Secrets of Stone and Earth

The students of Scamander returned to the common room after dinner to find that Newt and Tina had somehow beaten them there, despite still being at the head table when they left. They were both staring at the growth of the trees while Whispers was trying to get Dougal to play with him, but the older demiguise seemed a bit too tired for the excitable younger one. It was a bit dark in the room, but instead of lighting a fire, Tina waved her wand toward the ceiling and turned up the brightness of the stars above them.

Newt sat with his wife on the far side of the pit, opposite the students, and waited for everyone to get settled. Once they were settled, he spoke, "It's good to be back at Hogwarts and see all of you. It's quite amazing to see what has become of this room and I hope all of you had wonderful winter breaks and are growing and developing as much as the environment around you."

He smiled warmly and continued, "Before the break, I promised all of you that I would share some of the secrets of Hogwarts with you when we get back, however before I do that, I have a few other things to share. The first is I am going to be scheduling meetings with all of you to see how your experience at Hogwarts is going and to see where you want to be in the coming years. Typically career counseling takes place in a student's fifth year, but this is not what that is. You can treat it as such, but I will have another one specifically for the older students towards the end of the year."

Tina stopped him from continuing by asking the students, "Does anyone have any questions?"

Lily Moon raised her hand, and asked, "Did you both really hunt dark creatures over break?"

"Miss Moon," Newt replied, "I do not hunt any creature, I was only seeking to find and catalog this elusive magical creature. While it is dark in nature, I would never actively seek to kill a magical creature. Even in self-defense, I would seek to escape rather than harm one."

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small stick-like creature, "This is a bowtruckle, they are the most delicate of any creature I've come across in my lifetime. They congregate in trees most likely to be able to be harvested for wand wood. This little guy is the progeny of another one of my lifelong companions, named Pickett, who is now at my home taking care of one of the most magical trees in Britain. This one's name is Gilbert, I will always treat the creatures I encounter the same as I would for Gilbert here."

Harry and Lyra exchanged a glance. That whole speech made Harry feel terrible about killing the Sigbin in front of Newt. Their head of house had told Harry that it was truly a dark creature and hadn't tried to dissuade him from killing it, but he obviously wouldn't have done it himself. Harry knew he wouldn't ever try to kill something like Gilbert the Bowtruckle, but the magic in his staff and wand seemed to be specifically made for killing something like the shadow vampire he encountered in Manilla.

Lily apologized, "I'm sorry, Mr. Scamander. What would you have done if you had found it?"

"I'm not quite sure," he said with a smile. "From other similar experiences with unknown and potentially deadly creatures, I bet my lovely wife would have protected me from being killed in some gruesome manner while I attempted to make friends with it. With a dark creature like this one, which is known for eating corpses, I brought along several dead cows on the journey, on the assumption that they would make for tasty treats while I tried to figure out what its motivations were."

There were several looks of disgust around the fire circle, but Lyra thought it was a very good idea. She had learned to keep small rodents with her when visiting the areas of the island with the snake pits. Harry had told her that the snakes there would always assume she was bringing them something when they would smell her coming. Everyone liked a tasty treat, whether they were a small snake or a corpse-eating, flying crocodile.

Meagan asked, "What about the baragta? The good crocodile?"

Newt corrected her, "Barangitaw. Yes, they are quite friendly, and found a whole group of them, called a float, living near a small wizard village. The wizards keep them quite well-fed and we were able to spend a few days there, even going swimming with them and giving them underwater tummy rubs."

The students all giggled at that.

Tina took over again, "We have one more thing we wanted to discuss before we get to 'The Secrets of Hogwarts' that my husband promised you. That one thing being Quidditch."

That got everyone's attention, everyone sat up straighter to pay attention.

She continued, "Unless any changes are needed before next year, we are naming Cedric Diggory the captain of the Scamander team." She pulled a bronze badge out of her pocket that had a demiguise embossed into the metal with 'Scamander' and 'Captain' written above and below the animal.

"Mr. Diggory has already gone to great lengths to ensure that quidditch at Hogwarts will be safer for everyone involved and I feel he will be as dedicated to the position as he has been to all of his other studies at Hogwarts. To recognize his efforts, I am awarding him thirty points." She stood up, walked over to him, and passed him the badge.

