Riddle's actions, whether he knew it or not, had dire consequences that threatened everything he was working towards. His monumental, never-seen-before resurrection that would spark hope in the minds of his followers and pump fear into the hearts of his enemies was on the brink of failure.

Cracks began to appear in the foundation of his work, weakening his plays like an earthquake of extreme magnitude, but he couldn't see them. He was too smart for his own good, he couldn't keep up with the lies that he told himself and the girl. Meddling with forces he knew nothing about was about to bite him in the arse and he didn't even know it yet, but how could he? The forces at work were supposed to be incomprehensible to all, that was their purpose in this universe, and this fragment of Riddle's soul knew nothing of the hard work he put in to subdue and control the dark magic he sorely wanted. He was about to ruin it all, he was in too deep.

Riddle was ignorant to the mess that his former self left behind, and that was the saving grace that the universe needed to send out an SOS, to send a signal into the night for someone to help them. The unstoppable magic that was omnipresent was also omnipotent, they could have put an end to the threat of evil but they knew not to interfere with the way things were.

The last time they came too close to the fires of human nature they were scalded and spooked, their own actions had dire consequences that they were still dealing with. Their hubris was the reason this was all happening and they would retain that regret for eternity. Everyone was to suffer because of them. The girl… she was destined for this because of them.

They owed it to the girl to break their own rules and intervene. They promised to love her until the universe was no more, until the day the veins of the earth were drained of magic and the supernatural ceased to exist. Until the force that ruled over all imploded on impact and the balance…

The balance… that was what this was all for. They were tasked to protect her no matter the cost, but they surrendered their soul to her. She was the one in charge, they couldn't do anything unless she said so.

But that didn't mean they couldn't try. They tried before, centuries ago, so why couldn't they try again? For her?

Failure wasn't an option for them. They were, after all, inevitable.

PLEASE, MY LOVE, WAKE UP AND LISTEN…

Sir Nicholas stared out of the window in a mind-consuming daze, struggling to comprehend the view that greeted him like a slap across the face.

It wasn't real, it couldn't be. If he still possessed the ability to breathe then he knew he would have been winded, completely breathless by the horrifyingly beautiful shade of crimson that drenched every inch of the school grounds. It was impossible but the sky was no longer black, it was bleeding.

An eerie vermillion light replaced the white glow of the moon, but the moon had disappeared and yet it still bathed everything in sight with scarlet shadows and wound-like expressions. Unexplainable, prodigious red.

Trees and shrubs slowly began to melt like wax under an intense flame, animals hidden in the crumbling forest were howling in agony, the Black Lake was alive and sloshing about, sending waves of pink foam onto the shores. The world was dying, Nick was staring into the abyss of what the future held for the Wizarding world and he couldn't tear his gaze away. All signs of life were decaying and he knew he was partially responsible for all of it. Not completely at fault — absolutely not! — but he certainly played a part in this… This had something to do with the girl. Did he provoke her? Was chopping his head off a step too far?

They weren't happy.

"Sir Nicholas?"

Nicholas blinked and suddenly the red vision was gone. The starless sky was black again, the plant life stood tall and swayed in the light breeze like always, and the midnight air was quiet. No more blood-curdling bellows from the creatures in the woods, only the echoes of the whistling wind. Did he just steal a glimpse of the future? Had he imagined it? Surely not, the emotions the colour brought were as real as the disused classroom he was haunting. He felt fear, and pain, and death.

"Sir Nicholas?" the visitor repeated.

Nick didn't need to turn around to know who was asking for his attention. There weren't many spirits of fair Irish descent inhabiting the castle; he could recognise her dainty whispers in a crowded room full of rowdy living beings. Although she only said his name, he could tell she was displeased so he took his time admiring the flock of owls pecking at the frosty bug-infested awning beyond the window. Uncomfortable conversations weren't his forte, especially now of all times. If only he could rest.

"Nick?"

Helena was restless today too, she was never one to abandon formalities.

