I am Happy to Publish Another Chapter of The Apprentice of The Red Witch
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The first week at Hogwarts passed as students lost their way through corridors that seemed to change their positions each night. Harry navigated it the way Natasha had taught him to navigate unfamiliar terrain: observe, memorise, adapt. By the third day, he knew three routes from the Slytherin common room to the Great Hall, two of which avoided the staircase on the fourth floor that liked to swing sideways without warning.
He wrote to Natasha, sitting at the desk in his dormitory. He told her about the classes, the castle, the food, and the ghosts. He told her about Dumbledore's warning regarding the third-floor corridor, and she wrote back the same night in handwriting so sharp it nearly cut through the parchment: Find out what's up there. Carefully
The flying lesson took place on a Thursday afternoon, on a flat stretch of grass near the edge of the Forbidden Forest. Madam Hooch, the flying instructor, stood at the front of the group with her yellow hawk-like eyes and short grey hair, and told them all to stand beside a broomstick and say "Up."
Twenty broomsticks lay on the grass in two neat rows. Slytherin and Gryffindor together, which already felt like a decision designed to cause problems.
"Up!" the class shouted.
Most of the broomsticks rolled. Some twitched. A few didn't move at all. Neville's broomstick ignored him entirely, and Harry could see his ears going red.
Harry looked at the broom beside his feet. He didn't shout. He held out his hand and said "Up" the way he learnt with focus.
The broom snapped into his hand so fast it stung his palm.
Madam Hooch blinked. "Well done, Mr. Potter. Everyone else, try again."
They mounted the brooms. Madam Hooch walked down the line, correcting grips and postures, and told them to hover three feet off the ground on her whistle.
The whistle blew. Harry kicked off.
Three feet wasn't enough. His body knew it the moment his shoes left the grass. A year of flying with Natasha, of circling Willowmere Hollow at forty feet, of learning to lean into turns and trust the broom and feel the air pressure shift beneath him, had made three feet feel like nothing; he wanted to fly higher.
He held himself at three feet. Barely.
"Steady!" Madam Hooch called. "Hold your position!"
Harry held. Around him, students wobbled and drifted and grabbed at their broom handles with white knuckles. Neville rose too fast, panicked, and slid sideways before Madam Hooch caught him. A Gryffindor girl overcorrected and spun in a slow circle. Draco Malfoy hovered with practiced ease and a smirk that suggested he wanted everyone to notice.
Harry noticed. He filed it away.
After five minutes of hovering, Madam Hooch told them to fly a simple circuit: up to ten feet, around a set of markers, and back. One at a time.
Harry watched the others go first. Most managed it. Some wobbled through the turns. Malfoy flew with confidence and speed, cutting the corners tight, and landed with a flourish that earned a smattering of applause from the Slytherin side.
"Not bad," Daphne said quietly from beside Harry. She was standing with her broom at her side, watching Malfoy with an expression of mild assessment. "He's been flying since he could walk, apparently. Never stops talking about it."
"Potter!" Madam Hooch called. "You're next."
Harry kicked off.
He didn't fly the circuit. He flew through it. The broom responded to him the way his wand responded to his core: instantly, precisely, as if it could read his intent before he finished forming it. He rose to ten feet, banked left around the first marker, accelerated through the straight, leaned hard into the second turn, and cut inside the third marker so close that the bristles of his broom brushed the wooden post.
He landed on the exact spot he'd taken off from.
The grass was quiet for a moment. Then someone in the Gryffindor line let out a low whistle.
Madam Hooch was staring at him. Her yellow eyes were wide.
"Mr. Potter," she said slowly. "Have you flown before?"
"Yes, ma'am. My aunt taught me."
"Your aunt taught you well." She paused, then turned to the rest of the class. "That is what control looks like. The broom does what you tell it because you know what you want. Take note."
Malfoy's smirk had vanished. He was watching Harry with an expression that was trying very hard to be neutral and failing.
After the lesson, as students drifted back toward the castle, Malfoy appeared beside Harry.
"You can fly," Malfoy said.
"So can you," Harry said.
"I've been flying since I was four." Malfoy's grey eyes narrowed. "My father bought me a Nimbus Two Thousand for my tenth birthday."
"That's a good broom."
"It's the best broom." Malfoy paused. "I want a race."
Harry looked at him. Malfoy's jaw was set, his chin lifted, his entire body arranged in the posture of a boy who needed to win something and wasn't going to take no for an answer.
