Thanks again to my awesome reviewers after the last chapter, Psych0Geek, HoneydukeHPlover, and mywildcharmsforyou! That means a lot Honeyduke, thank you! Psych0 – astute point; I was using the style of Sirius/Bellatrix as part of the blueprint (along with some completely unrelated fights not even from HP) but you're right about the emotional impact that followed with that one. As for Logan, he ended up a little bit more of a sacrifice than intended in the cutting room of my mind (I try to be concise, with mixed results), but we'll be seeing a lot more of him – and other students/staff – in the future, not to fear. Thank you on the action compliment, too – that's something I was iffy on when writing it, so glad to see that it worked out alright from a readership standpoint.

Final chapter of Book 1, go. Like I said in the beginning, Book 2 will continue on in this thread; no need to jump around from link to link.

"Hagrid!"

Lily squirmed away from Vos and hurried over to Hogwarts's unconscious Gamekeeper. His giant chest heaved up and down, his eyelids fluttering but closed, the black and red scarring on his face looking worse by the minute. Neville caught her and her back as she wriggled and writhed to get close, to do something, anything but watch in helpless grief. Up to now her letting Sion into the castle hadn't inflicted any lasting harm, but Hagrid…

Headmaster Maribor's expression wrinkled as he pocketed his wand, staring out at the lake with a sense of longing, his eyes narrowed and hungry like a wolf that had just missed taking down a deer in winter. "Thief took my broom," he muttered.

"Headmaster – " Neville started, still holding a thrashing Lily tight.

"Leave him where he is," ordered Maribor, jabbing a finger at Hagrid and spinning on his heel back towards the castle. "Moving him might worsen the damage. I'll flag down the people from St. Mungo's and send them to join you out here. Then I'm off to London."

"London?"

Maribor's face darkened. "I'm going to have an unpleasant talk with the Auror's Office about down which toilet the Ministry's Galleons are going. When I get back, all of us are going to chat."

With that he raised the hood on his robe over his forehead, balled his fists, and stalked off towards the castle. Vos peeled Lily away from Neville as the latter crouched down to get a better look at Hagrid's wounds.

"Let me stay!" Lily cried, still struggling in Vos's arms. "Let me stay and help!"

Vos dragged her away towards the stone steps leading up to the castle: "He'll be fine. He's a tough old guy. Lily, come on."

"I want to help him!"

"You've done all you can today," said Vos, pushing her along with one strong hand. "Lily, you did fine. You did better than I could've hoped if you'd told me you wanted to face up with a man like that. You're a survivor and a fighter beyond your age, but I doubt you're much of a healer just yet. I guess I can be wrong again, but let the professionals handle it. They'll patch him up. Let go, alright? Let go."

"Lily," Logan whispered ahead of them, "we're okay."

She turned. He clutched his arm around his waist, the wendigo's gashes still oozing blood. His face was pale, his eyes sunken, his fighting strength wearing out now that Sion had run. A weight, an exhaustion, hit Lily like a truck all at once. Her shoulder pain flared up where the beast had raked her, and her nerves, standing on edge ever since she'd first seen Sion sitting atop the Owlery rafters, gave way to a rising tide of weariness and realization of what had just happened.

Of what happened…oh, I'm going to be in so much trouble.

Minutes, steps, and surroundings rushed by. They were climbing the steps to Hogwarts, then moving up through cordoned-off stairs and hallways. There was Healer Justman at the entrance to the Hospital Wing, demanding a play-by-play from Vos, who threatened to blast him out a window if he didn't let them in. There was the ward filled with curtained-off beds and the people from St. Mungo's in their white robes and blue sashes, looking up with quizzical eyes and confused frowns as Vos half-dragged Logan to a pair of private beds in an isolated room in the ward's rear, Lily trudging after them with her head down. There was the sun rising, the morning light shining in as Vos pushed her into a bed and Justman forced her to drink a super-sweet, steaming, purple-red potion that made her shudder, heat and butterflies and fluff rushing down her throat as her head crash-landed atop a pillow.

