidance of traditional healing afterburn. Cut sealed without scarring.
• No wand required for minor manipulations (doors, wards, flicker-calls).
• Magical objects (texts, grimoire, shampoo—see F. & G. Weasley Incident Report #7) respond as if bound to bloodprint.

ARCHIVAL NOTE:
Magic no longer obeys. It recognizes. It listens.
The Hollow was opened. The seal was accepted. The rune did not vanish—it nested.

BINDING SIGIL
(Attached in ink that cannot be re-inked. Blood-sealed. Activation upon recognition.) ᛃ — the branch turned inward. The line between threshold and name. The beginning of recursion.

Filed Under:

✦ Hollow-Born
✦ Spell-Consumption Events
✦ First Sightings of Bone-Fog
✦ Ashbound Memory, Living

END EXCERPT
You are not casting anymore. You are being answered.

Chapter Text

The dungeon smelled of burnt citrus and copper—tonic steam and crushed salamander scale rising from cauldrons in a low, medicinal haze. Snape was prowling the edge of the room again, trailing through the rows with an apron dusted in powdered moonstone, cooing over well-stirred mixtures and pretending not to notice the chaos simmering beneath every polished table. The torches burned low for precision today, lending the room a velvet murk, shadows stretched long and soft against the green-tinged walls.

Harriett stirred counterclockwise. Then once clockwise, deliberate.

The potion in her cauldron had turned the precise shade of tarnished silver the textbook described, but it shivered faintly at the surface now, catching her heartbeat in its rhythm. Her magic thrummed through the spoon like a pulse. The air around her shimmered faintly—too faint for anyone without the sight to notice, but she saw it: the way condensation avoided her sleeve, the way her flame bent sideways instead of up. Her sigil itched beneath the skin of her palm. The potion responded to it before she touched it.

She had moved beyond instructions.

The seat beside her was empty. Hermione had taken the corner bench today, citing focus and proximity to the scales. Ron had never made it to class. Neville was whispering an apology to a half-dissolved flobberworm. And the rest of the dungeon was swallowed in the careful clatter of glass and the rustle of pages turning just too late to fix the mistake.

Which was why, when Daphne Greengrass sat down across from her without a word, Harriett noticed.

Daphne moved like shadow given teeth. Not quiet—not unnoticed—but with the particular poise of someone born to be seen only when it suited her. She wore her uniform with precise disdain: collar crisp, sleeves rolled to the perfect point between function and elegance, every button fastened but the top one left undone in subtle rebellion. Her wand was tucked into her boot. Her braid was bound with green silk. Her gaze was steady, and when it landed on Harriett, it did not waver.

“You’re stirring too much,” Daphne said softly.

Harriett didn’t stop. “Am I.”

Daphne smiled. It was not kind. It was not cruel. It was the kind of smile one might give to a mirror that finally stopped lying.

“You smell like something old,” Daphne murmured. “Like bonefire. And salt.”

Harriett’s hand paused.

“Whatever game you were playing before,” Daphne continued, voice still low, still intimate, “you’re not playing anymore.”

Harriett met her eyes. “Wasn’t aware it was a game.”

“Oh, it always is,” Daphne said. “But some of us play to win.”

There was a pause, long enough for Snape to comment dolefully on someone’s use of fresh thyme, long enough for a Slytherin in the back to curse softly at a ruined bezoar. The potion between them stopped trembling. The spoon stilled in Harriett’s hand.

Daphne reached into her robes.

The envelope was black, sealed in deep green wax, pressed with the sigil of a coiled serpent wound around a tower of swords. No name on the outside. No address. Just the mark. Old. Clean. Quietly unmistakable to anyone who knew what they were seeing.

Harriett did not take it.

Daphne laid it on the edge of her desk like an offering and sat back, hands folded in her lap, expression unreadable.

“It’s not about the war,” she said. “It never was.”

Harriett arched a brow. “What is it about?”

“Legacy,” said Daphne, and for the first time, her voice softened. “Lineage. Magic older than banners and bodies. The kind they don't teach in the common rooms.”

The wax seal glimmered faintly where the torchlight caught it.

“I don’t join clubs,” Harriett said.

“This isn’t a club.”

“You think I’m one of you now?”

“No,” Daphne said. “I think you’ve remembered you never were.”

The bell rang.

Snape clapped his hands together. Cauldrons extinguished in synchronized hisses. Chairs scraped. Students shoved parchment into satchels with the frantic energy of a Friday afternoon. But neither girl moved.

The envelope sat between them like a sigil in a salt circle—still, and full of intent. When Daphne stood, she smoothed her sleeves with ceremonial grace. She did not pick the envelope back up.

“If you open it,” she said, “come to the north tower. Midnight. Bring your wand.”

“And if I don’t?”

Daphne smiled again, that same knowing curl. “Then the blood remembers you anyway.”

She vanished into the crowd without a backward glance. Harriett stared at the envelope. The wax had begun to hum faintly against the wood.

She didn’t touch it. Not yet. But the potion in her cauldron flared once—silver bright, then still. As if something had answered.

“What was that about?” Neville asked.

“I don’t know yet,” Harry responded.

The castle had long since gone to sleep, its corridors hushed into ritual silence, the breath of old stone and older wards curling through the stairwells like incense left for ghosts. Harriett walked alone—no cloak, no lantern, only the echo of her footfall softened by the moss-worn flagstones beneath her boots. The halls did not resist her. They bent.

She passed no portraits. No suits of armor stirred. Even the staircases seemed to sense her direction tonight, pivoting before she arrived, shuffling their steps into quiet compliance. She walked not like someone sneaking, but like someone expected.

The invitation—still sealed, still unread—pressed against her ribs inside her jacket. The wax had grown warm when the clock struck midnight. Not hot. Not burning. Just aware.

She reached the northern end of the dungeons as the final bell faded into the walls, past the disused potions closets and crumbling storage rooms students whispered about but never entered. Here the stone changed—less hewn, more veined, the walls beginning to remember what they had once been before they were shaped by wand and will.

At the base of the North Tower, beneath a sconce long since gone unlit, the air folded inward.

Not a door. Not an arch. A threshold.

The shape of the archway revealed itself only when she passed her hand near it, fingertips grazing the edge of torchlight—stone blurring, rippling like something viewed through glass. The invitation pulsed once. The wax cracked.

She stepped through.

The darkness swallowed sound at first. Then light returned—not torchlight, not fire, but something older. Cold and emerald-silver, flickering across runes carved in a spiral pattern along the walls. The hall was narrow and curved, leading down into a chamber buried beneath the tower’s foundations. Every breath she took echoed back in a frequency just off pitch.

When the floor leveled out, she found herself before a gate. It wasn’t barred. It wasn’t locked. It was circled.

A ring had been carved into the stone—deep and careful, lined with silver dust and fragments of dark glass. Runes had been set at eight points, each glowing faintly with a separate hue—copper-red, serpent-green, bone-white. Between them sat six figures in silence, hooded in black, wands across their knees, hands bound in ribboned cloth. A seventh space sat empty.

A robed boy stood before the circle. Older than her, though not by much. Tall, sharp-featured, eyes like tempered steel beneath a fringe of white-blond hair too pale to be natural.

He did not ask her name.

He only said, “The circle does not open for strangers.”

Harriett stepped forward. The silver caught the light at her feet.

“I was invited.”

He nodded. “Then it is your blood that must answer.”

No spell. No question. Just a dagger, offered on open palm. Its handle was serpent-shaped. The blade short. Ritual-clean. Harriett did not hesitate.

She took the dagger, turned it once in her hand, then dragged it across her palm where the sigil already marked her. The blade hissed faintly—not from her skin, but from the echo her magic made as it left her. The circle answered.

The runes pulsed.

A wind rose from nowhere, brushing her hair back from her face. The others stirred, their hoods lifting faintly, as if caught by breath. The boy’s eyes sharpened.

She stepped into the ring. The blood fell from her hand like ink across spellwork.

And the circle changed.

The silver didn’t just react—it cracked. Lines of ash flared out from her footprint. The serpent at the gate hissed. Not in anger. Not in protest.

In recognition. The runes all shifted hue at once, flooding into the same color—bonefire white. The seventh figure appeared. No one had cast a spell. No one had summoned.

But when Harriett reached the center of the circle, a girl robed in green stepped out from the far shadows and took the final seat without ceremony. Daphne. Her voice cut through the charged air like the tip of a duelist’s blade.

“Well,” she said, almost admiringly. “I did say the blood would remember you.”

No one clapped. No one cheered. This was not a celebration. This was acknowledgment. The circle sealed itself. The chamber breathed.

And the serpent carved into the stone behind them opened both eyes.

The floor of the dueling ring had once been stone. But tonight it was glass—dark, obsidian-smoked, threaded with silver veins that flickered faintly as if lightning had been trapped inside it centuries ago and had only just begun to stir. Harriett stood near the center, breath shallow, wand at her side but not quite steady, boots braced on a surface that reflected her face too clearly—pale, set, unreadable except for the sliver of something hungry at the corner of her mouth.

Across from her stood the challenger.

Sorrell Mulciber. Seventh-year. Slytherin. Not cruel—but deliberate. The kind of duelist who didn’t raise their wand unless they already knew three ways to win.

Her robes were unadorned. Her hair pulled back with military sharpness. A silver pin shaped like a snake coiled at her collarbone. She did not speak. She bowed once—short, without flourish.

Harriett mimicked it.

Not perfectly. Her bow came half a second too late, shoulders a little too stiff, the motion more defensive than composed. She straightened before she should have, and the watching circle noticed.

The boy at the gate called the duel.

“First blood or surrender. No fatal hexes. No external charms. Begin.”

The moment the word fell, Sorrell moved. No hesitation. No wind-up.

Just a whip-fast strike of lightning aimed low and deliberate, meant to unbalance. Harriett blocked on instinct—not well, not with poise, but with force. Her shield cracked like a pane of glass struck too close to the edge. The spell hit, fractured, scattered into shards of light.

She stumbled one step back. Regained her footing. Raised her wand again. And struck.

But her spell—too strong, too wild—overcorrected. Not a cutting charm, not really. Something between a jinx and a shockwave, flung not with calculation but with gut, with ache, with the buried hum of ritual still singing in her veins. The air snapped. The flame ward at the edge of the ring flickered violently.

Sorrell dodged without blinking. Fired back. Three spells in sequence—clean, classic, trained. Harriett blocked the first. Absorbed the second. Misread the third.

Her wand spun from her fingers, hit the ground with a clatter that echoed like a dropped bell in a sanctuary, sharp and humbling. The circle didn’t move. No one spoke. Harriett froze.

For one long, sharp breath, she stood disarmed. Wandless. Exposed. The glass beneath her feet shimmered, and in her chest, something coiled.

Not fear. Something older. Her blood pulsed.

The sigil on her palm flared—not visually, not with light, but with presence . And the flame ward responded.

The ring—carved in ash and dust and blood-oil runes—rose like a breath taken too deep. Fire spiraled once, twice, not outward but inward, flaring around her as though pulled from the marrow of the stones themselves. The serpent etched in the far wall lifted its head.

And Harriett did not cast. She stood .

The fire licked around her boots. Her eyes burned with reflection. Her hands were empty. But her magic was not.

It rose in the air like scent before a storm—ozone and memory, bone-dry air before the first break of thunder. It didn’t attack. It didn’t shield. It watched . The older magic in the room stirred—woken, startled, no longer passive.

Sorrell took one step back. Not fear. But deference.

The duel had not ended. There had been no call. No disarming spell to seal the victory. No surrender.

But something had shifted. Visibly. Tangibly.

Harriett reached slowly for her wand. Picked it up with care. The obsidian at her feet no longer showed her face. It showed the flame, coiling like breath around the memory of her form.

She turned to the gate.

“I’m done.”

The boy nodded.

“So is the duel.”

Sorrell gave the smallest bow Harriett had ever seen. It wasn’t gracious. It wasn’t mocking.It was acknowledgment. Not of a win. But of arrival.

Daphne met her at the edge of the ring, arms crossed, chin tilted slightly.

“You don’t fight like us,” she said.

Harriett wiped the back of her hand against her sleeve. “No.”

“You don’t duel .”

“I didn’t say I did.”

A beat.

Then, “But the flame recognized you.”

Harriett looked at her palm.

“No,” she said. “It remembered me.”

And the wall serpent blinked once. Just once. As if to say: yes, yes, I know you .

The corridor outside the dueling chamber was narrow and old—older, even, than the rest of the dungeon halls. Its stones were cut deeper, its sconces unlit, its air thick with the scent of ash and iron and the faint, unfamiliar hush that came after flame. Harriett leaned against the far wall, wand still clutched loosely in one hand, her pulse beginning to slow now that the magic had stopped humming behind her ribs like a choir half-strangled by silence.

The archway behind her sealed with a soft exhale of stone. She didn’t look up when footsteps approached. But she knew who it was.

Daphne Greengrass didn’t wear perfume, but there was a smell that trailed behind her anyway—smoke and something sharp, like crushed juniper and winter ink. Her shoes made no sound. She stopped just short of stepping into Harriett’s space.

“You bled into the ring,” she said. Not a question. Just a fact. “And it answered.”

Harriett’s voice felt rusted in her throat, rough with whatever still curled in her blood from the duel. “I didn’t plan to.”

“You didn’t need to.” Daphne leaned her shoulder against the opposite wall, her posture more dancer than duelist—precise, practiced, coiled like someone who always had a second blade. “You were recognized. And now, so are we.”

Harriett finally looked up. “What does that mean?”

“It means,” Daphne said, carefully, “that the society isn’t a game. Not like the clubs. Not like Quidditch.” She reached into the folds of her cloak, drew out a small, iron-disc token, and turned it in her palm. “This place was formed long before Dumbledore was Headmaster. Before the Ministry registered bloodlines. Before the Dark Lord made war a fashion.”

Harriett’s gaze flicked to the token. It was stamped with the dueling sigil—two crossed wands circled by a ring of fire, older than the Hogwarts crest, etched in a dialect she now half-understood but could never name.

“This society,” Daphne continued, “was a covenant. Between the old families, back when magic was not tamed but obeyed. When houses were more than surnames—when they were territories. When magic ran blood-deep.”

“And now?” Harriett asked.

“Now it’s a memory,” Daphne said. “But one that bites.”

Harriett let her head tilt back against the stone. “Why did you bring me here?”

Daphne considered her a moment.

“You’re not like them,” she said finally. “Your friends. Your professors. Even your enemies.” Her voice didn’t sharpen, didn’t rise, but there was a new texture in it now—a careful edge. “You walk like someone who’s had the ground shift under them. Like someone who’s learned to balance on a fault line.”

Harriett didn’t answer.

“You smell like bonefire and old names,” Daphne said, quietly. “And that means something.”

Harriett exhaled through her nose. “You sound like the ghosts.”

Daphne smirked. “Maybe I listen better.”

There was a pause.

Then Harriett said, low, “You knew I’d be challenged.”

“Of course.” Daphne stepped closer. Not threateningly, but close enough for her voice to go smooth as silk over steel. “That ring isn’t ornamental. It burns frauds. It forgets the unmarked.”

“And I’m not unmarked,” Harriett murmured.

Daphne’s eyes flicked downward. “No. You’re bleeding with something the rest of us only inherit in name. Your magic has memory now. Legacy. Old, dangerous permission .” Her gaze pinned her. “That’s power.”

Harriett felt the weight of her wand again, even though her fingers had never let it go. “And you want it?”

Daphne laughed. Not cruelly. Not kindly. Like someone used to cutting truth out of silk. “No. I want balance. I want leverage. I want to know the storm before it hits the windows.”

“And what makes you think I’m the storm?”

Daphne’s smile thinned. “Because they won’t see you coming until you’re already inside the house.”

Silence stretched between them for a long breath.

Then—

“I don’t trust you,” Harriett said.

“You shouldn’t,” Daphne replied.

“But I know what it means to owe silence. To trade secrets. To work in shadows not because you want to—but because the light doesn’t know how to hold what you are.”

Daphne tilted her head. “A girl after my own blood.”

Harriett pushed off the wall.

“I’ll share what I know,” she said. “But only if you do.”

Daphne held out her hand. Her ring—emerald-stoned, silver-banded, the kind worn by old families who remembered what it meant to keep a pact—caught the light.

“Secrets for secrets,” she said. “Knowledge for knowledge. No oath. Just recognition.”

Harriett looked at the offered hand. Took it. Her palm pulsed once. The sigil beneath her skin warmed. Their handshake was brief. But something old stirred in the shadows behind them anyway. 

A threshold crossed. A pact made. And neither of them smiled. Because this was not the beginning of alliance. It was the absence of war. For now.

The corridors were quieter by the time Harriett emerged from the dungeons, their shadows stretched long across the stone, soft as oil and darker than they had any right to be. She walked slowly, not because she was tired—though she was—but because the magic inside her hadn’t yet settled. It curled behind her ribs like smoke not yet cooled, restless, humming, breathing against the underside of her skin with the low ache of something once-forgotten now reawakened.

Her hand still tingled from where she’d clasped Daphne’s. Not with heat. With recognition .

The deal had been made. No oath, no vow—but a thread drawn tight between them, woven in the quiet spaces between the words they didn’t say.

She passed portraits that looked twice. Statues that bowed, not in deference, but acknowledgement. The staircases moved for her without complaint. Even the air felt different as she climbed—not warmer, not colder, but sharper. Like the castle itself had taken note of her path and chosen not to interfere.

She thought of the ring of flame that had crowned the dueling circle. The way it had surged—not in rage, but in answer —when her blood touched stone. She thought of the look on Daphne’s face when it happened—not fear. Not envy.

Certainty.

And she wondered if this—this edge, this pull —was what it felt like to stop being a story someone else was writing and begin becoming something else entirely. She was almost to the portrait of the Fat Lady when the weight of her thoughts grew too loud to carry in silence.

Was this what power felt like? Not thunder. Not light. But change. Not a sword raised—but a door opened.

She muttered the password under her breath. The portrait swung wide. And the warmth of Gryffindor Tower hit her like breath drawn too fast.