"When?" Harry asked.
"Now. The Quidditch pitch is empty. One lap around the goalposts. First one back to the centre circle wins."
"And if we get caught?"
Malfoy smiled thinly. "Then we'd better not get caught."
They flew.
The Quidditch pitch was enormous, an oval of green grass ringed by tall stands, with three golden hoops at each end rising fifty feet into the air. The school brooms were slow and heavy, but Harry had learned to fly on worse, and a year of Natasha's training had taught him that the broom mattered less than the rider.
They lined up at the centre circle. Malfoy counted down from three. At zero, they kicked off.
Malfoy was fast. Harry gave him that. He flew with the aggressive confidence of someone who had grown up on racing brooms, cutting straight lines and taking wide, swooping turns that used speed to compensate for the angle.
Harry flew differently. He flew the way Natasha had taught him: low to the ground on the straights, using the drag reduction to build speed, then pulling up hard at the turns, banking at steep angles that would have thrown a less experienced rider off the broom.
By the second set of goalposts, Harry was ahead. By the third, he was a full broom-length in front. He crossed the centre circle and pulled up, hovering, and watched Malfoy cross the line three seconds later.
Malfoy landed. His face was flushed, and his hair, which had been perfectly arranged before the race, was a mess. He stood on the grass and breathed hard and looked at Harry with an expression that was equal parts anger and grudging respect.
"Where did you learn to fly like that?" Malfoy asked.
"My aunt."
"Your aunt must be quite something."
"She is."
Malfoy said nothing for a long moment. Then he turned and walked back toward the castle without another word. Harry watched him go. Malfoy wasn't a friend. He wasn't sure Malfoy was an enemy either. He was something in between, and Harry decided to keep watching.
Potions were held in the dungeons, in a cold, dark classroom lined with jars of things that floated in murky liquid. The room smelled of vinegar and something sulphurous, and the torches on the walls gave off just enough light to make everything look slightly sinister.
Professor Snape entered through a door at the back, and the room went silent.
He was tall and thin, with black hair that hung like curtains around his sallow face and a hooked nose that gave him the look of a predatory bird. His robes were black, his eyes were black, as if he were going to a funeral ceremony.
"There will be no foolish wand-waving or silly incantations in this class," Snape said, and his voice was quiet in a way that made you lean forward to hear it, which Harry suspected was deliberate. "I can teach you how to brew fame, bottle glory, even put a stopper in death. If you aren't as big a bunch of dunderheads as I usually have to teach."
He took roll call. When he reached Harry's name, he paused.
"Ah, yes. Harry Potter. Our new celebrity."
Harry said nothing. He met Snape's eyes and kept his face neutral.
"Tell me, Potter. What would I get if I added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?"
Harry knew the answer. Natasha had made him read the first three chapters of Magical Drafts and Potions before he'd ever set foot on the Hogwarts Express. Asphodel and wormwood made the Draught of Living Death, a sleeping potion so powerful it could stop the drinker's heartbeat.
"The Draught of Living Death, sir," Harry said.
Something flickered in Snape's expression. Surprise, maybe. Or annoyance that his attempt to embarrass the new student had failed.
"Where would you look if I told you to find me a bezoar?"
"The stomach of a goat, sir. It's a stone that cures most poisons."
The classroom was very quiet. Snape looked at Harry for a long moment, and Harry looked back, and something passed between them that Harry couldn't name, but that made the hair on his arms rise.
"Well," Snape said softly. "It seems someone has done their reading."
He turned away and began the lesson. Harry should have felt pleased. He'd answered every question correctly. He'd shown Snape that he wasn't an unprepared celebrity coasting on his name.
But he didn't feel pleased. He felt unsettled.
There was something wrong about Snape.
Snape awarded Slytherin five points for Harry's answers. He took no points from anyone. He taught the class with cold precision and absolute control, and by the end of the hour, Harry had learned more about potion-making in fifty minutes than he'd learned from the textbook in a month.
Snape was a brilliant teacher. Harry recognized that.
Snape was hard because he wanted something, and Harry didn't know what it was yet, and that bothered him more than anything.
Harry sat near the fire with Daphne in the common room, struggling through Transfiguration homework. They were supposed to be writing an essay on the principles of inanimate-to-animate transformation, and Harry's parchment had more crossed-out lines than actual text.