Someone started clapping which continued to have the entire house standing and applauding him, even Whispers, who had sat down next to the older boy and was looking intently at the shiny badge. There was silence following the applause and Cedric looked up from gazing at the Captain's badge to realize that Newt and Tina expected him to say something.

"Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Scamander. I will make sure that this privilege doesn't distract me from my other duties and school work. We barely have enough students right now to field a reserve team in addition to our starters, so I would be happy if everyone was willing to play some kind of role on the team to make sure we can play. Even if you are helping just with broom maintenance or game strategy, instead of playing, that would be appreciated. It's good that Dumbledore allowed first-year students to play on the school teams as we will probably need to start training the next year's students as reserves. I'll make an announcement and place it on our board as soon as I've been able to reserve the quidditch pitch with Madam Hooch to have tryouts and start training."

Then he went back to gazing at the bronze badge in his hands.

"Well spoken," Newt complimented him. "Now we get to the main topic of conversation for the evening, the Secrets of Hogwarts." Cedric stashed the badge in his pocket to pay full attention along with the rest of them. "Before I continue, you need to know this will be kept a secret, so if anyone thinks they can't keep this between those in this room, please wait outside."

No one moved.

"Don't worry, this won't be the kind of secret that will create problems in your lives or with your friends. There are even ways you can share or take inspiration from them for what I am about to tell you."

Newt reached into his pocket and pulled out a long white candle with gold sparkles in the wax. Harry's eyes were instantly drawn to it as it was the same one he had received half of in the secret room with Tracey. Lyra had seen the candle he had brought back as well and he exchanged a look with her in silence until she realized it was the same one as what he had. Newt placed the candle in the middle of the pit and lit it with his wand, bathing the room in a golden light.

"Near the end of my time at Hogwarts, I broke a few rules. Not the one I was expelled for, I was covering for another student on that infraction and would do it again if I had to. One of the other rules I broke was the ban on experimental breeding." This drew concerned looks from the few older students. "Don't worry, I have rectified that violation since then, but this candle was the result of my first successful experiment. Currently, magical crossbreeding is something you may pursue in a mastery after Hogwarts as it is an incredibly delicate process that I won't get into now. Like Mr. Potter, I was attracted to the idea of truth serums and tried to make my own. There exists a type of magical insect called a Samoan Dragon Beetle, whose bite will cause someone to tell only the truth for a full day."

"Why aren't they used in place of veritaserum?" Patricia asked.

"Because of the side effects," Newt responded. "There is extreme swelling around the bite and even when that is dealt with, there will be some uncontrollable twitching that lasts for years to come. Knowing the effects of the bite, I attempted to breed out that particular effect and managed to succeed by crossbreeding them first with cicadas and then with honeybees. I had numerous failures along the way and ended up burning an entire colony when crossing them with locusts." He smirked with a bit of mischief which was strange to see from the older wizard, and added, "The resulting insect had quite too many legs and mouths and bred into swarms too quickly, threatening to burrow and eat the very walls of Hogwarts." Everyone looked terrified at such a possibility.

"So… Honeybees," he jumped back on topic. "I managed to create a stable magical crossbreed with mundane honeybees after first breeding them with cicadas to try to breed out the twitching side effect, and limit their breeding potential. I initially wanted to use their honey as a truth serum, but while it compelled people to tell the truth, the compulsion wasn't strong enough to be used reliably… However, the wax that they produced did turn into something incredible. I managed to fashion candles from their wax that held an interesting property." The students were all staring at the candle in front of them.

"This candle makes it so anyone who speaks a secret truth while in its light will not be able to reveal it to anyone who didn't hear it under the light of the same candle. It doesn't affect something that is public knowledge or falsehoods, just truths revealed here and now. If you have any secrets of your own, don't share them now unless you trust everyone here completely. With this, we can move on to the secrets of Hogwarts."

Tina took over again, "For those who participate in the Explorer's Club, I'm sure you know quite well by now that this is a very strange castle, filled with very peculiar things that frankly don't belong in an old fortress. Does anyone want to share something they have discovered? If you have already told people outside this room, the secret won't be bound by the candle."

Harry raised his hand, "There's a suit of armor outside this room that has a small statue of a mouse drinking tea inside it."

"Good!" Tina said. "Anyone else?"

