It was almost fully dark when they stepped off the train, so Harry's first impression of the village of Hogsmeade was firelight in windows. The village at this end of the tracks seemed larger than the one at the entry station, likely because it also housed people that served the castle somehow: at the very least, they'd passed what looked like farmland nearly ready for harvest on the way in. The school's food had to come from somewhere.

He didn't have much time to consider the village, because Hagrid's voice boomed from one end of the similarly-simple train platform as the other end, "Firs' years! Firs' years over here!" The big man was holding a large lantern and beckoning. The older students seemed to know what they were doing, heading for a whole fleet of carriages spaced out in the lane nearby, while the smallest children shuffled toward the gamekeeper. "All right there, Harry?" Hagrid asked as he spotted the boy, then encouraged, "C'mon, follow me—any more firs' years? Mind yer step, now!"

Fortunately, they spent enough time forming up that Harry was starting to get some night vision, able to make out a winding foot trail that Hagrid began trooping down, trusting forty 11-year-olds to follow in the dark. Maybe there was another adult on the back side to make sure no one stayed behind or fell in a ditch? They seemed to be descending through some trees, and it felt and smelled like they were approaching water.

"Yeh'll get yer firs' sight o' Hogwarts in a sec," Hagrid assured them. "Jus' round this bend here."

It was impressive, and the children made noises to indicate as such. The promised water they'd been walking toward was an immense lake, reflecting the lights of the towering castle that loomed on a cliff above it. There hardly seemed to be enough students on the train to justify a school of that size, much less all the lights. But maybe they just lit the windows the first night to impress the new students.

"No more'n four to a boat!" Hagrid insisted, drawing their attention to small rowboats in a fleet abutting the shore. The girls quickly took a boat with another girl that Parvati had befriended while wandering the train, and Neville, the boy who was still missing his toad, joined Harry, Ron, and Dean in the next boat back.

"Everyone in?" Hagrid checked. Harry caught sight of an old, hunched man with his own lantern on the shore, who'd apparently been bringing up the rear. He gave Hagrid a wave of his lantern, signalling that they were all aboard, before sitting in the rearmost boat. "Right then—FORWARD!"

Propelled by magic, the boats set out as one unit, a silent flotilla weaving across the still water. Or, at least, silent for a moment. Even such an impressive vista couldn't stop so many children from first whispering, and then getting louder, their conversations echoing off the lake.

"Heads down!" Hagrid roared over the hubbub, as his boat and then all the others, one by one, entered a cavern shrouded by hanging ivy. Harry noticed a quite sturdy-looking portcullis that was hidden above, ready to cut off this water entrance as needed. It soon became much brighter as an underground harbor for the boats was revealed, flat stone just above the water level and lit by ornate torches that sparked with flames not unlike those of magical transportation.

The boats pulled into line next to this walkway, reminding Harry very much of water rides at theme parks. "Exit through the gift shop?" he said, pantomiming lifting up the bar that held you to your seat in such rides, and Dean chuckled appreciatively. Ron and Neville, of course, didn't understand the reference.

"No, the exit's up those stairs," Ron gestured at the wide, winding steps up the interior cliff wall as they started to climb out.

Harry's explanation was cut off by Hagrid asking, "Someone lose a toad?"

Neville shouted, "Trevor!" and managed to get out of the boat without flipping it over, but only barely, racing to reclaim the wandering familiar.

"How did…" Hermione began, asking the question they were all thinking about how the toad had gotten here ahead of them, but didn't finish the thought as they began to struggle up the several flights of stone stairs.

"We are going to have calves of steel," Harry joked, realizing that there probably weren't any escalators or elevators in the many-storied castle.

By the time they reached what was likely the surface level, Hagrid asked Neville, "Still got yer toad?" then banged three times on a stout wooden door at the top landing. It opened to a tall, older witch whose hair was still dark beneath her green, pointed hat. "The firs' years, Rector McGonagall," Hagrid told her, with formality.

"Thank you, Hagrid. I will take them from here," the stern witch responded with equal formality. She fully opened the door into a huge atrium, lit by dozens more of the magical torches. A much larger set of double doors stood to the left, immense beams against the wall to bar this front entrance at need. Across, an only slightly-smaller set of doors were their likely direction as the professor organized them. To either side, hallways wound off into the bowels of the school and marble stairways led up and down.

Surprisingly, instead of directly into the large, interior doors, she led them into an antechamber hidden around a corner that wasn't entirely large enough for forty children. Easily commanding their attention, she repeated a lot of things Harry already knew about the houses, so he used the opportunity to people-watch. Most of the children in the room apparently knew this too, and were looking with similar curiosity.

