Christmas morning dawned under a rare, apocalyptic blizzard that sealed Hogwarts completely within a pale, suffocating world.
The common room stood empty. Most young witches and wizards had fled the frigid castle long ago—even the portraits' knights had crowded into warmer frames in search of mulled wine. Only the hearth fire still snapped and hissed, devouring pine logs in desperate bursts to fend off the cold seeping through the stone.
Lucian sat alone in a high-backed chair by the window, notebook open across his knees.
His quill hovered above the parchment, scratching furiously. Ink bloomed into chaotic black stains where the tip lingered too long.
On a morning meant for hot cocoa and unwrapping gifts, he was dissecting. Or rather—he was trying to decode the fragmented conversation that had spanned a thousand years the night before.
After receiving the Star Pupils, Rowena Ravenclaw's lingering divine thought had not bestowed any further inheritance—only a handful of disjointed image fragments and cryptic prophecies.
"You certainly left me quite the puzzle."
"If you couldn't speak plainly, it's because that thing is watching us, isn't it?"
He drew a deep breath. The quill descended again, sketching the broken images in an attempt to forcibly thread them together with logic.
Lucian closed his eyes.
The first vision Rowena had transmitted rose in his mind:
An abstract oil painting. Beneath a vast starry sky, once-brilliant points of magical light were winking out one by one. On the ground below, countless faceless human figures merged into a gray ocean. They possessed no magic—yet their collective upward gaze formed an untouchable, suffocating iron curtain, slowly and inexorably pressing down upon the heavens.
Rowena's voice came like a whisper from the deep sea—broken, in pain:
"…not disappearance… but rejection…"
"…billions of observers… anchors of reality…"
Lucian opened his eyes.
"Observers… Muggles."
On the page he wrote:
[Proliferation] + [Rationality] = [Iron Law]
"So that's how it is…" He stared at the still-wet ink.
"We always assumed the International Statute of Secrecy existed to protect wizards from Muggle persecution—or to preserve some fragile peace. That was wrong."
This was never a law of restraint.
It was a war over living space.
Magic is, by nature, the distortion of reality, the violation of common sense—a miracle. And now the outside world teemed with hundreds of millions of believers in science and reason.
Billions of Muggles knew cups could not become rats. Knew humans could not fly unaided. Their collective certainty—terrifying in scale—was denying the very foundation of magic's existence.
Not with swords.
With "common sense."
"The so-called witch hunts—tying women to stakes and setting them ablaze—were practically merciful. What we face now is a far more hopeless, more total purge. A silent strangulation."
This was exile.
Another memory fragment surged.
Rowena Ravenclaw's figure loomed impossibly tall.
"For a thousand years I watched every prophecy unfold…"
"I saw the end. I saw how the embers of magic would gutter out in mediocrity.
To keep wizards and magic from being reduced to mere legend, I had no choice but to make that decision—
to become the keystone anchoring magic itself."
In the vision, Rowena began to disintegrate. She unraveled into countless silver chains sparkling with starlight.
Those chains screamed skyward, fusing into the gray curtain pressing relentlessly downward.
"I laid my will across every stone of this castle. Beneath physics and materialism, I forcibly carved out a refuge called Hogwarts."
"…As long as I do not let go… as long as this castle stands… magic will not die…"
The image faded, leaving only that solitary shadow still holding up the sky.
Lucian turned to look out the window at the black mass of the Forbidden Forest. The doubt that had gnawed at him for months finally dissolved.
No wonder…
No wonder modern magic was so much weaker than the legends of old.
In the age of Celtic myth, wizards like Merlin or Morgan le Fay could move mountains and part seas—true, world-shaking power. Now? Even the greatest of the age—Dumbledore and Voldemort—fought duels that mostly consisted of red and green light bursting from wand-tips: dazzling, yet somehow cramped, like expensive fireworks in a too-small room.
The world had changed.
It had grown too crowded, too rational, too loud. This Muggle-dominated era was squeezing the numinous out of reality inch by inch.
He turned the page. His fingers whitened from pressure.
Another memory fragment surfaced.
This time—an ancient, shadowed forest in Albania. Towering trees twisted toward the sky, blotting out sun and moon. In that endless gloom stood Helena Ravenclaw.
The girl legend accused of stealing her mother's diadem out of jealousy now wore it upon her brow.
Helena gazed upward in despair. Above her, something invisible and suffocating gathered force. Then came the silent lash of erasure—the punishment for anomaly.
Her spirit screamed as her soul was torn apart.
From the shadows behind her stepped the man later called the Bloody Baron. His eyes were empty—no love, no rage. He raised his sword mechanically.
Snap.
The quill broke in Lucian's grip. Ink splattered across his hand.
"The so-called greedy daughter… the so-called jealous pursuer… all lies constructed to cover the truth.
Even your own lingering soul believed your daughter was a thieving ingrate."
Lucian's voice rasped. He seized another quill, ignoring the ink on his skin, and recorded the bone-chilling reality:
The witch celebrated as wisest of her age—Rowena Ravenclaw—had attempted to transcend mortal limits and touch the will of the magical world. That act provoked retaliation. Helena had not stolen the diadem out of envy; she fled to Albania carrying a curse capable of destroying her mother.
As for the Baron… he was merely fate's chosen executioner. The "crime of passion" was nothing more than the world-will borrowing his hand to stage a tragedy comprehensible to ordinary minds.
When history grows too bizarre, people always invent a vulgar story to explain it.
Lucian stared at the chaotic handwriting on the page.
Even history could be rewritten. Even memory could be altered.
This was the so-called fate of this world—it allowed no one to substitute their own heart for heaven's will. Cross that line, and it would reduce you to a grotesque footnote in an absurd legend.
The hearth fire had dwindled to glowing embers, breathing weakly among the ash.