"You're overthinking it," Daphne said, not looking up from her own perfect script. "McGonagall wants theory, not philosophy. Just explain the three principles and give examples."
"I don't understand the second principle," Harry admitted.
"The object must be—"
"Mind if I join you?"
Theodore Nott stood beside their table, books under his arm, looking vaguely annoyed. "Malfoy's being insufferable about his father again. Something about a donation to the hospital wing."
"Please," Daphne said, gesturing to an empty chair.
Theodore sat, arranging his books with the same precision Daphne used. He was tall and thin, with dark hair that fell into darker eyes, and an observant manner that made Harry feel like he was constantly being assessed.
Unlike Malfoy, though, it wasn't an unpleasant feeling.
"Transfiguration?" Theodore asked, glancing at their homework.
"Trying," Harry said.
"The essay's not that difficult if you think of transformation as persuasion rather than force. You're convincing the object to become something else, not beating it into submission."
That was a completely different way of thinking about it than anything McGonagall had said. Harry wrote it down before he forgot.
They worked in comfortable silence for a while, quills scratching, fire crackling. It reminded Harry oddly of studying with Natasha—the quiet companionship of people working toward their own goals in the same space.
"You do realise," Theodore said, "that Dumbledore told an entire school full of children not to go to the third floor, and that is the single most effective way to make every child in the building want to go to the third floor."
Daphne didn't look up from her Transfiguration notes. "We are not going to the third floor."
"I didn't say we should. I said it's interesting."
"It's not interesting. It's a trap."
"It could be both."
Harry was writing a letter to Natasha about Snape. He glanced up. "What would be on the third floor that's worth a death threat from a headmaster?"
"That's exactly my point," Theodore said. "Dumbledore wouldn't announce it to the whole school unless the danger was real. But he also wouldn't announce it to the whole school unless he wanted people to think about it. The question is why."
"The question is whether the thing behind the door is more dangerous than whatever punishment we'd get for going near it," Daphne said. "And the answer is yes. So we're not going."
Theodore looked at Harry. Harry looked back.
"We're not going," Harry agreed.
By late October, Theodore Nott had become obsessed.
"It doesn't make sense," he said for what had to be the third time, what's on the third floor? I can't even finish my classwork without thinking about the forbidden floor.
"What could possibly be dangerous enough to warrant that kind of warning but not dangerous enough to actually secure properly?" Theodore continued. "The door's just locked. No wards, no alarms that I could detect when I walked past it yesterday—"
"You walked past it?" Daphne's head snapped up. "Theodore, you're going to get us all expelled."
"I was just looking—"
"We're not going," Daphne said firmly.
"I'm going," Theodore said, just as firmly. "You two can stay here if you want."
Harry watched Theodore's determined expression and Daphne's frustrated one and thought about what Natasha had taught him: When something doesn't make sense, pay attention. Inconsistencies are where the truth hides.
"When?" Harry asked quietly.
Both of them looked at him.
"When are we going?" he clarified.
Daphne closed her book with a sharp snap. "You're both idiots."
"Probably," Theodore agreed. "Tonight? Midnight?"
"Fine," Daphne said through gritted teeth. "But if we get expelled, I'm telling everyone it was your idea."
At midnight, Harry crept out of his dormitory to find Daphne and Theodore already waiting in the common room. Daphne looked resigned. Theodore looked excited in a quiet, intense way.
"There's a passage behind the tapestry near the dungeons," Theodore whispered. "Takes us up three floors without using the main staircases. Less chance of running into Filch."
"This way," Theodore whispered, and pulled them down a side corridor.
"This is the wrong direction," Daphne hissed.
"It's the direction that doesn't have a cat in it."
They moved fast, keeping to the shadows, climbing a staircase that turned under their feet and deposited them on a landing Harry didn't recognize.
"Where are we?" Harry asked.
Theodore looked around. Then his face changed.
"Third floor," he said quietly. "Right-hand side."
The three of them stood very still.
"We should go back," Daphne said.
"Theodore."
"I just want to see the door."
"Just the door. Not what's behind it. The architecture of the locking mechanism alone could tell us what kind of protection they're using."
"You are going to get us killed over architecture."
"Think of it as applied research."
Harry looked down the corridor. It was dark, lit by a single torch at the far end, and the air felt different here. Heavier. The kind of heavy that meant wards, or enchantments, or something alive.
