Awakening

Wearing the knives caused a lot more chaos than they had intended. Not even the first day went by before the entire school was talking about them. It wasn't particularly strange for them as they both already carried staves, and everyone at school carried a wand; but for some reason, a knife was viewed as more dangerous in the eyes of others. Plenty of people would ask to see them, touch them, or have Harry and Lyra cut something with them. It was even a problem to practice their forms and stances in the common room as their housemates would bug them while they practiced. Eventually, Newt Scamander arranged for them to have a private room on the second floor where they could practice on their own.

The following Saturday, Gemma was back instructing them on their dueling, two weeks after her animagus reveal. They had seen her flying around the grounds every so often, and Lyra had occasionally tried to fly on her broom with the girl, but it seemed like she just liked to fly alone. Despite re-learning everything, their Slytherin friends and Greg were enjoying getting specialized instructions on the spells. According to Gemma, DADA teachers changed every year due to a curse on the position, so a consistent education in the subject could only be had if you got an older student to tutor you, like what they had now. She seemed happy that they wouldn't have Lockhart next year, and there was a betting pool on what reason he would not be there next year.

The professor in Gemma's first year quit for unknown reasons, the next one got pregnant and had to leave for her child, her third year he fell victim to a curse that made him mute. Last year, no one knew what happened to Professor Quirrel. Just one night near the end of the year the entire castle was woken up by what sounded like a very explosive duel, which was somehow related to the reconstruction of the third-floor corridor at the beginning of the previous term. The next day, he was gone and Dumbledore informed everyone that the professor had left the school.

For that day's tutoring, Gemma introduced Harry and Lyra to the smokescreen spell and reintroduced it to the others. The incantation was Fumos and the wand movement was just a spiral, so just waving your wand in a random series of circles also did the trick. The longer you continued to spiral your wand, the longer the spell would continue. Gemma also showed them the color of the smoke could be changed by focusing on the color-changing spell, but combining spells was a little above their level.

At the end of their day, they each had a series of small duels against each other. Whenever Harry was able to use his shield, he always won as none of the spells that the others could use would penetrate it. Daphne tried to freeze him solid, but he quickly threw enough pulses of magic at her for her to drop her wand before her ice could immobilize him.

Tracey managed to tag him with nearly five stinging jinxes before he could get his shield up, which impressed Harry quite a bit at the speed of her spells, but in the end, a knockback spell to her side won him the duel. Greg was a bit harder to defeat, due to his natural resistance, but enough continuous hits took him down. Gemma told him to practice more casting while he was being hit. Blaise didn't seem to be trying very hard and instead was just analyzing the efforts of everyone else and consequentially, he lost all his matches.

Lyra was a bit annoyed that she wasn't allowed to use fire in her duels. Only Harry was able to cast a strong enough shield to keep himself from getting burnt, and the others weren't able to use flame-freezing spells well enough to resist the heat from her fire. She did get to duel against Gemma once but lost due to the variety and strength of her spells, even though she did get to swat her to the ground once with a tendril of black smoke from her staff.

The next day, Harry and Lyra met again with Símone for their occlumency training and continued testing their perception of her presence inside their minds, giving them randomly assigned secrets to try to hide. One time, Lyra was able to ignore all the voices in her head and keep herself from giving away the secret she had been given of where in the room she had hidden a small key. However, their tutor still somehow just plucked the thought from her mind.

Harry, on the other hand, couldn't seem to figure out which thoughts were his and which were Símone's. So he just answered every question he heard in his head with the wrong answers. Their tutor just used that tactic to eliminate everywhere the hidden key was not and then pick the only place left. She could somehow tell when he was lying, so even when he put the truth inside a stream of lies, she could pick it out with ease.

Both of them could easily detect when someone was in their head after a week of engaging in the dominance ritual with Whispers, many times a day. Their little brother was overjoyed that they could now play his favorite game with him and would bug them to play at every available opportunity. He would poke and prod at one of their minds until it gave them a headache, and then he would go off and find the other sibling.

Brandt took them to Hogsmeade to see Ransom in the blacksmith shop after their occlumency lesson and he ran them through their drills ten times before he was satisfied to move them on to the next lesson. However, it turned out the next lesson was the same one, except heavier. He gave them each five silver bolts, with runes carved on the outside. The bolts were much heavier than they looked and slid down the blades of their blunt knives, fitting perfectly and wouldn't fall off without being physically removed. The smith went back through their stances and showed them ways to move between them, so each form flowed into the other one. Then he had them add one of the bolts to each of their knives and do it all again. Their assignment for the next week was to practice these movements, and any time they felt like the knife was too light, they were to add another bolt to the blade.

