"Okay, I think that should do it," Lyra said, inspecting the last of the tokens she, the Weasley twins, and two not-quite-seventeen-year-old Durmstrangers had spent the better part of the past two hours enchanting to counter the multidimensional maze someone had made of the space inside the annex which now housed the Goblet of Fire.
When no one was in the room, it looked like the Goblet was just sitting there, on a two-foot-high basalt plinth perhaps ten meters away, visible from the doorway. It looked like, once one stepped over the age line, it should take all of ten seconds to walk up to it and drop in a slip of paper with one's name on it.
Obviously, it wasn't that simple. The witch from Durmstrang had hit on the idea of transfiguring the walls of the annex to be transparent, and from the outside it was clear anyone trying to approach it was obviously being jumped around, each determined stride moving them off course, leaving them behind the Goblet or occasionally upside-down on the ceiling, but no closer to entering their name.
It wasn't quite an Escher trap — if it were, Lyra was quite certain none of the other students who'd put their names in would've been able to manage it (at least, not as quickly as they had), and based on what they could see there was some order to the way space had been expanded and twisted. It wasn't just crumpled, like a collapsed expansion charm, care had obviously been taken to maintain the space in three dimensions relative to the outside world, because people moving around inside didn't seem to be compressed or stretched, but pieces of it had been everted and flipped, which explained the areas where gravity was reversed and other spots where the person apparently disappeared momentarily, slipping into a pocket dimension — probably mirrored, that seemed to be a sort of theme.
According to the various failed candidates who'd been willing to tell them anything (and ranting overheard from those who weren't), there was an illusion or glamour in effect, too, giving the impression that one was trapped inside a hall of mirrors, but one twisted all out of shape by the space warping, folded into impossible, mind-boggling madness, reflections scattered apparently at random, made all the more confusing by the alterations which had been made to the decor.
The judges had removed every object other than the Goblet and its plinth, and charmed or transfigured every interior surface of the room to slightly-glowing whiteness. The light spell worked into it completely eliminated any shadows in the room, and therefore effectively cut off all access to the Dark. (From the other side, it was as though the room didn't exist, which was...really fucking weird. And also very neatly stopped Lyra just popping in, without making it blatantly obvious that they were trying to foil shadow-walkers.)
And of course, it made the whole space even more disorienting from the inside, the only actual reference point being the Goblet itself. (The doorway, apparently, was replaced by a mirror, indistinguishable from the others.) She could easily imagine it was impossible, on stepping into a new leaf of the space and finding the centre of the room now behind you, to tell whether you had just been jumped to the opposite side of it, or stepped into a mirror-pocket.
And that was on top of the age line, and a suite of fear- and doubt-inducing curses threaded through the thing. According to a failed candidate from Beauxbatons, these weren't very strong, but the Weasleys were pretty sure that they were a contributing factor in every candidate either managing to enter their name or giving up within fifteen minutes. They were also the main way people were finding their way back out of the damn thing within a few minutes. The mirror illusions vanished when the potential candidate decided to retreat — and returned if you changed your mind — but the space-warping maze was plenty confusing on its own. So someone had oriented the repulsion charms to push candidates back toward the doorway. Not that they had a single point of origin that could be used to navigate toward the Goblet or the opposite wall, or whatever, that would make it too easy.
Which presented a bit of a problem for Lyra.
Not that they would hinder her progress. Even if such things did affect her, she was fairly certain she had enough confidence (resolve and fortitude, as one of the Weasleys' new friends had put it) that they wouldn't slow her down any more than the age line. Which was to say, not at all, since that particular enchantment used a standard divination to check the birth-date of anyone who approached it, repelling them if they were not born on or before Samhain of Seventy-Seven. The maze would definitely be a problem, but hardly an insurmountable one — she highly doubted that anyone else had nearly as much experience as herself when it came to navigating (or even just existing) in extra-dimensional spaces. If they had managed it, she was certain she could, too.
The defense that would actually stop her from reaching the Goblet without assistance was the most sophisticated, though it was also probably the least obstructive to anyone else (assuming they recognised it).
Lyra was positive that the shifting labyrinth of mirrors those who had gone into the room described was the effect of a Zenobian Box: a class of ancient Palmyrene trap wards which produced multi-sensory illusions in response to the intent of anyone who entered them, generally responding to a desire to reach a certain goal and reacting in such a way as to prevent them doing so.