"Yes, my lady?" Nick responded lightly, drifting away from the view of the hungry owls to address the ghost of Ravenclaw who was dawdling by the classroom's entrance as though she was afraid of taking presence in the room itself rather than the imminent confrontation that was about to happen. She was a beautiful, mournful young lady with a waterfall of wavy hair that once was the richest colour of chestnut, a dimpled chin that wrinkled whenever she bit her lip, and almond eyes that were always slanted with sorrow or concern. Her fidgeting, illusory hands wrung over and over, her unease was hard to miss.

Had she seen what he saw a moment ago? Was it real? It was the dead of night, the headmaster wasn't awake at this time of the day so he couldn't confirm his delusions with someone who would likely know what was wrong with him, but even then he couldn't say anything.

His spontaneous beheading was a mystery to everyone, he couldn't confess to his crimes of tampering with the rules of normalcy because questions would be asked and he was too terrified to answer them. If everyone found out the truth, everything was over. They told him to stay silent and if he disobeyed them then he would vanish from this plane and be sentenced to an eternity of… well, who knows what. He didn't, and he didn't want to find out. It was selfish, Nick was embarrassed to admit that, but he told himself he was doing this to protect Black. If he went against the girl…

Nick held his suffering in as though stifling the urge to sneeze and tried not to think of them. Death was watching him, waiting for him to make a mistake, that was why he could feel their presence, was it not? It had to be.

"We need to talk," began Helena Ravenclaw, building a more confident rhythm despite her nervous tone, "our silence has gone on for far too long now, I know you feel it. Friar talks of an unspeakable chill that has intercepted the school and the baron feels it too. The other spirits that dwell here are concerned about… them… and I fear that if we do not band together and act then we are no better than the forces we do not speak of."

"It is not in our nature to meddle in the business of the all-knowing Ever Present, Lady Helena, you should know this by now," sighed Nick wearily, trying his best to avoid lingering on the specifics that Helena was steering him towards, but she was persistent enough to gloss over his inference. Nick was a snob, everyone knew that, but she wasn't going to stand for his blatant vanity any longer.

"The same could be said for you, Nearly Headless Nick, a redundant alias that has conveniently been dropped," she spat back, repulsed by his behaviour, "the others may not have realised how your party trick came into fruition but I know it's not from your sheer will, my good sir. We do not interfere with them, they promised to leave us alone."

"They are beyond our understanding," Nick corrected her, peeved by her perception of the events that transpired on his Death Day, "we are not supposed to comprehend how they work, we chose not to abide by the rules of their domain so we forfeited that privilege. I haven't the foggiest why you're implying that I somehow have anything to do with this?"

Helena did not continue for a moment. She drifted over to the cobwebbed windows behind Nick and took in the view of the Black Lake shimmering under the moon's white light. The living at Hogwarts were fast asleep and had been for hours, they expected the sun to rise and spoil the starry sky within the hour and Helena tried to enjoy the silence while she could. It gave her the peace she required to process her emotions, something she could rarely do with the hectic humdrum of school life going on around her.

"Yes you do," she whispered, her darting eyes landing on Nick as she tried not to bare her teeth, "what have you done, Nick? Please…" Helena was hurt that he didn't trust her, "you didn't… you wouldn't have…?"

"No, Helena," lied Nick, not yet brave enough to meet her gaze. He clasped his hands behind his back and stood tall, tense, and firm, "I have not. We all swore to each other that we would never approach her, when she arrived here at Hogwarts we all agreed that we would never speak of this again. The living are not supposed to know and I solemnly promise you that I have never gone against our word—,"

"Yes you have!" Helena spat, flaring up at his gumption, "I cannot believe you are lying to my face, Nicholas!"

Nick should have known this reaction was coming, Helena was the most logical one out of the collective that resided here at Hogwarts. The other ghosts may have been smart enough to stay silent about the Ever Present who stalked the corridors in the shadows of the second year Gryffindor student, but Helena was intelligent enough to know when to speak up. "You've done something and they're angry! The girl didn't know when she got here and we promised that it would stay that way, but the air has changed and it's bitter. We can all taste it and I know what that means. She knows."

"You cannot say that for sure, Black doesn't know," Nick urged her, finally locking eyes with the enraged young woman.