Laughter. Firelight. A burst of enchanted popcorn from the armchair cluster by the hearth. Someone strumming a few scattered chords on an enchanted lute. Dean, probably, or Seamus. The smell of parchment and pumpkin spice tea and whatever honeyed disaster Fred and George had left simmering in a teapot above the grate.

She stepped through. And the room noticed.

It was subtle—but undeniable. The way conversation dipped. The way heads turned, not all at once, but one after another like dominos falling through breath. A few upper years straightened. Parvati’s eyebrows arched. Katie Bell, curled in the window seat with a Defense textbook, looked up with sharp, calculating interest. Even Ginny—slouched in a corner with her legs tucked under her—glanced up from her game of Wizard’s Solitaire and watched Harriett pass like someone bracing for stormlight.

Harriett didn’t slow. She was halfway to the stairs when the voice cut through the room, crisp as frost.

“Where have you been ?”

Harriett stopped. She turned.

Hermione stood near the hearth, a book still open in one hand, but forgotten. Her expression wasn’t angry—not only angry—but wound tight, sharp around the mouth, eyes bright with the kind of worry that had long since hardened into something less generous.

“I asked you a question,” she said.

“So did half the tower,” Harriett said. “You just said it louder.”

A few people exchanged looks. Lavender muttered something into Parvati’s ear. Ron—slouched in a chair near the game board—didn’t move.

Hermione stepped forward. “You were gone all evening. Again. No explanation. No note. No message. You weren’t at dinner. You weren’t at the library.”

“You checked the library?” Harriett asked.

“You didn’t answer any of the questions I asked you yesterday. Or this morning. Or this week. ”

“That’s not a question,” Harriett said. “That’s a statement.”

Hermione’s voice rose. “We’re your friends , Harriett. We deserve to know what’s happening to you.”

“Do you?” Harriett said, quiet but clear. “You didn’t notice when I stopped eating. When I stopped sleeping. When my magic started cracking the floor under my bed. You only noticed when I left the table.”

Hermione flushed. “You’re being unfair. ”

“No,” Harriett said. “I’m being tired. ”

Silence. Then, Hermione, biting it back, “You can’t keep secrets like this and expect us to just keep following along.”

“I never asked you to follow me,” Harriett said. “You just assumed you were already in front.”

That struck.

Ron finally shifted in his seat. “Hey—” he started.

“No,” Harriett said. “Don’t. Not unless you’re going to say something honest. ”

“I—” Ron blinked. “You’ve changed.”

“ Yes. ” Her voice didn’t rise. It didn’t need to. “That’s the point.”

Hermione crossed her arms. “You think because you’ve found some new spell or some new book or some club that makes you—what? Better than us?”

“I think,” Harriett said, “that for the first time in my life, I’m learning who I am when I’m not being managed like a prophecy.”

Gasps. Real ones, this time. Someone dropped a mug. Harriett’s voice went soft. Softer than before. But razor-edged.

“And I think if you loved me only when I was confused —when I was easy to handle, when I asked for your approval before I breathed—then maybe it wasn’t love.”

Hermione looked stricken. “That’s not—”

“True?” Harriett asked. “Isn’t it?”

The room was very, very quiet.

Fred stood from where he’d been watching with a half-finished grin. Crossed the floor with casual ease and leaned against the nearest wall.

“I’ve gotta say,” he murmured. “That was a monologue worthy of House Black.”

Someone chuckled.

Katie Bell nodded. “She’s not wrong.”

Ginny spoke next, calm and clear and final. “You’ve been treating her like a patient. Not a person.”

Hermione turned, stunned. “I was worried— ”

“And it stopped being helpful when you stopped listening. ” Ginny didn’t flinch. “We saw it. The rest of us. She’s bleeding magic and memory, and all you see is a girl not holding your hand anymore.”

Hermione looked at Ron, like she might find refuge there. Ron didn’t meet her eyes.

Parvati cleared her throat. “Harriett, want to come sit with us?”

Harriett didn’t answer. She looked once more at Hermione. Not in hatred. Not even in anger. Just disappointment.

Then she turned. Crossed to the fire. And the upper years made room. They didn’t clap. Didn’t cheer. But they shifted. Subtly. Tangibly. Like something in the room had rebalanced around her. Like the lion had roared —and been heard.

Hermione stood frozen near the stairs. Ron lingered in silence, mouth drawn tight. And Harriett?

Harriett sat in the red velvet chair by the fire, legs folded, cup of tea passed silently into her hands by Lee Jordan, who offered no commentary, just a nod.

Her blood hummed. Her hands stilled. The tower breathed with her.

And above, the portrait of Godric Gryffindor himself flickered with flame at the edges—eyes bright, mouth unsmiling, but very, very watchful.

Excerpt from Magics of Accord and Challenge: A Treatise on Ancestral Dueling, Bound Circles, and Bloodline Recognition
Restricted Reference Copy – Level IV Clearance Required
Author Unknown (Believed to be R. Mulciber, pre-Ministry codification era)

Chapter VII: On the Origin and Function of Flame-Circle Dueling Societies in Pureblood Europe

Contrary to the popular belief that formalized dueling emerged in the wake of Wizengamot standardizations in the 12th century, the tradition of circle-bound, blood-marked challenge predates the Ministry by several centuries and follows its own, more arcane systems of legitimacy. Among these is the tradition now most commonly referenced by euphemism as The Society Beneath the Tower —a known but unspoken rite practiced primarily in British magical institutions.

This society, often mischaracterized as an extracurricular assembly, is not organizationally aligned with any school, government, or legal arm. It is instead a consecrated practice circle , anchored to the living wards of the earth beneath select magical strongholds. The circle is not a symbolic boundary—it is a magical construct designed to authenticate lineage, verify magical integrity, and test not merely technical skill, but inherited right .

Key Features of the Tower-Bound Circle:

• Blood Activation: Entry into the true dueling ring requires a blood offering at the threshold. The wound must be self-inflicted and intentionally placed. Ritual daggers passed down within old families often bear enchantments to ensure purity of cut.
• Sigil Recognition: Those with ancestral magic—especially magic derived from pre-Ministry oathcraft, pact-binding, or blood-sealing—may unintentionally provoke a reaction from the circle. In rare cases, this includes flame flare, ash spiral, or the manifestation of serpent-wrought wards. These events are not optional, and signify a shift in the structure of the duel.
• Challenge Structure: The duel may be won through skill, but can also be ended by recognition. If the circle acknowledges a blooded presence as aligned with its founding principles, it may disrupt the duel in favor of the challenger. This is not considered cheating, but fulfillment of ritual expectation.
• The Flame: Most controversially, the flame that borders the ring is not illusion. It is an ancestral echo, tied to the original pacts of the founding dueling lines—Black, Rosier, Peverell, Selwyn, and Greengrass. It reacts to memory more than to movement. When it rises, it signals that the duel has passed beyond the realm of contest and into the realm of legacy recognition.

It must be noted that only a small percentage of modern witches and wizards will ever provoke a full-circle reaction. When this does occur, observers are advised to treat the event as they would a spontaneous magical outburst in a ritualized setting: with caution, respect, and silence.

Contemporary Implications:

Although the Ministry no longer recognizes the circle’s judgments as legally binding, within magical aristocratic structures, its recognition still carries social and political weight. To be acknowledged by the flame is to be named—without title, without petition—as of the old blood .

Chapter Text

The Ministry smelled like secrets dressed up in lavender polish.

Not all of it—just this floor. The Registry of Magical Inheritance, Bloodlines, and Bequest was tucked into the second sublevel of the Department of Magical Law, hidden behind three locked doors, two enchanted filing cabinets, and a plaque that read Records Division E – Authorized Personnel Only in a font that looked exhausted. The walls were the same bureaucratic beige as every other Ministry office, but the air had weight. It pressed close to the skin, like the spell-thick fog in a ritual chamber—but fainter. Pinned down by paperwork. Institutional. Parchment instead of pentagrams.

Harriett stood in the narrow gap between two file stacks and tried not to let the Polyjuice drip down the back of her neck.

“I hate this,” she whispered, swiping a hand across her jaw. It came away slick and still slightly glowing.

“You’re just upset because I gave you eyebrows like my Aunt Mabel,” Daphne muttered from beside her, very much not looking remorseful. “There are worse things. You could’ve had Percy Weasley’s ears.”

Harriett glared. “You did that on purpose.”

“Oh, obviously,” Daphne said sweetly, flipping through a drawer labeled P–R (Lineage: Mid-1800s–Present) . “This is a high-crime operation. A girl needs to entertain herself.”

Harriett muttered something unkind about Slytherins and turned her attention back to the cabinet.

The registry was disturbingly well-organized, which somehow made it feel more like a trap. Everything filed alphabetically by maternal line , cross-referenced by wand core, house affiliation, blood-class, and known magical affinities. The ink on the parchment wasn’t quite still—letters occasionally shifted as if remembering how they’d been written, glyphs flickering with faint spell residue. This wasn’t record-keeping. This was containment .

She flipped through the P’s with a hand that still smelled faintly of mint potion and iron.

“Potter, Potter, Potter… no, that’s Charlus, and that’s Fleamont…”

Daphne’s voice came low beside her. “Look for the Ministry tag. They mark the ones under active enchantment.”

Harriett’s fingers froze.

There. Midway through the drawer. A parchment file wrapped in Ministry-stamped linen, bound in copper thread. On the front, her name:

Harriett Lilith Potter.
Registered 31 July, 1980.
Primary Guardianship: Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore.
Inheritance Tier: Class A, Modified.
Status: Bound.

She didn’t realize her fingers had clenched until the edge of the parchment crinkled. Daphne glanced over, saw her face, and—for once—didn’t say anything clever.

Harriett unfastened the copper thread with steady fingers.

Inside the file, the text shifted and rose like heat over stone. The ink was old magic, reactive. Her own name pulsed faintly on the page, followed by notations—clauses, wards, overrides. She scanned it fast, eyes narrowing.

“Blood-based guardianship... Right of magical suppression... Name-locked protections... This—” Her voice broke off.

Daphne leaned closer. “They tied your identity to him. It’s not just guardianship. It’s enchantment. Your name was used to anchor a system.”

“They built a cage,” Harriett said softly. “And named it me.”

Daphne didn’t answer for a moment.

Then, dryly, “Well. At least they spelled it right.”

Harriett barked a laugh—too loud, too sharp. Daphne winced and tugged her by the elbow deeper into the stacks.

“Quiet. Do you want to get arrested or reassigned to Magical Maintenance?”

“Honestly?” Harriett hissed. “Would be a lateral move.”

Daphne snorted. “You’re insufferable.”

“And you’re smug.”

“I’m Slytherin,” she corrected. “It’s practically a moral imperative.”

Harriett looked back down at the file. Her name still shimmered on the parchment—still bound, still not hers.

“But not for long,” she whispered.

The parchment didn’t respond. But the spell around it shimmered. Just faintly. Like something inside the ink had heard her. And disagreed.

They didn’t speak again until the castle was behind them.

The passage through the Floo spat them out somewhere deep in the lower levels of Hogsmeade, coughing on soot and cursing the Ministry’s warding dust. Daphne wrung ash from her braid with the air of a princess who had just survived a mudslide with dignity intact. Harriett muttered something impolite about bureaucrats and brushed off the hem of a cloak that wasn’t technically hers.

Outside, it was dusk. The kind with no sky left—just slate clouds and that particular bruise-colored light that made Hogwarts look less like a school and more like the memory of a fortress. They stood on the slope below the Thestral stables, wind curling sharp around their ankles, the air cold and briny from the lake. Daphne took a breath. Stared at the castle. Then turned to Harriett like she hadn’t been waiting, but had already decided on the question.

“So,” she said, not idly, not gently, “what are you going to do about Dumbledore?”

Harriett didn’t look at her. Instead, she looked at her hands. Still slightly ink-stained from the file. Still tingling.

“I’m going to take my name back.”

Daphne hummed once. “Dramatic.”

“True.”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know,” Harriett said. “But if the name’s the lock, I’m the key.”

The wind caught the edge of her cloak. It fluttered once—silver-threaded lining flashing against the dark. Daphne’s expression didn’t shift, but something behind her eyes did. A flicker of recognition. Or respect.

“Do you know how?” she asked.

Harriett didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. She was already walking.

The grimoire didn’t wait for her to open it.

By the time she returned to the tower—late enough that most of Gryffindor had retreated to their dormitories, and only the firelight and two leftover mugs of tea stood sentinel by the hearth—the book was already awake. It pulsed under the linen cloth, humming faintly with the sound of distant ink and the shape of language older than ownership.

She carried it upstairs. Past the velvet curtains. Past the sleeping portraits. Past the quiet shuffle of Lavender turning over in her sleep. She cast no silencing charms. She didn’t need to. The room made space for her.

When she set the grimoire on the desk, it opened itself. The pages flared once—bright, but not with light. With recognition . The ink did not bleed. It branded.

The name Potter burned across the page like a curse unraveling. Not handwritten. Not etched. Called . Each letter formed with a precision that felt too deliberate for the hand. The ink was red. Then silver. Then bone-white. A shimmer curled around the capital P , as if the page were remembering every mouth that had ever shaped the syllable into meaning.

Below it, the glyphs rearranged.

Rite of the Chalice and Name.
To sever the forged from the born. To silence what was spoken over what was given.
To reclaim.

Harriett sat slowly. Her palms were already warm. The sigil burned faint under her skin, reacting not to the spell—but to the truth it remembered.

The instructions followed. Not a list. Not a recipe. A procession.

• A name written in one’s own blood.
• A chalice shaped by hand or history.
• A mirror placed beneath moonlight.
• A whisper into water—of what was taken.
• A silence.
• A choice.

She breathed. The room did not. The air had stilled.

The grimoire’s pages curled slightly at the corners, not with heat—but with hunger. It wanted this. The name wanted this.

Potter .

She had always worn it like skin she hadn’t chosen. Given to her in death, inherited like a burden, signed across her bones by people who wanted her to fit it, to perform it, to keep it clean. But her blood had other names now. Her body had burned too much magic to pretend she hadn’t changed.

This wasn’t abandonment. It was ownership .

Her fingers moved automatically to the linen pouch at her waist—ritual salt, the knife, the mirror. Not tools now. Witnesses.

Tomorrow, she would perform the rite. Tonight, she read the page three times. Then once backward. Then again with her eyes closed. The ink never faded. The name never softened.

But at the bottom of the page, after the spell, the book had written something else. Just a single line, half-hidden in the fold of the parchment.

What you name yourself is what the Hollow will answer.

She traced it once. Just once. Then closed the book. And the castle exhaled like it knew something sacred had just begun.

Neville had insisted on the blanket fort.

Not suggested. Not meekly offered. Insisted—with the sort of quiet, adamant determination that meant either the Herbology exam had broken him completely or he’d read one too many tragic biographies and decided he, too, was going to reclaim his childhood.

“I just think,” he said, holding up a cushion like a holy relic, “that if we’re going to talk about blood rites and identity reclamation and the horrifying metaphysical implications of magical bureaucratic systems—”

“—which we were not,” Harriett said.

“—then we ought to at least be comfortable,” he finished, draping the cushion over the back of a chair with the air of a man making a deeply political statement.

“I brought tangerines,” Luna said brightly, materializing beside the hearth without warning and offering a teacup full of orange segments that might have been levitating half a second ago. Her hair was braided with tiny, silvery feathers, and her robes bore a pattern of spoon silhouettes dancing in what appeared to be a slow-motion stampede. Harry didn’t even want to consider how Luna got into the Gryffindor common room. 

Harriett blinked. “Why are they in a teacup?”

“Tangerines like porcelain,” Luna said, as if it explained everything.

Neville nodded. “She’s not wrong. My gran says citrus can smell fear.”

Harriett just looked at both of them. “You are two of the strangest people I’ve ever met.”

“Thank you,” they said in unison.

The blanket fort took shape quickly after that—pillows from every couch, two throw rugs, and what Harriett suspected might be her own school cloak, hung from the mantle and charmed to shimmer like the night sky. Someone (Neville) attempted a warming charm. It mildly ignited a sofa. Someone else (Luna) fixed it by whispering to the smoke. The firepit glowed politely. The tangerines floated gently between them like planets.

“So,” Neville said, adjusting his seat atop a beanbag that had definitely not existed earlier that evening. “Are you really going to change your name?”

Harriett plucked a tangerine from orbit. “More like peel off the bureaucratic curse wrapped around it. Apparently I’m legally seventeen different spells Dumbledore forgot to unregister.”

“That sounds inconvenient,” Luna said, nibbling delicately on a sugar quill that she’d dipped in salt for reasons unknown. “Do you think if you changed your name to something unpronounceable, the Ministry would explode?”

Neville’s eyes lit up. “Like a magical version of Prince.”

Harriett deadpanned, “What, you want me to be ‘The Witch Formerly Known as Potter’?”

“Imagine the paperwork,” Luna sighed dreamily.

Neville snorted into his tea. Harriett cracked half a smile.

“Maybe I’ll go with something simple,” she mused. “Like… Bloodstorm Starblade.”

“That’s a bit aggressive,” said Neville, tilting his head. “Sounds like a Quidditch move that gets you arrested.”

“I like it,” Luna said. “Very memorable. And intimidating.”

“You would,” Harriett muttered.

Neville leaned back on his elbows. “What about something softer, though? Like… Harriett of the Hollow?”

“That sounds like she’s cursed,” Luna said thoughtfully.

“She is cursed,” Neville replied.

Harriett raised her teacup. “Thanks for the reminder.”

They dissolved into muffled laughter after that—Harriett burying her face in her sleeve to avoid waking the tower, Luna humming something that might have been a lullaby or a sea shanty, and Neville trying to summon more cushions with a spell that kept accidentally conjuring lemons.

“You’re not nervous, are you?” Neville asked, voice lower now, somewhere between concern and curiosity.

Harriett let the question settle a moment.

“No,” she said at last, honest in a way she hadn’t been all week. “I think I’m ready. Just… not entirely sure what I’ll be when it’s done.”

Luna set her tangerine slice on her knee and looked at her with sudden, solemn clarity.

“Probably still allergic to magical bureaucracy,” she said. “But maybe less cursed.”

Harriett laughed. Quietly. Helplessly.

And in the glow of the floating tangerines and the half-collapsed blanket fort, for just a moment, she let herself be a girl again—strange friends, stolen sugar, and all.

