Are you there? It's somewhat urgent.
I'm here now.
I'm sure you recall that I was attempting to find anyone who may know anything about the Hogwarts wards. Unfortunately, the secrecy surrounding such warding projects and the amount of time that has passed since their foundation has made that difficult.
Yeah, I haven't heard from you about that in a while. What's the news, then?
I may have found someone who can help. Her name is Sarah Selwyn, an instructor in European warding and enchanting at Miskatonic. She was near the top of my list of people to contact from the beginning — she's a millenarian metamorph, and lived in Britain around the same time period, so would be familiar with contemporary warding techniques Slytherin and Ravenclaw were likely to have used, if nothing else. We've been corresponding through writing for some time now, and have just had our first in-person meeting. Which is why I'm writing to you now.
Don't get cagey with me, Tamsyn, come out with it.
Very well: she wishes to speak with you in person. I've told her everything you've told me, but I simply haven't the experience with the matter that you do. There are details I can't give her. In particular, I suspect she may wish to inspect the memory of your encounter with the wards.
I've tried putting that in a pensieve, it doesn't come out right.
She's a mind mage.
Jesus, Tamsyn, you want me to meet a thousand year old metamorph, who also happens to be a mind mage? You realise that sounds scary as all hell? And let her into my mind too, fuck that.
You don't have to let her into your mind — you may simply copy the memory into a reservoir for her.
Right, never mind, I'm stupid. Still, I
I'm not saying no, I know finding someone who can help isn't easy, but I'm a little nervous about it. A thousand-year-old metamorph mind mage sounds like the kind of person who could squash me like a bug if she wanted to, and I don't know her.
I wouldn't pass along the request to meet with you if I suspected she was likely to harm you — I am on your side, remember. Miskatonic may have a dismal reputation in the Old World, but I'm sure you're aware by now that that is nonsense. Selwyn is one of the founding members of the Cooperative, and has been well-respected in the Americas for centuries now. I'll admit that it is somewhat intimidating to be in a room with her, but she is aware of that — she regularly teaches students your age, and tries to take efforts to not seem so frightening. As far as thousand-year-old metamorph mind mages go, I suspect a schoolteacher is likely to be as safe to be around as you can expect.
And I have the feeling this is very personal for her, if that helps. She didn't spell it out, exactly, but she implied she has some personal connection to Ravenclaw — a daughter or a niece history has forgotten, perhaps. She grew up at Hogwarts, in its early days. The impression I came away with, meeting her, is that she is deeply concerned, legitimately. I understand why you might be nervous about meeting with such a mage, but I truly don't think she has any intention of hurting you. If nothing else, she is a public figure back home, and I imagine she wouldn't want to make trouble for herself doing something foolish with the Girl Who Lived.
Fine, that all makes sense. I do want to help, so. Can it be somewhere public? I think meeting in private would just make me more paranoid about it.
Of course. Are you familiar with the sandwich shop on Daisy?
Is that in Hogsmeade? The streets are all flower names, right. Hold on.
Okay yeah, I just got directions from Lily. I can find that.
When's the next day you have off? I can try to rearrange my schedule to come with, if that would make you more comfortable.
No, don't bother, I'll be fine. I don't need a chaperone, Tamsyn, honestly. I do have the eighth task next weekend, though. Can she get all the way to Britain by tomorrow? If not, it'll need to wait until after the task.
She can be there. How about meeting there for lunch, around noon?
Are you talking to her right now?
Yes. I wrote you after meeting her in the morning, and went back to find her after you agreed.
Right. Yeah, sure, that's fine. How does that work with the time difference over there?
It will be breakfast time for her. Thank you, Liz.
You don't have to thank me, I said I wanted to be kept in the loop. I didn't think that would mean having lunch with thousand-year-old metamorph mind mages at the time but you know whatever. Tell her I might be slightly high when I meet her.
Will that interfere with your ability to copy the memory for her?
Not really, no.
All right. She says she'll see you tomorrow.
Okay. I should think about getting to bed now. I've got a big day tomorrow, apparently.
Sleep well, Liz.
Liz blankly stared into her mirror — not truly even seeing, just, gathering herself for a moment.
Though she didn't think she looked terrible, at least. These Seer-safe linen dresses she'd been trying lately were comfortable, for Seer reasons, but they weren't her favourite. Like most of them, this one was rather plain, predominantly green with little curly embroidery in yellow at the hems, cinched in at the waist with a narrow little matching cloth belt. She didn't like that they tended to be pretty loose and drapey, her lopsidedness would be very obvious if she didn't wear something under it to flatten things — and her vests weren't quite as good, psychometrically, so kind of partly defeated the purpose. By this point the looser style of magic-made knickers didn't freak her out anymore, so that was better, just, it was difficult to completely eliminate anything that might bother her.
It did occur to her that she could wear a corset over the dress — there were some that were meant to be outerwear, different styles — which would help get the nice clothes-hugging-around-her feeling, and keep the psychometrically-pleasant linen as a barrier. She had to wait until after the blood alchemy procedure for that, though.
The conditioning oil stuff she was using in her hair these days made it behave better — she'd charmed it into a plait, and it would actually stay there all day now. It still wasn't perfect though, she didn't like the texture scratching against the back of her neck, so she'd wrapped one of her fashion scarves along the first several inches of the plait. Kept it from directly touching her skin, and the bright blue and red added a bit of colour, which she thought was nice. And she had her mother's necklace, of course, matching dangly gold-and-red earrings — she'd swap out the earrings sometimes, since Lily had left her a bunch and why not, but the ones in her lip and eyebrow just stayed the same all the time — some of her rattling beaded bracelets at her wrists.
It was completely unnecessary, since it wasn't like she was doing anything important, but she'd coloured her fingernails and darkened her lips while she was at it too (just with charms). Not the most effort she'd ever put in, of course, and it wasn't, like, excellent, but she thought she looked kind of nice? Not completely shitty, at least.
It was possible she'd gotten a little carried away — she was nervous, and overthinking it.
Liz realised it was somewhat irrational. When she'd been a little kid, after her mind-control superpowers had kicked in, it hadn't taken very long for her to grow accustomed to being basically untouchable by everyone around her — but then she'd gotten to the magical world, and Dumbledore had made it very clear, at their first meeting, that she wasn't the most powerful person in the room anymore. Most people she spent much time around wouldn't be able to do much about her mind magic, if she really tried to force it, but when she was around someone who she knew she wouldn't be able to resist, that she was basically at their mercy, if they chose to hurt her she couldn't stop it...
Well, that made her nervous. Even when she knew, rationally, that the person wasn't going to hurt her, it didn't matter. She remembered she used to be uncomfortable around Severus too, even though he'd never given her any real reason to be, she couldn't help it...
Thousand-year-old metamorph mind mages were rather more intimidating than Albus bloody Dumbledore.
Liz pushed out a frustrated sigh, glared at her own reflection. It was fine, she was going to be fine, honestly, what the fuck did she expect Selwyn to do in public? (Let's ignore for the moment the fact that a thousand-year-old metamorph mind mage could probably easily murder everyone in the restaurant and slip away before anyone realised anything was wrong.) Nothing was going to happen, she was just being pointlessly neurotic again, Selwyn was a bloody Runes professor, honestly. She reached back to pick up her bag, and (somewhat stiffly) walked out of her room.
It was lunchtime, but there were rather fewer people in the Great Hall than you'd normally expect at this time of day — people tended to be rather loser about keeping to a schedule on Sundays, and of course a bunch of people were probably having lunch out of the Castle today. Liz was only up here at all because this morning she'd asked the elves to send her nutrient potion up with a cup of coffee. (She'd barely had anything for breakfast, and she was supposed to take her potion with food, so.) The elves had some way of knowing when people sat at the tables, so she'd probably only have to sit down for a minute or two, however long it took them to make her coffee, and—
Her pace hitched, for a second, when she noticed a familiar mane of bushy brown hair. After pausing to take a short breath, preparing to act as casual and normal as possible, Liz headed for their spot at the Hufflepuff table.
"Hey," she said, stepping over the bench to plop down to a seat next to Hermione. Only Sophie and Sally-Anne were here with her, none of the rest of their friends anywhere around — Lily was probably somewhere with Blaise, and who knew what everyone else was doing. "You three going out to Hogsmeade?" They were all in muggle clothes, which wasn't unusual for a Sunday, but they also had their bags with them, which was a bit.
Hermione's attention was crawling over her, her mind clicking away — noticing that Liz had made herself up nicer than usual, wondering what she was doing — but she just answered the question. "Yeah, we could use a couple things. We're actually taking the floo over to Edinburgh."
"There are more shops at the Refuge." That was more or less the same distance, Liz thought, though the water crossing did make the trip rougher.
"We'll need to make a stop on the muggle side, so." Right, and there wasn't a muggle town associated with the Refuge, that made sense.
"Sally-Anne does, at least — her bras don't fit anymore — and Hermione's the one who knows how to get around."
"Sophie," Sally-Anne hissed, her cheeks going a little pink as she took a quick glance around them. Not that it mattered, nobody was paying them any mind.
Clearly unbothered, Sophie just shrugged. "You look nice! Is there something you haven't told us about?"
It took a couple seconds for Liz to put together that Sophie was suggesting she was going out on a date. "Oh! No, er, I'm going out to meet with Daedalus. Money business, you know." She did leave the Castle to deal with money and politics stuff now and then, so it was a believable lie. "I just got a little carried away, is all."
"Did you want us to pass you something?" Hermione asked — an unfocussed, hanging feeling in her mind implying that she expected Liz didn't want anything, but it was polite to ask anyway.
"No, the elves should be sending me up a coffee in a minute..."
The conversation resumed from where she'd interrupted it, talking about magical towns in general and Edinburgh in particular — Liz didn't know much more about magical Edinburgh than they did — what their plans were for today. By the sound of it, they had a couple things they wanted to pick up while they were out, but they'd be spending most of the day, just, wandering around. Magical Britain was basically a foreign country to muggleborns, and they didn't get to see much just hanging around at Hogwarts, so that made sense. Liz didn't have any advice for that, she'd hardly even been to Edinburgh — stay out of the bad part of town, she guessed, there were, like, hags and shite...
The brief time she was at the table, Liz tried to act normal, not give away any sign at all that anything out of the ordinary might be going on. That was made somewhat more difficult by, when Liz's coffee turned up — Liz transfiguring and fitting a lid to it out of a spare pencil, so it didn't spill on her way out — Hermione's eyes lingering on Liz's fingers, half-formed images and feelings brushing over her.
It was a little difficult to act normal when Hermione was actively remembering Liz fingering her.
And that was remembering because, yeah, that was a thing Liz had done now. Which was kind of wild to think about, honestly...
Because Liz and Hermione having sex was just a thing that was happening now, for going on a week. They still hadn't talked about it, just, she'd sneak Hermione into her room, they'd hang out for a bit doing whatever, and then they'd go to bed — on Friday, there hadn't even been a pretence of intending to go to sleep, they were both very well aware of what they were doing. They'd fall asleep — you know, eventually — and Liz would sneak Hermione out of Slytherin again in the morning. They didn't talk about it, at all.