The usual method to circumvent such things was a fairly standard occlumency trick — making the thing believe one's goal was something other than the thing it was guarding. It wasn't as though Boxes were actually animate, and enchanting schema weren't really known for being discerning when people were trying to fool them. But that only worked if one could interact with the Box, which Lyra couldn't. (Bella probably could, but Lyra hadn't magically managed to learn enough occlumency to let a Zenobian Box pick up her intent since the last time she'd been reminded that she was fucking terrible at the subject, sixteen hours ago.)
Likewise, if she went into a Box, she was effectively trapped. Normally the way out of a Box was perfectly clear as soon as the victim tried to retreat — that was actually the detail which had given away what they were dealing with here — but since the enchantments couldn't detect her intentions, they just kept presenting the same endless illusions no matter what she did. Which more or less would put her in the same position as any of the other candidates attempting to retreat (whether they'd managed to submit their names or not), except for the little fact that they could rely on the fear spells to shove them back toward the door. She couldn't.
The less popular, far more complex and difficult way to circumvent such things was to disable the senses affected by the illusion(s) and thereby ignore them, obviously inadvisable since it would then be effectively impossible to work out the extra-dimensional element.
The only other way Lyra was aware of to get around such a thing was to brute force it, maintaining an illusion-negating field around oneself, effectively creating a bubble of normality within the Box. Which took a lot of power, especially dealing with a Box as recently-established as this one — the enchantments hadn't had a chance to fade at all, yet. Not exactly the sort of thing even she could do without a proper team backing her up.
So, obviously, she'd had to put together a team.
In exchange for adding them as exceptions to the age line — it and the Box were, as best she could tell from out here, tied to the plinth on which the Goblet was sitting, so if she could get there she could alter it easily — and placing the pins they needed to drag the interior of the room back into three dimensions and hold it there, the Weasley twins (who apparently thought they stood a chance of being chosen over her, silly boys) and the two Durmstrangers, Sabine and Lars, were going to make a 'tunnel' through the Box for her. Of course, none of them (Lyra included) really understood how the space inside the room worked, but Lyra was fairly confident that the Box had been cast before it was pulled out of shape — setting up a Box in non-euclidean space would be stupidly complex, she doubted even Ashe could do the arithmancy for such a thing in less than nine hours, and if they had, it wouldn't be twisted out of shape as others had reported — so a tunnel cast through it from the outside to the outside, affecting the Box itself, should (theoretically) affect it as though it were still tied to three simple dimensions, sort of piggy-backing on the Box enchantments to get inside, or rather under, the space warping effect.
Basically, if all went according to plan, she wouldn't have to touch the Box at all.
"Are you sure about this?" Lars asked, giving the room a dubious glance as yet another potential candidate — Cassius Warrington, a seventh-year Slytherin — gave up, slinking away from the doorway looking very ashamed of his failure.
"My plans always work," she assured him.
"How are you going to get across the age line, though?" one of the Weasleys asked. His concern was probably understandable, that was the one part of the defenses they'd hardly discussed, though it was also the one part that none of them could get past. The Weasleys had even taken an aging potion in an attempt to trick it, which obviously hadn't worked.
"I was born in Nineteen Fifty." She gave him a broad smirk. "Or at least, that's what Magic thinks — there are reasons people don't generally go around using blood alchemy to clone themselves."
"So you're actually admitting..."
"Admitting? What's there to admit? I'm definitely not Bellatrix, so. Are you ready?" she asked, shoving the last handful of pin-tokens into her pocket.
"Yeah, yeah, let's go, Sabine," the other Weasley said, leading the Durmstranger away to find the other side of the wall at the back of the room which had been transformed into an impromptu task. While they waited, Lyra, Lars, and Weasley One started warning people not to interrupt them, waving them off from making their own attempts, and calling them back out of the thing with promises that it would be much easier to put their names in if they'd just give the three of them half an hour to make their own attempt first.
Several spectators, apparently sensing that something was about to happen, ran off to get their friends, returning out of breath some minutes later. Lyra smirked quietly to herself — people (mostly underclassmen) had been trying to figure out what she was up to all day. By the time Weasley Two and Sabine transfigured the back wall into transparency, there was quite a crowd gathered, some of them on the stairs and balcony overlooking the Entrance Hall, but most of them on the ground floor, trying to get a better view of the inside of the Goblet Room.