When she awoke from the ink of dreamless sleep, a gray, moody wet blanket covered the sky. There high in the sky, rising above the mountains to the east, was the sun poking through the clouds. It shimmered, shaded for a moment and glinting through a gap in the cloud cover the next, struggling, fighting, but still there.

A weight shifted on her knee. Lily sat upright in a hurry, fear shooting through her mind, her fight-or-flight reflex kicking into full gear.

"Hey, hey, I'm here. I'm here. You're safe. Everything's fine."

She caught her breath. Logan rested across the aisle, asleep, his chest fluttering in and out with long breaths. On a stool beside her bed, however, sat –

"Dad!" Lily cried. She tried to sit up in a hurry, winced, and fell back to her bed, clutching her shoulder.

Harry held her back with a smile on his face. "Take it easy, bouncy. You don't have to take on dark wizards every day."

Lily blanched as her mind came together. "Dad – where – what – Hagrid – "

"He's, er," Harry started, fretting and lowering his head. "He's at St. Mungo's sweetie. He'll live. He'll be fine. Less hair, and his teaching days are done. He's a great teacher, it's hard, but, well, Care of Magical Creatures wasn't the greatest class of all time, anyway."

"It's my fault!" Lily wailed, scrunching her eyes shut and fighting back tears. "All this is! I got people hurt!"

"Lily, no, listen to me, you did – "

"I'm going to be in so much trouble. They're going to expel me, the Headmaster's going to – "

"Sweetie, stop," Harry said, his voice growing just hard enough to cut her off even as his expression softened and his eyes sloped down. "Your Headmaster came to the Ministry yesterday and told me everything that happened. I had a talk with him, with your professors – not a real nice talk, there was a lot of yelling – and I have a pretty good idea on what happened. You're not in any trouble."

Lily flopped over on her side and turned away. "I did everything wrong."

"Listen to me," Harry said, patting her knee. "When I was in my fifth year here, I was convinced that a…a very close friend of mine was in danger. I led your mother, your aunt and uncle, Professor Longbottom, and if you remember Luna Scamander, the woman we gave you your middle name for, on a wild goose chase all the way to the Ministry of Magic. I led them right into a trap, just like this dark wizard led you into a trap. I got someone killed because I wanted to act. I could've gotten us all killed. If anything, I'm proud of you for doing a lot better than I did, when you're only a first-year to boot."

Lily shook her head as tears escaped her eyes, forging little salty rivers down her cheeks. "You said to be careful and I wasn't."

"But you were brave, and you kept your head under pressure," Harry said. He grabbed her hand, holding it tight, and added, "We can't ever be safe all the time. Lord Voldemort broke into the castle my first year. A basilisk attacked my second. Hogwarts isn't a place where only good things happen. It's unpredictable and wild and happy and sad and crazy and cozy. That's all the world is, Lily. Things happen that we can't control. What we can do is choose which road to go down when we're given the choice."

"But I'm not brave!" Lily cried. "I'm scared, Dad. The man – the one we fought – he wanted to kill me. He knows who I am. When he escaped, he said…he told me that we'd speak again, and I know what he can do."

Harry turned the very corner of his mouth up in a smile and rubbed his thumb over the top of Lily's hand. "Well, you're not alone, at least."

"Dad, you've fought everyone. You're famous. You don't get scared."

"I do," he said. "I'm scared because I watch my kids go off to Hogwarts every year, knowing I can't always keep them safe, and I don't always know what I should do. I hate feeling helpless. That's what makes me feel afraid. But when I'm at my worst, I see how strong you really are. You give me the courage to keep going."

Lily couldn't hold back her tears now. She leaned over into Harry's arms and cried as he rubbed her hair, a gentle, secure, strong thing with just enough confidence in it that made her feel at home in this castle, this place that had been unpredictable and wild and happy and sad and all the things that must have built Hogwarts so many hundreds of years ago.

A loud sneeze interrupted their embrace. Lily bolted back into her bed and away from her father, looking across the way as Logan shifted under his sheets. He yawned in the most artificial fashion possible, opened his eyes, and said, "I didn't hear – I mean, good morning."

Harry laughed, patted Lily's hand, stood up, and appraised Logan. After a moment he said, "Are you Logan?"

