Professor McGonagall's lips pressed into a thin, bloodless line.
She surveyed the wreckage of the bathroom—the shattered porcelain, the unconscious mountain of a troll sprawled across the tiles like a felled tree—and finally let her gaze settle on Hermione Granger, the girl who had just lied to protect Ashford.
"Miss Granger," McGonagall said, voice laced with weary disappointment, "you are a very foolish young woman. How could you possibly believe you could handle a troll on your own?"
Hermione's head dropped; her bushy hair curtained her burning cheeks.
"Five points from Gryffindor," McGonagall sighed. "For such reckless lack of judgment."
Then she turned to Lucian.
Her expression grew complicated—part admiration, part wariness, part something unnameable.
"As for you, Mr. Ashford… your methods are… unorthodox, to say the least. But one cannot deny their efficiency. You prevented a tragedy. Ten points to Ravenclaw."
With a sharp flick of her wand she gestured for everyone to leave the reeking ruin behind.
But before anyone could take a single step—
In Lucian's heart-phase vision, the Hogwarts magical field suddenly boiled.
Countless golden threads materialized from empty air, raining down like puppet strings from an unseen ceiling. They pierced skulls, spines, limbs—anchoring themselves deep into flesh and soul.
The world's correction had arrived, right on schedule.
Instead of suppressing him, the energy surge made Lucian's internal magic vortex pulse hungrily. He could feel it: those golden lines were not merely restraints. They were fuel. With the right push, he could pluck them like harp strings.
Reality misted over once again. That other Hogwarts—the one flying the Dark Mark, the one lit by sickly green will-o'-the-wisps—flickered into view.
Lucian understood, but he held still. He wanted to watch exactly how far the world would go to force its story back on track.
According to the golden script, Hermione should have been rescued by Harry and Ron. The three of them should have shared a secret, forged a life-or-death bond in blood and bathroom tiles. That moment was supposed to birth the golden trio.
Instead, the savior had been Lucian. Harry and Ron were reduced to useless spectators.
The causal chain had snapped.
So the world chose violence to stitch it closed.
Lucian watched Hermione's body stiffen. The soft, grateful glow that had been flickering toward him in stolen glances vanished. Her eyes went glassy, vacant.
When focus returned, the spark was gone—replaced by something flat, filtered, rewritten.
Lucian had saved her. That fact remained.
But in the rewritten memory, his calm precision had been recolored as cold indifference, arrogance. Meanwhile Harry and Ron's clumsy, panicked arrival had been gilded with halos of courage and friendship.
"He just… happened to be there. He didn't care whether I lived or died…"
"But Harry and Ron came for me… only they came for me…"
The new narrative multiplied inside her mind like a virus, drowning out reason.
She opened her mouth.
"Miss Granger?" McGonagall prompted, noticing the hesitation.
Hermione swallowed hard. Her voice came out small at first, then steadier—as though someone else were speaking through her.
"He used… very advanced magic. But…"
She turned toward Harry and Ron. The golden mist forcibly stripped away her admiration for Lucian and redirected it, pouring it over the two awkward boys like cheap stage lighting.
"If Harry and Ron hadn't burst in shouting and drawing the troll's attention… I might have died of fright before anything else happened."
Her words grew smoother, the script running flawlessly.
"Even though Ashford finished it off… it was Harry and Ron who gave me courage. They broke the rules to save me."
Snape let out a soft, derisive snort—but he didn't contradict her. It fit Gryffindor's cherished mythos perfectly: courage excuses stupidity.
Lucian stood motionless, watching the girl's soul twist and prune itself inside the golden fog until it matched the shape the world demanded.
"Exquisite," he murmured. "Truly refined cruelty."
The sight reminded him of his own body's original owner—forced into an Obscurial shell, screaming inside a prison of someone else's design.
It reminded him of the lunatics who still dreamed of carving him open to use as their perfect vessel.