"One look," Harry said. "We look at the door. We don't open it. Then we leave."
"Thank you," Theodore said.
"I want it noted," Daphne said, "that I objected to this."
"Noted," Harry said.
The door was at the end of the corridor. It was large, made of dark wood, with iron bands across its surface and a lock that Theodore immediately crouched down to examine.
"Heavy-gauge iron with a self-repairing charm on the hinges," Theodore murmured. "The lock is runic. First Era, if I'm reading the etchings right. That's old magic. Whatever's behind this door, they didn't want it getting out."
"Wonderful," Daphne said. "Can we leave now?"
"The door's unlocked," Theodore said.
Harry and Daphne both looked at him.
"It's unlocked," Theodore repeated. He was staring at the handle with an expression of intense curiosity. "A runic lock, First Era enchantments, heavy iron, and the door is unlocked. That doesn't make sense."
"It makes perfect sense," Daphne said. "It's a trap."
"Or the lock isn't the real protection." Theodore stood. His hand was on the handle. "Something else is guarding whatever's inside."
"Don't," Harry said.
Theodore opened the door.
The room beyond was dark. For a moment, Harry couldn't see anything except the stone floor and the faint gleam of torchlight reflecting off something wet.
Then something moved.
A head rose from the darkness. Then another head. Then a third.
Three pairs of eyes, each one the size of a dinner plate, each one yellow and slitted and fixed on the three students standing in the open doorway. Three mouths opened, revealing three sets of teeth that were as long as Harry's forearm and dripping with saliva. The creature filled the entire room. It was a dog, or something that had once been a dog, or three dogs that had been fused into one nightmare. Its body was massive and muscular, pressed against the walls of the chamber, and all six eyes were staring at them with the alert, focused hunger of something that had been waiting.
Harry's training took over before his brain caught up.
"Back," he said, and his voice was calm, and very, very quiet. "Now. Slowly."
Theodore was frozen, his hand still on the door handle, his face white. Daphne had gone perfectly still, her wand half-drawn.
The middle head growled. The sound was so low and so deep that Harry felt it in his chest.
"Theodore," Harry said. "Let go of the handle. Step back. Don't run."
Theodore released the handle. His hand was shaking.
Harry reached past him, gripped the edge of the door, and pulled it shut. The latch clicked. The growling continued behind the wood for another ten seconds, then faded.
The three of them stood in the corridor, breathing hard.
"A dog," Daphne said. Her voice was remarkably steady for someone who had just stared down a three-headed monster. "A three-headed dog. They put a three-headed dog on the third floor of a school full of children."
"It was standing on something," Theodore said. He was leaning against the wall, colour slowly returning to his face. "A trapdoor. It was standing on a trapdoor."
Harry looked at him. "You noticed the floor while three heads were trying to eat you?"
"I notice architecture. It's what I do."
"A trapdoor," Daphne repeated. "So the dog is guarding something underneath it."
"Something Dumbledore doesn't want anyone to find." Harry's mind was working fast. The death warning. The unlocked door. A creature that massive and that dangerous, placed inside a school.
"We need to go," Harry said. "Now. Before Filch or Mrs. Norris finds us."
They moved. Fast, quiet, through corridors and down staircases, using every shortcut they'd learned in two weeks of navigating the castle. Nobody spoke until they were back in the Slytherin common room.
Theodore sat down heavily in an armchair. Daphne stood by the fireplace with her arms crossed. Harry leaned against the wall and tried to slow his heartbeat.
"Nobody hears about this," Daphne said.
"Agreed," Harry said.
"Theodore?"
"Agreed." He paused. "But I'm going to find out what's under that trapdoor."
"Not now," Harry said. "We need to be careful and watch the third floor, since Dumbledore put all those securities for that trap door. It means that something valuable is underneath, and for sure, there is someone who wants to get whatever is being hidden there."
"Exactly, you're 100% right. Also, the one who's trying to steal it seems to have passed the first task by unlocking the door," Daphne said.
"I'm exhausted, going to sleep now. See you tomorrow." Harry said.
Harry woke to Theo standing at the foot of his bed, already dressed, his grey eyes bright with purpose.
"Happy Halloween," Theo said.
"Thanks, why do you look like you're planning something."
"I'm always planning something. Today I'm planning breakfast." He paused. "And possibly espionage."
"Those are very different activities."
"Not if you do them correctly."