"How do you know that?!" Helena seethed.

"Because I do! Just trust me, Helena!"

"No! How can I?! The day you denied your severed head being the result of their doing was the day I lost faith in you. I know Black was the one who helped you and I cannot believe you are being so selfish! We do not make deals with them!" She told him, justified in her deranged shrieks.

"I did not make a deal with them! You do not know Black, she is not this threat you make her out to be and she severed my head out of the goodness of her kind heart, no deal was made," Nicholas insisted, he had to fight on the girl's behalf. Of course her being a student of his own house gave him gratuitous bias but he had to make Helena see. Black was a good girl, a caring soul — she didn't know what she was doing or the power she possessed. It wasn't her fault.

Helena crumpled her face up and pouted, still thoroughly against him. "I believe she's fooled you, Sir Nicholas. There is more than a dark presence at Hogwarts that's connected to her, I know you can sense it," she uttered under her breath, still standing at his side as they shared the view of the grounds. A muscle in Nick's jaw ticked but he didn't give in.

"It's not her doing this," he muttered back, keeping his face stoic.

"I don't know…" Helena bit her lip out of nerves and mustered up the courage to continue. She still hadn't told him the main reason she tracked Nick down, there were more pressing matters.

"The petrifications," she whispered, afraid of the image of the boy she once knew invading her mind, "something else prowls our corridors, sir… History is repeating itself."

"If Headmaster Dumbledore has faith in the groundskeeper then we must too, we've been over this," Nick assured her, subtly rolling his eyes before she caught him. "Rubeus would never attack the students again, he is a reformed man."

"It wasn't Rubeus in the first place!" Helena hissed furiously, distraught that her companions still didn't believe her even after fifty years of proof, "I've told you time and time again about him—,"

"He is dead! If it was him the first time then fine, but do explain to me how he is able to attack the students beyond his grave," Nick interrupted, not wanting to get into this matter again.

Even though they were not directly affected by the Wizarding War and the monster that tried to take over the world, it was still a sensitive subject. The ghosts of Hogwarts remembered the poor boy that came to them all those years ago with curiosity in his eyes and charm rolling from his tongue, it pained them to discover the man he grew up to be.

"That's just it, Nicholas, he isn't dead," revealed Helena, her translucent eyes fogging up as she thought of the mistakes she so carelessly made, "the bitterness in the air isn't just them… a ghost haunts these hallways, a ghost unlike you and I."

"Whatever do you mean?" wondered Nick, taken to her strange confession. He turned away from the window and watched the Ravenclaw ghost drift around as though she was pacing, utterly wound up by their conversation.

"It's happened a couple of times, I swore it was just an illusion," Helena recounted, slightly glassy eyed, "I assumed I was simply seeing things and thought nothing of it… but then I saw him again."

"You saw who?" Nick croaked.

"I saw him, Nicholas," repeated Helena firmly, "I saw Riddle with my own two eyes, strutting down the corridors like he was still in attendance… and…" she couldn't quite get it out, but Nick pried it out of her with just one look, "and he wasn't alone."

"Who…?" But Nick didn't need an answer, he could see it in her eyes.

"No!"

"Black is not the girl you think she is," warned Helena, wiping away tears before they fell, "do not lie to protect her, she has you fooled. She's shrouded in dark magic, we both know how she's doing this. We cannot let them get away with this."

"But how? I don't understand," Nick stuttered, tripping over his words out of shock.

"It's not for us to understand, but for us to prevent. You said so yourself that we are not supposed to comprehend their existence, we evaded them and now they've come for revenge. We have to act now, we must tell Professor Dumbledore," asserted Helena, taking a stand against Nick so he would listen to her. "Not to mention Miss Warren's disappearance. No one has seen Myrtle in weeks and considering how she ended up in our company we should take that into account too! It is not a coincidence. Black brought Riddle back, she got rid of Myrtle and she is coming for us next —we must do something!"

