Their first NEWT exam, on the Monday, was Charms.

Charms was something Harry had been doing all through his time at Hogwarts, but it had certainly got a lot harder over that time. Back in First Year it was often enough to remember what spells did what, for the theory paper, but the NEWT paper asked about the tradeoffs involved in silent and wandless casting and about how the syllable structure affected the magical effects that could be expected from different Charms.

There was a question about why spells developed in different languages tended to have different incantations, and a question about what wand movements were necessary versus useful versus unnecessary or even counterproductive, and Harry had to admit that given the existence of point casting – spellcasting where the wand stayed in a single place throughout, and it didn't get waved at all – it was probably the case that for most spellcasting wand movements were merely useful, not essential.

Then Harry thought a bit more, and said that waving the wand was necessary with a difficult spell or a normal spell you were trying to cast silently but couldn't do both silently and point casting, or with certain spells where the wand was part of actually telling the spell what to do (you couldn't avoid moving the wand when you were casting a Levitation Charm, not really). It was useful in most cases, and obviously if you could point cast already then it was unnecessary.

Coming up with a case where it was counterproductive was harder, and the best example Harry could come up with involved spellcasting during a duel. If you did the wand movement for a Stunning Spell then you might miss the actual target, and that went double for the much fiddlier movement for the Disarming Charm.

That wasn't even the hardest question on the paper, either, and while Harry thought he'd done quite well when the hourglass ran out he thought he'd dropped at least a couple of points in a couple of places… and those were the ones where he knew enough to know he didn't know something, so he could quite easily have done a lot worse if he didn't know enough to spot something.

"So, we're all agreed on the rules, right?" Ron asked, at lunch. "We do not, under any reasonable circumstances, talk about the papers we've already done. If I'm going to worry about something I want it to be something where I'm still in control of my own destiny."

"Seems reasonable to me," Dean said. "On another note, Ron, what are you doing?"

"Huh?" Ron said, looking down at the sandwich he'd made. "It's spicy chicken, mayonnaise and lettuce. Nothing unusual about that."

"There is that you're frying it," Dean muttered.

Ron shook his head, taking off his Frying Charm, and cut the sandwich in half. "Mum showed me the Charm over Easter," he said. "It's a bit of practice, right? And it just means it's a hot sandwich, really."

"In both senses of the word," Harry pointed out. "Depending how spicy it is."

"There's at least three senses of the word, and I don't want you looking lustfully at my sandwich," Ron warned.

He took a bite, looked meditative, then swallowed. "Mm. That's good…"

"Any idea what we'll be seeing in the practical?" Neville asked.

"Merlin knows," Hermione said. "...actually, I'm not sure he would, he lived a long time ago and there's plenty of Charms that were invented since then…"

As it transpired, the Charms practical that afternoon was in many respects surprisingly familiar. It was a lot like what Harry had done almost exactly two years ago in the same hall, and with the same examiners – Harry had Professor Tofty again, looking slightly older and more wizened, but who greeted Harry like an old friend.

There were a few new spells which were too difficult for the OWLs, certainly, but that paled in comparison to the big difference for the NEWTs. Unlike the OWLs, almost every spell in the exam had to be done point-cast or cast silently or cast to an unusual level of control… or, in at least two cases, without your wand at all.

In comparison to the Theory paper, Harry felt he'd done really quite well on the Practical. He wouldn't have said he got full marks, but when Professor Tofty asked if he had anything else to demonstrate that bit went on for almost as long as the bits where he'd been asked to do things. The fact he could cast a lot of quite advanced spells with his breath just as well as with his wand led to Professor Tofty writing down several notes in an impressed sort of way, and when he mentioned the Protean Charms he'd been involved with setting up on the Ratatoskr that led to a five minute digression where he and Professor Tofty discussed the spell before the old examiner seemed to remember himself and move on to a quick final question about the Homorphus Charm.

Tuesday was then a day of Transfiguration revision intermixed with Harry writing up his Runes project. The day's exam was Care of Magical Creatures, which only Dean was doing, and while Harry could have gone down to help out he really did need to get his Runes writeup finished so there simply wasn't time for it.

Part way through describing his choice of runic language, and the pros and cons of Early Babylonian versus other approaches like Mayan or Futhark, there was some movement outside the window which caught Harry's attention.

Ollie was rising into the air with great sweeps of his iridescent wings, accompanied by a slightly nervous-looking Nora, and with Dean sitting on Ollie's back as the big Opaleye climbed to at least as high as the top of the castle. Then four coloured rings of smoke appeared, and Ollie's head snaked around to look at Dean for a moment before heading towards the blue ring.

"Didn't know that was on the Care of Magical Creatures NEWT, these days," someone said. "It's not in the textbook."

"Have you seen the latest revision?" someone else checked. "There's a bit in there about the Hogwarts Dragons..."

Wednesday saw Transfiguration, which was perhaps his worst subject at NEWT level. It wasn't one he felt he was bad at, at least not really, but it was just something where there were so many technical details going on that didn't excite him like the same sort of thing in Runes or Alchemy did.

On the Theory paper, in particular, it really showed. There were a few of the sort of questions where you had to give a single answer or a short answer, but then there were several essay questions, and one of them (which was about the differences between homogenous and heterogenous substances as a source material for a permanent transfiguration) Harry just stared at it for a minute or so before scribbling a quick note to himself and moving on to the next question.

That one was about Human Transfiguration, and while it was just as technical Harry could actually remember the details for that one – or, more specifically, he wasn't being confused by the way that similar sorts of questions came up in Alchemy but with potentially different answers.

Someone groaned, about halfway through the paper, and Harry could emphasize.

Towards the end, Harry went back to that question that had stumped him earlier, and his tail lashed a bit (earning him a sharp look from Professor Marchbanks) before he curled it around the leg of his chair to avoid disturbing the exam room.

He considered for a moment more, then with a mental shrug just put down something that sounded vaguely right – even if it did use some of the language from Alchemy instead.

Harry was fairly sure he wasn't getting full marks on that question, but any marks would be better than leaving it blank.

"Ugh," Neville grumbled, at lunch.

"Tell me about it," Ron agreed. "Actually, don't. Remember that thing I mentioned."

"Can we talk about exams where the person we're talking to didn't have it?" Harry asked. "I know that hasn't happened yet for me, but it has for Dean."

He picked up one of the latest things the experimenting House-Elves had come up with, which someone in Fifth-Year had called a 'burrito', and bit the top off.

"Um…" Hermione began, hesitantly. "I think you're supposed to take the foil off?"