He told them that eventually, the weights would get heavier and when they had perfected all the forms he was having them perform at specific weights, and only then they would move on to the next lesson. They didn't hear a peep the entire day out of Pik'kal in the back room, assuming he was even there.

Through students asking questions, Harry and Lyra revealed that if you were receiving training or had already received accredited training in muggle weaponry, you could carry them around the school. In the second week of March, a few older students started carrying different weapons; there were a few swords, a couple of staves, and a bow and arrow. They heard a seventh-year muggleborn was trying to get permission to carry a shotgun, as all of his family were trained in bird hunting.

As a result, the Hogwarts charter was called into question and it was specified that the rule about carrying weapons said they had to be something they could receive training for at Hogwarts and be a weapon that could be taken from one of the various suits of armor around the school in the case of an emergency. So the boy's request to carry a muggle gun was rejected.

To make sure they were getting the most out of their training, Harry and Lyra did their forms and movements in the morning and the evening in the room on the second floor. They also did their practical spell-casting in that room as well. Their practical spellcasting was mostly harmless at the moment, with the chilling charm, turning objects into matchboxes, and the knockback spell for dueling. They hadn't learned any spells from Professor Lockhart yet in DADA, except for dealing with household pests.

Occasionally, they would have some of their friends join them in their studies, Seamus was a common visitor in the room to help Lyra with the chilling spell. The way he was able to get Lyra to perform the spell properly was to have her use the mindset that she wasn't cooling the liquid or object, but instead, she was stealing all the heat that it had. Once she was able to adjust her thinking that way, it almost worked like a warming charm on herself as she sucked the heat away from objects and froze different things solid.

At the end of the second week of March, it was announced that the school had received a new flock of roosters and chickens, so eggs would be returning to the menu over the weekend. Harry excitedly rushed to breakfast on Saturday morning but found that there were none. An announcement at breakfast told them that the poultry killer had returned, poisoning the feed for the birds, and tainting all the eggs so they couldn't be served or fertilized. Further bad news was given as the Headmaster informed the students that there would be no more eggs and no more chicken until the culprit was apprehended.

After dueling practice later that day, Harry and Lyra spent the evening in Ravenclaw to use the quiet of the room to relax. They tried to find Hermione while they were there, but she looked a bit harried and was running around between different project rooms in a flurry trying to study and work on as many things as possible. She said hello to them but then ran off to work on something else immediately.

Penny joined them for a moment and showed them that she had cut up the blanket of the Kesaran-pasaran fur. She had taken sections and stitched them into various stuffed animals. They weren't well done, but it was the proof of concept that was important. Each one had a small rune on their hands or paws, or some two parts of the toy that if squeezed by two hands of a wizard, would begin to cuddle them for nearly a minute before stopping. It required only the magic of the wizard touching it, so it wasn't a risk to the Statute of Secrecy if it ended up in the hands of a muggle, like other wizarding toys that moved on their own.

Penny had done enough product testing with the blanket that, while it was fun for younger students, once they reached about the third year, they all felt it was creepy with one student describing it as a love-sick lethifold. The stuffed animals were fun for everyone. There were five of them, so Penny kept a squirrel for herself, which terrified the Gryffindor animagus of the same animal a year above her, and layered it with protective enchantments so she could play with it in her wolf form. Harry took the others to send back to Madison at the Knitter Critter as their first successful project.

Harry was a bit concerned with his primary project of mapping the castle. So far, he was no closer to finding the secret chamber that would hopefully contain the enemy of the Usurper. On top of that, homework from his classes had increased in preparation for end-of-the-year exams, and his weekends were almost completely booked with dueling, occlumency, and knife training now. Instead of exploring himself, he found himself looking through the logs of the other students in the Explorers Club and seeing the different things they had discovered. Nothing was leading him closer to his goal.

So now, the third week of March was beginning with nearly no progress from the last two weeks with adding anything new to his logs for the secrets of the castle.

Tuesday was a torturous day, it started with brewing antidotes in Potions class. They were working on slow-acting poisons which also required slow-brewed antidotes. These couldn't be sped up by infusing more magic into them while stirring, you needed to stir slowly and continuously over a long time at each step. There were no shortcuts with this one. For each step, they had to weigh out a specific amount of sand for their timer and let it run out while stirring at an even pace. Going too fast or too slow would ruin the potion. Changing speeds would ruin the potion. Measuring the wrong amount of sand would ruin the potion. There were many failures in the classroom that day.

