All Together Now
Dumbledore must have had a plan, leaving the schedules in the dorms rather than giving them out at the meals, as some of the anger of the older students had boiled off by the time they came for breakfast in the morning. Harry's schedule had no issues; he was in his second year without electives. His schedule was neat and organized, though every student, third year and above, was complaining.
Most electives and N.E.W.T. courses were scheduled for after dinner.
First and second-year students had a repeating schedule with all of their classes combined into two days and then repeating. The other thing the upperclassmen complained about at the teachers' table was the added history course for them on Mondays. From what Harry had been told, everyone dropped history after taking the O.W.L. exam in that subject. So to have it appear back on their schedule was a scandal of epic proportions.
He overheard one argument between a seventh-year girl and Delores Umbridge.
"You can't seriously expect us to spend three hours on a Monday learning a class we all dropped last year!"
She took a slow sip from her tea before giving an unnerving smile and addressing the student.
"Yes, I do. This is a required class and will be part of your permanent record. You may already have an O.W.L. in the subject, but your grade and participation in this new course will be considered at any ministry job you may be considering for the future."
The girl paled a bit at that statement, as did many who were listening in. Umbridge went back to drinking her tea until the girl she had been talking to turned around and started to walk away.
"However," the new professor began again, causing the girl and many others to spin around and face her. She continued to drink her tea as the students waited, with increasingly annoyed expressions at being held there, baited by her one-word statement to be trapped until she released them.
"However," she repeated when her teacup was empty. "I will allow you to test out of the course. You will all get the syllabus next week and may sign up for the exam at that time."
Word spread among the students about the option to test out of World History on Mondays, giving anyone who passed a three-day weekend. Even the second-year students were talking about it when they arrived at Transfiguration for their first class.
The room differed from last year, with at least twice as many desks arranged in circles around a podium in the center. The reason for the change became clear as Harry spotted students from every house in their year entering the room. If one class was like this, he assumed every class would also feature this same population.
Harry and Lyra grabbed seats near the podium as the other students filled in, mostly joining their housemates to sit with. When the bell rang for the top of the hour, Professor McGonagall exited the office and approached the podium in the center. When she got to it, she shot a spell into the surface, and it started to move, turning at an incredibly slow rate.
"Welcome to your second year. As you can see, all the houses are combined for this lesson, and they will be the same for each other course. With the Headmaster's Tournament coming up next year, we will be working on more spells than usual and have no time for dilly-dallying. We will start by going over everything from last year."
Placing her wand in her sleeve, the Professor clapped twice, and every student's desk had a large box, and a stack of cards appeared on top of it.
"The box contains wooden and metallic rods," she narrated as the children examined the arrived objects. "The cards contain pictures of wooden or metallic objects. You will transfigure one into the other until all your cards have been completed. When you are done, help other students. One point for each card you help someone with from your own house and two for someone from another."
She looked around the room as the podium spun slightly quicker so she could make eye contact with every student in the room.
"Begin."
As this was free transfiguration, without the use of an incantation, it required measured amounts of power and focus. The first few cards in their stacks were simple but got progressively harder. When Lyra started changing her piece into a barbed fish hook, it started to smoke, and she needed to start over. Harry wasn't the first to finish his cards, but he was high enough to earn points for their house, then moved on to help others.
They moved on to the bird transfiguration spell when the first hour was up. Both Harry and Lyra had been working on it heavily over the summer as part of their training with Flare's children, turning leaves into small birds for them to try to catch. They quickly moved on to help others who couldn't finish the spell or their birds couldn't fly. They overheard an interesting discussion between McGonagall and Luna Lovegood, as all the birds she was creating didn't fly - penguins, kiwis, and a tiny emu.
At the end of the class, they all felt particularly drained of magic but needed to continue on to Charms. When the mass of second-year students arrived at Professor Flitwick's new classroom, his was set up like an amphitheater with small stages in the middle of the aisles and one large one at the bottom. Next to his podium was an enormous golden harp, as large as Guryon Scamander.
When the students were all sitting down, the diminutive professor snapped his fingers, which produced a loud crack and garnered everyone's attention.
"You will all be put through the wringer this year," he announced with a certain amount of glee. "There are many individual spells you will learn this year, but our main focus will be spell-weaving. At the end of last year, you learned the animation charm, which combined the magic of three other spells. This year you will continue practicing that and other spells that can be meshed together for different results."
