[a bit of a short chapter, but not much to do here other than transition]
“You fought well, you both did,” Cassiepeia muttered as they stepped out of the pensieve, and Persephone smiled weakly at that. Objectively, she knew that there was nothing more she could have done at that moment, against three adult mercenaries clearly equipped and tasked to take her out…but still, it grated on her nerves.
“You have been holding on us,” Arcturus muttered, looking down at Harry, and she turned towards the man, his features carved from stone as Harry looked down at the ground, “Wandless magic with that control amidst spellcasting with your other hand…you both have been practicing silently.”
“We have,” Harry muttered after a beat of silence.
“And you used the same magic you used on those muggles.” Arcturus turned towards her, and she nodded at the statement.
“I could not think of anything else at that moment…it just came instinctively.”
“It was dangerous,” Cassieoepeia shook her head, “using magic like this without knowing the full scope of it is never wise, Persephone dear. You never know when your enemy can reverse the spell or counter it and make the situation worse for you. You handled the situation the best you could, but bear our words in mind.”
For the next time—that bit went unsaid, but it was heard all the same.
“You shall rest,” Arcturus said, sitting in his chair, his cane flat on the table before them, as the pensieve vanished from their sight, “In the evening, you will show me what you can achieve with your wandless magic. You will fight against Cassieopeia…to kill.”
“That is what you told us when we began,” Harry said, but Arcturus cut him off with a faint, almost humourless huff.
“Yes. But words spoken in comfort are different from truths learned with blood in your mouth.”
His gaze lingered on them both.
“You now understand what it means to feel death near enough to touch. Remember it.” He gestured toward the door, “Go. Recover properly. The elf will come to wake you both up.”
They left, and the solar fell quiet once more.
For a long moment, neither Arcturus nor Cassiopeia spoke.
Then she turned slightly, her gaze thoughtful, “That magic,” she said at last. “The one that destroyed the man’s hand…it was familiar to you.”
Arcturus did not answer immediately. He exhaled once through his nose.
“Yes.”
Cassiopeia studied him. “From where?”
Arcturus’ gaze shifted to the window, fixated upon the distant treeline. “It is not time to discuss that.”
A beat passed, and understanding flickered across her features—not agreement, but Cassieopeia knew her brother well enough. She would not be getting the answer today.
“I see,” she said quietly, and left the room.
Arcturus remained seated, his fingers resting lightly against the head of his cane, eyes distant, upon a time far removed from now.
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Sparks fell to the ground as Harry created a shield before him, and the next moment, it broke into lightless fragments. A yellow bolt of magic shot through the lingering shards, but Harry was no longer there. Shifting to the right, he whipped up his hand, shaping magic with nothing but his willpower and instinct. Ground tore up into jagged spikes at Cassiopeia's feet, but the Valyrie just smiled and rose into the air, suspended by her own power as she crushed his creation with a thrust of her wand.
Yet in that moment, a purple arc of pure, cutting energy scythed towards her back, followed by a bone-breaker as Persephone got up from where Cassipeoia had bound her, fire eating away at the vines that had trapped his sister. The curses were swatted away without issue, but that gave him the moment to transfigure the stone fragments into spears that shot towards her silently.
“Oh that’s an old trick, Harry dear,” she laughed, twisting and returning each spear at him with twice the speed, and Harry barely saved himself from being turned into a pincusion, the Aegis holding firm before the assault even as he dashed to the side. Fire formed in the sky above him, and Harry’s eyes widened as, despite the distance, he felt the heat burn on his arms and face.
Balls of fire fell on him and Persephone, roaring and threatening to burn them to a crisp as the land was set aflame. To the side, he saw a pale barrier emerge before Arcturus, saving him and Scylla at his feet from the heat, and he grit his teeth as he ran, evading the attack and shielding where he could not.
He dragged the wind sideways to divert the flames while Persephone froze the second solid and shattered it before it struck as they closed on each other again. Silently, Harry drove forward, pulling the ground uneven beneath Cassiopeia’s projected descent. Persephone layered over him, twisting gravity just enough to tug at Cassiopeia’s balance while launching a second cutting lash at knee height.
Cassiopeia descended into it deliberately with a mocking smile.
Her wand snapped once, and the gravity twist dissolved. The cutting lash scraped along a shield so tight it barely shimmered. She landed between them, and that was when the fight changed.
Until then she had been responding.
Now she advanced.
Harry struck first, releasing a concussive wave at close range, strong enough to collapse lungs and rupture internal organs. Persephone stepped inside its wake and followed with a narrow, focused thrust aimed at the base of Cassiopeia’s spine. They did not leave space between the attacks. In Little Whinging, this had been enough to dent cars and collapse furniture.
