We approached the Manor at a sedate pace, something that was almost entirely unnecessary but made me feel better about the whole ordeal. The overgrown fields surrounding it were in sorry shape. The closer we got, the more the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I didn't know how much of that was my nervousness and how much was a reaction to the sinister magic in the air.

Finally, I felt the wards. They formed a nearly tangible barrier around the grounds, slowing us nearly to a halt. I swore that I felt the magic judging us, looking somewhere inside to see if we were worthy.

And after far too many long, tense, horrible, anxiety-ridden moments…

The Black family wards let us through.

Black Manor

Black Manor was a massive building with very few nods to such petty ideas as sanity. From the outside, it seemed to be made of a tangle of hallways curving around, crossing each other, turning upside down and inside out only to end in rooms that clearly looked to be taking up the same space as other, separate rooms. The points where things joined or took up the same space made me genuinely nauseous to look at. Escher would've had a field day. I'd stopped to marvel at the mess, at the chaos of it, to wonder what I was even looking at, and Luna had answered.

"It looks like all the internal expansion charms stopped working," she said. "I've heard stories about this. People expand the rooms out and out and out with a nice pretty outside and a maze inside. Then the charms get too old and…"

"It's mad," I said.

"It's magic."

After nearly an hour of hunting for a door or window that we could open, we managed to find a way in. Our saving grace turned out to be a balcony half buried underground. As soon as I laid a hand on the glass door, a shudder both magic and mundane ran through the building.

"It's reacting to us being here," I said after a few breaths.

"Maybe it's waking up." Luna said this in the same pleasant voice as always. "I bet it's excited we're here. I know that I would be too, if I were a house."

I stopped to wonder at her. "Why?"

"Houses are meant to have people in them," she said as if it were obvious.

I took a deep breath. "Right," I said, reminding myself that I needed Luna's help. "That makes sense." It didn't. "I suppose we shouldn't keep it waiting, then." As if on cue, the door slid open of its own accord. I took a step back. "That said, I'm quite sure that that can't be a good sign."

Luna managed a giggle, somehow. "No, that's how I know I'm right! I don't invite in guests that I'm not excited to see!" With that, she strode in through the offered door. I quieted the part of me that insisted that any snake would be excited to see a mouse, and followed suit.

As soon as we passed the threshold, darkness seemed to settle in all around. It was hard to see even with the light filtering in from the window, and I rummaged through my bag for a candle, cursing magic's inability to play well with electricity all the while. Really, a torch would have been so much easier to manage, but that would have been too easy, wouldn't it? Luckily, the candles that Luna had provided were charmed to shed more light than normal (albeit in a strange shade of blue-green which gave everything a slightly underwater look) and had no trouble illuminating the whole room.

In the light, the room revealed itself to be an expansive bedroom in pristine condition. There wasn't even any dust. That said, 'bedroom' might not have been strong enough a word. There was a bed, and there were dressers, and all that you would expect from a bedroom, but that was only the start of it. The sitting area as big as my living room, taking up maybe a third of the space, spoke to that. Another third was made up of what was clearly intended to be a study area, complete with a few books. A quick glance at the spines told me that whoever had lived here had been a Hogwarts student. I recognised a few of the titles.

Not-Yet-Voldemort had been right. Hogwarts really did need a curriculum update.

There were conspicuous absences on the shelves, though. Whenever the occupant had left, it seemed that they'd taken some of their favourites with them. Another look around the room showed clear signs that we were in a sort of childhood bedroom whose occupant had seemingly moved out when they grew up. There were stuffed animals on the bed, but no personal photos. Old spellbooks were left behind, likely long since memorised. I flicked through some of the books just in case while Luna wandered around.

A few minutes later, she called out. "This place is filled with Nargles."

I managed to pull my eyes away from the potions book I was skimming. "Nargles?" Looking around, I saw an open door and no Luna. I set the book back down on the shelf and made my way over.

"Oh yes, they're always causing trouble. I think this infestation might be worse than most." Walking through the door, I found what might have been the largest walk-in closet I'd ever seen. It was bigger than my room at home, and was just as strangely half-stripped as the bedroom had been. Only elaborate shoes and dresses remained. Whoever our mystery Black was, I could appreciate their sense of practicality in what they'd taken when they left.

The clothes weren't the thing that drew the eye, though. There on the opposite end of the closet was a doorway. It was inscribed with a complex runic array with a crystal embedded in the centre. Luna was staring at it with head cocked sideways. Feeling out, the array seemed to be thrumming with magic, above and beyond even the family magic baked into the building all around us.

