Ashe jerked awake, the haze of dreams lingering for a moment, leaving her disoriented and confused.

Even after her mind fully woke up, her eyes stubbornly remained bleary and unfocused, but she didn't really need them to know where she was — the kink in her shoulder, the dull ache in the side of her neck, she must have passed out at her desk again. She had rather too many projects going on at once these days — her own work, assisting Severus and Argus with the castle, on top of the usual classwork and student projects — and she'd been having rather more trouble sleeping than usual. She'd been taking one last pass at the enchantments intended to isolate the portions of the castle set aside for their guests, forcing certain bands of the wards back so they could manage their own security. They'd finished the script some time ago, but Langley had come to her with privacy concerns, she'd taken it upon herself to amend their work, isolate those sections of the castle from the divination and detection spells on the wards.

The Hogwarts wards being as deep and complex as they were, that was a much more difficult proposition than it might seem at first glance — Ashe must have lost track of time working at it and drifted off.

Though she had, she noticed, looking over her work, managed to mostly finish it. Just cancel out this floating terminator here, and... Well, normally she'd worry throwing something as obstructive as this into the middle of a ward scheme would cause potentially catastrophic interference, but the Hogwarts wards were tapped directly into the magic of the land here, the wards were essentially grounded. It was possible to flood the system more quickly than it could compensate for — after years working with the wards, she was certain that would be the only practical way to crack them from the outside, though it would take an absurd volume of magic — but her slapdash mental model of what exactly that interference would look like was well within acceptable limits. Especially since the interference from this hack should resonate destructively with interference from other hacks they already had in place throughout the property, it should be fine.

Distracted with running the figures in her head, it took a little while for Ashe to remember she'd been startled awake by something. Her office was dark — Tansy must have come by at some point, presumably throwing the quilt she'd woken up under over Ashe while she'd been taking care of the lights — so she couldn't be entirely sure, but it didn't look like anything was moving around. An easy reach for the enchantments laid into the room, a twitch of a finger (she winced at the warm light suddenly assaulting her eyes), and nope, empty. Then what had...

There was an odd, liquid shiver across the wards. Ashe straightened in her chair, frowning to herself. The magic of Hogwarts did some odd shite sometimes — the castle's peculiar willfulness was, she thought, a consequence of how its heart had been crafted, the kind of ritual magic that had been commonplace at the time, but now illegal for centuries and half-forgotten — but this feeling wasn't something she'd encountered yet. It was something...warm, and smooth, and almost gleeful, like...

There was another shiver, an echo originating somewhere on the property, radiating out from a single point.

...happiness. Someone was making contact with the wards, and the castle was happy.

What the hell...

Clumsily, wincing at the aches she'd developed sleeping somewhere she really shouldn't, Ashe pulled herself to her feet. And almost immediately started shivering — she wrapped the quilt more tightly around herself, cursing under her breath. Managing the wards wasn't technically part of her job, but she did have a better intuitive feel for these things than anyone on staff, and this odd whatever it was was subtle enough it was possible she was the only one who'd been woken up by it. Might as well check it out herself.

After all, with all the guests coming in and out of the castle, if someone was fucking with the wards she really should at least see who it was. Just because the castle seemed to like them didn't mean their intentions were necessarily good. Like any other being with a soul, Hogwarts had its own biases, and was capable of being fooled.

Ashe wandered the night-darkened halls, tracking the disturbance to its source. The shivers weren't constant, but they were frequent enough Ashe could follow them, despite how diffuse the sense of direction she got was. It took quite a while, perhaps even upwards of an hour, but in time she found their intruder.

Intruder, because the woman she found — slowly wandering through the Charms department, fingers softly trailing along the stone of the wall — was entirely unfamiliar. A shade shorter than Ashe, she was wearing a plain cotton skirt, trailing down to about a handspan above her ankles, a slipover in a colourful mix of green and blue and white (it looked vaguely tartan-ish, though not quite right), loosely draped over her shoulders a thin shawl printed with a complex geometric pattern in black and green and blue, something about it looking very Eastern to Ashe's eye. The sandals she was wearing, despite the cold, also looked vaguely Eastern, decorated with ceramic beads and tiny bits of brass. Though the woman herself obviously wasn't Asian — Ashe had come up behind her, couldn't see her face, but her messy, short-cropped hair was a sunny blonde, her colouring in general clearly European.