Harry inspected it, then the other burritos on the table, and swallowed.

"That does make sense," he said. "Still, it adds an aluminium-y taste."

Ron shook his head. "Same old Harry," he said. "Anyway… hold on."

He pointed his wand at his knife, lips moving slightly, and turned it into a fork. Then his fork into a knife.

"Now that's dedication," Dean said. "Or something."

"Use the fork!" Hermione said suddenly, sounding like she was barely avoiding a fit of giggles.

Harry wondered if she'd been getting enough sleep.

After the worrying theory exam, Harry was ready for the Practical to be very difficult indeed – and it was, but in a different sort of way.

While the Charms Practical had been very like the OWL one, the Transfiguration Practical was all focused on the new things they'd been working on over their NEWT year. Silent Transfiguration made an appearance, and Harry had to do a couple of fiddly ones without saying a word but while still using the official Transfiguration spells, but then they moved on to Free Transfiguration which required a lot more concentration.

Professor Antimony asked Harry to perform half a dozen Transfigurations in sequence on the same object, rattling each one off as soon as Harry had finished the previous one, then asked him to go back to the second thing she'd had him Transfigure it into rather than the first. That means that Harry had to perform the Untransfiguration spell with a great deal of finesse, and he let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding when it turned out to be the fluffy teddy bear he'd been aiming for rather than a wooden spoon or a large rock like he'd worried.

At least his worried breath hadn't set fire to the fluffy teddy bear, as well.

Then there was the hardest bit of the examination of all, which was Human Transfiguration, and there they found they had a bit of a problem because the exam paper said that the pupil had to Transfigure their own hand and foot. They had Madam Pomfrey on hand to revert any problems, but nobody had thought to have a spare person along in case someone couldn't Transfigure their own hand or foot for magic-resistance-related reasons, and after a minute or so of confusion Sally-Anne volunteered since she'd finished her own practical.

At least the actual spellcasting went all right (though Harry hadn't managed to produce the tortoiseshell pattern for the cats-paw that Professor Antimony asked for, having only achieved a calico), so Harry left that exam feeling like he might actually have passed Transfiguration after all.

The only one of their group who was doing Potions was Hermione, and that meant for everyone else it was – theoretically – a day with nothing to do.

Harry wasn't so naive as to believe that was the case, though. He still had more write-up to do on his Runes project, and so did Ron – who'd been able to start earlier, because the Ratatoskr had been finished some time before Harry's telescope, but who had a lot more to write about.

Indeed, Harry had to contribute to that one as well, because he'd been involved in the process of making it. Ron was insistent that they had to get it all right (or as much as possible) because, well, this was the official writeup of the process of inventing the hyperdrive.

Harry had to agree, and so the two of them spent much of the day working on Runes writeup one way or another – Harry working on his telescope one while Ron did the details about using the Ratatoskr and the runes involved with the fuelling system (among other smaller arrays that had been included) and then the two of them working together on the FAST sequence and how it had been connected to the silver simulacrum.

"One of the weirdest things about it is that… now I think about it, I think the silver globe is sort of essential to how it works," Harry explained, to a politely interested Neville as his friend tried to decide whether to keep revising his next subject (Herbology, where he already knew basically everything) or the one he expected to have the most trouble with (Arithmancy, next Thursday and right before Defence). "Because normally when you Apparate it's just you – if you Apparate when you're on a train, say, you don't bring the train with you, but you bring what you're carrying. But because Ron was holding the silver globe, and that was connected by the Protean Charm to being a representation of the Ratatoskr, it's like he was carrying it with him as he moved."

"...yeah, you're right," Neville agreed. "That is weird. It's probably, um… hold on, it's a word something like quince."

Harry tilted his head.

"One of these weird structures which affects itself, or produces itself, or something like that," Neville said, picking up an Arithmancy book. "Um… hold on, here we go. A quine, that's the word."

"...now I want some quince," Harry admitted. "I don't think I've ever had it before."

"And when what you've had before is a list which includes, as far as I can remember, brick, that's saying something," Dean muttered.

Harry had enough free time over Friday lunchtime – which was when Dean was doing Divination – to fly out and get a book, which he did in London because while the Fort William bookstores were good it was hard to compete with the middle of London.

Actually, that wasn't strictly correct. It wasn't so much that Harry had free time, as that he decided quite abruptly that if he kept focusing on runes for much longer without a break he'd probably go completely bananas.

With that in mind, Harry had a look for a book which he could read a bit at a time – perhaps a chapter at a time – to reward himself after another hour or so of revision or Runes or something of that nature. As it happened he found two books which would do, one of them the latest Anne McCaffrey book – nothing to do with Pern, sadly, but the third Freedom book about the Catteni empire and the humans (and non-humans) dropped on the world of Freedom, andtheir now-quite-developed home there.

The second book was also a sequel, to that sort of intriguing book Oath of Swords he'd read a while ago. That one had ended with the main character becoming a Paladin, a chosen warrior of the war god, and it seemed as though this second book was about the implications of that and what it meant and so on and so forth.

Both seemed like excellent ways to relax, and Harry Apparated his way home several pounds lighter but two books heavier.

Then he went right back to explaining how he'd checked each runic interaction for problems.

"Okay, it's the weekend now," Ron informed them, as Dean came into the common room.

"It is?" one of the Third-Years asked.

"As far as I'm concerned, it is," Ron replied. "And, more to the point, I want to hear how Dean's exam went because it's one I won't stress out about. If that's okay, mate?"

Dean shrugged, then sat down next to them. "You know how it is in Divination, right?"

Harry went back over everything he'd heard about Divination. "So someone predicted your death?"

"Weirdly enough, that didn't come up," Dean answered. "I think they got a centaur to write some of the questions on the theory paper, there was some stuff about what it means when Pluto is in Taurus and stuff."

"What does it mean when Pluto is in Taurus, then?" Neville asked.

"Means it's a long bloody time ago or a long bloody time in the future," Dean answered. "Last time it was was in eighteen eighty-four, so it's basically Dumbledore and anyone older than him. But it's all about cycles of likelihood and so on."

He stretched. "I'm really looking forward to getting to sleep in pretty much until next Friday… anyway, the practical was kind of interesting, a lot of it was to do with finding stuff out about the examiner. Little stuff, but I got right that he'd recently bought a pet rabbit, stuff like that. And I got right which card he had, that was interesting."

That sounded curiously like stage magic, and when Harry mentioned that Dean nodded.