"I don't think that Nargles did that, Luna." I eyed the array up and down warily.

"You never know," she said. "What do you think it's for?"

"I'm not sure." I tried reading it offhand, but I'd not anywhere near memorised runic script yet. "I can probably figure it out, though." A closer look pointed out to me a few runes that I did know. 'Fire' seemed to be a theme in one of the circles, and I was pretty sure that another was something like 'punish'. If so, it was repeated worryingly often throughout the whole array. "I don't think it's a good idea to mess with it."

"Shame that the other door out is sealed, then."

That got my attention. "Sealed?"

Luna gave me a thoughtful nod. "Oh yes."

I quickly turned and made my way back into the bedroom proper, beelining to the other door. A quick check showed that the word 'sealed' may have been an understatement. The door seemed to be completely fused with the wall, as if it was just a piece of door shaped moulding. I knocked on it, and it sounded as if it were solid wood. Great.

"Do you think we can go back outside, find another way in?" I asked as Luna emerged from the closet.

"I think that the house wants us to be in here," she answered.

"What, why?"

"Because the way out is closed," she said as calmly as ever.

I looked over and realised with dawning horror that she was right. Quickly, I ran over to test the balcony door only to find it was locked. "We still have the portkeys," I said, mind racing.

"Do you think that the house would let us back in?"

I took a deep breath. No, no I didn't. Not if the house was making decisions, at least. Mocking up a blasting charm was out for the same reason. I reminded myself that this was where I needed to be, though the assurance was growing quickly less convincing. Another once-over showed that none of the books in the room would be any help. Of course they wouldn't.

"I suppose," I said slowly, "that I should get translating."

It took two hours of work, five sheets of parchment, and Luna's enthusiastic help for me to get what I believed to be a functional translation. Or, at least what I believed to be something approximating one. Some of the runes in the array had no equivalent in High Ritualism and You, any of the rituals in A Ritualist's Spellbook, or the outright runic translation guides in my actual textbooks for my upcoming Ancient Runes class.

Hence, approximate was the strongest word that I was willing to use about my work. That 1:1 translation had taken the first thirty or so minutes. The next thirty were focused on actually arranging the mostly translated runes into their order. The last hour was spent in conjecture, attempting to make educated guesses about what all the untranslatable runes actually meant based on context. Luna had been immensely helpful there, her admittedly more creative mind filled in gaps in ways I hadn't considered. At the end of it all, I knew two things for absolute certainty.

The first was that the magic involved was the Darkest thing that I'd ever seen save for maybe the Diary. The second was that the caster had had the sort of issues that would make a fascinating case study for generations of therapists to come. Neither was good.

In simplest possible terms, the array was designed to seal the door and deter the caster from attempting to open it from the other side. 'Simplest' being the key word there. Ascribing the word 'simple' to the construct was about as accurate as calling Hogwarts 'some Scottish school'. That is to say, an insult to everyone and everything involved. The parts of it that I understood were genius. Mad, certainly, horrifying as anything, obviously, but genius regardless. Sealing the door was the easy part. Barely an afterthought in a minor sigil shoved off to the side. The twisted brilliance of it was in the deterrence.

To anyone but the caster of the spell the door was simply sealed. Over and done with. If, however, the caster themselves attempted to open the door from the other side, they would experience increasingly severe punishment the harder they tried. The lowest of these punishments was stinging, followed by freezing, followed by burning, followed by ripping flesh, followed by something with the same root as the stinging but modified for severity. The best word I could come up for it would be 'agony'. This would be concerning enough on its own, but I could tell by how burnt the runes were into the wood that the caster had reached agony levels more than once.

That wasn't even the bad bit. The most genius, mad, and complicated in ways I didn't even understand part was how it was fuelled. After all, the spell called to the Dark Powers and nothing but. A price had to be paid, and if I was reading it right then the way it was executed was horrifyingly elegant. When the deterrence was activated, the runic array would reach into the mind of the caster and take the happiness from their memories. It was only specific memories with a common element, of that I was certain, but I didn't even know how to start trying to interpret the array to figure out what that element might be, though. Soul magic was pointedly not my field of expertise.

As horrifying an insight into a stranger's mind as that all was, none of it was important to the here and now. That fact took me longer than I cared to admit to remember. Morbid curiosity, and all. The actually important bit was this: The price was filtered through the crystal at the centre to feed the runic array, and there were no particular consequences for removing it for anyone but the caster.