They were far stronger now.
And yet, Cassiopeia’s wand blurred before their eyes and the concussive wave split in half before it touched her. The thrust glanced off a reinforced barrier and carved into the earth behind her instead. In the same motion, she redirected the remaining force outward. Harry was lifted off his feet and thrown ten paces back, his shoulder skidding through dirt before he forced himself upright again, worldessly healing the dislocation.
Persephone surged to cover the opening without thinking. She ripped the moisture from the air and flash-froze it into a lattice around Cassiopeia’s legs, while compressing the soil beneath her boots into a sinkhole. It was not elegant, but it was lethal if allowed to complete.
Cassiopeia did not give her that grace.
Her wand struck downward once, sharply, and the frozen lattice shattered outward in a spray of ice shards, peppering Persephone’s raised arms and drawing blood. The sinkhole hardened like stone beneath her. She pivoted, and a narrow jet of cutting magic lashed toward Persephone’s throat.
Harry raised a shield before her just in time even as Persephone ducked under it by a hair’s breadth and answered with a horizontal sweep meant to take Cassiopeia’s knees out entirely, droplets of blood splashing out from her arm as she did so.
For the first time, Cassiopeia was forced to step back as the ground heaved and was swept sideways in the torrent of Persephone’s power.
Only a single pace.
But it was enough to sharpen her expression.
“Better,” she murmured.
Harry closed the distance again, ignoring the protest of muscle and bone, and shaped the air into a crushing vice around Cassiopeia’s midsection. At the same time, Persephone slammed a concussive blast into her shield from the opposite side, forcing her to split focus between pressure and impact.
For three seconds, they had her contained.
Her wand arm slowed.
Her shield thinned.
Harry felt it.
And he committed too fully.
He surged forward, abandoning distance, trying to turn containment into a decisive finish. The crushing vice tightened beyond stability, and Persephone layered a second blast without waiting for his signal.
Cassiopeia’s wand cut upward in a brutal arc.
The vice shattered.
The backlash tore through Harry’s control and snapped his wrist with a sickening crack as the rebound folded into him. Before he could recover, invisible force hooked around his arm and twisted. Bone gave way cleanly, followed by a curse cutting onto his right arm, rendering the limb useless for casting.
A shout tore its way of his throat as the sting and the burn as blood welled up from his wrist, and he fell to his knees, green energy welling in his arm even as his magic ran low.
Persephone redirected her attention from him immediately after a moment, dragging stone upward behind Cassiopeia to blindside her and launching a cutting lash aimed not at limbs but at her throat, her fingers arced towards the Valkyrie’s jugular.
Cassiopeia however, saw it before Persephone had even moved. Her wand flicked once, minimal and exact. The stone behind her disintegrated before it formed. The cutting lash was caught mid-flight and bent aside with terrifying ease.
She stepped inside Persephone’s range and drove the butt of her wand into the girl’s sternum hard enough to lift her off the ground. At the same time, her free hand twisted as she laughed, loud and cruel, and the world around Persephone rotated violently. Gravity inverted without warning, slamming her headfirst toward the earth. Cassiopeia reversed it an instant before impact, then inverted her again, disorienting her completely before finally hurling her down with enough force to knock the breath from her lungs.
Harry roared and lashed out blindly with his remaining hand, ripping a raw wave of wandless magic toward Cassiopeia’s back even as blood forced its way out of his mouth and his heart hammered in his head.
She turned, and this time she did not disperse it.
She cut through it.
The wave split apart, bleeding harmlessly into the air. Her wand snapped downward, and Harry’s legs were taken out from beneath him as if struck by an invisible scythe. He hit the ground hard, and bindings of compressed force wrapped around his torso and limbs before he could gather another spell.
Persephone forced herself upright once more, vision swimming, and hurled everything she had left in a final, concentrated thrust meant to collapse Cassiopeia’s windpipe.
Cassiopeia raised her wand and simply pushed.
Persephone’s magic unravelled mid-cast. The force rebounded, slamming into her own chest and flipping her backwards. She struck the ground and did not rise again.
The field fell silent save for Harry’s ragged breathing as he strained uselessly against the bindings.
Cassiopeia stood over him, wand steady, expression no longer indulgent.
“Dead.”
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“Neville,” Ron had said at the breakfast table, right before the teachers and everyone, as he had picked up the newspaper, you are on the front page!”