They did talk while Hermione was over, of course, just...not about that.
Which Liz was still fine with. That she and Hermione were having sex now was kind of weird, and confusing, but she wasn't exactly complaining.
It did sometimes make it kind of difficult to act normal when other people were around, though.
Liz managed to, just, ignore Hermione's wandering thoughts, at least enough to not give anything away — Sophie and Sally-Anne didn't think they were acting any different from usual. She tucked her nutrient potion in her bag, and wormed back out from the bench. While she was leaning over to pick up her sealed coffee cup, Hermione asked, "Were you coming back to the school tonight? We do have a study group meeting, later." She wasn't actually thinking about the study group, but she couldn't say what she was actually thinking in front of the Hufflepuffs.
It was Sunday, after all — this was one of the days Hermione would normally come over. She'd been looking forward to tonight, would be disappointed if Liz was going to be gone.
(Even by now, Liz was still pretty confident that Hermione wasn't actually attracted to her...but that didn't stop sex from being fun, so.)
Liz cleared her throat. "Um, I'll be back in time. It's just a lunch meeting, I should only be gone for a couple hours. See you then." A quick round of goodbyes, and Liz was walking away. Feeling Hermione's attention warm and prickling on her back — more thoughtful than anything else, way less intrusive than some people (because she wasn't actually attracted to her), but still a little bit distracting. She didn't quite relax until she was over halfway to the doors out, when Hermione turned back to the conversation at the table.
She let out a little sigh, her eyes tipping up to the ceiling for a second — she was such a mess sometimes, why couldn't she just be normal for two minutes...
It was a nice day out today, but she decided to take one of the carriages down to the station anyway. With the work they'd done on the road, the walk over wasn't nearly as miserable — but it did take a lot longer on foot, she wasn't sure if she even had enough time for that. Climbing up into the thing was a little awkward, since she was so bloody short, but that was why she'd transfigured a cover for her coffee. The carriages could fit well more than one person, of course, but thankfully nobody was moving to join her. She tugged the door closed, and the thing lurched into motion.
Liz spent the trip blankly staring out the window, idly sipping at her coffee, and trying not to worry. It would be fine, she didn't really think Selwyn was going to do something — if nothing else, she didn't think Tamsyn would set her up to meet with someone obviously untrustworthy. Just, sounded like an intimidating person, was all, she didn't know...
But she didn't really think she was walking into danger, so she just tried to stay calm, sipping at her coffee and taking slow, deep breaths.
Paradoxically, the addition of a whole bunch of extra people in the Valley didn't result in Hogsmeade seeming any more or less busy, on the average — from what she could tell, whether there were people around varied, more than it used to. The international village had been planned in a way that the old village hadn't, so they'd included all the amenities the residents might need while they were at it, shops and restaurants and things. That didn't mean people in the new village never visited places in the old village, simply that there were more places to go — Hogwarts students, on their time off, were as likely to visit places in the new village now, established residents also went to places over there all the time. She didn't have any real maths on this, obviously, but she thought it was a wash: there were more people living in the Valley now, but there were also more places to go, so it didn't really seem any more crowded. There were people around, the walkpaths connecting the two halves of the village and the train station with a constant slow trickle of traffic, people here and there in the streets, but it wasn't really any better or worse than usual.
The exception was the Three Broomsticks. The nice pub in Hogsmeade had always been terribly crowded when students were around, or if there was some sort of scandal going on — it was pretty standard for mages to gather in the local pub or cafe or whatever to trade news and gossip — but outside of those times it'd be far more empty, almost even quiet during the off hours. Now, the place was full pretty much constantly — around lunchtime on a Sunday, with the addition of Hogwarts students in the village, people were even spilling out into the streets around it. Now that they were into the warming months, some outdoor seating had been added (blocking half of the street, of course), but even then there wasn't enough for everyone, standing around, a few groups of teenagers (Hogwarts students) with plates and mugs, just, sitting right on the village's rough cobblestone streets...
Liz shook her head to herself as she passed by — honestly, the food here wasn't even that good, there were plenty of other places they could go...
Eyes did find her as she passed through the village, attention clawing at her skin as people recognised her, but thankfully nobody came up and bothered her at all. She did notice some pointing and whispering from people — not Hogwarts students, she didn't think, people who weren't as accustomed to the Girl Who Lived being around — but they left her alone, which was honestly as much as she could hope for. She ignored them as best she could, gritting her teeth a little at the physical press of attention on her, trying to remember the directions Lily had given her. She went down the main street, past the Three Broomsticks, the post office, and then the turn right past the apothecary...ah ha, a blue house with a trellis frame crawling with cucumbers, recognised it from Lily's description immediately, and she took a left...
...and it looked like this was the place. It was pretty common in a lot of magical towns for shopfronts or restaurants or whatever to have residences on the floor(s) overhead — where the owner lived, if it was a detached house, in cities often blocks of flats — and the same was true in Hogsmeade too. This was in a primarily residential part of the village, houses all around, but the entire ground floor had been converted into a modest little restaurant, a sign by the street advertising its presence — a third level had been added to compensate, the plaster of the additional construction not matching the wood siding of the first two levels. This one had gone rather further in the conversion than most, the front face and the first several metres of the walls entirely cut away, revealing the interior, looking like any little cafe, tables and chairs arranged through the space, a counter back there. Something they just did for the summer months, she assumed, the walls could probably slide back into place when they wanted them. There was a lot of weird shite you could do with magical architecture, so.
She felt attention on her, followed the feeling back — a blonde woman was sitting alone at one of the tables in a corner, watching her. From the street, she couldn't make out many of the details very well, and she didn't even know what Selwyn looked like. She had a pretty firm feeling that that was her anyway.
Liz reached into her bag, retrieved her bottle of little crystallised drugs. (Mostly cannabis, but she thought there was something else in them too?) For whatever reason, Severus gave them to Liz in an envelope, but she'd recently started transferring them over into a spare potion bottle instead — stopper it closed, and she was far less likely to accidentally lose any of them. She tipped one of the tablets out onto her hand, tucked it under her tongue. Taking a last, long breath, Liz stepped through the gate.
The little sandwich shop was rather plain, wood-panelled floors and walls (where the walls still existed, that is), the tables and chairs plain and undecorated, lit primarily by the indirect sunlight bouncing in through the missing walls, open and airy. There was a line at the counter toward the back, signs up listing off the different things they were selling. The seating was pretty minimal, only, like, eight four-person tables — Liz guessed they actually did most of their business on carry-out. In fact, there wasn't even a hostess or anything to meet her at the door, if she wanted a table she was probably supposed to go up to the counter and ask for one...not that there were any empty ones left anyway.
Looking around, she noticed the blonde woman at the table had stood up, waving a hand, her gaze still fixed on her — her attention light and cool, thankfully not too unpleasant. Her hair was about shoulder-length and curly, held back out of her face with a blue and red patterned kerchief, wearing a plain yellow sleeveless blouse and, oddly enough, a denim skirt. A little brief for Scotland in May, Liz thought, but she guessed it was probably warmer in America? (Also, magic.) She looked a little young for a professor, maybe, like, Deirdre's age...but it wasn't like Liz had expected her to look her age, considering she was literally a thousand years old. Metamorphs could look however they wanted, so.
And it did seem like that was definitely Selwyn, since it looked like she was expecting Liz and everything. Right. She should just...go over there, then.
Liz was only a couple steps through the cosy little restaurant when the drugs hit — she paused for a moment at the wave of dizziness, pleasant warm tingles rushing over her skin, leaving her feeling vaguely floaty. Once it settled — feeling smooth and comfortable, a half-step removed, the attention on her and the mental noise of the minds around still there, but softer and easier to ignore — she started moving again.
"Lady Elizabeth," the woman said with a little nod as she approached the table. "Thank you for agreeing to see me." Her voice was low and smooth, the accent sounding American, though with a bit of an extra lilt to it Liz couldn't quite place. Maybe vaguely Celtic? That would make sense, if she'd grown up in Britain literally over a thousand years ago — most people in the west and north had still spoken Cambrian or Gaelic back then. Though, did accents stick around that long? She really had no idea...
"Sure. Just 'Liz' is fine, by the way."
"Sarah." She gestured at the chair opposite her, but didn't sit down right away herself — she actually walked past Liz, and... Oh, she was going by the counter. Probably telling the staff that the person she'd been waiting for was here now, so they could actually order and shite.
Liz was slightly worried about eating here, honestly. Magical suppliers generally weren't so bad, and it wasn't like it'd bother her, as long as her drugs were still in effect at the time, but it was possible it'd come out in nightmares later. And she'd be sleeping with Hermione again tonight, and with the way she unconsciously snuggled in her sleep, it'd be far too easy to accidentally drag her in...
Oh well — the few times she'd accidentally pulled Hermione into her nightmares she'd been more worried for Liz than annoyed about it, so. She hung her bag off of the back of the chair and sat down. Selwyn (Sarah, whatever) had sat facing the rest of the shop, probably so she'd notice Liz coming in, but she was too comfortable at the moment to be self-conscious about the people behind her.
(It really was very unfortunate that just being high whenever she needed to be in public was a bad idea.)
Sarah came back a moment later, passing by Liz to get to her chair. Her eyes might have wandered down to Sarah's legs for a second — her skirt only went halfway down her thighs, okay, it was just automatic. "She should be by with a menu in a moment. After we've been served, I'll put up a paling, so we may speak privately."
"Okay." She might have been annoyed with the need to sit here for longer, being stuck with the scary ancient metamorph and needing to act normal about that, but honestly Sarah wasn't nearly as intimidating as she'd been expecting. Could hardly even feel her aura at all, honestly — her mind was there, cool and smooth and quiet, politely self-contained, but. She must be holding in her magic, to not be scary on purpose, which Liz honestly appreciated.
Sarah must be feeling out Liz's mind too, because she said, "Are you attempting to read me, or is this your mind's resting state? I have heard you're a stress-triggered childhood mind mage."
"Oh no, my mind just does that. I might be, you know, sprawling out more than usual, that happens when I'm on something, but I'm not trying to be a nosey bitch, I just can't help it. Sorry."
There was a little twitch of Sarah's lips, a twitter of warm amusement in her head — probably at the nosey bitch part. "Practicing ritual integration will weaken the boundary of your mind."
"Um..." After a few seconds, it belatedly clicked that ritual integration was Sarah's way of saying subsumption in a way that no one around them would understand — not that that made Liz any less confused, frowning across the table at her. "You can tell? I didn't think that should leave behind anything obvious."
"I have long experience with a wide range of esoteric magics."
Okay? That wasn't really answering the question, but Liz guessed Sarah was literally a thousand years old, probably seen fucking everything by this point. "Right. Does it, though? I mean, I can't turn it off. The part where you push magic through your mind or whatever, you know, I can't stop doing that — that's not a, er, integration thing, I've always been like this."
"Even so, there are means to limit the effects. Repeated ritual integration may augment..." Sarah glanced away for a second, her mind clicking. "Think of it as a form of gravity. These magics may increase the weight of your influence, so to speak, drawing more of the ambient environment into your orbit. You have quite a powerful aura, for a mage of your age — effectively tuning the environment around yourself to your own magic greatly reduces the resistance your mind must overcome, and so it may sprawl out more easily."