The ascent to the Forbidden Tower was a kind of unraveling.

Not a journey marked in steps or distance, but in the way breath shortened against stone that hadn’t been warmed by footfall in decades, the way the shadows stretched longer here—not like the rest of the castle, playful and watchful, but old, bone-deep, cast by things that remembered when this place had been something else entirely. The stairwell wound higher than it had any right to, cut in a spiral so narrow Harriett’s shoulder brushed the wall each time she turned, and every footstep echoed not forward, but downward—as if sound itself could not bear to climb so high without remembering what it had once been made to guard.

No portraits hung here. No wards flared to greet her. No torches snapped to life at her presence, though her magic pulsed faintly at her wrist, restless under skin that still ached from the dueling ring’s kiss and the Ministry’s discovery. The only light came from the moon, high and white as bone tonight, filtering in slanted through the shattered ribs of the tower dome above. It cast the world in quiet blue, like the surface of a frozen lake, and made every broken flagstone beneath her boots gleam like the spine of something long-buried, only now remembering how to rise.

The air grew thinner as she climbed—sharper, cleaner, stripped of the familiar musk of parchment and fire and adolescent sweat that haunted most of the castle’s lived-in places. Here, the air had teeth. Here, it curled through the cracks in the stones like incense left behind by an altar no longer prayed at, smelling of quartz and ash and something fainter, sweeter—like crushed violets gone to seed and memory.

When she reached the top, she did not knock. She did not speak. She only pressed her palm against the ancient wood of the trapdoor—a door carved in concentric circles of silver-stained runes, dulled now with time and dust—and let the sigil under her skin speak for her.

The lock did not click. It sighed.

The door gave way not with ceremony, but with recognition. A push. A breath. A yielding of space that had not yielded in years.

The room beyond was round, windowless save for a single jagged rupture in the stone dome above, where moonlight poured in like spilled milk across the floor. The glass from that break still littered the corners—pale shards that caught the light and made it hum, some frosted with age, others stained faintly with blood or ink or something older. At the center, a pedestal waited. Granite, coarse-cut and deep-rooted, veined through with mineral white like bones fossilized in place. And nestled into the top of the pedestal as though grown there, not placed, was the chalice.

It was not beautiful. It was not meant to be.

Dark iron shaped in three bands, each stamped in a language the Ministry had stopped recording sometime in the twelfth century—names wrapped in circles like bramble, each layer laid atop the next like a palimpsest of inheritance. Its bowl was shallow, its rim worn smooth by centuries of hands that had bled into it willingly, and its interior shimmered faintly with mother-of-pearl that shifted color with her breath. Not opalescent. Not shining. Just aware.

She set her satchel down beside it. Pulled the grimoire free with reverence, wrapped still in linen that smelled faintly of dust and juniper and the vault. The book opened before she could reach for it, its pages turning with the slow inevitability of tide, of breath, of blood moving through a body too changed to be still.

The page it settled on did not speak. It shone.

There, scrawled in ink that moved like oil over water, was the heading—Rite of Sovereign Naming: The Chalice of Unmaking and Claim. The letters rearranged themselves as she stared, curling inward like serpents eating their own tails, folding into translations her tongue did not yet know but her blood already understood.

Beneath it, instructions manifested. Not lines. Not bullet points. Not Ministry-approved steps. A ritual, unfolding in layers, each a breath deeper into the dark. First: ash of bone from a line remembered by blood, not name. Second: ink forged not of pigment, but iron and soot and the wax of the false seal that bound her name to the state. Third: a single drop of blood, cast in claim, not sacrifice. And last, the invocation—unwritten. Spoken not aloud, but through the mark carried in the marrow.

She took her time.

She ground the bone ash finer than dust, careful not to breathe it in. She scraped the seal Daphne had melted for her into flakes, mixed them with soot scraped from the underside of the dueling ring where flame had licked the floor when her magic had flared wild and unshaped. She stirred it with a wand she did not recognize—hers, yes, but remade in her grip, the core pulsing differently now, whispering in a tongue she did not yet know how to answer. The ink that emerged was thick, metallic, a shade between rust and mercury. It did not reflect the moonlight. It absorbed it.

The quill she dipped into it was phoenix feather, gifted by the book itself during her last rite, drawn from a page that no longer existed. It smelled faintly of cinders.

And with that, she leaned over the chalice. She wrote the name the world had given her.

Not the one she had chosen. Not the one her magic called her by now, in the space between breath and spell. The one the Ministry had recorded. The one written on birth certificates and prophecy scrolls. The one sealed in vaults, tattooed into school registries, whispered through wards that never asked for her permission before they locked her down.

Harriett Lilith Potter.

The name shuddered the moment it touched the chalice.

The ink fought. Not like a living thing. Like a dying one. It resisted shape. It bled backward. The ‘r’ in Potter twisted first, then the ‘a’ in Harriett, curling in on itself as if trying to escape. But she finished it. Firm hand. Even line.

The ink dried too fast. Then not at all. It stayed wet, glistening darkly, catching the edge of her breath like it meant to drown it.

She drew the dagger. This time, the cut was not painful.

It was almost a relief—the press of blade against palm, the sting of reopening an old wound that had never truly healed. The blood welled slow and thick, darker than before. As if her blood had aged with her. As if it, too, had waited for this.

She let one drop fall. The name trembled. She let the second land in the center of the ‘o’ in Potter. The chalice answered.

It did not flash. It did not flare. It cracked.

Not visibly—not with light. With sound. A resonance, low and wrong, echoed through the pedestal and into the bones of her feet, and then the name fractured along its spine. Each letter split. The ink sucked inward like breath held too long. The mother-of-pearl at the base of the bowl blackened.

Her name was pulled inside it. One letter at a time. Not torn. Not erased. Severed.

And when the last curve of ink vanished, when the blood stopped boiling and the metal grew still again, the chalice sat empty.

Empty—but not clean. The residue of her name lingered like scent after lightning. And inside her hand, the sigil shifted.

It did not flare with fire. It did not hum with warning. It bent—subtly, imperceptibly, the curve of a single stroke where before there had been a line. Like the stem of a plant curling toward the sun. Like the first breath of a new name not yet born, but already awake.

She closed the grimoire. Slowly. Gently. The book did not resist. The page did not bleed. But it stayed warm in her hands for a long, long time.

When she stepped back, the tower felt different.

Not hollow. Not dark. Just… still. As if the room had witnessed something it had waited centuries to see, and now could rest. The wind no longer howled. The stones no longer whispered. Even the moonlight grew softer, like it had lost interest in being harsh.

Her name was gone. And what would come next had not yet taken shape. But it would.

She was no longer Harriett Lilith Potter.

And whatever the world might call her tomorrow, it would not be bound by ink and parchment again. It did not announce itself with thunder.

There was no crash of wind against windowpanes, no shattering of wards or flickering of enchanted lanterns. The castle did not groan. The sky did not scream. There was only a shift—a silence inside a silence, a thread gone taut and then, quite suddenly, gone altogether.

Far above the tower, on the highest floor of the tallest spire, in a chamber lit by nothing but a single candle and the slow turning of time, Albus Dumbledore dropped his teacup.

It did not break.

But the sound it made when it struck the saucer—sharp, too loud, like a chime rung through bone instead of china—was enough to make the phoenix stir on its perch, feathers ruffling like leaves in windless heat. Fawkes let out a single, warbled note. Not distressed. Just aware.

Dumbledore did not speak. He did not blink. He sat with one hand still poised midair, as if trying to catch the moment after it had already fled the room, and the other curled into a fist so tight the joints had gone white.

Somewhere, a name had been unmade. And it had not asked his permission.

He stood—slowly, not stiffly, but like someone who had just realized the floor was farther away than it used to be. His wand lay on the desk, unlit, forgotten. The candle guttered. And in the vast, echoing silence of that office where portraits slept and old instruments spun dust into magic, Dumbledore whispered a word.

Not Harriett. Not Potter. A name he had not spoken since she was swaddled in blood and prophecy. It did not answer.

And far below, where the air was colder and the stone remembered things the Headmaster never had to carry, Harriett staggered.

Not dramatically. Not even visibly. Just a breath misstepped. A falter in the center of her ribs, as though something had unhooked from her spine and left the shape of itself behind.

Her hand clenched. The grimoire at her side pulsed once, as if in confirmation. The chalice had gone cold. The ink was dry. Her palm still bore the faint trace of the sigil, but it no longer burned. It no longer obeyed.

And the magic tether—once imperceptible, once coiled so tightly through her name that she had forgotten how it felt to move without dragging him behind her—was gone.

Just gone.

She braced one hand against the stone of the pedestal. The tower, steady beneath her boots until now, seemed to shift beneath her like breath caught mid-exhale. Her vision flickered—not with darkness, not with dizziness, but with memory. She saw her wand as a child, stuttering to spark in Ollivander’s palm. She saw the Sorting Hat pause, confused, naming her brave when it had only seen fear. She saw every time Dumbledore had said her name like it meant something she didn’t understand.

She saw the leash. And she felt it snap.

Not loudly. Not cruelly. Just a clean, dry break, like a thread cut too close to the bone. She felt it recoil—not into Dumbledore, but into the castle, into the very air between them, like a spell released too late. She gasped. Not in pain. In… relief.

Not relief. Sovereignty. Her name was hers now. Not granted. Not branded. Not bound in wards layered like silk over chain.Just hers.

And the silence that followed was full of breath. Her own. New. Entire.

The wind returned, soft as fur against her cheek. The moonlight did not blink. And in the heart of her name—whatever it would become—something opened.

Not a door. A future.

Excerpt from Foundations of Sovereign Magic: Ritual, Name, and the Self , 7th Edition
Chapter 12: Leashes and Lineage—On the Consequences of Bound Magic

“To name a thing is not merely to know it—but to claim it, shape it, and sometimes, to own it. Thus, all true magic begins not with power, but with permission.”
—Thales Greengrass, The Laws of Inheritance and Ritual (1624)

It is a lesser-known but deeply consequential fact that the legal registration of a magical name is, in certain instances, far more than bureaucratic procedure. While most witches and wizards are named and catalogued for the sake of Ministry census, educational placement, and magical trace monitoring, certain individuals—usually those born under prophecy, bloodline omen, or exceptional magical signature—are subject to a more insidious classification: the Binding Writ of Authority .

This writ, often masked within the folds of inheritance law or parental consent protocols, permits an external magical agent—typically a guardian, Headmaster, or Ministry official—to place tethering enchantments upon a child's magical core. These enchantments are rarely overt. They do not present as shackles or suppressions in the traditional sense, but rather as silencers, limiters, subtle redirections of will. A Bound magic does not lack strength. It merely does not answer to the one who wields it.

In cases where the child's name is registered with a middle name or suffix not naturally chosen, such additions often act as linguistic locks—permitting the enchanter to define the vessel of the child's identity through imposed grammatical structures. The name becomes not a vessel of sovereignty, but a spell in itself. A claim.

These bindings have measurable magical consequences:

• Stagnation of Core Development – The Bound individual’s magical growth may appear stable or even strong on the surface, but it will be fundamentally externalized. Spells will depend heavily on wand usage, incantation precision, and emotional volatility, with minimal instinctive flow or ritual depth.
• Traceable Magical Signature – The individual’s magic may remain traceable well beyond Trace age thresholds, with no known method of privacy shielding that can fully obscure the echo of the tether.
• Interference with Ancestral Memory and Lineage Magic – The Bound will be unable to access legacy enchantments, bloodline protections, or ancestral loci such as family vaults, grimoire keys, or name-inherited wards until the binding is formally severed.
• Psychological Echoes – Prolonged magical binding often causes symptoms mistaken for emotional instability: dissociation, magical misfires under stress, or sudden untraceable surges of ambient power. In reality, the core is simply reacting to being leashed too tightly for too long.

The only confirmed method of removing such bindings is the Rite of Sovereign Naming —also known in older traditions as The Chalice of Names . This ritual, when performed correctly, fractures the tether by reasserting magical authority through the shedding of blood, ash, and name—thus granting the witch or wizard the legal and metaphysical ownership of their magic anew.

It is worth noting that the breaking of such a binding is not without consequences for the one who cast it. In some cases, the snap of the tether may cause magical recoil, the severing of shared protections, or even the collapse of long-standing enchantments linked through the name.

Power, once returned, does not forget its leash.
And magic remembers who dared to tie the first knot.

Chapter Text

She left after curfew, of course—because that was when the castle slept deepest, when the last portraits had shut their painted eyes and the suits of armor stopped their muttering patrols to lean into silence, when the walls exhaled the long breath of stone unburdened and even the ghosts grew quiet. The corridors had bent for her again, not dramatically, not like the first time after the Rite of Hollowing, but subtly—stairs lengthening or shortening as needed, hinges failing to creak, floorboards remembering not to betray her weight. She did not use a cloak this time. She didn’t need one. The castle had learned the shape of her movement, the cadence of her breath, the rhythm of footsteps laid over sigils no one else could see. It let her go.

Outside, the air was sharp with frost, though the calendar still insisted it was early November. The wind had teeth but no breath, a dry, low ache of cold that curled through her sleeves and whispered against the back of her neck with a kind of reverence. She did not flinch. The world was changing around her, bending slowly toward some older axis, and her body—still strange in its new magic, still raw at the edges where the leashes had been burned away—recognized the call of it like a long-lost tongue. Something in her blood had heard a name spoken without voice, and answered.

She apparated without flash, without sound—without the usual wrench behind the ribs that came with long-distance jumps. The Hollow welcomed her before she arrived, folding space gently, like a hand cupped to catch a falling stone. She landed not at the gate—there was no gate—but just outside the low stone wall that still ringed the ruins like a memory half-dissolved by time. The garden had gone wild. Ivy claimed the fenceposts. Snowbells bloomed out of season. The air was heavy with the silence of places that remember too much.

Godric’s Hollow had never stopped being quiet, but tonight it was reverent.

The cottage stood in its broken silhouette, moonlight washing the fractured roof in silver and soot. No new flowers had been planted. No candles flickered in the windowsills. Whatever reverence had once lingered in the shape of bouquets and handwritten notes had long since been cleared away by the Ministry’s delicate preservation spells. Harriett stared at it, this shrine to her own beginning, this wound dressed in official commemoration, and did not step forward—not yet. Her hands remained at her sides. Her shoulders did not shift. But her magic pulled toward the door.

And the wind shifted.

It wasn’t loud. Wasn’t sudden. Just a tilt in the air, a turn of pressure against her skin. A low thrum rose beneath her boots—not vibration, not sound exactly, but sensation, like something vast stirring below the frost-hard soil. Not hostile. Not even welcoming. Just aware. The way old bones might stir when a familiar footstep passed above them. The way the tide moved toward the pull of a moon it could not see.

She passed the threshold without fanfare.

The doorframe stood, though the door itself had long since been shattered—splintered from the center, hinges rusted into silence. The interior was sparse, not from time, but from care—every board preserved, every beam held up by gentle charms that did not interfere, only paused decay. It should have felt empty. It didn’t. Magic clung to the corners like soot—quiet, thick, dense with memory. She felt it settle on her shoulders like a second cloak.

Harriett did not speak. She did not need to.

The room at the back, the nursery, had been left untouched. A crib still leaned half-collapsed against the far wall. The wallpaper had curled inwards like old parchment. Dust blanketed everything, undisturbed except for the faint trace of footprints she had not made. She followed them anyway.

The floor creaked once—soft, reluctant. Then held its breath. She crossed into what remained of the garden.

It hadn’t been a garden in years. Not in the deliberate way, not in the manner of tended things. But the space was still there—carved out by absence, held open by magic that had long since outlived its caster. The soil glowed faintly in the moonlight—not visibly, not to the eye, but to the blood. To the bone. Something beneath it stirred as she stepped past the crumbling stone path and let her hand trail along the curve of a broken archway, where honeysuckle vines had overtaken the wood, blooming out of season, white blossoms gone translucent with frost.

And the hum deepened.

This was not where they had died. That had been inside, under a ceiling that had half-collapsed in the explosion of spell and scream. This was where something else had happened. Where her father had drawn the last protection circle. Where her mother had stood holding her, not to shield, but to bear witness. The garden remembered.

So did the ground.

She dropped to her knees without thinking, the gesture not reverent, not deliberate—just necessary. The air here tasted like salt and smoke, the kind that didn’t rise from fire but from memory made physical. She pressed one hand into the earth.

It answered.

The pulse was slow, but sure. Not a heartbeat—older than that. More like tide. The ground did not shift, but something within it did. Something beneath. A root system of magic too old to name. It curled against her palm like something recognizing its own reflection.

She whispered, not aloud but in the way ritual demanded: breath shaped with intent, not volume. “I’ve come to remember.”

The vines rustled once. Not in wind. In response.

And beneath the soil, something stirred—sleep-heavy, salt-bound, bone-deep. Not a person. Not a ghost. Not even a guardian. Just presence. Just magic old enough to dream.

She stayed there, hand buried in the earth, until her pulse and the garden’s beat aligned. Until her magic stopped pressing outward and began to listen.

It had never been about reclaiming. It had always been about restoring.

The earth did not crack. It did not split open with the drama of prophecy or divine violence. It breathed. That was all. A single exhale—not from above, but below—the kind of breath that loosens the knots in roots, that whispers to bone-dust slumbering beneath loam, that turns ash into ink and remembers the shape of old names. Harriett felt it first in her spine: a subtle press, like her body being realigned around a truth too large for language. Then in her palm, where the soil had warmed beneath her touch. The hum became a current. Then a pull. Not violent. Not eager. Just inevitable.

She stood slowly, her knees dusted with frost, her palm streaked in pale dirt that shimmered faintly under moonlight like old salt kissed by summer storms. The air had shifted. Not cooler, not warmer—but heavier, thick with the hush that comes before music, before memory, before the stirring of something old enough to forget how to speak.

The vines parted without a word. She had not expected that. She had come prepared—wand tucked against her wrist, small blade hidden in the hem of her boot, ash-blessed thread wrapped around her ribs like a promise—but the honeysuckle withdrew like tide retreating from the shore, curling back on itself in slow, deliberate silence. She passed beneath the archway.