So, shoving my many notes on this madperson's work into my bag (and briefly entertaining burning the lot), I shook myself loose. Luna stood and stretched.

"Are you ready?" she asked with a yawn.

"Yes," I said after a moment. "I just hope that we don't have to do this for every door we want to open."

She shrugged. "At least we'd learn a lot."

I paused. She had a point. "Yes, but I don't know if any of it would be useful."

"Oh it certainly would be, I think. Just not right now. Knowledge is funny like that, don't you think?"

"You're right, of course," I said. I found that I was quickly coming to terms with Luna being right in the strangest of ways. With one last wary glance at the runic array and a deep breath, I grabbed the crystal and pulled. It came free easily, and I almost dropped it. Holding it, I could tell that the crystal absolutely radiated magical power. It would be harder not to feel it, honestly. It was warm to the touch, the same way the sun was warm filtered through the window. Memories of lazy days curled up around a book came unbidden. The effect was peculiar, and I found my mood brightening almost on its own.

"Wow," I eventually breathed. "Luna, here, feel this!"

I handed the crystal off, and I saw her face crack in a grin. "I don't think it ever forgot," she said, staring down at it.

"Forgot what?"

"What it took."

This had been the centrepiece of the 'price' segment, hadn't it? "Do you think we should keep it?"

"Maybe…" Luna closed her eyes and took a deep breath. "But maybe you should put it in your bag. The joy isn't ours to feel."

I saw some sense in that, but saw even more in being wary of mind-altering magical constructions, and quickly shoved the crystal near the bottom of my bag. It would be a good power source, if nothing else. That done, I turned to the door. I turned the hidden knob we'd found in our inspection and pushed it open.

Luna and I entered into another massive closet, this one actually filled with clothes. Mostly dresses, I noticed, and most of them black. Emerging from the closet found us in another bedroom, similar in layout but distinctly different in character. Where the room before had been stripped in its occupant's exodus, this one looked rather as if someone had just got up one day and simply never came back. The other thing that struck me was the layout. The first room was split up into thirds—bedroom, sitting area, and study—while this one was nowhere near so balanced. The 'study' seemed as if it had encroached on everything else to the point that the sitting area was just a couple of chairs near the desk. The only concession to the room being a bedroom was a cramped bed, a vanity, and a full-length mirror. The rest of the space was filled with tables covered in complex notes, articles and parchment pinned to boards, and tons and tons of books stacked upon numerous shelves. It was as if somebody had compiled their own personal library and simply decided to move into it.

I had a sudden vision of my future, and it looked bright.

Making my way over to one of the tables, I gave the notes a look. With my very recent and holistic dive through my runic translations, I realised that the owner of this bedroom was in fact the person who'd created that runic array. The writing style was similar, and I recognised some of the runes that I didn't know. From a quick once-over, it seemed like the last project Mystery Black Number 2 had been working on was something to do with extracting something that was a property of life (in the same way runic script described blood as a property of life) and putting it in something else.

Well, I had been looking for the work of someone clever, and my mission was a little mad…

"I think," I finally said with a long look around, "that we've found our starting point."

And so Luna and I got to work.

The room proved to be a treasure trove full of knowledge, all of it fascinating, but little of it useful. Or as Luna had asserted, it wasn't useful yet. I knew that I could certainly make use of books discussing in depth magical theory, or different runic dictionaries, or magical first-aid texts, and any other time I would have loved to dig into a treatise on how different kinds of magic affected the flight patterns of different migratory birds (Luna's eyes in particular had seemed to shine when I found that one), but none of that had any bearing on my little problem. That wasn't to say that they hadn't found their way into my bag, though. You never knew what would be useful given context.

So we browsed and skimmed and tried not to get lost in our reading for hours, the only noises the turning of pages and the occasional groan of the building settling. At some point, Luna pulled me out of a text on the history of duelling charms to eat the lunch that Mr. Lovegood had prepared for us.

It was getting to late afternoon when I managed to find something with potential. Hidden between a cheery book on identifying poisonous fungi and a hilariously biased history book was an ancient looking brown tome without a title. In fact, it didn't seem to have any decoration on it at all save for the old leather binding it. It rang all sorts of alarm bells both good and bad in my mind, and I quickly realised that it was bound to be important. In no time at all, I'd hefted it onto a nearby table and was trying to open it. 'Trying' being the operative word. I wasn't succeeding. There was no latch and no mechanism to speak of. The book simply failed to open.