"No pressure," she murmured to Weasley One.
"Lyra, I'm only going to say this once," he said, far too seriously. (Honestly, it was just a game.) "Stuff it. Prêt, Lars?" he asked, his twin doing the same on the opposite side of the Box. Both Durmstrangers nodded, and after a quick count-down coordinated by twin telepathy, all four of them began to cast the illusion-negating charm they'd tweaked to create a tunnel, rather than a bubble. It was visible first as a golden line twisting and apparently splintering as it stretched through the room between them — ha! I knew it! — slowly growing to create an arched space within the incredibly annoying enchantment.
As soon as it was tall enough for Lyra to stand up inside it, she stepped through the doorway. Her sense of balance vanished instantly, as her magical and visual perception fell out of sync with each other. She closed her eyes and forced herself to relax as she moved her limbs experimentally, feeling out whether there were any differences between the physics of this space, and the one she'd just left. It seemed not.
She opened her eyes again to take stock of her surroundings. The Goblet did appear to be directly ahead of her, still mirrors hemming her in on all sides, except where her golden path cut through them at odd angles. It hadn't really occurred to her when they'd been working out the plan, but it did very effectively show her the way through the space warping as well. Or, well, it cut her directional options down to two, at any given point. And right now, she could even see the door through which she'd entered.
That made things much easier.
Ignoring the apparent location of the Goblet, she followed the tunnel off to her left. The location of the Goblet did appear to jump around on her a few times, but she just kept going, letting her momentum carry her in the right direction — if she stopped when the room shifted, it would be only too easy to lose track of which way she'd meant to go. Though she did stop dead the first time she felt herself round an eversion, the Goblet bouncing instantly from her nine o'clock to her three o'clock as she stepped into a mirror-version of the world. She was pretty sure that if she continued on in the direction she had been moving, she would end up back at the door, her path folded over on itself.
But only pretty sure. She meant, that was definitely her best guess as to what was going on with these eversions. She could tell when she entered one, but that alone was disorienting enough there could easily be some other twist or flip involved, faking her out. If she'd been thinking ahead, she would've thrown a curse at the door or something, just so she could feel which direction it was in, but she hadn't, so...
Fuck it, what was the worst that could happen? She ended up back at the door like an idiot? She could curse the thing and have another go. Her first instinct had been that she should turn around to keep going, so that was what she did, realising quickly that she'd chosen correctly, because rather than tripping back out of the eversion she stepped into a flipped leaf — putting her upside-down in relation to the Goblet.
Okay, then.
It seemed that whoever had designed the thing had been fairly consistent, probably because, as the mind mage had said, they did want at least a few students to be able to figure it out. She wound in and out of five more eversions — technically three re-versions, and two more eversions, but they felt the same, the difference being akin to turning right or left around a corner — all of them simple mirror-reversals, before (finally) reaching the Goblet.
Finally because, despite only being in here for maybe five minutes, being surrounded by so much glow was making her uncomfortable. Not enough that she needed to leave, just...probably about as much as the repulsion and doubt charms affected normal people, actually. She was guessing, but it would make a certain kind of sense if whichever sadist decided to use this method of cutting her off from the Shadows had calibrated it so that she would have an experience somewhat equivalent to everyone else.
She could just drop her name in now, but that would hardly be very impressive (she imagined most people would consider it cheating, to have a bloody path laid out for yourself), and she had promised to fix the room so her co-conspirators could enter as well.
Flattening out the five-dimensional shape the space had been turned into, though, would require her to reach its corners — or what should be the corners — which meant she'd have to leave the "path". So she needed to disable the Box first.
Whoever had set it up had left the enchantment exposed, black ink painted on black stone — practically invisible, physically. The runes did glow magically, of course, but even she had had to be within a few feet before she'd been able to make them out. Presumably they'd figured since it only had to last about eighteen hours, there was no point actually carving them. Lyra would have been surprised if they had, honestly, something this complex would take hours to carve, especially in fucking basalt. They also hadn't protected them in any way, but then, maybe they hadn't expected anyone to actually try to break their puzzle after getting this far and (presumably) entering their name. That would, after all, only make it easier for others to throw their names in as well, increase the competition for the title of Champion.