Herbology was the exact opposite, needing to repot and fertilize a plant called a 'Spiky Bush' that lived up to its name. It was just a green bush with golden spikes all over it which had its primary use in potions that reacted to living things and explosives. It was also used as a defensive plant and placed in areas where wizards didn't want other living things. When someone got too close to them, they would fire off the spikes that grew on them, so the best way of dealing with them was to get them to unload all of them and then deal with an angry plant that had no teeth. For someone who could cast a shield charm, this posed no issue, however first years hadn't learned that, so they needed to wear protective clothing and just jump in front of it and shake it until all the needles and spikes were used up and fallen to the floor, where they could also be collected as potions ingredients.

History was history, and they learned about some Goblin rebellion in 1741. It didn't sound that important as it was just a few dozen Goblins who claimed wizards stole from their bank branch in Southern Sweden but didn't have the approval of the head branch to retaliate. They were wiped out by the wizards they were attacking and their leader was named Farglau the Foolish. After learning more about the Goblins and their history from the Dwarves, these little skirmishes seemed even less important than before. Professor Binns still hadn't taught them about the war that founded Gringotts, but they wouldn't be the ones who asked their teacher to do something outside his lesson plan. That was even assuming the ghost of their professor was even capable of deviating from his lesson plan.

So Tuesday evening, after dinner, Harry and Lyra retreated to their practice room with Whispers to go through their routines and a little bit of homework. When it got close to curfew, they switched over to occlumency training. Harry was busy playing with Whispers and staring into the bright blue eyes of his little brother while Lyra tried to trace the paths of her emotional triggers through her mind and body. Both of them had been able to figure out where it felt like their emotions originated, but not where they ended up. It was quite a difficult thing to see inside their own minds like there was something other than gray matter there like there were actual pathways and routes behind their eyes and under their skin.

Harry was able to get close to a minute with Whispers now, though only when he focused solely on defense. Any time he thought of attacking back, Whispers would take advantage of his split consciousness and force him to blink. However, today he had dealt enough with the spiky bush that he tried to change tactics. Instead of deflecting blows, he just imagined his mind was covered with spikes. If Whispers couldn't attack somewhere because of a spike, he could divert his attention to attacking as well. This tactic worked well and Whispers couldn't figure out a good spot to aim his mental attacks, putting him on the defensive.

It was hard to estimate time while engaged in the dominance ritual, and even more difficult to figure out if something else was happening around him as it required precision focus on the glowing blue eyes in front of him. While he was focusing on the game, he started hearing someone talking about being hungry. It didn't sound quite like Lyra, but he focused on matters in front of him. After trading mental blows with Whispers for a little longer, his little brother found a hole in his cerebral defenses and broke his concentration.

Sitting up, he turned to Lyra who was sitting on the floor with her eyes shut focusing on her emotions. He was about to start up with Whispers again when he heard the voice again, and now it sounded frustrated.

§No! I cannot eat, it is too hard. Next time I will kill small snacks!§

Harry quickly tapped on Lyra's shoulder, breaking her out of her meditation, "There's a snake outside our room, it must have escaped from the Slytherin common room. It's looking for a snack."

Lyra pulled out her wand in case the snake didn't want to be friendly, and approached the door. Harry drew his wand as well and opened it, ready to greet whatever was on the other side. However, after looking up and down the hallway, nothing was there.

Lyra lit up her wand and saw that towards the end of the hall, the bathroom had flooded. The light from her wand reflected off the water on the floor and they could see a cat at the edge of the puddle, looking away from them, unmoving. Harry immediately recognized the annoying cat as Mrs. Norris.

"There's no one here," Harry told his sister. "It's almost curfew, let's get out of here before Mrs. Norris goes to get Filch."

She nodded and they went back into the room and gathered up their belongings. After putting their knives back on their belts and packing their pouches with their books, Whispers put his gloves back on and left the room. With both their wands lit now, they saw Mrs. Norris was still down at the end of the hall by the pool of water. While they went the other way, Whispers approached the cat

Harry and Lyra ran after Whispers who arrived at the cat before them, and reached down to pet her, then jumped back, looking confused and saying, "Cat is rock."

Lyra reached down and touched the frozen cat as well, and told Harry, "She feels totally solid, maybe it's not real?"

Harry felt the cat as well, noticing the detail in the fur and face of the statue. It was the most realistic stature he had ever seen, and it hadn't been here when they first entered their study room.

As they examined the statue, they heard an angry voice from the other end of the hallway, "What are you two doing with my cat?" Turning around, they saw the bedraggled Mr. Filch walking down the hallway toward them.

"I don't think it's your cat," Harry told the caretaker as he approached, "I think it's a statue."

As he got closer, he pushed Harry to the side of the hall without care and picked up the statue, looking it in the eyes. Frantically he turned it from side to side looking at it with fear and worry, then tucked it under his arm and turned to Lyra with a murderous look in his eyes.