I felt my eye twitch slightly. Well that just wouldn't stand, would it? I wasn't going to lose to a book again, that was for sure.

Three ritual circles later, and I was getting increasingly worried that the book was winning. I had just started work on my fourth when Luna pulled my attention away with a hand on my shoulder. It was a matter of some effort not to snap at her. She just smiled at me.

"It's sundown," she said. I looked to the balcony window covered in packed earth.

"How do you figure?" I asked.

"My watch says so." She raised up a wrist adorned in… was that a miniature sundial? How was that supposed to work? After an embarrassingly long moment, I realised that Luna and I were witches. It almost certainly worked by magic. I shook my head to clear my stupor.

"Well we can't leave yet," I said. "I've almost got this book open."

Luna gave it an appraising look. "Have you tried asking it?"

I looked back down to the book. "Would you please open?" I asked, feeling a bit daft. Fortunately, it stayed decidedly shut, proving me right.

"How rude," Luna pouted. "Well, we can always come back later."

I hesitated for a moment, looking between her and the book. "Fine. But I'm bringing it with us."

Luna looked up and around as if to check for something. Seemingly finding whatever she was looking for, she picked up her broom and basket, grabbed her earring, and disappeared with a cry of "Flobberworm!"

The dark around me seemed to magnify as I gathered my things, even more so than the loss of Luna's candle would justify. I knew that there was no chance of there being anything alive in the place. Really, I did. Even still, I couldn't help but search for shapes in the shadows. I swore that the odd rumble of the building settling grew louder. It was irrational. Nerves, most likely.

I finally managed to get everything I needed into my backpack and slung it over my shoulder, feeling faintly ridiculous for getting so nervous the moment that Luna left. Bracing myself, I grabbed my earring and portkeyed away.

The next morning started just the same as the first. We had breakfast, Mr. Lovegood made up a picnic basket, Luna and I were presented with portkeys (colourful bracelets this time), and we flew out to Black Manor. This time, Luna was happy to spend the hour or so long flight talking to me all about the creatures she and her dad liked to go see. I hadn't read about any of them. She seemed to be quite the expert, though, and I was always happy to learn, even if the fact that 'nobody else can see them' set off sceptical little alarm bells in my head.

Much bigger alarm bells began ringing once we arrived.

The house—and I was using that term loosely—had changed in our absence. The wards seemed less angry, barely projecting any emotion at all, actually. That would certainly be good under other circumstances, but change meant life. As we got closer to the manor, it became very clear that the shape of the place had changed too. It was smaller, less strung out. Less, well, mad. Slightly. The tangle of exterior hallways and rooms seemed to have shrunken into itself, with hallways shortening and some of the rooms seeming to have disappeared entirely.

"Nature is healing," came Luna's awed whisper.

"I don't think nature did this," I said after a long moment. "I think this was magic."

"What's the difference?" she asked. "Nature is alive, and the manor's alive. I think this is wonderful!"

"Healed blood wards hurt intruders, Luna."

She squirmed a bit on her broom. "Maybe wonderful for the house isn't always wonderful for us. Still wonderful."

I rolled my eyes. "Don't suppose that the balcony to that bedroom's still around?"

Luna and I flew around to check. I wasn't even shocked when the balcony was gone entirely, seemingly sucked back into the sin against architecture. What we did manage to find was a propped open window to a large room on top of the building. That would've been fine but for the drop of far-too-many metres between the window and the nearest flat surface below it. After some assurance from Luna ("It's not the fall that hurts!", "Please be quiet.") and some very careful manoeuvering ("Look, if I hold my broom just right it starts to shake! I think it's purring.", "Luna."), we managed to get in through the window without dropping anything or anyone.

And if my heart happened to be pounding after crawling across the much too wide gap between my broom and the windowsill? Then that was nobody's business but my own.

"That was exciting, don't you think?" Luna asked as she climbed into the room. "A shame that there's no windows in quidditch."

"I think that I'm very glad that we don't have to leave the same way we came in."

As Luna continued to muse, I retrieved two more of her candles and lit them with another pre-prepared Incendio. I made a note to make more of those. I was running out, and they really were dead useful. More useful would be not having to need them at all, but beggars couldn't be choosers. Luna pulled me out of my grumbling with a gasp as soon as I lit the candles, and I followed it with one of my own when I looked up.