Ashe had come up behind her, quietly, but she was certain the woman already knew she was here. The gentle, tingling sense of magic on the air was unmistakable — the woman was a legilimens, and a very powerful one. Ashe isolated her own mind instinctively at the faintest contact, but even though the woman surely didn't get anything from her, she must have felt her presence at least.

Sure enough, the woman said, "Good night, Professor Babbling. Sorry for waking you." She had a peculiar accent, Ashe couldn't quite place it.

"Who said you woke me? Maybe I'm just out for a walk."

The woman shot a smirk at Ashe over her shoulder, eyes dancing in the darkness. "Hogwarts told me."

The implication there was obvious — this stranger got enough information from the wards to know whatever she was doing with them had prodded Ashe awake. (Also, she realised, who she was, they'd never met before but the woman had identified her without even looking.) So, she'd probably known Ashe was coming long before she'd gotten here. That was...more than a little unnerving. Ashe didn't think even Albus was that closely tied to the wards. "I guess she likes you."

"Hmm." Ashe had come up beside the woman, at an angle she could actually see her face now. Round-cheeked and high-browed, she looked rather younger than Ashe, she thought, maybe in her mid-twenties, which she was immediately calling bullshit on. The weight of her mind on the air, the way the magic of the castle bent in toward her, no, she was older than that — much older than that, unless Ashe was very much mistaken. It could be hard to tell, there was no real way to detect it, but...

Was this woman a metamorph? Not Langley, surely, and while she did have talent in the mind arts, Kyrah simply wasn't this...big. Someone new, then.

Or, more to the point, someone old. With how much the castle seemed to like her...

"Ah, here we are." The woman, who'd been slowly pacing down the hall, came to a stop. With a graceful finger, she sketched a single unfamiliar rune in the air, glowing a brilliant silver, and flicked her wrist — the rune shattered into a hundred narrow bands, slicing into the wall to her right, and the stone, floor to ceiling a dozen metres long and a good half a metre thick, vanished, a pair of darkened classrooms on the other side suddenly visible—

But only for a moment. There was a solid clang in the mental presence around her, and a sudden flood of magic, so intense it almost burned to stand so close, the empty space where a wall had been twisted, thin light lensing around distortions in space, Ashe instinctively looked away from something that should not be—

As abruptly as it had started, the overwhelming storm of magic ended. In the immediate aftermath, another odd shiver rippled out through the wards, the synthetic spirit of the ancient castle squirming with alien satisfaction.

When Ashe turned back around, she saw the wall had reappeared, exactly as it had been before.

"... What was that?"

The woman smiled, pale hazel eyes dancing in the diffuse torchlight. "Removing a sliver."

Ashe blinked. "That explained absolutely nothing at all."

"I suppose it wouldn't." The woman turned to lean back against the wall and folded her arms over her stomach, wrapping herself up in her colourful shawl. "I've read your work, Professor. It's quite good. Your signature project, I assume you were inspired by modern computer programming."

Ashe felt one of her eyebrows tracking upward — it had been, obviously, but very few of her peers had ever picked up on that, not many kept up with muggle technology. "Familiar with computers, are you."

"Of course. I'm a bit of a tinkerer. I've always found technology fascinating, be it magical or not."

"Magical technology?"

"How else would you consider artifice?"

That...was a good point. Muggle engineering and design really weren't that conceptually different from magical enchantment and artifice, when it came down to it — they were simply working with different resources. Which was obvious, she just didn't think she'd ever heard anyone put it that way. "Alright. Your point?"

"Oh, I'll get there eventually. How much do you know about the early history of Hogwarts?"

Ashe would protest that was another subject change, but she assumed the woman meant to make a point concerning the foundation of the wards themselves, to eventually come around to an explanation of what exactly she was doing here. So, going about it the long way, fine. "No more or less than any schoolchild learns, I think. Though, I've always had the feeling our historians get a lot wrong — there's too much of modern ideas and politics in the story everyone knows."