There, tucked behind the broken stone wall that had once marked the boundary of the Potters’ garden, half-swallowed by time and overgrowth, was a slab of slate barely wider than a hearthstone. Runes lined its edge—worn smooth in places, illegible in others, but still faintly pulsing beneath her gaze. Her blood knew them. Her breath shortened.

She knelt again, this time not in reverence, but in recognition.

Pressed her hand to the center rune. Waited.

The stone did not move. But the earth beneath it sighed.

A seam appeared.

Not cracked, not shattered—revealed. Like skin parting around a buried blade. The stone receded an inch. Then another. The soil stirred. Roots shifted—knotting together, then unfurling. And slowly, quietly, the slab folded open, revealing a narrow passage beneath. No spell. No ward spoken aloud. Just permission. Given, not taken.

Harriett descended.

The stairs were not carved—they were grown. Stone shaped by root and time, smoothed by water long since dried, edges softened by centuries of soil pressing inward. Moss clung to the corners like velvet. The walls pulsed faintly with warmth. Not heat. Not fire. Just presence. Like walking into a space that had been expecting her, that had been waiting—not desperately, not hopefully. Just patiently. As old things do.

The passage wound downward. Not deep—this was not a vault, not a tomb—but far enough that the surface air no longer touched her skin. She passed beneath a low arch where bone fragments had been set into the stone like teeth—wolf. Deer. Something older. Salt lines had been drawn in crumbling circles across the floor, their centers scattered with long-dead herbs and the remains of spells too delicate to survive sunlight.

And then she stepped through the final root-curved threshold, and the garden uncoiled before her.

Not a garden in the living sense—there were no roses here, no manicured hedges, no blooms bred for fragrance or charm. This was ritual soil. Blood-dark, root-deep. A space not meant for beauty, but for becoming.

The chamber was round, ringed by salt that had sunk into the stones. Nightshade grew wild along the perimeter, violet-black petals curling back from stems thick with sap and memory. A single tree stood in the center—leafless, silver-barked, its roots exposed above the ground like fingers grasping upward from the earth. A basin sat at its base. Empty. Dry.

The air was thicker here. Every breath felt like it had to be earned.

Harriett stepped forward.

The salt rings flared faintly as she crossed them—not in protest, but in awareness. They tasted her. They remembered. The nightshade did not retreat. It bent, ever so slightly, in her direction. She moved without speaking, without raising a wand, without calling any name but her own. Her footsteps echoed against the stone with the hush of a name whispered through water.

She stopped before the basin.

It was shallow, carved from dark stone, rimmed in iron that had not rusted, though every law of time and weather said it should have. The bottom was scorched—something had burned there. Something recent. Or something that never stopped burning.

A branch rested beside it—curved, silver-veined, marked with the Potter rune carved deep enough to reach marrow. She did not need to be told what it was.

A key. A spark. The memory of a threshold. This was not a burial place. This was a garden of reckoning.

And it had been waiting for her.

There were no instructions. No parchment tucked beneath the stone, no grimoire page fluttering with inked diagrams and measured runes. Only the weight in her chest, the pulse in her palm, and the soft, steady hum of the basin waiting beside the silver-rooted tree—expectant, not demanding. The garden did not whisper what it wanted. It simply watched.

Harriett exhaled slowly.

She unwrapped her hand, the scar from the Chalice Rite still faint along the skin like the line left by lightning when it chooses not to kill. Her fingers trembled, not with fear, but with something deeper—something that moved like memory and ached like inheritance. She drew the blade from her belt. The one from the Hollow vault. Bone-handled. Moon-tempered. Still faintly warm from where it had slept against her spine.

She did not cut her palm this time.

Instead, she knelt. Pressed her knees to the dry black soil, stained with the silence of a hundred years, and turned her left arm outward, exposing the space just above the crook of her elbow—close to the bone. The place where blood ran truest. Where names did not lie.

The blade sank in without pain.

Not gentle, not cruel—just honest. The kind of wound the land remembers.

Her blood spilled slow. Thicker than it should have been. Darker. It hit the earth with a sound like ink dropped into flame—not loud, not wet, but final. The soil drank deep. The roots stirred.

A ring of salt, once crumbling and faint, brightened beneath her—its edge glowed faint gold, then silver, then something redder and older. Like the color of firelight behind closed eyelids. She dipped her fingers in the basin and smeared what blood still clung to them across its lip, completing the circuit. Her magic caught the scent of it and rose—not wild, not hungry this time, but willing. Almost reverent.

Harriett reached for the pouch at her hip and withdrew the salt. Not ordinary salt, not kitchen-ground or even wand-cut. This had come from Elinor’s urn, stolen grain by grain on the new moon and buried with rowan root for seven days. It was heavy in her hand. Not in weight. In consequence.

She poured it in a slow, spiraled line around the tree’s roots, walking counterclockwise with bare feet pressed into the dampened soil. The salt hissed when it touched the blood already soaking the ground, not violently, but like something waking from too-long sleep. The air thickened. Her breath caught on the stillness of it. The moment stretched.

Then the bloom began.

It was not sudden. It did not explode with color or break the night with green. It moved like dusk—slow, inevitable, inching forward on limbs that remembered sunlight only vaguely. The tree’s bark darkened to charcoal, then lightened again, silvery white with streaks of something like opal beneath. Faint veins lit within its branches, and along its trunk, ancient sigils began to emerge—not carved, not painted, but drawn upward from beneath the bark itself, like bruises in reverse.

The roots pulsed once. Then again.

And slowly—achingly—buds began to unfurl.

They weren’t flowers. Not truly. More like glowing knots of energy that breathed with the rhythm of the land beneath them. Like stars folded too close to the earth. The nightshade around the edge of the garden stilled, bowed its heads. The salt ring brightened.

And from the highest branch—curved like the neck of a sleeping serpent—something fell.

Not fast. Not heavy.

Just downward, deliberate, as if placed.

It landed in the basin with a soft sound—stone against stone. Harriett moved forward on shaking legs. Reached down.

The fruit was not fruit.

It was the shape of one—roughly oval, slightly pointed, ringed with tiny ridges like the veins of a seed pod—but it was smooth as riverstone, cool and pale, except for where her fingers touched it. There, it warmed.

She held it with both hands, breath held behind her teeth, the weight of it impossible to explain. It wasn’t heavy. But it was full. Dense with something like memory. Like permission.

The tree no longer glowed. The basin no longer pulsed. The roots had gone still again.

But in her hands, the stone-fruit beat once.

Not a sound.

A thrum.

Like a heart. Like a name.

It began with a shadow.

Not cast, not sudden—but grown, the way dusk bleeds into the edges of afternoon, gentle and unstoppable. The light in the garden dimmed, not with passing clouds, not with fading moonlight, but with presence. The air thickened. The nightshade bowed.

Harriett rose slowly from where she had knelt beside the basin, the stone-fruit cradled still in her palms. The tree behind her no longer glowed, but its branches remained alert, stretched upward like they were listening to something only the roots could hear.

She turned.

At the edge of the ward—the place where the salt ring met the wild tangle of roots and time-forgotten ivy—stood a woman.

Not young. Not old. Timeless in the way stone could be. She wore a mantle woven from living vine and grave-dark velvet, clasped at the throat with a sigil Harriett almost recognized—Peverell, but older. Sharper. Before the Hallows had been named. Her face was carved with poise, not age. Her hair was braided in seven parts, each threaded with something that shimmered like frost-laced iron. And her eyes—

Her eyes were Harriett’s.

Or rather, Harriett’s were hers.

“You are late,” the woman said, voice like root and wind and oath. “Child of mine. Blood of my line. Echo of the first breach.”

Harriett didn’t speak. Couldn’t. Her tongue felt caught on the edge of breath, as if even that might dishonor the moment. The woman stepped forward. The ward did not resist her.

“You have bled the circle,” she continued. “You have stirred the soil. You have summoned memory where memory slept. So I came.”

Harriett swallowed. “Who are you?”

The woman inclined her head. “I am the thirteenth matron of the Hollow. Daughter of House Peverell, by bond not blood. Guardian of the gate beneath the name Potter. I am Iolanthe. And I have waited long for you.”

“I—” Harriett looked down at the fruit in her hands. “I didn’t know what I was waking.”

“No,” Iolanthe said softly. “But you knew it was yours to wake.”

A long silence settled between them—neither hostile nor gentle, but expectant. Like a bell yet to be struck.

“I thought the Potters were war heroes,” Harriett said finally, hoarse. “Inventors. Aurors. Not this. Not—ritual. Not blood magic. Not guardians of salt and stone.”

“They were what history made of us,” Iolanthe replied. “But we were something else before we were useful. Before we were remembered in terms the Ministry could catalog.”

“You… started this?”

She smiled faintly. “No. I inherited it. As you do now. The Hollow is not a beginning. It is a return.”

Harriett stepped toward her, just once, the fruit still warm against her chest. “Why me?”

Iolanthe’s gaze softened—but it did not lose its edge. “Because no one else would come.”

She reached forward—not to touch, but to gesture—and the air shimmered faintly between them. An echo of wards long-buried. “When the last rites were sealed beneath this garden, a name was marked to carry the call. Not for prophecy. Not for power. For memory. You bear that name.”

“Potter,” Harriett said.

“No,” Iolanthe said. “The name beneath it. The name before it. The one etched into your blood before your bones remembered breath.”

Harriett’s fingers tightened around the fruit. “Dumbledore bound it.”

“Yes,” Iolanthe said, and her voice did not tremble. “He feared what you would become. So he offered you safety. And called it love.”

Harriett looked at the soil. “He said he wanted to protect me.”

“And so he did,” Iolanthe said. “From yourself. From the truth. From the house beneath the ashes.”

“Why didn’t anyone stop him?”

“Because it is easy to silence the dead,” she said, “when the living have forgotten how to listen.”

Harriett felt her breath shake.

The roots around the tree shifted faintly—just once, like the soil had sighed.

“Is this a test?” she asked. “A rite? A—trap?”

“No,” Iolanthe said. “This is home.”

Harriett looked up. Her voice broke when she spoke again. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“You’re not meant to,” the woman said. “You are meant to remember. That is the work. That is the rite.”

The garden brightened—not with light, but with clarity. The vines pulled tighter. The salt ring re-etched itself with a faint whisper, settling like breath drawn after grief.

“The fruit you hold,” Iolanthe continued, nodding once toward Harriett’s hands, “is not for eating. Not for keeping. It is a key.”

“To what?”

“To yourself.”

Harriett blinked. “How do I use it?”

“When the name returns,” Iolanthe said. “When the final door remembers your touch.”

She stepped back now. Her feet did not disturb the garden. Her presence faded not in body, but in weight—like the memory of a storm retreating from the sea.

“I will not return unless called,” she said. “But the soil will listen. And the wards are yours now.”

Harriett wanted to ask more—what comes next, how to hold all of it, how to carry blood and name and magic without becoming something hollow—but she didn’t. Not yet.

Instead, she whispered, “Will I be enough?”

And Iolanthe, halfway into shadow, turned only her eyes.

“You are the daughter of silence and salt. You are the last bloom in scorched soil. You are already more than they deserve.”

Then she was gone.

Not vanished. Not disappeared.

Returned.

The garden remained still. The basin gleamed. And in Harriett’s hands, the fruit pulsed once more—soft as breath. Sure as blood.

Harriett did not move for some time after Iolanthe vanished. The air still held the shape of her presence, like a wind pressed into velvet, like the memory of hands that once knew how to braid fire. The branches above did not sway, and yet she felt them watching. The garden no longer curled away from her footsteps or trembled beneath her touch—it breathed with her now, slow and wide and deep.

She knelt once more by the basin and poured the remaining water back into the soil with careful fingers. The blood in it glimmered faintly before it sank, like a vow offered and accepted. The earth sighed again, softer this time, like the pulse of something sleeping in trust.

The fruit in her hands was still warm. Not hot. Not living. But warm in the way old stones remember the sun, in the way bones remember names long buried. She did not know how to use it—not yet—but she knew it would wait. Not like a weapon. Like a door.

The garden was no longer overgrown. The nightshade had curled back from the salt-ring, its blossoms drooping with a kind of reverence. The moss along the stones had gathered into runes—not words, not warnings, just… recognition. A pattern too old for textbooks. A knowing too deep for language. And at the farthest edge of the space, where the roots once tangled too thick for steps, a path had cleared.

Not straight. Not obvious. But open.

Harriett rose.

The wind outside the wardline picked up—cold with autumn, sharp with the coming frost—but inside the ring, the air remained steady. When she stepped beyond it, her foot fell on stone that no longer resisted her weight.

The climb back to the surface was longer than she remembered. Or perhaps it was simply different—her steps no longer chased by ghosts or stitched to dread. The tunnel was dry now, the lichen silver-gold beneath her light. Roots no longer reached for her ankles. The air grew thinner, but not unfriendly. At one point she passed a spiderweb strung between two corners of stone, and paused—because it glittered. Because someone had braided sigils into it.

When she stepped out into the ruined cottage, the wind met her like an old friend testing for changes. It rustled her hair and pulled faintly at her collar, but did not bite. The chimney had collapsed further since her last visit, and the corner wall bore a new crack, but the threshold—just beyond the hearth—had not shifted. She touched it once. Just her fingertips. And the stones warmed.

They knew her now.

She crossed the overgrown threshold without ceremony. The night was full and dark and starless, clouds stretched low across the sky like gauze too stubborn to part. The gate to the yard creaked open without protest. The wards she’d slipped through days before now parted before her like grass before rain. She walked with the fruit still in her palm, her wand untouched in her holster, her steps measured not by time but by something older: gravity, inheritance, breath.

At the edge of the Hollow, the graveyard stood quiet. She didn’t linger. Not this time. She would return. But not as a visitor. She disapparated just beyond the old stone wall, the crack of it swallowed quickly by the fog.

When she landed again—behind the greenhouse at Hogwarts, feet half-sinking into cold mud—she exhaled like she’d been holding it all night. The castle loomed ahead, lit faintly by torchlight and late-hour enchantments. She tucked the fruit into the folds of her cloak, pressed flat against her chest like a second heart, and started up the hill.

No one stopped her.

A portrait blinked sleepily as she passed. A gargoyle shifted its weight, but did not speak. Even the Fat Lady—usually quick to harumph and fuss—only opened without comment when she murmured the password.

Inside, the common room was nearly empty. A few seventh-years dozed near the hearth, books cracked open across their laps. Ginny lay curled in the red armchair, fast asleep, a rolled-up copy of Which Broomstick tucked beneath one arm like a pet.

Harriett moved like smoke. Silent, spare, untouchable.

Her dormitory was cold, but not unkind. The window had been left cracked again—Parvati’s habit—and the breeze had blown the corner of Harriett’s blanket half-off the bed. She didn’t fix it. She sat at the edge of the mattress, unwrapped the fruit, and stared at it in the dark.

It didn’t glow anymore. But the warmth hadn’t faded.

She placed it gently into her satchel, tucked between the grimoire and the bone-handled dagger. Then she unbuttoned her boots, peeled off her socks, and slid beneath the covers with slow, deliberate care.

For the first time in weeks, her name did not ache when she thought it. It sat quietly inside her chest, no longer gnawed at by borrowed protections or carved into someone else’s legacy. It was hers. Fully. Unequivocally.

The Hollow had taken her. Claimed her. Not like prophecy, but like soil claiming rain.

And tomorrow, the castle would feel different. 

Because she had brought something back with her. Because she had been recognized. Because the blood had bloomed.

And because the garden was no longer sleeping.

From the Journals of Iolanthe Peverell

Dated the Year of Hollowing, Moon Third, Root Deep

The land remembers. Even when the name has been stripped, even when the children are taught to fear their own blood, the stones hold vigil. Salt clings to the bones. Roots coil tighter beneath neglected ground. We think we bury the old ways, but they wait. Always, they wait.

I walked the lower garden tonight. The moon was thin, the stars masked, but the earth opened at my tread. The nightshade has bloomed out of season again. I took that as a sign. The rites are not finished. They never are. Magic like this is not a fire to be lit once, but a kiln—ever-hungry, fed by the bones of remembrance.

The Chalice remains unclaimed. My blood was the last to stir its ink, and it has not sung since. I have taught the runes to no one. Not because they are secret. But because they are sacred. The Potter line has forgotten itself. And forgetting, they have grown brittle.

There will come another.
A child not born, but named. Not raised, but called.
I do not know their face. Only the shape of their magic—
carved like riverbed stone, sharp at the edges, soft where grief has pressed it flat.

When they come, the Hollow must be open. The salt rings must be re-drawn. The nightshade must be tended.

If I am gone, let this be the record:

The fruit will not rot. The roots will not forget.
And when the blood returns, the garden will answer.

— I. Peverell, Keeper of the Hollow,
Daughter of Silence,
Heir of the Stone Unnamed.

Chapter Text

The day they left for Christmas, the snow fell soft and slantwise against the castle walls, whispering against the windows like a secret trying to get in. The carriages were already waiting by the gates, enchanted thestrals pawing silently at frost-laced ground, their breath rising in clouds that did not melt the chill. The sky was the color of parchment left too long in ink, cloud-smeared and goldless, but the students buzzed with the kind of bright anticipation that could only come from temporary escape. Scarves were knotted tight. Trunks were shrunk and charmed and dragged across stone. Laughter ran ahead of them in little bursts of steam.

Harriett had packed light.

Not because she needed little—she never did—but because she couldn’t bear the thought of carrying more than herself. The grimoire was bound in linen and salt, tucked between an old jumper and a tangle of protective wards braided into her socks. The branch from the Hollow, long since dried and turned to ash, had left a smear on the inside of her satchel, like even now it refused to forget what it had once been.

The common room had emptied quickly that morning, but Neville had waited by the fire with a paper-wrapped box in his lap, blinking sheepishly when she came down the stairs.

“It’s not a real gift,” he said immediately, thrusting it out like it might bite. “Just—something I thought might help. For, um. All the plant-related rituals. Not that I’m saying you need help. Just—I mean. It’s good for encouraging bloom. That’s all.”

Harriett took the box with careful hands. “Thank you,” she said. “That means more than you think.”

He beamed so wide it almost hurt to look at him.