We were in what could only be a ballroom. Or at least, I assumed that it must be. A majority of the room was composed of a large wooden floor. There was a stage off on one side, abandoned instruments telling a tale of revelry gone by. It was almost perfectly preserved save for the fine layer of dust and the myriad stains and scorch marks scattered around. The last time this room was used had been a very bad day for someone, clearly. Given the Blacks' reputation, I wasn't sure if I wanted to ask the question of 'who?'.

"Do you think the instruments still play?" Luna asked.

"I doubt they're in tune."

"I've heard stories about the sorts of parties the old families would hold." She began to approach the stage. "The instruments would play themselves. Maybe if we could wake them up somehow…"

I followed her, keeping a wary eye looking around. I didn't trust any part of this place, especially not an abandoned ballroom whose last event had seen what looked to be a rather large fight. Luna wiped some of the dust off of an ancient looking cello and began to hum something. An idle part of me noted that she had a pretty voice. I listened for a long few moments, letting her soften the tension in the air like she was so good at. When her song finally finished, the silence seemed louder than before.

"I don't think they're waking up anytime soon," I said.

"Maybe," she said without disappointment.

"Let's get going." I pointed a thumb at the lone set of doors out. "We've still got the rest of the manor to explore."

The elegant and dust-covered double doors opened with a low groan which was echoed by the manor. I wasn't quite sure that it was just the sound of the foundation settling anymore. Immediately, the musty smell of abandonment assaulted my senses. It struck me suddenly that I hadn't been smelling already. Not in the ballroom, not in the bedrooms the day before. For some reason, these rooms were preserved while the hallways weren't.

Black Manor seemed to revel in giving me questions when I was looking for answers.

The hallway we came out into smelled like stale air and allergy season, dust kicking up wherever we sunk our feet into plush carpet. It curved to the right and distinctly downwards, leading into a shape that I knew from the outside to be a spiral. The strange thing was how very… stretched it seemed, for lack of a better word. It was as if the hallway was meant to be only a few feet long and had been lengthened out and up into a massive spiral. The burnt-out candles and dust coated moulding dotting the walls were almost impossibly wide, like taffy that someone had grabbed and pulled. The consequences of expansion charms fading, I supposed. Too many things shoved in too small a space. When physics asserted itself, the house had had no choice but to squish or stretch. The whole effect was incredibly surreal. Idly, I wondered if I'd stepped into a funhouse mirror dimension of some sort.

Luna and I wandered for what must have been hours. We poked our heads into lifeless bedrooms, ancient sitting rooms, near-empty studies, and half-rotten storage closets. All of it fruitless, and all of it telling a tale of decadence.

When we finally found the library, it was only my nervous grip on my candle which let me avoid a disaster.

The Black family library was beautiful. There was no other word for it. Massive, maybe. The huge circular room had rows and rows of bookshelves arrayed around a central fireplace, each tall enough to need a ladder and each filled all the way up. Books floated lazily between the stacks, shelving and reshelving themselves according to whims only they understood. Tall windows stood to let in sunlight, but were blocked by the chaotic knot of hallways outside. Desks and couches were scattered about, placed between shelves, against windows, and around the lone fireplace at the centre of it all. An only mostly sarcastic part of me mused that going to learn from Voldemort wouldn't be so bad if this was what it would give me access to. A suspicious part noted how important proper bait was to any good trap.

I quashed both parts down and set to looking around.

Something that struck me rather immediately was the lack of dust or decay. Like the bedrooms from the day before, it was as if someone had just gotten up and left just a few minutes before. Clearly the Black family magic prided itself on its knowledge above all else. My grudging respect was quashed by the realisation that the Blacks had never heard of the Dewey Decimal System. Or sorting by category. Or organisation at all, apparently. Transfiguration was next to Dark Arts was next to Potioneering was next to The Adventures of Happy the Hippogriff. French texts were next to English were next to Greek were next to Latin. (I made a note to shore up my knowledge of the romance languages. The scholarly wizarding world didn't seem to care much for the English-centric muggle mindset.)

It was with the start of a headache that I resigned myself to scouring the library.

On the third day, Black Manor had changed once more. The ballroom up top of the construction was no longer there, nor was the spiral staircase down. In fact, it looked from the outside as if all of the rooms and halls that Luna and I had explored had simply disappeared. The spaghetti of halls seemed much smaller. Less hopelessly tangled. There was a connection there, but I wasn't sure what it was.

We found our entrance by way of an open window in a room hosting a duelling platform and chairs lining the walls. The wards surrounding the platform thrummed even to my still-developing magical senses. Luna seemed to feel more from it, urging me to keep a wide berth. I didn't argue.