"Yeah, it is," he agreed. "Except I actually was using magic. You had to use a different method each time, and each one you got right was a point…"

"Anything go weird, like in third year?" Ron checked. "You know, like a proper prophecy or something?"

"Closest I got was dropping my Tarot deck on top of my lithomancy kit," Dean replied, glumly. "Half the major arcana went all over the floor, and I think I lost my The Star."

Harry tilted his head slightly. "So what does that mean?"

"The examiner gave that one to me for free, actually," Dean said. "He told me it meant I dropped my tarot deck."

Since the weather was quite good over the weekend, Harry took his revision – in this case his complete set of Alchemy notes, because he'd been doing Runes for days on end – out onto the grounds.

There was exactly one Quidditch practice session while he was out there, Ron drilling the whole team intensely as he relished getting out into the open air for a bit, and Harry sat in the stands for an hour or two watching in between taking notes on how you neutralized properties and conveyant catalysts.

With Gryffindor in the lead and the favourites for the Cup, but with only one more chance for Ron to win the Cup, it seemed pretty clear to Harry that his friend didn't want to give up the chance for another Gryffindor trophy. Everyone else seemed to be catching his focused enthusiasm, as well, and while his own Quidditch days were years behind him Harry felt as though the Gryffindor team was in rare form – technically proficient, tactically minded, and with that little extra something as well.

Ron couldn't spend all of Saturday practicing, though – if for no other reason than that Draco Malfoy and the rest of the Slytherin team also wanted to shake the tarnish off – and once he was done they adjourned to the grass that sloped down to the lake.

"Surprised you're not watching the Slytherin team practice," he said, glancing over at Blaise. "Isn't that required by team solidarity?"

"Team solidarity is a Hufflepuff concept," Daphne informed them all, precisely. "When Slytherins support their team it's because they think their team is going to win… or because they think it benefits them to be showing a united front against the other Houses."

"So why do Ravenclaws support their team, then?" Neville asked, looking interested as he paged through Deciduously Deceptive – one of the extra research books he'd found for Herbology. "It's not solidarity, and it's not one of those, um, machiavellian reasons."

"Statistics, clearly," Blaise said. "They've done the research and found that teams with more supporters statistically perform better. Of course, they're sometimes a bit prone to not see the wood for the trees, so they get the cause and effect the wrong way around."

Harry stifled a snigger. "And Gryffindors?"

"You can make a Gryffindor cheer for anything," Daphne answered. "Watch. Three cheers for the exams!"

Hermione looked conflicted for a moment, then shook her head and cheered.

"See?" Daphne asked, looking smug. "Told you."

"I only did it because it was funny," Hermione protested.

Seeing what everyone was revising over the weekend was sort of interesting. Harry was alternating his time between Alchemy and Runes, of course, on the grounds that he'd be able to do one last big blast of Defence revision after both those exams were over, and Hermione switched to an Arithmancy book around half past three in the afternoon to make sure she didn't lose track of that.

Blaise was reading a History of Magic book, his only comment being that the two extra years of that subject had given him plenty of interesting ideas, while Tracey (being the only one doing Muggle Studies) was going through a pile of fairly recent newspapers. One of them prominently featured the Good Friday agreement, and another mentioned the Millennium Dome (which Harry vaguely remembered hearing about, though he wasn't very clear on the details).

It was a nice, pleasant sort of afternoon, a change being as good as a rest, and as the sun slipped lower and it got towards dinnertime Harry was idly contemplating going through another few chapters of The War God's Own when he caught sight of something soaring over a nearby line of trees.

Horst popped up over the copse, grabbing what looked like a drastically oversized Quaffle in both hands, and flicked it down towards the ground. There was just a flicker of Sally's blue wings, and then Harry was interested enough that he put his things in his bag before taking off to go and have a look.

He rose quickly, giving him a better view, and gradually all ten of the (other) Hogwarts dragons came into view – four of them up each end of a big grassy area marked out with scratch lines on the lawn, with Gary lying off to the side and Nora stood on her hind legs and watching all the others as they batted a ball back and forth.

"Okay, good!" he heard her say – loudly enough for the other dragons, but Harry could only just hear her due to the distance. "Wait – hold on, Lucy, you can't do that!"

Lucy closed her mouth with a snap, and the flicker of flame she'd been exhaling waved into the air. "Why not?"

"Because it might break the ball," Nora explained, as Harry got a bit closer. "Then we wouldn't be able to play until we got another one, and it'd be rude to keep asking someone to make us new balls."

Lucy nodded her head, looking contrite.

"It's okay, now you know," Nora told her. "So who wants to be in goal now? Remember, if you're in goal you have to have at least one foot on the ground, but you get to use your wings to catch."

Billy and Sally put their hand-paws up, and Nora re-picked the teams to shuffle them around a bit, and they'd just started playing again when Gary tossed Nora's Silver Snitch into the air.

It buzzed around in a circle, and the dragons from both sides lunged towards it – eventually Vicky managed to be the one to actually get it, and Nora clapped.

"Well done!" she said. "How many points do you have now?"

"Nineteen!" Vicky shouted.

"Silly, it's twelve," Nora told her. "I've been counting for everyone. You had eight, and then you got the silver ball so that's four more."

Harry wasn't quite sure how scoring worked yet, but it seemed like they were all having fun.

Around midnight on Sunday evening, on top of the Astronomy tower, Harry turned his new telescope towards the sky.

"Okay, you're going to want to point it over... there," Ron said, pointing, and Harry swivelled it in the right direction – near the horizon. "That's the Andromeda constellation."

"Right," Harry agreed. "Are we looking for a particular star?"

"Nah, mate, I want to see how the galaxy looks through this," Ron replied. "I've got an idea for how to tell how much better it is, there's maths and stuff we do in Astronomy about it, but Andromeda can look pretty good through a normal telescope."

He bent over the eyepiece. "Let's see… Merlin's wispy nostril hairs. That's beautiful."

After a comment like that, Harry had to look, and – well, he had to admit to being impressed as well.

They'd both done an Astronomy OWL, and they'd both seen what Andromeda looked like through a telescope, but this one was gathering a lot more light. It wasn't nearly as zoomed in as the pictures the Hubble Space Telescope took, because the zoom on Harry's telescope hadn't changed, but while it had about the same field of view as a typical telescope the detail was so much brighter and richer because – well, because it was gathering so much more light.

"Let's have a look at Capella," Ron decided, pointing just about due north, and Harry duly swung the telescope around again. "There's a binary pair near there which is kind of hard to get a good look at with our normal telescopes…"

Ron bent over the eyepiece, then, as Harry stepped back to let the expert handle it.

