Skyl's sixth year was almost over. For his age, he was basically a high schooler now—but in another year, he'd be stepping into the working world, expected to make a living on his own as an adult wizard.
Before last year's O.W.L.s, Professor McGonagall had given Skyl a career consultation. She offered two suggestions.
The first was to join the Ministry of Magic as an Auror. For a talented young man like him, she said, doing paperwork would be a waste of time. As an enforcer who fought criminals and evil, he'd rise fast.
The second option was equally straightforward: stay at Hogwarts to teach. Aside from Divination, Skyl was qualified to take the professor's post for virtually any subject.
His "road ahead" and his "fallback plan" were both laid out for him. But Skyl didn't like either choice—because the road ahead wasn't ambitious enough, and the fallback wasn't expansive enough.
If he wanted to aim higher, why stop at being an Auror—why not become the leader of wizardkind worldwide? If he wanted to play it safe, why merely be a professor at Hogwarts—why not build his own school?
Skyl didn't actually want to be anyone's leader, and the Tower of Tomes already looked very much like an advanced magical academy, a place for casters with spare capacity and exceptional talent to continue their studies.
After obtaining the secret hoard of a demon-god of knowledge, the Tower of Tomes fully had the qualifications to cultivate mages of legendary rank—perhaps even godlike ones.
But as things stood, it was still hard to define the Tower of Tomes as an educational institution.
Its structure was loose—more like a gathering of casters, the way people might set up booths together at a weekend street fair. There was no unconditional chain of command between mentors and apprentices. Unless an apprentice joined a mentor's "classroom" and formally became their student, a mentor had no right to interfere with an apprentice's behavior.
Of the Tower of Tomes' four original founders—Skyl, Brelyna, Onmund, and J'zargo—not one of them had truly taken on the responsibility of teaching. The only care they showed their companions was opening access to almost every book they had.
Skyl was generous with knowledge, so he never treated books as a kind of currency. That approach felt far too capitalist to him.
Magic was there for anyone to learn. How much you gained depended on your talent and your effort. And in that process, the sparks of insight scholars produced—new knowledge refined and fermented by the mind—would become new books, added to the Tower of Tomes' library collection.
Sometimes, Skyl felt his work wasn't so different from what people did in humanity's earliest days: gathering and simple sowing. Only he wasn't gathering berries or planting wheat—he was gathering scholars and sowing knowledge.
Under Brelyna's management, Winterhold's population grew steadily. Thanks to migration brought by the civil war, the once-desolate empty city had gradually become a major settlement—second only to Skyrim's capital, Solitude, and the prosperous southern city of Whiterun. Winterhold's educational institutions continuously produced mage apprentices, and the talented among them would join the Tower of Tomes.
This was the crucial step before sowing: clearing the land and enriching the soil, so the seed of magic would have ground in which to sprout and grow.
If you wanted to cultivate deeply and make the harvest easy, it came down to two things.
First: build a stable communal society—large population, flourishing culture, stable politics, thriving trades. An environment like that was rich soil; toss a couple spellbooks onto it and you'd get a whole crop of mages.
Second: develop the Tower of Tomes into a true educational institution, not merely a place to wander through and browse book stalls.
These two goals could advance side by side. Brelyna took on most of the work proactively. In Winterhold she was a city administrator, and in the Tower of Tomes she often organized seminars—a group activity from their academy days that continued on. On a regular schedule, she gathered the apprentices, encouraging mutual help, answering doubts along the path of study, sharing research results and travel stories—something absolutely vital to their growth.
With Brelyna's help, Skyl could keep his mind on long-term goals: upgrading Winterhold, expanding the Tower of Tomes, exploring other worlds—instead of wasting time and energy on petty social headaches.
Trees take years to grow; people take a lifetime to educate. For an immortal, there was no need to rush.
And for an immortal, this April passed in the blink of an eye. Blink a few more times and—summer vacation was coming again.
A lot happened at Hogwarts this school year. The biggest, of course, was the campus expansion and the renovation of the old grounds.
The student dorms were upgraded properly; now there were more single rooms to choose from. They also built dedicated sheds, pens, and training yards for raising and breeding magical creatures.
Then there were places like the alchemy workshop and magical laboratories—buildings for production and research, almost like an integrated "teaching-research-industry" setup. The other small details weren't worth listing one by one. The bottom line was that Hogwarts now looked grander, and its functions were far more complete.
That mysterious white tower on the northern hill was rumored to be the new headmaster's office, but it still hadn't been put into use. Even so, some students swore they'd seen a figure flash past one of the tower windows—like someone was already living there.
When the construction crew dredged the sewers and accidentally discovered the Chamber of Secrets, that caused an uproar too. Harry Potter single-handedly killing the basilisk was thrilling and inspiring, and the rumor that Draco Malfoy was the Heir caused an even bigger storm.