Despite the English accents and lighter hair and eyes of the local wizards he'd met so far, Harry was slightly surprised to note that the majority of the students seemed to be Asian. Thinking about it more closely, even the kids like Draco and Ron he'd assumed were fully white had evidence of mixed European and Asian heritage in their faces. He guessed he shouldn't be too surprised, since Wong had mentioned in passing that there were several stable convergences in Asia, so the Vanir had mixed with the humans of that continent even more thoroughly than with those of Europe.

It suddenly made a lot of sense why the Vanir were long-lived, but most were not functionally immortal like the Aesir of Asgard. They were in many ways mostly human, simply born on another planet.

"Will we all fight the same troll, do you think?" Ron asked, quietly.

"What?" Harry asked, realizing that while he'd spaced out McGonagall had left and the children had started talking again.

"According to my brothers, you have to fight a troll, and they pick your house based on how you fight it," Ron explained.

"I think your brothers must have been messing with you," Harry told him, and Dean and Neville nodded along.

"It's a magical, telepathic helmet that weighs your soul," the brown-haired girl that Parvati had befriended explained. "I'm Lavender, by the way."

They'd introduced themselves and started to ask how she knew when there was screaming from the back of the room as the temperature suddenly dropped. A ferocious crush of children backed them against a wall, trying to clear a path for the parade of spectral figures that had walked through the wall and barely seemed to notice the children. They were arguing with one another in voices that seemed heard from a great distance away and through water. The Old English they were predominantly speaking in wouldn't have been intelligible to the kids even if they heard it clearly.

"Wesaþ hāle," a short, rotund man dressed like a monk said to them, beneficently. "Welcumen tó Hofweord." The rope scars on his ghostly neck rippled oddly as he talked. In addition to their desaturated and translucent forms giving them away, each wraith bore the marks of their manner of death.

"Thanks?" several children replied, recognizing what they thought was, "Welcome to Hogwarts."

"Aweggā," McGonagall ordered the ghosts as she returned to the room, shooing them back out the wall. "Now, form a line. We do this by surname, so A through D up here, everyone up to L here, M through P over here, and the rest of you after P in the back."

With a lot of bumping, they got into roughly the right order (Malfoy having to shove his bodyguards into the right groups when they tried to keep standing next to him), and she nodded and led them out of the antechamber and into the doors Harry had identified earlier. The enormous great hall featured four immense tables full of students, each running parallel to the aisle between the door and the other end of the room, two on each side. The aisle led to the front of the room that was raised a step, where a perpendicular table seemed to hold the staff where they could face the students.

It reminded Harry of The Last Supper, with all of them on one side of the table. It must make it hard to chat with the other adults. Did they have to spend every meal mostly watching the students?

"Look up, Harry," Parvati insisted, noticing that the boy was engrossed in the people and was missing the most interesting part of the room. He glanced up and it was like he was staring into space. An enhanced field of stars loomed in the darkness below the roof where the light from hundreds of floating magical candles gave out, featuring the colors of nebulae that were added to NASA's images to make them more interesting. "Must be a spell," Parvati whispered.

At the end of the aisle, just before the teachers' table, McGonagall had set up a small wooden three-legged stool with an ornate, close-faced helm of what seemed to be an iridescent metal like titanium, though periodically flickers of color would race across the metal in a fashion that made Harry feel like the object was thinking.

"This is the Helm of Sorting," the professor explained, in an accent that seemed too Scottish for her to be a Vanaheim-born witch. "It was forged by the Norns for the sole purpose of setting you on the best path to achieve your wyrd: your destined fate. It chooses your house not just by your personality, but by determining which will give you the best start in life to develop the traits you need."

She then pulled out a scroll that apparently had all of their names in alphabetical order, as she'd explained earlier, and each child took turns walking up to the stool, sitting, and having their head completely swallowed by the massive helmet. An 11-year-old wearing a helm likely fit for an Aesir warrior was inherently comical, and Harry was reminded of bobble-head or Funko Pop toys.

Some took longer than others, but one by one each student was assigned to one of the four houses. The helmet would briefly change into the house colors for the one chosen after the child put it on. Harry, privately, wondered if the Norns had put a finger on the scale: what were the chances that they'd be so evenly divided by destiny? By the time it got to him, each house had gotten at least six kids, and not more than nine, and there were only eight more left, including himself. He wouldn't be at all surprised if the numbers came out pretty close to ten for each house. So far, Neville had been the only real surprise for Gryffindor, but Lavender, Hermione, and Parvati had all also made the house, with Padma going to Ravenclaw as she'd expected. Dean and Ron were still to go after Harry.