Once again we wandered the halls and checked every room before coming to the same library as before. It might have been a trick of the eye, but I was sure that the books were reshelving themselves with a bit more pep in their proverbial step. The part of me crying 'trap!' grew steadily louder, and I ignored it just the same.

The fourth day of research saw yet more disappearing halls and an entrance via an exterior door to the kitchen. A servant's entrance, I supposed. Likely one for house elves if the size meant anything. I couldn't help but wonder at it. Couldn't house elves teleport through wards? Dobby had seemingly been able to. If so, then why a door sized for them? Yet more questions that I hadn't the time to find answers to. I was noticing a trend, and I didn't like it.

On our exploration on the way to the library, Luna and I found a set of three bedrooms side by side. The first was absolutely pristine. It looked clearly lived in, but its occupant seemed to have conducted themselves with a comforting sort of absolute discipline. It reminded me of my parents rather a lot. I could respect it, even if my own rooms tended towards a sort of organised chaos. The second room was the room of Mystery Black Number 2, the mad scholarly one. Luna and I gave the shelves another quick once-over for anything of use, but the sense of time running out gave the search a rushed quality that it hadn't had on that first day. The third room, the one we'd entered via the balcony, had its door sealed permanently. The word 'TRAITOR' was burned into the wood in thick, harsh lettering. I took a moment to vainly hope I never met Mystery Black Number 2 before we moved on.

The fifth day saw us entering via a greenhouse overgrown with plants. Most of the ones I recognised seemed to be benign potions ingredients, though there was a distinct walled-off section that looked to be composed entirely of plants likely too dangerous or toxic to be kept with the rest. We eventually entered a grand entrance hall, the doors to the library standing open right across from us.

Something seemed to spark in Luna's mind then, as she grabbed my hand and dragged me through and out of the library despite my vocal complaints. For a moment I missed Harry and Ron. They at least knew better than to get between me and my books. She led me through faintly familiar and surprisingly normal looking halls before we turned a corner and found a dusty ballroom. The same dusty ballroom as before, in fact. Not that I expected there to be a second one, but there was enough money in this place that I wasn't discounting anything.

I looked back into the hall. When we'd walked that route a few days before, it had taken nearly an hour to do, discounting our exploration of the rooms adjacent. It had spiralled down for two floors, ramped up for one, and I was pretty sure that it had twisted upside down at least once. This time, though, it had been just a few turns. A few metres between each turn. It was a frankly reasonable distance.

Black Manor was seemingly restoring its expansion charms, squeezing back into itself, but why? Why now, so many years after its occupants had left? The only thing that had changed was us, so what had we provided? I voiced my thoughts to Luna, but she just hummed and fingered her blood-mask.

"Maybe it's doing some spring cleaning now that we're coming by?" She looked around. "We're the first visitors in some time, I think."

It was a good enough explanation, but it rang false somehow. Questions, questions, and more questions. Unlike the one of mortality, though, the answer to this one was just on the tip of my tongue. Something in the back of my mind knew it, and the niggling sensation that I ought to have figured it out already persisted, hurting my focus in the library and keeping me awake that night.

The sixth morning, Black Manor seemed on the outside as if it was restored in full. It looked rather like someone had taken a tudor style mansion and jammed it together with a gothic castle; towers, turrets, gargoyles, and all. The front door swung open as we approached, and my unease grew tenfold. We entered into that grand entrance hall that we'd seen the day before, turned left into the library once more, and marvelled for a moment at the sunlight streaming in through the windows for the first time. Books reshelved themselves at a dizzying pace above us. Just as I went to pull out Luna's candles once more, a nearly tangible pulse of magic swept through the library, lighting the candles on the walls and setting the fireplace alight.

Luna and I stood there hushed and looking around for a long moment. When nothing else seemed to happen, we continued our search. A search which quickly ended when I found an ancient looking journal on the coffee table in front of the fireplace. A journal that I was quite sure hadn't been there the day before.

"Luna?" I called. "I think someone's been here." Warily, I circled in towards the book. Someone else might have felt silly treating a book as if it might explode, but I knew better. Strange journals turning up out of nowhere hadn't exactly ended well for me previously. Two very large wrongs don't make a right, they'd just kill me even faster somehow.

Luna turned the corner to see me eyeing the suspicious book. "That's new. Do you think it checked itself out?"

