The next morning, Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom.
The room was choked with a suffocating wall of garlic. To Lucian's senses, beneath that sharp, sinus-burning stench lay something far worse—rotten, cold, like the reek of old corpses left too long in damp stone.
The smell of a soul in decay.
Lucian sat in the back row.
In his vision, the man at the lectern was a tangled knot of ruin.
Professor Quirrell's body was wrapped in threads of ashen gray and dark crimson—living parasitic vines that crawled along veins and sinew, all converging at the back of his head beneath that ridiculous purple turban.
Tendrils of a parasite.
Around Quirrell, the aura that should have signified life and fortune was guttering like a candle in a draft. Only a few thin, dull gray strands still twitched, puppeteering the corpse into motion.
This wasn't even a last flare of vitality. It was a marionette jerking on strings.
A perfectly good piece of chalk snapped in his fingers every few minutes for no reason. His eyes kept glazing over with blank confusion. His robes were covered in tiny unexplained scratches—especially the turban, which now bore fresh bird droppings.
On the opposite side of the room, Harry and Ron basked in borrowed glory. Harry was furtively showing off a freshly unwrapped Chocolate Frog card under the desk. Golden threads of fortune danced above his head with every flicker, shouting silently:
I am the protagonist of this world.
Lucian lowered his gaze. It couldn't have been more obvious.
"Ab… about the emergency tr-treatment… after a werewolf bite…"
Professor Quirrell stood behind the lectern, face bloodless, eyes darting. He kept glancing toward the back door and windows as though monsters might burst through at any second.
The Slytherins were already snickering openly. Malfoy was enjoying himself, deliberately clicking his quill against the desk like castanets.
"First… we must… distinguish between a full-moon bite and… an ordinary one…" Quirrell's hand shook; the chalk screeched across the board in a long, grating line. "If it's… full moon… then the curse will… will…"
He froze at the crucial point.
Quirrell's jaw began to twitch unnaturally. A wet, choking "g-g-g" sound bubbled in his throat, but no complete word emerged.
"What happens then, Professor?" Theodore Nott drawled lazily. "Do they turn into stuttering idiots?"
Laughter exploded across the room. Harry winced and rubbed his scar; it had suddenly stung.
This was Hogwarts in microcosm: the Savior smirking, the Dark Lord playing pretend, and a flock of ignorant lambs mocking the wolf in sheep's clothing.
"Due to irreversible erosion of the magical circuits, the infected soul falls under bestial domination."
The voice cut cleanly through the restless air.
Laughter died instantly. Every head turned.
Lucian hadn't stood. He remained leaning back in his chair, gaze passing over the sea of students to lock directly onto the trembling figure at the front.
"Silver nitrate mixed with white dittany will staunch the bleeding—true. But that addresses only the flesh. The real issue lies in the soul."
"Werewolf venom is, at its core, a coercive magical parasite. It forcibly suppresses the host's self-awareness and overlays a second, savage will onto the body."
He paused, eyes drifting to the purple turban.
"Such a conflict of dual wills within one vessel inevitably leads to mental collapse: incoherent speech, loss of motor control, and… extreme photosensitivity. Wouldn't you agree, Professor Quirrell?"
The room went tomb-silent.
To the students, Ashford simply sounded very clever and very obscure.
To Quirrell—or rather, to the thing inside him—the words landed like thunder.
The trembling stopped. In its place came the absolute stillness of a coiled viper.
Quirrell slowly lifted his head.
Harry clapped a hand to his forehead and let out a stifled gasp of pain.
"Mr. Ashford…" Quirrell's voice had lost its stutter. It came out low, hoarse, almost serpentine. "A… remarkably astute observation. Five points… to Ravenclaw."
He turned back to the board to write, presenting his back to the class.
But in Lucian's sight, the black-red mass coiled at the base of Quirrell's skull suddenly boiled, fixing on him with predatory focus.