The animation charm had been difficult but had very practical results they had seen in many places inside and outside Hogwarts. As the group absorbed Flitwick's speech, he began to gesture toward the harp next to him.
"I told you all before that the modernly named 'Tickling Jinx' was originally developed to play the harp. Do any of you want to stand before all of your classmates and try to play this one?"
Lyra practically jumped out of her seat to volunteer. Tonks had given her a mission of mastering a few spells before she could learn how to style her hair with magic; one was the tickling jinx. So she had thrown herself into that particular spell to her great joy and annoyance of all the Hidden on the island. Being occasionally tickled was fun, but being hunted down by a tickle monster regularly was not.
"Miss Black will be the first to attempt," Flitwick told the room. As she came down to his stage, he told them, "I will light up a sequence of strings for her to play. She will then attempt to repeat that with her spell."
Harry smiled, knowing his sister was also grinning, even with her back to him. After playing Simon with Whispers all summer, they had already been working on pattern recognition and repetition, so she had to focus on the spell to do well.
Lyra pulled out her holly and phoenix feather wand as Flitwick lit up five harp strings in sequence.
With a deep breath and practiced focus, Lyra incanted, "Rictusempra!"
Invisible waves of magic pricked each string in order and created a strum of the harp. Flitwick smiled and proceeded to create other longer and more complicated sequences. Lyra matched each sequence until their teacher gave her one that needed her to strum multiple strings at once for each part of the sequence, and she couldn't match it.
While she looked disappointed, the professor smiled happily, "Above and beyond, Miss Black! Fifteen points to Scamander!" He clapped his hands twice, and smaller harps appeared on the small stages around the landings of the seats in the amphitheater. "The harps will give you a sequence to perform if you tap them with your wand. Each student gets two attempts before their turn is over. If the harp gives the sound of a bell, that is the last one you need to do, and you may move on to help others. Miss Black and I will be moving around to assist."
Harry smiled as Lyra ran over to some Hufflepuffs starting to work. When it was his turn on the nearest harp, he performed two six-part sequences flawlessly before letting someone else take over. There was no bell, so he waited for another turn on the next rotation. The next time, his sequence jumped to ten which he also completed, and surprisingly got a bell that told him he could help others. It was surprising because he didn't have to perform any of Lyra's complicated patterns, and her longest was nearly thirty plucks. After giving himself a shrug, he moved to the Slytherin section and started to help the Carrow twins with their spell.
When class ended, Harry met up with his sister, who asked to use Hermes to send a letter to Tonks. She had Flitwick's confirmation of competence for the spell and just needed to be able to levitate multiple objects at once now. Both could do medium-sized objects and even clumps of dirt, but when doing separate objects, one or both always fell. Styling hair wasn't an issue for Harry as even water couldn't keep his down.
Lunch was a needed respite as they had spent the entire morning casting spells, and their entire year was exhausted. Harry needed to start making more jerky to keep up his energy between classes and would need to ask Professor Sprout for another container and flobberworms in his project room. Luckily that would be their last class of the day with Potions next, so the amount of active magic they would perform in the afternoon would be minimalized.
Harry rushed to the classroom first, arriving at a locked door. Another student of their year, Tobias, arrived shortly after from the Slytherin dorms.
"The door is never open before class," he told Harry in an exhausted drawl.
"I just wanted to get started," Harry replied disappointedly. "I also wanted to see how he's going to cram all of us in that tiny room."
"Yeah… I wonder…" Toby replied slowly. "The older Slytherins are wondering when you will make an appearance in our common room. They told all the firsties not to attack you if they see you or your sister around." He chuckled, "As if a bunch of firsties would have the balls to attack Harry Potter."
"After dinner?" Harry suggested, and then the rest of the students showed up in a large group as class time approached.
At starting time, the door opened suddenly, with Professor Snape looming over them. His eyes were under heavy darkness, with his cloak blowing slightly in an unseen breeze. He turned to look at all of them, then commanded, "Enter."
Harry pushed into the room and stopped suddenly, with others bumping into him from behind as he jumped out of the way to look at the changes to the room. The small room had been expanded greatly with dozens of brewing stations for the increased class sizes. There were still jars of preserved animals along the walls, though with the added room, Severus had also placed animals that were as tall as the ceiling in vats of yellow liquid, with chunks of their body carved out of them in different places.