That only served to make me warier. Yes, some experiments the day before had proven that the books were likely reshelving themselves based on what the people in the library needed, so particularly useful ones might very well present themselves like so, but I was still suspicious. "Maybe," I allowed. "But if it starts talking, or writing back, or even uses the word memory, then I'm burning it." I made no move to approach.

Luna had no such qualms, and approached the jaws of the trap into which we'd been so expertly baited with all the caution of a child at a puppy farm. She plopped herself down onto an admittedly comfy looking couch, picked up the definitely-cursed book, and opened it up in her lap.

"Oh," she said as I reached for my Incendio sigil. "It's in Cumbric!" She sounded strangely pleased by this. "I never get to practise my Cumbric. On the Powers of Magic, by Corvus Blaec. I think it's a research journal!" Luna flipped the page, read for a bit, and finally spoke out loud.

"Let all Magic see that I am Corvus Blaec, eldest son of Gryffes Blaec who founded our Noble House," she translated slowly. "My father stood tall as Lord, and lays low with the earth. Now it is mine to stand as Lord. Let this record stand as a testament to our greatest strengths: the Magic which blesses our blood and the knowledge with which we wield it. To you whom I have already blessed with the first, I pen this book as a record of the last. In this way, you might stand as Lord when I too lay low with the earth. Use it well."

Luna began flipping through pages seemingly at random. I approached slowly, curious despite myself. Over her shoulder I saw text I couldn't read (and of course I had another language to learn, why wouldn't I?), and diagrams and rituals laid out on parchment. On one page she found a highly detailed drawing of a body which had been flayed open. It would have looked like so much meat if it weren't for the clear pain in the figure's eyes. Luna snapped the book shut as soon as she saw it. Looking at her, she seemed a little unnerved. I couldn't blame her. I'd almost puked when I'd seen similar sketches in Moste Potente Potions.

"Are you okay?" I asked, putting my burning curiosity to bed for a moment. She didn't respond, instead taking a few deep breaths. My worry jumped up another notch. I circled around and sat down next to her on the couch. "Luna?"

Her breaths turned shaky. "Did you know that nobody knows for sure when unicorn mating season is? Anytime anyone has tried to put them in captivity to watch them, they just lay down until they're let out." She spoke with a strangely level voice, and I realised that I'd accidentally run afoul of something deeply important. I'd heard my Grandpa talk like that sometimes when I was staying over and people would ask him about his old war buddies. Normally, he'd start drinking soon after. I never knew how to deal with it then, and I didn't know now.

"Luna?" I asked.

"It's awful, trapping innocent creatures like that. Isn't it?"

"Horrible," I said softly, carefully. "Can I hug you?" She nodded slowly, and I wrapped my arms around her. "Are you okay?"

She let out a shaky breath at my rhetorical question—people that were okay didn't just break down on a hair trigger like that, I would know—and finally shook her head. "Daddy says that it's okay to not be okay. He says that we keep going and keep learning and it'll be okay later." Luna finally leaned into the hug. I gave her another squeeze, like I could hug tight enough that the pieces would fit back into place. "I think he might be wrong," she whispered.

"Well let me help," I said because my mind was racing because something had happened and I didn't know what and this had come out of nowhere. After a moment that was almost definitely too long, I finally latched onto something. "You're the one dealing with this. That's the hard part, like you said. Let me do the easy part and help. Just tell me what happened. What did you see in the book?" Talking about things was supposed to help, right? I knew that talking about my own stuff had made it easier for me, at least. My Grandpa said it helped him. So that had to be the right thing to do.

A glance showed the offending journal still sitting on Luna's lap. I grabbed it and shoved it in my bag. Out of sight, out of mind. Hopefully.

She took another shuddering breath complete with tears before cuddling up to me. I was happy to provide what comfort I could. "Blibbering Humdingers and Crumple-Horned Snorkacks and Dragons can all take so much magic," she said, voice still level as anything. "They're made up of it. But we're not. If we put too much magic in, it hurts us. Really badly." I just held her, not quite sure what to do.

"The picture in the book," I tried. "Have you… Have you seen that before?"

"It looked like my Mummy, the last time I saw her," she whispered in that horribly calm voice even as her breathing shook more and more. I squeezed her again, mind reeling. Ron had said that her mum had died, that she'd changed. And that… That'd do it. No wonder she daydreamed about things that didn't exist. If that was my reality, I would too. For once I really, truly had no idea what to do. I was good at knowing things, sure. Facts and figures. I'd always been pants with people, their feelings, and there wasn't any spell I could cast to make this better.