It reminded him that, in this scripted universe, everyone's fate had already been written in someone else's ink.
"Even the purest gratitude must be erased?"
His fingers tightened around the ebony wand hidden in his sleeve. The wood shivered faintly, tasting its master's quiet fury.
"Manipulating human nature to patch causality… the method is grotesque."
"And far too crude."
Lucian stepped forward.
"Now that the misunderstanding has been cleared up," he said, voice as level as ever—as though he had not just derailed the entire act—"Miss Granger, your hand is still bleeding."
Hermione blinked down at her palm in confusion.
A broken pocket watch lay in her open hand, its cracked crystal edge wet with fresh blood.
A hazy memory surfaced: this watch had shattered that very afternoon when Ron's cruel words sent her running from the Great Hall in tears.
Lucian moved closer. He reached out as though to examine the wound.
The instant his fingers brushed her skin, the vortex inside him opened like a starving maw.
The golden threads busily weaving false emotion inside Hermione's mind suddenly found an escape route.
A hairline fracture appeared in the artificially perfect "friendship" narrative.
Vast streams of golden light surged up Lucian's arm and vanished into the black hole of his core—swallowed, compressed, devoured.
Lucian withdrew his hand.
"Superficial," he said quietly, pressing a clean handkerchief over the cut. "But some wounds heal on the surface while the scar beneath keeps reminding you what real pain feels like… and what is only a dream."
The words were spoken so softly that only Hermione heard them.
She froze, clutching the handkerchief.
The flawless script inside her head stuttered. A single discordant note rang through the manufactured warmth toward Harry and Ron. The sting in her palm was sharp, undeniable. The sudden rush of gratitude she had felt toward the two boys now seemed… hollow. Thin.
"Right then—back to your dormitories, all of you!" McGonagall clapped her hands sharply. "Five points to Gryffindor for your… remarkably fortunate idiocy."
Harry and Ron exhaled in relief and tugged Hermione toward the door.
"Hey, Hermione—you really scared us back there," Ron muttered, trying for levity.
Hermione didn't answer. She glanced over her shoulder.
The black-haired boy was already walking away, disappearing into the shadowed corridor without a backward look.
In her palm the blood-stained handkerchief burned like fever.
…
Room of Requirement.
Lucian leaned back in the chair, idly rolling a small golden orb between his fingers.
He had left a seed inside that handkerchief.
As long as the world kept trying to glue the trio together, kept intervening to rewrite Hermione's perception, the seed would feed—drawing endless energy straight from the corrections themselves.
He studied the glowing sphere.
"If this force can bend plotlines and slip between world-lines… could it one day reverse death itself?"
For now, though, he needed to test its other potential.
He crushed the orb in his fist.
Golden motes exploded outward. Space around him warped, melted, collapsed inward.
When reality snapped back into place, bitter cold slammed into him, thick with coal smoke and the metallic tang of old blood.
A winter steeped in industrial poison and suppressed magic.
He stood on a narrow, shadowed street.
The sky was the color of diseased lead. Heavy clouds leaked faint sickly-green halos—the afterimage of a Dark Mark that never quite faded.
Shop windows were boarded or filled with propaganda: Blood Purity: A Survival Guide, The New Order, How to Spot Mudbloods Among Us.
This was Hogsmeade.
But not the Hogsmeade of butterbeer and laughter.
A huge black-and-green banner snapped in the wind above the Three Broomsticks.
Lucian drew his aura in tight, layered a high-grade Confusion Charm over himself, and began to walk.
The few people on the street moved like ghosts—heads down, heavy black robes clutched tight. No one spoke. No one looked up. Fear had been trained into reflex.
"Spare a knut, sir… please…"
An old wizard huddled in the shadow of the Hog's Head. One eye gone, the remaining one clouded. A splintered wooden sign hung around his neck: Pure-blood. Crippled in Service.
Even pure-bloods, once their usefulness ran dry, were allowed to rot.
