"Boggarts are not beings," Travers said. "Does anyone know what that means?"

"It's a kind of spirit that created by human emotions," Hermione said after raising her hand. "It was never alive."

"That's important to remember," Travers said. "They were never born, and they cannot be killed. What are some other examples of non-beings?"

"Dementors," I said, even as Draco called out "Poltergeists."

"One at a time, please, and all of you are correct. A point to all of your respective houses," Travers said. He paused. "Being amortal, these creatures cannot be killed. That can pose a problem for certain kinds of wizards."

Was he looking at me?

"They can only be dealt with," he said. "And the means of dealing with them are different with each species. The one factor that all of the spells have in common is that they all deal with positive emotions. Because these creatures are created from powerful negative emotions, the way to drive them off is to use the emotions that are their opposite."

The entire class was silent. Although Travers sometimes showed signs of being a mild bigot, that wasn't unusual in the Wizarding world. He did have a powerful way of speaking, though. He actually wasn't bad as a teacher.

"The way to deal with the Dementors is the Patronus charm, which is a spell that is rather difficult even for many adult wizards. Fortunately, the spell to deal with Boggarts is much easier."

There was a wardrobe in the back of the room, and from inside there was the sounds of scratching. The silence of the class made that sound seem to echo. I saw fleeting moments of anxiety on the faces of many of my classmates, even the Slytherins, although they were better at hiding it.

"Boggarts are generated by fear," Travers said. "And as such, they are driven away by laughter. What other limitations do they have?"

"The size of the room?" Tracey said.

Travers nodded. "A boggart will shapeshift into your greatest fear, but it will size itself to the room it is in. Nundus are huge, but in here, it would probably be the size of a horse."

"It's weaker than the thing you are afraid of," I said.

He nodded. "It's a pale reflection of the genuine thing, although the fact that it can copy powers does make it somewhat dangerous. It is less dangerous in a setting with multiple people; it will be trapped, unable to decide whose fears are most pertinent."

"Some people think they are sentient; others think not. No one really knows, any more than any one knows what they really look like when there is no one to watch them. Ultimately, they feed on fear, and are strengthened by it. Most boggarts are not truly dangerous, but it is possible that given enough fear they could become so."

Everyone was silent, and I could see the wardrobe shaking. People in the room were growing more tense.

"Knowing what you fear is the first step in overcoming that fear," Travers said. "And that is what we are going to do today. I have shown you the wand motions for the Ridikulous spell. Given your young age, I do not expect that all of you shall be able to accomplish the spell at first, but I expect that all of you will be able to do it by the end of class."

"Who will be first?" he said. "Line up. The first three will earn points for their house."

Malfoy was the first to stand up. He stepped forward, his shoulders tight and a grim expression on his face. He glanced at me, as though he was wondering if I was his greatest fear.

I doubted it, and when Travers flicked his wand to open the wardrobe, I was proven correct.

A tall and skeletally thin man stepped out of the Wardrobe. He was wearing deep black robes, and he was bald. His face was waxy, and his eyes were a deep red. A hood covered his face.

Draco was pale and sweating.

"Remember the spell," Travers said, leaning down close to his ear.

"Rikkikulous!" Malfoy said. It took him three tries before the figure began to slip and stumble before falling on his back.

Voldemort; it had to be. Was this a true representation of how he looked, or was this just the manefestation of Draco's fears?

Considering that his father had worked for the man, it was possible that Draco had a better idea than most about what he looked like, but it was just as possible that the elder Malfoy had protected him from seeing him.

Hermione was next. She stepped forward, and the creature shifted and changed shape before our eyes.

It's form settled, and I stared at what resulted in shock.

It was me.

My face was looking at her with a cold, dispassionate look. "I don't know why I bother with you. You'll never catch up with me, so why are you even bothering trying? You don't belong at this school anyway."

"R...Ridikulous!" Hermione said, getting it right on the first try. Her face was red, and she would not look at me.

My figure began to tap dance, grinning in a way that didn't seem quite right. I saw some of the other students shudder.

Goyle was afraid of Voldemort too, although his version wasn't as well formed as Draco's. This Voldemort ended up dressed like a woman, in a pink sundress.

Crabbe, though, was afraid of me. I saw myself standing in my pajamas with a bloody sock in my hand. My head was cocked, and a creepy smile was on my face. There was a lot more blood on the sock than I recalled had actually been; had he been one of the students who had seen me, or was this what his mind had created from the stories told by the others?

"Ridikulous!"

My figure was suddenly dressed like a circus clown; somehow that only made me look more disturbing. My grin grew wider, and it soon was unnaturally wide.