"You killed my cat! I'll have you chained up in my office and beaten for that." Lyra froze as the caretaker pulled out a large baton and raised it over his head.

Harry had recovered from the shove and already had his wand out. Seeing the man raise the baton, Harry performed the casting movement for the knockback charm, calling out "Flipendo!" with a great amount of rage in his voice.

His aim was slightly off and it hit Filch on his right hip, which launched the man to his left and fell into the large puddle on the floor. He rolled a few times while protecting the statue of the cat held under his arm. Then he got up and stared at Harry who was pointing his wand with a yellow light glowing on the tip.

"Attacking a faculty member, you'll be expelled for that," he growled. Then pulled out a silver whistle and blew it. No sound came from it, but Harry felt a pulse of magic wash over him and down the hall towards the main staircase.

Harry lowered his wand as he saw Whispers sneaking up behind Filch and didn't want him to get in trouble too. A few seconds later, Tina and Newt came running down the hall with their wands drawn and stopped when they saw Harry and Lyra standing over Filch who was still sitting in the puddle of water.

"What's going on here?" Tina demanded.

Before either of them could respond, Filch jumped to his feet and pointed to Lyra, "The girl killed my cat, and the boy attacked me."

"We didn't!" Lyra cried out. "We found the cat that way."

"He was going to attack Lyra, so I cast a knockback jinx on him," Harry said at the same time.

"Liars!" he yelled back, "My cat is dead, and you jinxed me to get away!"

Newt motioned to Harry and Lyra to stand to the side as he pointed his wand towards Filch, "Accio Cat!"

The statue of the cat was yanked from his hands and flew into Newt's. Filch ran over to him, ignoring the children to stand next to the professor as he examined the cat. Tina pulled the children aside to question them while that was going on.

"What happened?" she asked them quietly.

"We were in our practice room," Harry began, "and I heard a snake somewhere outside complaining about being hungry. That's like nearly everything they talk about, so we peaked out to try to return it to the dungeons."

"But nothing was there," Lyra continued. "So we packed up all our stuff and when we came out again, we saw Mrs. Norris over here by the puddle. We ignored her since she normally is around that man," she pointed towards Filch, "but Whispers wanted to go pet her."

"What are you saying about me?" Filch demanded at seeing her pointing.

Harry took over again, "Whispers said the cat felt like a rock, and she did when we touched her. We thought it was a statue, but then Filch showed up and accused Lyra of killing it and threatened to chain her up and beat her. He pulled out a club and when he raised it, I cast the jinx on him."

As Harry finished the story, Professor McGonagall and Professor Vector arrived on the scene as well. Tina waved them over and told Harry and Lyra to stand over against the other wall. They waited patiently as Tina explained their story to the two new professors and then all of them went to talk to Filch as Newt began casting a variety of spells on the cat statue.

After nearly five minutes, Newt announced, "The cat is not dead, it is petrified. I'm not sure how it was done, but I think it is in a state of Kulivrian equilibrium."

Vector, McGonagall, Tina, and Filch all simultaneously said, "What?"

Newt explained, "It was just a theory, one that has never been proven to exist until this very moment. An Austrian Unspeakable theorized that living things could be placed in a state that would be impossible to tell if they are alive or dead, and he postulated that such a state could be used medically to keep a patient from dying without aging until they could be properly treated."

"Well make the girl change my cat back!" Filch yelled while pointing at Lyra.

"I very much doubt that a first-year student, no matter how talented, could have done this," Professor McGonagall informed the caretaker.

"What's going to happen to my cat?" he sounded desperate.

"I would like to take care of this little girl and run some tests," Newt responded.

"She's not a girl…" he said quietly. "Mrs. Norris is a lady."

Despite Harry and Lyra not telling anyone about the incident, the entire school learned by lunch the next day that Mrs. Norris was no longer patrolling the halls at night. It was astounding how secrets were impossible to keep at Hogwarts unless they were magically contained and enforced. This led to many hushed conversations about breaking curfew now that the only people who would be out at night were the occasional professor and the prefect patrols. Mrs. Norris and Filch were the only people that students were concerned about as the cat seemed to always be able to find hiding students. Being able to avoid another teenager was child's play, especially for students who knew all the routes the prefects patrolled on.

Mr. Filch had taken up residence in a classroom across from the Scamanders' office and tried to visit his petrified cat every few hours to check on her status. Eventually, Tina posted a sign on their door that stated, "Mrs. Norris's status is unchanged." After that, he only checked on her three times a day, after meals.

Newt called in Lockhart and Snape to examine Mrs. Norris to see if either could figure out the cause or the cure for the state of the cat. The defense teacher looked through numerous books filled with cryptic writing and attempted to perform dozens of diagnostic spells in various dead languages only to announce that he couldn't figure out how the petrification was caused.