The woman smiled, an oddly ambivalent smile, at once gentle and sharp, cheerful and bitter. "Much of our history was rewritten in the generations immediately after the Statute. This is something all societies do, now and again, when the world has changed enough the old too often finds itself, intentionally or not, reinterpreted through the lens of the new. No culture on earth that I am familiar with remembers their own past nearly as well as they think they do. Britain is no exception.

"Though, so far as I am aware, the past has not been so thoroughly forgotten that modern people don't remember the original purpose of this castle."

Ashe felt a smile pull at her lips. "It is a castle. The Founders built it as a fortress, during their war against the Danes, I think."

"Saying they were fighting the Danes is a bit too broad — Helga and her family were from the dales of Svíþjóð — but that's not particularly important, I suppose. You are correct, this castle was originally used as a fortress in a time of war, long before it was adapted into a place of learning." Her smile turning a little crooked, the woman said, "Does anything about that idea seem odd, to you?"

Ashe shrugged. "Not really. It's easier to reuse something than to replace it."

"Professor, does Hogwarts seem particularly defensible to you?"

"Oh." Frowning to herself, she took a moment to consider the arrangement of the various courtyards and wings of the castle, how it sat on the cliffs and along the lake. "No, now that I think about it. I never noticed that. The castle was different back then, wasn't it?"

"Very different," the woman said, nodding. "If one of the so-called Founders were to walk these halls now, they wouldn't recognise it. But then, that they wouldn't recognise it wouldn't be an unusual thought to them."

"Er..."

The woman giggled, the sound high and smooth. "Think about it, Professor. Say what one will about the víkingar, they were very adaptable warriors. You might not know what sort of enemy you'll be fighting until they arrive at your doorstep — their numbers, their composition, their equipment, their tactics. Hell, there were jarlar who liked to fly into battle on dragon-back, they weren't exactly a regular, predictable foe. You're an expert with complex, variable magics. If you were designing fortifications to defend against an attacking force, but you didn't know exactly what that force would look like, how would you handle that?"

"Well." Ashe let out a long sigh through her nose — that was a very interesting theoretical problem, wasn't it. Well, theoretical for her, obviously the Founders would have had to find an actual, practical solution, in a time when warding had been much more primitive. (She found her respect for them ticking up a notch.) "I suppose, I would come up with a variety of scenarios, and design defences suitable for each. I would divide the material of the castle into blocks that could be shifted and shaped as needed, or hidden away in folded space when they weren't. I would write a script for the wards that could rearrange these elements as needed to build the defences to match these pre-programmed scenarios. The actual process might be a bit of a mess, I guess..."

Her lips tilting into a smirk again, the woman said, "And if you're in the middle of a conventional battle, and magical reinforcements pop in, backed up with three jarlar on dragon-back?"

"I suppose we all die, then. You couldn't change the form of the castle to respond, the pieces moving around might pulp everyone inside. Is that a real scenario?"

The woman nodded. "Yes, that actually happened. We almost lost that battle."

Ashe felt herself stiffen, icy tingles sliding down her spine. It took her a second to find her voice. "...We?"

"I was here. I was here from the beginning, in fact — that's why the wards like me so much, I participated in the ritual that sculpted their heart."

"Who are you?"

This time, the woman actually hesitated for a moment, a slight tension running through the power hanging all around them, her smile hitching just a little. "I was close to the woman you call Rowena Ravenclaw, make of that what you will — though I would prefer that not get out. I'm here checking the wards ahead of the arrival of the delegation from the International Confederation; I have a job to do here, and I don't want to make a scene. Just call me Sally."

At any other moment, Ashe might have laughed at such an intimidatingly powerful woman using a name as silly as Sally, but she was rather too distracted with the, just, insane thought that... "Was Ravenclaw your mother?"

'Sally' raised an eyebrow, giving Ashe a flat look, and didn't answer the question. "Your solution is a good one, theoretically, working from your particular skillset, but it isn't a practical one. What was needed was something much more...readily adaptable. Something that could be changed, at a moment's notice, in reaction to evolving circumstances, without jeopardising the people inside or opening up even temporary holes to be exploited."