Old Malfoy practically came flying into the school with his pants on fire, checking again and again to make sure Draco was safe. Then he immediately flipped the table, blaming the appearance of a Horcrux on campus on Dumbledore's incompetent management, and demanding that the school board unite to remove him.
Even with that massive scapegoat shoved onto his shoulders, Dumbledore stayed cheerful as ever.
Every day he walked his dog—named Afu—back and forth between the main castle and the northern white tower. The Weasley twins, out on their nightly roam, passed along a surprisingly credible bit of gossip: they claimed that late at night they'd seen Dumbledore strolling beside the Black Lake with another person, and sometimes they'd even take a boat out onto the water to fish.
By mid-May, the school board sent letters to pressure Dumbledore. At first it was just for show, but the old educator happily accepted the demand to resign. Delighted, he stepped away from the headmaster's post for the time being, packed up with a companion, and went on a spur-of-the-moment trip.
In the less than two weeks he was gone, Harry and his friends decided to expose old Malfoy's scheme. Like most students, they firmly believed Dumbledore was innocent—and they were also sick of Draco's smug little face. He'd been strutting around nonstop, threatening non–pure-blood classmates, acting like a full-blown school tyrant.
Back during last summer break, Harry had run into a house-elf named Dobby. Dobby was the Malfoys' servant, and Harry learned the truth about the diary. But because of a house-elf's slave-bound nature, Dobby couldn't betray his master, so he couldn't directly accuse Lucius.
Harry had kept Dobby in the Tower of Tomes for more than half a year by now, and they'd become friends. So Harry came up with a scheme to help Dobby regain his freedom.
This ties into an interesting rule about house-elves: they don't wear proper clothes, often just rags for modesty, and the household won't provide clothing—because if the master gives a house-elf clothes, it effectively dissolves the master-servant bond, and the elf becomes free.
Usually, house-elves are terrified of being given clothes. They don't want freedom. They're deeply addicted to a life of being ordered around. To them, freedom isn't a treasure—it's a vast emptiness, a void they'll fall into and never crawl out of.
But Dobby was an oddity. He desperately wanted freedom.
Harry and the others deliberately stirred up trouble, provoking a clash with Draco until a full-on brawl erupted between the two houses. In the chaos, Draco got mobbed. He was hit with a whole pile of petty hexes—his face swelled up like a dinner plate, his lips puffed like sausages, and his nostrils wouldn't stop spitting fire. He was admitted to the hospital wing on the spot.
"You're dead, Scarhead! My father will definitely have you expelled!" Draco cursed from the stretcher.
When Lucius heard, he came to the school to visit Draco. Harry used an "apology" as an excuse and took the opportunity to hand Lucius a roll of soft white fabric. Old Malfoy accepted it without understanding, opened it, saw it was a pair of boxer briefs, and immediately tossed it away in disgust. Dobby, hiding behind Harry, reached out and caught the underwear.
And just like that, he was free.
Lucius stared at Harry in disbelief. "You set me up?!" He reached out to grab Harry by the collar.
And then he got beaten up by a house-elf and a little wizard. Don't be fooled by their size—one was a magical creature, the other was a young future Dark Lord in the making. Together, taking on a grown wizard was no problem at all.
After that, Draco could never again say, "Even my dad has never hit me," because now his dad had been hit by Harry.
In any case, once free, Dobby publicly exposed the diary plot. A house-elf's testimony alone wasn't enough to carry much weight, but combined with the identification of an anonymous Potions professor who refused to reveal their name, Lucius's guilt was basically confirmed.
Old Malfoy paid a huge price greasing palms and pulling strings, avoiding a prison cell, but he was still expelled from the school board. And before the school year ended, Dumbledore returned to his faithful Hogwarts.
The end-of-year feast was held as scheduled.
This year, Gryffindor had a wild swing of highs and lows. Harry's reckless solo basilisk kill cost the house a huge amount of points, but their bravery in exposing the conspiracy earned points too. The two canceled out with a hundred points still left over, and in the end Gryffindor successfully defended the House Cup.
The remaining days flashed by, and soon everyone was seated once more on the express train bound for London.
The farewell of the seventh-years was still moving. Harry and his friends asked Skyl reluctantly whether, this time next year, he'd be leaving too.
Skyl patted the tops of the four of their heads. "It's just graduation. We'll still see each other at the Tower of Tomes. In the end, we all have to get used to parting, don't we?"
He walked out of the station alone and looked at London's sunset.
A sedan parked by the curb. A woman stepped out, came to stand beside him, and watched the dusk-soaked street scene with him.
Only when the sky had gone fully dark did she ask, "Are we going home?"
"Of course."
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