Lyra didn't really care about that, though. She was pretty fucking sure they could enter the name of every single Hogwarts student and she'd still be picked, because who the hell was going to put on a better show? (She was also probably the most qualified contestant just in terms of technical skill and ability, but the Tournament was about showmanship as much as anything else.) The twins were delusional if they thought they stood a chance, but she wasn't complaining, she wouldn't have been able to pull this off without their help. If they wanted a silly, completely worthless reward, she was more than happy to give it to them.
She sidled around the plinth until she found one of the key phrases and obliterated three of the symbols with a quick aguamenti. The rest of them went dark immediately. Simple enough.
Next order of business: finding the fucking wall. The Goblet was (to external appearances) in the centre of the room. With the illusions deactivated, the door was now visible, but given the space-warping, there was no guarantee that just walking away from it would bring her to the back wall. Walking toward either end of the tunnel, though, would get her to one of the walls eventually. She hadn't paid attention to which side she'd come from, and lost track of it, looking at the enchanting, so she picked a direction at random, skipping off mostly for the look of it, though she was genuinely excited to see what everyone thought of this little project when it was done.
As luck would have it, she ended up back at the door a couple minutes later. Now, for the fun part.
"You can drop the tunnel," she called to the four mages on the outside.
As the golden light — more a series of arches and oddly twisted pockets than a tunnel, from this perspective — winked out, she began walking around the circumference of the room, placing pins every meter or so as she went. The leaves of folded space were intercut with each other and therefore had unexpected points and planes of intersection throughout the interior of the room, but they were also still continuous. Walking along with one hand on the wall, it was easy enough to find the corners, even given the random eversions and apparent gravity-reversals, and as she did, make a mental layout of the space. (Which was...very weird, clearly deliberately folded into some particular shape, like a paper aeroplane? but obviously not actually an aeroplane — maybe a stylised bird of some sort.) She imbued each token with a sense of where it should be in three-dimensional space as she placed them, and after about fifteen minutes found herself back where she'd started, on the opposite side of the doorframe.
"Okay, you can activate the pins!"
They weren't quite as coordinated about that as they had been setting up the tunnel. With a stomach-turning jerk, the tokens, anchored to the fabric of the space where they were placed but enchanted to orient themselves with respect to each other and the locations she had designated in the three familiar dimensions, dragged the room back into its normal shape, more or less. It took only a few more seconds to throw out a set of "dimensional magnets" — the concept stolen from those neat expanded, self-erecting tents, they just repelled each other when activated, pulling the dimensionally-altered "edge" of a physical space with them until they reached equilibrium with the reality they were fighting. Right, that should hold for an hour or two, and the others should be able to walk straight to the Goblet, now.
Which only left the age line. Where the hell... She could have sworn her detection charms said it was anchored to the plinth, but...
Oh. Oh, that was clever. The plinth itself had been altered, turned completely inside-out. It could probably only be accessed (properly) from the "opposite" side of the everted leaves. Damn it! How had she missed... Never mind, too late, now. She wasn't about to un-do the pins and fuck about with finding her way back here without the tunnel, in a bloody mirrored reality.
A few quick detection charms assured her that there were no nasty surprises waiting for her if she just went ahead and did this the easy way — or, well, the difficult-but-fast way. It would still be less complicated and therefore arguably easier than undoing everything she'd just done, fixing the age line, and then re-doing everything. (And it would definitely mean less time faffing about in the awful enchanted glow.) It was just one spell, and one that wasn't that complex if you actually understood what you were trying to do. Any OWL Transfiguration student should be able to do it, she thought. Transfiguring objects in more than three dimensions wasn't exactly OWL standard material, but the concept was exactly the same as altering any other physical object, from a technical standpoint. Granted, no one in their right mind would use transfiguration to, say, turn their trousers inside-out, because there were charms for that — or, you know, use your fucking hands — but it could be done, and this was the same, just...in a different direction than usual.