"...Oh." That actually made a lot of sense, when she thought about it. Severus had said something similar, once — and it kind of reminded her of a different conversation, when he'd explained that her Sight would get more sensitive as she got more powerful, like, the net she was catching stuff with getting bigger — and also just intuitively? But, "Isn't that going to happen no matter what anyway? Like, as I get older, and do more magic, I'm going to grow more powerful, and my aura is going to get noisier."
Sarah shrugged. "True. And it may be that whatever benefits you get from these magics are worth accelerating the process somewhat. I simply thought I would point it out."
"Right. Well, thanks, I guess, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to keep doing it anyway. Learning languages instantly is an awesome cheat, and I like never getting ill ever."
"Ah, yes, I use the former trick myself — it is very convenient. How many languages have you acquired already?"
"Um..." Counting on her fingers, there was English, she learned Cambrian the normal way, she copied French from Valérie, and she got Gaelic and the Glasgow dialect from Muirgheal. "I speak five, but I only copied three of them. Counting English, I mean."
"Not bad. I assume you've only started recently, and hardly have the freedom to go out and hunt down languages — learning five languages to fluency at only fourteen is quite exceptional regardless."
"Yeah, I guess. Still think being a mind mage is cheating. I mean, how many do you speak?"
Sarah smiled a little. "More than that."
"Sure, but I'm curious."
"Are we counting dead languages?"
They were still languages, weren't they? "Yeah."
"One hundred seventeen. Give or take a few dozen — it depends on how you count."
Jesus fucking Christ. She realised Sarah had had a long time to pick up languages — and the mechanics of how subsumption worked meant they technically weren't limited by physical brain space either — but that was just fucking absurd...
Before Liz could figure out how to respond to that, a waitress showed up. There were menus, which only some magical places actually did, and they were kind of interesting, actually. Liz and Sarah were both given the sheet of paper and a pencil — the rather blocky magical-made ones, intended to plan out enchanting projects and the like — the menu split up into different categories of things, with the list of ingredients they had for each kind of thing. They were supposed to tick off the ingredients they wanted, and they'd assemble the plate for them — since everything was made to order, it might take a bit if it was something they actually had to cook immediately before serving, but still, that was really neat. There were sandwiches, or, savoury porridges with different mix-ins and toppings or whatever, and Gaelic-style flatbread bake things, and what sounded like basically magic pizza, and salads and such, some different sides, including chips actually made out of potatoes, rare on the magical side...
"Um, hey, do you know where these things are from?" Liz asked her before she could walk off. "I mean where they were bought from."
"Some of it," the woman said, mind turning in confusion. "I can go back and check, if it's important."
"Do you know if any of the meat or dairy is muggle-raised? That's the really important part." Some magical supplies were better than others, but they were almost always better than anything muggle-raised.
"Why would it— Oh!" she chirped, her eyes going wide. "You're a Seer, of course, I'm sorry. Ah... I know the dairy is mostly from the Smethwycks, or from Ywst. The mutton is mostly from the Eirsley lands, or from around Kildare, but I'm not sure about the rest. None of it it muggle-raised though, I don't think."
The Smethwycks and Eirsleys were both commune types, like the Greengrasses, their stuff was probably fine — she'd actually bought stuff from the Eirselys' farms before. "Ywst" was what the mages called...part of the Outer Hebrides, she wasn't sure where exactly, but she knew there were, like, old traditional commune types there, and she thought one of the more humane farms she'd gotten stuff from before was in County Kildare? She wasn't sure. They weren't buying stuff from muggle suppliers, though, which was the important part. "Right, that should be fine. Thanks."
"My pleasure, Lady Potter, if you need anything else please ask." Liz grimaced a little at the silly lady business, but the woman was gone quick enough she might not have even noticed.
Anyway, right, lunch — Liz scanned over the menu, idly sipping at her nearly empty coffee. She mostly only knew the Gaelic flatbread thing from Muirgheal, but it sounded good, so why not. The shredded mutton sounded fine, and some mushrooms, sure, pick a couple different kinds of cheese...add some salt beef in there, why not, but by this point it was getting pretty full. Ooh, some garlic-sage mustard to finish it off, there we go. And they did have chips, so she might as well, and there was an option for a white cheese sauce to go with that. Oh, and the rosemary-honey bacon in the add-ins also sounded good, she could try that...
"It seems someone is hungry," Sarah said, seeming rather amused.
Liz shrugged. "I didn't really have anything for breakfast. Besides, healers are always telling me I don't eat enough."
"If you have difficulty eating sometimes, it may be worthwhile to try taking one of those tablets of yours before mealtimes."
...Well, yeah, maybe. "It's not that eating is hard, or anything, I just forget to do it."
"Ah ha, and now you sound like one of my Mastery students..."
Before too much longer, the woman came back. She quick glanced at their menus, and then gave Liz a funny look — no, she hadn't changed her mind about something after marking it, she'd meant to pick multiple things. She was hungry all of a sudden, okay? The woman went off with their menus, but was back only a couple minutes later, with a bottle of...cider, that was cider, like a large wine bottle. Two glasses were set on the table, there was a brief talk about their order being put in, and how long that was expected to take — Liz's thing, at least, had to bake in the oven for a short time — before she was walking away again.
"The orchard this cider is produced at is an old sanctuary, dating even before my time," Sarah said, pouring one of the glasses from the bottle. "I imagine it shouldn't have any unpleasant echoes for a Seer."
By sanctuary, Liz knew she meant old holy sites the ancient Celts used to have, sort of neutral places where they often didn't even allow weapons at all, for religious reasons. The Wizengamot Hall (and the Bones lands) were on the site of one of the big, important ones, but they used to be all over the place. Cider from such a place that been maintained all this time should be good for Seer reasons, but, "How strong is it, exactly?" She was already high, so, getting drunk on top of that wasn't a great idea.
One eyebrow ticking up, Sarah turned the label to her. Mages didn't mark things with the per cent alcohol, like muggles did, instead they had different categories things were sorted into. This one was labelled as a table beer — despite not being beer, sometimes the terms were confusing — which meant it should be weak enough most people wouldn't even notice. "Oh yeah, that should be fine. As long as it's not too sweet, anyway."
Sarah poured a little bit into the second glass for her to taste — and no, it was pretty good and spiced and everything, but it wasn't too sweet. Thanks for buying the drinks, she guessed? Liz hadn't really planned on getting anything, a lot of times the coffee you could get any random place wasn't very good. Both taste-wise and for Seer reasons, honestly...
"I haven't been to Hogwarts since before Secrecy," Sarah said, seemingly out of nowhere, "and I have little idea of the programme there these days. Have they adopted the ICW model?"
Liz frowned. "You mean, like, the Competencies and Proficiencies?" The curriculum wasn't exactly the same in different countries, the central ICW institutions in Switzerland just set the minimum standard — the exams set in different countries were written by their own educational authorities, and different schools also had their own programmes, so. "No, Britain still has their own thing. Mostly the old curriculum from, like, Renaissance Italy or whatever? with some local stuff mixed in too. The spells we're taught are still mostly in Latin and Greek and everything." Since looking into other schools, she'd learned that wasn't actually normal — incantations might sometimes be in a somewhat archaic dialect, depending on who'd originally invented it, but they tended to actually be in the local language — doing everything in Latin (and more rarely Greek) was a relic of the old Renaissance-era standard.
"Ah... So it has changed rather little, then. Though I did hear Britain has some manner of standardized exams."
"Yeah, the OWLs and NEWTs."
Sarah's brow dipped in a frown, a brief cold shiver from her head. "What?"
"That's what they're called," Liz said, with a helpless sort of shrug. "You can't get fussy over silly-sounding names in Britain — I mean, the school is called Hogwarts."
"Yes, I still don't know where that name came from."
"What, it wasn't always called that?"
It seemed a little silly for a thousand-year-old metamorph mind mage to roll her eyes. "No, of course not. This place was once called Scáthachluain—" The Gaelic term was recogniseable, but she pronounced it differently than Muirgheal would, presumably a more archaic form of the language. "—literally the Vale of Shadows — but in our time came to be known as the Open Valley — the 'open' here used metaphorically to mean free, independent of any of the kingdoms on the Isles at the time, and welcoming to all peoples who may wish to come. The literal English translation, in time, became the modern name of Hogsmeade. After the fortress was converted to a place of learning, it was simply called the Academy. I haven't any idea where the modern name came from."
"Oh, well." Liz just shrugged, not sure what else to say about that.
"I have heard of the educational reforms ongoing presently — Hogwarts truly hadn't yet implemented a Mastery programme?"
"I don't know what to tell you, Sarah, maybe you haven't been paying any fucking attention while you've been away, but it sucks here." Sarah blinked at her, an odd cool shivering in her head. "Like, at Hogwarts, yeah, but kind of the country in general? Britain is a backwards aristocratic shithole, which I know I shouldn't complain about, since its backwardsness benefits me but, you know, whatever. It took us until the fucking Nineteen Nineties to even start getting a proper education system, and by the sound of it we're doing a pretty bad job of it. And I fucking hate it at Hogwarts, that place sucks, there's a reason I'm planning on transferring out."
There were feelings going on in Sarah's head, but she was keeping it very contained, Liz could hardly tell what it all was, exactly — besides that she wasn't happy to hear that someone who'd actually been there recently thought Hogwarts sucked. She did arch a single eyebrow at the end, though. "Oh?"
...Liz belatedly realised that was supposed to be a secret, and she probably shouldn't be openly talking about it in public. She didn't really feel much attention on them, though, she didn't think anyone was eavesdropping. "Um, yeah, er. Next year, after OWLs, I'm leaving. Durmstrang, probably. Syracuse is also on my list — the student duelling tournament is down there this year, if it's too hot for me then it's just Durmstrang. Probably apply to a few other places too, just in case..." Durmstrang was pretty selective, after all.
"Durmstrang, but not Beauxbatons?"
"Too big — fewer people is better for Seer reasons."
Sarah nodded. "You might consider adding the University of Kraków or Prague, or the Public Academies in Swerin, Passau, or Klaipėda. The University of Van is also very nice."
"Van? Where the hell is that?"
"Armenia. They accept the ICW standard for transfer students."
"Oh, well, sure." Armenia seemed like a long way to go for school. She wasn't even entirely certain where that was, honestly, it wasn't an ICW country — down near Persia, maybe? "I'll think about it, I guess."
From there, they talked a bit about why she thought Hogwarts sucked, exactly — or, Sarah asked a couple questions about it, and Liz kind of ranted, a little. She realised a lot of it was a relatively recent decline — Hogwarts did used to be a very good school — and they were working on fixing a lot of the big issues anyway. Though they weren't really fixing the fact that their curriculum was outdated in some ways. Like, Charms and Potions were fine, mostly, but Transfiguration was terrible, with basically no alchemy included whatsoever, and the Runes programme was pretty bad too — Babbling tried to make up for it, but pretty mixed success there. And there were no language programmes (except Cambrian) — there was the language club, but that wasn't a great substitute — and no literature or anything — there was the stuff they read in Cambrian class, but that was basically it. Especially with all the muggleborns in the school, they could definitely use some culture stuff, like, what magical Britain was like, and all the religions and whatever, muggleborns often came out of Hogwarts kind of ignorant about even basic things. And there was essentially no art whatsoever. There were clubs, but that was really it — and with the way the guilds in this country worked, it'd probably be difficult to add anything without their explicit approval. Schools in other countries had, like, pottery classes, or painting or drawing, sometimes even textile stuff or more out there things like glass-working...
