Chapter 16:
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The tower Sue had chosen was one of the lesser-known spires above the Charms corridor, the kind that no one visited unless they were lost, trying to find a nesting owl, or actively avoiding the rest of the school. The air here tasted of parchment, stone dust, and cold.
The windows were all open slats without glass, so the wind came in unfiltered, rustling the edge of hanging tapestries and official forms that had been pinned down with small, rounded stones. He found her seated at a squat wooden table dragged in from somewhere else entirely — probably a staff lounge or empty classroom — her quill moving with quick, purposeful strokes over a parchment longer than her forearm.
She didn’t look up when he entered.
“Alright,” he said, rubbing his fingers together like he was trying to warm up the courage. “What’s this big plan you’ve been hiding from me?”
That got her attention. Her quill paused. Her eyes flicked up with the smallest of creases forming between her brows, the kind of look that made him feel as though he’d just called the Eiffel Tower ‘a tall thing’ or accused a basilisk of being a bit snakey.
“Big?” she repeated, tone clipped and vaguely scandalized. “That’s what you’re calling it?”
Before he could formulate a backpedal — maybe “important” or “game-changing” or “life-derailing”—she reached down and produced a stack thick enough to be weaponized. Documents, scrolls, stamped envelopes, and even what looked like one very expensive vellum scroll folded into quarters. The edges were tabbed with tiny colored flags, the corners pressed crisp, and the wax seals alone looked like they’d cost more than a dozen chocolate frogs.
He blinked. Most of it was written in elegant vertical script, tightly packed characters running down the page like falling water. Japanese? Chinese? Both? He couldn’t tell — some had the blocky, architectural look he vaguely remembered from labels in the Potions storeroom; others were more graceful.
“I’ve been getting you enrolled into Mahoutokoro,” she declared, with all the pride and formality of someone announcing she’d brokered peace between mermaids and grindylows using only tea and sarcasm.
Harry reached for the top form slowly, like it might bite. Sure enough, tucked near the front were several sheets in English, crisp and smooth and watermarked with sigils that shimmered faintly when he tilted them. One had a phoenix stamped in golden ink that flickered crimson at the edges.
His fingers brushed the signature lines. The documents were official.
He turned one page over, catching a surname — Li — next to a swirling glyph he couldn’t place. His brow furrowed.
“These people… these are relatives?” he asked. “Or just family connections?”
Sue didn’t look up. “Yes.”
That was it. Just yes. No elaboration. No family tree.
There was no smugness in her voice, no pride or defensiveness, just a flat declaration of fact, the kind of truth that didn’t need dressing up. Not a boast, not a confession. Just the way things were. Harry nodded. He didn’t challenge it. He didn’t need to. She was probably right. In her world — in this world — it really was the only way anyone got anywhere.
“Tuition?” he asked, already reaching into the folds of his robe for the money pouch that always felt lighter than it should. “Application fees?”
“You’ll need to cover that.”
Of course.
She slid a neatly folded slip toward him. It was pale gray parchment with exchange rates in three currencies and a banking form already half-filled for Gringotts. She’d even left a blank space for his vault number, which she could have just asked him for. Somehow with her taking all of this control over his life, she still wanted to respect some of his privacy.
“And these… connections,” he said, narrowing his eyes as he tapped one of the more elaborate seals with his fingertip. “We’re talking favors, right? Strongly worded favors. No blackmail?”
He stretched out the word, blackmail, like he was testing the taste of it, watching her face for any twitch of guilt, any wrinkle of amusement. Instead, she just gave him that look. The look she reserved for questions so self-evident that answering them would be an insult to her dignity. The kind of look she once gave him when he asked whether Antarctica had wizards or if dragons could swim. Only this time, she added an arched brow, which, in her world, was equivalent to a full-blown slap across the cheek for idiocy.
Harry sighed. He’d earned that one.
They hadn’t had much time for kissing, or touching, or even talking lately. They'd both hadtoo many things to plan, too many threats hanging overhead and too many fires that needed putting out before they could breathe properly again — but somehow, despite the distance and the stress, she had still gone and done all of this. For him. For them.
He leaned back, scrubbing a hand through his hair, the same hand that always curled into a fist when things felt too big, too fast, too inevitable.
“I thought I’d have to fight them,” he said, half-laughing at himself. “I thought there’d be some long argument, a battle of reputations, bribes, magical vetting, whatever. I mean, after the cult attacks, the sabotage, the Death Eater infiltration—” He gestured vaguely toward the grounds, as if the whole cursed mess of the school year could be summed up with one swirl of his hand. “I thought I’d need to beg for a chance.”
“Hence the favors. And threats,” Sue said evenly. “It’s all taken care of. You sign. You pay. You show up.”
She slid a silver quill across the table, elegant and needle-thin, as if she were handing him a wand or a sword or a contract with fate.
He let out a long breath.
“Let me guess — you’ve got people in the student body, too. Friends. Relatives. People who’ll keep an eye on me?”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. The faint smile that tugged at the edge of her lips, the one that only ever showed when she was caught red-handed doing something impossibly clever, told him everything he needed to know. That smile always came with a blush, too, as if she were embarrassed by her own brilliance, even as she basked in it.
He suspected one or two of those “watchers” would be reporting directly to her. For safety, of course. And fidelity. And maybe, just maybe, because she liked knowing things before anyone else.
He leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek and she tilted into it without hesitation. Her cheeks flushed deeper, and she busied herself with straightening the papers, acting like the kiss hadn’t mattered even as the warmth of it lingered on her face.
He didn’t say anything, the only thing he could possibly say was "thanks" after pretending to be incensed by her taking initiative without consulting him. She’d done this for him. Not just the paperwork, the connections, the planning — but the assumption, the certainty, that he would do what needed to be done once the pieces were in place. That he would rise to meet the path she had cleared.