"Wow, this is actually kind of hard to follow," the squirrel Animagus admitted. "There's almost too many stars… okay, there's Capella itself and the others are…"

Ron's voice quieted into muttering for a minute or so, then he nodded. "Okay, I've got it. Yeah, I can make them out really easily here… it's kind of weird because normally you don't expect the stars to be this bright but this focused down, they're usually smeared out at least slightly. Must be the bigger lens."

Harry could understand that well enough, and had a look himself.

"It's in the middle of the view," Ron clarified. "They should be slightly red?"

At least a few stars in the field of view were slightly red, but there was only one in the middle of the view… and it definitely was a pair, Harry could distinguish them both.

He made a note of that, and Ron checked his chart again.

"Okay, I've got two possibilities here," he said, musing slightly. "...let's go for broke, I think. Where's Aquarius…"

"What does going for broke mean?" Harry checked.

"It means… hold on, I kind of want to see if this is going to work first, before I explain," Ron told him. "Because if it doesn't work it'll sound stupid…"

Harry waited, looking out over the grounds around the sleeping castle and contemplating his time at Hogwarts.

Ron was alternately checking some scribbled notes and muttering imprecations to himself, mostly about Merlin but occasionally moving on to Morgana and once Shakespeare, then whistled.

"So," Harry asked. "Does it sound stupid?"

"No, what it does is look bloody amazing," Ron replied. "Or, well, actually it looks like a nice blue Uranus, a sort of sense of the rings which are kind of tilted towards us right now, and some little dots in almost a line which is most of the moons."

He shook his head.

"We need to work out a way to make this zoom in more," he said. "The thing that's limiting how good it is really is the zoom level, it means everything is tiny bright dots. But everywhere I point it I'm seeing more stars than we really should, so it's definitely gathering way more light than it should… it's only a guess but I think it's acting like it's got a mirror several feet across."

Harry made a note of that as well, then turned the telescope to look at Sirius. (The star, not the Dogfather.) The result was brighter than Harry had seen anything through a telescope before, or seemed to be – it certainly was the brightest thing he'd seen through a telescope at night, and Harry wondered if he should think of it as Sirius White to distinguish it from the other one.

He looked for a couple of minutes, then let Ron look, then took a slight breath.

"Lumos," he incanted, and Ron threw up a hand involuntarily as light streamed out of Harry's mouth.

"Cripes, Harry, warn me next time," he asked. "That's buggered my night vision and no mistake…"

Harry's ears went flat. "Sorry," he admitted. "But I wanted to show you something else I worked out, and I kind of need light for it."

Working carefully, with his tongue stuck out (mostly to remind him not to close his mouth), Harry took the runed band off the end of the telescope, then twisted it around to invert it – putting the runes on the inside.

Then he swivelled it to offer Ron the eyepiece. "Have a look."

Ron did so, and frowned. "Okay, now I can't see… um, anything, actually. Point that mouth this way? ...no, it's still completely black. What did you do?"

"It's kind of the reverse effect, I think," Harry explained. "Instead of gathering loads of light and making things much brighter, it's making things much dimmer so it's just black."

"Weird," Ron summarized, as Harry removed the band and flipped it around again. "I half feel like asking to borrow this telescope for my practical, the only problem is we're not allowed to bring in outside telescopes!"

With his Runes coursework finally finished, and with how he'd been up well past midnight, Harry slept in on Monday morning – only vaguely noticing Neville going off to his Herbology theory paper, then going right back to sleep.

There were some days you just got the sleep in early and did the revision later.

Harry hadn't quite been keeping up with the Quibbler, but when he saw the most recent one he had to do a bit of a double-take.

It announced shock revelations about the Minister of Magic, and at Harry's reaction Ginny grinned before passing him the paper.

"It's the centre spread," she explained, and Harry opened the paper to that section before reading through.

It was a very strange article. It went into great detail about how the Minister had been the subject of an assassination attempt by a centaur, which sounded only vaguely familiar (and Harry had the feeling Conal or Xenia would have mentioned it at some point, if only to apologize) and about various peculiar decisions indicating that the Minister had some kind of problem with going dotty in his old age.

It wasn't until almost the very end of the article – with a mention of attending Queen Victoria's funeral wearing an Admiral's hat – that Harry realized that the shock revelations in question were about Faris Spavin, the Minister from 1865 to 1903.

And were mostly the sort of thing you found in a History of Magic textbook.

"Well, it was certainly shocking at the time," Luna explained, when Harry asked. "And I didn't know about it until I read about it."

Hermione muttered something about tabloids.

Most of Monday afternoon, and well into the evening, was taken up with frantic revision. Mostly that was Harry, Ron and Hermione swapping questions about runes from all over the world, while Neville was doing his Herbology (and Dean tried not to gloat about the fact that he'd only got one more exam, having done four of his five subjects the first week of NEWTs).

Eventually, when it was just gone past eleven-thirty, Harry closed his book with a snap.

"I think it's time to stop for the night," he announced. "The exam's tomorrow, and we're not going to do ourselves any good if we keep going until two in the morning, then can't get to sleep until five and end up doing the exam on less than four hours of sleep."

Ron frowned, looking dubious. "What do you think we should do, then?" he asked. "Just go to bed?"

"I'm planning on having some hot chocolate, then going to bed with an Alchemy book," Harry answered. "And not even reading that after it's gone about one in the morning, even if I've not gone to sleep by then. You should probably do Astronomy, though that's sort of a guess."

"By the way," Dean said. "I had an idea, just something to look forward to. You know how when our Defence NEWT is over we'll have done all our schoolwork, basically ever?"

That got nods, including from the slightly frazzled Neville. (There'd been an incident with an out of control Greater Spurred Vine that had got into the wrong compost, and he'd had to fight it off with Panthera – though the examiners had seemed to approve, so Neville said that as it hadn't been his mistake he hoped his marks would be fine.)

"Well," Dean went on. "What do you think about the idea of going and having some firewhisky, the five of us? To celebrate making it through Hogwarts."

"I'm not sure I approve of getting drunk," Hermione admitted.

"Well, I wasn't meaning getting drunk, just… having a drink," Dean clarified. "Unless you want to get drunk, anyway. It just seems like something nice to do."

"My uncle liked drinking a whole bottle at once," Ron said. "He was a right laugh. Of course, he did end up a bit peculiar towards the end…"

Harry wondered if firewhisky was one of those things which meant what it said, and if his friends could experience breathing fire themselves by having some.