She moved the Goblet, setting it off to one side on the floor, and after ten minutes or so of cursing and trying to find the right orientation (it was a bit like trying to pick a lock with a hairpin, if she was trying to re-evert the plinth from the wrong "angle" it wouldn't work) and pouring way too much magic into the thing — fucking basalt, pain in my arse — managed to get it to collapse through itself, the darkened runes of the Box enchantment replaced by the much simpler scheme defining the age-line. It was backward, of course, because she was on the "wrong" side of the mirror, but they had already worked out the arithmancy and the additions they needed. It wasn't terribly difficult to figure out which runes corresponded to which theoretical elements, even when they were reversed.
Completely out of patience for this project (and feeling much more tired than she had when they were actually working out how to do it), she inked the alterations onto the top of the pillar rather than finding a way to add them to the already-set scheme more securely. Painting over the original enchantment would hold it together well enough. It was, admittedly, quick and dirty, but if it collapsed in twenty minutes that was fine. More than enough time for Lars, Sabine, and the twins to put in their names. And it made setting the bits of parchment the others had signed and exposed to their magic (casting a few non-effective charms at them) in their proper place much easier. The runes, old and new, glowed blue as she (re)activated them, the golden line around the edge of the room flashing briefly white.
She set the goblet back on top of the plinth, pinning the scraps of parchment in place, and pulled another one from her pocket, this one inscribed with her own name — and a few choice titles it would amuse her to hear Dumbledore read aloud at dinner tonight.
The blue-white flames of the Goblet rose higher as she dropped it in, licking at her fingers, the magic recognising her, tying her to it, committed, if it should choose her. Which of course it should. As Angel had said, if it didn't it was wrong.
She turned and gave a mocking bow to her audience — more people than she'd expected, she hadn't been paying them much attention, but she hadn't really thought many people would stick around to watch her place pins or sit there fumbling around with the plinth for the last ten minutes or so. Dumbledore, she noticed, was standing at the edge of the small crowd, looking very disapproving, and probably not because it had taken her several tries to get that transfiguration right.
Also (apparently) not because a bunch of seventeen-year-olds who'd tried and failed to put their names in were in the midst of confronting Sabine and Lars (and also the Weasleys, but it looked like most of the angry upperclassmen were from Durmstrang and Beauxbatons — the Drumstrangers were doing most of the talking because Fred and George were almost as bad at French as Gin). If that was what he was so miffed about, he probably wouldn't have turned on his heel and stalked away, leaving the Runes professor from Durmstrang to deal with the lot of them.
No, Lyra was fairly certain his fury was directed at her, he just knew that no good could come of confronting her over this. He didn't have any say in the Goblet's selection, and it would look terrible if he chewed her out for entering and then had to announce her as his Champion in just a few short hours. She felt her smirk growing even broader at that. Made getting to spend the day on such a fun little puzzle even more worth it.
She skipped back to the doorway (more for the look of it than because she felt like skipping — how long had she been up? she should probably go take a nap...), her most innocent smile firmly in place, fully prepared to pretend she had no idea what any of them were so upset about. That didn't last long, though — she quickly spotted Maïa sneaking around the Weasleys to meet her, looking very much as though she'd like to slap and/or publically snog the hell out of her again. She managed to maintain enough control over herself when Lyra reached her she only said, "You're insufferable, you know," but that didn't do anything to stop the victorious smirk ruining Lyra's perfectly innocent expression.
"You love me." Maïa went adorably red. Tee hee.
Before she could see how many more adorably embarrassed things she could make her girlfriend do in public, though — that cute little squeak, for instance — they were interrupted by a furious veela.
"It is not fair, we had to solve the maze for ourselves! You cheated!"
Somehow, it hadn't occurred to Lyra that the candidates who'd already managed to enter their names would have a problem with her team's efforts. Especially since none of them were from Beauxbatons — it wasn't like she'd keyed in anyone to challenge Fleur's attempt to become a Champion. Some of her classmates who'd already tried and failed to put their names in might manage it now that the maze was disarmed, she guessed, but she doubted that any of them were more qualified than the candidates who had figured it out for themselves, worrying about them was just stupid. Not, of course, that Lyra minded people being angry at her, it just made the whole thing even more amusing, really, but.
Maïa, on the other hand, did mind people being angry at Lyra, especially when they were objectively wrong. "She didn't cheat!"
"Contestants must be seventeen years of age to enter!"