Lucian remembered the final word Rowena had left him—the one that still sent chills down his spine:
"…the great rise of Muggles…"
If the world yearned to purge uncontrollable magic, to force everything back into mundane physical law—then who was its chosen agent in this era?
"Harry Potter…"
Lucian spoke the name softly. His quill traced slowly beside it, sketching an unbalanced scale.
"The perfect half-blood. The hinge connecting two worlds."
In his eyes, the bespectacled boy was a carefully crafted instrument. Harry carried wizard blood—yet his soul had been forged in a cupboard, thoroughly Muggle.
Beside the name he wrote a footnote:
Undertaker of the old era. A boy who longed for family and warmth—perhaps never knowing his true purpose was to toll the death knell for his own world. How tragic.
The world-will did not need Harry to become another Merlin. It needed only a knife—one rusted with mundane iron, yet sharp enough to pierce the heart. That knife's mission was to excise the tumor of ancient Dark magic and pure-blood arrogance that refused to die.
Voldemort.
This was the most ironic farce imaginable: using a boy who yearned for normalcy to strangle the most stubborn fanatic of the magical old guard. When Voldemort fell, the proud, twisted spine of Dark magic would break with him.
The quill scratched harshly across the parchment again, writing a second name.
"Hermione Granger."
Lucian pictured the girl with wild brown hair—hand always raised highest in Transfiguration, voice crisp:
"It's Levi-o-sa, not Levio-sa."
"Clever Miss Know-It-All?" He shook his head.
Through that diligent, book-loving girl, he glimpsed something far larger approaching.
Beside her name he wrote heavily: Slayer of miracles. Her thirst for knowledge was pure and sincere—yet unwittingly she had become an accomplice in strangling wonder. The world was cruel enough to weaponize humanity's noblest qualities.
Within these castle walls—apart from himself—only she had never truly revered "miracle."
Unconsciously, she served as proxy for some vast will: reducing the idealistic, the wild, the ineffable to formulas crouching beneath physics.
The thought sent ice through him. He looked at his own scattered notes—how many similar logical derivations did they contain?
Since when had he begun measuring the contours of mystery with the ruler of reason?
Had he, too, unknowingly become a tool in that grand will's hand?
That sensation—of being manipulated by invisible strings—raised his wariness toward the world-will to its utmost.
In his previous life he had never been so fanatically obsessed with framing everything in physics—otherwise he would never have studied inner alchemy alongside it.
Since arriving in this world, his behavior had never been this manic. Until now he had never attempted to rigorously define magic in physical terms. Something had interfered.
And without him as a variable—
Lucian seemed to see Minister of Magic Hermione Granger twenty years hence. Every law she passed would turn wizards into nine-to-five clerks, reduce wand-waving to rote procedure.
When the mysterious was fully subsumed under physics, when spells became statutes—magic itself would die.
Lucian dropped the quill. It rolled across the floorboards. Exhausted, he leaned back, letting his body sink into the velvet armchair like it was a gravestone.
Rowena Ravenclaw had left him only a handful of disjointed puzzle pieces—yet in this moment he had assembled the suffocating whole.
This was never a simple good-versus-evil war.
This was a grand, silent demythologization—or perhaps the wizarding world's own Journey to the West.
Voldemort was the gravedigger of the old magical age, the last living symbol of pure-blood supremacy. Therefore he must be executed.
Dumbledore was the undertaker of that same era—merciful yet ruthless, slowly boiling the frog, assisting the world in administering irrevocable euthanasia to magic, guiding it toward openness and democracy.
And Harry and Hermione? Merely the new era's carefully cultivated janitors—sweeping away lingering anomalies before building a vulgar, safe order where no miracle could ever again take root.
Outside the window, the night wind of Hogwarts still howled.
To Lucian, it sounded like the last feeble sigh of ancient magic in this world.
"So then… what am I?"
Lucian rose. The velvet chair dragged across stone with a dull scrape. He walked to the tall arched window and looked through frost-rimed glass at the snow-buried world beyond.
Thick clouds pressed down like lead slabs upon the Forbidden Forest's treetops. Above those clouds, Lucian seemed to feel a vast, icy will gazing down—waiting coldly for every actor to take their place, waiting for the plot to slide perfectly into its predetermined groove.
He turned the broken quill into a match with a casual flick.
Hiss.
A small orange-red flame bloomed in the dim common room. He brought it to the corner of the parchment.
Fire devoured the ink greedily. The page curled and blackened. All those startling deductions, all those brutal truths about divinity and mortality, all the unfinished last words even Rowena could not finish—turned to fragile ash in the light.
"What a pity…"
Lucian watched the flakes drift down into the dying embers, voice soft as a sigh.
"I never intended to play the savior."
His blurred reflection stared back from the glass.
"I didn't come here to help you finish the play," he said quietly to the void beyond the window. "I came to flip over the chessboard—and watch the real show."
If an iron curtain really was slowly pressing down from above—if so-called reality was destined to strangle miracle—then what meaning was there in mastering magic? If he could not tear a hole in this damned heaven's mandate, then all of this was nothing but a prisoner's futile struggle.
Rowena's method was doomed from the start… but he was not Rowena. Deep in his soul lay coordinates from another world—a variable that transcended this plane's laws. If Muggle "common sense" could kill magic, then perhaps another system's "truth" could pry open that iron curtain.
Somewhere in the infinite possibilities, he might yet find a new ecological niche for magic in the coming age—or at least preserve this last flicker of miracle.
This Christmas, the whole of Hogwarts basked in the scent of roast turkey and the pop of Christmas crackers.
No one knew—no one would have believed—that behind one frost-laced window in the castle, an eleven-year-old Ravenclaw had just taken up the wand Rowena Ravenclaw was forced to lay down a thousand years before.