In which Eerika Hogwarts was a Viking, Salazar Slytherin was much more evil than anyone thought, and Godric Gryffindor lost the love of his life.
His green eyes glowed with malice as the slip of a girl stood in between him and his property, his cowering daughter trembling behind the bint.
"Move aside," Salazar Slytherin hissed.
The girl's head lifted, her chiseled—and far too angled and sharp to be any kind of pretty, what did Gryffindor see in her?—face seeming to shimmer in the torches. "No," she said simply. One arm was wrapped around his coward of a daughter, the other had a staff planted to the floor, knuckles white.
He could feel the magic thrumming through the air, the worthless spawn frozen in their places around the hall emitting magic in their terrified state. Gryffindor and Ravenclaw and Helga—whatever did I do to you, Helga?—all had their staffs and weapons at ready.
Gryffindor, his half-broken mind snarled. He took yours, so let you take his.
"Then hear the words of Slytherin, Eerika Hogwarts," he whispered, the sound weaving and gliding through the air like a thousand snakes emitting from a single point. "If you care so much about the coward, about your suitor, about the castle—then let you be bound to them. Your soul will reign until the end of stones, unable to reach out, unable to communicate. You will never have your proper funeral, never see your family again, you will never exist. Hogwarts will become nothing but a castle. So as you were formed from dust, to dust you shall return!"
Grey eyes widened in fear. Gryffindor cried out in fury as the girl's fingers began to decay and then break off and vanish into a poof of ashes. Her eyes wrenched away from her rapidly-decaying body towards his gleeful eyes, glazed with fear and horror and pain. And then, faster than anyone could react, her magic exploded in a whirl of color and wash of light and heavy white smoke, blowing her body to smithereens.
He was blown back, out of the massive doors that he hung there less than a decade ago, out of the massive school of magic. Hogwarts, he thought with savage glee.
Gryffindor came bursting out of the castle, rage and grief and magic swirling around him in an awesome light show, leaping off the front steps with his sword gleaming as it made a graceful arc towards his head.
And all he could think about in the ensuing fight that would go down in history was the grey eyes that had narrowed in determination just before they were destroyed forever.
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Godric took a deep breath and dipped his quill in green ink—more expensive than common black, less so than red or purple. In his graceful, bold handwriting, he wrote,
Hogwarts, School of Magic
on the outside of the envelope.
Eerika Hogwarts.
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A thousand years later…
James Potter thought that he was being watched. It felt like it, anyway. It was a nagging feeling, one that he could never seem to be rid of, and honestly, it was freaking him out.
Neither of his parents had gone to Hogwarts. His mother was from France, a distant branch of the Black family of Britain, and had gone to Beauxbatons. His father had been homeschooled, as had his grandfather and great-grandfather and many times before that. When he curiously asked why they didn't simply go to Hogwarts, he got something vague about old family hurts, which didn't make much sense to him.
Had he lived to see his twenty-first birthday, he would have understood, and been told the story that had been passed down from father to son(s) for a thousand years.
But his father died on his twentieth birthday as a "present" from dear old Voldemort, and James Potter himself died less than a year later.
And the Gryffindor legend of Eerika Hogwarts, and the family's vengeful hatred of anything and everything Slytherin and tireless work with the castle to attempt to set the sixteen-year-old girl free, died an abrupt and painful death.
So Hogwarts was, in effect, nothing but a magical castle.
Elsewhere, a girl's soul keened in heartbreak.
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When Harry Potter arrived in Hogwarts, the castle's inhabitants were utterly exasperated at what the boy managed to get into—trolls, dark wizards, basilisks, more dark wizards, magical goblets, more dark wizards, overcontrolling Ministries, even more dark wizards, dark artifacts, and finally, the dark wizard. (Are you seeing a pattern yet?)
But, like his father before him, he felt like he was being watched—always, whether it be during a Transfiguration lesson, the middle of the night when he was staring out his dorm's window, or facing down Voldemort in the bowels of the castle's dungeons. And, unlike his father, he wasn't creeped out by it. He could feel the weight of that concerned gaze that he could never pinpoint, because unlike Harry's father, he grew up in an abusive household, where a look meant the difference between no food and a lashing.
And, there was the fact that even with everything that happened at Hogwarts, he was all but unscathed at the end of it. The only exception was during fourth year, and he hadn't been on the grounds during that fiasco.
So after he returned to the castle after his long absence in hunting down the Horcruxes, there was a special feeling of peace that he associated only with Hogwarts, and even though they arrived in the most discreet way possible, every inhabitant of the castle immediately knew that something was up. The stones groaned as they settled with a Gryffindor within her walls once more, the contradictory feelings of urgency and happiness vibrating through the air.
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When he died, the castle—battered and blown and torn—cried, the grinding of stone against stone splitting the air in an audible indication of grief. And then, long before Hagrid came trudging out of the Forest with Harry in his arms, she felt him return, breathing life into cold limbs once more.
Wake up, she shouted with all her considerable strength, moments before Voldemort ordered Narcissa Malfoy to check his living status, flinging a thousand years' worth of bled-off magic of hundreds of thousands of children and teachers towards his spot in the Forest.
And he did.
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The redhead and the brunette that Harry spent a lot of time with watched as the teen—hardly older than she when she made her own sacrifice—leaned his forehead against her wall.
And then, she felt it. A faint stir of magic emanating from where his forehead rested, searching, searching. She sent a flood of magic towards that particular corridor, and his friends watched, bemused, as Harry smiled softly as he finally found that mysterious source of the gaze.
Thank you, his magic whispered faintly, so quiet and tiny in comparison to her own.
Eerika, she introduced herself, unused to being able to speak, slowly throwing off the curse now that Slytherin's sustaining magic was gone.
This time, the magic stream was quieter, slower, more tired. She carefully connected with him, and fed a tiny bit of magic back through to him as his 'voice' swished through stone: Harry.
I know, she said, laughing gaily.
To the bemusement of the inhabitants of the castle of Hogwarts, the rough stones seemed to sparkle with delight, glittering with previously unseen flakes of mica.
Green eyes glowed with contentment as Harry Potter rested his forehead and palm against a rough castle's walls.
LINE BREAK
Ruby: Or, in which this is the darkest thing that I have ever written. Period.
I was inspired by Wheezy1's HP& the Manipulator of Destiny. On chapter seventeen, it said, "in unique cases a soul can inhabit other objects or places". My mind seized upon the places, tied it with the Hogwarts fic that I had already started, and ran with it. Quickly. Kind of like Jen snatching the popcorn and running with it when she's caffeinated and then thoroughly shaken by a horror movie like a can of cream soda. Anyway.
Eerika-Norse, "ruling forever"
Toodles!