"That is merely a guideline which all of the schools agreed to, for reasons of legal arse-covering." Nyberg, a few feet away arguing with some of his own students, snorted trying not to laugh. Maïa pinched her. "And even if it were an actual rule of the Tournament, I wouldn't be cheating. You saw me cross the line. According to the official method of assessing the age of potential contestants, I'm old enough. I'd just be helping them cheat." She smirked, indicating her accomplices with a nod.
"Enough!" Nyberg snapped, cutting off whatever Fleur had been about to say, his words echoing oddly — words because he used an illusion to demand silence in French and English simultaneously. That was just...fucking brilliant, really, why had she never thought of that? It would cut down massively on having to repeat herself for idiots who couldn't be arsed to learn French! "The judges discussed the matter last night, and decided that any student who was able to overcome the protections between themselves and the Goblet to enter their name should be considered qualified to participate, and sufficiently determined that it could not be argued that the organisers of the Tournament did not take adequate precautions to prevent unqualified students entering. You four may enter your names before I reverse—"
"But, sir!" someone on the other side of the crowd — Warrington, she thought — whined. "They didn't get past the protections! They just got that little freak to do it for them!"
"Love you, too, Warbler!" Lyra called at him, over Maïa muttering about how she shouldn't let people call her a freak. Which, complaining about people calling her a freak would be almost as ridiculous as complaining about people calling her insane (which Maïa did all the time). They weren't wrong. Well, they weren't wrong for characterising her as such, they were wrong in the implication that those were bad traits to have. But that was just par for the course outside of the House. Outsiders had different standards — namely, placing an inexplicably high value on mediocrity.
Nyberg ignored her, as did her co-conspirators, rushing to enter their names even as the professor smirked at the irate seventeen-year-olds. "And does forming alliances and making agreements not constitute a legitimate strategy for solving problems and overcoming challenges which are impossible for you alone? It is true that you all assumed that you must work individually to enter your names and cooperative efforts were not anticipated, but there were no restrictions placed on the methods by which you might overcome the protections to submit your names for consideration. And I presume all of you who have attempted to enter believe yourselves the best possible candidate to represent your schools. If that is the case and you are confident of it, there is no reason to begrudge your peers their own chance to enter. The selection is not a lottery. The Goblet chooses the most worthy, most able candidate to represent each school."
"But, Professor Nyberg!"
"No, Poliakoff! No but's! You are all welcome to resume your own attempts to enter after I have returned the protections to their proper state. I estimate this will take about half an hour. In the meanwhile, I advise you to disperse."
That definitely wasn't a suggestion, and if Lyra caught it everyone else had to have as well. There were a few more grumbles, but within two minutes the other students had retreated.
"Lyra!" one of the twins hissed behind her. She turned to see all four of her accomplices standing just inside the Goblet room. "How do we get out?"
"You— What? What the hell did you do?" Lyra demanded, stealing Nyberg's instantaneous-translation trick. (She might have to sit in on some of his lectures, because if that wasn't fucking brilliant, she didn't know what was.)
"We didn't do anything!" Sabine protested.
"Yes, we only put our names in, and now we cannot leave."
"You..." Nyberg frowned, but his confusion quickly shifted to exasperated disbelief. "You didn't tell them they had to leave their tokens keyed into the scheme."
It wasn't a question, it only took a few seconds to work out that was the only reason they wouldn't be able to get out, that they'd used the same slips of parchment to enter the Tournament instead of writing out new ones, inadvertently locking themselves inside the age line. "Hey, don't give me that look! I thought it was obvious!" Actually, she knew it was obvious, she shouldn't have had to say anything.
"You said you were adding us as exceptions!" one of the Weasleys objected.
"I did. You removed yourselves from the list of exceptions when you took away your reference tokens and burned them like fucking morons."
"We thought it was done!"
"It was done! You—"
"Could you please pass us some more parchment and a quill?" Sabine sounded as annoyed with herself as the Weasleys did with Lyra.
"Don't bother." Nyberg sighed, flicking a single quickly-cast rune at the plinth. The age line fizzled out at once. "I was already going to have to re-write it anyway. Vilks, Gould, ten pages on the various methods of adding an individual as an exception to a ward scheme, on my desk by Friday morning, or you're both failing my class. And you two, rest assured I will be speaking to your Graphic Arts instructor as well. Now, go."