Lucian paused. He flicked a single silver Sickles onto the stones.
The coin rang brightly in the dead silence.
The old man scrabbled for it, terrified someone might steal it, then looked up in shock when no curse followed.
"What year is it?" Lucian asked.
The man blinked, then whispered, clutching the coin like a lifeline:
"Tenth year of the Dark Lord's reign… 1991, generous sir."
"And the Savior? Harry Potter?"
The name struck like a curse. The old wizard convulsed, clapped a hand over his mouth, eyes darting wildly for masked patrols.
"Shhh! Are you mad? Speaking that dead brat's name in times like these!"
He shrank deeper into shadow. Perhaps it had been too long since anyone spoke to him; perhaps the dam of silence finally cracked.
"There is no Savior… That Halloween ten years ago finished it. The Potter whelp was blasted to ash by a single green light from the Master himself!"
Sick awe trembled in his voice.
"He stepped over the infant's corpse and claimed the whole wizarding world. The Ministry surrendered in an hour. Dumbledore took what was left of the resistance and vanished into the hills…"
Lucian nodded once.
No sacrificial love-shield from Lily. No ancient magic. Voldemort had arrived at full power that night—and cemented his godhood by killing the prophecy child outright.
"Then what," Lucian asked, gaze lifting toward the darkened silhouette of Hogwarts on the horizon, "is Hogwarts teaching now? Why are there first-years arriving?"
He had seen them earlier: nightmarish Thestral-drawn carriages escorted by Dementors.
"Fresh blood," the old man rasped, a twisted smile splitting his face—half gloating, half despair. "Or fresh fodder. Potter's dead, but they say mad old Dumbledore cooked up another prophecy… claims the Longbottom boy is the real hope now."
"Neville Longbottom?"
"Aye, the round-faced little nobody." The man spat. "Today's his Sorting. Ten years of dead rebels later, now it's that poor sod's turn to feed the grinder. The world always needs a hero to throw into the meat—"
Lucian's eyes narrowed.
Heaven's way: diminish the excess to supply the lacking.
To balance Voldemort's overwhelming dominance, the world had activated its backup candidate.
Neville Longbottom—whether he had the potential or not—was now the designated symbol. Logic didn't matter. A first-year facing a fully ascendant Dark Lord didn't matter. The world only needed a name tagged "Savior" to push forward—toward death, or toward miracle.
In the distance, Hogwarts loomed under black cloud, its lights dim and militaristic. In this timeline it was Voldemort's stronghold, and Neville's personal hell dungeon.
Lucian felt his internal vortex singing. This broken, despair-drenched world was saturated with correction-energy. Golden threads converged on the castle by the thousands. The stage was set; the actors were taking their marks.
Yet at the very center of Hogwarts yawned a nauseating void.
"If you're working this hard to force the script," Lucian whispered to the empty air, "then let's see how far you'll push that disposable spare tire before the Bad Ending locks in."
"Who just said that name?"
Air cracked like gunfire.
Five silver-masked hunters Apparated into existence. Green light from their wands sealed every escape.
No warning.
"Avada Kedavra!"
Emerald lightning stabbed straight for Lucian's heart.
His pupils dilated to black.
The shadow behind him boiled upward.
A thick, violent tide of black oil erupted, spread wide, and swallowed the Killing Curse whole.
"What the—"
Black tendrils lashed out, ignoring Shield Charms, punching clean through robes and flesh.
Sickening cracks overlapped—five spines, five necks, five sets of limbs twisted at unnatural angles.
Five bodies pinned to the wall like insects.
From ambush to silence: one breath.
Lucian snapped his fingers.
The nightmare mist froze, then docilely retracted, melting back into the shadow beneath his robes as though it had never been.
More Apparition cracks echoed in the distance.
"Too slow."
He stepped over the corpses.
His figure blurred amid swirling coal ash and snow, fading into nothing.
Behind him only slaughter remained—and perfect, suffocating silence.