When he took his turn on the stool to the ferocious whispering that had begun after McGonagall announced his name, and had the helm placed on his head, he was surprised that it was not dark inside, but full of flashing colored light that he could almost resolve into vision. A gravelly old woman's voice sounded as much in his mind as his ears, "So many possible fates."

A similar but slightly-younger-sounding voice added, "So much greater chance for triumph or folly than the others."

"We could place him somewhere safe," a third, the youngest-sounding, suggested. "Hufflepuff to nurture his ability to make heroes work together who would otherwise be poised for civil war."

"That he is likely to do, regardless," the middle child argued. "Ravenclaw to drive him toward merging magic and technology?"

"An outlier of a chance, even if so assigned," the youngest argued. "More likely to mire him in further self-deprecation when it does not come as easily to him as it would his mentor."

"There are only two real choices," the eldest voice agreed. "The road of the hero, or the path of the left hand of death."

"Woah!" Harry cut in. "Do I get a vote? I vote no on left hand of death!"

The first voice, impossibly old, explained, "It is the safer path, child. Slytherin would teach you to master the skills to prove valuable to the powerful and make yourself indispensable enough to protect the things and people you love. Why fight the tides, when you can build a boat?"

"I'm pretty sure it's actually a lot more straightforward to build a seawall than a boat," Harry disagreed. "I could get started with just some sandbags. Boats are complicated. Especially if you want them to go where you want."

"I'm not sure if that's profound or a complete misunderstanding," the youngest voice said, a bit of humor therein.

"Turn back, child," the middle voice cautioned. "For your friends, Gryffindor is merely a place to find courage to bear up in the coming trials. But, for you, it would call upon you to fight. Possibly to die." The colorful clouds projected by the helmet suddenly became almost clear, a fully 3D vision in first-person of him surrounded by black-robed figures in metallic masks, wands pointed at him, a figure even more terrible half-seen looming from the darkness ahead.

"Okay, one, if I could get this to Tony he would use it to make video games amazing," Harry marveled. "Two, death is just possible, right? I also maybe come out of it awesome?"

"Awe is certainly upon the path, young one, if you can overcome your trials," the eldest told him, wearily, as if it had warned many Gryffindors before.

"If I'm stuck being a wizarding celebrity, might as well be for something I did," Harry shrugged, making the helmet bob on his head. "Total no on left hand of death."

"So be it, young one," the three voices intoned together.

The helm was lifted off of his head to huge applause from the Gryffindor table, and a surprising small smile on the face of the stern Rector McGonagall. "Take your seat, Mr. Potter," she instructed him, showing him the helm that had turned a brilliant metallic red and gold.

To cheers of, "We got Potter!" led by a couple of redheads that were probably Ron's brothers, Harry joined the Gryffindor table. Dean and Ron weren't far behind, and the table finally quieted down as the sorting was finished. The colorfully-robed man with an immense white beard who must be Headmaster Dumbledore stood up at the head table, made a dad joke about saying a "few words" only to spout four nonsense words, and then kicked off the feast.

A ripple of magic passed along the tables, with the customary sparks as food was teleported onto the surface. Vanaheim's feasting tradition was very similar to Asgard's, so the tables suddenly seemed to groan under the weight of huge platters of roasted meats, with miscellaneous other trays of food shoved in between. Parvati, sitting across from Harry, sighed and said, "They did warn us that this place was not vegetarian-friendly. Is there at least chicken? Ah, over there! Can someone pass me the chicken?"

Harry got to know the rest of his roommates as he ate. He already had a good handle on Dean and Ron, and Neville (last name Longbottom of all things) turned out to be a multi-generation Vanir native who had been worried he wouldn't have enough magic to go to Hogwarts. "Happened to my aunt," Harry nodded. "But she's doing great. Plenty of opportunities on Earth… Midgard."

"That's what me mum did," explained the Irish-accented boy named Seamus Finnegan that he hadn't met until dinner. "Didn' fancy stayin' here for the war, so went t'Earth and married my da'. She didn' tell 'im anythin' until I started showin' me magic. Bit of a nasty shock for him."

"I guess you didn't get picked up by the sorcerers, then, and that's why you weren't with us on the train?" Harry guessed.

"Mum doesn' trust the local wizards much," Seamus shrugged. "Said she didn' leave the war here just t'have me fightin' wars on Earth."

"I wasn't too sure about that either," Hermione interjected. "I want to keep learning magic after Hogwarts, but I don't know if I'm cut out to be the line of defense between Earth and the terrors of the other dimensions. I was looking into a few in particular, and there's a being called Dormammu that seems hard to even comprehend, much less battle."