Luna had appeared moments later, her scarf trailing like kelp, a sprig of mistletoe tucked behind one ear and a vague expression of knowing something no one else ever would. She handed Harriett a folded page torn from The Quibbler , scrawled over with symbols and a poem about moonlight stored in glass bottles.

“For the journey,” she said. “In case the train tries to lie to you again.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

They walked to the gates together, boots crunching through old snow, their breath rising in quiet curls. Fred and George passed by on a floating luggage trolley shaped like a sleigh, pelting each other with hexed peppermints. Ginny shouted something at them and was promptly pelted too. Someone enchanted a snowball to orbit their head like a moon. It was loud. It was foolish. It was unbearably sweet.

And Harriett laughed.

It cracked out of her chest like light from a sealed vault—sudden, full-bodied, nearly unfamiliar. Neville looked delighted. Luna twirled like she’d planned the moment herself. Harriett held the sound in her mouth for as long as she could. Let it settle into her bones. Let it warm the places the Hollow had touched and left hollow still.

The train was already steaming by the time they reached the platform, carriages full and windows fogged with breath and conversation. Fred waved them into a compartment near the front, where Ginny was already curled with a book and Lee Jordan had transfigured a chocolate frog into a harp that croaked out carols in vaguely correct key.

The ride passed in soft chaos.

Ginny read out loud from a muggle murder mystery and let Luna guess the killer. George tried to start a betting pool. Fred added increasingly ridiculous rules to Exploding Snap until everyone was out by default. Neville dozed with his head against the glass, humming to himself between dreams. Luna braided bits of wool into Harriett’s sleeves. There was tea and toast from the trolley, a brief duel in the corridor when a third-year tried to impress someone from Ravenclaw, and exactly one moment where the entire train car sang along to a very off-key rendition of “Witching Through the Snow.”

And Harriett smiled. She really smiled. The kind that made her cheeks ache, that made the space behind her ribs feel slightly too large. For once, she let herself belong. Not because the moment was easy—but because she chose it.

But the closer they came to London, the quieter she grew.

It was gradual. Not a sharp withdrawal, not a slammed door, but a slow receding of tide. Her words came less frequently. Her laughter dimmed to silence. She sat straighter in her seat, chin tilted, eyes fixed on the window where the countryside blurred into shadow.

And when the train finally shuddered into the station—when the brakes shrieked and the voices rose and the bags came down—Harriett did not move right away. She watched the others. Ginny hugging Neville goodbye. Luna adjusting her mistletoe. Fred ruffling George’s hair in what might have been affection or preparation for sabotage. She watched them all. Held the warmth like a stone in her pocket.

Then she stood.

Ron and Hermione were waiting near the luggage racks.

Hermione’s smile was already rehearsed, polite and wide. Ron looked awkward, like he wanted to say something funny and couldn’t remember how. The sight of them—so familiar, so known—should have felt like coming home. But it didn’t. It felt like obligation pressed into skin.

Harriett felt the weight of the holidays settle like frost on her shoulders.

They would go back to Grimmauld Place. The three of them. They would dance around the fractures that had formed in September. They would pretend. They would try. And Harriett would be a ghost in a house already full of them.

She stepped off the train with her satchel slung over one shoulder and her magic curled quiet behind her throat. The station air was sharp and full of the scent of snow and soot and something older.

Hermione reached out, offered a hand toward the handle of her trunk. “Ready?” she asked, too brightly.

Harriett looked at her for a long moment. Then nodded once. “Sure.”

But her smile didn’t reach her eyes. Not this time. And somewhere in her blood, the Hollow stirred.

The drawing room at Grimmauld Place had always smelled faintly of smoke and lavender—faded traces of old fires and older women—but tonight, it smelled like nothing at all. The kind of nothing that only followed deep cleaning or deeper magic. Harriett stepped inside slowly, her boots muffled by the thick, ancestral rug, her coat still damp with December’s breath. The others were upstairs—Hermione unpacking with quiet determination, Ron banging drawers in search of an extra jumper—but Harriett had begged a moment. Just one. Just long enough to breathe before she folded herself into politeness again.

The air in the room was too still.

Not stagnant. Not musty. Just… arrested. As though the house had taken a breath the moment she crossed the threshold and hadn’t yet exhaled. The curtains were drawn against the night, the fire burned low in the grate, and all the portraits on the walls were asleep—or pretending to be. Even the silver on the mantel looked dulled, as if refusing to gleam too brightly in her presence.

She made her way toward the hearth, fingers trailing lightly along the carved edge of the desk where Sirius had once left an ink stain in the shape of a dying star. The chair she’d once seen him curl into—barefoot and scowling—was still there, upholstery frayed at the corners, the arm carved with idle knife marks. Her palm itched as she passed it.

The grimoire, tucked beneath her shirt, pulsed faintly against her ribs.

Something else answered.

The sound was small—almost imperceptible. A hush within a hush. A note held just below hearing. It was not a whisper, not quite, but the suggestion of one. A breath drawn behind the walls.

She paused. Turned.

The cabinet beside the bookcase had been left slightly ajar. Inside, the clutter of generations slept: a cracked opal snuffbox, a rusted wand holster, the silver goblet that had once tried to hex Molly when she touched it too suddenly. And there, nestled among velvet and disuse, was a locket.

It was shaped like an eclipse—flat, round, engraved not with initials but with something older. A sigil, barely visible unless the light caught it just so: a serpent coiled in an ouroboros of thorns. The metal looked like hematite—grey-black, dull as moonless sky—but it gleamed faintly when she drew closer, as if the presence of her skin had pulled memory to the surface.

The locket was humming.

Not in tune. Not in music. But in a frequency that she felt rather than heard—just beneath her breastbone, just above the grimoire’s weight. It thrummed like the throb of a bone bruise. Familiar, but not friendly.

She reached out. Slowly.

Her fingers brushed the surface. The sigil pulsed once—sharp and quick like a startled heartbeat. Harriett did not flinch. The metal wasn’t cold. It was warm . Not recent warmth, not heat from fire or sun, but the slow, unsettling warmth of something once-alive, kept alive.

The clasp gave way beneath her touch with a soft, intimate click. Inside, there was no photograph. No curling edges of wizarding snapshots. No face.

Just a rune, etched directly into the lining. Carved—not inscribed—into the inner curve of the locket like a name written in bone. It looked like flame curled in on itself, a spiral of thorned tongues and inkless script. It shifted when she looked at it too long, the way certain magic did—unsettling in its refusal to remain static, as though her attention redefined it every time.

Her thumb traced the edge. It did not burn. But it responded.

Her palm stung suddenly, and she hissed through her teeth. The cut from the Chalice rite—closed, healed, hers—had split again. Not wide. Just enough to bleed.

And the locket sang .

It did not open further. It did not shine. But it hummed with sudden, greedy recognition, like the scent of fire meeting dry earth. The rune inside flared—visible only for a blink, but clear. Harriett staggered back one step.

The locket remained open.

The blood on her skin trembled, not dripping, not drying—held aloft in the air like dust caught in candlelight. It hung there between her hand and the sigil, shivering. Waiting.

She inhaled slowly.

“Who bound you?” she asked aloud, though no one would answer.

And then— A flicker.

In the corner of her eye, near the bookshelf: movement. Not a full ghost. Not yet. But something close . She turned. Nothing there.

The grimoire pulsed again—one beat, two. Her magic rose in her throat like breath turned thick with memory. The locket’s rune dimmed.

But the blood hadn’t fallen. She closed the lid with careful, reverent hands. Not to seal it away. But to mark it. This was not a thing to fear. It was a thing to learn.

The moment she turned away, the fire in the grate leapt an inch higher. And somewhere in the walls—just faint enough to doubt—she heard a voice like crumbling salt, “Ashes remember.”

The house had long since settled into silence again.

Ron was upstairs, sleep-heavy and mumbling. Hermione had claimed the spare room near the second floor landing, where her wards crackled faintly if Harriett passed too close. The portraits, too, had grown quieter in her presence—either lulled by the weight of her magic or cowed by the sigils pressed faint beneath her skin. Even Walburga had gone still behind her curtains, as though she knew what might be listening.

Harriett sat in the drawing room, cloaked in the same dim hush the house wore like a second skin. She had drawn the curtains. Doused the lamps. Only the fire remained—low and steady, throwing shadows across the wallpaper and casting the dark furniture in gold-edge and ruin.

The locket sat on the table before her, cradled in a square of velvet torn from the hem of an old cloak.

She did not touch it. Not yet.

Instead, she studied it in the half-light, the way one might study a wound left too long untreated—wondering, absently, if it might have healed differently if it had been seen sooner. The metal had darkened again since their last encounter, returning to that dull hematite gleam, but the sigil on its face still pulsed faintly when she exhaled. Her own blood, dried now along the seam of her palm, itched faintly as if remembering something it hadn’t yet understood.

She waited. Waited until the house fell deeper, until the pipes stopped groaning and the stair creaks quieted and even the magic that had once snarled beneath the floorboards went still.

Then, in the quiet, she said his name.

Not aloud. Not loudly. Just a breath.

“Regulus.”

And the locket answered.

The rune inside flared—not bright, but deep. A pulse beneath the surface of reality, like a heartbeat remembered just after waking from a long, unslept dream. The fire in the grate dimmed—not out, not cold, just… pulled inward. Like something holding its breath.

And across from her, where the shadows had gathered thickest near the hearth, something moved. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t cinematic. It was subtle.

A fold of air unspooling. A curl of dust recoiling from breath that had no lungs behind it. A shape where there had not been shape before.

He stood in the corner of the room—half-lit, half-not. Not quite a ghost, not quite a boy. Just a presence. Memory sculpted into outline. A silhouette threaded together from will and place and blood too stubborn to vanish.

Harriett looked up. Met the eyes of a man who was not. Regulus Black did not shimmer. He did not flicker. He was there. Not solid. Not transparent. But present . Like a thought with form. Like memory with teeth.

He wore robes darker than midnight, sleeves frayed at the cuffs, collar half-undone as though caught mid-flight from something he never outran. His hair—longer than Sirius’s had ever been in life—fell in tangled waves around his jaw, shadowing cheekbones that had never filled out. His eyes were grey. Not silver. Not soft. They looked like the moment before winter breaks the last leaf from the branch.

“You called,” he said.

Harriett did not breathe. She did not move. Regulus stepped forward. Only one step.

It was enough to catch the light. Enough to make the shadows part. Enough to see the seam in his chest where memory failed him—the place his heart should be, blurred slightly, pulsing like a missing word in a spell.

“You’re not a ghost,” she said. Her voice was careful. Low.

He gave the suggestion of a smile. Not warmth. Just acknowledgement. “No.”

“Then what are you?”

“A memory,” he said. “Held in place by blood. Yours, and his.” He nodded toward the locket, where the sigil now shone dull red at the edges. “I didn’t expect to be remembered.”

“You weren’t,” she said. “Not properly.”

“No,” Regulus said, and there was no bitterness in it. Just fact. “I drowned trying to destroy the Dark Lord.”

He stepped forward again—slowly, like something testing its own gravity. The fire danced higher in response. His form sharpened. The hollows beneath his cheekbones looked carved by something sharp and ceremonial. Not hunger. Sacrifice.

Harriett swallowed. “You tried to destroy him?”

“I failed,” he said, simply.

“But you tried.”

“Yes.”

She studied his face—so like Sirius, and yet not. There was no laughter in him. No sharp joy. But there was focus. There was silence. There was steel.

She reached forward. Took the locket into her hands. It felt lighter now. His eyes fell on her palm, on the sigil etched faint beneath the skin.

“The Hollow,” he said.

She nodded.

“You woke it.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“You didn’t have to.”

She held the locket up slightly, watched the way it responded to her touch. “It responded to me. But only after I bled.”

Regulus tilted his head. “That’s how all of us answered, once.”

“All of who?”

“The ones who kept the old vows,” he said, and his voice had shifted slightly—gaining weight, as if not all of the words were his. “Those who bound their names to more than stone. Who kept silence, kept secrets, kept salt between their teeth.”

“Blood magic.”

“Memory magic.”

Harriett let the locket fall back into her lap. “Why are you still here?”

“Because someone had to remember,” he said. “And he never did.” His gaze, heavy now, flicked toward the ceiling. Toward rooms where Sirius’s laugh no longer echoed. “He left this place. But he never came back to it.”

She didn’t apologize.

Regulus looked at her again, and for a moment—for a flicker of breath and not-breath—he looked young . Nineteen, maybe. Maybe less. Still unfinished. Still wanting.

“You aren’t like him,” he said, soft. “But you carry something he couldn’t.”

“What?”

He didn’t answer. Only stepped back, toward the fire.

Harriett stood. The locket in her palm pulsed once. He was already fading. Not unraveling. Not breaking. Just stepping back into silence. Into the fold of memory that had birthed him.

But just before the shadows reclaimed him fully, he said—

“The locket is only the beginning. The Black family left more than bones in this house.”

And then he was gone. No flicker. No flash. Just absence. But the locket remained warm in her hand.

And somewhere in the pipes above, a cold wind howled like the bones of something forgotten finally remembering what they were for.

Sirius was trying to make toast.

It was not going well.

The kitchen was filled with the scent of scorched bread and misplaced optimism. A pile of blackened attempts already leaned at a tragic angle on a plate beside him, and the toaster—enchanted by Fred or George, or possibly both in unholy concert—was now smoking gently, its slots flickering in and out of phase like a faulty portkey. A jam jar had exploded somewhere in the chaos, sending raspberry shrapnel halfway up the wall.

Harriett stood in the doorway, blinking blearily, curls still damp from sleep and magic. She had come downstairs for tea. She had not come downstairs for… this.

Sirius didn’t notice her at first. He was frowning intently at the toaster, wand clenched like a duelist preparing for his final stand. The bread inside rattled. Hissed.

Harriett cleared her throat. “Are you… losing a fight with breakfast?”

He whirled. Tried to look casual. Failed.

“I am conducting highly classified spellwork,” Sirius said solemnly. “You may observe. Quietly. From behind something flame-retardant.”

Harriett stepped into the room, surveying the battlefield with the air of someone who knew exactly how much effort it took to cover up a small explosion. “That toaster’s growling.”

“It’s defending itself,” he said. “It’s evolved. It fears me.”

She crossed to the counter and plucked a piece of the toast-mountain. It crumbled into ash between her fingers.

“Sirius.”

“Yes?”

“That’s charcoal.”

“It’s rustic.”

Harriett raised an eyebrow. “It’s a war crime.”

He sighed dramatically, flinging the tea towel over his shoulder like a defeated matador. “Fine. You win. Breakfast is canceled. We eat regret.”

“Just as well,” she said, dropping into the nearest chair. “I’m more of a guilt-and-black-coffee girl anyway.”

Sirius rummaged through the cupboard until he found the kettle—the normal kettle, not the one that hissed obscenities when handled before noon—and filled it with practiced familiarity.

He didn’t ask why she was up so early. She didn’t ask why he was already trying to feed someone at all. They just moved, soft and parallel, like old stars dragged briefly into the same orbit again.

When the kettle began to hum (politely), Sirius turned, leaned against the counter, and gave her a look far too sober for a man in a jam-stained shirt.

“So,” he said. “My dead brother appeared to you in the drawing room last night. That’s not going to become a pattern, is it?”

Harriett took the mug he passed her, sipped. “No promises.”

“Did he at least say something useful? Or did he just glower handsomely from the shadows and vanish with a dramatic swirl of robes?”

Harriett considered. “Bit of both. He was a bit… echoey.”

“Of course he was.” Sirius sank into the chair across from her with a sigh. “Regulus always had a flair for unfinished business. And unfinished sentences. I swear, the boy once gave an entire toast at a family dinner without ever reaching a verb.”

Harriett snorted. “That’s impressive, honestly.”

“It was horrific,” Sirius muttered, dragging a hand through his hair. “He thanked the ancestors, invoked the bloodline, nodded to the candlesticks, and then passed out from anxiety.”

There was a beat of quiet. Harriett looked at him over the rim of her mug. “I liked him.”

Sirius tilted his head. “I’m glad. He was… he was more than what people let him be.”

“I think he wanted to be remembered,” Harriett said. “But not as a Black.”

Sirius barked a laugh. “Who does?”

Harriett grinned, faintly. “You’re wearing the ring.”

He looked down. Sobriety returned to his face—not heavy, but real. “Yeah. I am.”

There was a pause. Then Sirius said, more gently, “How are you doing, really?”

Harriett blinked. “You’ve never asked me that like an adult before.”

“Don’t get used to it,” he said. “I’m only trying out responsible behavior until it cracks.”

She gave him a look. But her voice, when it came, was softer.

“I’m… I don’t know,” she said. “Different. Not broken. Just—reassembled. All my pieces are in new places.”

Sirius studied her for a long breath. Then he leaned forward, elbows on the table, expression sharp but fond.

“You know, when I was sixteen, I tried to fake my death by riding a cursed broomstick into Knockturn Alley. Took three weeks for my mother to realize I wasn’t in France. Do you know what that was?”

Harriett stared at him. “A terrible idea?”

He smiled. “Control. Desperation. Fireworks. All the usual Gryffindor coping mechanisms.”

Harriett shook her head. “And they let you raise a dog?”

“They let me raise you, ” he said, and then caught himself.

The silence stilled. Harriett met his eyes. Her voice, when it came, was quiet.

“You didn’t raise me.”

Sirius nodded. “No. But I’m here now. And I’m trying. For what it’s worth.”

She nodded. Looked down at her tea. “It is worth something.”

Sirius pushed the plate of burnt toast across the table. “Go on, then. Eat the ceremonial cinders of Black family reconciliation.”

Harriett picked up a piece, bit it, grimaced. “This tastes like regret and wand polish.”

“Ah,” he said, pleased. “Authenticity.”

The kitchen settled into the quiet again, but it felt better now—lighter. The jam on the walls had stopped dripping. The kettle still hummed faintly. And in the corner, just beyond the frame of the door, the portrait of Walburga Black sneered in eternal disapproval.

Sirius saluted her with his toast. Harriett didn’t laugh—but her smile curled sideways, dry and honest. And that, for this morning, was enough. 

The house was already arguing with itself.