Harry pulled on his robes. They walked to the Great Hall together, and the castle smelled of pumpkin and cinnamon, and Theo was smiling in that quiet, dangerous way that meant the day was going to be interesting.
The Great Hall looked extraordinary.
A thousand live bats fluttered from the walls and ceiling. Enormous carved pumpkins grinned from every surface, their insides lit with enchanted candles that flickered orange and gold.The feast hadn't started yet, but the smell of roasted meat was already filling the hall.
Harry wasn't paying attention to any of it.
He stood with Daphne and Theo near the entrance to the Great Hall, the three of them slightly apart from the stream of students filing toward the Slytherin table. Theo had his hands in his pockets and his usual expression of detached observation. Daphne was watching the hall with one eye and Harry with the other.
"We need to split up," Harry said, keeping his voice low. "Tonight is the best chance we've had. The whole school is in one room. If anything happens near the third floor, someone should be watching."
"Agreed, I'll go to the third floor," Theo said. "I know the route. I can reach the corridor in four minutes from here, and I know three places to hide within earshot of that door."
"You mapped hiding spots," Daphne said flatly.
"I mapped the entire floor. The hiding spots were a bonus."
Harry looked at him. "Don't go inside. Don't touch the door. Just watch. If anyone goes near it, remember their face and come straight back."
"I know."
"And if something goes wrong, come to the hall immediately."
"I know, Harry."
"Good." Harry turned to Daphne. "We go in. If Theo isn't back in two hours, we go find him."
Daphne nodded.
Theo slipped away from them without another word. One moment he was there, the next he was gone, swallowed by the corridor leading to the staircase.
Harry and Daphne walked to the Slytherin table and sat down.
The feast began. Food appeared on the golden platters, and the hall filled with the noise of four hundred students eating, laughing, and talking. Harry ate, but his mind was on the third floor. He kept glancing at the entrance to the hall, waiting for Theo to appear.
Then the doors of the Great Hall burst open.
Professor Quirrell came running in. He was a thin man who wore a large purple turban and who had spent the first month of term being afraid of his own shadow. He taught Defence Against the Dark Arts, and he was, in Harry's opinion, the least convincing Defence professor in the history of the subject.
He was not unconvincing now.
He sprinted down the centre of the hall, his face white with terror, and his voice came out in a scream that silenced every conversation in the room.
"TROLL! TROLL IN THE DUNGEONS!"
He stopped, swaying on his feet, and then added, in a voice that cracked: "Thought you ought to know."
He collapsed on the floor.
The hall erupted. Students screamed. Almost everyone froze. The noise hit Harry's ears from every direction.
Then Dumbledore was on his feet.
"SILENCE!"
The word cut through the chaos. Every mouth closed. Every eye turned to the headmaster.
"Prefects," Dumbledore said, and his voice was calm and absolute, "lead your houses back to the dormitories immediately. Teachers, with me to the dungeons."
The hall exploded into motion. Benches scraped. Students surged toward the doors. The prefects shouted instructions, trying to organise the flood of bodies into something resembling order.
Harry grabbed Daphne's arm.
"Theo," he said.
Daphne's face went white. "He's on the third floor."
"He doesn't know about the troll."
They looked at each other. The Slytherin prefects were already herding the first years toward the exit, calling names, counting heads. Harry and Daphne fell into the group, moving with the crowd toward the dungeon stairs.
For about a minute.
Then Harry caught Daphne's eye, and she gave a single, tight nod, and they peeled away from the group at the first corridor junction, slipping sideways into a darkened hallway while the rest of the house continued downward.
"If we get expelled for this," Daphne whispered as they climbed the stairs, "I want it on record that I blame Theodore Nott entirely."
"Noted."
They moved fast, taking the stairs two at a time. The castle was emptying around them. Distant voices and footsteps echoed through the corridors, growing fainter as the houses retreated to their dormitories. Within minutes, the upper floors were silent.
Too silent.
Harry slowed. His instincts, the ones Natasha had sharpened over a year of training, were firing. Something was wrong; he could hear it, the air was changing, but he couldn't see it.
"Do you smell that?" Daphne whispered.
Harry held up a hand. Stop.
They were in the second-floor corridor, approaching the staircase that led to the third floor. The smell was stronger now.
The troll came around the corner.