"Perhaps at the end of class," Travers said hurriedly. He stepped toward Crabbe, and the boggart twisted again. This version of Voldemort was much more detailed than Draco's had been.

Did Travers have personal experience of the man?

Half the Slytherins, as it turned out, were afraid of Voldemort. Four were afraid of me, as was one other Ravenclaw.

Pansy Parkinson's fear was a mirror that showed her as being ugly. Daphne Greengrass's fear was of herself in a hospital bed, looking deathly ill.

Blaise Zabini's was his mother offering him something to drink. Apparently not all fears had obvious meanings.

I'd thought of skipping this class; showing my fears to others ran the risk of outing me, or of weakening a position that I had worked very hard to achieve. Yet not showing up would also weaken my position. If people thought I was afraid of a boggart, or afraid to show what my fear was, they might think that I was safe to attack again.

So many students were afraid of Voldemort that I had to wonder what the point of the exercise was. If Travers was a Death Eater, it had to be difficult to watch his boss being humiliated over and over.

Or maybe he was like a House Elf and secretly wanted to see his boss fail.

His expression never altered throughout any of it, although he did take notes?

A quick look over his shoulder with several flies showed that he was noting our fears in a column next to our name. Why was he collecting that information? For his master? Of was it for some lesson further down the line?

I'd been working on a plan all night to deal with this. I'd push my emotions into my bugs, as much as I could. In the past, I'd only been able to push the expression of my emotions into my bugs, but I'd been working on doing it all night, and I'd thought I was able to manage it.

What was I afraid of, really?

Being discovered?

I had a plan to deal with that, beginning with my Peruvian Darkness powder and ending with the tunnel to Hogsmeade that the staff didn't think we knew about. There was a floo in Hogsmeade that I could use to get to Diagon Alley, and from there I'd make my way to America by slipping onto a ship.

Before I'd come to this school, I wouldn't have had the resources to have made it on my own, but things were different now. I had stolen several books from the library, books that I would return if this all went well. If it didn't, I'd use them to continue my studies on my own. I'd also looked up the location of America's version of Diagon alley, and I would be able to get supplies there to educate myself on my own.

Leaving Hermione and Neville behind would be painful, but they'd be relatively safe as long as they were at school. It wasn't like I would be able to protect them once they got home anyway.

I'd been storing non-perishable food in my fanny pack for a while now, preparing for the event that I was discovered. I'd heard preppers call it a bug out bag, which I found a little ironic.

In Earth Aleph, preppers were considered crazy cranks. In my world, Earth Bet, with Endbringers, the Slaughterhouse Nine and other dangers, they'd been considered just a little more prepared than the rest of us.

What else could I possibly fear? Most of the fears of my past were things that I had dealt with, which meant that they probably were no longer my greatest fear.

Some of the Ravenclaws were showing obvious fears; being told they were failures, giant spiders, snakes, floating, flaming skulls. Some of them were afraid of Voldemort too, but not as many as the Slytherins, which made sense. Voldemort had to feel closer to people who had death eaters in the family. In some cases, he might even be closer.

Was this an exercise to see who wasn't afraid of Voldemort?

"Miss Hebert?" Travers said.

Sighing, I stepped forward.

The entire class was watching. I casually reached into my fanny pack and pulled out the darkness powder in my left hand, ready to throw it.

Shifting, the creature settled into a familiar form.

It was Lisa, wearing the costume I'd last seen her in; the black bodysuit with purple lines and the domino mask. She was leaning toward me with a look of terror on her face.

"Wake up, boss!"

What?

She reached out as though she was going to shake me.

"You've been dreaming. It's not over! If you don't wake up he's going to destroy everything!"

I felt a chill of horror go down my spine. Had my victory over Scion not been real? Had it just been the feverish dream of a dying brain?

Was this?

Which was more likely... that I'd woken up in another body in a world with real magic, and that I'd ended up going to a school for magic, or that I was hallucinating?

Why hadn't it even occurred to me before?

I'd thought that I'd resolved my issues about school, about Emma and Sophia and Madison. I'd had more important things to worry about for a long time now. Yet here I was in a school again, dealing with bullies in a world where I was no longer helpless.

Was this my minds way of trying to work through that trauma?

"You need to wake up!" Tattletale said. "He's coming!"

She looked behind her and she screamed, and a moment later a blast of light came from another place, hitting her. She reached out to me, as though to beg for my help, but the flesh melted from her skull.