Snape brought in a large quantity of restorative draughts and attempted to treat the problem like a curse. There was some reaction to a potion that cured transfiguration-based curses and caused a few hairs on the cat to change back to normal, but then they seized up again and the potion failed to achieve further success.

Saturday morning, before their dueling practice, a group of five hooded individuals entered Hogwarts. They strolled into the castle and walked through the Great Hall during breakfast. Their appearance caused hushed conversations to break out across the room and only increased when someone mentioned the term, 'Unspeakables.'

Harry had only heard the term once before from the Umbridge woman outside of Fudge's office, which also reminded him that he hadn't heard back from the man about Sirius Black. Right now, he switched seats over to the Gryffindor table where Percy was telling a group of first-years about the Unspeakables.

"It is a very respected job," he was saying. "Though no one knows who they are. See up there?" he pointed to the hooded men talking with Dumbledore at the staff table. "No one knows their real names, just secret ones that are given to them when they join. They do all sorts of mysterious research at the Ministry. They're probably here to look at Filch's cat."

Harry returned to his seat and watched as the Unspeakables sat down at the staff table to eat, not bothering to lower their hoods before starting. One of them sat apart from the group next to Professor Vector. The two seemed to be engaging in conversation, and occasionally she'd point out a student and the hooded wizard would write something down.

During dueling practice, they continued their spell work, using Gemma as a target as she worked on her dodging. Whatever natural grace she had before completing the animagus ritual had only increased, making it almost impossible to hit her with any spells. She also tried to incorporate her transformation into the practice, changing into her swan form to dodge spells in the air, and changing quickly back to human form to cast shield charms.

Lyra and Daphne were both having fun with the smokescreen spell and finding it to be a specialty. Lyra seemed to have an extra level of control over it, allowing her to make it denser or thinner in certain areas as well as some control over the paths it traveled before dispersing when it got too far from her. Daphne, on the other hand, had combined the control of the smoke screen with her ice-conjuring spell to create a heavy mist that would grow ice crystals on surfaces it touched while also obscuring vision. It worked well to slow down Gemma until she found out a strong flap of her swan wings would disperse the charm.

At dinner, only one of the Unspeakables was present but stood at the lectern as students entered the hall. They looked like a gargoyle up there, frozen in place and waiting for everyone to arrive. The hooded person didn't seem to mind the whispers and speculation at their presence and didn't make any movement until ten minutes after the food had appeared on the table.

"Good evening students," a voice came from underneath the hood. The voice was deep, but not in a way that would betray the gender of the person under the hood. It was deep in the way that a voice might sound if it was being spoken inside a cave, reverberating off the walls.

Harry and Lyra looked around at their fellow students and noticed that they all seemed to have a slight tilt of their heads as they stared at the person at the podium. They almost seemed entranced and drawn to the voice as if they were being compelled to listen. They exchanged a glance at each other as neither of them felt particularly drawn to the voice in the way the others were.

The Unspeakable continued, "I am known as Aspect. For those of you who know about others in my position, you know this is just a code name, and it is irrelevant to the current conversation. As many of you have guessed, we are here due to the situation with the cat of the Hogwarts caretaker. After examining the subject, we have determined that we will be able to reverse it before you finish the term. However, I proposed telling all of you about this for another reason. We would like to have the students of Hogwarts see if they can also create a solution."

Typically, a statement like that would have elicited whispers and hushed conversations among the tables, but this time, Harry and Lyra observed that all the others continued to stare with tilted heads at the hooded person at the front, without moving. The Unspeakable turned their head toward Harry and Lyra and stared at the two of them before continuing the speech.

"This type of petrification has been seen before, at Hogwarts in fact, though we still do not know the cause. I am asking for any student who is able to determine the cause or is able to create a remedy to report your findings to a professor who will pass it along to me."

Lyra spoke up, "Is there some kind of reward?" The heads of all the students in the hall turned towards her in unison, making her a bit frightened.

"Please don't interrupt," the Unspeakable responded, and all the heads swiveled back to their voice. "The Department of Mysteries does not offer rewards. Knowledge is its own reward. If you wish to attempt this feat, which was solved the last time by the previous Potions Master of Hogwarts, a basic analysis of the curse will be posted outside the Great Hall."

Without saying anything to conclude his speech, the Unspeakable slowly faded away. Harry and Lyra both squinted at the spot he stood, but neither of them could see any traces of disillusionment or invisibility. When he had completely vanished, all of the other students collectively shivered and shook their heads with many of them rushing out of the hall to see if they could find what the Unspeakable had mentioned about the posting.