"Anyway, just think about it," Dean suggested. "I don't want to do peer pressure or anything… or we could go and get a Muggle drink, you need to be eighteen to buy a drink at a Muggle shop but that's not a problem for some of us."

"Do Muggles have any interesting drinks?" Neville asked. "I know they have wines, and so on…"

"Well, I don't actually know what counts as wizarding drinks," Dean admitted. "Wine counts as both or something…"

The Runes theory paper, which greeted Harry after breakfast the next morning, was difficult… but it was difficult in the right way, which came as a distinct relief for the teenage dragon.

Some of it was just based on memorization, like what the secondary meanings were of certain runes in Hieroglyphics or Mayan symbols or Akkadian, or asking Harry to write out the runic interaction rules for the Aramaic family of runic languages (fortunately without asking for the complete list). But most of the rest was the sort of thing that someone who interacted with runes for a job would actually be doing, like working out the meanings of a sequence or finding the problematic interaction in a set of runes. There were even questions about both constructing and deconstructing runic sequences, necessarily simplified a bit (the question gave Harry choices instead of just expecting him to construct one from scratch, for that one, while the deconstructing questions did things like showing a damaged sequence and asked what the effects would be).

It was a bruising mental workout, and perhaps the best question on the whole exam paper was the one at the end. It was a long-form one, showing a drawing of an actual object – in this case, a necklace with a dozen runic charms on it, each one with a single rune – and asked Harry (or, by inference, whoever else was taking the paper) to outline examples of ways you could arrange the necklace to do different things.

The idea of having a runic necklace with different bits that could be rearranged was one they hadn't actually run into yet, and Harry had come up with four arrangements and was working on a fifth by the time they had to down quills.

After a quick lunch, it was time for the Practical. All the examiners were present, and while it was a slightly staggering four hours long that was divided up into three hours of practical questions (everything from scribing letters from three different runic languages onto pieces of slate to a professional standard, to asking you to explain why a runic object hadn't worked) and one hour of discussion about the details of your project. In Harry's case his turn was in hour three of four, meaning he had to interrupt his question about how to safely disable a protective rune sequence that had been designed to be a problem if interfered with to go over and have his discussion, but then again they had to do something like this or have the Runes exam sprawl out over two days.

Professor Marchbanks seemed to have read every word of the write-up on both projects Harry had contributed to, and on at least four occasions she asked extremely technical questions where Harry had to confess that he wasn't quite sure of the answer.

He made mental notes to look them up later, though. Possibly after Friday's Defence Against the Dark Arts exam.

One thing that did feel distinctly strange was talking about how the light-blocking effect was total, and so couldn't be used for things like observing the sun. That meant that Professor Marchbanks said it was a curiosity but largely without value, which Harry had to agree with even though he had a very specific purpose in mind for it.

He didn't think it would be very good to mention in your exams that you planned to install a rune sequence on a basilisk.

Wednesday saw several NEWT students trying to cram the last few facts about History of Magic into their heads, and others – like Harry – trying to pick up a few more details about Alchemy that might come up on the test.

And then there was Blaise, who was doing both subjects, and since they'd been scheduled on the same day he apparently got special consideration. He wasn't allowed to give details, but the way he said it (and the way he glanced at Hermione before mentioning it) left Harry fairly sure that he'd be doing the exams at the same time with the help of a Time-Turner.

June was assigned to be his escort to make sure he didn't try and tell anyone what the questions were ahead of time, which was fair enough because she was one of the Prefects who wasn't from his house and also wasn't doing exams this year.

After that curiosity, though, Harry and Hermione went back upstairs to drop off everything except the things they were allowed to take into the exam – and it was on with the Alchemy theory paper.

Harry had nurtured a suspicion for some years now that if Alchemy had been offered as a subject during the days of the Marauders – that meaning the original four, Moony, Padfoot, Prongs and The Other One – they'd all have taken it.

It had that slight feel of lateral thinking which was the hallmark of many jokes, and it involved the same sorts of things as the more creative bits of magic that they'd produced (along with Sirius' retroactive proteges Fred, George, Tyler and Anna, for that matter)… and, of course, it was difficult but not in the boring mind-numbing memorize-this sort of way. It was a much more open and creative activity, where you could end up quite fascinated.

Then again, there was really only so much you could do with a NEWT theory exam paper.

Perhaps because it was a subject with no OWL paper before it, some of the questions were quite simple and the sort of thing that Harry thought of as really being the basics (like the primary use of copper in alchemical transmutations, or the concept of the Observer Effect which was the formal name for why many transmutations were somewhat dependent on the alchemist).

They got trickier fast, though, with some questions asking about characteristic properties of materials from tin to pitch to coal, and others asking him to outline the way he'd add properties from one substance to another – first with most of the steps laid out and a few missing, then entirely freehand, and finally one where the list of available ingredients was limited to only a dozen and Harry had to work out what to do.

It was around that point that Professor Tofty quietly asked him to stop lashing his tail, as it could disturb other students.

Apologizing and wincing, Harry moved on to the final few questions on the exam. There were two essay ones, and then the last one of all was a particularly cunning one where it outlined a transmutation and then asked why it wouldn't work.

Harry found four reasons, but he wasn't sure those were the only ones.

Despite his own earlier injunction not to talk about any subject they hadn't done yet, and for that matter the fact he was reading a book about Astronomy in the middle of eating, Ron was curious enough to ask about how Alchemy was going.

Harry said that so far it seemed to have been easier than Transfiguration and about the same as Runes, though also mentioned the extra degree of interpretation and said that that was both good and bad.

"There's only so much interpretation you can do in Arithmancy," Neville contributed, flicking between his own last-day studying and looking at the others. "At least when there's a little bit you can argue for why you're right…"

"Unless you're barking up the wrong tree," Harry mused. "Then you might spend several minutes of time barking when you could just turn back to human and get a broomstick."

Dean sniggered. "Your idea of what dogs do is a bit skewed by living with Sirius, huh?"

"Probably," Harry shrugged.

The afternoon's practical exam was a very practical exam, with alembics and retorts and all sorts set up throughout the exam room and cupboards full of reagents lining both side walls.

There was also quite a surprise, for Harry and for everyone else, because the examiners were both over six hundred and eighty years old.