Logan looked meek. He set his jaw and nodded his head ever so slightly.

"Huh," said Harry. "Thought about becoming an Auror one day?"

He grinned and clapped Logan on the shoulder before walking out of the room. Logan rubbed his shoulder as if it were a holy site, staring slack-jawed out the door before eying Lily and saying, "For being famous, your dad's pretty cool."

"Yeah," Lily said, allowing herself the slightest smile she could muster, "he's a good dad."

Healer Justman released them two days later, and the entire school knew a fight had gone down around the boathouse. The first-years bombarded Lily and Logan with questions in the Ravenclaw common room, during meals, and even in classes when teachers weren't paying attention. To Lily's relief, Wayne Torres acted as a sort of shield between them, listening to the tidbits they had to say and turning them into wild stories that entertained his audiences and took the spotlight away for a few blissful minutes. Even Lily's family hungered for more: James and Rose demanded to know what had happened, spitting curses at the Hogwarts establishment for letting Lily run headlong into trouble at every opportunity, while Al looked on as she talked with a sort of sad, pitying expression that made her want to vomit. Only Hugo seemed to understand what she felt, even if he didn't talk all that much whenever she felt the need to vent.

Focusing on classes and school and the normal everyday grind of Hogwarts felt otherworldly. After fighting Sion and escaping from the wendigo, Lily felt like an alien in the halls. Questions still lingered in Lily's head, however. In search of answers, or at least relief, she left Ravenclaw Tower early on her first Friday night since being released from the hospital ward and headed up to the Astronomy Tower.

Professor Vos's office door was open when she arrived at the tower loft. When Lily stepped in, Vos sat crouched in front of his fireplace, twirling his dagger in his hands, his face steady and serious.

"Where'd you get a dungbomb?" he asked before she had a chance to speak.

Lily paused. "What?"

"I talked with Logan earlier in the week. He tells me you saved his life with some quick thinking and a little creativity," said Vos, still staring into the fire. The flames danced off his eyes, dark and foreboding. "Sounds like Rowena Ravenclaw would be proud to know one of her students had that kind of wit in a crisis situation."

"It was dumb luck," Lily murmured.

Vos chuckled. "Well, if you have luck to spare, feel free to share. I keep wondering when I'm going to get lucky, and I've been waiting for a long while."

He got up and walked behind his desk, setting his dagger back in its place under the red and green flag and taking a seat. "Alright, I know the first question. 'Jurre, what in the bloody hell are you keeping under our school?'"

"That wasn't my first question."

"Well, it's my first answer. I know what it looks like – a monster – but it's anything but that," he said. He pulled open a drawer, hoisted a bottle full of translucent brown drink, uncorked it, and said, "You know what, I'm cancelling class. Stay as long as you want. I had a hell of a time with the fourth-years right before you showed up, and I'm just done for the week."

Rather than pouring a glass, Vos drank straight from the bottle. "That monster is a library."

Lily gave him a wry look. "A library with tentacles and two dozen eyes?"

"Ya, ya, lekker, huh?" Vos said, grinning. "I told you a time ago that I'd tackled some pretty strange stuff during my time in Germany. I was alongside Sion, the woman I mentioned, Alanis Fell, and our mentor – the same mentor who I'm guessing tasked Sion with coming after me here in the first place. We're not on speaking terms, if you can imagine. Shocking. Anyway, we did a whole lot of tests on some crazy stuff. Space. Matter. Time, which led to discoveries on how to speed up and slow time, if you paid attention to that globe Sion had that you cleverly destroyed. That was something we invented. Good going on that, by the way."

"I was just…I didn't know what was going to happen."

"Ya, humility and all that. Anyway, I told you we went to Malta and discovered something in a very ancient magical ruin, dating thousands and thousands of years ago."

"You discovered that?"

Vos frowned at his bottle. "No, we discovered that's parent. That's a baby."

"Baby?"

"Mm. Anyway, when…when you first shot at Sion and everything went to hell, when I saw you collapse in front of that thing on the ground – you saw something in your head, didn't you? Felt something? An epiphany, almost?"

