Night had fallen.
After a generous Intisian dinner, Bernadette found herself still faintly dissatisfied — and when she traced the feeling to its source, she realised she'd been quietly comparing the meal against Hogwarts' cooking.
"To think that a bunch of homely little creatures would be such extraordinary cooks."
To be more precise: it wasn't the cooking itself that was extraordinary — it was the culinary magic.
Come to think of it, among all the Beyonder Pathways, there really wasn't a single Sequence or ability dedicated to cuisine or gastronomy. What a waste.
She stifled a yawn, pulled back the blankets, and lay down in her clothes.
Just as she was hovering at the edge of sleep, she suddenly snapped wide awake — crystal clear in an instant. She knew, with complete certainty, that some force had invaded her dream.
A Sleepless Pathway Beyonder?
To slip so effortlessly past her defences into her dream — that had to be at minimum Sequence 3. And a Sleepless Beyonder of that rank meant, in all likelihood, an Archbishop of the Church of the Night.
Bernadette immediately moved to pull herself out of the dream — and found, to her sharp surprise, that she couldn't.
Without hesitation, she raised her hand. The crimson spear coalesced in her grip in an instant — the Spear of Longinus — and she prepared to simply shatter her way out.
At that very moment, the world in front of her blurred. When it resolved, she was standing in a clean, tidy room lined with six or seven beds — the kind of ward you'd expect in a hospital.
She scanned her surroundings with careful eyes. A voice spoke suddenly from behind her: "Were you looking for me?"
Bernadette spun around and stepped back sharply — only to find a round-faced boy, no older than ten or eleven, lying in a hospital bed, staring up at her with wide, curious eyes.
"Why did you invade my dream?"
The boy shook his head. "Not an invasion — just saying hello."
"Hello?" Bernadette's eyes narrowed. "Hello's been said. Now let me wake up."
"Not yet," the boy said, "because I still want to ask you for some—"
"I'm afraid I can't accommodate that."
Without waiting for him to finish, Bernadette raised her hand and hurled the crimson spear straight at the boy.
In the next instant, the Spear of Longinus — carrying its terrible, contained power — seemed to tear a seam through the fabric of the dream itself, shattering everything inside it like a broken mirror.
Then came a crash, and it all dissolved into shards.
In almost the same breath, Bernadette jolted upright in bed, quickly cloaking herself in The Emperor's New Clothes.
The reason she'd acted so decisively was because she was far too familiar with how Sleepless Pathway Beyonders fought: one would drag the target into a dream, while another struck in the physical world simultaneously. Every second spent lingering in the dream was another second of mounting danger.
She waited — braced, alert — but nothing happened.
After a while, her expression shifted into something peculiar. "Was it... actually just a hello?"
Elsewhere.
The round-faced boy lay blinking at the ceiling of the hospital ward, dumbfounded. "All I wanted was a bit of ice cream. Was that really necessary?"
He curled his small fist tight, jaw set with resolve. "Fine. Fine! I'll just wish you good luck then!"
The world of Harry Potter, over the following few days.
Time flew past.
After that visit to Nurmengard, Dumbledore had not been seen again, and no one knew what had come of his meeting with Grindelwald.
Snape, from that day onwards, walked around with a thundercloud permanently over his head. Gone was his usual favouritism toward Slytherin — for once, he docked points from all four houses with the impartial disregard of a man in a very dark mood.
After his fateful "recognition" of Snape, Harry had been tangled up in knots about how to act around him. On one hand, the years of accumulated dread. On the other, the knowledge of what had passed between Snape and his parents — which made it nearly impossible to look at this "godfather" with any straightforward feeling whatsoever.
As for our dark lord, Lord Voldemort-in-Quirrell, he remained as much a comedic footnote as ever — a figure of reliably bewildering uselessness, good mainly for conversation over meals. Vincent dropped by to visit Patricia twice more during this stretch.
And just like that, the weekend arrived, and with it the next day of exchange. Since they no longer needed to leave messages, the Sunday felt surprisingly open. Vincent spent the afternoon pub-hopping with Professors McGonagall and Flitwick — Snape had, needless to say, not joined them.
That evening, just after washing up and getting ready to sleep, Vincent heard a scratching at his door.
He opened it to find a small white cat — Persian, by the look of it — wobbling unsteadily into his room, then immediately flopping down at his feet and gazing up at him with enormous, pitifully pleading eyes. It let out the softest, most unbearably sweet mew.
"???"
Vincent stared. Where had this cat come from? Why was it playing the fainting maiden on his doorstep the moment he opened the door?
He nudged it with his foot. "I think you've got the wrong room."
"Mew~"
The cat blinked at him with those enormous eyes and let out another saccharine little cry.
Then it slowly shuffled itself sideways — moving inch by inch toward the corner of the room — and settled itself with a thump in front of Bernadette's "wand." Just lay down there, flat on its belly.
Mew~
"Give me a sniff of those leaves." That was what it actually wanted to say.
It had gone a whole week without catnip, and the craving was gnawing away at it something fierce. Hogwarts' greenhouses did grow knotgrass, and it had even snuck in to pinch some — but the taste was nothing compared to the real thing.
Could this cat have something to do with Bernadette? She'd never mentioned any cat.
"Mew~"
The white cat launched another round of the Big-Eyes Offensive. It knew full well that the great dangerous person in front of it did not seem to be susceptible to this tactic, but it was the only card it currently held.
Just give me a sniff! Now!
Vincent crossed his arms and settled onto the sofa, watching the cat rub itself back and forth against the "wand," clearly desperate to gnaw on it but too frightened to actually try. Then it hit him — hadn't Bernadette mentioned that this wooden stick had a peculiar "magic" of its own, something that caused knotgrass to sprout from the ground nearby?
Knotgrass — also known as catnip.
A plant that made most cats feel blissfully happy and relaxed.
So this cat had been drawn here by the wand?
With that thought, Vincent extended his hand and Summoned the wand to his palm. He'd tried to study it before — and as Ollivander had essentially confirmed, it had magically inert, stubbornly resistant properties but was extraordinarily hard as a material. Casting spells with it was frankly inferior to going wandless. Except for the Lumos charm, for some reason — the same blinding-flashbang effect happened with this stick as with Bernadette herself. Which meant there was nothing special about Bernadette, just about the stick.
Oddly enough, Vincent had never managed to figure out what triggered the knotgrass-sprouting.
At that moment, the white cat suddenly grabbed at its own belly with both front paws — just like Doraemon reaching into his dimensional pocket — and produced several large clumps of soil, which it arranged carefully around the wand.
"???"
Vincent stared.
This was... wasn't the "Belly Dimension" Snuffler's exclusive ability? Since when did ordinary cats have this power?
He'd never heard of any magical creature of the feline variety possessing a spatial storage ability.
Unless someone had... crossbred a Snuffler with a cat?
Surely not.
Vincent had always assumed that kind of thing was strictly in Hagrid's wheelhouse.
To be continued…
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