"But that's not possible." Ashe cleared her throat, forcefully dragging her attention away from the question of just who 'Sally' was. It was clear she wasn't going to answer, and it...probably wasn't important. The castle, at least, felt pleased she was here, and if she knew enough about how the place worked to do whatever it was she was doing (which still hadn't been explained yet), she might actually be telling the truth about being closely tied to the Founders. Honestly, Ashe was more interested in the explanation of what she was doing than who she was. "Even what I suggested would have had serious practical concerns in actually implementing, but the fluid sort of reactivity you're talking about..."

Sally smiled, crooked and smug. "Oh, it's very possible. I'm certain you've heard of graphic transfiguration tricks — the important ones here are anchoring and mediated conjuration."

"Yes, of course." One of the fundamental principles of transfiguration was that it was temporary: the energy forcing the object into an unnatural shape decayed over time, and the object would revert once its formal inertia overcame the power of the spell. However, it was possible to use enchanting as a loophole, to design a script that drew in ambient magic to sustain the transfiguration — this must be what Sally meant by 'anchoring'. (It was standard practice among most manufacturing outfits these days, a quick and dirty labour-saving measure.) Mediated conjuration was a somewhat more exotic topic. In layman's terms, it was possible to design an artifact that would act as a sort of conjuration focus, the user dictating the exact result, but most of the work done by the enchantment, automatically.

This was very finicky, though. The only practical example Ashe was familiar with off the top of her head was a technique used by certain Egyptian libraries. Ancient documents were kept in climate-controlled vaults, where they could be most effectively preserved, the contents accessed indirectly through artifacts that conjured copies — the user simply selected the document they wanted from the archive, and the device provided an exact replica with no further outside input. But this trick required having the original on hand to copy from, it was more a mediated doubling charm than proper free conjuration, which was much more difficult. The problem was intent: the result of a conjuration was a product of the caster's intent, which required a complexity of mind and magic enchantments simply couldn't imitate. It should theoretically be possible to design a new theory of transfiguration that didn't require the same sort of inputs, but without significant advancements in humanity's understanding of magic, it was simply impossible to conduct that kind of magic without...

Ashe felt a wave of tingles break across her skin, realisation crashing over her like a cold wave.

...without a soul.

As a product of its creation, involving half-forgotten and now very illegal ritual magic, Hogwarts had a soul.

"Is the entire castle conjured?!"

Sally smiled — the pleased, proud smile of a teacher regarding a good student. "The original castle had been entirely composed of anchored conjuration, yes."

For long, breathless seconds, Ashe could only stare sightlessly, the implications of that idea swirling dizzyingly in her head.

That...

That was...

It was absolutely insane, yes, but when she thought about it? It actually explained a lot. Hogwarts didn't really behave as a normal, physical building should. The common assumption was that this was a consequence of magical accretion — if magic is concentrated in a single location for long enough, very strange things start to happen — but Hogwarts wasn't really that old, not compared to the structures usually used as an example of the phenomenon. Not to mention, some of the things Hogwarts did were unusual. Stairs seemingly trying to trip people up on purpose, doors refusing to open unless asked politely, that sort of thing, that was normal in sufficiently ancient magical buildings. But the way the castle seemed to move...

In only the decade or so Ashe had been here, her apartments had rotated nearly a third of the way around the residential wing, and just this year her bathroom had randomly flipped to the opposite side of her bedroom. A couple years into her tenure, her office suddenly grew a door connecting to her classroom, despite the two rooms being on different floors — the distance between them had suddenly expanded the next year, when her office migrated right next to Filius's. Now it was actually quicker to get to her classroom from her apartments or the Great Hall to go to her office then through that peculiar extra door, teleporting three floors and halfway across the castle in a single step.

And that wasn't even getting into some of the weirder areas of the castle. The Grand Staircase, for example, the Come-and-Go Room, the catacombs — not dungeons, Ashe had noticed very obvious signs of burials in the lower levels — the Slytherin and Hufflepuff dorms, the elf warrens, all twisted up in each other, a confusing tangle that seemingly shouldn't even be able to exist in normal physical space. And then they moved, constantly, the passages in Slytherin and the catacombs in particular seeming to change not just year to year, but sometimes day to day.

That wasn't an ordinary thing to find in old magical buildings. There were other examples of similar phenomena all around the world, yes, but they were very rare, and never so extreme as Hogwarts.