A big part of why Liz particularly didn't like Hogwarts much was just because British mages were stupid about the Girl Who Lived, of course, but it wasn't all that — Hogwarts really was just...not very good, in a lot of ways. Sarah was a little dumbfounded that they didn't even have any kind of healing classes (besides the few things they were taught in Charms and Potions). That was standard in the rest of Europe, and they had had a mandatory basic and elective more advanced Healing class the last time Sarah had been to Hogwarts — centuries ago, during a previous Triwizard Tournament, apparently — and language and literature and art stuff too. So yeah, Hogwarts, not a great place, honestly.
Their food showed up while they were still talking about Hogwarts sucking. Her 'sandwich' looked about how she expected. A piece of circular flatbread — a kind of Gaelic oatcake, it sort of looked like a crêpe or something, but had a rougher, chewier texture to it — folded in half and adhered together around the edge, making a pocket that was kind of bulging a bit with the stuff crammed into it, lightly blackened in strips from the frame it'd been baked on. (Magic pizza they would float, but this was supposed to go straight on the grate, flipped over halfway through cooking to get both sides evenly.) The chips looked good, the thick wedges dusted with flecks of herbs, and the bacon smelled amazing. This kind of 'sandwich' was supposed to be able to be picked up and eaten by hand — it was a quick and easy thing people had at home sometimes, and was sold as street food at the markets and shite at the Refuge — but this one looked a bit too fragile for that. Probably her fault, with all the stuff she'd asked to have crammed in there — or maybe this place always made them like this, her plate did come with a fork. So Liz got to breaking the 'sandwich' into pieces, cheese and sauce oozing with each press of her fork, steam thick with spices and herbs, which was just making her hungrier.
Liz tasted a bit of it, and holy crap that was great...though, from familiarity with how other people ate, and cooking for other people now and then, she could tell most other people wouldn't think so. The sauce that came with the...mutton she thought (or maybe that was the mushrooms?) and the mustard, in particular, she thought other people would have a problem with those flavours being together. She liked it, though, and that was all that mattered. Since breaking apart the sandwich meant she had a mush of stuff here anyway, she went ahead and scooped all the chips over on top, quick tasted the sauce that came with them before drizzling that over the whole mess — normal people wouldn't think that should go with the mustard either, this time the cool shiver from Sarah's head also a good hint — and then she broke the bacon up into little chunks with a few charms, and sprinkled those on too.
While Liz was stirring the mess around, making sure the chips got nice and covered, humming to herself a little — not even fully conscious of doing that, it just leaked out — Sarah said, "I'm certain you've heard this before, but your appetite is quite peculiar."
"Yeah, I know. The food I was given when I was little was, you know, kind of shite, and then I was feeding myself since I was, like, nine. I'm aware other people don't like what I like, sometimes. Have to remind myself of that whenever I'm cooking for other people."
"Ah, I know how that can be — my American grandchildren have repeatedly begged me to stop serving rakfisk at holiday dinners."
...It was a little odd to hear the woman sitting in front of her, looking hardly older than twenty or so, casually talking about her grandchildren. Though, she was bloody ancient — she must have who-even-knew-how-many-times-great-grandchildren out there — but she didn't look it, was all. "I don't know what that is."
"Fermented freshwater fish, preferably served raw."
"Ugh, gross..."
Compared to the mess Liz had on her plate, the sandwich Sarah had looked perfectly ordinary. She preferred her own lunch, though — Sarah's looked fine, she guessed, but this shite was great. Sarah waited a couple minutes for Liz to start in on this cheesy, herby disaster, before pulling something out of her bag and setting it on the table. It was a little disc, glyphs in an unfamiliar script carved along the edge and painted over. Liz knew painting over runes was good for preservation purposes, but it also just looked pretty, blue and black lines making a sharp contrast against the vaguely yellowish-pinkish clay. A tap of a finger and a crackle of magic, and a paling snapped into existence around them. "Unless you object, I thought we could get to the matter at hand."
...Right, they were actually here for something. Liz hummed, finished chewing and swallowing her bite of stuff. "Okay. What do you want to know, exactly?"
"What was the first sign you noticed that there was a problem with the wards?"
"Oh, well..." She hesitated for a moment, taking another bite — shite, the mutton and the mixed-up sauces was really good on the potatoes, excellent food decision right here. "Um. I don't know, in retrospect I guess it should have always been obvious they were kind of fucked."
Sarah frowned. "What do you mean?"
"Well, they say Hogwarts is super safe or whatever, but it doesn't seem like it is? My first year here, the Dark Lord got into the school by hitching a ride on one of the professors — you know, he doesn't have a body, so was hiding inside of someone, I guess. I don't know, I get boggarts forming inside the wards, but it seems like hostile spirits like that shouldn't be able to cross the wardline, you know?"
"...No. No, that should not be possible. The wraith should have been expelled from the host, at the very least. Did you mean to imply that boggarts are known to form in the Castle?"
"Sure. Isn't that normal?" Liz said, when Sarah just silently frowned at her, mind cold and sparking and lurching. "I mean, the wards do highly concentrate magic, and, there are a lot of shadowy corners and shite. In a high magic environment, with a lot of enclosed, dark spaces, you're going to get demons forming — that's just how it works."
"The environment within the Castle should be entirely separated from Shadows. Boggarts should not be able to cross the boundary."
"...Oh." She meant, like, the wards they had at the Greenwood? Liz had always assumed that was some weird thing because of the sacrifices they did, it wasn't normal for wards to prevent demons from forming...though she guessed the wards at Hogwarts had also been set with sacrifices, so, maybe that had something to do with it. "I don't know what to tell you, boggarts regularly form at Hogwarts. Nobody talks about that like it's an odd thing that shouldn't be happening, so they must have been showing up for a while. And there's the acromantulae, of course."
"Yes, I heard about that," Sarah said, low and exasperated. "My understanding is that the colony was well outside the wards."
"Well, sure, but it started with Hagrid bringing an egg into the school when he was, like, my age."
A jolt of her mind, sounding rather dumbfounded, "He brought an acromantula egg across the wardline? And nobody knew?"
Liz shrugged. "Nobody caught him until well after the thing hatched, must have been months, so I assume the wards didn't alert anyone."
For a long moment, Sarah just stared at her, flat and cold. Her mind was twisting and flickering, a constant turn of thoughts going on in there, but too far away for Liz to really guess what that was about. Probably hadn't realised it was nearly as bad as it was.
"...Anyway. So, it should have been obvious, but the thing that tipped me off was— Last year, we were starting our electives, and I'm taking Divination. The book assigned for it was stupid, though, so I looked at the other books in the divination section, and found one on spirit-walking. Or dream-walking, whatever, I've heard people use both terms. You know what that is?"
"I'm familiar with the concept, yes." There was some kind of note on Sarah's voice she didn't know how to read, maybe amused? It did seem unlikely that there would be magic Liz knew about that Sarah didn't, but, you know, just checking.
"Right. Anyway, so, I thought it would be neat to check out the founding of Hogwarts, or at least try to, so I went somewhere as close to directly over the wardstones as I could, and tried to See back there. I nailed it too, saw the ritual and everything, very neat. But, the wards crystallising was kind of freaking me out, and, when it spit me back out, suddenly the wards were there — went pawing through my body and my mind, which, I get that it was just making sure I was okay, but it was really uncomfortable. Once it was sure I was fine it, like, gave me a little mental pat on the head, and it was gone."
"...The wards communicated with you. Consciously."
"Yep. Wasn't the only time, either, I've gotten its attention a few times now."
Sarah sank into a thoughtful silence, turned to stare off into the distance to Liz's side. The activity swirling away in her mind, it looked like she was working up to something, so Liz didn't continue the story right away — besides, she couldn't eat if she was talking all the time. A few bites of her lunch later, Sarah said, "That is not...entirely unexpected, I suppose. Given the character of the governing elements, and how long the wards have been in continuous operation, it is perhaps inevitable that they might develop a form of self-awareness, in time. It is amazing to think... I never thought that might happen, from the outset — our understanding of the phenomenon of consciousness was...rather less developed in that time."
...There was something funny about the way Sarah was talking, niggling at Liz, but she couldn't quite put her finger on it. "Sure, yeah, that makes sense. Anyway, in retrospect, looking at it in my pensieve, I noticed that the wards felt, like... You know, when a radio isn't quite properly in tune, kinda hissy and staticy. It seemed off. I told, er, Mercy Anne about it at the time—" Almost used her real name, whoops. "— and she said she'd look into it, and that I should try to get the wards' attention again. Didn't really work, it might notice me sometimes, but, just for a second before looking away again, you know?"
Sarah nodded, giving Liz a sharp, thoughtful sort of look. "You know her real name. Mercy Anne."
"Um...sure? Do you?" She did seem to have already known Mercy Anne wasn't her real name, so...
"I can tell she's playing a character, but I have no idea who she really is."
Right, thousand-year-old mind mage, just felt that Tamsyn was lying, got it. "She was kind of cagey about it, at first, but she sent me a memory once where someone was using her real name, so. It's a secret though, obviously, I'm not telling you about it." Until she had reason to believe Tamsyn wasn't keeping Liz's secrets, she wouldn't be the one to do it first.
"Fair enough," Sarah said, with a careless little shrug. "Mercy Anne told me you received some sort of vision from the wards." She reached into her bag again, and set down another device — this one had a reservoir on top of a clay base, surrounded with more ruins, very similar to the thing Severus made to practise subsuming memories. "I would like to have a look, if you are comfortable."
"Sure." Reaching for her wand, Liz explained, "I kept trying to get the wards' attention, but it never really worked — until the Triwizard Tournament happened. I think the wards were worried I was kidnapped or something? Like it knows what the Tournament is, you know. Anyway, checked me over again, like the first time, but this time I managed to ask if something was wrong with it before it pulled away again." It took a little more effort to copy the memory of that exchange with the wards than normal, but it looked like the spell took correctly, the silvery-blue memory-stuff leaving the reservoir softly glowing. "Not sure how clearly that's going to come through, but there you go."
It didn't take long for Sarah to analyse the memory. Her eyes focussed on the reservoir, and there was a sudden shift on the air as Liz felt a sharp, warm crackle of magic extend from Sarah. Like the floor had just canted under her, leaning in toward Sarah just slightly, as the ambient magic around them was drawn toward her — reminding Liz of what Sarah had said before about gravity, actually, obviously Sarah would be 'heavier' than Liz. The extension of her mind was very tightly focussed, not approaching anywhere near Liz, and in a blink the reservoir went dim, Sarah's mind smoothing over again, the sense of weight gradually lifting away.