For a moment, Neville had frozen, wondering how the fuck the Daily Prophet gotten hold of his excursion into the Forbidden Forest. Sighing, he had glanced at the headlines, wondering just what scoop Rita had penned down about the Boy-Who-Lived murdering Acromantulas with his Parsletongue. Sitting down beside his friend, he had sighed and looked at the newspaper the ginger was holding out in his direction—not that Ron seemed to have read any of it beyond the bold “Longbottom” printed at the top.
Thankfully, the breakfast table was still half-empty, with only a couple of students aside from him and Ron sitting at it. Glancing at the headline as his coffee and toasts appeared before him, Neville blinked in shock at the words.
‘Spectacle at the Greengrass Manor; Conspiracy or Collusion’
‘Persephone Potter attacked—Revenge for Neville Longbottom’
“So, what’s it say?” Ron garbled past the bread in his mouth, and Neville silently put the paper down, only for the ginger to groan, “Oh come on, if I wanted to read I would have done so already!”
“They were attacked, in Greengrass Manor,” he said at last, and Ron choked on his breakfast at the words. Patting his back, Neville sighed and continued, “Persephone is confirmed to have been hurt.”
“And the Prophet is saying it is because of you?!”
“They are letting people think that,” he corrected, before shaking his head, “which is the same thing, but it allows them to escape anything my grandmother or I could have done.”
“It is not like she would stop the people from thinking bad about the Potters,” Ron muttered, before wincing and looking at him, “Sorry.”
“No its alright,” he smiled weakly, waving a hand, “My grandmother has been a vocal hater of the twins, despite all that I have tried to do to change her perception of them. She is probably paying the Prophet a bonus at this moment. Still, it doesn’t make sense why someone would attack the twins like this.”
“Someone who wants the Boy-Who-Lived’s favour?” a merry voice piped up from behind them, and Neville and Ron nearly jumped out of their chairs before hands landed on their shoulders, adn Lockhart leaned down to inspect the paper, his perfumed almost burning off Neville’s olfactory senses then and there, “My my, two mercenaries, defeated by the Potter twins? Why, that almost sounds like they disabled two adult, dangerous wizards on their own…quite impressive, won’t you say, Professor Snape?”
“If that drivel is true, then yes,” the Potions Professor sat down on their left, picking up his copy of the paper and entirely ignoring them.
“I believe it is true,” Lockhart grinned, straightening up and patting them on the shoulder, “That near confirms their spot for the Wand of Ares I think. You would need to step up your wandwork if you are to compete against them, Mr. Longbottom.”
“I’d rather not take part if that is alright Professor.” he shook his head, meeting the DADA teacher’s bright eyes.
“Oh, I did not mean the competition, Mr. Longbottom,” he grinned, and Neville paused at that smile, but Lockhart was gone and seated at hsi chair before he could formulate another thought.
“Blimey,” Ron muttered,” weird that one. Still can’t get what Hermione saw in him and his eye burning robes.”
His muttering faded into the low murmur of the Hall as a few more students trickled in from the snow-dusted grounds. The Yule holidays had emptied Hogwarts of its usual noise; the four House tables stood shortened and drawn closer together near the staff dais, turned into one as they always did when numbers were thin. Even so, the space felt larger than usual.
Or perhaps that was simply the distance people were keeping from him.
Neville noticed it without meaning to. A pair of second-year Hufflepuffs entered, laughing about something, and then quieted when their eyes flicked towards him. One of them tugged the other’s sleeve, and they shifted farther down the table than necessary. A Ravenclaw boy glanced at Neville openly, curiosity plain as day, before lowering his gaze and pretending to inspect the treacle tart as though it were a matter of great academic interest.
Ron huffed under his breath. “Ignore them.”
“I am,” Neville said automatically, though the truth was that he could feel it—like an itch beneath the skin. Not fear. Not quite. Wariness. The Prophet had done what it always did: it had drawn a neat circle around his name and left everyone else to decide what that meant after his parsletongue had been exposed.
And now, Revenge for Neville Longbottom.
He had not asked for that.
He pushed his cup aside, appetite dulled. He needed to get to the Room of Requirement anyways.
At the staff table, Lockhart had already begun recounting something animatedly to Professor Vector, the beautiful witch nodding along, clearly enchanted. Snape sat rigidly beside him, black eyes unreadable as he turned the page of his newspaper with deliberate care.
Then the doors to the Great Hall opened once more, and Neville turned as Headmaster Dumbledore entered alone.
He was smiling, as always, robes of deep plum trimmed with silver thread that caught the pale winter light filtering through the enchanted ceiling. Yet something about him seemed… thinner. Not in body, but in presence. The air did not quite bend around him the way it usually did. The way the Great Hall had always lit up at his arrival…it felt less harmonised with his steps.
Neville could not have explained why he noticed.
He just did.