"There's a ladder between the third and fifth floor that plays music if you climb it fast enough," Milicent told everyone.

"There's a Klotzki puzzle made of floor tiles in an empty room on the sixth floor," William told the room. Then added, "I haven't been able to solve it yet."

Newt raised his hands for silence, "Yes, there are a lot of strange things around Hogwarts, and nearly all of them weren't there when the original founders built the castle. They were added by students, professors, and headmasters alike over the years. I have been permitted by the headmaster to tell you this secret and inform you that we are going to add more strange things to the castle over the years between now and when all of you graduate."

He smiled as he looked at all the curious and excited young faces before him, "This will not be shared with subsequent students in the years to come, only the seventeen of you. Don't rush to figure something out as you have plenty of time, but if you have an idea for something you want to add to the castle, make an appointment with me or Tina in our office to share your idea. It can be anything from an entire room you think would be interesting to have or just a music box hidden behind a portrait that plays your favorite song and produces owl treats when the song ends. Anything is possible, however, we will only accept one idea per student, so think long and hard about what you would like to see in the castle that will be here for centuries to come."

All of the Scamander students delved into thought as many initial ideas were dismissed as not being extravagant enough.

"Look through the logs of the Explorer's Club," Tina told them. "Look at other things that already exist around the castle. You can talk to other students and brainstorm ideas, but you won't be able to tell them that you are going to create something new in the castle. Once you have something you want to implement, I will run it by the Headmaster to see if it already exists. He can figure out if it does, though unless he already knows about it, he won't be able to tell me where it is or how to access it. You are competing for ideas with 1,000 years of other people adding to the castle, so this will not be an easy task. This is probably why there is a mouse drinking tea inside a suit of armor, as others may not have been able to think of an original idea that could be implemented, and ended up just doing something simple but strange."

Lee raised his hand, then asked, "Is the only way to add something to have the headmaster do it? There must have been ways for people to find out how to do it on their own, right?"

"That's probably true," Tina said with a shrug. "However, they would probably need to know the castle as well as the Headmaster himself, and how the wards function to allow for the addition of something new inside of them."

"That's enough for tonight," Newt told the students. "We can discuss this more as a group at the end of the school year." Then he licked his fingers and reached over to the candle, snuffing the flame out, and returning the room to its starlit light. Everyone started whispering among themselves about ideas for Hogwarts as they dispersed.

As Harry and Lyra started to head towards their favorite tree, Tina stopped them, "Could the two of you join us in our office for a bit?" They nodded and collected Whispers and Dougal to join the Scamanders as they left the room.

On the way out, Newt took them on a different route through the maze which led to a small set of stairs. At the top of it was a door that opened into their office from earlier in the year.

"We're going to put the directions to our office on the board later," Tina told them. "It's much easier this way than going all the way to the main staircase and doubling back."

Once they were all seated in the office, Newt addressed them, "Before we tell you about the things that happened on the island after you left, I wanted to make sure I ask you both something directly. Did either of you have anything to do with what happened to Vincent Crabbe?"

Both Harry and Lyra shook their heads, with Harry trying to focus hard on the fact that a snake had done it, not him, in case Newt or Tina knew legilimency.

"Do you know anything about the attack?" Tina asked seriously.

Harry thought it would be best to try to distract them a bit, so he told them, "Hermione told me that Vincent attacked her. She might have told someone else, but I took a dreamless sleep potion that night to make sure I slept through the night."

"Why hasn't she told any of the professors?" Tina asked. "Or the Aurors?"

Harry shrugged, but added, "Would it do any good? Vincent's father was probably the one who got Lucius Malfoy out of Azkaban. Hermione probably thought that it would only bring her trouble to report him."

Tina sighed, "You're probably right about that. Your government is sometimes hopelessly corrupt" She frowned and continued, "I will try to speak to her and get her to report him all the same."

"Let us move to more pleasant matters," Newt changed topics. "We found out how the trust-based invisibility of the hoohoos works on the island and answered another question about the demiguises that had been bugging us since shortly after we arrived. It took us less than a week to gain their trust and reveal themselves to us. They are quite beautiful and like the demiguises of Whispers's family, are also much larger than most other hoohoos we have encountered before. Have they grown at all since your blessing?"

Lyra shook her head, "No, but they have started to lay more eggs than they did before it. Though there is never more than one female that we've seen. All the new chicks are boys."