But if the entire structure were conjured...

As insane as that sounded? It explained everything.

"Fucking hell..."

Sally giggled again. "Yes, it is quite impressive, isn't it? The form of the castle can be altered through the wards, at will. There are multiple grades of influence a person can have — looking at how they're set up right now, the students have virtually none, most professors have some minor control over their own spaces, the four heads of house have significantly more, though restricted somewhat to particular areas of the castle, and the headmaster has similar power over the entire structure. Though, the greatest permissions — the sort of access you would need to entirely reshape the castle, from the ground up — haven't had anyone new keyed into them for a while. It feels like some centuries, though I can't say for certain.

"From what I can tell, at some point over the generations since the school opened, knowledge of exactly what this castle is was forgotten. Which, I imagine Wynn and Sylvi would be quite disappointed to know that — they did consider these wards their crowning achievement, and nobody even remembers what they are!"

It took Ashe a second to find her voice. "Ah, Wynn and Sylvi?"

"Hrodhwyn Uí Bháinfhéigh and Silvahárr of Syltheris — how corrupted the names have gotten over the years, honestly," Sally said, rolling her eyes, "I don't know where the hell 'Ravenclaw' came from, and Salazar? You do know he wasn't Spanish, right? Spain was barely even a thing, the peninsula was still mostly controlled by the caliphs, and—"

"Wait." Ashe struggled to control her voice, an edge of laughter still far too obvious. "You called Slytherin Sylvi?"

Sally shrugged. "That's what everyone called him. Family and friends, anyway."

That... That was just silly. With the absurdly terrible reputation Slytherin had in Britain these days, she just— Ashe tried to hold it in, but it was no good, she burst into laughter.

The ancient woman glared at her — not too angry, Ashe thought, just sort of vaguely irritated. "The stories about Sylvi people tell these days are complete nonsense, you know. About all four of them, really, but how Sylvi and Helga have been reinvented is particularly bad."

"I assumed the stuff about Slytherin was mostly shite." There were scattered historical documents that suggested Gryffindor had been the first of the Founders to die — by all accounts, he had lived hard and fast, Ashe wasn't surprised — and the other three had still been at Hogwarts for a couple decades after, so the story about the Gryffindor–Slytherin feud was probably a myth invented later. Honestly, the pureblood supremacists hold Slytherin as some kind of hero in their absurd mythology, but the very idea of 'purebloods' hadn't even existed in the 10th Century! So bloody stupid. "But I hadn't realised they'd gotten Helga way off too."

"Oh, yes, Helga is almost as bad as Sylvi." Her lips tilting into a crooked, nostalgic smirk, Sally said, "Damn scary woman, Helga Einríðisdóttir. She was a Swedish jarl before coming to Britain, you know, had already been a famous dragon-slayer at the time. I actually saw her duel a jarl on dragon-back, she killed both sorcerer and dragon — and she didn't have a mount of any kind," she went on, smile stretching wider, eyes dancing, "she just summoned herself up to the thing, and fought them in mid-air like a complete fucking monster. Came back afterward charred and covered in dragonblood, all magic-high and giggly. I've been around for going on eleven centuries now, and that's still the single sexiest thing I've ever seen."

...

Okay, yes, that did sound seriously fucking impressive, Ashe would give her that. It was a little unnerving just how much Sally had apparently...enjoyed watching what had to have been some pretty serious violence, but it had been a different time, then. Warrior culture had still had a dominant place in society, just as much with the Celts as with the Danes — as foreign and disturbing as it might seem to Ashe, it was simply what Sally had been raised with.

"So, okay, the castle is conjured." As interesting as Hufflepuff apparently having been some kind of ridiculously deadly magical viking was, Ashe honestly did find the question of the wards more interesting. Really, a mediated conjuration in the form of an entire castle was, just, completely fantastical. The sort of over-the-top magical achievement that only existed in myth and fiction. "What exactly are you doing, then?"