At the head of the room was the professor's lectern, desk, board, and a door leading to his office. Those had always been there, but now an enormous skull was also mounted on the wall with two large glass cylinders of bubbling green liquid next to each side. The skull was one that Harry immediately recognized as belonging to the basilisk that the Usurper had killed. All of the fangs were intact, so many fakes must have been made after being knocked out by Lockhart's magic axe.
Many other students stopped to stare at the changes in the classroom but quickly moved on as their professor glared at them. Harry approached a desk near the front, only to find someone's name stamped on the top in gold lettering.
"Some of you may notice," Snape announced loudly, "that you all have assigned seats this year. No one gets to sit with who they choose. Everything is alphabetical by your last name."
Harry looked around and eventually found the spot where he would be working with… Leonard Quincy. The boy was a Hufflepuff in their year, and Harry knew precisely two things about him. That he was a Hufflepuff and was in their year. Leonard gave Harry a small nod as he sat at the table.
"Welcome to your second year of Potions. To start off with a bit of fun, I will be poisoning all of you today."
Upon hearing this and remembering the previous year, many students ran for the door, only to find it was just a blank wall. Knowing that Severus was looking for a logical response to such a threat, Harry locked eyes with Lyra, and both nodded.
In the middle of the chaos of students running around and looking for the door, Harry turned invisible and snuck to the front of the room. When he saw a sparkle of Lyra's presence opposite their professor, he drew his wand and cast the knockback jinx, "Flipendo!"
At the same time, Lyra incanted, "Ikkuma alukpok!"
Both spells hit a shield on either side of their professor as he stood there without changing his stance or even unfolding his arms while he watched the chaos in his classroom. The spellfire did stop the panicked students from running around and garnered their attention. Before Harry and Lyra could cast anything else, black ropes appeared at their feet and coiled around them like snakes, forcing them visible, and then they fell to the ground on their sides.
"Sit down," Snape commanded everyone standing but did not get rid of the ropes binding Harry and Lyra. "From everyone who panicked and ran around like headless chickens - three points. Mister Potter, Miss Black," he grimly addressed them on the floor, "you both attacked a professor." He paused as the room of students braced themselves. "Ten points to your house, each," There were gasps around the room, "and detention. Go sit down."
The ropes vanished, and they returned to their seats, thoroughly confused about their reward/punishment.
"So again," Snape rolled his eyes, "today I will try to poison all of you. However, I will not leave you without the tools to defend yourselves. You will deal with many toxic fumes in this classroom, and while the enchantments in the room will keep them from accumulating; having your face right over a cauldron producing such fumes can be deadly. So you will all be learning the Bubblehead Charm today."
It was surreal to be doing wandwork in potions, and after such a long day of it, many students were already exhausted.
The incantation was, "Aere puro orbis," the wand movement was drawing at least two wraps around the object you wanted to put the charm on. Harry remembered that Brandt had cast the spell on him over a great distance when he was entering the barn with the sigbins. So there must also be another version, incantation, or wand movement to achieve that result.
For the class, they were given a small plant to practice the spell on, and then they were to open a potion vial near it that would give off fumes that would kill the plant if their charm didn't work properly. Harry's partner was not very good at the spell, and they went through four plants before he was able to get it right. In the second hour, they practiced on themselves and used a small vial of a very pungent potion to test it. If they could smell it, it wasn't working.
As the last ten minutes approached, the professor left the room. When he returned, he had a bubblehead charm on himself and was levitating a large cauldron with a metal lid. It floated out to the middle of the classroom before settling on the floor.
"Everyone, collect a bezoar and place it on your desk in front of you. If your charm doesn't work, swallow it immediately," Snape instructed.
There was a brief rush as students ran to the boxes marked with goats and collected the hardened mass that would save their lives if their charm didn't work. When they were seated, everyone sat nervously with one hand hovering over their bezoar and a bubble around their heads. Professor Snape seemed to relish their nervous anticipation for nearly a minute before the top of the cauldron in the middle of the room vanished.
A purple fog slowly escaped the container, first coating the entire floor, like dry ice, and then slowly rising. From the far side of the room, Harry could hear coughing, followed by a gagging noise of swallowing a bezoar. There were at least two other sets of coughs and then gagging noises, but Harry couldn't tell from where through the purple fog. Then his partner, Leonard, began to cough.
Harry turned to him as he started to try to shove the bezoar into his mouth. However, the charm seemed to be partially active and wouldn't let him get it into his mouth. He struggled for another ten seconds before collapsing on the floor and started to convulse.