Woah. Okay, Liz could definitely believe the person sitting across from her was a thousand fucking years old now — she'd never felt ambient magic act like that around someone before.
For the next couple minutes, while Sarah picked over the memory, they just quietly ate. Liz was maybe being slightly gross, because this stuff was great, okay — also, she was always weirdly hungry when she was high...or maybe she just noticed in a way she didn't when she wasn't on anything. Whatever. Sarah was a lot more slow about it, taking bites and idly chewing, seemingly on auto-pilot, staring unfocussed into the distance. There were feelings pulsing off of her, but even while distracted with the memory her mind was still very self-contained, it was difficult to guess what any of it was.
Eventually, her eyes snapped back into focus, Sarah glaring down at her sandwich. "I didn't realize the Castle asked for help. Mercy Anne made it sound as though you'd had some kind of vision while in contact with the wards."
Sarah managed to catch Liz with her mouth full — shaking her head with a hum, it took her a moment to finish chewing and swallowing. "No, er, it was definitely talking to me. I think it was kind of relieved that someone's actually trying to help, honestly."
"...Yes, I got the same impression. It seems the local phoenix has been trying to call attention to the issue for some time, with little success."
"Mhm." Liz was about to ask if Sarah knew him, if he'd been around all the way back then, before realising she already knew the answer to that question — Fawkes had turned up around the time Ignatius Gaunt was overthrown which, if she understood correctly, was well after Sarah's time. "So... Do you know where there might be a copy of the ward scheme? I mean, if we can give that to the staff and tell Babbling whatever you might know about how the wards work, that'll definitely help."
"I'm afraid there isn't one," Sarah said, with a sharp little shake of her head. "The existence of a second copy would have presented a serious security flaw. My old notes may still be out there somewhere, but those would require some assistance for a modern scholar to interpret. And I am skeptical of whether they still exist regardless — the old library at Caegelyn was lost some centuries ago. Or, the documents in question may have been claimed by Uí Fhlaihearta at some point, but if so they would be very difficult to get our hands on."
Her old notes? She had notes on the wards? What did she mean by that, exactly? "Um. Okay. So you can't help, then."
"I didn't say that. Finish your lunch."
...Okay, then.
Sarah didn't answer any of Liz's questions about what exactly she had in mind, which was a little frustrating, but she guessed she'd be figuring out soon, anyway. By this point, Liz was getting a very odd feeling about Sarah — partly just because of some suspicious things she'd said, but also she thought it might be a Seer thing? It was hard to explain exactly, just... Like a sense of anticipation, like when Liz knew she had a duel or an exam or something coming up soon, but not exactly, a sense of interestingness, her eyes unconsciously drawn back up to Sarah again and again...
There was something about her, but Liz couldn't put her finger on what. (And she didn't think it was just because she was a thousand-year-old metamorph mind mage.) But whatever Sarah had planned, Liz had a feeling it was going to be interesting, so she was kind of excited to, just, get to it already.
Which meant she probably ended up inhaling the rest of her lunch rather quicker than was entirely polite, but oh well.
They both finished their lunch after a little while — Liz feeling slightly nauseous now, that was maybe a little too much food for one sitting — Sarah conjured cups to pour their glasses of cider into, and then conjured a cork straight into the bottle. That was a neat trick — the size and shape would need to be very precise, and it'd have to come into existence slightly compressed to properly hold the seal, the visualisation and control necessary to pull that off was kind of absurd. But, well, thousand-year-old metamorph. (She hadn't even bothered drawing her wand for either, fucking ridiculous.) Sarah flagged down a server, and paid for the both of them — Liz would have been fine with covering her half, but she didn't slow down for long enough to even try — and then they were walking out the door.
Following Sarah out onto the street, Liz tried very hard not to stare at Sarah's legs — and she failed kind of badly, honestly. She couldn't help it, that skirt was pretty short — by magical standards, anyway, it wouldn't be too unusual for a muggle walking around London or something — and Liz always did awful at not being a creep when she was on something. "Um. So, where are we going?"
"This way." That wasn't really an answer, but okay...
Sarah led them through the village, back to the main street, turning in the direction toward the train station. They actually went all the way out of the village, Sarah turning left in front of the station onto the road leading up to Hogwarts. They didn't walk all the way up, though: they were only maybe halfway to the gates when Sarah stopped, waited for a carriage to rattle by before turning left, leaving the road to follow a dirt track leading through the trees. Liz knew this path, it was the same direction the incoming first-years took instead of getting on the carriages — after switchbacking through the trees a couple times, this path ended on the shore of the lake, across from the Castle.
...There wasn't anything down here, as far as Liz knew. But maybe there was a secret passage across the wardline or something?
They got to the shore eventually, a wide, flat cleared spot, trees and bushes kept back to use as a landing site. The place was empty now, though — as far as Liz knew, it was only ever used for the first-years' boat trip up to the Castle. Though, glancing around at the curve of the shore, the Castle atop the cliffs on the opposite side of the water, the shape of the hills around, Liz was pretty sure this was where the village used to be, back when the wards had been raised. Maybe a little further up that way, in that patch of trees right there, but around here anyway. She didn't know why it'd been relocated further away from the shore at some point between now and then — Hogsmeade had been destroyed and rebuilt multiple times, presumably it'd been moved on one of those occasions — but she guessed it didn't really matter.
Sarah stepped up to the shore, and drew her wand. For a moment she simply stood there, breathing, an intense, razor-edge focus coming over her mind. Then there was a sharp, hot, loud burst of magic — the ground under Liz's feet again seeming to tilt under her feet, the world around Sarah drawn in by her sheer magical weight — a smooth swirl of her wand, and Sarah conjured a fucking sailboat. Not big by boat standards, a long narrow thing with one square sail attached to the post and a second triangular one angling down to attach at the front point, maybe only fifteen metres long and the post maybe five metres high. But, not big by sailboat standards was still a fucking huge amount of mass to conjure all at once, what the fuck?!
While Liz was, just, gaping up at the fucking conjured boat, Sarah hopped up into it — rising much smoother and easier than she should be able to, her cup and bottle of cider lazily floating up alongside. She turned back around, extending a hand down in Liz's direction. "Come on."
As dazed as Liz was by this woman doing something as fucking impossible as conjuring an entire fucking sailboat in one go, she wasn't so out of it that she couldn't put together what was happening. "We're going down to the wardstones."
"Yes. You needn't come along, but Mercy Anne gave me the impression you wished to be involved. Besides, the Castle did ask you for help — you should at least see with your own eyes that that it is being provided."
...She wasn't wrong about that, Liz guessed. And it'd be really cool to see the chambre in real life, so. Sarah didn't so much pull Liz up by the hand as levitate her up, a wave of tingly magic washing over Liz's skin suddenly making her feel completely weightless, Sarah gently tugging at her hand to direct her up and down onto the floorboards of the little boat, her weight suddenly dropping back with a lurch. "Woah," Liz breathed. She shook her head, the moment of weightlessness leaving her feeling a little dizzy — though the motion didn't really help, her vision swirling and her head spinning for a moment. Right, drugs, almost forgot. "Is that what flying feels like? Not on a broom, I mean unassisted flight."
"More or less. Where did you even hear of it? I understand that's extremely rare magic these days." Implying it hadn't been at some point in the past, but Liz guessed that was possible? Witchcraft used to me more common, once upon a time.
She shrugged. "Mercy Anne can do it — she sent me a memory of the ritual almost two years ago now."
Whatever Sarah thought about that, she didn't react any more than to nod and let out a little ah. She walked away from Liz, her cup and the bottle of cider still bobbing after her, came to a stop next to the post, one hand resting on the wood. Her other hand reaching back, Liz tensed at a wave of magic sweeping toward her...past her, whatever spell that was not aimed at her. She jumped as the floor tilted under her feet, the boat lurching forward — the back end was run up on the ground, Sarah must be getting them out into the water. Jerking into motion, Liz stepped over to one of the benches lining the inside wall on either side of the floor, plopping down to a seat. Roughly and quickly enough that a little bit of her cider slopped over the top of her cup, she started licking at the stuff splashed over her skin without thinking about it. Oh well, it's not like Sarah was even paying any attention to Liz being embarrassing...
Sarah definitely knew how to sail a bloody boat. Liz guessed that shouldn't be a surprise, since she had managed to conjure one (which was still absurd), complete with all the moving parts and the ropes attached here and there all over the place along the sails. She didn't move at all, standing next to the post — casually sipping at her cider, her other hand now and then pointing at this thing or that thing, little flicks of her fingers, things moving around over their heads at her direction. Liz didn't know what any of that shite did, but it was clearly doing something, as the boat pretty quickly picked up speed, skimming over the surface of the lake. They were moving faster than they probably should, considering it wasn't an especially windy day, but there were probably ways to use magic to cheat at sailing, so.
Unexpectedly, startling Liz a little, magic pressed against her, cool and soft and tingly, swept over her in a dizzying wave. Her head spinning, her vision went out of focus, like seeing double, two images laid over each other — there was the boat, Sarah standing next to the post sipping at her cider; and she also saw a different boat, people pulling at oars, standing toward the front a tall slender man with long curly black hair, the way ahead illuminated by a ball of deep red fire held in his hand. Liz blinked, and the cool tingly magic dribbled away, her vision returning to normal.
...What the fuck was that?
The Lake wasn't that large, and Sarah had them going at a pretty good clip — it wasn't very long before they were passing through the wardline, about halfway across the water. Liz was keyed in, so there was no resistance at all, the magical barrier like walking through a slightly tingly, silky curtain, parting easily to let her through. But a couple seconds after there was an odd deep thrum, echoing out through the environment around them — Liz thought she might have even seen ripples radiate out across the water — as the magic around them abruptly crystallised, the air turning heavy and hard. Liz felt the presence on the air, like a mind but not quite, absolutely enormous, glittery threads of thought as hard and shining as polished steel (though jittering and sizzling at the edge of hearing, like colourful static) stretching out and out and out far beyond her range, alien notes of feeling ringing off of the network of thought and memory — not organised like a familiar mind, growing like the branches of a tree, or sparks thrown from a spreading fire — even more foreign than elf or goblin minds, vague yet overwhelming, inscrutable in both its character and its sheer scale...
The Castle was focussing on them. Not Liz, she couldn't feel its attention on her, but on Sarah.
Its attention had landed much harder on Sarah than it ever had on Liz. Or, maybe that magical echo had happened every time it'd focussed on her, and the contact had just been too overwhelming for her to notice...
Or perhaps that thrum was a result of the Castle failing to penetrate Sarah's mind — as it approached, Sarah tensed, head tilting up to the side, and the alien, overwhelmingly powerful, absolutely enormous mind just glanced off. Jesus Christ...
Anyway, Sarah didn't keep herself closed off, once the initial impact had passed her hold on herself loosened. The combination of the presence of the thousand-year-old wards and the thousand-year-old metamorph was intense, making Liz a little dizzy, gripping at the bench with both hands even though she realised the way the boat seemed to tilt under her was just her imagination. The two of them were communicating, Liz couldn't tell what about from here, curiosity and amazement and fascination pulsing off of Sarah, the wards simmering with an electric feeling she read as excitement? maybe? The wards were so bloody weird, it was hard to say.
