Moody's Magical Eye kept moving, sweeping the Great Hall like a searchlight, until it locked onto a corner of the long table.
The Weasley twins.
They were huddled together, voices low, deep in some furtive scheme.
The Magical Eye cut through the crowd without effort, picking out the key words scrawled across their notebook.
"...the aged white dandelion root isn't old enough..."
"...that drop of dragon blood is too active, it nearly blew the cauldron..."
"...the project funding Professor Douglas approved — we could probably squeeze out a bit more..."
Aging Potion.
Moody understood immediately.
These two restless troublemakers were trying to use magic to fool Dumbledore's Age Line.
An image formed in Moody's mind. A farmer. Cold, patient, unhurried.
And this entire Hogwarts was his field.
Harry Potter was the finest stalk of wheat in it.
All Moody had to do was wait. Wait for the harvest season, then swing the sickle.
As for the Weasley twins...
Weeds.
Weeds worth watching, but not worth pulling up. Not yet.
---
The night deepened. The castle sank into sleep.
Only the kitchen still held a light , a dim, amber oil lamp burning in the corner.
Dobby carried a bowl of hot soup, picking his way carefully across the stone floor.
Winky was on her knees in the corner, a ragged cloth balled in her fists, scrubbing a massive copper pot with a kind of frenzy that looked less like cleaning and more like penance.
The pot had long since reached a mirror shine. Anyone else would have stopped. She hadn't.
She kept scrubbing the same spot, over and over, bearing down with a force that seemed designed to hurt.
Her fingers had worn through. Thin lines of blood seeped from the broken skin, leaving dark red smears across the copper surface.
She wasn't drinking anymore. Professor Douglas had cut off the kitchen's supply of Butterbeer to her.
So she had found another way to punish herself. Endless, frantic, relentless work , enough to drown out the fear and the guilt that had worked their way into her bones.
"Winky..."
Dobby set the soup down beside her and called her name, softly.
She didn't respond. She was somewhere else entirely.
Her lips were moving. Broken words pushed up from her throat like fragments of a nightmare spoken out loud.
"Master... Master needs Winky..."
"A... a powerful spell..."
"Winky shouldn't... shouldn't have looked..."
Her whole body began to tremble.
"The smell of the Dark Mark... getting closer... right there in the stands..."
"Master is so frightened... Winky is so frightened too..."
Dobby listened without a word, his great ears drooping to either side of his face.
He felt helpless.
He thought of what Mr. Holmes had told him.
"Some wounds, magic can't heal, Dobby."
"Some wounds can only be tended by one's own kind."
Dobby reached out his thin, bony hand and gently closed it around Winky's, the one still trembling against the copper.
He couldn't cure her.
But he could stay.
And he could quietly hold onto every word she said. Every broken fragment of it.
Maybe one day, these scattered whispers would fit together into something , something terrible, and true.
The oil lamp flame danced in the silence of the kitchen, slow and small.
Time moved through the old castle's stone without a sound.
---
A feeling of anticipation hung over Hogwarts like a held breath, stretched to its limit, saturating every corridor and courtyard.
Everyone was preparing for the approaching tournament.
Everyone except Harry Potter.
Harry hadn't been sleeping well. Not for a while now.
He'd told himself it was the homework. The endless, suffocating pile of it , Snape's essay on the Draught of Peace, McGonagall's Transfiguration drills, and Douglas's bottomless stack of Dark Magic theory analysis.
Then this morning came.
The familiar pain woke him. Not the searing lightning-bolt kind that split his skull open , he knew that kind. This was different. This was a cold needle, held by some invisible hand, pressing into his nerves slowly, deliberately, one jab at a time.
A dull, deep ache. And underneath it, a chill that had nothing to do with temperature.
Harry reached up instinctively and pressed his hand to his chest.
There should have been warmth there. A small, steady warmth , the kind that had been there all term, solid and reassuring beneath his robes.
His fingers found cold wood.
He shoved the bed curtains aside and sat up, pulling the wooden plaque out from inside his collar.
It was the same plaque. Same carved runes he'd never been able to read. But the warmth was gone entirely , it felt like something dredged up from a damp cellar, dead and cold, carrying the chill of a thing that had stopped living.
Worse than the cold was the absence.
That Dementor inside , the one Professor Douglas had described so casually as an unlucky fellow , the source of all that heat, all that humming energy.
Gone.
As if it had never been there at all.
The cold spread outward from Harry's chest. Inch by inch through his blood, down into his arms and legs, until his whole body felt frozen from the inside.
He had to find Douglas.
The thought surfaced, and with it, an immediate, instinctive dread.
Since the start of term, Harry had gotten very good at avoiding Professor Douglas. Like an overly conditioned cat , the kind that has learned exactly which rooms to stay out of. After every class, he was the first one through the door.
Because of one sentence. One greeting, delivered in a perfectly easy tone, that hit harder than anything Snape had ever said to him.
"Harry — how are the practice exercises coming along?"
But now there was no choice.
The hollow, gutted terror in his chest was worse than a hundred Potions essays stacked on top of each other.
He dressed quickly, pulled on his robes, and walked out through the Gryffindor common room at an unsteady pace. A few students were still up by the fire, bent over a game of wizard chess. They glanced up as he passed.
"Hey, Harry, where are you going this early?"
"Library," Harry said, not slowing down.
The corridor to the Defense Against the Dark Arts office felt longer than he'd ever known it to be. The knight portraits tracked him as he went, their painted eyes following with something that felt uncomfortably like scrutiny.
He stopped in front of the familiar oak door. Professor Douglas's nameplate hung at eye level.
Harry drew a breath. Cold air filled his chest.
He raised his hand , it was trembling slightly — and knocked.
"Come in."
Douglas's voice from the other side. Calm. Almost pleasant.
Harry pushed the door open.
The office was empty except for Douglas, sitting behind his large desk. The surface in front of him was covered in an odd assortment of pieces: ticking brass gears, precisely cut transparent crystals, and a few writhing deep-brown roots that looked like they'd come off some magical plant.
Douglas held a pair of small silver tweezers in one hand, barely breathing, attempting to thread a glowing filament , thinner than spider silk , into a glass sphere no bigger than a pigeon's egg.
He looked more focused than Harry had ever seen anyone look over a cauldron.
"Harry?" Douglas looked up. Genuine surprise crossed his face. He'd noticed, of course, that the boy had been avoiding him all term , always the first one out the door after class. "Is something the matter? I don't recall setting up any tutoring today."
Light tone. Easy. Almost amused.
It landed on Harry like a stone on cracked ice.
His nose stung. The hollowed-out terror and helplessness shifted all at once, reshaping themselves into something rawer , a grief that had nowhere to go.
Of the two people in all of Hogwarts he'd been counting on, the one sitting in front of him didn't seem to think his world had just ended.
➤ Next: Amulet Failed? Uncle: Time to Upgrade Your Gear!
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