"But—,"

Nick's strangled rebuttal was swiftly cut off by the arrival of two more ghosts phasing through the locked door, and Helena reverted into herself in the baron's presence to keep her dignity intact. Nick never liked how quickly Helena shrunk whenever the baron appeared but that wasn't important right now. The Friar, the more empathetic of the two, noticed the tension in the room and looked inquisitively at the pair.

"We're not interrupting anything, are we?" He asked, his boyish round face softening as he caught Helena's eye, but she didn't dismiss his worries fast enough. "Ah, I thought so."

"It is nothing, my good man," Nick assured him, fixing a false smile on his tired face, "we were merely swapping aimless tales—,"

"Lying to them isn't helping your cause, Nicholas," Helena interjected, tired of the facade, "they can feel them too."

"Indeed," grunted the baron, his face forever screwed up with a rage he couldn't seem to release, "the castle is plagued, darkness is coming for us all."

"Always the optimist, this one," commented Friar, holding onto his vacant smile for as long as he could, "we may be wrong in our assumptions, you cannot claim that they are aware of what they are doing. A girl of her age, it's preposterous to blame her for all of this."

"Precisely, your hunches are wrong," Nick agreed, looking at Helena in the hopes that she would understand their point, but he failed miserably.

"The fact she may be oblivious does not mean that it is not true," she corrected him, biting back against his barks, "they've bewitched you, you've fallen for their tricks."

"Now, now, Helena," Friar warned her, his visage paling quickly as though he had suddenly come down with the flu, "you mustn't say such things, we don't want to insult them—,"

"I don't care!" Helena screeched, glaring at the three hard-headed spirits, "I don't care if they take offence to anything I say and I spend every day regretting my decision to obey them, this is wrong! Black is a danger to us all and I will not just wait around for them to consume us all, we may as well hurry her along and face the unavoidable at this point! If she's keeping Riddle as company then it is her fault!"

"It's not her fault!"

"NO! IT'S HIS! You do not know him like I do!"

"If you'll allow me a moment to speak," the baron chipped in, breaking the uneasy silence that fell between the ghosts after the Gryffindor and Ravenclaw delegates soaked in their own fury, "but Friar and I came here for a reason, and by the sounds of your delightful discussion I believe you should give us the courtesy of relaying the information before you both tear each other apart."

Ashamed of her lost temper, Helena let out a frustrated huff and shrugged, not caring too much about what her murderer had to say.

"Then speak."

"Black is out of bed again," he confessed in a bored tone, his heart wasn't really in it, "and she has company."

If Nick had corporeal limbs then he would have stumbled backwards, startled by the baron's admission, but he caught himself and pretended to not look all that concerned. Helena, however, gladly relished her reaction, composed her glorious 'I told you so' glare and aimed it at Nick without shame.

"Who is she with?" She growled.

"…I think you already know the answer to that, my dear," said Friar gravely, clasping his hands together as though in silent prayer, "we must do something… before it's too late."

"We must go to Professor Dumbledore right now," demanded Helena, taking charge of the situation, but Nick lurched forwards like a knee jerk reaction.

"Wait!"

"Nicholas, we must," countered Friar, taking Helena's side, "as residents of Hogwarts it is our duty to inform the headmaster that he has returned—,"

But it wasn't enough. No matter how hard the other house ghosts tried (not that the baron tried very hard) they couldn't get through to the Gryffindor representative. Nick loosened the fastening of his choking ruffled collar and began to move towards the exit, feeding his need to escape.

"Where did you see them?" He asked the men as he inched away, but Helena sensed his intentions before Friar could answer and gasped, offended by her friend's betrayal.

"I cannot believe this! Nicholas!" she exclaimed, "don't!"

But he did.

Nick couldn't wait, his snobbish personality had him in a chokehold he couldn't escape and he fled the classroom before Helena acted. He rushed through the stone walls and began to search the corridors for the girl and her evil counterpart, he had to get to her before the others. He didn't believe them, it wasn't feasible that she was with him… that he was even here again, that was simply impossible. Nick grew to like Black, he enjoyed her vivacious attitude and the way she bounced off the walls around the lions' tower, he even dared to say that he was proud she was a Gryffindor — so there was no way on earth she would be with him.

