The castle was quiet at five in the morning.
Cael moved through the corridors with a torch, observing the exquisite castle. Albion trotted at his heel, tail held high, fully awake. Astrape had declined to join them. She was a nocturnal hunter by nature and considered five in the morning a personal insult.
Fawkes had long returned to the Headmaster's office.
The training statue had been his mother's idea.
She had sent it with the bookshelf and the magic texts and everything else he'd told her he didn't need — a golem, four feet tall, enchanted to move at specified difficulty levels with a sword of its own. She it sent anticipating that he would not train consistently without external pressure and had provided the pressure preemptively.
He set it at level two and drew Excalibur.
What followed was not elegant. Level two was not meant to be elegant — the statue was faster than a beginner expected, its patterns complex and lethal, its blade finding openings that sloppy form created. Caedmon had drilled the basics into him with the thoroughness of a man who had been fighting since before most countries existed.
You have infinite magic, Caedmon had said, more than once. That means nothing if someone takes your head off because your stance was wrong.
He worked through the forms in the early dark. The statue found an opening in his third combination and tagged his shoulder. He reset. Started again. By the time the sky had shifted from deep blue to the grey pink of actual dawn he had been tagged four times and gotten through the level two sequence cleanly twice.
"Grandpa would have called this 'acceptable',". said Cael with a dry laugh. "High praise"
He put the statue away and sheathed his sword.
Then he looked at the lake.
Albion was already at the water's edge, tail raised, making a low sound in his chest, greeting something below the surface. The water trembled slightly at the edges and then Davy Jones surfaced.
Cael pulled off his training tunic and dived in.
The water was cold. Scottish cold, the kind that would have stopped most people at the knee. It didn't bother him at all. He waded to chest depth and then swam.
Below the surface the lake opened — vast and dark and alive, the pre-dawn light filtering down in pale shifting columns, the castle's reflection breaking and reforming above. And moving through it, unhurried and enormous, Davy Jones.
Ten limbs. Eyes ancient and warm and immediately delighted.
Cael said hello in the language of the Krakens. Yes he was a baby Kraken not a squid.
What followed was a conversation between the little prince and a baby kraken. Davy Jones moved and Cael moved with him, through the deep water and back up toward the light, the squid's arms trailing around him with the easy familiarity of something that had decided he was acceptable and saw no reason to be formal about it.
Albion hit the water three seconds later.
He was not a graceful swimmer. He was enthusiastic, which covered the distance. He paddled with all four legs and his wings half spread and his tail working overtime and arrived at Davy Jones's level with the energy of someone that had been looking forward to this since yesterday.
Davy regarded him with a joyful cry.
Albion made a low growl.
A tentacle extended playfully.
Albion grabbed it immediately. Pulled. The tentacle pulled back. A game established in under ten seconds with no further negotiation required.
Cael floated above them and watched his dragon play tug of war with a baby kraken at five in the morning in a Scottish lake... and grabbed another tentacle immediately joining in.
Later.
He surfaced when the sky had gone properly pink.
Albion surfaced two minutes after him, shook water from his scales with the violent enthusiasm of someone who had thoroughly enjoyed himself and wanted everyone to know it, and trotted up the bank to where Astrape sat watching from a rock.
She looked at him.
She crackled jealous and regretfully, she flew and sat on Cael's shoulder, nuzzling against his neck harshly in mock anger.
Albion looked at her smugly.
A tentacle broke the surface beside Cael. Sad to say goodbye to new friends.
Cael pulled himself out of the lake, shook water from his hair without particular concern, and picked up his tunic.
"We will be back tomorrow!" he told Davy Jones.
From below came a deep, happy cry.
See you soon.
The Great Hall at breakfast was loud and warm and smelled of toast and something that had been cooked with butter. Morning light through the high windows, owls arriving with post, the enchanted ceiling doing its honest accounting of a grey Scottish September sky.
Cael sat down at the Gryffindor table and worked through eggs with the focused efficiency of someone refueling rather than dining. Albion occupied the space beside him devouring an entire chicken and Astrape enjoying bacon.
Ron arrived, still pulling his robes straight. Harry arrived beside him, warm and slightly rumpled and considerably more cheerful than the first morning in a new place had any right to produce.
"Morning," said Harry.
Fred and George dropped onto the bench across from him with matching grins.