Sally smiled again, seemingly pleased to be going back to a more academic subject — and, Ashe thought, a shade relieved. "I'm not surprised you haven't noticed. The castle has been like this so long, I suppose it's only expected modern people shouldn't even realise what's wrong. To put it bluntly, the wards have been crippled — the defensive ones, I mean. I haven't been keeping up with events in Britain nearly as much as I should have, but once I did a bit of research it was blatantly obvious. Some modifications were made to the wards once the castle's use as a school really started to pick up, mostly intent-based. It should be, quite simply, impossible for someone bearing harmful intent to any resident of this castle to cross onto the grounds. And these wards operate through divining magics, not the ordinary channels that interact directly with the mind, they are all but impossible to fool. Helga came up with the idea herself — the Danes of the time had very developed divination techniques — and though Wynn and Sylvi spent years working at it, they never could crack it, not for longer than a few minutes at a time.

"Look back at the last couple centuries here, Professor," Sally said, her voice low and solemn, "and tell me if you believe the wards are operating as they should. Far too often, there have been interlopers with harmful intent, or even professors seeking their positions for malicious ends — that also should not be possible, the wards should reject them when the headmaster tries to key them in. And there are certain artifacts that should not have been able to cross the wardline, certain beings that should not be allowed here. There has been an acromantula colony out in the Forest, for decades now, living within the bounds of the wards, that should not be possible. The dementors showed up at a quidditch match, no, they should have been dispersed the second they touched the wardline. The wards are under too much strain, suffering under too much resistance, they simply cannot operate as they should.

"Can you make a guess as to why?"

Well, no, ordinarily she wouldn't be able to — Ashe hadn't even realised there was anything wrong. There were significant portions of the script that were...inert, but she'd always just assumed they had exotic activation conditions that simply hadn't been met. There was a fair bit of noise on the wards but, again, she'd always just assumed that was a natural consequence of having so many interlaced elements at once, and the castle did effectively funnel it into the ambient magic of the valley. It hadn't occurred to her that, while the wards did manage to compensate enough to prevent any explosive overburdening, the interference might still be significant enough to prevent varied elements from functioning properly.

Perhaps because, well, that wasn't a problem she'd ever encountered before. Most ward systems, if they were burdened badly enough to start interfering with basic functions, they would have long ago collapsed under the strain. That the Hogwarts wards were anchored so well to function at all under such perilous conditions was honestly quite impressive. She felt her respect for Ravenclaw and Slytherin tick up yet another notch.

It wasn't a problem she'd considered before but, now that she knew a little bit more about the heart of the wards and had witnessed Sally doing whatever it was she was doing (even if she hadn't understood what it was at the time), the answer was pretty damn obvious. "Construction. The more modern sections of the castle were built, with outside materials — I imagine there's plenty of remodeling done in the older areas as well. You're vanishing the physical materials, and filling in the gaps with conjured replacements."

Her smile stretching wider, Sally nodded. "Very good guess, Professor. That's exactly correct. While the castle can compensate to accommodate foreign materials, they were always intended to be limited — furniture, supplies, clothing, people. Once your predecessors built outside stone and metal into the very structure of the castle, no, the wards could not compensate for that. Like thousands of burning slivers driven into its skin," she said, her voice sinking a bit, going cold and bitter. "To those who can hear it, Hogwarts is crying out in agony. I'm simply trying to help her."

Ashe barely managed to hold in a gasp, when the implication finally occurred to her. If the castle was truly aware — which it was, in a sense, if a rather alien one — interference borne on the wards would be the closest thing it was capable of experiencing to pain. "I... I hadn't realised, I had no idea..."

"That's quite alright, Profesor, you needn't feel guilty. You couldn't have known."

"Can I help?" The words burst past her lips before she'd even really consider them...but, once they'd registered, she didn't regret that she'd said them. Yes, she might not have known, sure, but the work she'd done on the castle over the last years, here and there, the way she'd just sunk whatever burdensome floating remainders into the wards, she...

She had, Ashe had abruptly noticed, been contributing to the persistent, centuries-long torture of an innocent living (sort of) being. Sally might not condemn her for it, but she couldn't help feeling awful anyway.

"I mean, I realise it's a very complicated, long term project — with how long this has been going on, it could take years to finish — and I'm not nearly as familiar with—" Ashe broke off with a groan. "I just noticed I might not be all that much help, I don't have nearly the same power over the castle you do..."