Somewhere upstairs, the old curtains were trying to hang themselves with tinsel. The staircase refused to stay in a single position for more than thirty seconds at a time. Kreacher had been heard muttering darkly about “improper pine placement” since dawn. The drawing room tree had fallen over twice, one of the suits of armor was refusing to wear its paper crown, and someone had apparently jinxed the punch to sing carols whenever stirred too enthusiastically.

Harriett emerged from the second-floor corridor in mismatched socks and a jumper that said "Ask Me About My Tragic Destiny” in shimmering gold thread—courtesy of Fred and George, who’d charmed it to hum softly whenever she entered a room. She hadn’t figured out how to turn it off. She hadn’t really tried.

Downstairs, Sirius was bickering with the wreath.

“—you do not get to dictate where you hang, you overgrown dandelion—!”

A loud thwump followed by a yelp echoed up the stairs.

Harriett poked her head into the stairwell. “Is the wreath winning?”

There was a beat.

“Temporarily,” Sirius called back. “But I’ve hexed it with seasonal depression. Should droop soon.”

When she entered the parlour, he was crouched beneath the mantel, wand smoking faintly, hair dusted with holly. The wreath was twitching on the floor, wrapped in red ribbon like a hostage situation gone festive.

“Tea?” he asked, standing and brushing himself off. “Or something stronger disguised as tea?”

“Cinnamon guilt with a splash of crushed childhood,” Harriett replied. “Make it a double.”

“Ah, our traditional holiday blend.”

He passed her a mug and they moved toward the tree, which had managed to stay upright for at least ten minutes now. It was listing slightly to the left and humming what sounded like God Rest Ye Merry Hippogriffs in a minor key, but no one had the heart to fix it.

Remus was in the corner trying to charm the fairy lights into a spiral pattern. They responded by tying themselves into what looked suspiciously like a noose.

“Your decorations have a death wish,” Harriett said.

Remus didn’t look up. “Your godfather tried to use Parseltongue on the star again. It bit him.”

“I regret nothing,” Sirius called from the kitchen.

Harriett sank into the couch beside a very drowsy Ginny, who was wrapped in a blanket with a cup of coffee and the vague aura of someone trying to ignore the concept of morning altogether.

“Merry Christmas,” Ginny said into her mug.

Harriett nodded solemnly. “May your presents be non-fatal.”

From the hallway, a shout—“FRED, THAT IS NOT A STOCKING, THAT IS A CURTAIN—”

“IT’S LONGER, MUM! BETTER FOR LOOT STORAGE—”

“Mum’s gonna kill him,” Ginny murmured.

“Can we watch?” Harriett asked.

Neville arrived next, half-asleep and wearing a jumper that blinked. “My gran says good luck is best worn in wool.”

“That sounds like something you'd embroider on a battle flag,” Harriett said.

Luna appeared silently behind them all, holding a gift-wrapped turnip.

“Blessings of the frost moon,” she said serenely. “I brought snacks.”

No one asked. They’d learned.

Presents began to appear beneath the tree via an enchanted chute from the attic (courtesy of the twins, who’d nearly been hexed for testing it with fireworks the week before). Laughter rolled through the room in steady waves. At one point, Sirius tried to wear a tree skirt as a cape. At another, Remus caught the star mid-air as it launched itself at Percy’s head. Molly Weasley arrived with enough cinnamon buns to open a bakery and immediately cursed every fork in the house into festive submission.

Harriett watched it all quietly from her corner, tea forgotten in her lap, one leg tucked under her. She wasn’t exactly smiling—but the heaviness had softened. The edges were blunter here. Softer, maybe. Less like armor. More like something worn in, well-loved.

Sirius dropped beside her on the couch without ceremony. She glanced at him.

“Thanks,” she said.

He sipped his punch. “For what?”

“For the chaos. The warmth. The sentient wreath.”

He nodded gravely. “It has a name now, by the way. Mortimer.”

“Of course it does.”

They clinked mugs.

Outside, snow began to fall. Inside, chaos reigned. And for the first time in a long while, Harriett felt almost… held. Not by a hand. Not by a spell. But by the messy, overwhelming, deeply imperfect noise of it all.

It wasn’t peace. But it was joy. And she’d learned that sometimes, that was rarer.

The fire had long since burned low.

The sitting room was mostly dark now, shadows puddled like ink beneath the furniture, warm ghosts of candlelight still clinging to the edges of the armchairs. The tree had gone quiet—its hum dulled to a slow, breathlike rhythm—and the last of the wrapping paper had been transfigured into garlands and fed to Mortimer the Wreath, who now slumbered upside-down on the mantle.

Everyone else had gone to bed. Remus had drifted off reading by the hearth, glasses slipping down his nose. Ginny had curled into an impossible knot of blanket and leg on the rug. Even Sirius had finally retreated upstairs after a muttered threat to curse the pudding if it started singing again.

Only Harriett remained.

She sat cross-legged in front of the old Black family cabinet, the locket cupped in her palm like an offering. It pulsed once when the last creak of stairwell faded.

Then again. Softly. She didn’t have to say the name. But she did anyway.

“Regulus.”

The locket opened not with a click, but a sigh. The sigil inside shimmered, then brightened—not light, exactly, but awareness. And from that thin line of magic, from that pressed echo sealed in gold and grief, he stepped forward.

Not a ghost. Not a shade.

A memory in the shape of a man, drawn in grief-smoke and starlight, dressed in the fine robes of a boy who had died trying to become something more.

Regulus Arcturus Black looked young and ancient all at once. His eyes were not the eyes of a teenager—they were steady, glass-dark, like ink left too long on a page. He stood not on the floor, but in the space between it. Not flickering. Not cold. Present.

“Late,” he said softly, gaze drifting over the room. “But not too late.”

Harriett did not speak. She couldn’t. Her magic had gone very still beneath her skin—not frightened, not wary. Just… listening. The way an old key might hum when it’s near the right door.

Regulus turned to her. “You found the garden.”

She nodded.

“You’ve bled for your name.”

“Yes.”

“And the Hollow answers.”

She didn’t ask how he knew. Some truths didn’t require explanation.

Footsteps sounded behind her. Soft ones. Sirius. His voice, when it came, was quieter than she’d ever heard it. “Reggie?”

Regulus turned. For a moment, neither moved.

Then Regulus smiled—not big, not bright. But real. The kind of smile someone might give from the other side of a veil. Sirius stepped forward, barefoot, wrapped in a threadbare robe, hair tangled and eyes wide like a boy who hadn’t expected the world to offer him anything back.

“You look like Mum’s disappointment and Dad’s good silver,” he said.

“And you,” Regulus replied, “look like someone who finally got out.”

They both laughed. It wasn’t long. But it was whole.

Harriett watched the two brothers—not young men, not quite ghosts, just echoes finally given breath. And in her chest, something clicked into place. A lock sealed generations ago slid open behind her ribs, and the magic there—Black magic, old magic, waiting magic—breathed out like fog on the edge of a mirror.

Regulus stepped closer. The locket in Harriett’s hand warmed.

“He thought he could use it,” he said, more to himself than to her. “Voldemort. The old ways. The roots. Thought them kindling. Thought wrong.”

“What did he try?” Harriett asked.

“To shape Death like a wand,” Regulus said. “To harness the bones of gods and not look them in the eye.”

He looked at her.

“But Death does not obey command. It trades in witness. In vow.”

A pause. 

“The Hallows,” he said. “He wanted them. Killed for them. Called them Elder. Stone. Cloak.”

Harriett’s throat tightened.

“But those are just names for children,” Regulus whispered. “To the Hollow, they are something else. The Gate. The Voice. The Shadow.”

“The Gate?” she echoed.

Regulus touched the locket. It flickered like breath.

“To pass through,” he said. “Not to conquer.”

“And the Voice?”

“To call the dead. Or to listen.”

Harriett swallowed. “And the Shadow?”

His gaze settled on her then—still, unblinking, lit with something old.

“To walk between.”

The locket in her hand pulsed once. Then again. Then— Stilled.

Regulus stepped back.

“It’s not done,” he said. “But it begins with a name.”

Harriett tried to speak. But he was already fading. Like a candle pulled into memory. His last words hovered like a breath against the glass.

“You carry our legacy, child of the Hollow. Let it burn.”

And then he was gone. No wind. No chill. Just the faint scent of candle smoke and salt.

Sirius sat down beside her on the rug, silent, one hand on his chest like he could still feel the echo. Harriett reached across the quiet. He took her hand. And the fire did not flare. But it burned a little steadier.

From Echoes in Salt and Smoke: A Treatise on Death-Marked Magic and Ancestral Remnants , by Elspeth Vale (c. 1764, reprinted with posthumous annotations by her shade in 1897)

“Ghosts are memory. Shades are will. But Echoes—ah, Echoes are testimony.”

In rare cases where death is neither complete nor denied, the soul may fracture, not as punishment, but as anchor—leaving behind an echo , a remnant pressed into the bones of place and blood.

These are not ghosts, which haunt by absence. Nor inferi, which mar by violation. Echoes are born of deliberate magic: death-marks made not by curse but by oath. Often sealed within ancestral relics—jewelry, weapons, or ritual talismans—the echo binds itself not to the world, but to the lineage of the one who wore it. In such cases, it may only be summoned by a descendant bearing true blood and sacrificial magic (most commonly blood, salt, and grief given willingly).

The Black family was known—infamously so—for their practice of sigil-binding, particularly in lockets, rings, and family heirlooms too precious to discard yet too dangerous to display. Many of these objects contain marks which, when combined with blood and name, awaken a fragment of the dead, complete not in body or memory but in purpose. These Echoes are neither lucid nor free; they speak in metaphor, appear only when willed, and fade once their role has been fulfilled.

Some scholars argue that such magic is a perversion of necromancy. Others call it ancestral diplomacy—a way for old families to consult their dead in times of dire need. What is certain is that such practices require legacy magic, and are nearly impossible to counterfeit. An echo-spirit will not answer a stranger. They remember only blood.

Notably, there are reports that the Hallows themselves were once bound by this same type of death-mark: not items of conquest, but artifacts of remembrance—each one tied to the three roles of Echo:

• The Gate — to cross
• The Voice — to call
• The Shadow — to remain

It is unknown how many of these echoes remain. Most fade when the lineage is broken. A few, however—particularly those sealed by the House of Black—linger.

Waiting.

Chapter Text

The owl arrived just after dawn, its feathers rimed with frost and its wings too silent to be natural.

It bore no scroll, no ribbon. Just a letter, folded tight and sealed not with wax, but with Ministry-threaded cord, a dull gold braid that shimmered faintly with embedded wards, each one stitched with runes designed not to protect the sender, but to compel the recipient. It landed on the sill of the library window, claws clicking once against the glass, and waited—poised, still, patient in that way only magical things trained by systems could be. Harriett had known it would come. She had felt it in her ribs for days now, the way one might feel a storm before the sky darkens, not in wind or thunder, but in the ache of old bone remembering the fall.

The grimoire on the table stilled when the cord touched it.

No pulse. No warmth. Just the hush of something deeply displeased.

She did not reach for it immediately.

Instead, she sat back in the armchair Sirius had claimed last night during a half-hearted debate about which cursed heirloom made the best drink tray, one leg curled beneath her, fingers still stained faintly with ink from the journal she’d copied spells from before sunrise. The house was quiet. Upstairs, Ron’s snores filtered faintly through floorboards warped by centuries. Hermione’s wards ticked like clock hands behind closed doors. Even Kreacher had retreated, unwilling to clean near a room that remembered her.

But the letter did not wait.

It shimmered again—faint, faint, like breath across a blade—and the air in the room dipped in temperature. Not dangerously. Just... enough.

Harriett rose without sigh or ceremony, crossed to the sill, and took it. The cord retracted at once, vanishing into the seal as if it had never been tied, and the parchment uncurled with bureaucratic obedience. The ink inside was black. Not Ministry-blue. Not Auror-gold. Black, with that faint shimmer that meant it had been drafted by wand and sealed with a recognition spell, the sort of thing you only saw on summons of ancestral challenge—not a warrant. Not a charge.

An invitation.

To be questioned.

To be proved.

Her thumb skimmed the first line. Her name was printed wrong.

Harriett Lilith Potter, it read—spelled in full, middle name included, her birth writ not as identity but as inventory, stamped beneath the royal seal of the Department of Magical Lineages and Inheritance Law. The Ministry’s crest shimmered beneath it like something carved from old bone.

There were words. Sentences. Dates. They blurred.

All she saw was this:

“Your status as magical heir is under formal review.”

And beneath that, in tidy, precise script:

“You are hereby summoned to a Trial of Verification, under Section VII of the Arcane Claims Act (1279, revised 1834, sealed 1981). Attendance is compulsory. Absence will be taken as forfeiture.”

Her magic rose in her chest like a tide.

Not angry. Not startled. But... steady. A quiet, iron-wrought knowing that came from the Hollow, from the garden beneath Godric’s Hollow, from the chalice where her name had broken like glass beneath her own blood. Her palm itched. The rune still shimmered there, faintly, visible only in moonlight and madness.

They would not take it from her.

Not this time.

Behind her, the fire in the grate flickered as if stirred by breath.

She read the rest of the letter.

Then folded it once, precisely, and tucked it into the grimoire.

Not for safekeeping.

But for witness.

Because this—this was not a trial. This was a reckoning. And she would not come to be questioned.

She would come to be seen.

The drawing room had not yet woken.

The light from the tall windows was the pale grey of a December morning not yet decided on snow, and the walls still held the hush of sleeping portraits, their painted eyes closed not in rest but in ritual—a thing old houses did when they wanted to listen without being seen. Harriett’s footsteps softened against the rug as she entered, her fingers curled tight around the folded letter, its magic still humming like a distant song she didn’t want to hear.

Sirius was already there.

Not waiting—he didn’t know yet—but present. Curled in one of the armchairs with his legs flung over the arm like a boy avoiding conversation, a half-solved crossword charm floating lazily in the air before him and a mug of tea balanced on the stack of old spell books he refused to move off the coffee table. He looked, for once, peaceful. His hair was pulled into a loose knot at the nape of his neck, grey streaking through black like frost creeping through ash, and the fire hadn’t quite reached his side of the room, leaving him haloed in a soft gloom that seemed to agree with him.

She didn’t want to disturb him.

But she did.

“Letter came this morning,” she said, voice flat as folded parchment.

Sirius looked up. One glance at her face and he straightened. The crossword charm dissipated with a hiss, its unfinished clues drifting like ash. He reached for his wand, but paused when he saw what she held.

“Ministry?” he asked. Quiet. Careful.

She nodded once. Crossed the room and handed it to him without unfolding it. His fingers brushed hers. Warm.

He read it without speaking. The silence stretched, but not painfully—it was the kind of quiet that held the shape of old truths, the kind that builds before a storm but doesn’t break. When he finished, he turned the letter over, as if expecting it to keep speaking. It didn’t. But the air around it was heavy, thick with wards and the faint, iron-slick scent of summons-magic. His mouth pressed into a line.

“Bastards,” he said eventually. “Of course they did.”

“They think I’m lying,” she said, evenly. “About the Hollow. About the name.”

“They think they own it,” Sirius replied. “They’ve always thought they could cage legacy like it was just another breed of dog to register.”

Harriett sat across from him. The fire crackled once between them, like punctuation. “They wrote me down like inventory.”

“They always do.” He set the letter down. “James hated that bloody department. Wouldn’t even sign my guardianship forms until they removed the clause about bloodline value assessments.”

She blinked. “There was a clause?”

“Three.” Sirius leaned back, looking tired in a way he rarely let show. “One for magical volatility, one for moral deviation, one for projected breeding potential.”

Harriett snorted. “Subtle.”

“Ministry subtlety,” he said, raising his tea like a toast. “Same flavor as arsenic.”

There was a pause.

Harriett looked at the fire, her voice lower now. “They’re calling it a verification. But we both know what it is.”

“A test,” Sirius said.

“A threat.”

He nodded. “And a trap, if they think you’ll play by their rules.”

She looked at him. “Should I?”

“No,” he said simply. “You should play by yours.”

The fire flickered again, warmer this time. She felt it behind her sternum, that slow, familiar ache—like something inside her had started to remember its shape only recently and didn’t quite know how to settle into it. Sirius watched her. His expression wasn’t worried. It was something else.

Pride, maybe. Or warning. Or grief in disguise.

“They’ll bring witnesses,” he said. “Old names. Departmental vultures. Probably that cow from Bloodline Regulation—Phrasine Grebble.”

Harriett made a face. “That sounds like a fungus.”

“It probably is,” Sirius muttered.

She ran a thumb along her palm, feeling the warmth of the sigil just beneath the skin. “They want me to prove I’m Potter enough to hold what’s mine.”

“Then remind them,” Sirius said, and there was iron in it now. “You’re not just Potter. You’re Black. And Peverell. And Hollow.”

She raised her eyes to his. “They won’t like it.”

“They don’t have to,” he said. “They only have to lose.”

Another silence fell between them, but this one felt steadier—like a pact drawn in the firelight, unsigned but certain. Harriett leaned back in the chair. The letter rested on the table like a challenge.

Sirius picked it up, folded it again, slower this time. “You want me to come with you?”

“No,” she said. Then, after a breath: “But I want you to be waiting when I walk back in.”

He nodded. “Always.”

The grimoire on the shelf rustled faintly, as if approving.

Somewhere behind the walls, the house shifted its weight, stone flexing like muscle around bone. And in the hearth between them, the flame flared once—low and sharp, like the breath before a spell is spoken.

The Headmaster’s office was colder than she remembered.

Not in temperature—though the hearth was unlit, and the air held the brittle edge of old parchment and older politics—but in presence. The portraits, too many to count, too many to name, all seemed to feign sleep in uncanny synchrony. Their frames creaked once as she stepped inside, but none stirred. Not even Phineas. Not even Dilys.

She did not knock. The stairs had already moved for her, slow and deliberate, as if the castle understood something she had not yet said aloud. She passed through the griffin without hesitation, the password unspoken. The door did not open. It receded.

Dumbledore stood behind his desk, hands folded lightly before him, the sleeves of his robes sweeping the polished wood like a tide coming in. He looked not surprised, nor alarmed, but quietly expectant, as if he had always known she would arrive this morning, clutching a letter that burned without flame.