Lily clammed up. Saw was a drastic understatement. Experienced? Felt? She didn't know how to describe the frenzied rush that had blasted her mind with a wave of sensory input, as if the entire world had threatened to jump into her mind all at once.

"That's its defense mechanism," Vos explained. "We have wands, that beast Sion brought, the wendigo, it has claws and horns. What I brought here to Hogwarts is a living archive. It contains a piece of the memories and experiences of hundreds, maybe even thousands, of ancient wizards and witches who millennia ago created its parent, a much larger and more powerful magical creature that I left behind in Germany. They're not natural. Manmade. Whatever the wizarding equivalent of bioengineering is. Essentially, it's one large brain that stores information and wisdom and knowledge for all time, and when threatened, it creates a magical connection – like Legilimancy, if you're familiar with that branch of magic – that dumps a part of that knowledge out all at once into an enemy's mind. It drives them insane as their brain attempts to process what it can't. It's a weaponized version of your mind trying to divide by zero."

Lily's brain hurt trying to understand what Vos had said, let alone what he meant – and maybe that was the point. "So what I saw…"

"You saw a glimpse of the whispers and echoes of a thousand witches and wizards who have been dead a long, long time," finished Vos. "That thing is the reason I even came to Hogwarts."

"What? Why?"

"I told you about how I grew up, Lily," Vos said. "I was born in shite. I grew up in shite. I don't intend to die in a world like that. I want to create a world of equal opportunity, where we don't discriminate on things like we did back home in South Africa, skin color, location, heritage, or on what we discriminate on in the wizarding world – magical birth, heritage, strength. Equality means we all have the opportunity to succeed, to pursue dreams, even to wield magic."

Lily felt a chill run up her spine. "In ancient history, wizards and witches lived out in the open. See Ancient Egypt and Sumeria," Vos went on. "They knew great things, things that have been lost to time and history's destructive march. I want to know what they did. I can't help bring about a better world without gaining insight first. Wisdom. Knowledge. Think, Lily, these are things your house prides. Learning. That's what Hogwarts is all about. I brought my creature here to grow in safety, away from the poaching of people like Sion and my mentor, and to thrive with all the magic in the air. And while I teach, I can also learn."

Swallowing hard, Lily asked, "What was that place down below? All those tunnels?"

"Oh," Vos said, snorting, "nothing much all that interesting. Back when the founders made Hogwarts, they lived in a violent time. That's an escape route out of the castle onto the grounds. Basically an underground labyrinth. Whoever knew the right way out could escape invaders, while those behind them would get lost in the tunnels. I only used it because it was hidden away, plus because my creature needs to stay in the water most of the time, and there's an underground cave down there that connects to the lake. It's convenient and doesn't hurt anyone."

"But back when Hugo, Scorpius and I were in the dungeons, I saw the Headmaster – "

Vos gritted his teeth and swirled around the contents of his bottle. "Ah, yah. John Maribor knows exactly what I'm doing and approves of it."

"Why?"

"Because he's going to be Minister of Magic one day. Come on, Lily, you haven't started to figure out that man? Maribor is an extremely powerful wizard who is good to have on your side and bad to fight against, as Sion found out. He prides strength and organization, two things the Ministry's lacking these days, and he despises them for it. The community loves him, on the other hand. He wants every advantage he can get, and he knows a game-changer when he sees one. Back when your father saved the world and all, the Ministry collapsed because it denied Voldemort's return and any way it could slow him down or stop him. The Headmaster's not that stupid."

Lily swallowed and wrung her hands. Vos was a persuasive man, she gave him that. She'd come in with questions about him, thinking he had bad intent, but now eased up. Still she wanted to know what came next: Was Sion coming after them? Was this…mentor of Vos's going to show up? Was this the whole wizarding war against Voldemort returning in a new fashion?

She opened her mouth to speak, closed it, thought her words over carefully, and said, "So what now?"

"Well," Vos said, clinking his bottle against his desk, his movements now exaggerated and growing wobbly, "I told you Sion holds grudges. You saw that in action against me. I won't lie: He'll have one against both you and Logan."