Sally seemed rather surprised with her outburst, but not in a bad way. If anything, she was pleased, her smile so wide her teeth glinted in the torchlight, hazel eyes dancing. "I am certainly willing to accept the help, Professor. It will indeed be a long, difficult project — unless circumstances change significantly I might not be able to stay long enough to finish it myself. We will have to consider what to do about—" She froze, her face abruptly blanking, stiffening a bit against the wall. "No."

Ashe shivered as the magic in the air shook with the word, heavy and cold and foreboding. "I'm sorry, I didn't—"

"No, not you," Sally said, sounding somewhat absent. Glancing slightly away from her, seemingly speaking into the empty air, "Do not pull yourself across the wards all the way. They will certainly react to your presence — we wouldn't want to wake the Chief Warlock, would we?"

Off to Ashe's right, there was a shiver of magic, shadow and light contorting around one another, and expanding out from the centre of the vortex appeared... Well, it looked like a ghost, with smokey edges and somewhat transparent, but it definitely wasn't. For one thing, the figure still had colour to her — somewhat washed-out colour, but definitely colour. Her because it was a woman, a girl really, perhaps in her early twenties at the oldest, wearing a loose, cheery sundress, curly black hair (or possibly a dark red?) bouncing around her shoulders, face pulled into a brilliant grin.

And the woman had absolutely no magical presence whatsoever, like she were no more than an illusion — less than an illusion, really, since even illusions had some effect on the magic around them, and with this apparition there was none. That was...odd. And more than a little unnerving.

Her voice odd and distorted, as though she were speaking from behind a thick barrier, the stranger said, "I suppose not, Dumbledore can be so tedious."

"What are you even doing here?"

"I'm avoiding the Board. They're being tedious at me because you're not there, and Lindsay wanted to have a final word with you before we officially left. And you're going to have all year to play with your pet castle. Starting tomorrow."

Sally sighed, her eyes tipping up to the ceiling for a second. "Yes, I suppose so." She pushed herself off from the wall, with every hint of reluctance. "The life of a politician," she said to Ashe, her lips twitching with an ironic smirk. "I'm afraid I must excuse myself, Professor."

"That's quite alright." Ashe tore her eyes from the apparition, with some effort. It was, just, a weird phenomenon — shadow magic, maybe? — and the girl herself was slightly off-putting, the sharp, bloody grin she was giving her. "I should probably get to bed anyway. I was passed out at my desk when your work woke me up."

"I see." The strained, unpleasant expression on Sally's face was replaced with a warm smile. Somewhat amused, she thought, but in a way more affectionate than judgemental. (Reminded of someone else, perhaps? They certainly didn't know each other well enough for Ashe to warrant that kind of look.) "It was a pleasure to meet you, Professor."

She hesitated, just for a second. "Ashe," she said, stepping a bit forward to extend her hand — in the muggle way, but Sally didn't strike her as someone who wouldn't know what to do with it. "If we're going to be working together on a project as involved as fixing the castle, you might as well use my bloody name."

Sally grinned, and shook her hand, warm and firm. "Of course. Good night, Ashe. I'll see you tomorrow." Releasing her, she took a step back, held a hand out toward the apparition. The half-present woman skipped forward, wrapped an arm up with Sally's. With a last nod from Sally, and a slightly unsettling smirk from the apparition, that odd flash of magic rose, a maelstrom of light and shadow twisting around the two of them.

And in a blink, Ashe was alone in the corridor, the night still and quiet once again.

[Svíþjóð] — Sweden in Old Norse, specifically the historical region of Svealand the modern name of the country ultimately comes from. The "dales" Sally is referring to are the valleys in western Svealand, mostly in the province of Dalarna. (The name of the province literally means "the dales".)

And some of my Hogwarts/Founders worldbuilding finally comes up in something! Wooo! Yes, the castle really does have a soul, sort of — the wards were started with a sacrificial soul magic ritual, done to create a sort of governing intelligence over the wards. There are reasons why they did it that way, but it's complicated and esoteric, and not particularly important. All that really matters is that Hogwarts has preferences and a will of its own, even if they're a bit alien and incomprehensible. After all, a bloody castle isn't going to see things in the same light as people, just by nature.

Next chapter will feature the arrival of the Irish. I should get started on that. Good fun.

—Lysandra