“Harriett,” he said, voice mild. “You’ve received the summons.”

She held it out.

The parchment lay between them like a blade left unsheathed on neutral ground. The wax had been broken, but the magic still curled faintly around the edges—authority clothed in bureaucracy, and laced with the unmistakable tang of Ministry ink.

“They’re disputing my inheritance,” she said.

Dumbledore nodded slowly, as if the words were weather, and he had long since grown used to being rained on.

“They’re invoking Clause Twenty-Seven,” she added, quieter now. “The one reserved for suspected magical fraud. The one you signed into law during the last war.”

The Headmaster’s expression did not change. “At the time, it was deemed a necessary protection.”

“Protection,” Harriett repeated. The word cracked a little at the edges.

“For those who might falsely claim heirship in the wake of tragedy,” Dumbledore said. “There were many eager to seize what was not theirs.”

“And now I’m one of them.”

“You are not,” he said. “But the law is no longer mine to shape.”

Harriett let the silence stretch. Let it grow teeth.

“You could contest it,” she said. “You could speak on my behalf. You could bring the truth to the Wizengamot and undo what they’re trying to silence.”

Dumbledore exhaled.

And for a moment, she saw it—the weariness beneath the robes, beneath the carefully weathered kindness, beneath the myth. Not weakness. But calculation. The tiredness of someone who had weighed costs too many times and now could only see the scales.

“This is a matter of blood, not belief,” he said.

The words did not sting. They struck.

Harriett stepped back, just once, as though the air between them had turned sharp.

“A matter of blood,” she echoed. “And you’ve nothing to say about mine?”

Dumbledore looked at her—really looked—and in that gaze, she saw the shape of the future he had once built for her. It was golden. Gleaming. Neatly cut. It did not have room for Hollow sigils and rites drawn in bone ash and names spoken in the language of thresholds.

“I have guided you,” he said. “As best I could.”

“You leashed me,” she said, softly. “You wrote me into a story I didn’t choose, and now that I’ve stopped following the script—”

“You have become something else,” he said, not unkindly.

“But not yours,” she finished.

He did not deny it.

The silence that followed was not empty. It was full of everything she no longer needed from him. All the apologies he would never give. All the truths he had buried under parchment and prophecy and the kind of love that did not recognize what it tried to control.

She turned to leave. Did not bow. Did not thank him.

But as her hand brushed the edge of the door, he spoke once more.

“The Ministry will not understand what you’ve become.”

She paused. The doorknob cooled beneath her palm.

“They don’t have to,” she said. “I didn’t ask them to.”

And then she left, her footsteps echoing like thunder through the staircase as it coiled open to let her pass. Behind her, the portraits said nothing. The air did not stir. The fire remained unlit.

And for the first time, the Headmaster did not follow her with his eyes.

The altar knew when the blood turned.

It didn’t burn—not at first—but smoldered. White heat with no smoke. The lines Harriett had carved into her wrist shimmered with the ash-pale light of something not quite fire. The runes along the altar shifted. The circle beneath her boots pulsed once—then again, slower, deeper, like breath dragged from the lungs of the earth itself.

She stood still, blood dripping softly onto the altar’s hollow bowl, as the three spirits stepped forward.

No longer cloaked in quiet. They moved now as judges.

The first, the war-marked man with soot-black eyes and hands wrapped in old bandages, spoke without ceremony. “The Rite calls memory first.”

Harriett blinked—and the chamber vanished.

She stood on stone slick with blood. Not hers. A battlefield, but older. Bodies in robes not worn for centuries. A woman screamed—not in fear, but in fury—and fire licked the sky above a ruined stronghold. And then— A cradle. Crying. A boy wrapped in emerald silk. A man lifting a wand. Not to bless. To bind.

The spell surged. Harriett screamed.

It was not her voice—but she felt it in her throat. A child sealed to inheritance not his own. A lineage branded into skin that never had a choice. The cry split the air. She fell to her knees—but did not look away.

When the vision ended, she was breathless, pale, shaking. The man said nothing. Only stepped back.

The second stepped forward—the woman with root-bound hair and eyes like salt. “Then we ask sacrifice.”

This time, Harriett did not fall. She rose.

The altar glowed brighter—violet now, with threads of silver winding through the edges—and a new image formed before her eyes: her mother’s hand, cupping her cheek in that last moment before death. A shield charm whispered through blood. A man stepping in front of a curse he could not stop. A child screaming in a cot beneath a wound in the sky.

And behind it all—a second set of voices. Whispering. Watching. Let her die. Let her live. Let her forget. Let her be forged.

“No,” Harriett whispered.

The sacrifice was not just theirs. It had always been hers.

She bit her tongue. Let the blood rise in her mouth. Did not spit it out. Did not flinch when the altar asked again. Instead, she raised her hand—marked with her vow, her name, her broken chain—and let the blood drip from her tongue onto the stone.

“I offer what you buried,” she said. “I offer what they forgot.”

The woman nodded once. Stepped back.

The third spirit remained. Still cloaked in black, still wearing the circlet of bone.

They did not speak right away.

Only stepped forward—and held out a hand.

Harriett took it.

And was no longer herself.

She was Dumbledore, binding her name to parchment with silent spells no one would see. She was the Ministry registrar, watching her lineage be marked and sealed without consent. She was Sirius, shouting into a room that would not listen. She was Regulus, drowning with a locket full of poison and a prayer never spoken.

She was everyone who had been used.

And everyone who had tried to rise.

And then, finally—she was herself.

Back in her body. Knees trembling. Mouth bloodied. Eyes wide.

The spirit in black said only: “Truth.”

Harriett’s voice cracked. “I am not what they made me. I am not their prophecy. I am not their puppet.”

And then she raised her hand.

“I will not give you my defense. I will give you my vow.”

Silence.

“I will bind what you buried. I will speak the name no one else will. I will not look away.”

The fire beneath the altar roared to life.

The room brightened—not with flame, but with memory catching light, with blood claiming breath. The altar cracked. The stone ring split into three petals of ash. Her magic flared beneath her ribs, sharp and wild, no longer waiting.

The three spirits moved as one.

They did not kneel. They did not bless. They recognized .

“You are judged,” they said.

And the name Harriett Lilith Potter burned off the scrolls where it had once been sealed.

She did not cry. She did not fall. She stood in the ruins of an old judgment and called it justice.

And far above them, where the Ministry wax seals still glowed and Dumbledore waited with silence on his tongue, something ancient twisted in the wards.

Not broken.

Freed.

The Ministry did not look like a place that remembered blood.

It was built of marble and illusion—polished to the point of forgetting, lit with pale enchantments that smelled like bureaucracy and lavender polish. The Atrium echoed not with magic, but paperwork. Witches in gold-trimmed robes crossed its tiled floors like chess pieces mid-game, their eyes heavy with judgment and disinterest in equal measure. Somewhere, a memo in the shape of a paper raven fluttered down past the fountain. No one looked up.

Harriett stood just outside the Floo, fingers still dusted with soot, her hood pulled low to shield her face from the enchanted mirrors embedded in the walls. The light caught her boots but not her eyes. Behind her, beneath a Disillusionment Charm so old it pulsed faintly with fatigue, Sirius lingered in shadow.

He was close enough to speak. Close enough to run if he had to.

“You don’t have to do this alone,” he murmured, voice warping with the spell’s edges. “You can still back out.”

“I do have to,” Harriett said. “That’s the point.”

His breath caught. For a moment, neither moved.

Then he whispered, “You’ve got fire in your blood, kid. They’ll try to snuff it.”

Harriett exhaled. “Let them try.”

She turned and stepped away before either of them could say more.

The marble corridors narrowed as she moved deeper into the Ministry. A functionary in a violently purple robe intercepted her by the lift—pale, owl-eyed, with a clipboard charmed to hover beside him like an obedient vulture.

“Harriett Potter?” he asked, scanning her up and down like she might smear the linoleum.

“Lady Harriett of the House of Potter,” she corrected coolly, brushing her hood back. “Status under review.”

The clerk flinched—barely. But enough.

“Follow me.”

The lift juddered to life with a groan and the scent of old brass. No welcome music. No cheerful Ministry slogan. Just silence punctuated by the distant flutter of memos soaring overhead. Harriett stood very still. The deeper they descended, the colder the walls grew, like something beneath the marble was remembering how to bite.

“Trial Chamber Three,” the clerk intoned as the lift hissed open.

The hallway that greeted her was all sharp edges and deliberate quiet. Portraits lined the walls, but none met her gaze. Even the sconces flickered reluctantly, like they knew what kind of justice waited ahead.

A wrought-iron door stood at the end of the corridor, sealed with five different wards—each older than the last. The clerk performed a complicated unlocking spell. The air split with a hiss.

Inside, the chamber was circular, tiered with seating and judgment. There was no audience. No jury. Just a semicircle of Ministry officials in heavy robes—Records, Enforcement, Bloodline Verification—and behind them, a dais with the Minister’s chair left conspicuously not empty.

Cornelius Fudge.

He wore green trimmed with gold, his expression forced somewhere between grave and benevolent. His fingers tapped rhythmically against his cane, and the little bowler hat he wore was perched with the calculated absurdity of someone who wanted to be underestimated.

“Miss Potter,” he said, voice oily with practiced affability. “Welcome.”

She stepped into the circle.

Her robes were unmarked save for a single stitched sigil inside the cuff. Her wand remained tucked at her side. Her expression gave nothing away.

“I believe the summons said Lady Potter,” she said.

A ripple passed through the officials—not shock, but irritation. The kind that meant she was already losing points.

“Yes, yes, of course,” Fudge said, waving a hand as though brushing away dust. “Titles are such delicate things. Though I must say—it’s a curious one, isn’t it? Never registered, never filed. And now here you are.”

“I stand in the name of my ancestors,” Harriett replied, voice clear and steady. “I have undergone the Rite of Ash. My blood has been verified by the ancestral spirits of the House of Potter.”

The man to Fudge’s right—Thistlewharp, Records—cleared his throat, shuffling a parchment. “And yet the Ministry has received no formal endorsement from Gringotts.”

“You’ll receive it by nightfall,” Harriett said. “They know how to deliver proof. Do you?”

A few of the officials shifted in their seats. One woman near the end narrowed her eyes, but said nothing.

Fudge offered her a smile too wide to mean anything. “You’ll find, Lady Potter, that such attitude does little to improve one’s case.”

Harriett took one step further into the circle.

“I’m not here to make a case,” she said. “I’m here to end yours.”

That landed. Even Fudge stilled for a beat before forcing a chuckle.

“Bold words, my dear. Bold indeed. But what we have here is not poetry. It’s paperwork. The records state you were bound magically at birth. That Dumbledore himself placed protective enchantments over your name, guardianship rights, and more. The records do not show any consent on your part.”

“Because I was fifteen months old,” she said coldly.

“Be that as it may,” Fudge said, “unbinding those protections is a serious offense. Particularly if they were tied to blood magic and Ministry-sanctioned wards.”

Harriett’s voice went quiet. “Is that what you call it? Protection ?”

“Come now,” he tutted. “You survived, didn’t you?”

She said nothing.

Fudge leaned forward. “Do you deny that Headmaster Dumbledore acted in your best interest?”

Harriett stared at him. Then raised her hand—palm out, sigil bared, still faintly marked with ash and blood.

“I don’t have to deny anything,” she said. “The magic already has.”

The air shifted. Not all at once. But subtly—like something long asleep rolling over in its grave. The rune on her skin pulsed faintly. The marble beneath her feet gave a sound like heat expanding inside bone.

Somewhere, far above, a chandelier trembled. Fudge paled. The room fell into stillness. The kind of stillness that comes before the first crack in a mirror.

“Proceed with the verification,” someone muttered.

A golden seal appeared in the center of the floor, spinning slowly. Magic crawled up the walls like lichen. The bloodline sigils of the Houses Potter and Peverell unfurled in the air—gilded, spectral, and watching .

Harriett stepped into their light. She did not bow. She did not explain.

She simply said, “I have returned.”

And the runes opened their eyes.

Excerpt from Codex Magica: Ministry Charters, Vol. II – Bloodline & Guardian Authority Statutes (Revised ed., 1913)

Section IV: Binding Under Special Circumstances
Clause 47B: Magical Custodial Authority & Emergency Lineage Interventions

In the event that a magical minor is rendered wardless by sudden death or disinheritance, and no immediate family member of suitable magical standing may be appointed, the Ministry of Magic reserves the right to designate a Custodial Guardian empowered to act in lieu of bloodline authority. Such an individual must be of sound magical mind, hold no known allegiance to hostile factions, and be approved by the Department of Magical Affairs and Family Security (DMAFS).

Under this statute, a Custodial Guardian may:

• Bind protective enchantments to the minor’s name, magical core, and familial claim.
• Establish conditional wards and bloodline tethers for the child’s continued safety.
• Temporarily suspend inheritance transfers until such a time as the minor comes of legal magical age or is otherwise deemed fit by the Ministry.

Binding provisions may include name-seals, bloodline occlusion, sigil rerouting, or genealogical cloaking, provided such measures are deemed to serve the child’s welfare. These spells are entered into the National Inheritance Registry as “Emergency Status Wards” and remain enforceable until formally released by a Ministerial Tribunal, or until the minor files for Right of Sovereignty under clause 82D.

NOTE: In cases where the Custodial Guardian is a known political figure (e.g., a Headmaster, Order member, or former official), added scrutiny may be applied after-the-fact via annual review. However, the intent of the binding at time of execution remains legally prioritized over subsequent developments.

Important Addendum (1899): Magical minors are not considered capable of fully consenting to the revocation of said bindings prior to their seventeenth birthday unless under extraordinary magical circumstances, such as prophetic designation, altered magical inheritance, or demonstration of bloodline recognition rites as outlined in Article VIII.

In disputes involving reclaimed ancestry, posthumous bloodline emergence, or ritual sovereignty, the Council of Verification may convene to determine the heir’s claim to agency.

Until such rulings are issued, the minor in question is to be treated as conditionally bound , with no right to act on behalf of their house, name, or ancestral magic without express approval.

Chapter Text

The light from the seal did not dim.

It deepened.

What had been golden bright turned strange—rose-gold fading into bronze, into iron-glow, into something older than light and shaped like memory. The bloodline sigils of Potter and Peverell remained suspended in the air above her: one, a sword crowned in flame and ivy; the other, a circlet of three broken branches, arranged like a constellation. They did not flicker. They did not move. But they watched —not as symbols, but as presences. As eyes.

Harriett stood at their center, her boots framed by the glowing edge of the seal. The hem of her cloak stirred slightly where magic gathered thick at her ankles, like fog pulled from the marrow of the earth. The runes on the wall had awakened. Slowly, they pulsed to life—each one a heartbeat, a breath, a name.

The Ministry courtroom was no longer the Ministry’s.

They tried to pretend otherwise.

“Clear the circle,” snapped Fudge, rising from his too-comfortable seat with a rustle of velvet and unease. “There’s been a misfire—someone’s tampered with the magical floorwork—”

“No one tampered with anything,” said Madame Bones. She remained seated, but her gaze had gone sharp beneath the lens of her monocle. “That’s a bloodline seal. Ancient class. Self-summoned. That doesn’t happen unless the House in question wills it.”

“But it’s not Ministry-sanctioned!” Fudge hissed. “This—this is irregular—this is theatrical—”

“This is older than your Ministry,” Harriett said.

Her voice echoed with something beneath it. Not volume— depth . Like another voice walked beside hers in the bones of the air. She didn’t raise it. She didn’t have to. The seal amplified her not like a spell, but like a vow fulfilled.

Umbridge’s mouth curled sweetly at the corners. “My dear,” she simpered. “Let’s not be dramatic. All this ritual talk is simply romanticizing a process that, at its heart, is legal, not literary—”

“You bound me with parchment,” Harriett said. “I answered in blood. That makes this a matter of both .”

The seal glowed brighter.

Around her, the courtroom had stilled.

The gallery—packed with functionaries and witnesses and the quiet vultures of wizarding law—no longer whispered. The air was too heavy to speak through. The presence of old power was thickening by the breath, and those without ancestral magic flinched without knowing why. Something in the floor was shifting—no longer decorative, no longer inert.

A chime sounded. Not a bell. Not a spell. A resonance.

From the ceiling, three silver chains dropped like threads of starlight. Where they landed, they sparked against the ground—and the seal rippled in answer.

Fudge made a strangled noise. “What—what is that?”

Bones stood.

“The Ministry invoked clause 47B of the Bloodline Authority Act,” she said coolly. “It allows for magical verification through rite or witness.”

“I didn’t mean this kind of witness!”

“Your law doesn’t make the distinction.”

The sigils above Harriett turned. And the stone beneath her feet opened.

No collapse. No spectacle. Just a smooth, slow unraveling—as if the floor had only ever been the surface of something much deeper. The golden seal split in thirds. Each curve peeled outward, revealing an ancient stair beneath—black stone veined with white salt, etched in spirals and runes that pulsed dimly at her approach.

Umbridge’s voice dropped two octaves. “What is the meaning of this?”

But Harriett had already stepped forward. The stone welcomed her. And the seal—the living circle of her name, her House, her inheritance— closed behind her.

No one followed.

Madame Bones did not object. Because some trials, once invoked, belonged to no court . They belonged to memory .

The stairwell spiraled downward like a scar carved into the Ministry’s foundations—narrow, veined with salt, humming low in her bones. Harriett descended without a wand, her boots steady on each stone step, the grimoire at her side pulsing like a heart wrapped in linen. Her breath echoed differently here—carried not by air but by memory. The runes on the walls glimmered faintly in her peripheral vision, too old to name, too true to ignore. Above her, the courtroom receded like the surface of water abandoned by a diver.

The Rite of Ash awaited. But she was not alone in the descent—not quite. From the chamber above came the storm.

“This is absurd !” Fudge’s voice cracked, shrill with panic. “You cannot simply allow a student to vanish into an unauthorized substructure of the Ministry—Madame Bones! Call the Aurors!”

“I don’t believe that would help,” she replied, and while her voice remained even, there was something dry in it. Almost amused.

“You’re letting her invoke blood magic ! In a government building!”