Liz tentatively reached out to the presence on the air — not in Sarah's direction, but the wards were more than large enough to make contact nowhere near where they were talking — basically just saying hello. Hard-smooth-cool silvery tendrils of alien thought suddenly surged through her, an odd ecstatic thrum racing over her head to toe, her hair almost standing on end (excitement). A feeling of soft warmth pressing in, another of the Castle's funny mental hugs (gratitude), its presence brushing everything else aside, the boat and the Lake around her seeming to drop away, overwhelming...
But only for a moment, the Castle's strange inorganic mind retreating again. It didn't pull away entirely, Liz could tell it was still watching — little silvery threads lingering in the air, brushing over and around Sarah, jittering with colourful static and electric anticipation — but its attention was being drawn elsewhere. Letting them get on with it, Liz guessed.
The instant before the silvery threads of thought left Liz's mind entirely, Sarah standing next to the post was replaced with a funny image, a featureless book and a gently glowing crystal flickering back and forth — as the wards left her mind, the image vanished. If she understood correctly, Sarah was the heir of the Founders the Castle had been trying to tell people about this whole time. So, Tamsyn had managed to find exactly the right person. Good job, she guessed?
Sarah had mostly isolated her mind again in the aftermath, but she wasn't closed off completely, disbelief and confusion and cold, harsh anger radiating from her. Turning to look at Liz over her shoulder, she hissed, "Physical materials?"
"Er..." Liz blinked, shaking her head — which just made the world spin around her for a second, because she was still high, of course, forgot again. Communicating with the wards was overwhelming, okay, she had no idea how Sarah could think straight so soon afterward. "What do you mean?"
"They've been doing repairs and making additions with physical materials? true stone and iron shipped in from the outside?"
"...Well, yeah. How else are you supposed to build things?"
Sarah scowled. "The structure of the Castle is projected by the wards themselves, through a variation of enchantment-mediated anchored conjuration. The wards cannot tolerate outside materials that haven't been properly integrated."
...
Wait.
Was she saying the Castle was conjured? What the fuck? "How does that even work? Wouldn't you just break things when—" No wait, Sarah said anchored conjuration — the form of a conjuration and the energy needed to sustain it could be provided by an enchantment, which would also stop the conjuration from being disrupted, since it was being continually reinforced. Or a ward in this case? She'd heard of people doing that with enchantments, but not with wards, that was a new one on her...though theoretically the same concept, she guessed. Of course, they couldn't just describe the entire structure of the Castle in the ward scheme, too complicated, but if people keyed into the wards could provide the image for them, then...
...then, people could just imagine what they wanted the Castle to look like, and the wards could create it for them. Didn't have to worry about powering it either, in such a highly-magical location as Hogsmeade Valley, the wards had all the power they would ever need — the sky was (literally) the limit, you could do whatever you wanted. Theoretically, if Liz understood correctly.
"Oh, that is so fucking cool! How the hell did Slytherin and Ravenclaw do that? It was over a thousand years ago now, and I've never heard of anything like it!"
Sarah's lips twitched, a little pulse of reluctant amusement. "It is quite an achievement, isn't it. I'm certain another wardcrafter could design a similar scheme, but mediated conjuration this complex requires a consciousness of some kind to direct it. The only feasible means of creating such a consciousness is human sacrifice — even in our time, such methods were already...going out of fashion."
"...Right." Liz guessed that made sense, there were all kinds of effects of old ritual warding that they couldn't reproduce in the modern day — not because they didn't know how, but because the methods required to do it simply weren't considered acceptable any longer. Sounded like the wards of Hogwarts were just another example. "But yeah, um, nobody knows the wards do that? I think that must have been lost when Gaunt took the Castle." She remembered, the wards trying to explain it to her, the book representing the ward scheme passing from one person to the next, until it slipped through someone's fingers and was lost, the painful pins and needles starting up from that point, flashes of random bits of the Castle and repair work being done that suddenly made a lot more sense now...
"I suppose it may have," Sarah admitted, turning back to face forward with a sigh. "That will require hundreds of hours of labour to repair, perhaps thousands. And that is without considering whatever inadvisable alterations may have been made to the script itself."
There had been glimpses of that too, people disappearing into the wardstone chambre, only making the situation worse each time. "Yeah... Are you going to be able to tell the staff here what to do?"
"I can teach a few how to integrate outside materials into the wards. I will need to see the alterations to the script before I can decide whether that will be manageable by anyone other than myself."
"Right." Fair enough. Liz kind of wanted to ask why Sarah was the only person who could possibly deal with that, how she knew so much about the wards, but she wasn't certain she'd get a straight answer.
By this point, they were coming up on the opposite shore, the cliffs and the Castle perched atop them looming up over their heads. The boat slowed down a little, and with a sweep of Sarah's hand the post and the sails and all the ropes and things just vanished in a blink. Even without them, they kept coasting gently along, the boat slipping right into the cave. Moving up to the front tip of the boat, looking for rocks ahead, Sarah raised one hand, vivid red fire blossoming to life between her fingers, illuminating the way...
Unexpectedly, Liz felt magic whirl around her, and then press in on her mind, cool and tingly — going slightly numb, a wave of dizziness, seeing double. Again, she could see Sarah at the front of the boat, but a second image was overlaid, the same tall slender black-haired figure from before, standing in a very similar pose, looking off the front of the boat in the light cast by a handful of fire. It only lasted for a couple seconds, and then the image faded, the ambient environment around her returning to normal.
...There was something very familiar about that man, Liz was certain she'd seen him before.
Or, perhaps, Seen him before.
Was this a Sight thing? It certainly felt like it — though, most of the time she just knew things, getting actual visions was a new one on her. When she wasn't scrying on purpose, anyway...or high, come to think of it? There was that time at that party at the duelling thing in Lithuania, when she kept seeing Seeing things...
She guessed it wasn't so weird that she might be getting glimpses of the day the wards had been raised, in context. She'd been there before with dream-walking, so there might be an echo of that on her, and she was pretty much in the same physical location that the flashes she was getting had happened, over a thousand years ago. It was weird how they seemed to be focussed on that one black-haired man and on Sarah, though, didn't know what was up with that.
Though it was giving her a funny feeling, eyes continually drawn back to the woman in front of her, a thrill running along her spine, her breath tight with anticipation...
They reached the shore at the back of the cave before too long, the boat gently grinding up onto the rocky sand, lurching to a halt. Sarah floated down to the ground, her cup and bottle of cider still bobbing after her — this time she transfigured the front of the boat down into a ramp for Liz, which was convenient. Once Liz was off the boat, Sarah dismissed the oversized conjuration with a flick of her fingers, the boat vanishing like it'd never existed at all, a hissing and lapping of water as it rushed to fill the suddenly empty space. Sarah glanced at Liz quick before turning to walk deeper into the cave, the grimy, damp stone glistening in the light thrown by the fire still gently crackling in her hand, throwing wild flickering shadows.
They walked past the stairs leading up to the Castle on the right, following the shore...but there wasn't anything over here. The cave wasn't particularly large, she could see the whole thing — the wall ahead, bare stone coloured with patches of moss and lichen, continued on for a short while before curving back around to meet the shore, the gritty sand of the beach ending where stone met water. Liz knew the original passage down to the wardstones must be over here somewhere, but she had no idea where, she couldn't see anything out of the ordinary.
While she was still looking around for the entrance, the flickering red light vanished, the cave abruptly plunged into shadow, only dimly light by reflected sunlight bounced in from the entrance over the Lake back that way. Liz couldn't even feel Sarah's mind anymore — one second she'd been walking only a few steps ahead of her, and the next she was, just, gone. "Um, Sarah? I can't see the entrance."
There was a short pause, and then Sarah reappeared, just a couple steps ahead to Liz's right. "Of course, I apologize. Your hand, please," she said, holding out the hand that wasn't still holding a ball of fire. Liz might ordinarily have hesitated — this was a complete stranger, and a thousand-year-old metamorph mind mage at that — but her drugs still hadn't worn off, so.
The instant Liz's skin touched Sarah's, the funny cool tingly magic struck again — she saw this same cave, recognisable, looking through the eyes of someone losing their footing on the sand, falling to a knee, the same black-haired figure from before giving them a hand up. Just a blink, and then the vision was gone, Liz left blinking down at her hand in Sarah's.
"Liz? Is something wrong?"
She twitched. "Ah, no, just... Seer moment."
"Of course." Sarah turned around, started slowly tugging Liz forward. She still couldn't see anything ahead, just a solid rock wall. She dug her heels in for a second, before forcing herself to relax — Sarah must know where she was going, and she had gotten through a second ago, just follow along. "Seers do tend to have an interesting time around me, as long and interesting of a life as I've led. This should only take a moment."
A rather disorienting moment, Sarah pulling her straight through solid stone. Like, the illusion didn't disappear, the stone was still there. Even as she was pulled into the wall, pressing in from all sides, hard, cold, heavy magic clenching in all around her, the stone immediately around her head entirely blinding her. Squeezing her eyes shut, gritting her teeth, she kept walking, letting Sarah lead her on...
Sarah meant, lots of shite had happened in her life, so it wasn't unusual for Seers to get echoes of things when they touched her — like how Liz would get an echo of the animal's suffering when eating meat, sort of, same idea. Except, that wasn't what was happening, she kept Seeing that black-haired man, it'd make a lot more sense if it was Sarah she—
...Wait a second.
"We're through, you may open your eyes now." They were in a narrow passage, surrounded with stone to all sides, maybe only three metres wide and two metres tall illuminated solely by the flame in Sarah's hand. It looked like a natural cave, still, the surface uneven and patched with lichen, the way ahead swiftly vanishing from sight as it curved to the right. Sarah waited for Liz to let go of her hand — she'd maybe been gripping on more tightly than necessary, the rock pressing in on her from all sides had been rather unsettling — before starting to walk again, leading the way ahead.
Metamorph. From what Severus had explained, they essentially had total control of their own fundamental identity — they could change their 'natural' form at will. They could look like whatever they wanted — so long as their body remained functional, anyway, they could kill themselves by transforming into a shape that couldn't sustain consciousness — it wasn't unheard of for metamorphs to even change sex. Liz had heard Dora joke about it, mostly in the context of very crude sexual comments...
Maybe the black-haired person she was seeing was Sarah, as she'd been a long, long time ago.
Except, the feeling Liz was getting was that those glimpses were mostly from the night the wards had been set — on a boat being rowed into the cave, you know, bringing people in for the ritual. Tamsyn had said Sarah had grown up at Hogwarts, like a relative of Ravenclaw's who shouldn't have been born until later. Either Sarah had lied to Tamsyn about who she was, or Liz was interpreting what she was Seeing wrong...
They walked silently down the passage for a minute, the walls to the left and right gradually closing in, the passage curling and gently rolling up and down, the firelight glinting over the damp stone and throwing flickering shadows. The whole time, Liz just felt weirder and weirder, like she was missing something important, that should be obvious, staring her right in the face. Watching Sarah ahead, frowning at her back — an occasional blink showing her the same black-haired man, walking along the same passage with the same ball of fire in his hand, magic around Liz tense and smooth and cool and tingly, silvery threads of alien thought brushing over Sarah, the wards still watching them...