And she was right. That’s why he’d chosen her. That’s why he stayed with her.
He signed.
The moment the ink dried, one of the forms folded itself crisply in half, then again in quarters, then once more into an elegant triangle. Without prompting, it rose off the table like an enchanted paper crane and took flight, darting through the open window with a flutter of wings and a faint sparkle of magie.
It was gone in a heartbeat, off to places he couldn’t yet see. Harry stared after it for a moment, then turned back to the stack.
“I really hope the dorms there aren’t co-ed,” he muttered, as if to tease her blatant insecurities about other girls.
She smiled dangerously at the barb.
-
By the end of the week, the castle’s usual rhythm, already fractured by the presence of Beauxbatons and Durmstrang, finally shattered completely under the weight of yet another foreign delegation.
As with the prior two, the entire student body was herded outside to see their arrival.
The surface of the Black Lake rippled with a disturbance too uniform to be natural. It shimmered as if a heat mirage had stretched out across the water, only the air was cold, crisp with frost and the lingering kiss of morning dew. Then, in the span of a blink, the illusion peeled back like a curtain drawn aside, and a ship appeared like it had been resting just beneath their vision, cloaked rather than submerged.
It was far more magnificant than the Durmastrang ship.
It had the wide, sloped hull of a western warship, though it sat lower in the water, as if purpose-built to ride waves rather than crash through them. The rear deck jutted out in a curious extension, shaped like a tiny landing platform — a helicopter pad, Harry thought, though he wasn’t entirely sure if the magical world even had helicopters. Perched atop the midsection of the vessel, like someone had grafted a spiritual retreat onto the spine of a galleon, stood a full-sized Japanese temple with red lacquered beams and gold trim flaring at every corner. From beneath the sweeping eaves, dozens of slender wind chimes swayed and sang in the lake breeze, their metal tongues ringing out an eerie, deliberate five-note melody that echoed across the grounds like the memory of something half-forgotten and ceremonial.
“An Atakebune!” a Ravenclaw nearly shrieked, standing on their bench for a better look. “A real one!”
The name meant nothing to Harry, but Atakebune it was then!
As the ship drew closer to the shoreline — guided, he noticed now, by gentle gusts of wind that responded to subtle wand flicks from a few onboard crew members — the details grew sharper, more fantastical. Twin golden dragons coiled along the hull’s sides, their bodies carved directly into the dark wood, their scales layered with real leafing that glinted in the morning sun like coins under water.
The ship kissed the dock with not a sound, not even a creak of rope or splash of water. It simply stopped.
And the Mahoutokoro contingent disembarked not with the flourish of Durmstrang’s soldiers nor the gentle pomp of Beauxbatons’ procession, but with a kind of fluid precision that felt rehearsed and yet not performative. Every student moved in synchronicity, their footsteps spaced and matched without conscious effort, flowing like threads drawn from the same spool.
What, was Mahoutokoro a military school or something?
They were young. No older than the Triwizard competitors, surely — all sixth and seventh years if Hogwarts’ age alignment applied abroad — though they wore a kind of composure that made them seem both younger and infinitely older. Their uniforms echoed Hogwarts in cut and formality, but diverged in detail: the girls wore longer knee socks under elegantly fitted skirts and robes, while the boys wore long jackets that flared slightly at the waist, reminiscent of hakama without quite becoming them, with family or school crests embroidered near the hem in delicate threads of silver and jade.
Harry’s eyes swept their faces and postures, searching for tells — nerves, pride, confusion — but found none. They were still. Not stiff, not fearful. Still in the way of duelists, or Aurors. It was the kind of poised calm that came not from inexperience but from training, and Harry felt a familiar sense of envy.
He needed that. He needed that poised calm and discipline training.
Then came the headmistress.
She descended last — tall, imperious, composed — and if she was at all surprised by the din of the Great Hall echoing down from the upper windows, she gave no indication. Her hair was silver, not from age but by nature, he guessed, twisted into a sleek bun pinned in place by a crescent moon of pure silver. Her robes were elegant but understated, colored in deep maroon and ashen gray, the cloth heavy and textured, like raw silk shaped by discipline. Her presence had the kind of sharp stillness that reminded him, uncomfortably, of Professor McGonagall — if McGonagall had been born in the era of sword temples and could silence a room with a breath instead of a bark.
She approached the waiting line of faculty without hesitation, eyes landing directly on Dumbledore, who — to Harry’s mild surprise — bowed low, deeper than he had even for Madame Maxime, deep enough that his beard nearly brushed the front of his boots.
“Madame Li,” he said, voice warm but formal, “Welcome to Hogwarts.”
The headmistress returned the bow, shallower but precise, and said something in fluid English laced with an accent as clear as a bell and harder than steel. Harry didn’t catch all of it — he was too busy glaring.
Sue, who had somehow found her way beside him during the excitement, refused to look at him. She was suddenly, urgently invested in the state of her sleeves — specifically the embroidery near the cuff, which she began to adjust with all the intensity of someone unraveling the mysteries of wandless magic.
“Oh, now you’re being your usual shy self,” Harry muttered.
She said nothing.
“Let me guess. That’s your aunt.”
Sue made a tiny noise — somewhere between a cough and a sigh — and continued smoothing her sleeve, as if she hadn’t heard him, as if they weren’t standing twenty meters from a floating magical temple that had disgorged a legion of militant students and a woman who looked like she could win a staring contest with Mcgonnagal.
As if she hadn't just pranked the crap out of him.
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As promised, July is devoted to A Much Deadlier Tournament.
I still have no idea where this story is going and I'm writing it by the seat of my pants. As a result, I can't write it as quickly as Voidfall because it has an actual plot, but I think I can manage 2-3 chapters per week this month.