"Help!" Harry called out as he tried to pull off the bubble around Leonard's head but couldn't break it with his bare hands.
He didn't know how long he could wait, so he tried to think of a solution. If the gas could get in, other things should also be able to. Snatching his own bezoar and his staff, he crushed it into powder on the floor with the base, then picked up the powder and sprinkled it onto the bubble near Leonard's head. He watched as the powder fell through the bubble, and he inhaled it through his nose. After another ten seconds, the convulsions ceased.
A wind swept through the room, and the purple fog was sucked up into the ceiling. Standing right next to Harry was Professor Snape, a small smile on his face that vanished almost immediately.
"Everyone who had to take a bezoar has detention on Thursday after dinner procuring more. I need to take Mr. Quincy to the infirmary. Class is dismissed."
With a casual flick of his wand, Leonard was yanked up into the air as if suspended by a hook in his ankle, and the rest of his body was limp. Professor Snape strolled out of the room with the body floating behind him.
On the way to Herbology, Harry explained what happened with Leonard to the rest of the students, mainly overly worried Hufflepuffs. Harry tried to tell them that if Leonard were really hurt, Snape would have shown some urgency about his condition. No one seemed to buy his explanation about the cruel Potions Professor. When they arrived at Professor Sprout's classroom, she was just as worried about the condition of her student until someone described the fog they were breathing.
"He will be fine," she assured them. "It is a potion derived from a South American jellyfish and magical mushroom called a Violet Nightcap. It is just a sleeping gas that needs to be inhaled and causes coughing and convulsions before it takes effect."
"So he wasn't trying to kill us?" someone asked.
"Not today, he wasn't," Professor Sprout replied sarcastically and with a roll of her eyes.
Professor Sprout's new classroom was nothing special, just extra rows of increasingly elevated desks in the same room, obviously expanded by magic. When everyone was seated, she placed a large clay pot on her lectern with mandrake leaves popping out the top.
"Who knows what this plant is?" Nearly every hand in the room shot up, and a few students even blurted out the answer.
"I figured this might happen," Professor Sprout said with a sigh. She tapped the lectern twice with her wand, and a piece of paper appeared on every student's desk.
"This is a quick quiz about the properties and handling procedures of the Mandrake plant. It should take you no more than twenty minutes. Begin now."
Harry looked down at the paper in front of him. From the work on the Mandrake Draught last year, he already knew the answer to every question. It took him less than half the allotted time to finish, and nearly everyone was done well before the end of the time given.
"So I see that last year's task from the Unspeakables had all of you learning ahead of your material. Regardless, you will all be in charge of growing a mandrake during the school year. You just will not need to learn about it with me. I will return your quizzes next class; anyone who scored Acceptable or lower needs to pair up with someone who received an Outstanding or Exceeded Expectations on the project. They will teach you what you need to know and will be awarded fifteen points if they raise your score to an E and thirty if they bring it to an O by the end of the term."
"What will we be covering this year?" one brave voice asked.
Rather than responding immediately, their professor went to a cabinet and retrieved a clay pot. In the center of it was a mushroom with a white stalk and a red cap with white spots.
"Our primary focus this year will be on magical fungi. Who can identify this one?"
Two hands rose among their year-mates. One was called on and replied, "Is it a jumping toadstool?"
"Two points to Ravenclaw, though it is commonly called a Leaping Toadstool. This one is fully mature and has been saved for this class."
She retrieved another clay pot with only dirt in it and placed it nearby the first. Slowly, the red-capped mushroom leaned slightly toward the second pot, then straightened up and shook its top like a wet dog, tiny spores floating to the soil. It then scrunched down so the stalk was barely visible and then jumped nearly four feet high in an arc, landing it right in the middle of the new pot. There were quite a few sounds of astonishment from the students as this transpired. Professor Sprout picked up the old pot and tilted it toward the class to show where the white and yellow spores had landed.
"These will all grow into new Leaping Toadstools. The one that just leaped will continue to do so once every day if it has a space to do so. The new toadstools will take a full lunar cycle to grow before they can begin leaping. You can imagine this kind of growth can be very dangerous as it spreads exponentially. This is the case with nearly all magical fungi and the reason why we need to study them."
The class continued for the next hour and a half, going over two other types of fungi, and their teacher showed them an animated photo of a valley completely taken over by Leaping Toadstools. Any time one would leap, dozens would detect a new spot and jump themselves, leading to a chain reaction of flying mushrooms all over the valley as they tried to get a new space to grow. Despite the danger of their growth, it also made them very inexpensive potion ingredients as they could be farmed in large amounts very quickly, though a special license was required to do so.
