From the castle grounds, Ravenclaw Tower was unassuming enough. At a distance, cobblestones melted together in the eyes into a solid block of grey spiraling skyward, silhouetted by the setting sun. Even if you squinted and strained, you couldn't see within the fortress of the mind, couldn't see the quills and absently abandoned socks and illegible scrolls scattered just within the portrait hall. You couldn't see the rebellion in the minds of Hogwarts' most revered strategists. And you certainly couldn't see the girl who perched astride the highest turret of the tower, letting the wind waltz her flyaway white-blonde hair through the sky.

As she settled her bare toes into a more comfortable position on the several-inch ledge that supported her, Luna smiled indulgently, feeling as though she were about to take flight. In fact, it occurred to her, as she gazed westward at the pastel twilight, that she might even be mistaken for some species of bird, from the right angle, up here, where no respectable, sane human would ever be. Her color pallete was off as far as indigenous, Luna admitted to herself; but if someone had really abysmal depth perception...

A pop of static from the two-way receiver lashed to her belt interrupted Luna's thoughts, and Terry Boot's voice crackled out of the battered black box. "All right up there, Lovegood?" Terry asked. "Still not sure this was the best idea, to be entirely honest. We've got all the typical belaying precautions up, but all the same, with the Carrows prowling around, who knows what could happen."

"I'm doing marvelously, Terry," Luna called back serenely, whispering the activation spell and aiming her wand at the box as she spoke. "It's actually quite picturesque up here, and not frightening in the least. Besides, you know, there's a unique breed of Margipox that only comes becomes visible in the first moments of dawn"

There was a brief pause, and she could picture Terry raising his eyebrows skyward into that half-exasperated half-fond expression he'd taken to wearing around her.

"Right. Well. I've got all the hardware raring to go on my end, so it's all up to you to make sure the transmission comes through all right, and do some last-minute fiddling if I tell you it isn't. Ideally, the radio receiver should give off a few sparks."

"What color are the sparks?" Luna asked, tapping her toe along the ornately carved ledge in a nonsense rhythm.
"Don't rightly remember. All sorts of colors, I think. Red. I think red was involved, and possibly yellow. I got a veritable firework show when I turned on this set earlier, and the local unit seems to be doing all right for itself. Probably just residuals from the connecting spells we rigged it up with."

The work Terry referred to was his pride and joy, and the better part of why Luna was a thousand feet above the lake.

At the start of term, when the school was just beginning to accustom itself to what the DA termed the Dark Days and Potterwatch had first appeared on the radio waves, all student Wirelesses had been confiscated, on pain of Cruciatus. Luna knew the tactic. Isolate us, lock us up behind stone and try to turn us against each other. It was brilliant, even in its cruelty.

It went without saying that being found with a Quibbler was an offense it would take you a few days to recover from, if caught, so copies of those quickly became sparse as well. Day after day passed, and Luna became more and more restless, needing to know, needing to be a part of the fight she'd found herself a part of two years ago.

One night, Luna wandered down towards the common room after her dorm-mates were fast asleep, meaning to gaze awhile at her mother's favorite star for inspiration. The Ravenclaw tower was unquestionably the most splendidly beautiful bit of architecture Luna had ever seen, and even after six years of calling it home, it still gave her a chill of appreciation whenever it opened in front of her again. Though an observer would see only stone, from within, the walls seemed to be composed entirely of glass, molded into a flawless dome.

From the left and right of the portrait hole, stairs were delicately carved from a substance slightly more opaque from the walls, spiraling around the tower to reach the fourteen doors – seven pairs set directly opposite one another, each set a level above the next. As students advanced in years and in wisdom, they climbed higher and higher to find their home, until, at last, in their seventh year, they occupied an unbroken circle directly below the pinnacle of the tower, the apex of which was left open, to allow sunlight and starlight alike access into the common room proper. As a sixth year, Luna's home was the righthand semicircle six levels above the common room floor, its five beds each positioned with an unimpeded view of the night, the mountains, the grounds.