Dumbledore moved from table to table rather than going directly to his seat, offering warm greetings to the handful of students remaining over Yule.
“Miss Abbott, I do hope your mother enjoyed the candied pinecones we sent?”
“Mr. Finch-Fletchley, I trust the snow here is more cooperative than at home?”
He paused beside Neville and Ron last.
“Mr. Longbottom. Mr. Weasley,” he said pleasantly, blue eyes twinkling behind his half-moon spectacles. “A quiet Yule thus far, I hope?”
Ron swallowed hurriedly. “Er—yes, sir.”
Neville inclined his head. “Yes, Headmaster.”
Dumbledore’s gaze lingered on him a heartbeat longer than necessary—not probing, not prying. Simply… measuring.
“I imagine the newspapers have been rather loud this morning,” Dumbledore added mildly. “I would advise remembering that ink is not always an honest historian.”
“Yes, sir,” Neville replied.
The Headmaster’s smile softened, and then he clapped his hands together lightly.
“I have taken the liberty,” he announced, raising his voice just enough for the Hall to carry it, “of procuring a small token for those industrious souls who have elected to remain at Hogwarts during the holidays.”
A ripple of curiosity passed through the sparse tables.
With a wave of his wand, small parcels appeared before each student—neatly wrapped in House colours, tied with simple cord. Even Ron blinked in surprise as a red-and-gold package landed beside his plate.
Neville looked down at his own. The paper was green, understated, the knot precise. He unwrapped it carefully, revealing its contents. Inside lay a slender wooden case. Opening it revealed a thin, silver-edged book—blank pages, but enchanted; he could feel the magic woven into the parchment.
“For thoughts best kept organised,” Dumbledore said lightly from somewhere behind him. “Reflection, after all, is the foundation of wisdom.”
Ron leaned over to peer into Neville’s gift. “You got a book? I got sweets.”
Neville closed the case slowly. “I suppose it fits.”
“Quite,” Dumbledore agreed.
And then he moved on.
Neville watched him ascend the dais at last. For the briefest moment, as Dumbledore settled into his chair, the twinkle in his eyes dimmed—only slightly, but enough that Neville felt it like a cold draft across the back of his neck.
Something was shifting, only he did not know what.
Breakfast dissolved soon after that into scattered conversations and the scrape of chairs against stone. Ron was quickly drawn into a debate with Ginevra about whether snowball fights could be considered legitimate defensive practice. Neville excused himself quietly, the wooden case tucked beneath his arm, and he started towards the seventh floor.
The corridors were silent on his way up, and his eyes turned towards his elft, where an illusion and ward hid the petrified ghosts from the student’s view, the Grand Staircase muted in its sounds and presence with the empty castle.
Snow pressed against the tall windows, pale light washing the castle in winter stillness. His footsteps echoed as he climbed, then turned, then climbed again, until he stood before a stretch of blank wall on the seventh floor.
Back and forth. Back and forth. I need to grow stronger.
The stone rippled on the third pass, and a door formed.
Inside, the Room of Requirement waited.
The torches burned low and steady. The air was warm, thick with the faint scent of parchment and dust. Shelves lined one wall, filled with texts older than the castle’s battlements. At the centre stood a duelling circle etched into the floor, its lines faintly glowing.
And beside it—
She was already there.
Helena Ravenclaw stood in pale translucence, silver hair falling like moonlight down her back, expression distant and sharp all at once.
“You are late,” she observed.
Neville closed the door behind him. “Breakfast.”
Her gaze flicked to the case beneath his arm. “A gift.”
“Yes.”
“From the Headmaster?”
“Yes.”
She regarded him for a long moment.
“The castle shifts,” she said quietly. “The currents grow restless.”
“Peace is a dream anyways,” he said quietly, though the words felt different now than they once had.
There had been a time when he would have baulked at those words. Peace was good. Peace was what his parents had died for…but now it was simply… an observation.
He had heard things scream in the Forest that night—creatures that had never expected to die. He had felt the resistance of living flesh through magic shaped by his own will. He had watched venom eat through stone and known, with awful clarity, that hesitation would have meant his own bones bleaching beneath the canopy.
He had seen his best friend petrified and frozen, dying with each moment. He had seen Ron bleed before his eyes, Hermione crying over his unresponsive body.
Peace was not a state of the world.
It was the space between threats.
The duelling ring flared softly beneath his feet, lines of ancient magic awakening in slow pulses of light. Across from him, a facsimile of himself took form, solidifying from shimmering air. Its wand ignited in a deep, venomous crimson—no longer theatrical, no longer impressive.
Simply lethal.
Neville did not swallow this time.
He stepped forward first.
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