They also briefly covered the Violet Nightcaps at the end of the class. It seemed that was to put their minds at ease about their Potions class and Snape's attempted poisoning.
At dinner, Harry finally got to sit and talk with Lyra. They had been apart for most of the day or just had their focus taken by the teachers so much that their only eye contact was before attacking Severus. Lyra agreed that this year would be much more hectic, and even without any assigned homework, the teachers were setting the stage for some grueling work.
After dinner, they gathered Whispers and Silvy to make an appearance in the Slytherin common room. As they were passing by the Potions classroom, the door opened, and Snape blocked their path.
"Inside. Your detention begins now."
Having no room to argue, the two students and two animals trudged inside. Even Silvy seemed to understand this was serious, and her ears drooped to reflect the tone of the situation.
When they were sitting at desks, he addressed them, "You both attacked me today." he paused for a moment before continuing, "It was the right thing to do." They both perked up at the statement. Lyra started to open her mouth but was interrupted, "There had to be some punishment, or others would do it for minor reasons. Even your teachers can be threats, as you learned last year with Lockhart. Defense teachers never last at this school and are often problematic themselves. It's always good to be on your guard around them."
"Like Lupin?" Lyra asked.
"Like all your teachers," Snape replied. "Now, I assume you are going to the Slytherin common room?" After nods from them both, he said with a smile, "Make an entrance they will remember."
The door opened behind them, and when they turned back to where Snape had been standing, he had vanished. With a shrug, they left the room and continued to the wall where the entrance of the common room was.
Lyra raised an eyebrow toward Harry, "Shadows and flame?"
"And fear," he replied with a smirk.
Harry took Silvy from Whispers and stuffed the kneazle into his robes, then the three of them turned invisible.
§Open.§
Harry hissed, and they snuck through the wall into the common room.
The setup was the same as the previous year. Blaise, Daphne, Tracey, Cho, and the Carrow Twins were occupying the same spot at the window as before. One of the dark's farthest spots had Draco, Vincent, Pansy, and a couple of first-year students he didn't know the name of. Gemma and Hayden were sitting at a table looking through a small metal box of something, but they couldn't tell what.
Lyra tapped Harry on the shoulder and took his arm, pointing to one corner where he spotted someone standing, disillusioned. The height of the figure suggested it was probably Severus. Harry didn't want to catch his friends completely off guard, so he spun his wand quickly, whispering a ventriloquist charm, and shot it at the chair next to Tracey's ear.
"Be prepared for a fun entrance," he whispered, watching her surprised reaction.
After a quick word to the others at the table, they tried not to look expectantly around the room as Harry, Lyra, and Whispers positioned themselves in the middle of the room. As soon as they were where they wanted to be, Lyra started to flood the area around them with black fog from the sigbin leather she always kept on her, sending many students into a panic. To add to their terror, Harry added a smoke screen spell that would add black smoke above them.
On cue, Lyra turned visible and burst into flame, standing like some kind of fire effigy in the midst of the black fog. At the same time, Harry also turned visible and let out as much magic as he could, tinged with all his worst thoughts of revenge. Whispers also appeared with them and growled as Silvy jumped out of Harry's robes and joined Whispers with a hiss. The effect was incredible; some ran for their lives while others drew their wands and pointed them at the intruders in their room.
"Someone told me you were expecting us?" Harry said with a smile and stopped the fearful effect of his magic as Lyra put out the flames around her.
"What the hell, Potter?" Gemma yelled at them, "You probably gave a few people heart attacks and I just barely got a few of the firsties to calm down after the scary stories from the night in your common room. You could have told us you were coming."
Tracey raised her hand, "We knew." She gestured to the others around her.
"I also knew," Snape appeared from the corner of the room. "All of you with your wands out who didn't attack, one point from Slytherin."
"Hey, we were told not to attack Potter!" an older girl replied.
"Did you know who it was the moment he appeared?" Waiting half a second for a response, "I didn't think so, so also detention for you, Miss Aspen."
"As for the two of you," Snape looked toward Harry and Lyra, "detention on Thursday after dinner for causing such a disturbance. Next time, just enter like a normal person."
Harry was about to yell back, but a kick to his heel from Lyra shut him up. Snape walked backward into the darkened corner he came from and vanished from sight.