Luck seemed to favour him tonight, the other house ghosts fretfully chased down Nick as he tracked Black down, they didn't diverge from their paths and alert the headmaster like they were supposed to. No matter how loud they yelled they couldn't beseech Nick, he was just out of reach of them during the entirety of their pursuit.

"Nicholas! Do you not possess a shred of integrity?!"

As he ignored yet another one of Helena's persistent cries, now muffled by at least two classrooms, Nick phased through the final corridor wall and froze, disturbed by the scene that he happened upon.

In the shadows of the third floor, sequestered by a refoiled arch that split the hallway in two, stood Black and Riddle, the former enchanted by the latter. A dark force rocked his spirit, if he wasn't already familiar with the pair then he would have guessed that the two students were… romantically involved with each other…

It was not what he expected to see at all and he hated how quickly his doubt grew.

Riddle had the girl backed against the wall, squashed between his body and the stone bricks, and Nick writhed at the sound of their pants. Why was she out of breath? He didn't want to know, he couldn't look at her without receiving the sharp stab of something sinister in his gut. This was bad — worse than bad, this was cataclysmic! — and he couldn't process the shame trickling through him in time to react.

The others were right, the headmaster needed to know right now.

But it was too late.

The flickering of the ghost's icy blue aura caught Riddle's attention out of the corner of his eye and he snapped his neck towards Nick, catching him mid-snoop. With his hand still around Black's neck, holding her tight against the wall so she stayed perfectly still, Riddle watched him carefully and his charming, pearly white smile grew delirious when the three other ghosts arrived to join the party. Helena caught her whimper and flinched, deeply affected by Riddle's gaze, but she bravely took a stand against him and said the words he longed to hear.

"You won't get away with this," she hissed into the night, and Riddle laughed only once.

"Good to see you again, Helena… Come to us, my pretty," the hiss coming from his lips sounded foreign to the spirits, they couldn't quite understand him, "let's see how they match against your power…"

"Lyra!" Nick shouted out to her, desperately trying to knock the girl out of her stupor. He recognised the milky glow in her usually silver eyes, she was under the influence of an Unforgivable curse and he almost melted.

This wasn't her, she didn't know what she was doing. His confidence in her wasn't misplaced, relief was an understatement of how he was feeling but it wasn't enough. It was his duty to help a student in need.

The sickly slithers of the basilisk drained the ghosts of their strength, they couldn't do anything but stare in horror as the great snake reared its head around the corner and petrified the four spirits in their place. Their screams for help never left their non-existent throats, they were like bugs caught in a trap and they sizzled as the basilisk's luminous orange eyes scorched them.

Riddle watched in glee as they levitated together, perpetually stuck in a state of panic like dead flies caught in a spiders web, and it didn't take him long to waft them out of a nearby window. If he was lucky enough then they would drift off into the sky and float away from the school without a trace, leaving him and Black to carry out their plans without any more interruptions.

But the universe wasn't finished yet, it still had to try and get to Lyra before he snatched her forever.

For a split second, the Unforgivable curse that wrecked her body flickered and faded, Riddle's attention on her lapsed only for a moment but it seemed to be enough for her to break through.

Lyra blinked hard and groaned, rubbing her heavy eyes as though trying to get rid of grit trapped underneath her eyelids, but before she removed her hands his fingers wrapped around her throat once more. The corridor was pitch black, she could hear the slimy hisses of something nearby, and her heart stopped.

…where am I?

Unfortunately, Riddle was a second faster.

"Imperio!"

Her body was a mere play toy to him, she was easily moulded and quick to influence now she was used to his magic. The longer he held onto her, the faster she fell. The milky glow returned to her eyes and her vacant smile ignited passion and repose in Riddle's soul.

He almost lost her… that wasn't going to happen again. He didn't know how long he had this time, but that didn't dissuade him from trying. Since his encounter with the beasts from the other dimension he became one with the girl, she was his and his alone. Keeping his puppet's strings taut was his only priority now, he couldn't let go.

He was a second year student once upon a time, how hard could her classes be…?