Eventually, the passage ahead changed, abruptly transitioning into the familiar greyish stone used everywhere in Hogwarts, the hallway straight and with square corners a sharp contrast with the more natural features she'd seen so far. Sarah unexpectedly halted right before the switchover, her toes only a foot away from the flat stone floor. Liz waited behind her for a moment, before asking, "Is something wrong?"
Instead of answering, Sarah snapped her fingers, a ripple of glittery rainbow sparks crawling over the air. Glyphs slowly faded into existence, sketched all along the boundary, floor ceiling and both walls, glowing angry red and poisonous green.
"...What are those?"
"Trap," Sarah said, flat and unamused. "This didn't used to be here. They aren't integrated into the wards, either — I suspect they will trigger if we cross them."
"What's the point of that? Don't you already need to be high up in the wards to even see the entrance to get here?"
"I don't know, Liz." Sarah was silent another moment, staring at the ring of glyphs blocking the way forward. "Someone will be altered if we cross, or if we interfere with the functioning of the script in any way. Normally, I would not be overly concerned, as this ward is not lethal — and I suspect the Headmaster, at the very least, has already been alerted to my presence regardless — but the script is quite comprehensive. If we break through, I may accidentally trip it in the attempt."
"What would it do?"
"Force us into stasis and transport us to some other location. Only our bodies — any other object on our persons, including our clothing, will be left behind."
"...Oh. I would prefer to avoid that, please."
A little shiver of amusement reverberating from her mind, Sarah drawled, "Agreed." She stared at the script for another moment, before letting out a short sigh. "Very well. There is only one safe option." A crackle of magic in the air, the walls seemed to smear for a moment, lines blurring and colours running together, before resolving back into normality with a subaudible pop. The only difference Liz could see was that the glyphs were gone. "Someone out there certainly knows we are here now — we may have a time limit. Come along," she said, stepping onto the flat stone floor and continuing down the hall.
Liz hesitated, tentatively stepping onto the first stone, where the glyphs had been before — she waited for a breath, but nothing happened. "What did you do?"
"I had the Castle replace that section of the hallway with fresh stone — its anchors having vanished, the trap dissolved immediately. Whoever it is tied to will have felt the enchantment fail."
...So apparently you could just have the Castle conjure new bits of itself, fuck, that was so cool. She had so many questions, but this didn't really seem like the time, so she just followed along.
Some silent walking later — the hallway around them totally straight, featureless grey stone, silent save for their footsteps and their breath — Liz noticed that the fire in Sarah's hand wasn't the only source of light anymore. It was hard to tell at first, Sarah was taller than her and blocked most of the view, but leaning her head to the side, the tunnel didn't disappear into blackness ahead anymore, she could make out a silvery-white glow. It grew brighter as they walked, forming a square at the end of the hallway, the light bouncing off the walls down toward them, the last several metres glowing in the darkness, the room beyond washed in gentle, steady light. As they neared, Sarah let the fire go out, plunging them into shadows — but not for long, the hallway brightening with each step, silvery light cool and soft, almost like a Patronus but without the sting of light magic...
Near the end of the hallway, only a few metres away now, Sarah slowed. "Isolation spells here, the environment is very dense past them." She looked to the left-side wall for a moment, frowning, before shaking her head and continuing on.
The barrier of the isolation spells prickled over her skin in a wave, almost stung, once she was through Liz hitched to a stop, her breath freezing in her throat — fuck, Sarah had not been kidding about the ambient magic being thick in here. Not unpleasant, smooth and soft and cool and colourful, Liz could almost make out countless rainbow sparks dancing in the air, it was kind of making her skin tingle, in a pleasant sort of way. It didn't hurt, just, it was a lot, a little hard to breathe, thick in her throat like sage and copper and lavender...
After a few seconds gathering herself, she managed to force herself back into motion, the first few steps stiff and unsteady. Soon she was stepping into the wardstone chamber, every surface brightly shrouded in a constant silvery glow.
The Founders had clearly converted a natural cave of some kind to house the wardstones — they hadn't created the chambre, but they had opened it up some, natural stone carved back into a vague squashed ball shape. The chamber was, maybe, about ten metres wide — not the same width at every point, she didn't think, some of the natural unevenness of the walls still there — and about four metres tall at the centre. The ceiling curved down gradually from the highest point at the middle, before arcing in sharper to make not-quite-perfectly flat walls, before doubling back to gently curve down toward the short circular platform in the middle. As smooth and curvy and uneven as the chamber was, the perfectly square frame of the hallway they'd come in by (and a second door she could see about a third of the way around to the right), almost looked out of place, sharp and inappropriately inorganic.
Every single inch of available surface was covered in glyphs, floor and walls and ceiling. Babylonian, Egyptian, strings of Greek lettering, even some that were totally unfamiliar to Liz, placed in groups or seemingly at random, some inscribed within geometric designs, circles and stars and trefoils. The runes and the designs were so thoroughly saturated with magic that they visibly glowed, blue and green and red and silver and violet and black — not that Liz could quite express how something could glow black — tinting the stone in a complex patchwork of colour.
The source of the light was the dominating feature of the room, emanating from the precise centre, floating halfway between the circular platform below and the ceiling above. The soft silvery glow was surprisingly intense, seeming almost as bright as the sun — and yet it didn't hurt to look directly at it in the slightest, Liz could even still make out the source through the glare. An oversized diamond, so large it must have been made with alchemy, set with countless faces and covered in glyphs — the glyphs themselves glowing blue-violet, but still almost seemed like dark spots against the backdrop of the silver radiance from the gemstone itself — the interior of the diamond seemingly filled with countless sparks in all colours of the rainbow, jittering and dancing...
Much of it was familiar, from what she'd Seen spirit-walking a year ago...but not all of it. Blocks of stone and ceramic in different colours, black or white or brown, and in various sizes had been somehow fixed to the chambre surface, sketched with more glyphs of a visibly different design from the originals — additions, clearly. Those were almost subtle compared to the...seven, big blocks of stone that were suspended in the air around the central diamond, marking a ring about halfway out to the walls, fixed in place with heavy iron chains attached to the floor and ceiling, each of them covered in glowing glyphs. As she looked around, Liz noticed that not all of the glyphs were glowing, some entirely dark, some only flickering now and then, one of the suspended wardstones occasionally sizzled with lightning, snapping away along one of the chains to ground itself into floor or ceiling. She felt very certain it wasn't supposed to do that, something so terribly out of balance that the interference built up so intensely to release itself as physical electricity.
Liz wasn't an expert, but even she could tell something was wrong, immediately. She could feel it too, an occasional lurch or shiver in the weight of magic on the air, a hissing crackle at the edge of hearing...
While Liz paused at the entrance to look around, Sarah continued on, slowly descending the curve of the floor toward the platform at the bottom. She belatedly started following after, the floor of the chambre sizzling under her feet, warm to the touch even through her shoes. Sarah made a little circle around the platform, glancing up at the floating diamond, the suspended wardstones — impossible to guess what she was thinking or feeling, the thick soup of magic in the air completely blocking off her mind.
Nearing the platform, Liz spotted the knife set in the precise centre: a crude handle wrapped in some kind of cord for a better grip, the one-sided blade streaked with bright red blood, visibly wet, glimmering in the silvery light filling the room. Still sitting exactly where Rowena Ravenclaw had left it, over a thousand years ago.
Blinking, her attention was drawn over to Sarah, as she started floating up off the ground. Not exactly surprised that Sarah could fly, she had seemed familiar with it at lunch, just not something you saw every day — gently lifting off the ground unsupported, blonde curls starting to drift up in a cloud behind her head (kept away from her face with the patterned kerchief tied over her brow), as though underwater. She floated up next to the intensely glowing diamond — the heart of the wards, some kind of reservoir they'd used to collect the souls of those five people they'd sacrificed — and started extending a hand toward it.
She wasn't going to touch it, was she? That...seemed like a bad idea...
Despite just out and touching powerful magical objects generally being unwise, Sarah hardly hesitated — the instant her skin touched the surface, there was a deep thrum in the soup of magic around Liz, Sarah's hair extending out in a wave and her clothes ruffling. Hints of soulfire crackled around her, magic bleeding off of her aura so intense Liz could see it, purple and green and silver. Her eyes drifted closed, Sarah was grinning, her teeth shining in the light of the wards.
For a blink, Liz saw something else: that same black-haired man, sitting cross-legged on the platform, the diamond held in one hand, bursting into eye-watering radiance, the man snatching his hand away as though burned, the diamond beginning to float unsupported—
Wait.
Liz had Seen him before. She recognised him now. But that was– she couldn't—
That was fucking impossible.
After a few seconds, Sarah lifted her hand away from the diamond, the colours dancing in her aura going quiet again. She drifted back down to the floor, still smiling, her greenish-blueish eyes dancing — looking oddly gleeful, the expression much brighter than anything Liz had seen from her so far, clearly thrilled by...whatever had just happened up there. Liz watched her, her eyes wide, disbelieving. But she felt it, with the same inexplicable certainty that a lot of her Seer shite came with, but that was fucking impossible, she didn't know how to...
She couldn't be. Liz had to be mistaken.
Touching down again a short distance away from her, almost in reach, grinning from ear to ear, Sarah said, "They're alive. Of course, I realized that already, but to feel the..." She trailed off, as though unable to find the words. She looked back up over her shoulder at the diamond, slowly shaking her head to herself. "Marvellous, simply... I never expected anything like this, not in a thousand years — literally, I suppose!" chuckling under her breath. "They're beautiful."
Liz hardly even heard what she was saying, the words brushing over her meaninglessly. Her throat dry, her tongue stiff, it took her a long moment to find her voice. "Slytherin." Sarah looked back at Liz, the amazed grin on her face dimming somewhat, one questioning eyebrow arching upward. "I mean, Silvahárr of Syltheris — that was your real name, right?"
Her head tilting to the side a few degrees, eyes narrowed just a tick, Sarah stared back at her for a couple seconds. Then she said, "I haven't gone by that name in a very long time."
...What the fuck.
No seriously, what the fuck.
"Are you fucking with me right now?"
Sarah's smile widened again, silvery light glinting off of her teeth, tilting a little toward a smirk. "You're the Seer — you tell me."
...She wasn't fucking with her. But that was impossible.
In the stories of the Founders— The older ones, not the version with Slytherin and Gryffindor fighting over admitting muggleborns resulting in Slytherin being kicked out, with a promise of some monster he left behind 'cleansing' the school, which had originated with Gaunt's time in control of Hogwarts — in the old stories, epic poems and such, Slytherin was a metamorph. It didn't come up a lot, his warding skills and diplomatic achievements were normally considered more important, but it was still mentioned. There was a very old comedic poem Daphne knew where Godric (as in Gryffindor), who prided himself as a great transfiguration master, kept getting frustrated with Silvahárr (as in Slytherin) casually pulling off crazy shite, because transfiguration was just easy for metamorphs in a way it wasn't for anyone else, intuitive, which was just cheating—
(Crazy shite like, say, conjuring a whole fucking sailboat in one go.)
