Author's Note: Next chapter, started on New Year's Day after I'm done with my celebrations and a nice ten hour rest. Hopefully I'll complete it by tonight.
Or LOLjk, it's the 2nd and I've just finished the Kaleidoscope segment.
We've only scratched the surface of this story.
There was a heavy lack of reviews last chapter. I'm not going to be that guy and ask you to fix it, but I do appreciate them very much!
Extra long chapter for all of you!
Kaleidoscope
With the wave of his hand, the door flew open. He rarely did anything without the help of magic nowadays, since the muscular degeneration in his arms made it impossible to do anything but hold onto relatively light objects like his wand.
"Good morning, Augusta," he called into the dark hallway. She wasn't quite expecting him, but he hadn't tripped any wards.
There was the sound of shuffling and instantly, every light in the manor exploded into the brightest they could be.
He furiously blinked as Augusta Longbottom descended the stairs, her wand drawn.
"What did you say to me as Linus and I breached the wards of Dresden?"
Augusta stared at him for a moment.
"Nothing. I looked at you and looked to the blood red sky, then shook my head and readied my wand."
He nodded.
"What did I set fire to, to keep us warm at the gates of Nurmengard?"
He squinted, trying to remember, then he chuckled. "Albus's beard. He put it out in an instant, but the look on his face kept us warm for a lifetime."
She smiled, a wistful expression. "Welcome to my home, Florean. Make yourself comfortable."
Florean walked over to an excessively uncomfortable chair and took a seat.
"There's a storm brewing, Augusta."
Dame Longbottom frowned.
"Harry Potter and young Neville has entered Hogwarts, with the Malfoy scion and the Greengrass prodigy. Albus sent me a very opaque letter about some trouble that Linus is in and I wish to visit him later today."
"We're getting old."
"Not as old as Albus. He still has his fingers in every pot of honey. I don't see how we can't come out of retirement for just a little while. The last war snuck up on us because we lived our lives for twenty years while our children and our spouses thought it'd be better to fight."
Now Augusta was angry.
"Florean-," she all but spat, but he cut her off.
"Even Abraxas and Edgar gave themselves away for the cause. We expected no less from Charlus and Dorea, but I can't help but wonder how many members of the Order need not have died had we raised our weapons."
Augusta strode over to a dusty cabinet and threw it open. Inside was a smattering of books and wands, rings and staves, darts and daggers.
"As you know, Florean, these are my mystic codes, all written or built from scratch by the dedication of the hope that every generation had the chance to change the world. Do you know how many of them still function?"
Augusta had always been the most aloof about her magical abilities of all the fighters.
"None, Florean. None. Thirty years of hard work, from when I was the genius, the anomaly of a girl, thought to be a squib at the age of eleven, throughout the time I did research with my brother in law as an unspeakable."
Florean sighed. "I'm not asking you to draw your mystic codes again. I'm asking for you to pick up a wand and investigate this deal with Linus with me. We've been partners in battle for too many years for us to just abandon him."
Augusta shook her head. "He was the odd man out when he learned together with Albus and Grindelwald so many years ago. Our so-called bonds are a fair bit weaker."
Florean didn't speak.
Augusta ran her hand over a crystal ball with a spiderweb crack within it.
"I'll be going then. Serve ice cream for a few more hours, then have a chat with Linus at four."
He knew she'd be there.
Children
It turned out that the Sorting would not have eleven year olds wrestle trolls. It wasn't a quiz of magical knowledge or any sort of test. They stood in line, and when their names were called in alphabetical order, they put a rather large hat on their heads and they were sorted by the hat.
The hat had sung a song, much to the amusement of the younger in the room and the boredom of the more grown up. Albus Dumbledore was a clear exception, as he smiled brightly at every cleverly rhymed verse.
Harry watched the Sorting as it unfolded before him like a soap opera - the low whispers and the calm ring of Professor McGonagall's voice providing a soundtrack for the judgment.