"You were at the lake," Fred said.
"How did you know?" Cael asked.
"Peeves," George explained.
"Peeves watches the corridors at five in the morning?" Cael asked.
"Peeves doesn't sleep," they said together.
Hermione arrived, sat beside Cael, opened her notebook, and didn't look up.
Then the twins started pitching their 'sneak into Filch's office plan'.
"Filch," Said Fred.
"His office," George said.
"Third floor. The one with the trophy cabinet that hasn't been properly examined in several decades."
"We feel it deserves attention."
"Academic attention," Fred added, piously.
"The kind that requires," George said, looking at Cael with great casualness, "someone who can silence a corridor without a wand."
Cael ate his eggs. "When?"
"No," Hermione said flatly, still not looking up.
"You haven't even heard the full plan," Fred protested.
"There is no version of this plan that ends well," she replied, turning a page. "It's the first day of term. Whatever Filch keeps in that office is there for a reason. I will not help you get detention before lunch."
Cael kept eating. "Fine. We won't."
Hermione relaxed. "Good."
Cael winked at the twins the moment she looked away.
The twins' identical, utterly untrustworthy smiles returned.
"We'll let you know," Fred said.
"Soon," George added.
Ron was looking between them with the expression of someone doing rapid calculations about whether he wanted to know any more details. Harry was eating toast and carefully not making eye contact with anyone.
Transfiguration was at ten.
McGonagall's classroom smelled like chalk and old wood and the particular quality of a room where difficult things had been attempted for a very long time. On the teacher's desk, sitting with the composed stillness of something entirely comfortable with itself
A cat.
Cael sat down. Opened the Grimoire.
He looked at the cat with his magic eyes.
The magic signature underneath was distinct. He recognized it from dinner.
He read the transformation. It was an exceptional spell.
He studied the mechanism. The entry points. The specific structural logic of how a human became an animal and remained themselves throughout. The places where the magic interfaced with the body, the way the magic distributed itself across the form, the ingenuity of the spell.
His hand moved in the Grimoire. The quill wrote without being directed — the Grimoire registering what his eyes were reading, pulling the information from his mental library and anchoring it to parchment, diagrams forming alongside notation in the old Fey script that only he could read. The transformation's structure. The mechanism. The precise relationship between the original form and the adopted one.
He read it for thirty seconds.
Then he understood it.
He closed the Grimoire. Looked around the room. The other students were settling, getting out parchment, doing the first class things. Nobody was looking at him.
He stood up.
Moved to the clear space beside his desk the open space at the room's edge, where nothing would be in the way.
Hermione looked up from her notes. Looked at him. Looked at the space he was standing in. Her quill stopped.
He said one word. Quietly. In the language of the fey... the oldest language of magic.
Animagus transformation.
It took seconds.
What stood at the edge of the classroom was a golden lion's body, large and fierce with beautiful golden fur. Silver wings folded against its back, and a tail that was not a lion's tail, long, the color of dark amethyst, dripping with poison.
The entire classroom had stopped breathing.
McGonagall stood perfectly still behind her desk. For the first time in many years, she appeared to have nothing immediately available to say.
The manticore looked at her with calm golden eyes. She looked back.
The Grimoire on Cael's desk continued writing on its own, pages flipping as it recorded every detail of the transformation.
When Ron and Harry walked in and froze, McGonagall recovered first.
"Mr. Weasley. Mr. Potter," she said crisply. "Late on your first day? Detention after class. Now take your seats."
They nodded immediately, still shocked and frightened by the previous scene.
Seconds later, the manticore melted back into Cael. Robes neat, Excalibur at his sheath, he reached casually for his quill.
He glanced at Hermione, who was staring with about fifteen questions burning in her eyes.
"Awesome, right?" he asked, grinning.
Hermione closed her mouth, then opened it again. "Yes," she said, voice full of awe. "Can you teach me?"
Cael sat back down. "I can try. But I'm a natural metamorphmagus — self-transformation is easy for me. You'd need much higher mastery of the subject first."
Hermione's small pout was immediate.
McGonagall composed herself with visible effort and turned to the class with perfect professionalism.
"As I was about to demonstrate," she said, "the art of Transfiguration requires precision, patience, and dedicated study."
She paused, her eyes flicking to Cael for a fraction of a second.
"For most of us," she added dryly, and turned to the blackboard.