Blaise came up to greet them right after, "Welcome, Harry and Lyra, to our common room. Let me give you a tour."
"We know our way around," Lyra replied casually with a smile and purposely just loud enough for other people to hear.
"We enjoyed the wedding," Harry told Blaise after hugging Tracey.
"Well, I wish them a long honeymoon. My mother loves the dress, by the way. She says she will model it for Witch Weekly sometime in the fall when it is time for the winter fashions. She will also plug you and the store you got it at."
"Hermione did the enchanting," Harry told them, receiving a surprised look in return. "It's based on my magic, but she was able to replicate it without me."
Lyra had plopped herself down between Cho Chang and Daphne and was asking the Asian girl about a decorative pin that her hair was styled with. Harry turned his attention back to where Hayden and Gemma were going through their mystery box in the corner and went over to them.
"What's in the box?" he asked when he was closer.
They instinctively closed it and pulled it away when he was close, but then they shared a look, and both shrugged.
"Sorry about that, Harry," Hayden told him. "Slytherins don't normally just approach two people having an obviously private meeting."
He opened and turned the box toward Harry. Inside were all sorts of tiny insect-like creatures, some with humanesque faces or limbs. None of them were moving.
"Fairies," Hayden explained, "at least how they're commonly known. They're really just magical insects that are drawn to magical places. Very very hard to catch."
"I caught them over the summer," Gemma added. "When I was lounging around, I occasionally saw them and snapped them up. They naturally fear people, but swans with the reflexes of a wizard?… They stood no chance."
"Professor Snape says there are a bunch down in the Chamber of Secrets now. There are all sorts of grasses and moss down there now growing from the Usurper's cocoon."
"We need to get down there again," Hayden said greedily. "The wings are excellent magical catalysts when turned into powder. The rest of their bodies have their uses as well."
"Which is why I'm selling them to you, and every second you wait means they are less potent," Gemma told him, steering the conversation back to what they were doing before.
Hayden took out a scrap of paper and scribbled something on it; they were symbols, not numbers, and slid it over to Gemma.
"This much for each pair of intact wings and this for each damaged pair," she looked a bit unhappy with his offer, "and fifty percent more for any recovered from the Chamber of Secrets."
"Done. Harry, let me know when we can get back down there."
Harry shrugged, "Talk to Professor Snape. Maybe it can be my detention on Thursday?" he said hopefully.
"Why on earth would he let you get away with the stunt you just pulled?" Gemma asked.
"Because he told us to do it - 'Make an entrance,' he said," Harry told her.
The three of them laughed for a moment before hearing the sound of a throat clearing behind them. Hayden snapped the box shut and pulled it toward him in response. Marcus Flint was standing there, waiting impatiently with a sneer on his face.
Marcus was in his 7th year last year. He must have failed something, like Greg had, to be held back. That was his business, so Harry just gave him a nod and raised his eyebrows to wait for him to talk.
"I heard you had an interest in our snake fighting club. I want to see what you can do."
Without waiting for a response, he turned and walked away. Harry went to follow but also whistled toward Whispers, who scampered after with Silvy. Lyra was still chatting with the girls on the couch, with Blaise having gone somewhere else. They walked past the dormitories until the hallway became less polished, as if inside a stone-walled cave. Eventually, they entered a large arena with two rows of seating made out of the same black rock as the walls. Around the room were many other Slytherins; Harry spotted Blaise on one side with a few older students and Draco with his entourage on another.
"Is this the Slytherin dueling area?" he asked Marcus.
"It has many uses," he replied gruffly. "Who wants to challenge Potter?"
Vincent stepped up. Harry suppressed a giggle as he was wearing a silver glove to hide the damage to his arm. It seemed to be a perfect match to the one that Draco had to hide the curse mark on his hand.
"I challenge Potter," he declared. "And if I win, he leaves and doesn't come back."
Harry stopped himself from rolling his eyes. The demand was stupid, but he did have two whole years of fighting in this contest. He might actually pose a challenge.
"And if I win, I get to choose the color of your glove for the rest of the term." After a moment of consideration, he added, "And you can't remove it."
Crabbe hesitated for just a moment before agreeing. The two of them stepped into the circle and waited.
"How do we start?" Harry asked after half a minute.
"Crabbe, stop being an idiot and cast your spell!" one of the older students yelled.
He growled and pulled out his wand, "Serpensortia!"