Neither version of the Founders' story says anything about when or how Slytherin died. In the Slytherin-was-a-racist-bastard version, Gryffindor kicked him out of the school, and he was never heard from again. In the Slytherin-was-a-metamorph version, he stuck around until all three of the other Founders (and his wife) had died, and then just walked out of the Castle one day, and was never heard from again. That wasn't unusual for metamorphs, they would get tired of being the same person eventually, watching their loved ones die of old age, would abandon their life to go be someone else...
So it wasn't impossible, actually. If the Slytherin-was-a-metamorph version was true — which did seem the more likely of the two, what with all the old poetry around it they had, and the whole thing with Ignatius Gaunt — then he might still be alive out there, somewhere. Metamorphs didn't have a natural lifespan, after all, they simply didn't die of old age. Most of them didn't live any longer than normal people, of course, since they could still die from violence or accidents or whatever, but the ones who did...
But that was ridiculous! What were the chances of Tamsyn, just, stumbling across actually Salazar Slytherin?!
...
When she thought about it? Maybe pretty high, actually. Tamsyn had been specifically looking for people with knowledge of the warding common in the right time and place, who might know anything about the Hogwarts wards, and Sarah was from here, and was even a bloody Runes professor — an expert in enchanting and warding, just as Slytherin had been...
There couldn't be that many people who fit the bill, it wasn't as much of a coincidence as it seemed. The conditions Tamsyn had set on someone who could help would perfectly apply to Slytherin himself, if he were still out there.
Which, apparently, he was.
Liz had absolutely no fucking idea what she was supposed to do with this.
While she just stared at 'Sarah' in a daze, trying to process the fucking bombshell that had just been dropped on her head, 'Sarah' turned away to the right. Liz thought she'd been waiting for some response, but when she just kept staring at her, well. Again, 'Sarah' started floating up off the ground, drifting toward the suspended wardstone that kept snapping off bolts of lightning. Getting too close to that seemed like a bad idea — but 'Sarah' drew a few glowing glyphs in the air with a finger, and the static suddenly ceased, the floating glyphs throbbing, occasionally flaring brighter, seemingly capturing the interference somehow. 'Sarah' came right up to the wardstone, turning to lean her face close over the surface, and started slowly orbiting around it, scanning over the script carved into it...
The way she was tilted partly sideways gave Liz a pretty good angle up her skirt, when she came back around this way. She tried not to look, and completely failed — it seemed like 'Sarah', who apparently happened to be Salazar fucking Slytherin, was wearing lacey red knickers.
"Why are you girl?"
'Sarah' turned to look over Liz's way, one eyebrow curling up — feeling the warmth on her face, Liz shrugged helplessly, trying not to cringe. She hadn't meant to say that, it'd just...come out. Turning back to whatever she was doing over there, she said, casually, "I was born one."
Casually, because that was a fucking wild thing to say. "...Seriously?"
"Secretly, yes. I was given a sex-change potion when I was an infant — I understand my father, operating on an incomplete understanding of metamorphy, believed I would have better prospects were it to be believed I was born a boy. And he was likely correct, to be fair. Even back then, women were treated more equitably among mages than we were among muggles, but it was still hardly ideal. Of course, he may also have done so to ensure male heirs to continue the family line — my mother died not long after my birth — but that part didn't work out, naturally. We did not understand how sex selection works back then — the potion merely reshapes the body, but does not alter one's genes."
...Some of the Norse poems did joke about all of Slytherin's children being girls, and also being kind of, you know, less than entirely masculine. Liz guessed this would explain that.
"Ah, here we are." 'Sarah' sketched a few more glowing glyphs in the air, and then made a harsh chopping motion with one hand — a big chunk of the suspended wardstone, as much as a fifth, just vanished in a blink. The floating glyphs she'd cast flared, the glyphs carved into the runestone winked out as the script failed, the intense magic pressing in around Liz shuddered for a moment before calming again. 'Sarah' waited for a few breaths, before dispelling all the glyphs she'd cast, and then she vanished the suspended wardstone (complete with chains) with a negligent wave of her hand.
The magic in the chambre felt significantly calmer now. It wasn't completely fixed, obviously, still hissing with static at the edge of hearing, but the harshest notes had been silenced — and of course that thing wasn't sparking off every few seconds. 'Sarah' must have killed some functional elements too — some of the glyphs carved into that thing had been glowing — but whatever it was she must have decided it wasn't important enough to keep.
And she would know, Liz guessed — she'd designed the wards in the first place.
This was so fucking insane, it was hard to believe, just, she had no idea what to say, just stupidly staring at the woman, and...
Her feet gently touching down on the floor again, 'Sarah' turned back to Liz. "That will help, a little, though of course the work is far from finished. Repairing the damage that has been done to the Castle will take years, I expect — thousands of hours of labor, perhaps tens of thousands. Neglect over the course of seven hundred years or more cannot be so easily reversed."
"...Yeah, I guess."
"I do mean to see through the project, though it may take some time to begin in earnest. I can't sneak in from across the Atlantic every day. I may need to find some means to join the staff for the following term...though that will be difficult. I'm afraid Sarah Selwyn is currently considered a war criminal by the I.C.W., for my involvement in efforts to resist the imposition of Secrecy on the Americans — last I've heard, there is still a warrant out for my arrest, and Britain is hardly friendly to anti-Statutarians."
Somehow, Liz couldn't say she was surprised that Salazar bloody Slytherin was wanted by the ICW for war crimes...though she wouldn't have expected it to be over anti-Statutarian activities. And honestly, with what she knew about the war in the Americas, the charges were probably horseshite anyway. Also, kind of absurd that a warrant for her arrest was still out after hundreds of years, but she guessed she was a metamorph... "I'm guessing you could just...be someone else again. Not Slytherin, that wouldn't go over well these days."
'Sarah' rolled her eyes — that still seemed kind of odd, considering she was a thousand-year-old metamorph mind mage and, apparently, literally Salazar Slytherin. "I'm aware. I have no idea where that asinine story came from — Hroðwyn and Godric were both muggleborns, nobody gave a damn about that back then. This concept of purity of blood did not even exist yet..."
"Ignatius Gaunt, probably."
She scowled. "Naturally. Pray the gods may have mercy on you, Liz, that your great-grandchildren will be less infuriating than mine."
Liz didn't plan on having children at all, so that wasn't a problem she'd have to deal with.
"As I was saying," 'Sarah' said, looking away again. She began to idly pace around the central platform, eyes wandering over the glyphs, occasionally glancing up at the shining diamond. "Now that I am aware of the severity of the situation — and that the Castle is aware, and suffering — I will repair what was done to this place. It will take time, years, but time is one thing I have in abundance." Gazing up at the diamond with a funny look on her face, 'Sarah' muttered, "And I do try not to abandon my children, when I can help it."
...Okay, then. No idea what to do with that, just, keep standing here staring like an idiot...
"The Castle begged you to find them help. Now that I am here, you may consider the deed that was asked of you completed — thank you, Liz, from the both of us."
"Sure," Liz mumbled, out of a lack of any better idea of what the fuck to say. She was sure she'd feel kind of relieved about that later — the wards did seem to be in pain and kind of miserable, and also living here probably wasn't very safe with them this out of balance? — but she, just, couldn't really summon the feeling right now. "I just... Yeah, um... You're really Slytherin? I'm sorry, that's just...a lot."
'Sarah' shot her a look, seeming faintly amused. "Yes, Liz, I really was — a very long time ago, multiple full lifetimes. I have forgotten much of that life, honestly. Memory fades, with time, even for metamorphs. I've taken to preserving a library of copied memories, so I may revisit what once was, but I did not start that practice until centuries later. You recall the raising of these wards more clearly than I do — if you have questions about that time, you may be better served by investigating on your own."
...Oh.
"But we have run out of time. The wards inform me someone is approaching the chambre...Bathsheda Babbling."
"Right." They probably shouldn't be caught in the ward chambre — Liz guessed that would take some pretty serious explaining. "Oh! Um... Babbling is the Runes Professor, she's, er... I don't know if you remember, in the stuff the wards showed me, she was one of the people who was trying to get the Headmaster to find someone to...to find you, I guess. And she's a Mistwalker, and a bit, you know."
Frowning a little, curious, 'Sarah' said, "You are suggesting I should bring her into the restoration project."
"Yeah, I think she'll help." That was just her thought, not a Seer thing, but she was pretty confident of it anyway. "Um...it'd probably be safe to tell her who you are too, but, I guess that's up to you. She didn't actually go to Hogwarts as a student, and Mistwalkers can be...different, from most British mages. So."
"I see," she said, nodding. "I may just do that. It would be convenient to have an ally on the staff — thank you again, Liz. Unless there is any other urgent matter you wish to bring to my attention, it is about time to send you on your way."
"No, I... Um..." She shrugged. "Good luck? With, you know, getting a job and all, and with this shite..." waving vaguely around the ward chambre
'Sarah' smiled, shaking her head to herself. "And may the gods smile over you too, Lady Elizabeth. Farewell."
Before Liz could even think to respond to that — probably just by pointing out again that she didn't need to call her Lady Elizabeth — hard cold silvery tendrils of magic abruptly sprung out of nowhere and wrapped around her, there was a firm tug, feeling almost like a portkey, and Liz was plucked off of her feet and dragged away, the ward chambre disappearing in a swirl of rainbow colour, her stomach jumping up her throat and—
—her feet thumped against solid ground, her bag still swinging from the momentum of whatever magic that was yanking her off balance. Liz let out a little yelp, scrambling to try to get her feet back under her, but then she was tripped by something bumping into the backs of her legs, and she fell backward onto...
...a bed? "Luceat." The lights sprung on, tinted somewhat reddish-orangish, soft and pleasant, Liz pushed herself up to a seat. She was in her dorm room, somehow.
What the fuck was that? It'd felt almost like a portkey, but, she didn't think that was it, exactly...
For a moment, Liz just stared blankly at the walls of her room, her head a confusing mess of conflicting thoughts, trying to process...
Nobody would believe her.
She'd just met Salazar Slytherin, and nobody would believe her.
Letting out a sigh, Liz shrugged out from under her bag's shoulder strap, pushed herself up to her feet. She should copy the memory of today quick, to make sure she didn't forget — and also to show to Nilanse and Hermione later, of course...and Tamsyn too, why not. (They would believe her, at least, but it wasn't safe to show a memory of the inside of the ward chambre to just anyone.) After that, she didn't know. She did have some schoolwork she could get to, but she didn't know if she'd be able to concentrate on it very well at the moment. There was a study group meeting later, she could have Nilanse pop her back home and make some snacks quick, if she couldn't figure out anything better to do with her time...
Liz hitched to a stop, a few steps away from her desk. There was a large glass bottle sitting on her desk, half-full, plugged closed with a cork...
'Sarah' had sent along the leftover cider.
Feeling inexplicably giddy, Liz burst into giggles — she didn't know why, that was just weirdly funny to her. This was the strangest fucking day she'd had, that was all...
So, that happened.
And we're down to 10 scenes remaining in fourth year. I'll be jumping back to First Contact for a couple chapters, see you then.