"Abbott, Hannah!"
A girl with blonde pigtails and far too much embarrassment for her own good stumbled out of line and trotted over to the stool and sat down. Professor McGonagall dropped the hat over the head and it fell all the way down to her nose. After a few moment, the hat's brim, which seemed to function as its mouth, opened.
"Hufflepuff!" it called out.
There was a smattering of applause from the table covered in black and yellow trimmings. Harry took a quick glance down the line of students and found an unmistakable sneer of the face of Draco Malfoy.
As Bones, Susan was called to sit her trial, Daphne elbowed him. "Which house?" she whispered frantically into his ear.
Harry shook his head and shrugged, then elbowed Neville to the left of him. "Which house?" he repeated, a shade more frantically than Daphne.
Neville's face scrunched up for a moment. "Daphne's going first. I'll try to get her house. Then you can see if you-"
His whisper was lost as the hat shouted "Ravenclaw!" for Brocklehurst, Mandy.
Harry gripped both Daphne and Neville's arms and nodded towards the Sorting, trying to divine how his year mates were being sorted based on their expressions as they approached the stool and their general personality - at least what was visible to him from a single glance.
"Slytherin!" the hat called for Bulstrode, Millicient. Harry thought he saw a pleased grin on the girl's face.
"Finch-Fletchley, Justin!" the hat screamed over the din created by the table in green and silver. The boy didn't seem to hold much confidence, but he kept looking hopefully at the pair that he had left behind.
"Hufflepuff!"
"Granger, Hermione!" The bushy-haired girl that they'd met on the train, who'd taken the boat ride with them, marched up to the stool, one foot in front of another.
This time around, the Hat took a rather long while. Harry could hear Malfoy's chortle but he kept his eyes on the lower half of Hermione Granger's face. She seemed to be biting her lip, conflicted about something.
"Gryffindor!" the hat finally shouted, sounding vaguely exasperated.
Harry nodded and pulled both his friends close. "I think you have some influence over where you want to be," he hissed at them.
"Greengrass, Daphne and I won't say your name again!" Professor McGonagall warned. Daphne walked over to the stool with her head held high and stared balefully up at the Deputy Headmistress, who seemed to just keep herself from rolling her eyes. She dropped the hat over Daphne's face.
"Slytherin!" the Hat chimed. Neville cursed under his breath. Harry flashed a quick smile at Daphne, who received more cheering than Vincent Crabbe before her.
"Slytherin and Ravenclaw won't be quite that easy for me to get into, I don't think," Neville whispered to Harry.
"Slytherin!" the Hat shouted for Gregory Goyle.
Harry watched the sortings a bit longer, before, "Longbottom, Neville!" jolted him out of his thoughts.
Neville marched up to the stool at stared at the hat warily, then let McGonagall drop it over his face.
He took the longest by far. For a moment, Harry watched his fists clench and unclench. There was even a false alarm as the Hat's brim opened, then shut again. A minute later, the hat waved back and forth emphatically, indicating a fair bit of nodding from the boy.
"Slytherin!" the hat shouted.
Silence. Complete and utter silence. Harry threw a glance at the staff table. Dumbledore looked confused, if not displeased. The tall, thin man dressed in black and off-black with a sallow face and a hooked nose which someone had identified as the Potions Professor gave Neville a shrewd stare. The Professor with his head wrapped up in a turban looked ready to faint. Professor McGonagall's nose twitched.
Neville looked around, shrugged, then walked over to the Slytherin table and sat down next to Daphne. There was a belated polite clapping for Neville which died away rather quickly.
"MacDougal, Morag!" was sorted into Ravenclaw and Malfoy was put into Slytherin nearly immediately.
A few more names were called, including a pair of twins who were sorted into Ravenclaw and Gryffindor respectively.
"Potter, Harry!"
The whispers grew to a fever pitch as Harry disassociated himself from the crowd and crept over to the stool.
Black, completely black. The hat shouldn't have kept out quite this much light.