After dinner, Harry and Lyra pushed through the crowd to see what had been put up. 'Basic Analysis' was exactly what it was, written on a golden plaque and mounted on the wall:

Advanced Petrification

Gray Transfiguration Curse

Slow Acting Confundus

Seen six times in the last hundred years.

GOOD LUCK - Department of Mysteries

Even though it was late on Saturday evening, there was a huge rush for the library as students went to try and figure out this bad riddle. Harry and Lyra just shrugged and went back to their common room as they had way too many other things to do with their time and energy. A cat belonging to a man who had threatened them wasn't worth their time.

Sunday brought Brandt and Símone to the castle for their Occlumency lessons. Once they were in the classroom, Harry asked Brandt about the status of the situation with the Minister and Sirius Black.

"It's being handled," he replied cryptically. "Something happened that needs to be resolved before we can get more information. That's all I can say right now, but I hope we can get it resolved by the end of the school year."

"Everything happens at the end of the school year," Lyra commented. "Filch's cat situation, and now this."

Símone was busy having a staring contest with Whispers. At the moment she was attempting to do it at a distance of about two meters instead of eye-to-eye in front of his face. It seemed like she could last longer the farther away from the demiguise she was. When they broke eye contact, she smiled and turned to the others.

"This is incredible, I think I'm figuring out how they predict the future. It could create an entirely new field of Occlumency if I'm correct in my theory," she told them.

"What are they doing?" Brandt asked.

"When someone performs occlumency, you can feel when someone touches your mind like a pin through a bubble. Everyone's feeling is a bit different but it all comes down to a wall of some kind being pushed against and penetrated somehow. I feel hot spots on my shield, Harry feels gusts of air on his face, and Lyra feels pressure on a bubble. With Whispers, it feels like his wall can expand beyond his mind as if he can grow his wall so that it takes up the entire room and he feels when different things are pushed against it from further away. Somehow that is also being transformed into a temporal distance rather than a physical one and he can feel things impacting his mind space from the future."

Brandt looked confused, "I can understand the concept, but I have no idea how to factor that into my training or the children's."

"I can assure you," Símone told him, "if I can figure out how to do it myself, I'll try to teach Harry and Lyra. For now, let's see how much they've progressed. Harry can go first."

Harry sat in front of his tutor. As she raised her wand, he imagined his mental shields, in the same way as he did with Whispers, covered in spikes, and she cast, "Legilimens!"

Harry felt a rush of wind on his face, but this time, the wind pulled back as it got closer and seemed to move around a bit before pushing in again. However, like Whispers, he tried to swat the wind away, and it moved back around and attacked twice more before he felt it inside his head. When it pulled back out, it felt strange, like eating spaghetti, but in reverse.

"Good job!" she commended him. "You've managed to work out how to create defenses without instruction. What did you base them on?"

"We were working with the Spiky Bush in Herbology," Harry said. "I was playing with Whispers, but having a hard time with attacking and defending, so I imagined spikes around my mind."

"Good idea. As you get more advanced, you'll learn how to create more complicated structures. Use things you know well and your memories can become weapons and defenses. Do not try to use things you are unfamiliar with as the strength of your understanding will translate into the strength of your defenses. Use things you know the most about and can manipulate in your head. Practice building them while you engage in your mental sparring with Whispers. I'm going to try with Lyra now."

She moved to sit in front of the platinum blonde girl and pointed her wand in her face, casting, "Legilimens!"

It took her a few seconds to finish with her, and said, "Your walls are a bit thicker now, though you need to wait before you start thinking up defenses. Work on them with Whispers until you have a better idea of what to do. Right now you tried to do them all at the last moment and it was like pushing around confetti as they didn't have any proper form. Though, please tell me what you were trying to imagine."

"Devil's snare," Lyra said. "We got to work with it in Herbology. I thought that if I could hold you out long enough, I could sneak it in."

"It's a good thought, but you need to practice a lot before using it on someone who is attempting to break into your mind." She looked at both of them and asked, "How are you doing on your emotion tracing? Have you figured out where any of your stronger emotions start and end?"

Harry responded, "I think I figured out sadness. It feels like it starts in my mouth and gets expressed near the outside corners of my eyes."

Lyra waited for her turn, "I think I've got anger. I feel it in my teeth and it comes out the top of my head."

"That's a good first step," Símone told them. "Make sure you don't restrict your understanding of emotions to just your head though. Your whole body channels emotions, so expand your horizons and see where that leads you. For now, I want you to focus on the feeling you get from your hot springs. The feeling of pure relaxation. Take that feeling and use it as a shield and a sponge, placing it where you feel your sadness and anger leading. When you experience these emotions, let them get absorbed into the memory of the hot springs. Don't let them escape and appear on your face or in your actions, just the feeling of the hot springs. Try it now."