Legilimency.
A probe from the Dark Lord himself.
Lucian only gave the faintest curl of lip.
Inside him, the vortex turned slowly. The gray magic—born of Obscurial chaos yet tamed by inner-alchemy—erected an unbreakable dam across the mental plane.
The tide of malice crashed against it… and a thin thread was quietly swallowed by the vortex.
At the same moment, Lucian's mind flicked forward.
His gaze settled on Harry, who was still rubbing his scar in the front row.
With the lightest mental nudge, Lucian reached into the air.
Several thick golden threads of destiny tethered to Harry—symbols of overwhelming luck—snapped silently. Under his guidance they were forcibly rerouted, grafted onto the crown of the unlucky puppet at the lectern.
Quirrell's chalk snapped again.
This time, though, the dust didn't fly into his eyes or stain his robes.
It traced a bizarre arc and dropped neatly into the wastepaper bin beside him.
Quirrell felt the anomaly.
The probe had vanished into nothing—like throwing a stone into the sea. Worse—he sensed a sliver of his own power had been… consumed?
Impossible. This was only a first-year.
The bell rang, shattering the suffocating tension.
"Cl… class dismissed." Quirrell dropped the chalk and fled toward his office like a man pursued.
Oddly, none of the usual tripping hazards caught him today. Every stumble missed by millimeters.
Students surged out, chattering and packing bags.
Hermione walked at the rear of the crowd, arms full of books. As she passed Lucian's desk, her steps faltered.
In the past she would have marched straight up—demanding to know which obscure text he'd read that theory in, or scolding him that it bordered on Dark magic.
Today she only gave him a complicated glance, fingers tightening reflexively around the now-clean handkerchief in her pocket. Then she bit her lip, ducked her head, and hurried away in silence.
If books and logic no longer explained reality, then observation came first.
Lucian watched her retreating back with quiet satisfaction.
The variable seed was performing admirably.
His gaze drifted—almost casually—toward the direction Harry had gone.
There, the once-blinding solar corona of golden fortune around the boy now showed a hairline fracture. The thick rope of destiny still dragged the Savior toward the next plot beat, but the path ahead suddenly looked far less smooth.
"So then," Lucian murmured as he stepped out of the classroom, "the next act."
Since the Dark Lord had noticed him, the stage needed expansion.
He opened his palm.
In the center, a thin wisp of dark-red aura—freshly extracted from Quirrell—writhed and thrashed inside a cage of gray magic.
"Conservation of energy. Conservation of fortune." Lucian spoke softly, unhurried steps carrying him up the marble main staircase.
At that moment, a startled cry and the muffled sound of something heavy tumbling echoed from above.
Lucian lifted his eyes.
At the landing just overhead, Harry Potter—the boy who always slipped through disaster unscathed—was sprawled ignominiously on a stair that had abruptly vanished beneath him. His right foot had plunged through the gap up to the calf.
Worse: the rare misprint Dumbledore Chocolate Frog card he'd been showing off moments earlier was now fluttering away on a draft, drifting lazily toward the bottomless stairwell.
"Oh no! That's the misprinted Dumbledore!" Ron wailed, leaning dangerously over the banister to grab for it, nearly toppling himself.
"Damn it, why did the stairs—?" Harry hissed through gritted teeth, his usual uncanny instinct for avoiding traps suddenly, inexplicably offline.
Normally the card would have been blown back by a convenient ghost, or caught on the next landing by blind luck.
Today it simply vanished into the dark, in full view of everyone.
Malfoy's signature sneer floated down from higher up: "Seems Potter's luck is all stored in that scar. Can't even keep hold of a card. Pathetic."
Lucian stood in shadow, watching impassively.
In his spiritual sight, the blazing corona above Harry's head dimmed for a heartbeat—several key golden threads severed. That single instant of darkness corresponded perfectly to this small, petty stroke of misfortune.
The fracture had begun.