The Durmstrangers fled, followed closely by the Weasleys, leaving Lyra alone with Nyberg and... Where the hell had Maïa— Oh, she was checking out the Goblet.
"There's... This is weird."
"What's weird?"
"Does this— Does the Goblet of Fire feel kind of...alive, to you?"
Lyra shrugged. Of course it did — not human, but definitely alive. She assumed it was some sort of demonic entity summoned and bound to the cup to judge the worthiness of potential contestants. Probably not originally for the purpose of the Triwizard Tournament, she vaguely recalled reading somewhere that it was first used for the Tournament by Durmstrang, and that Beauxbatons won the right for all of the schools to use it to choose their Champions at some point in the Fourteenth Century. (The Tournament used to have stakes declared between the Heads of the Schools, and Durmstrang had been foolishly overconfident that their magically-chosen Champion would prevail over the best the others had to offer.) But it was clearly much older than that. "Of course it's alive. How else would it choose the Champions? I mean, that takes a degree of consciousness that enchanted constructs just don't have."
"What about the Sorting Hat?"
..."Okay, that most enchanted constructs don't have. And the Hat feels alive, too."
Not to mention, they didn't really know how the Hat had been made. It was generally considered an enchanted construct, in the sense that it grew out of spells that had been anchored to sustain themselves, but Lyra's (Bella's) first impression of it had been that it was more like House Magic, an effect of magical accretion — albeit one which had somehow been accomplished in a very short period of time, rather than over the course of several centuries. She suspected there had to be ritual involved, possibly human sacrifice. That was the easiest way to imbue an inanimate object with sentience, or even sapience.
Though if it were, she thought it would need to be 'fed' periodically? The House of Black hadn't just sacrificed muggles at Yule because it felt really fucking good (though it did), it had been an integral part of maintaining the Family Magic — she'd managed to figure out that much, at least, from the Grimoires. In the absence of proper sacrifices, she suspected it had started cannibalising the remaining members of the House, probably part of the reason Walburga had apparently lost her fucking mind and died at the age of, what, sixty-five? Of course, that was mostly because they'd made such extensive use of blood wards, which were dependent on the Family Magic rather than tied into ambient magical currents like place wards. Lyra hadn't actually put it together until after she'd gone to check out the ward Dumbledore had placed on Harry and the Dursley family.
As long as there were enough mages in the family to support them, blood wards — even dozens of them, distinct and under-optimised — were fine, but enough was about thirty reasonably powerful mages (like Sirius or Harry or Gin) or probably forty-five or more average mages (like Zee or Cissy or Ted Tonks). Even by the time Bella was born, they'd probably been getting toward the critical point of not having enough mages to sustain them without the sacrifices, and then Bella started killing them, so as soon as they stopped making annual sacrifices the Family Magic (what was left of it) would've started "starving". One of the things she'd done over the summer, while she was re-binding the elves, was cut out all of the blood wards to stop them bleeding out the now-disunified remains of the House Magic completely.
But she was pretty sure no one was sacrificing people to the Hat. Maybe it fed off mental energy while it was Sorting kids, or was tapped into the school wards or something? Anyway, not really important. What were they even talking about, again?
"...used in a ritual to choose a champion to represent the tribe or clan," Nyberg was saying. Ah, right, the Goblet of Fire.
"And their god answered...through the Goblet?" Maïa said, sounding doubtful.
The professor nodded. "Indeed. Tokens are submitted which represent each potential champion, and it chooses the one it believes best suited to the task, giving their token back. And though the people and their god are all but forgotten, now, the consciousness which was once the face of magic to them lives on in this relic, given new purpose some...six and a half centuries ago, I believe. The Headmasters of the time convinced it to choose their champions simultaneously, when before it had only chosen from one group at a time — a hero to represent the holder of the Goblet against whatever foe they faced."
"Oh! That is fascinating! Where did you— Is there a book I could look for on the subject?"
Nyberg gave her an odd, questioning sort of look. "There are many books on the history of the Tournament, yes, most of which include something on the Goblet of Fire, though they are mostly concerned with the choices it makes and the geas which binds the contestants to participate. Less so the creation of the Goblet itself and the people who gave it life. But we do have a primary source available..."
Maïa's eyes grew very wide. "You mean...it talks? Like, the Lord spoke out of the fire?" Sounded like she was quoting something, though Lyra wasn't familiar with it.