The children looked at each other and focused on their feelings. Reluctantly, Harry started to browse through unpleasant memories from the Dursleys. As he felt the sadness creeping up his face towards his eyes, he imagined two pools of warm and relaxing water near his eyes, drowning the unpleasant thoughts in the hot springs of his home. The Dursleys weren't his home, just an unpleasant memory. He watched those bad thoughts sink to the bottom before opening his eyes and looking back at his tutor, who was looking toward Lyra.

His sister had a few sparks coming off her hair which came in bursts then stopped, then after a few seconds started again. After a few rounds of sparks, they subsided for a long period and she looked back up.

"It looked like you were having trouble controlling your anger," Símone told her. Lyra looked like she was about to respond, but was told, "Don't worry about that. Anger is a powerful emotion, it will take a lot of practice to fully control that one. It takes practice, more practice, and yet again - more practice." To Harry, "You managed to prevent the sadness from reaching your face. However, you need to make sure you don't completely get rid of your negative emotions, make sure you keep them to deal with them at a later time or they will come back to haunt you when you least expect them."

"How do you deal with them?" Harry asked.

"It depends on the memory that causes them," she responded. "Sometimes you need to accept them as something you cannot change. Other times, you need to have a serious conversation with the people involved. Bad memories can be softened by good memories the same way a good memory can be ruined by a bad one. Many bad memories will never be solved, but when they are invoked, you'll know how to deal with them. As you learn occlumency, I will eventually start to evoke your bad memories as a way of attacking your minds. You will need to learn how to deal with your negative thoughts to combat my attacks on your mind, so it would be good to start learning how to deal with your worst memories now before they can be used against you."

Both of them had quite a few bad memories and knew they would need to find a way to deal with them quickly.

The afternoon consisted of their knife training and they moved on to defending against attacks. They heard the voice of Pik'kal again who complained about crafting simple metal rods to help with their training. The blacksmith used them to beat on their dull knives as they held the forms they had been taught.

After every series of hits, he would stop and correct the forms by kicking at their feet or lifting an elbow to make sure they were in the proper form. Harry tried his best to hold the forms as he was being struck, but Ransom told him he needed to have some give in his forms or he would hurt his arms. The blades he was holding would stay firm, but his arms needed to move slightly to absorb the hits.

After he struck their blades repeatedly in each form, he had them do it to each other, not showing them any specific strikes, but just telling them to hit the blades from different angles with the rods. He explained to them that before they learned to defend from someone with talent, they would learn to defend from amateurs. As a person like that wouldn't know how to properly strike someone with a blade, they would attack each other with badly performed moves and that would suffice for the training. All they had to do was to strike the blunt weapons with the rods as the other held the form and then switch roles. It was quite difficult to do and just hold the form without responding to the attack or trying to strike somewhere that wasn't the blade of the false-edged weapon.

By the end of the lesson, there were nicks and damage to both their fake blades and the rods they had been given, so they got to hear Pik'kal complain and insult Ransom in his strange voice as he crafted multiple copies of their training tools. It felt weird to have and carry around fake weapons. Lyra even used the color-changing charm to make the blades of her fake weapons blue, just so she'd remember which ones weren't real. Everything about carrying a knife that you weren't using was weird. No one carried a wand that was just a stick to wave around and practice wand movements, so why weren't they learning how to actually use the knives for what they were meant to be used for?

So, with a bit of frustration about their lessons, they returned to the castle and prepared for the next week of studies.

Throughout the next week, studying in the library was a hassle. Students who seldom set foot inside were running around and trying to track down books related to the task of the Unspeakables. There seemed to be an unspoken agreement that some great boon would be given to the student that discovered the solution, despite the dismissal that there would be any kind of reward. A mysterious prize seemed to be even more alluring than one that was defined. Snape had already told his classes that he had rejected several solutions so far and that everyone he needed to reject would result in a loss of points for that student.

Harry had received a response from Madison from the Knitter Critter about their cuddling stuffed animals and wanted to schedule a meeting to discuss the price for their discovery. Harry passed on the news to Brandt who responded with a message that he would need to schedule a meeting with Amicus Slant, as it pertained to the initial agreement, once the price was determined, he would split it properly with Penelope.

Thursday morning, an announcement was posted on the common room bulletin board:

Spring Vacation Library Camping!

April 4 - 10.

It's that time of the year again - For those of you not going home for the break, the Library Adventure Club will be heading deep into the stacks to see what we can discover.
We will climb mountains, dive to the bottom of lakes, explore caves, and find books lost to time in the depths of Hogwarts.