Nicolas Flamel was wearing a quite fine outfit of the sort which looked a little like it had been in fashion when he was thirty or so, and fortunately for him so much time had passed that it looked interesting and formal rather than hopelessly outdated. It was a sort of burnished red colour, while Nicolas Flamel himself was so pale as to be almost white, but he and his wife Perenelle (who was almost the same colour but with a blue version of the same outfit, topped with a wimple for no reason Harry could discern) greeted everyone with a smile and a hand-shake each.

"It's lovely to see so many of you following the practices of the Art," Nicolas said, putting an audible capital letter on the word Art.

His accent was French, but with a slightly odd sound to it – one that Harry had never quite heard before, almost as though it had a hint of an American-style flavour to it.

It might have been an accent from hundreds of years ago, possibly. More hundreds of years ago than normal, that was.

"Your papers are on the tables, with three tasks to take up. I'd like to ask you to do them in the order listed, since one of them has no time critical components and Perenelle and I will be asking you some questions about your course work and note book during the time you're doing that transmutation," the ancient Alchemist said. "Does anyone have any questions?"

Blaise put up his hand. "Are you going to tell us which task isn't time critical?"

Perenelle was the one to answer that. "It would be obvious as soon as the first person was called up. It's the one about making a better candle."

Harry was already interested, and he hadn't even seen the questions yet.

After around two years doing it – more, depending on how you counted making the mithril for Panthera – Harry had managed to reach the point where doing a transmutation was sort of relaxing, overall.

It wasn't exactly easy to work out the bits which were missing, certainly – the bits where Harry had to use his knowledge of how Alchemy was actually done to fill in the gaps – but once he'd got started, letting the reagents simmer away in their alembic as salt water and iron gently mixed was something that Harry could just let happen.

It even meant he had the time to work out what the missing bits on the other two reactions were, until the rusting process had gone on for fifteen minutes and it was time to decant.

There were only a few flecks of reddish rust in the water, so far, but they were enough for Harry to be going on with. He took some gypsum – which was a different sort of salt to normal rock salt – and dissolved it in some more warm water, along with a scattering of Invar dust and some quartz – then, after five careful seconds, added the slightly rusty water.

The resultant mixture was heated to boiling point for five minutes to charge it with energy, and Harry wrote down what he was doing, then put a dozen more iron nails in.

It wasn't quite fast enough to be visible, but what the transmutation had done was to concentrate down the rusting process that had happened in fifteen minutes so that it only took five seconds with the new mixture. The Invar was associated closely with things like precision clockmaking, and the quartz was the same, while the gypsum was just because it meant there was a different salt mixture involved.

Another fifteen minutes, and there was now quite a lot of rust in the water – and Harry repeated the process all over again.

By the end of the first hour of the exam, Harry had a small flask full of reddish salty liquid which had been sensitized three times in total. It didn't have many purposes, at least not as it was, but it was a rusting agent so potent that it would dissolve iron like acid without actually being acid.

And sometimes, you just wanted to get rid of iron.

The next one was the wax one, and Harry was most of the way through – letting the wax slowly steep as it absorbed the potential for storing energy from sunlight, via orange peel and phosphor – when he was asked to come and discuss his alchemical project and his notes.

Madam Flamel, as it transpired, was extremely knowledgeable about Alchemy.

She freely admitted that, well, she'd not been the alchemist out of the two of them until decades after Nicolas had completed his Magnum Opus, but then again as someone who had lived for longer than even most witches or wizards could ever contemplate she'd had so long to pick things up that even a dabbling interest in the alchemical mysteries had reached the point she was still one of the most practised… practitioners… alive.

Of course, that didn't have to mean there was any pressure.

"Would you be able to explain how a transistor works?" Madam Flamel asked. "I am afraid that I am not necessarily up to date on how some Muggle technology works."

"It's… I think it's about forty to fifty years old," Harry said, frowning. "And the idea is that it's sort of like an electric switch, but it's an automatic one, and it can be very small. It's mostly made of silicon, like rock crystals, but it's got other bits in it as well which make it act like a switch."

He reached for his project, shuffling through until he found one of the diagrams. (Dean had given him some help with sketching it out, though the diagram itself as it went in the report was Harry's work.) "You connect these parts to the rest of the circuit, but the electricity doesn't flow through… but if you have electricity flow down this one, then suddenly it turns it on."

"Ah, interesting," Madam Flamel told him. "So you used the principle of inheritance?"

"That's right," Harry agreed. "I thought that having materials that provide a property attached to these in and out pins, but attaching the condition to the third pin, would make it so that you could have the property only act when the condition was met. It was harder than I'd thought, though, because I had to work out a way to specify which part of a complex alchemical transmutation should go to which pin."

He smiled slightly. "I considered telling it in a clear, calm voice, but that doesn't work very well even on humans who don't speak English so I didn't think it'd be likely to work on something that doesn't speak anything at all."

Madam Flamel chuckled slightly. "It's not a bad description of magic, sometimes, but you are correct," she told him. "So, how did you solve the problem?"

"I ended up building on the principle of inheritance," Harry said. "Since the legs of a transistor usually have wires attached to them, I used wires of different metals-"

"Why different metals?" Madam Flamel interrupted. "And which metals did you use?"

"Copper for the middle leg," Harry told her. "That was the first one, because it's conductive and known for being conductive, and since this is the last step or nearly the last step it won't interfere with a coppering..."

Harry came out of the Alchemy exam feeling that he'd learned something, almost as though it had been as much a lesson as anything, though it wasn't as if he'd been just lectured to. Quite the opposite – Madam Flamel, he now realized, had essentially taken him on a rapid run through the whole of the logic he'd followed in his project, plus a few of the side steps in his notebook, and done so in such a way that he had to have been good at Alchemy just to sustain his side of the conversation. At the same time, she'd pointed out a few of the places where he missed something, or how he could avoid blind alleys in his work in future, and while some of it made him feel a little foolish he was still grateful.

He also had some candles that could recharge in sunlight, though owing to a slight miscalculation they smelled of orange peel while recharging instead of while burning.

Hopefully it wouldn't cost many marks.

Thursday was a lovely break in the week's exams, with nothing scheduled, and since there was only one exam left – Defence, which Harry was fairly sure was his best subject – the teenage dragon was able to actually relax a little.

Of course, that break in the exams only really applied to him. And Dean, but then again Dean had been down to his last exam for almost a week already.

For the others, Hermione and Neville were off to a punishing Arithmancy exam which took up the whole morning and part of the afternoon, and then Ron's Astronomy exam sprawled over the later afternoon and then the evening.

"I'm just bloody glad the Defence exam doesn't start until ten in the morning tomorrow," Ron said, not for the first time. "I'm not expecting to get out of Astronomy until after one AM, and I'll be lucky to be able to get straight to bed."

