The world went white, and then it was gone, and Rowan was somewhere that was not a place at all.
He knew it immediately. The same instinctive recognition that tells you you're dreaming even as the dream holds you. His mental palace. The architecture of his Occlumency, the structure he had built and maintained and fortified over years of disciplined practice. It should have been orderly. It should have been silent. It should have been exactly the way he'd left it that morning: walls standing, corridors clear, every memory filed and sealed and accessible only on his terms.
Instead, everything had changed.
The palace was vast. He'd expanded it over the years without thinking about it, corridors and rooms multiplying organically, unchecked. Corridors stretched in directions he hadn't consciously designed. Rooms had appeared on their own, filled with things he hadn't meant to keep. He'd always known this, in the abstract. Occlumency texts warned about it. The mind builds what it needs, whether you sanction the construction or not.
He'd never looked too closely at what had been built without his permission.
Now he had no choice.
The walls were cracking. Splitting from within, fine dark lines spreading across the stone like frost across glass. Dark lines. Literally dark. The fungus had carried a dark magical signature, and now that darkness was working through his mental architecture, forcing everything he'd hidden into the light whether he wanted it there or not.
Rowan moved forward, because standing still felt dangerous and because there was nowhere else to go. The corridor ahead was one he recognized. It led toward the deep archive, the section of his palace where he kept the memories he least wanted to revisit. The orphanage. The mill. The years before Hogwarts, compressed into small dark rooms that he never opened.
The doors to those rooms were open now.
Simply ajar. As though someone had walked through them minutes ago and not bothered to close them behind her.
Her.
The thought arrived fully formed, with a certainty that had no logical basis, and Rowan stopped walking.
The light was coming from inside the first room. The warmth of it spilled into the corridor, bringing texture. Sensation. Things Rowan had never felt in this space before. The palace was usually abstract. Surfaces without temperature, air without movement. Now the stone beneath his feet was cool. The air carried a smell he couldn't identify at first, familiar yet distant, and then he placed it: ink and leather and the particular dusty warmth of a greenhouse in spring.
Hogwarts. The smell was Hogwarts.
He stepped into the room.
It was the dormitory. His dormitory. The one he shared with Hector and Lawrence and Amit and Timothy. The four-poster beds with their blue hangings, the moonlight through the tall windows, the particular quality of silence that existed at three in the morning when everyone was asleep. He knew every detail of this space intimately. He'd spent hundreds of nights here, performing his Occlumency meditation, organizing his thoughts before sleep.
His bed was made. The others were empty. And sitting in the chair by the window, the chair that was usually piled with discarded robes, was Iris.
Except it wasn't Iris. He knew that with the same instinctive certainty that had told him this was his palace, that had told him the doors were open before he'd seen them. This was a construction. Something the fracturing magic had built out of the raw material of his mind, shaped by the force flooding through the cracks in his walls.
It looked exactly like her. Dark hair pulled back in that practical knot she wore when she was thinking hard about something. Posture slightly forward, elbows on knees, watching him with that particular quality of attention she had, the one that made him feel simultaneously seen and safe.
The eyes were wrong. They held a quality that Iris's eyes never held when they looked at him. Patient and ancient and very, very sad.
"You knew," it said, in Iris's voice. "That it might kill you."
Rowan's chest tightened. "Yes."
"And you didn't tell me."
"No."
"Why?"
The question was simple. Rowan opened his mouth to answer it and found he couldn't.
The thing wearing Iris's face waited. It didn't press. It simply sat in the chair by the window, watching him with that patient, sad attention, and waited for him to find the words on his own.
The palace shuddered. Another crack split the ceiling above them, and through it came a rush of light and warmth and pressure. The weight of things that had been held back for a very long time suddenly being released.
The room dissolved around them. Gently, like fog burning off in the morning sun. When it was gone they were somewhere else.
The Great Hall. As it had been on his first night. The ceiling open to the sky, the candles floating, the four tables stretching into the distance. And there, scattered along the Ravenclaw table, were the others. Edmund, grinning at something. Lawrence, nose in a book. Celeste, leaning back with her arms crossed. Hector, laughing at something Timothy had said. Sebastian, watching Rowan from across the hall with that complicated expression that was equal parts rivalry and respect.
All of them rendered in perfect detail. All of them wrong in the same way the Iris-thing had been wrong. Expressions carrying a quality the real people never wore when they looked at him. A kind of quiet, knowing weight.
None of them spoke. They just sat there, in the positions he remembered them in, looking at him with those patient, grieving eyes.
The Iris-thing was beside him again. Had always been beside him, perhaps. Time didn't work properly here. It gestured toward the table, toward all of them.
"You calculate them," it said. Stating a fact the way a textbook states a fact. "Every single one. You think about what they're worth. What they can do for you. What they'll cost."
"That's not—" Rowan started, and stopped.
Because it was.
The palace cracked again, deeper this time, and the Great Hall scene shattered like glass dropping from a height. The fragments hung in the air around him for a moment. Frozen mid-fall. And then they rearranged themselves into something new.
The mill.
Rowan went still.
The cotton mill was rendered in brutal, perfect detail. The thundering machines. The air thick with lint and coal smoke. The low ceiling, the gray light, the worn wooden floors black with oil. It was the most vivid thing he'd ever experienced in this space. Every sense engaged, every detail sharp, as though the force flooding through the cracks in his walls had poured itself into making this one scene as real as possible.
And there, crawling beneath a spinning frame with careful, practiced movements, was a boy of about nine. Small and thin, dark-haired, moving with the quiet efficiency of someone who'd learned that hesitation could cost you fingers.
Rowan.