It was twelve feet tall. Its skin was grey and lumpy, the colour and texture of wet granite. Its legs were short and thick, its arms long and heavy, ending in fists the size of boulders. It carried a massive wooden club that scraped along the floor behind it, gouging a trail in the stone. Its head was small and round and stupid, with tiny eyes that blinked slowly, and its mouth hung open, revealing teeth like broken fence posts.
The smell was unbearable, a terrible one for a little bit, it made Daphne vomit.
Harry's body reacted before his mind caught up. His hand found his wand. His eyes tracked the troll's movement.
The troll saw them.
It stopped. Its tiny eyes focused, and something that passed for intelligence flickered behind them. Then it raised the club.
"Move!" Harry shouted.
He shoved Daphne to the left and dove right. The club came down where they'd been standing and smashed into the floor. Stone exploded. Fragments sprayed across the corridor. The impact shook the walls and sent dust cascading from the ceiling.
Daphne was on her feet, wand out. "Stupefy!" she shouted.
The red bolt hit the troll in the chest. It flickered across the grey skin and vanished. The troll looked down at where the spell had struck, then looked at Daphne, and grunted. The Stunning Spell had done nothing. Troll hide was too thick, too resistant to standard magic. It was like throwing a pebble at a wall.
The troll swung the club sideways.
Daphne threw herself flat. The club passed over her head and smashed into the wall, punching a hole through the stone. Rubble rained down.
Harry stepped forward. He grabbed the back of Daphne's robes and pulled her behind him in one motion, putting himself between her and the troll.
"Stay behind me," he said.
"Harry, you can't..."
"Stay behind me."
Harry raised his wand. "Flipendo!"
The Knockback Jinx struck the troll in the chest. It staggered. But the troll didn't fall. It steadied itself, grunted, and swung the club again.
Harry dove left. The club crashed into the floor where he'd been standing.
"Impedimenta!" Harry shouted.
The Impediment Jinx caught the troll in the legs. Its movements slowed, each step dragging. But even slowed, it was still coming. The jinx was designed for human-sized targets. Against twelve feet of mountain troll, it was a delay, not a solution.
The troll wrenched its legs free and swung again. Harry rolled. The club whistled over his head and hit the wall, and plaster rained down on his shoulders.
He was running out of spells. Everything he knew from Natasha's training and first-year classes was designed for duelling other wizards, not for fighting something that weighed a ton and had skin thick enough to shrug off direct hits.
Then a voice rang out from behind the troll.
"Incendio!"
A jet of flame struck the troll's back. The creature bellowed, a sound that shook dust from the ceiling, and spun around.
Hermione Granger stood at the far end of the corridor, her wand raised, her bushy hair wild around her face. Her eyes were wide with terror, but her wand arm was steady.
"Hermione!" Harry shouted. "Get back!"
But the troll had already turned. Something about the fire on its back had triggered a rage that overrode whatever passed for thought inside that flat skull, and it was moving toward Hermione with speed that something that size should not have possessed.
Hermione backpedalled. She fired another Incendio, but her aim was off, and the flames scorched the wall instead of the troll. The creature closed the distance in three massive strides, raised its club, and swung downward.
Hermione threw herself sideways. The club hit the floor where she'd been standing and the stone cracked from one wall to the other. She landed hard, her wand skidding from her hand, and she scrambled backward on the floor, her eyes locked on the club that was already rising again.
Harry saw it happening. The troll lifting the club. Hermione on the ground. The club at its peak, beginning its descent. Three seconds, maybe two, before it came down on her.
Everything Natasha had taught him collapsed into a single point of focus.
Harry had one spell that could stop it, one spell that Natasha had spent the final weeks of summer drilling into his core, the spell she wouldn't let him board the train without learning.
He had no other choice.
Harry closed his eyes.
He felt his core surge. The warmth flooded upward through his chest, down his arm, into his wand that was his in a way no practice stick had ever been. The magic gathered at the tip, dense and bright and burning.
He opened his eyes.
"Confringo."
The spell erupted from his wand in a bolt of searing light that crossed the corridor in an instant. It struck the troll in the centre of its chest, and the explosion that followed was enormous. The force blew the troll backward off its feet. The club flew from its hand and shattered against the far wall. The troll hit the ground, and the impact cracked the flagstones beneath it, and it did not get up.
It did not move.
It did not breathe.
The corridor was silent except for the sound of settling dust and the faint hiss of scorched stone cooling in the cold air.