A long snake shot out of his wand. It had black and white stripes that seemed to move up and down its length, growing and shrinking in size, making it very hard to determine exactly how long it was, though Harry estimated it to be around four or five feet.
Harry brandished his wand without switching to parseltongue and called out, "Serpensortia!"
Harry decided to go with fear for his choice and summoned the same snake he had used to attack Vincent last year. The difference this time was that this snake was ten feet long and had barbed fangs as it opened its mouth. It coiled itself into a pile and used it as a base to raise itself six feet into the air and hiss.
The color drained from Vincent's face. He pointed at Harry's snake with a shaking arm and then fainted. His own snake had no commander and just slithered toward some of the other students until someone blasted it out of existence.
"Well, that was easy," Harry commented. "Are you all afraid of snakes?"
"Of course not," Marcus replied. "Vincent is just a wuss. What kind of snake is that?"
"Don't know the name," he replied. "They are normally only a foot or two long. I just made it bigger."
"Does anyone want to provide us with better entertainment than Malfoy's suckup?" Flint asked.
Draco looked like he was about to jump up to reply to Marcus's insult but instead opted to levitate his friend back to where he was sitting.
"No one? Fine, I'll take care of this." He turned back to Harry, "Prepare yourself, Potter."
Harry vanished his snake, knowing he would need something for fighting and not scaring his opponent. Marcus pointed his wand, and without an incantation, a serpent larger than Harry's brown snake burst from his wand. It was dark gray, with a head that resembled a dragon with scales that looked like small shields the size of his hand that shifted and moved as it slithered across the floor. The more he looked and stared at the scales, the more familiar it seemed.
"Is that a chaincoil?" Harry asked, remembering the necktie that strangled him in the Knitter Critter.
Flint looked surprised, "It is. How did you know about it?"
Embellishing the truth, Harry replied, "I had one wrapped around my neck once."
While his opponent looked confused, Harry brandished his wand and incanted,
§Serpensortia!§
The white snake, the daughter of Flare, burst from his wand, larger than she was in real life at a total of eight feet. The snake coiled up at Harry's feet and hissed at Marcus's creation.
"A cobra for sure, no idea what kind," Marcus stared. "Let's do this."
The armored snake charged Harry, and his white serpent moved off to pull its attention. Marcus's snake struck first, thinking it would get a quick kill, but Harry had it use its tail as a club, and there was the sound of striking metal as the strike was parried. Harry used the opening to have his snake strike, but one of the fangs broke off as it bit into the armored skin of the chaincoil.
"Nice try," Marcus smirked.
He took advantage of the injured snake by striking again and biting into the midsection of Harry's snake. The white snake flailed back and forth as he could see dark poison flowing through the white body of his creation. It broke its other fang trying to bite the dark serpent and, just before it went limp, managed to use its tail to pierce her opponent's midsection between the scales moments before dying herself. Even after being stabbed, the armored serpent seemed to have full mobility as it slithered back to Marcus.
Harry vanished his dead snake as Marcus addressed the spectators.
"We will have the preliminary fights to establish ranking at the end of September. If you faint, like Crabbe, you will automatically be placed at the bottom of the ranking."
Some other students started having other small matches with each other, conjuring small snakes to fight around the seats and edges of the arena. As Marcus left, Harry spotted Lyra encouraging Whispers to fight a small snake conjured by a second year.
Obviously, the little serpent stood no chance, and Whispers just batted it around while predicting each strike it would make. After a while, the conjuration couldn't hold up to the abuse and vanished. Whispers then took Silvy from Lyra and pushed her to fight against one of the smaller snakes in his place. After seeing that they were having fun, Harry returned to the common room and sat on the couch next to Daphne.
She smiled at him while putting down her book, "They're all still fighting in there?"
"Marcus killed my snake," Harry said with wide eyes as he leaned his head back and looked at the ceiling. "It was incredible."
"You take losing pretty well," she told him with an inquisitive stare.
"It was just for fun," Harry shrugged. "I did scare Vincent so much that he passed out the fight before."
"That wasn't for fun?" she asked with one eyebrow raised.
"Some people never fight for fun, and we made a bet on the fight."
"Another one like Draco's mudblood curse?" Harry nodded, and she laughed.
"I get to pick the color of the glove he wears for the rest of the term," Harry shrugged. "Kinda boring, but I know he will hate it."
"Can I pick a color?" Daphne asked hopefully. Seeing a smirk from Harry, "Gold with sparkles."