"Considered going to Pomfrey for a sleeping potion?" Dean asked, sketching something out with a pencil on a piece of clean white paper.

"Nope," Ron replied. "Those mess up your sleep for days afterwards. I'm looking forward to sleeping for ages after the NEWTs are done with, but I'll do it properly…"

"Probably for the best," Harry agreed.

He leaned over a little, wing twitching as he instinctively tried to steady himself and controlled his reaction by reminding himself he wasn't currently flying. "What are you revising at the moment?"

"Wards and stuff," Ron answered. "Well, you know, not officially wards, but positioned defensive spells."

"So wards," Dean summarized.

"Pretty much," Ron agreed. "Anti-Apparition and Anti-Disapparition spells still make my head hurt a bit… I kind of want to see if the Ratatoskr can punch through one, but if it can then that whole ship becomes a secret and I'd rather keep it."

Harry hummed. "I can't remember, are there anti-Portkey spells?"

"I… think there are," Ron said, sounding dubious. "I mean, I can't think of them offhand… where's that textbook, again?"

He held up his wand. "Accio."

"Is that technically practice?" Harry asked, as Ron caught the textbook out of the air.

"Could be," Ron agreed. "I could summon someone's shoe, or something… not sure what the NEWT Defence exam is going to be like, actually."

He frowned. "Perhaps it'll be duels? Or, like, fighting a dragon?"

"Nah, you can't set that," Dean replied. "They'd just get upset."

"Good point," Ron agreed.

Harry flicked his ears, sending his glasses bouncing up for a bit. "I think I'd get upset if the exam was fighting a dragon. I like the local dragons, even though only one of them is me and ten of them aren't and that's only nine percent. So it's statistically irrelevant."

"I'm not sure that's how statistics works," Ron said. "Is it?"

"Let's ask someone who does Arithmancy," Harry suggested. "Fortunately, we know two quite well. Is that how statistics works?"

Ron gave him an odd, tolerant look. "I don't think they heard you, mate, they're busy."

"I normally speak this loudly when talking to them," Harry replied, suppressing a smile. "If they can't hear me, I respectfully submit that it's their problem."

Every time he did this he could see why Dumbledore did it. It was great fun.

"By the way, Harry, what do you think of this?" Dean asked, turning his sketchbook around. "You're a dragon, not the same sort of dragon as Ollie and the others, but still a dragon. How does this look?"

There was a sketch of a sort of saddle on the paper, and Harry inspected it carefully.

It looked a bit like it had taken inspiration from saddles for horses, but Dean had put a lot of thought into how you could modify it as well. The bit that was mostly flat on a horse's back had a high peak in it down the middle, for a back ridge, and the cantle and pommel (Harry was fairly sure those were the words) were raised up higher to compensate.

There were also some stirrups.

"It's a pretty good start, I think," Harry said, looking around at his own back and thinking about the shape of the backs of all the other dragons. Some had ridges – Nora was, after all, a Ridgeback – but the very fact the name was used was because it was in some way diagnostic, and several other dragons didn't have them. "I think maybe that bit should be more flexible, so it can adjust to the dragon instead of assuming it's got a ridge… and you're going to need a safety strap, as well."

"I wondered about that," Dean replied. "How long should that be? If it's too short it's not going to let me do anything useful, but if it's too long…"

The Fat Lady opened while they were talking, and Hermione came in – as did Lapcat, the lithe panther slinking up to his normal chair.

Then he became Neville.

"I think I screwed up one of the questions," he said, looking glum. "There was a bit where Professor Marchbanks asked me to work out a really difficult problem, in front of her, and I didn't do very well."

"Hmm…" Harry said, wondering.

"Huh?" Neville asked.

"I'm just wondering if the idea was to see how you did the problem," Harry explained. "It seems like a really crafty thing to do. Do you know if Professor Marchbanks was originally a Slytherin?"

Neville scrunched up his face a bit. "I've no idea how I'd work that out."

"Well, I know that the problem I got was very hard as well," Hermione said. "In hindsight I think I took a bit too long on it."

"As in, you came out of the exam after me, despite having a G surname while mine is an L surname," Neville said, seeming a bit less tense now. "What was it, anyway?"

Hermione glanced at Ron. "Actually, it was how far the Ratatoskr could Apparate. So I had to remember the Arithmantic equations covering Apparition, and how they decay over time, and I had to estimate the maximum power buildup of the FAST rune sequence and plug that into the equations… it was a lot further than I thought, I think it could get a few light years in one go, though I didn't work out exactly how many before it started to get risky."

She went slightly pink. "That's the bit where Professor Tofty told me to stop…"

After a carefully early start to a good night's sleep, Harry's Defence paper arrived the next morning.

Not everyone in Seventh Year was even doing Defence, and they'd been a bit rowdy the previous evening in the Great Hall (though, thankfully, not enough that Harry had to do anything about it). They might have been rowdy the next morning as well, except that everyone in question was still asleep.

Or that was why Harry guessed they weren't at breakfast.

The Theory paper was first, in keeping with what was probably age old school custom or some kind of rule that nobody had explicitly been told, or possibly just that this way let some of the examiners sleep in, and Harry took his seat – sort of grateful that this was the last exam, because it had been awkward enough fitting into the chairs gracefully this year – before getting to work.

As the NEWT paper, it was hard, but it wasn't necessarily focused on any particular thing. There were a few questions of the sort which were just checking that you'd memorized a particular detail – like what a Dementor was classified as, and Harry remembered that they were Spirits but didn't think that that was actually important for dealing with them, and what the best cure for werewolf bites was (something that Harry thought was considerably more likely to be actually useful).

Then there were questions where it started with a single detail, but then went into greater depth. A good example of one of those was the Disarming Charm, where the question started by asking for the wand movement and incantation (both of which Harry remembered) and then went on to ask about the things it could do and the things it couldn't do, possible countermeasures, and how to recognize it if it was being cast at you.

It even asked what other spells could be confused with the Disarming Charm and why, in an essay section.

"I know we're not supposed to talk about it," Hermione began, over lunch, "but what did you think about that section on appropriate times to use different kinds of spells?"

"It was kind of a pain," Harry said, thinking about his own answer. "It's going to be a bit subjective, but what I thought was that you should use spells if the ones which are less harmful aren't going to be enough."

He took a bite of a burger, then swallowed. "What I mean is, if you can use a disarming charm, that's great, but if you're dealing with enough opponents that one of them can just pick up their wand again or something, you'll need to do something that will stop them from just keeping on going."