You're not looking into the inside of a hat, Mr. Potter. You're looking into a piece of your mind that you haven't quite filled yet.
Harry started. There was a voice in his head!
No, Mr. Potter. There is a voice on your head.
He nodded bemusedly, identifying the scratchy, fuzzy voice as that of the hat's.
Difficult. Very difficult.
A real challenge, eh?, he thought back to the hat. In that case, can you just put me into Slytherin?
You and Mr. Longbottom both. Aren't you too young to be making decisions off friendships that haven't seen a single test? Rather reckless, I must say. In that case, better be-
"No!" Harry felt his lips move. He had actually shouted aloud.
No? Not Gryffindor, young Harry Potter? I had sorted both your parents into-
No. Slytherin.
Slytherin? Slytherin. You will be great. It's all here in your head. You're calm, hardworking and dedicated. Your intelligence is apparent to anyone who's spoken to you. You're brave enough to make decisions. Yet you're excessively loyal, I see it now! Are you sure you wouldn't be in-
Slytherin, Harry thought more insistently.
Very well.
"Slytherin!" the hat shouted.
If the silence had been deafening in Neville's case, it was now oppressive.
Walking On The Road with Apollo To Your Back
Astrid knew that it had gone south the moment a four-part ward layer had dropped on her general location and various bound fields kicked into effect. The bound fields were uniquely easy for her to deal with, considering her specializations in magic, but the wards were a little bit of a problem. They were designed far more to keep things in than to isolate a specific area and enable certain types of magic.
Day was about to become night and the sun's final rays were stretched and distorted gold and red through the branches of the trees in the forest.
Her senses stretched over the wards and her magic unspooled from her like rope coming free from its coil and she rose exponentially in strength.
"Ahh, I see. There's only one of you!" she shouted into the now-darkness. "Very close to pure, but not quite the same as our Fates, norn-that-isn't!"
There was no anger from the phenomenon, no response, but Astrid didn't expect it. This sort of magic reacted to action fed with amazing intention.
She cleared the film before her eyes and she was in a village again, rather than a forest. A pair of old men sitting on benches sat frozen in fear, a chess piece in one man's hand, a cigarette burned down to the filter in the other's. A dog was paused mid-jump, his eyes wide. The young girl who had bent down to pick him up had begun to bleed from the eyes.
"This is… not quite the type of production I enjoy seeing," Astrid muttered. Her adrenaline was coursing through her veins and her pupils were dilating, but she knew instinctively that she had nothing to fear.
She walked into an old bar and peered around. There were nearly twenty people in here, all frozen, but she had spied what she had wanted. She swept the men and women, who had all begun to bleed from their eyes to the side and flicked her hand.
A huge grand piano followed her out of the bar into the town square and she played a vengeful chord onto it.
"Who was the last man to defy you like this, not-quite-norn?" she whispered into the air. The air whispered back.
Kill.
"No, I don't think so. I think I'm going to do my job instead, and keep these poor people from, well, dying."
Her fingers snapped into a prelude, testing the strength and the bounds of the Curse. It was a Curse, a very unique one, one that made things like the Unforgivables which she had been warned about for so many years seem like child's play.
She seamlessly transitioned into another piece, now by Handel, recreating the suite of instruments with the different voices of the violins and trumpets she didn't have with nothing but the dexterity of her fingers.
The blood began to recede into people's face as the Curse tried its best to bring its influence against something as innocuous as the piece that Astrid was performing so masterfully, without holes, without openings.
"Now, that's the thing about the Baroque era, isn't it? It's quite an impenetrable wall." And with that, the music solidified. "There are very, very few forces as old as music, built off pitch and timbre and tone. And, of course, skill, dedication. It's a magic of its own, isn't it?"
The Curse fled and a village would forever wonder how they lost fifteen minutes of time. They would also wonder who had carried the piano from the bar into the square. through a door that was decidedly too small for it to pass through.