Harry stood with his wand still raised. He could feel the emptiness where the magic had been, a cold space inside him where the warmth had lived a moment ago. He had used more than he'd meant to. Far more. The Confringo had taken nearly everything he had.
His vision greyed at the edges. His knees buckled. He caught himself against the wall and forced his legs to hold.
Daphne was beside him instantly. "Harry."
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. Sit down."
"I'm fine." He looked past her. "Hermione."
Hermione Granger was still on the floor. She was staring at the troll, which lay on its back with a crater in its chest and smoke rising from its skin. Her mouth was open. Her hands were shaking.
Harry walked to her. His legs felt like they belonged to someone else, and the corridor tilted slightly with each step, but he walked.
He stopped in front of her and extended his hand.
"Are you hurt?" he asked.
Hermione looked at his hand. Then at his face. Then at the dead troll. Then back at his face.
"How did you do that?" she whispered.
"Training," Harry said. "Are you hurt?"
She took his hand. He pulled her upright. She was trembling.
"No," she said. "I'm not hurt. I was looking for... I heard about the troll, and I was in the bathroom, and I didn't know, and then it was in the corridor, and I tried to run, and..."
"You cast Incendio at a mountain troll," Daphne said, arriving beside them. "That took nerve."
"It didn't work," Hermione said, her voice small.
"It distracted it," Harry said. "It turned away from us. If you hadn't been there, I wouldn't have had the opening."
That wasn't entirely true. Harry would have used the Confringo regardless. But Hermione didn't need to know that right now. What she needed was to stop shaking, and telling someone their contribution mattered was a faster way to achieve that than telling them the truth.
"What spell was that?" Hermione asked, staring at the troll. "I've never read about anything that could..."
"Later," Harry said. He could hear footsteps. Many footsteps, coming fast, from multiple directions. "Teachers are coming."
They came around both corners at once.
McGonagall arrived first, her robes billowing, her face white. Behind her came Snape, limping slightly, his black robes singed at the hem. Then Quirrell, who took one look at the troll and sat down on the floor with his hand over his mouth. Then Flitwick, tiny and breathless. Then Dumbledore, who arrived last and stopped in the centre of the corridor and looked at the scene with an expression that Harry could not read at all.
The dead troll. The cratered chest. The shattered club. The cracked flagstones. Three first-year students standing in the middle of it, one of them swaying on his feet.
McGonagall's gaze swept from the troll to Harry to the wand still in his hand.
"Explain," she said. One word. Sharp as a blade.
"We were heading to our dormitory when the troll appeared in the corridor, Professor," Harry said. His voice was steady, which surprised him, because the rest of him wasn't. "It attacked us. Miss Granger arrived and attempted to distract it. When the troll turned on her, I used a Blasting Curse to stop it."
"A Blasting Curse," McGonagall repeated. "You are eleven years old."
"Yes, Confringo Professor."
"An eleven-year-old cast a Confringo powerful enough to kill a fully grown mountain troll."
"Yes, Professor."
The corridor was very quiet. McGonagall looked at Harry. Snape looked at Harry. Dumbledore looked at Harry. Every teacher in the corridor looked at Harry..
Dumbledore stepped forward. He looked at the troll for a long moment. Then he looked at Harry, and his blue eyes were bright and piercing behind the half-moon spectacles.
"Are any of you injured?" he asked.
"No, sir," Harry said.
"Then I suggest you return to your dormitory, Mr. Potter. You and Miss Greengrass. Miss Granger, a prefect will escort you to Gryffindor Tower." He paused. "I believe we will need to have a longer conversation about this. But not tonight."
"Yes, sir."
Harry turned. Daphne took his arm, because his legs were failing and they both knew it, and together they walked back down the corridor, past the teachers, past the dead troll, past the cracked stone and the settling dust.
Behind them, Harry heard Snape's voice, low and directed at Dumbledore.
"That was not a first-year spell."
And Dumbledore's reply, quieter still, barely audible.
"No. It was not."
Harry kept walking. Daphne held his arm. The castle was dark and cold around them, and somewhere on the third floor, Theo was probably still watching the corridor, unaware that everything had changed.
Harry's wand hand was still shaking.
But the troll was dead. And Hermione was alive. And whatever conversation was coming, whatever questions the teachers would ask, Harry knew one thing with absolute certainty.
Natasha had been right to teach him that spell.
And he would do it again without hesitating.
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