"You get some of that here, too, though," Neville objected. "I think most of our parents had to fight You-Know-Who. And sometimes there are problems that Asgard doesn't want to deal with."

"I actually saw Thor, one time, a few years ago," Lavender (Brown, it had turned out) said, a bit dreamily. "Some jotun raiders were getting close to our village, and he came down the Bifrost with Sif and the Warriors Three to fight them off. My parents helped!"

Harry missed the rest of the discussion because he was distracted by a sudden sense of foreboding, almost feeling like pinching in his scar. A dark-haired man in black robes with a hooked nose was staring at him, talking to a green-skinned hag in voluminous robes that seemed familiar, somehow.

"Who are they?" he asked Percy, Ron's prefect brother who had set up near the first-years.

The officious boy explained, "The one in black is Professor Snape, he teaches potions, chemistry, and alchemy. The, er, woman, is new. I think she is probably this year's defense seminar teacher. We get a new one every year to teach different ways of defense and combat, sometimes without even using magic."

"Thanks," Harry said, focused on Snape. While he'd gotten used to being stared at, the man's focus on him was intense, especially since he hadn't looked away when Harry had noticed him staring. Harry shrugged and turned back to the table. Maybe he was a big fan.

As soon as dessert was finished, the headmaster stood up and gave a short speech pointing out that magic in the corridors was forbidden, so was going into the forest without a professor, and, for this year, so was the third floor corridor, "...unless you wish to suffer a very painful death."

"Is he serious?" Harry asked Percy.

"Maybe. It could be a convergence. It may currently be a portal to one of the more dangerous worlds? That happens from time to time. I shall ask."

"Additionally," Dumbledore continued, "I would like to welcome this year's defense seminar professor, Mistress Morgan." The hag, warty green face barely visible under her cowl, nodded at the introduction. "I know we had announced that it would be our own Professor Quirrell, who had gone on sabbatical to learn new techniques. Unfortunately, he had an accidental run-in with Morgan that left him incapacitated for the year, and she was kind enough to take his place in recompense. So, at least, we can know we have the superior warrior teaching, yes? I hope you'll all treat her very well. Now, perhaps the school song?"

Harry was pretty sure that Dumbledore was just making up a joke song as he went as he sung the silly words without much of a tune, especially with how excited Ron's goofy brothers, Fred and George, were to join in. What a strange old man.

Dismissed shortly afterward, Percy and his fellow fifth-year prefect Alexis Marie made sure the first-years stuck together and followed the rest of the mass that was Gryffindor out of the hall, up the giant staircase, and on the way to their tower. After a brief interlude where a tiny floating man who was partially translucent tossed sticks at them, Percy explained, "That's Peeves: some kind of partially-illusory construct that the God of Mischief, Loki, created when he was a student here. No one has managed to get rid of him. He plays pranks. Avoid him if you can."

"I guess we're never skipping leg day," Harry complained to the other kids from Midgard who might get the joke, after they'd climbed to the seventh floor and the entrance to their dorm. The older kids were just streaming through a large painting of a fat lady as if it didn't exist.

"The portrait will become a barrier if your magical signature is not registered," Percy explained. "Once everyone is through, we will add you to the list." This process involved some wand waving and Percy telling the painting a password, and then they were all through.

The room beyond the painting was a comfortable, low-ceilinged den primarily lit by a roaring fireplace. There was probably not quite space for several-dozen Gryffindors to all have enough study space at once, but it was still a large room with many alcoves and lots of comfortable seating in reds and golds. The dim lighting finally insisted to Harry's body that he had no idea what time or even day it was back in LA but it was probably time to sleep.

He trudged up another couple of flights of stairs into the dorm he'd share with the other first-year boys, fell into the bed where his trunk had been set up, and resolved to wait until the next day to check on Hedwig and send her to tell his aunt he'd gotten there safely. He was totally out of it before the other boys had even finished getting to their beds.


And that's it for now. Please follow if you enjoyed it and would like to see more. Let me know what you'd like to see happen next in the reviews!

I've honestly been blown away by the amount of attention so far, so this will almost certainly be the the work I continue after finishing Born in Fiendfyre. Thanks to everyone that's read, favorited, followed, and reviewed! I may try to slide in a few chapters from time to time before the other series is complete, just so everyone doesn't have to wait seven months, but no promises. Hopefully the wait will be tempered by my dogged determination to finish a series when I start it, so you know I'll give this my full attention once I'm back to writing it.

In the meantime, check out my profile for my other works. My main project right now is Born in Fiendfyre, a Dresden Files/Harry Potter crossover. It probably doesn't require a ton of understanding of the Dresdenverse to get into, if you found this from the Potterverse crossover feed. I hope you'll check it (and my other projects) out!