Closing the translucent door behind her, Luna began down the deserted stairs, gently pushing away one of the magically suspended study hammocks that floated lazily around the space as it nudged her arm, thinking she was out for a midnight study session. Luna reached the ground floor moments later, and headed for the slight indentation in the floor where she always sat on nights like this, after she deduced it provided the most direct view upwards at the moonlit sky. She was just about to turn her focus upwards, and search out the constellation she knew so well, when a movement in her peripheral vision stole her attention.

Emerging from what seemed to be an unassuming cobblestone, Terry Boot appeared to be levitating out of the floor itself, his back still turned to Luna. He slowly and painstakingly slid the cobblestone back into place before turning towards the lefthand flight of stairs – and meeting Luna's eyes.

"So, have you found it, then?" Luna asked, twirling a strand of hair between her pinky fingers.

"Fou ... I..." he stuttered, turning a pleasing shade of pink. "Don't know what you're on about."

"I know what it is, silly. I've read all the legends dozens of times. You've found the Labyrinth, haven't you?"

He had the decency to give up the pretense of ignorance and this point, and settled for gaping. "You actually know what it is?"

"Well, I know what the stories say. Is it really a age-old Ravenclaw secret, a labyrinth ruled by the portrait of Socrates' himself and the namesake of the Socratic Method itself?"

"Well," Terry coughed, clearly seeing the game was up. "You really have read those stories," he finished, lamely.

"Of course I have. Be a bit daft to call myself a Ravenclaw if I didn't truly know what its history was, wouldn't it?"
Terry looked like he might have other thoughts on the matter, but wisely chose to kept htem to himself.

"So, I imagine you must be working on something important, or you'd never have been able to find your way in, right?" Luna prompted, levering herself out of her stone perch. "No one's gotten in in ages, though probably because no one bothered to look much."

"Well," Terry began, on firmer footing now that he could talk about his projects. "I've been working on quite a few, actually. Mostly grafting together the concepts of Muggle technology onto a magical apparatus, so that they can operate in magic-saturated areas, like Hogwarts. Mostly just bringing Wizarding England up to speed with a few things they've missed in the past few decades. Soc's been helping me, in his own way, of course, and letting me set up a real Lab right in the center of his Lab, if you will, and answering all his questions gave me some bloody brilliant new ways to fit everything together, if I do say so myself. It's been a good way to keep my thoughts busy over the last few weeks, when – well, you know."

Something in Luna's mind clicked while Terry was speaking. "No chance you've got the workings of a radio down there, do you?"

Terry gave a halfhearted wince. "In a manner of speaking, yes. Theoretically, I've got a setup together, with all the necessary enchantments in lieu of Muggle electronics."

"But?" Luna prompted, rolling on the balls of her feet.

"But I haven't been able to test it, see, because you need to set up a manual receiver, and I haven't found a way to set it up on top of the tower, where it really should be."

"Why don't you just levitate me?"
"Why-yo-WHAT?" Terry babbled, struck dumb by the suggestion.

"See, without a radio, I can't listen to Potterwatch, and with a war on, it's only intelligent to expose oneself to - " Luna paused, allowing herself a grin, "a wide range of programming, let's say." Terry Boot was sympathetic to the cause of the DA, even if he was more of a researcher than a fighter himself.

"So, let me get this straight. You want me to levitate you up to the top of the tower, hundreds of feet above the ground, so you can listen to a few people rattling on about Potter for a few minutes?"

"Yes, exactly, that's precisely it!"

Two days later, after much concerted effort to slice a tiny hole in the wards, already unstable from Dumbldore's demise, Terry and Luna had propped open a window and Luna had slid through, clinging to the outer edge until Terry began to levitate her upwards, shakily but steadily, until she reached the upmost point of the tower itself. There were arrested momentum enchantment barriors on every side of her, Luna knew, and a Weasley Wizarding Wheezes Invisible Trampoline (Hours of Hallway Fun!) stretched out between the tower and the Owlery, to guard against worst case scenarios, but despite all the protections, and Luna drifted skyward, she felt a thrill of excitement. Finally, she could do something meaningful.

And so, she waited, letting her thoughts wander and fly on the breeze, for the outside world to crackle through the antenna.