"But what about, um…" Dean began.

"Don't forget," Harry cautioned him. "I did several hundred words on this, I can't just boil it down."

"Good point," Dean admitted.

"I don't mind Defence talk," Ron said, having some chips. "But can it at least be about something we're likely to face in the Practical?"

"All right," Hermione agreed. "What's the incantation of the bunker shield spell?"

Ron blinked. "What, that thing? Isn't it nearly useless?"

Neville raised his hand. "I think I know. It's, um, Protego Munitum?"

"That's right," Hermione agreed. "It's a good alternative to using Transfiguration for defence."

"Right," Harry said, committing it to memory. "And the downside is, um… it's static, and it has to be anchored to the ground. And you can't cast spells out of it… and it's really fiddly, so you can't just cast it like a normal shield charm."

He was about to continue, because there were more problems with it, but something in the pocket of his robes began to heat up.

"Afternoon, Harry!" Sirius said, when the two-way mirror activated. "You done with exams yet?"

"Just one left, the Defence practical," Harry replied. "Sorry if you were planning on a celebration lunch."

"Kreacher's already working on a celebration dinner," Sirius said, glancing behind him. "He told me not to spoil my appetite. I had to sneak myself a sandwich. Anyway, Remus is going to be there as well, he's just out getting some bunting and stuff."

Harry frowned, tilting his head. "Didn't he have an appointment or something?"

"Yeah, but to be honest neither of us is too upset he's not in it," Sirius said, grinning in a way that reminded Harry that his Dogfather and Draco were actually fairly closely related. "Especially because it was meant to have Umbrage in the meeting, and she didn't show up today."

"Is that woman still in the Beast division?" Hermione asked. "Why was Remus even meeting with her, anyway?"

"She's trying to push some new law about it being possible to fire werewolves if they miss work for the full moon," Sirius told them. "The regulations say she has to convince a werewolf representative before going ahead with it, and there's no way that's happening – not when Remus is the representative – but if she doesn't show up to the next hearing then that law's gone, so Remus is just grinning and bearing it."

He paused. "Or wolfing it."

"She's probably just trying to waste your time," Neville said.

"Yeah, but we can waste hers too, and at least we're not petty little screwed-up horrible people," Sirius countered airily. "Most of the time. Some of the time. I have a doctor's note about it."

Spirits lifted, Harry went off to the Practical.

It was one of the ones where they had to wait in a side room until called, a couple of dozen nervous witches and wizards alternating between watching the door and staring at their wands and making vague conversation about spells, and Harry tried his very best not to get too stressed out.

Neville had brought Panthera, which Harry supposed was fair enough – if he didn't have it he couldn't even ask if it was allowed – and Draco was audibly pondering if they'd get bonus marks or marks off for knowing certain rather unpleasant curses.

"Probably best to start with the less unpleasant ones," Blaise suggested. "Work your way up."

Hermione went in, then Neville and Draco at about the same time, then all of a sudden it was Harry's turn and he was following Professor Marchbanks into the Great Hall.

"I presume you have your wand," the examiner said, leading Harry over to a table in one corner of the room – not far from the Gryffindor points hourglass, in fact.

Harry could see Professor Antimony over on the other side of the room, talking to Draco, and then she and Draco both took out their wands before bowing.

"Eyes on me, please, Mr. Potter," Professor Marchbanks said.

"Sorry, Professor," Harry winced, reaching into his pocket. "And yes, I have my wand."

He held it up, and the Professor nodded slightly before taking her seat and getting out her notes.

"First, I will want you to cast the Shield Charm," she said. "I will be attempting to breach it."

Harry nodded, and held up his wand. "Protego."

A shimmering shield formed around him, and Professor Marchbanks made a note before pointing her wand at him – or not quite at him, instead about a foot or so over his head.

"Stupefy," she incanted, and the spell bounced off with a flash. "Tarantallegra. Locomotor Wibbly. Incendio. Reducto. Reducto Maxima."

That last spell shattered the Shield Charm, and Professor Marchbanks wrote down the result.

"I would ask you to perform the Patronus Charm, Mr. Potter, but I am quite aware you can do it," she said, with a slight smile. "What spell would you cast if someone was being held hostage by another wizard?"

Harry thought about it for a moment.

"I'd cast the Stunning Spell, Professor," he said. "But I'd use the one that Slinkhard developed, because it's safer to be hit by it twice, and I'd cast it both with my breath and with my wand in case one of them hit the hostage."

"Please demonstrate," Professor Marchbanks requested, waving her wand and conjuring a wooden statue of one person holding another at wand-point.

Harry was quite impressed, then got on with the spell casting. Pointing his wand in one foreclaw, with his tail waving slightly for balance, he inhaled slightly and then rattled off the incantation as fast as possible. "Stupefy et non ultra!"

Two jets of light flashed out, both hitting the hostage taker, and Professor Marchbanks wrote down some more notes.

Harry wasn't sure what to think about that, though he was glad he'd practiced the spell enough he could point-cast it rather than the extremely complex wand movements required.

"Now, Mr. Potter, I will want you to cast a spell for self defence without your wand," she went on. "You can cast any spell you would like."

Harry put his wand away, but stayed balancing on three legs and pointed his claw instead of just exhaling the spell.

Expelliarmus, he thought, and hit the conjured statue with a silent Disarming Charm.

"Very good," the examiner said, then, which made Harry feel a bit better. "Next question. How would you disable a troll?"

She raised an eyebrow. "If you plan to cast a spell which a troll might resist, we can bring in a troll to demonstrate."

"If it had a club, I'd take the club away with a Levitation Charm," Harry said. "Then I'd tie its legs together with an Incarcerous spell."

"Demonstrate the spell," Professor Marchbanks asked.

Harry duly did so, saying the incantation this time, and trussed up the statue (which was starting to look quite badly abused).

"Next question," Professor Marchbanks said, then stopped for a moment. "What in Merlin's name is that?"

Harry looked around, surprised, and saw she was looking up – at the ceiling.

His gaze followed hers, and he saw an enormous dragon – poisonous green and striated with silver, with a pair of wicked horns like Horst's ones but at least twice as long, and far bigger than even Ivor or Nora– knifing through the sky over Hogwarts.

It backwinged for a moment, then shouted a DEPULSO so loud Harry could hear it from inside, and the blast hammered into the castle about where he thought Dumbledore's office was.

Chunks of mortar and ancient stone went flying.

AN:

Oh.

Well.

That's a thing.