"Not quite," Nyberg said, chuckling. "More like, you touch the flame and it communicates with impressions and magic, like any other Aspect of Magic. It can only be awakened every three years, and then only for a day before it makes its choice and falls back into dormancy," he added, "but while it burns, those who touch the flame can speak to it. Ask questions."
"Lyra!" she exclaimed, nearly bouncing with excitement, "Did you talk to it? Did it show you anything?"
"Er, no." Eris was hardly likely to let some random fire-god that far into her mind. And Lyra was pretty sure Maïa knew that. It had to have come up...at some point. Hadn't it? Maybe it hadn't. "I felt the binding magic when I put my name in, but nothing else."
The professor nodded, giving her a tiny smirk. "I imagine gods tend to be possessive of their favourites, yes?"
"What?" Lyra said reflexively, resisting the urge to freeze in surprise, give herself time to assess exactly what the fuck was going on here.
"Apologies, I must have misinterpreted Angelos, when she insisted that you're her sister."
Oh. Right. It hadn't occurred to Lyra that that might be a bit of a dead giveaway about the whole black mage thing, especially to anyone who knew that Angel was an Avatar of the Dark. Fuck. "You must have, yes. Because being a black mage might not be Unforgivable at the moment—" ICW law was slightly more reasonable than Britain's. "—but I'm still going to be here after the Tournament ends."
"You may want to remind your sister of that fact," he suggested, eyes dancing.
She might, yes. Though there was really no telling whether that would help. If their positions were reversed, Lyra knew she would think it hilarious to tease Angel by making her life just a little more complicated...
"Oh... Oh, that's strange," Maïa muttered, a hand extended to the very edge of the Goblet, a few tiny blue flames licking at her fingers. She pulled them away relatively quickly, shivering and pressing her hands to her temples.
Lyra snorted. If Maïa was going to keep poking around with ritual magic — which, given her reaction to that little introduction ritual she and Gin had conducted, she thought she probably would — they might need to have a talk about how to talk to magical entities. Or rather, how to listen to them without being completely overwhelmed. Magic highs were fun. Someone doesn't talk to humans very often migraines, not so much. "Are you okay?"
"I think I asked too big a question," she moaned, eyes screwed shut. "That was just...just a lot."
Lyra wasn't sure what exactly she'd asked, but she was willing to bet it was something like what are you. "Yeah, heads up, sometimes when you ask gods what they are, they actually try to answer. Human minds can't really comprehend that sort of thing."
Maïa managed to open her eyes enough to glare at her. "I didn't ask what it was, I asked where it came from." Same difference, really... "And you couldn't've mentioned that, I don't know, before I touched the fire?"
"I didn't realise you were going to just go trying it!"
Nyberg patted Maïa's shoulder. "Go sleep it off Miss...?"
"Granger," Lyra supplied, though she refrained from adding my muggleborn girlfriend, because Maïa was already annoyed enough with her. "Come on, Maïa," she said, taking her arm to turn her toward the door. "He's right. And I was going to take a nap before the feast anyway. Professor Nyberg."
He nodded in farewell, flicking his fingers toward the door. "Yes, go away so I can fix the mess you've made of Angel's lovely origami. I believe it was supposed to be a duck."
That quote Lyra didn't recognise is from the Bible. Because Lyra's well read like that.
I spent like, four hours trying to figure out how to describe a five-dimensional maze. The basic premise is, you take a three dimensional space and treat it like a flat piece of paper, fold it into a different shape, like, say, a swan, then take a few of the planes (areas) now defined by the folds, and turn them "inside-out" in a dimension completely different from any of the ones involved in the original room, or the one in which that room is now a duck (because Angel is bad at origami, it's such a patient, fiddly art...). I think of this direction as 'through', basically the same thing Lyra's doing with the plinth, flipping shite around. As you try to walk in a straight line through the original three dimensions, the way that the room's been twisted and folded means you actually end up moving in a very different direction than you intend with every step. You can, however, find an edge of the original space, and follow it around what would be the edge of the paper in an actual origami bird, which is what Lyra did to "unfold" it. Does this make sense? I don't know. It's one of those weird experimental chapters like writing a scene from Eris's POV. Extradimensional origami is hard. —Leigha