I shook my head. I'd sent the Undersiders away. Lisa wouldn't have been there to try to wake me up. If she was, everything would have been lost anyway. If I questioned my very existence, then what would anything I did here and now matter?

For a moment I closed my eyes and I tried to wake up. Nothing happened.

Sighing, I opened my eyes again, and I lifted my wand.

"Ridikulous," I said firmly.

The form in front of me shuddered, and a moment later it shifted into another familiar form.

It was me... not the old me, but the new one. My own body looked incredibly small and vulnerable, weak now that I looked at it from the outside.

"I'm still here," she said. She looked at me entreatingly. "Why won't you let me go?"

It took me a moment to realize the implications. Was this Millie Scrivener? Was she trapped in her own body, living in an unending hell as she watched a parasite take over the life she should have had? Unlike me, she was actually an eleven year old girl, and she'd seen her family murdered in front of her. She'd seen me do things that had to have horrified her.

I felt an old, familiar feeling; it felt like the walls were closing in around me. Was that what it was like for her? Trapped in unending darkness, with no one who cared what had happened to her?

I'd barely even thought about her or her family, yet it was possible that she had been right there beside me all along. Just because this was my boggart didn't mean that the fear itself wasn't real.

After all, for all the children who were afraid of Voldemort, he really was a threat to them and their families.

"Ridikulous!" I said more firmly.

Both of the things the monster was showing me couldn't be true, not simultaneously. That meant that at least one of them had to be a lie, and maybe both of them.

The shape shimmered again.

It was me again; but this time I was standing over a pile of bodies. There were faces I recognized, including people who were in this very room. Hermione, Draco, Crabbe, Goyle...Snape, Dumbledore. I was standing over them with a bloody scalpel. My entire body was drenched with blood.

On the walls behind me, several of the students were pinned up, their torsos cut open with a fine precision. Some of them were skill alive, staring at us with a look of sick horror on their faces, even as their lungs were still moving and their hearts were still beating.

Some of them had been flayed, and thanks to my experiences tracking down the Slaughterhouse Nine, I knew exactly what that looked like. Blood was pooling toward the pile of bodies in the middle of the floor.

I'd seen this before with Bonesaw... no...Riley now. She was better, and I would never...

It wasn't like I'd ever do something like this; take my enemies apart so that I could figure out how they worked; how magic worked. Even if Scion really wasn't gone, I wouldn't...

I was staring down at them all with a dispassionate look, and then I looked up.

"It's a start," my voice said. It was cold and seemed to lack even the slightest hint of emotion. "But I'll have to do them all. It's for the best."

"Ridikulous!" I heard Travers say beside me.

The shape flew backwards, and a moment later the Wardrobe closed and locked itself.

"That was... a little more interesting than I expected," he said. He was staring at me like he'd never seen me before, and looking around, I saw that everyone in the class looked pale. Some of them looked like they were about to vomit, and I could hear a sobbing sound from the back of the class.

Hermione wouldn't look at me.

Was this because of what I'd seen earlier, or because of what she'd just seen? Did she really think that I was the same kind of maniac that I'd spent more than two years hunting down?

I was better than that. I'd done horrible things, but only to stop things that were even worse.

What else would have shown up if Travers hadn't banished the thing? A dead baby?

That would have done wonders for my reputation... knowing that I'd once killed a baby, even if it was only to save him from an unending torture. Boggarts didn't give context, and I certainly wasn't about to explain.

"Sometimes it is difficult to find a sense of humor about these things," he said, and for once his voice almost sounded gentle. "I will expect results by the end of term, but I think it might be best if you face the boggart on your own. I'm not sure the rest of the class would be... comfortable facing your fears."

It seemed that everyone in class was averting their eyes. I could still hear sobbing from the back of the class.

Maybe I would have been better to have skipped this class after all. It hadn't left me in a weaker position, but it had possibly damaged my reputation.

Worse, it had left me with some deep, disquieting fears.

Was this world real, or was it all a hallucination, the last gasp of a dying brain? Although I tried to push the thought away, it horrified me on a level that nothing else would have.

Even if this world was real, what about the other fears that had been revealed. Had I stepped into an empty body, or was I trapping a young girl in a hell from which she couldn't escape?

Last of all, was the thing I was most afraid of myself? I'd done a lot of terrible things in the name of the greater good; it got easier and easier to do them the more of them you did. At what point would I lose that last vestige of morality and become the thing I'd always been fighting against?

I'd seen what pragmatism had done to Alexandria, to Eidolon, to Contessa. Was I any better? Would I become even worse when I had much more power than I had now?

All in all, I found myself wishing that for just once I'd stayed in bed.