Tents, sleeping bags, and food will be provided.
We will gather after the train leaves on April 4th.

Sign up ASAP!

Lyra pulled out a pen and wrote her name down on the paper, then passed it to Harry to do the same. They had both tried to hike as far as they could into the library, but were always limited by time and had to give up after just an hour or two. This would give them a chance to go much further than they had tried before. They ended up talking about looking for any secret chambers all the way through dinner and then going through the lists of the ones they had found as they went to visit the Ravenclaw common room after dinner.

Hermione was still too busy to hang out with them and told them that she would be going home for break, so she couldn't join them in the library camping. Penny was also doing the same but could meet any weekend before then to discuss the sale of the cuddling stuffed animals with Amicus Slant and Madison from the Knitter Critter. The Ravenclaw common room was much quieter than the library, so Harry and Lyra spent the evening there discussing their exploration plans and rereading parts of The Two Towers from the Lord of The Rings books, having finished it a few weeks prior.

During the night, Harry was woken up by a scratching noise from somewhere in the room. Lighting up his wand woke up Colin, Arthur, and William as well.

"What's that noise?" Arthur complained.

"Turn off the light!" Colin told him.

William just pulled the covers over his head and tried to go back to sleep.

Harry found the source of the noise was his trunk. When he opened it, he started to panic as it was coming from the snakeskin bag containing the horseshoe crab he had gotten from The Giver.

"What the heck is that?" Arthur asked as Harry pulled the bag out of the trunk.

"Trouble," Harry told him and sheathed his wand as his staff responded to his thoughts and jumped out of his pouch on his nightstand, already glowing as he plucked it from the air.

As he exited the dormitory, the crab inside the bag stopped struggling as much but was still awake and moving. He needed to get to Newt and Tina and let them know what was going on. However, when he got to the door of the common room, he found it locked. He tried an unlocking charm on it, but that failed. He tried pounding on it, but there was no response.

Without any other option, he ran up to the top of the boys' dormitory stairs and entered Lee and Cedric's room.

"Cedric, wake up," he shook the sleeping boy.

"What?" he replied groggily.

"There's a monster nearby and the common room is locked."

"What?" he was confused. "Do you need a warm glass of milk?"

"What?" now Harry was confused. "Why would I need milk? Can you contact Mr. Scamander?"

Cedric was more awake now and Lee was starting to stir as well. "What's going on?"

Harry tried to explain it more delicately, "I have something to alert me to a monster in the school. It just went off. I can't get out of the common room to tell Newt. Can you get out?"

"I don't know," he replied, fully awake now.

Putting on a pair of slippers, he walked with Harry back down to the entrance and tried the door himself, then tried unlocking it, still getting no results.

"Something is going on," Cedric told him. "Stay with me, we need to wake everyone up."

The two of them climbed to the top of the girl's side of the room and he knocked on Patricia's door until she answered it. She answered wearing a pair of floral pajamas and fluffy blue slippers.

"You better have a very good reason for waking me up," she said groggily.

Cedric nodded, "There's some kind of emergency; the common room is locked and Harry says there's some kind of monster outside. I need you to wake all the girls and keep them in your room until we find out what's going on."

She heard the seriousness in his voice and rushed down to the first-year girls' dorm as Harry went back to his to rouse his year-mates and Cedric rushed to the second-year dorms. Harry got his roommates up and started to head up to Cedric's room as the girls started exiting their room.

Harry held up the snakeskin bag towards Lyra and said loudly, "It's here."

Her eyes widened as she grabbed her roommates by their shirts and dragged them as fast as she could up the stairs to Patricia's room. Once she was safely inside, Harry entered Cedric's room and waited for further instruction.

Everyone stayed silent for nearly twenty minutes before there was movement outside in the common room. Cedric peaked out, then called out, "What's going on? Harry told us there was a monster. We have everyone in the top dorms."

"There was another petrification," Tina's voice called out. "Send Harry down here at once."

Cedric poked his head back in as Harry gave him a nod and picked up the snakeskin bag and his staff to head down. Newt and Tina were standing by the entrance with their wands out and lit up. Lyra started to come down as well, brandishing her staff.

"Why was the dorm locked?" Harry asked.

"The school must have locked it," Newt told him, as Lyra also arrived. "How did you know what was going on?"

Harry pulled the horseshoe crab out of the bag, and said, "It's awake. Where is the monster?"

"Monster?" Newt asked. "There has been another petrification, do you know what's going on?"

Harry shared a glance with Lyra, "I think so, but I don't know what the petrifications are."

"We're going to go see the headmaster," Newt told them and started to lead them away.