"Tell him yourself," Harry told her. "If he doesn't do it, I'll find him and do it myself. I'm not very good with sparkles yet, which will make it look even worse."
For another thirty minutes, they talked about Daphne's classes. She was starting her electives this year and had enrolled in Runes and Arithmancy, not for any particular reason or future, just because the best jobs required high scores in those subjects. Harry told her that he wanted to do Runic studies because he was interested in permanent enchantments. Finally, Lyra returned from the dueling room carrying their sleeping kitten, and Whispers tagged along.
The day's last class was Astronomy, completing an incredibly long day. At least the following day, they had more time to sleep in before their first class and had only two classes in total, Defense Against the Dark Arts before lunch and History after.
Due to the class size more than doubling this year, the first session was held in The Great Hall. All the tables were gone, and soft mats were scattered throughout the room for students to lie down and look at the stars on the ceiling. As some students started lying down, Professor Sinestra told them to sit up and face her at the lectern.
"Last year, all of you learned about the constellations, moon phases, and important times of the year. This year you will start to learn why. You were just supposed to memorize as much information as possible before, and now, we will put much of it into practice. We still won't do much magic in the class, but you will learn why Astronomy is a core class at Hogwarts."
Many students perked up and wondered how stargazing could relate to any other course.
"The centaurs and Professor Trelawney will tell you that the stars can be used to predict the future. That will not be taught here. Who among you can tell us why you stir a specific number of times when brewing a potion?"
Many hands went up, and Colin was called on, "Because the arithmantic significance was determined for that number, and the magic of the brewer needs to be infused over time, which is what the count of stirring measures."
"Correct, two points. However, it is not the complete answer. Anyone else?"
Harry and Lyra both raised their hands, and Harry was called on.
"The number is only arithmetically significant in the region where the potion is being brewed. Different regions have different significant numbers."
"Good, one point. However, it isn't fully correct. Why are any of these numbers significant for any reason?"
There was silence over the room until Ryan Adamson blurted out, "They just are! That's what they always have been!"
Professor Sinestra replied, "Oddly enough, that is the correct answer. No points because you didn't know what you were answering. Many things in magic are the way they are simply because they've been done that way for so long that repetition has become a rule for how things are done. Some things have existed longer than anything else. What has existed longer than wizards and magic itself?"
A brave Ravelclaw answered, "The stars?"
"Yes, two points. The stars have been used for many things, but what is their most common use?" After a moment of silence, she replied to her own question, "They measure time. Days, nights, seasons, years, ages, and more specific amounts like the time a specific constellation is in the sky during a season, how long it takes for a specific star to change position, how long one is below the horizon from the time the sun sets, and literally every other movement you can think of. Wizards and muggles have been measuring these times for thousands of years and are the most consistent measurements that exist.
"A potion brewed in the significance of the time a star is in the sky during a specific season will work regardless of location. Some wand movements are based on tracing a constellation. Most powerful rituals need to be performed at a specific time of year, and the position of the stars can make that time as precise as it needs to be."
Harry was impressed. He enjoyed watching the stars but hadn't seen the purpose of how they related to Magic before. So far, his only rituals relied on sacrifices with little accounting for any time involved. He had to do some basic math to figure out the timing for his hair-regrowth potion for dragon fire burns; astronomy could improve on that. From last year, he knew that the stars had different positions depending on what part of the world you were in, and while he knew the path of the stars over his island almost perfectly, they would be slightly different here in Scotland.
Professor Sinestra observed the reactions of the class as they absorbed this new information. When she had given it enough time, she continued.
"For the first few weeks of the class, we will do all classroom work here or in a lecture hall. You will learn the tools and spells to properly chart and measure time in regard to the stars in the sky. After that, you will need to do a large amount of self-study tracking constellations throughout the night."
"What about the curfew?" Ginny Weasley blurted out.
"Hand, Miss Weasley," the professor replied sternly. "As long as you are working on assignments for astronomy, curfew will not be enforced. I'm sure some of you will try to take advantage of this, as many do in past years, and there will be punishments for those that do."
Harry was already planning on taking advantage of it. Exploring the castle was fun, even when he was doing it to find the Chamber of Secrets last year. Who knew how many other things around this mysterious castle would reveal themselves at night? He spied Colin and a few other members of the Adventure Club, smiling to themselves, and knew that they would also be taking advantage of the removal of the curfew when they got a chance.