Luna knew they all called her crazy, but she thought them just as daft, in her less charitable moments, for being so unobservant as to believe the world made sense. In a fair, sensible world, actions follow logic like ducklings in a row, and catastrophes befall the villains, with happy endings and suitably tragic deaths the only due for the heroes. In a fair world, mothers don't fall dead at their cauldrons helping to brew an experimental curse antidote, only to be forgotten by a public unnerved by an incident beyond even the most skilled Forensi-Wizard's capacity to explain. In a sensible, rational world, you don't see thestrals at eleven, and you certainly don't learn to love them before they explain to you in hushed tones that you shouldn't.

She was used to the raised eyebrows and the furtive stares, but they'd never much bothered her, not when there was so much else in the world to concern oneself with; watching for the wingbeats of Nargles, peering at the ground for footsteps of the elusive Snorkack, squinting to see the dust left in the wake of a Blibbering Humdinger flock. Luna couldn't imagine journeying through the world believing in and searching for only the parts of it you knew were there, instead of the multitude of possibility peeping out from just beyond the obvious. It would make your days so impossibly dull, living that way, tied to the mundane and the knowable.

Sometimes, Luna wished she could just stay here, head in the clouds, perched far above the loss and frustration and chaos of a society ruptured by the madman who had once been Tom. Up here, where the flighty breeze was queen, a world split at the seams resolved itself into clean, interrupted landscape. Up here, her optimism untethered by pain , the masked, the braze and the broken alike shrunk to the size of pawns, and Luna could see the entire chessboard, receding into the past and sprawling into the inevitable future, the culmination of the patterns extending rut-like through time. She could see the black king falling on his own sword, as all megalomaniacs eventually must. She could see the valiant pawns collapse into tearful memory. She could see lives crushed beneath the serpent's fangs, just as they had been trampled beneath jackboots and skewered by uncaring crowns. Luna had read about the Warlock's Hairy Heart, but all the same, she wished so fervently that her heart could take wing and fly away while her body climbed back down the stairs, back to the lions and the snakes and the war.

But even as she considered it, Luna knew that there was no refuge for her now. Two years ago, perhaps she could have stepped aside. Perhaps she could have gazed into the distance as the blood was spilt and the battle cries screamed, existing on another plane entirely. But every time Luna looked at a valley now, she wondered if Harry might be hiding in the safety, wondered if Hermione and Ron might be foraging along its byways. She remembered Harry's smile and the way he'd counted her as one of them, remembered Hermione's unflappable strength and Ron's easy humor. Luna had stood with Ginny in front of a classfull of second-years as the Carrow's curses fell, smiling even when the other girl eyes had begun to leak unbidden tears, because no one who burned so bright and had shown such kindness could be allowed to stand alone.

It was odd, for Luna, finally knowing she had friends. Normally, she felt life was much improved by its uncertainty, by the wondrous quantum uncertainty of a world that may morph into unrecognizability at any moment. But this feeling, of standing beside them and knowing that others would rise to stand beside her in a heartbeat, was different, because, for once, it was a phenomenon more glorious for its certainty than its mystery.

"Fifteen seconds now!" yelled Terry's head, protruding for a few moments from the window below before ducking inside to man the Lab.

"I'll be watching," she breathed, knowing full well he was too rapt in his work to hear her. Five, three, one, Luna whispered, and then the receiver came alive with light, illuminating the blackness with a rainbow of sparks for a few moments before beginning to putter and pulse with a steady golden glow.

"All systems go!" Terry yelped from below, triumph evident in every syllable. "Come on down, before you miss much more; Rapier's on already!"

"Coming!" she called.

Luna let fingers slip away from stone, let her cape billow around her as she fell, arms outstretched. She laughed as the wind and the night embraced her, drawing her earthward. Luna knew the price she would pay for that certainty and warmth, and she accepted it. She was ready to be grounded by reality, ready to stand her ground and fight, and perhaps even be laid beneath the ground in the heat of war. But, for just one moment, she thought to herself, as the safety trampoline bore up on her, for just one moment, she would elude the ground, and allow herself to fly.