"Firebirds are nearly entirely male," Newt informed them. "They generally reproduce very slowly which is why they are so rare. To see so many where you live is one of the amazing things about them. Every type of firebird has unique strengths that others do not. For example, all firebirds are able to fire travel in some way; the phoenix can cover long distances in a burst of fire but takes a while before it can do so again. Your hoohoos are capable of traveling short distances and the fire they produce when traveling is much smaller which somehow relates to an inability to bring others along with them, plus their recharge time is much shorter. The hoohoos can throw fire while a phoenix will only be able to ignite things near it. Other firebirds from other regions have unique abilities as well, though they will be similar."

That made Lyra very interested to learn about the others and what their abilities were, and to collect their feathers.

"After you left, we visited the other hoohoo sanctuaries in the region and tried to compare the habitats to figure out why yours has the unique type of invisibility. While comparing the volcanic craters of the other sanctuaries with yours, that is where we found a difference. Buried in the earth in the crater on your island is a graveyard for demiguises."

He paused for a second while Harry and Lyra absorbed the shock of the discovery.

"The running theory is that the magic from the deceased creatures somehow bled over into the hoohoos through diet and proximity to give them this unique ability in this location alone. We used diagnostic magic to examine the bodies below the earth and determined they all died of natural causes. This led us to believe that the others in the village must have buried them there, but not recently. The most recent burial was probably done about three hundred years ago. This is what led us to the answer of a suspicion we had since our arrival." Newt gestured to Dougal, "My friend here is around eighty years old. The oldest demiguise in The Hidden Village is Chief who is probably just over forty years old. Since you told us that The Giver knew many generations of Charlie's ancestors, it makes no sense that there weren't any older ones on the island."

Tina continued the story, "We have a theory that the poachers you encountered and dispatched knew about the island and had been culling the population every generation, taking all of the adults and leaving the others to repopulate. Can you think of anything that would contribute to that theory?"

Harry's anger was growing with each additional sentence, he could feel the heat from Lyra's hair growing at the same time. As his magic began to vibrate the air around him, sparks started flying from Lyra's hair as well. Newt and Tina's eyes went wide at the display of their fury. Harry was frantically searching his memories to see if he could think of anything that would justify this theory. While trying to connect the dots, he remembered something about Mango. He took a deep breath and tried to calm down and focus on the memory.

"Mango…" he said to Newt. "Mango got his name from the fruit. He had never eaten one before. Before we arrived on the island, it seemed that the only members of the tribe that left the village were Charlie and Teacher. They're the ones that found us on the beach, along with Whispers. The others seemed too scared to leave; they had never even been to the mango groves on the west side for their entire lives."

"It seems plausible that they didn't even know why they didn't leave the village, just that they shouldn't because of something deadly outside of it," Newt commented. "Anything else you can think of?"

Lyra had been thinking as well, and said, "The Giver's parents. He told us that visitors to the island killed them, that might have happened about three hundred years ago."

Harry considered that, and then said, "I'll be right back."

He took off down the stairs to the common room maze. Lyra just shrugged as Newt and Tina looked to her for an explanation. It took Harry about five minutes to come back and he was holding a wooden bowl filled with blood.

"That's one of the communication bowls I've heard about, right?" Newt asked, and Lyra nodded.

Harry spoke into it,

§Is he there yet?§

There was no response, so Harry addressed the others, "I called for The Giver, but only The Usurper was there, telling me that he had gone to collect some potion ingredients that could only be done at night. The Usurper went to bring him back."

"Professor Snape informed us that the bowls only last a month. It's been longer than that since we returned," Tina said with the air of a question.

"Preservation charm," Harry responded. "I have enough preserved bowls to last until we go back for the summer."

"Smart idea," Tina said. "Ten points to you Mr. Potter."

"That's not a school-related achievement, dear," Newt told her.

"I guess so, maybe I just like giving people points," she smiled back. "Though it is a good use for the preservation charm that they both learned as first years, so let's say that's why I gave them the points."

"You didn't give me any points," Lyra said expectantly.

Tina got up and walked over to a desk, took out a small blue vial, and passed it to her. Taking out her wand, Lyra took a minute to perform the charm properly and returned the vial to Tina.