“And you invoked the Bloodline Authority Act,” she said, adjusting her monocle with one gloved hand. “If you didn’t expect the old magics to answer, you shouldn’t have knocked.”

“She’s fifteen!”

“She’s the heir .”

Fudge turned to the crowd—Ministry officials, Wizengamot observers, members of ancient families seated with polished canes and quiet eyes. “Surely no one else here supports this farce? This ritual nonsense—this… dramatics dressed up as legality!”

A pause. Then—

“I support it,” said a voice. Deep. Gravel-edged.

All heads turned.

Lord Avery rose slowly from the front bench—his robes old, trimmed in rust-colored velvet, his House sigil etched in opal at his collarbone. “The girl’s magic spoke louder than any proclamation. If the Circle opened, it did so by right.”

Fudge sputtered. “You—your family—”

“Stood with the old rites,” Avery said coldly. “Long before yours learned to sign parchment.”

A murmuring rippled through the gallery.

From the left, Madam Selwyn—matriarch of an ancient line long rumored to deal in stormcalling and oathbinding—stood next. “We recognize the Hollow’s invocation. Our family once guarded the Black Gate at Dunmoor. We know the signs.”

“She carries more than blood,” said Lord Greengrass from the shadows. “She carries memory.”

Bones raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. Her eyes had gone very sharp.

Umbridge stood abruptly, sugar-pink robes fluttering like a warning flag. “We cannot possibly— should not possibly —allow children to dictate what qualifies as legitimacy!”

“She is not dictating,” Selwyn said coolly. “She is demonstrating. ”

“Which is more than the Ministry ever did,” murmured Greengrass.

Fudge’s voice went ragged. “You’re aligning with her ? With the Potter girl who lied about He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, who—who walks with a grimoire under her robes and refuses orders —”

“We’re aligning with truth,” said Lord Rosier, who had not stood but had the tone of someone used to being heard anyway. “And if the truth has chosen a vessel, we’d be fools to deny it.”

A silence fell. Not total—but gathering .

The mood of the courtroom had changed. No longer uncertain. No longer curious. It had begun to bend. Not toward Harriett herself—no, they were not so sentimental—but toward the shape of her. Toward what she represented. Toward the gravity of a bloodline older than any Ministry seal, finally rising again to speak its name.

And below, Harriett reached the bottom step. The chamber at the base of the spiral was not a room. It was a vault .

Wider than it looked. Older than it should be. Walls carved in layered script and salt-veins, a circle traced in ash across the floor like the aftermath of something divine. In the center stood the basin.

The Ancestral Chalice. And behind it: three thrones.

One carved of twisted root and bone—Peverell. One wrought in iron and glass, half-broken by time—Potter. And one that shifted as she looked at it, neither empty nor full—made of shadow.

The moment she stepped into the ash-ring, the runes flared. The chamber sealed. And above her, the Ministry heard the sound of old stone locking into place.

“Merlin’s bones,” someone whispered. “She’s really doing it.”

“She already has,” said Avery.

Madame Bones watched the shifting light above the seal, her gaze unreadable.

“Let it be done, then,” she said. “The Ministry wanted a trial.”

And the Hollow, at last, had answered.

The door sealed with a hush like breath drawn before a name is spoken. Not slammed. Not locked. Just sealed , as though the room itself had closed its eyes.

Harriett stood in the center of the circle.

The air in the vault was dry, brittle with long-dormant magic, the kind of magic not made for wands or wards but for rites, for stories carved into stone, for names etched in blood beneath moonlight. The Chalice sat between her and the thrones—silver-cracked and salt-lined, rimmed in something older than flame.

It was not empty.

Ash swirled at its base. Bone-dust. A single drop of blackened wax. The sediment of a hundred offerings no one had the courage to claim.

And still, it waited.

The first throne stirred.

A light flared in the iron seat—red-gold, like a fire seen through the cracks of a hearth long gone cold. A figure rose slowly from its surface, cloaked in scorched velvet and laced with frost. Their face was marked not by time but by memory, features cut sharp as a seal ring. Their voice, when it came, echoed like history read aloud in a voice that had never asked permission.

“I am Riannon of House Potter,” they said. “Flame-born. Oath-breaker. First of the Severed Line.”

The second throne answered.

It did not rise, but unfolded —like roots breaking soil, like a grave opening without violence. The figure who emerged was older still, cloaked in bark and bone, their skin mapped with sigils that shifted between breaths.

“I am Aedric of the Peverell,” they said. “Who bore the Voice. Who bled the Gate. Who last called the Shadow by name.”

The third throne did not speak.

Instead, the circle itself responded—its edge burning white, its ash flaring upward in small, silent sparks. And from the center of the Chalice, a third presence rose.

Not human. Not ghost. A shadow threaded with silver and written with runes that refused to sit still. It said nothing. It did not need to.

Harriett’s bones hummed. The sigil beneath her skin pulsed.

Then the first spoke again:

“You have stepped into inheritance by fire, by blood, by word.”
“But legacy is not a title. It is a debt.”
“What have you paid?”

Harriett did not bow.

She raised her head, shoulders square despite the shaking in her limbs.

“I have walked the Hollow,” she said. “I have bled in the Garden. I have burned my name to make it mine again.”

“And who taught you?” said the Peverell voice, low and cold.

“No one,” Harriett said. “They buried it.”

The ash flared.

“Then you must pay in kind.”

The lights in the room dimmed. The circle beneath her feet shifted—one ring becoming three, the outermost etched in salt, the middle lined in rust, the center blank.

A voice said, “ Memory. ”

She staggered.

Pain lanced through her head—not sharp, not stabbing, but drowning. The world tipped. Her breath caught.

And she saw — Not her own life. Not her own thoughts.

But her birth— as if from outside herself. A ritual chamber dim with candlelight. Her mother’s voice ragged and hoarse, chanting names not found on any Ministry roll. Her father—quiet, bloody-handed—pressing a seal to her forehead. Not love. Protection. Not affection. Terror.

And then the breaking. A voice—Dumbledore’s? No. Older. Removing something. Wrapping a thread of magic around her soul.

She gasped, falling to one knee. The second ring glowed.

“Sacrifice,” the next voice whispered.

This time, the fire came for her chest.

Not physically—but deeply , cracking the walls she had built to survive. She felt Sirius’s hands reaching for her when she first arrived at Grimmauld Place. She felt Hermione’s silence. She saw Ron looking at her with fear instead of friendship. She saw what she had lost. She saw what she had given.

She screamed—but did not fall. The inner circle ignited.

“Truth, ” said the final voice. “ Speak what was not spoken. Answer what was not asked. ”

Her throat burned. She rose—barely.

“I am the blood of the Peverell line. I am the name you buried under ministry filings and false prophecies. I am the heir you left to rot in a cupboard, and I will not beg you for recognition. I will not perform. I will not plead .”

Silence. Then—

“I will bind what you buried. I will speak the name no one else will. I will remember the cost, and I will make others remember, too.”

The Chalice flared. The ash lifted into air. The sigil on her palm burned white. The spirits did not smile. But they saw her.

“Then it is done,” they said as one.

The Chamber fell still.

And from the shadowed throne—the one with no name—came the faintest nod.

Harriett’s legs gave out. She fell to her knees, not in defeat, but in release. The light faded. The seals locked again.

Above her, the Ministry court held its breath. And when the chamber doors opened once more—when Harriett emerged into torchlight, ash-smudged and glowing—she did not speak.

She did not need to. The stone recognized her. The flame answered her. And the bloodline bowed. The doors opened without being touched.

Not flung, not forced— parted , as though the air itself had shifted to make way. They moved slowly, reverently, iron-edged and rune-bound, sighing along ancient hinges with the sound of stone remembering its purpose.

Harriett stepped into the light.

The courtroom, which had once held the echo of whispers and skeptical quills, had fallen utterly silent. Every official parchment hovered, suspended in the air by startled magic. Every tongue stilled. Even the torches dimmed slightly, their flames tilting toward her—not in warning, but in instinct.

She walked with ash still smudged along her cheekbones. Her robes were torn at the hem, scorched faintly at the sleeves. Her left hand was bandaged with salt cloth, and through it glowed the sigil she had bled to earn—burning white-gold through linen.

But her spine was straight. And her eyes burned brighter than any wandlight. Behind her, the vault sealed itself with a hiss like breath against candlewax. Ahead of her, the full Wizengamot stared.

Cornelius Fudge scrambled to his feet, face the color of chalk left out in rain. His lips moved, but no sound came at first—only a panicked flutter of paper, a squeak of old leather boots, and the sound of political scaffolding beginning to crack.

“Th-this proceeding is highly irregular,” he croaked at last, voice brittle with fury. “Unauthorized. Unsanctioned. That vault was meant only for—”

“She was summoned by Rite,” interrupted Madame Bones, rising with the weight of old law behind her. “By bloodline and by magic older than this court. You saw it. You felt it.”

“I saw a child walk into a vault and come out with soot on her face!” Fudge snapped, hysteria cracking through the polished layers of his bureaucracy. “This is not legitimacy! This is theater—!”

“You fear it because you cannot name it,” said a voice from the pureblood gallery.

Heads turned.

It was Lord Nott—older than his son, sharp-eyed and cruel, but bound to tradition in a way that made him dangerous. He stood now, slow and deliberate, his dark robes trimmed with sigils only the oldest would recognize.

“She went to the Hollow,” he said. “She spoke before the thrones. She bled the ashline. We have not seen that done in four generations.”

He inclined his head, not in reverence, but in ancient acknowledgment.

Others rose with him.

Lady Greengrass, regal in emerald and onyx. The Head of the Rosier estate. The Montague heir. Even the old Parkinson matriarch—bent with time, eyes bright as daggers—lifted her cane in salute.

They did not cheer. They witnessed . The rite did not require approval. It demanded recognition.

Harriett stepped forward to the center of the chamber. Her boots echoed against the stone, and the golden circle of verification—so long used to determine inheritance by blood and bureaucratic spell—flared beneath her like a blooming star.

“I was named without consent,” she said. Her voice carried. Not with force, but with inevitability. “Filed under a name that was not mine. Bound by law that did not know my blood.”

Whispers broke like waves. Fudge’s hands fluttered like frightened birds. Umbridge coughed something too low to hear.

“I reclaimed my name,” Harriett continued. “Not through the courts. Not through your forms. But through the House that birthed me and the Hollow that shaped me.”

She lifted her right hand. The sigil flared white-hot.

“I stand before you not as the girl you thought you knew.”

The light surged.

“I am Harriett Ione Peverell-Potter,” she said. “Heir of the Hollow. Voice of the Bound. Sovereign by Rite and Witness.”

The verification circle did not flicker. It roared —gold fire spiking into the air, sigils rising like constellations above her head. The ancient crests of the Potter line and the Peverell name wreathed in white ash, carved from light.

One by one, the purebloods in the upper gallery bowed their heads. Not because they were loyal. But because they knew what power looked like when it was finally called by name.

Sirius, from the shadows beyond the official line of witnesses, smiled like a man who had just seen someone else set the house on fire the right way.

In her place stood something not yet a queen, not yet a myth, but burning toward both.

Cornelius Fudge opened his mouth again. But the court did not listen. Because the name had been spoken. And the blood had remembered. 

The doors did not close behind her with thunder.

No—this was the Ministry, and the Ministry prided itself on appearances, on the illusion of civility wrapped in oak and brass. So they swung shut with decorum instead, a hush of authority pressed tight like wax over an old wound, the sound more sealing than final, more verdict than echo.

Harriett walked forward alone.

The golden seal was still behind her, its light burned into the bones of the floor, but the corridors ahead unfolded in quiet opulence—polished stone veined with faint sigils, columns that remembered names long since dissolved into ash, the scent of charmed ink and aging magic clinging faintly to the air like dust that refused to settle. She did not stumble. Her robes dragged the sound of her passage into shape—measured, quiet, absolute.

She had made no oath, and yet the air around her responded like it had been branded.

The silence broke with her name.

“Lady Peverell-Potter.”

It was spoken in the tone of courtrooms and mausoleums—reverent, weightless, but meant to be remembered. The kind of name said not for the person addressed but for those within hearing range. An invitation, a warning, a test.

She turned.

A woman in robes the deep violet of dried ink stepped forward, her shoes soundless on the polished stone. Lady Persephone Rosier moved like a spell still unfolding—graceful, coiled, studied. Her hair was pinned in a spiral of silver combs, her hands ringed in family magic, and when she smiled, it was with the gentle disinterest of someone used to power arriving at her table rather than needing to request it.

“You walk like one of ours,” she said, and the words were not flattery. “It has been some time since the blood last chose to speak in public.”

Harriett did not respond immediately. She was still coiled from the weight of the courtroom. The ancestral magic that had blistered the walls of the chamber still moved beneath her skin like half-set fire. Her name—it still echoed behind her ribs like the tail-end of a storm not yet finished breaking.

“I came to be heard,” Harriett said. “Not to be greeted.”

“You were,” Lady Rosier replied. “And now they’ll never forget.”

Others had gathered.

She hadn’t heard them come—hadn’t felt the magic shift, hadn’t noticed the slow tightening of court—but the corridor now bristled with velvets and ringed sleeves, with robes stitched in legacy and sharp-eyed curiosity. The Montagues were here, and the Selwyns. A branch of the Greengrass line stood flanking a scroll-bearer in black and steel trim. Even the eldest Macnair—gaunt and smooth-faced like a blade honed down to purpose—stood in attendance.

None bowed. But none turned away.

Lord Nott, older than he looked and more dangerous than he spoke, moved to the edge of her path. “You could have burned the whole house down,” he said mildly. “But you asked to inherit it.”

“I didn’t ask,” Harriett said. “I claimed.”

He inclined his head. “As your line once did. Before blood turned to parchment.”

There was a shift, soft but sharp, in the shape of the gathered. An opening. A folding inward. The lords and ladies of the old world did not cheer. They did not bow. But they watched her now the way they watched comets—beautiful and deadly and perhaps inevitable.

A courier stepped forward—young, half-veiled, bearing a letter stitched with the Peverell triskelion. Harriett did not take it. Behind her, the courtroom doors remained closed. Ahead, the hall narrowed into stillness.

Someone else spoke. Female. Dry. Cool. “You did not wear the circlet,” said Lady Selwyn, her hair braided with starlight thread, her eyes like stained-glass windows cracked under age. “A statement?”

“A warning,” Harriett said.

The silence that followed was thoughtful.

No one dared reach for her. But still, they circled—flashes of silver crest pins, brooches carved with runes old as sea-bone, the scent of ancestral oils and salt-laced glamour curling beneath their perfumes. They did not offer loyalty. That would come later, if at all. But the air held possibility. An old door had opened. A new language had been spoken.

Harriett met their eyes—one by one. Not as a child. Not as a weapon.

As heir.

A lesser witch might have been overwhelmed by it. But Harriett had stood in the Hollow with her hands full of ash and her name full of ghosts. She had walked through the fire of her own bloodline and come out breathing smoke.

They saw it in her eyes. They saw it in the way the torches guttered when she passed. No one stopped her. But no one dismissed her either.

And somewhere beyond the Ministry walls, tucked into the space between two safehouses and a charm ward so deep even the bones didn’t remember it, Sirius Black sat in a cracked armchair with a flask at his side, his hair pulled back in defiance and his eyes burning with something too sharp to name.

He had felt it. Across the city, through every ward, through every curse that tried to keep him out. He had felt her name take root in the world like a flame lit in dry season. He leaned back and exhaled smoke.

“You brilliant little menace,” he whispered. “You did it.”

And the fire did not answer. But it glowed a little brighter in its hearth.

THE DAILY PROPHET — Special Evening Edition

“ Fire in the Blood: Harriett Potter Declared Trueblood Heir in Ancestral Rite at Ministry Trial ”
By Eldred Twycross, Senior Political Correspondent

In an unprecedented display of ancestral magic not witnessed in over four centuries, Harriett Potter—known to most as the Girl Who Lived—has been officially recognized as the rightful heir to the House of Potter and, more startling still, the long-dormant Peverell line.

Earlier today, in Courtroom Ten of the Ministry of Magic, what was meant to be a standard hearing to verify Miss Potter’s claim to her inheritance spiraled swiftly into something much older, stranger, and entirely ungoverned by current magical law.

Eyewitnesses described the sudden appearance of spectral sigils—Potter and Peverell crests drawn in ancestral flame—unfurling across the chamber floor. Runes bloomed along the walls, and golden fire crawled up the Ministry stone as Harriett stepped into their light and invoked a Rite known only through fragmented texts and oral tradition: the Trial by Ash.

“This wasn’t a legal defense,” said Octavius Muldoon, a clerk present for the hearing. “She didn’t argue. She didn’t petition. She just… said she had returned. And the magic obeyed.”

Sources confirm that Minister Fudge attempted to delay proceedings, calling the display “highly irregular and possibly fraudulent,” while Undersecretary Umbridge reportedly fainted at the emergence of the spectral Potter lineage record, which has not appeared since the reign of Minister Farfax the Grey.

But what, precisely, is the Trial by Ash?

Modern readers may struggle to understand what occurred—largely because the Rite predates the Wizengamot, the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, and even the formal establishment of Gringotts arbitration. In brief, the Trial by Ash is an ancestral rite in which claimants are tested not through legal documentation but through the will of their bloodline itself. Witnesses speak of Harriett undergoing a magical gauntlet behind sealed stone—no records exist of what occurred within, only that she emerged marked, changed, and accepted.

According to Arithmantic scholar and folklorist Professor Elspeth Derrow, the rite is “a vow between the living and the dead, the remembered and the buried. It is not a trial in the modern sense—it is a reckoning.”

Further confounding the situation is the fact that the House of Peverell has been considered extinct for centuries. The name lingers only in myth and in reference to the Deathly Hallows—powerful magical artifacts long believed to be legend. Yet, following the Rite, Harriett was acknowledged by no fewer than thirteen Old Houses, including Rosier, Greengrass, Selwyn, and Nott.

In a single afternoon, she shifted the political weight of the Wizengamot.

“She’s not just a war hero anymore,” said Lord Edric Travers, scion of one of the oldest families in Britain. “She is a sovereign in her own right. Blood-recognized. Flame-sworn. Whether the Ministry approves or not.”