"Why? We didn't – "

"This is not a rational man we're talking about, Lily. He lives to fight. He has one purpose in this world, and this pleasing the man he sees as a father…with a dose of revenge karma thrown in."

The fireplace was doing a bad job warming Lily up. "So there's someone else? Some other dark wizard?"

"I don't want to describe our mentor. I can't, anyway. He's beyond description," Vos mused, his expression grim. "Shifting gears: Can you tell me something? Sion said he knew you. How's that?"

Lily didn't want to talk about the past year's nasty events, but it all came out of her. She spilled her guts about Grace, about loneliness, about falling for the first person to show her compassion and a listening ear, even if it was a ghost, a deception – and then a letter, one that asked for her help, one that counted on her jumping to act to do a good deed and help save the day, only for it all to be a ruse.

Vos stayed quiet until she was done, nodding, drinking, closing his eyes here and there. "I almost admire him," he said when she'd finished.

"What?"

"Sion. He had the patience to wait an entire year, to try and try and not give up until he found a way in," Vos said. "In a better person, that diligence is a wonderful trait. In a crazy man, well…you saw. Don't beat yourself up over it, Lily. You were great down there. You handled yourself like a fully-grown witch, not a first-year. But enough about all this depressing talk. It's late, you probably want to sleep, and like hell I'm having class when I'm getting drunk."

He slammed his bottle on the table, got up and stretched. As Lily rose to leave, Vos picked up his wand and said, "Oh, one more thing. I heard from the Headmaster that they're moving everyone sick to St. Mungo's this weekend."

Lily felt her stomach drop. "What? Natalie and all them – they're going to be alright, right?"

"Yah, it's just a precaution. They can treat them better there. But when Natalie went down the second time, I caught you in the middle of doing your best to stun her," he said, flicking his wand in the air. "You got the incantation right, but the wand all wrong. It's just a quick slash up, down, or to the side, but the key thing is to move your arm. Watch – Stupefy!"

Vos fired a jet of red light into the wall, throwing up sparks as the magic hit the wood and disappeared. "You try it."

Lily pulled out her wand, aimed at the same wall, swallowed, and yelled, "Stupefy!"

Red sparks dribbled out the end of her wand, arcing down and bouncing around the floor before burning out. "Work on it," sighed Vos. "Go get some sleep."

The final month of term passed quickly. Lily felt a knot in her stomach every time she woke up and saw Natalie's empty bed, envisioning her best friend alone and frightened in a sterile hospital far away from the familiar. If even her father could be afraid, however, surely Natalie could handle it. She'd handled it once.

Exams seemed like a petty obstacle in light of everything that had happened, and as the days turned hot and long, Lily felt strange – at peace, almost, accepting and putting everything past her. She couldn't change all that now. She could only act on whatever came ahead, dark wizards or not.

In spite of all the troubles of the past year, Lily felt a profound sense of longing when the term came to an end. Boarding the Hogwarts Express felt like leaving behind a place she'd just begun to explore, somewhere that had challenged her, thrown her to the dogs, made her cry and hurt and wail before, at the end of all things, opening its arms for her. She'd braved the castle's tests and come out alive.

She bumped into Al on the train as it pulled away from Hogsmeade. Logan and Wayne beckoned her into their cabin, but she shooed them just long enough to give her brother some time. He didn't say anything at first as the end of the station platform brushed past the train, the green Scottish countryside looming ahead, the Black Lake and the castle dwindling behind. Al put his hands on Lily's arms, smiled, and said, "I think you grew a bit. This shirt's looking small."

"A little bit," said Lily.

"You ready to go home?" said Al, looking her up and down, his expression serious. "First year's tough to leave. I know things have been hard on you. All the bad things in the world decided to hit you this year. From – "

"Al, stop, you sound like Dad."

He laughed and looked away. "Yeah, well. Yeah. I could use a summer at least. We can visit the people at St. Mungo's. They'll be fine. Just a little time off'll be nice."

"A little bit," repeated Lily, smiling brighter now. "Then we'll come back."

"Then we'll come back," said Al. "Then we'll come back."