The days after exams at Hogwarts always felt strange.
Classes were technically still in session, but no one was really learning anymore. Corridors filled with laughter instead of urgency. Homework was spoken of in the past tense. Even the castle itself seemed to relax, staircases moving more lazily, portraits gossiping rather than arguing.
Luna liked this time best.
She wandered the halls with no particular destination, wand twirling lazily between her fingers or tucked back into her hair when she needed both hands free, usually to pet the various portraits of animals. Sometimes she hummed. Sometimes she simply listened—to the way the castle breathed, to the echo of footsteps that no longer hurried.
You are quieter now, Egeria observed one afternoon as they passed a sunlit alcove overlooking the grounds.
I'm trying not to be noticed, Luna replied cheerfully. People get worried when they notice things.
They already worry, Egeria said dryly.
Luna smiled but didn't disagree.
At night, when Luna slept, the arrangement between them shifted gently.
Egeria never woke her.
Instead, she borrowed the body carefully, respectfully—moving with Luna's familiar lightness, wrapping the Ravenclaw robe properly around their shoulders, slipping through the corridors like a scholar rather than a queen.
The library welcomed them.
Egeria read everything.
Not skimming, not searching for specific answers—simply absorbing. Spell theory. Magical history. Runic frameworks. Marginal notes from witches long dead, arguing politely with one another across centuries.
Wizarding magic was inefficient.
Elegant, yes. Creative. Emotional. But inefficient.
And yet—
It works because it wants to, Egeria realized, fingers tracing the spine of a book on pre-Roman wards. Not because it must.
By morning, Luna woke with the faint, pleasant feeling of having dreamed about books.
"You found something interesting," she said aloud while brushing her hair.
Several hundred things, Egeria replied. But also… something incomplete.
Luna paused. "Incomplete things are usually important."
On the last full day before students would pack their trunks and spill onto the Hogwarts Express, Luna felt the pull.
It wasn't urgent. Or frightening.
Just… insistent.
She followed it with the ease of someone who had long since stopped questioning why she knew where to go.
Seventh floor, A stretch of blank wall.
The Room of Requirement, where such great memories of her joining the DA happened.
Luna for a moment wondered if the DA will continue next year. She'll have to ask Harry.
Luna paced once. Twice.
"I need a place that shows me what's been hidden... what's been forgotten," she said softly.
The door appeared. And in she walked.
Inside was chaos.
Not the useful chaos of the Room when it became armories or classrooms—but the slow, sedimentary chaos of centuries. Broken furniture stacked atop forgotten inventions. Crates of abandoned homework. Objects no one remembered losing and no one expected to see again.
The Room of Lost Things.
Egeria's awareness sharpened.
How can this place even exist, the oposite of this wall should be the outside, how is a roomalmost the size of half the castle able to fit... did we get transported? Egeria questioned botht he world and Luna.
"Egeria magic doesn't behave like the science you Goa'uld like to use, magic is the in-between, the thing at the corner of your vision. Magic just is and it does what it wants." Luna wandered while she spoke, fingers brushing objects she didn't recognize and somehow understood anyway.
A cracked Cabinet, a bloody axe, caseses of old butter beer, even a bust with a tiara on it—
She stopped.
There.
Resting on the bust, half-buried beneath tarnished silverware and bent plaques, sat a delicate diadem. Silver filigree. Blue gems dulled by neglect.
But the magic that overwhelmed it wasn't normal, what intended—
"Oh," Luna breathed. "That's sad."
That is dangerous, Egeria corrected. I may not know why its dangerous but my instincts are screaming at me to stay away, I even feel it calling to me.
The diadem whispered.
Not words. But pressure. A suggestion that Luna was small, that knowledge was owed, that greatness required sacrifice.
Luna frowned at it.
"No thank you," she said politely.
She reached into her bag and withdrew a thin, time-worn notebook.
Her mother's journal.
Pandora Lovegood's handwriting danced across the pages, looping and enthusiastic, filled with spells that no one sensible would have tried and notes written sideways in the margins.
Luna flipped to a marked page, one with made of creatures that could possible exist in the margins. Luna giggled as she saw them again. "Silly mother; a mammal with a duck bill that has venom and lays eggs. And they call me Loony."
Going back to the words in the book Luna stopped halfway down. "This one," she murmured.
The spell wasn't destructive. It was separative.
Luna raised her wand, grip steady, expression calm. "choristés kai enopoiiménes" (Separate and Consolidate)
The magic slid out at the command of the spell—not forceful, not loud—threading itself between what belonged and what did not. The corruption peeled away like a shadow lifting from glass.
Something screamed. Not a human scream but one more alike a demon.
The sound collapsed inward, folding into nothing as Luna guided it—carefully, deliberately—into a left boot just in the small pile to her right.
"katharízo kai katastréfo sta elliniká" (Purify and Destroy) I jet made from a mixture of light, lighting and tendrils engulfed the boot as the demonic scream grew louder until all that was left as a small shoot stain on the castles floor.
The diadem felt different now.
Lighter.
Still powerful—but clean.
What was that Luna? I know your thoughts but even with that I am still at a loss. That seemed more evil that any Goa'uld. Egeria said quietly.
"Something torn off and forgotten in this room, a vile thing to to do really after all, souls are supposed to always be whole. Good thing I kept up with my Greek or else this would have been much harder to finish." Before Egeria could comment about souls being real Luna lifted the diadem and placed it on her head.
The world… shifted.
Understanding bloomed—almost overwhelming the young witch, her mind seemed to click into place with the diadem—no not click in but become aligned. Patterns in her mind settled. Language threaded itself into place.
"Oh," Luna said softly. "That's what it says."
You can read it now, or rather we can read it now, Egeria realized. So much knowledge... The ship. The systems. The name.
"Yes," Luna replied, smiling. "Spes Magus."
Magic's Hope. He dear ships name. Quite fitting.
She tilted her head, listening to the castle one last time as it hummed around her.
Summer awaited, so did the stars.
And Luna Lovegood—student, Seer, host, and now inheritor of something old—walked back out of the Room of Requirement wearing a crown meant for wisdom, not power.
The castle noticed.
But, wisely, said nothing.