"Ten more points to Lyra for performing a charm at least a year above her current level," Tina smirked.

The bowl of blood bubbled in front of them and a hissing sound came out of it,

§I am here, the kingsbane fetched me with much urgency.§

Harry hissed back into the bowl,

§The Scamanders have returned.§
§They think that the poachers who came may have come many times in the past.§
§Have you ever seen them before?§

The Giver replied,

§I had never encountered them before.§

Harry spoke to the others, "The Giver says he never saw them before we dealt with them."

Tina told him, "Ask him about the older demiguises and where they all went."

Harry leaned back towards the bowl,

§Do you remember how older Hidden died?§
§They can live nearly as long as I can, but Chief isn't more than forty years old.§
§What happened to his parents? And Charlie's?§

There was a long silence before The Giver responded,

§I have no memories of Hidden older than them§
§The one you call Chief is the oldest one I remember.§
§When one would reach his age, one day he would stop coming to see me.§
§Then a younger one would take his place to visit me.§
§I never knew what happened to the older one who stopped coming.§
§Until your arrival, I did not have a productive way of communicating with them.§

Harry faced the others and translated what he had been told.

"It sounds like they were being culled," Newt said with anger and sadness in his eyes. "If it happened regularly when they reached a certain age, then they were coming back after a regular amount of time to take all the adults."

"The Giver was probably protected by his magic, the hoohoo were safe due to their invisibility, and the Lampong probably was avoided due to the danger," Tina surmised.

"We need to tell Nestor," Lyra said, her hair still giving off small sparks. "His friend needs to investigate the sunken boat as soon as possible."

"That also means that any international trade that related to demiguises would have fluctuated around these culling times," Newt added. "I'll try to see if I can track where invisibility cloaks have come from over the years to see if that can be tied back to specific places. Not all demiguises come from your island of course, so it will be hard to figure out specifically where the cloaks came from." Turning to Harry, "Can you ask The Giver how often a younger demiguise replaced an older one that visited with him?"

Harry hissed into the bowl with Newt's question, and after a moment The Giver responded, and Harry translated, "He estimates that it was around twenty years each time."

"That would be long enough for a new generation to mature," Newt said sternly. "They must have someone who works with them that is familiar with their development cycles." He stared off into the distance in disbelief, "Three hundred years… this has been going on for so many generations of both wizards and demiguises."

This wasn't something he could do anything about besides feeling furious, so Harry tried to change the conversation, "I have one of your candles," he told Newt.

"What? How?" He looked shocked and confused.

"There's a secret room I found with Tracey that had it inside. It had a message inside that we needed to reveal a secret to each other to be let out. When we did, the hovering candle went out, fell to the floor, and split in half. One piece for each of us. I wrote it down in the logs for the club."

"I don't know how that could exist," Newt pondered, "I haven't shared the candles with anyone except for Tina." He considered the situation before saying, "Try telling your sister Tracey's secret."

Harry didn't want to reveal Tracey's secret, but it would be interesting to test the properties of the candle, so he whispered to his sister, "Tracey said that…" and then he stopped.

It felt like his brain had run into a wall like it was trying to reach for something that he knew existed, but it was encased inside a glass box, protected. He tried to tell it to Newt, "Tracey told me that…" but the same sensation washed over him.

"That's so weird," he told everyone. "It's like the memory is imprisoned inside my mind. I can see it, and I can think about it, but I can't share it."

"I just can't figure out how someone else got a hold of the candles or created a room to give them out," Newt was racking his brain to figure it out.

Seeing that Newt was incredibly focused on figuring out the situation, Harry and Lyra excused themselves to return to the blood bowl and try to speak to Whispers about the poachers and what to do next.

Once they were gone, Newt sat on the loveseat in his office and pondered the situation. Dougal, sensing the emotions of his friend, squeezed himself between him and his wife and started to stroke his head. Tina got up and started to pace as she tried to figure out how it had happened as well. After a few minutes, Tina stopped in the middle of her pacing and looked back at her husband.

"I think I know who created the room, the room for exchanging secrets," she said. Seeing Newt's attention on her, she told him, "I think it was Leta."

Thinking about her for the second time that evening, emotion and memories filled his eyes. He smiled softly, and said, "Yes, I believe you're right."

He stood up and embraced Tina while shedding a few tears for his fallen friend, and first love.