I felt her tears on my shoulder, and I realised that I needed to do something anyway.

"I'm not okay either," I said with the desperate hope that I wasn't making things worse. "I'm going to die soon, Luna." She gave me a squeeze this time, pulling me closer. I let her.

"I don't want to die," I whispered. "I was supposed to graduate and help Harry and Ron out and become Minister of Magic. I'm not ready to go." Tears started falling down my face because of course they did. How could they not? "But we're friends. And friends help each other, right? We can be not okay together."

I felt her nod against me. "Friends," she said. "Okay." As if that summed up everything.

We didn't end up getting much more done that day.

On my last day with the Lovegoods, I found the answer to one of my questions. Luna and I were flying towards the Black Manor for the last time when she'd stopped us dead in the air just outside of the wardline.

"Feel it," she'd said the most urgently I'd ever heard her say anything.

Not one to ignore a warning so uncharacteristic, I closed my eyes and opened myself up to the magic once more. Near immediately I felt the wards, swirling and angry once more. That was a change, but not exactly a bad one. It had been like that when we'd showed up the first time, which meant Luna had seen something else that I hadn't. She had a tendency to do that. I took my time, let myself be 'one with the magic' as Not-Yet-Voldemort had once instructed me to do. Several minutes passed as I wondered what it was that Luna had found before the answer became incredibly clear. There was a weight to the wardline that there wasn't before, the sort that made my hair stand up on end and put a prickle at the back of my neck.

The Black family magics had woken up, and they were watching us.

I was dimly aware of Luna guiding me down to the ground and dismounting us both as my mind raced. The house had been clearly and obviously active, yes, but that was easily explained as the ambient effects of two witches prompting it to tuck in its chest, to stop conserving power. That didn't explain why the wards would be so aware, though. It wasn't just a waking, that was practically a revival! That sort of thing took power and lots of it, and wasn't the sort that a week with two witches with immature cores would…

Oh. I was thick. An idiot, really. I was pretty sure I'd earned an Order of Merlin for my innovations in the field of being a complete bloody moron. I'd forgotten something so simple, so fundamental, the very reason I was even at Black Manor in the first place! I was unravelling! My thaumic centre was inverting, causing increased instability in ambient thaumic energy around me! In common terms, I was radiating magic like the bloody sun! And all of it was filtered through the blood-masks, making the blood wards see it as Black magic. No wonder the house had woken up. I'd hooked it up to the magical equivalent of a nuclear reactor for nearly a week straight!

And it had herded us, too! Making sure we spread the magic around to get everything. God that was clever. A part of me suddenly felt very sorry that walking past the invisible line a few feet in front of me would tear me to shreds, because I desperately wanted to get a look at the ward schema. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to curse the wardcrafters responsible or shake their hands. There was a brief moment where I considered going and finding that Sirius Black fellow and convincing him to let me in before I remembered that he'd almost certainly been barred from entry. And was a mad, violent murderer. That too, I supposed.

"I think that we're done in Black Manor," I finally said.

"I think that Black Manor agrees," Luna responded. "It would be rude to just barge in."

"I'm glad I thought to take all the promising books with me." And I was. There was now a very appreciable (and magically expanded) portion of my trunk at the Lovegoods' which was dedicated to Black Manor books. Partitioned off, of course, because most of said books were thoroughly cursed. Someone that wasn't the 'right sort' cracking them open likely wouldn't regret their mistake, but only because they wouldn't have time to. An unforeseen benefit of my blood-mask, but one I was immensely glad for regardless. Really though, what kind of person puts a curse on books? That had to be an Azkaban-worthy crime in and of itself.

Luna cupped her hands around her mouth. "Thank you for letting us borrow your books!" she yelled.

That got me giggling at my newest friend and I followed suit. "Thank you! I'll bring them back someday, I promise!"

Luna turned to me with a beatific smile. I found myself grinning right back at her. "I'll race you back!" she cried out, quickly mounting her broom.

"Wait, no, you know I'm…" Luna took off. "Oh sod it." I remounted my broom and made to follow.

The rest of the day went like that. Trying to keep up with Luna on a broom, failing, stopping to talk, and repeating it all again. She kept a smile on my face throughout, even when she was telling me about creatures that I was reasonably sure simply didn't exist. And when we finally stumbled through the door to the Lovegoods' home and I eventually lay down in bed? I realised that I hadn't worried about the future one bit that day.

For just one day Luna had given me freedom from the dread that had come to define my thoughts, and I wouldn't be forgetting it anytime soon.