Chapter 54. The End of the Second Year
At first we even found it funny, how everyone reacted to our changes. Well, yes: in such a not‑exactly eventful year, our transformation quickly became the hot topic for at least a week. But that avalanche of curiosity very soon turned, to put it mildly, exhausting. It felt like everyone who could be bothered considered it their duty to come up, ask questions, and all but peer under our skin. Worst of all, of course, it was for Andromeda.
We hadn't exactly had complaints about our looks before—genetics sprinkled with magic do give a rather striking result. But now the girls had literally gone crazy trying to pry out our secret. Especially considering the local aristocratic beauty standard: that sort of noble pallor which in reality more often looks not refined, but frankly unhealthy. You can reproduce something like that with cosmetics, but to make it truly fitting and beautiful is much harder, because of everyone's original skin tone.
And once it finally sank in for the girls that the very structure of our skin had changed—that was when the true siege began. We had to act decisively. With our roommates, the most basic argument worked: price. We shamelessly doubled the cost at the very least. After all, finding someone who can tell you in advance whether a ritual will go perfectly or will need years of fine‑tuning is an almost hopeless task. And even if you find them, that still doesn't mean everything is actually feasible. Eggs of an ice phoenix aren't the sort of thing that just lie around on a dusty shop shelf. Even we most likely only got them thanks to how exclusive and unique an item we sold to the goblins. It's one thing to breed a basilisk. It's something else entirely to raise it for a thousand years, and with the involvement of a historical figure like Salazar Slytherin on top of that.
We didn't regret that choice for a single instant, though. We got exactly what we wanted. As for the rest of the overly zealous curious souls, we simply started methodically avoiding them. Fortunately, we had more than enough people to talk to: Hermione, Harry, Ron and Coraline, who quite quickly fit herself into our circle and started going with us to the Room of Requirement, dragging Luna Lovegood along in the process. We weren't even surprised when one day we caught her standing in front of that very painting where a particularly deranged man was trying to teach trolls to dance ballet.
Right up until the end of the holidays we were busy picking apart what exactly the ritual had given us. We understood the temperature control and the ability to see temperature almost immediately—back at the moment of awakening. After that, though, we had to move on to experiments.
First of all, body temperature suddenly stopped being something vital. Our bodies seemed to slip free of their usual constraints: they just automatically adjust to the environment. Because of that, to others we almost always feel cold to the touch. Magic, though, turned into a separate story. It had been abundant in us before; now there was almost three times as much. We seriously started wondering what you could even spend such a reserve on, considering that even before we had never once pushed ourselves to the limit.
Now, about spells. Overall, their behavior hardly changed at all, but ice magic became almost harmless to us. "Almost" because physics hasn't gone anywhere: if you smash someone over the head with an ice club, it absolutely doesn't matter how resistant that poor soul is to cold.
On the other hand, spells connected with temperature began to fall into our hands with startling ease. They were easier to handle, and the control became finer. We even managed to summon the ice of Cocytus without any consequences for ourselves. It appeared as huge ice chains emerging straight from the air, ready to bind the body and soul of anyone who happened to be nearby. Controlling them, however, was very difficult—we had to forcibly keep the spell from binding us as well.
In parallel, we sometimes asked Fawkes to teleport us—just to figure out that strange, painfully familiar sensation at the moment of transfer. It was all too obvious that it was akin to the innate ability of phoenixes; it's just that our elements are opposite, so this feeling worked more like a hint than an instruction. Nevertheless, we already tried, relying on it, to recreate an icy version of phoenix travel.
And since we didn't consider ourselves suicidal, we didn't practice it live. Instead, we used the incense‑burning skull Dumbledore had given us to run the theory through a prediction, to be sure our conclusions at least wouldn't lead to us spontaneously dispersing somewhere in the stratosphere.
Thus, unnoticed by everyone else, our time‑turner routine continued, buying us glorious extra hours and days before Voldy's return. In the end, we mastered this ability. Its usefulness was obvious: phoenixes can teleport even to places protected against Apparition. Which meant that from now on, so could we.
During the same period, Hermione made serious progress in preparing to become a Metamorphmagus. All she had left was to have us confirm—on the level of theory and models—that the upcoming ritual would succeed, and to persuade the Headmaster, who was already knee‑deep in this anyway, to supervise the dangerous procedure. For us, alas, that path turned out to be closed: the phoenix magic inside us is too strong, it simply won't let another form fix itself. Theoretically, in time, we might find a workaround, but that's research on an absurd time scale, and for now we're not ready to sacrifice that much time to it.
So our "second" year at Hogwarts came to an end—quiet on the outside, dense on the inside. For the first time in a very long while, the House Cup went to Ravenclaw. Despite Snape's blatant bias, the ravens managed to pull ahead by a couple of points. Gryffindor, having no source of points other than Quidditch, safely slid down to third place. As consolation, we still kept the Quidditch Cup.
"Why do I get the feeling you're cheating?" Coraline suddenly blurted. She was sitting opposite us on the couch in the train compartment and was eyeing with a certain horror just how much taller we'd grown over the course of the school year. This year we'd decided to go home in her company. We really had neglected talking to her far too often—usually it was Coraline who initiated our rare joint walks.
"It's definitely the loop‑tailed chrono‑moths," Luna said dreamily the moment she heard the question. "You know, they're invisible, but they just adore the smell of condensed time. Such a moth lands on your shoulder and twists space, locking you in an invisible time loop for exactly three days. From the outside, for all of us, only one day passes…" She thoughtfully swung her radish earring. "But inside, you live three full days in a row. Your body has no idea the Great Hall calendar is lagging behind. It dutifully stays awake, works, and grows three times faster just to make it in time for breakfast. You really ought to be careful. If the moth ties the loop too tight, you'll come back to us as very old people. That would be terribly awkward."
"You've hit it right on the nose," we smirked. Deciding to play along, we first spoke through Andromeda, then continued through Regulus: "We caught it. And we stretch every day into three so we can study more."
"You have a time‑turner?!" Coraline squeaked, jumping to her feet.
"Quiet!" we hissed in unison, automatically whipping out our wands and hurriedly throwing protective charms over the compartment so no one could eavesdrop.
"Did you absolutely have to shout your guesses across the entire train?" we grumbled once we were done and the silence field snapped into place.
"Sorry," the girl muttered, not very convincingly, and a second later she was already showering us with questions. All of them boiled down, essentially, to one:
"Why didn't you take me with you?"
"Coraline," we cast a meaningful glance at Luna, who was watching the conversation with genuine interest, "I don't think this is the right time and place to discuss it."
"Hm. If there is anyone you can definitely trust, it's Luna Lovegood," Coraline said firmly. At her words, Luna herself visibly flustered and stared out the window as if she had nothing to do with any of this.
"All right, all right," Regulus relented, laying a conciliatory hand on his sister's head and ruffling her hair. "I promise: I'll talk to the Headmaster about you. Later."
Coraline twitched in annoyance at once, like a cat that's been petted at the wrong moment, but didn't argue—she only narrowed her eyes, clearly memorizing the promise and planning to present us the bill for it in the future.