He didn't go straight back to Gryffindor Tower after the session ended. The library was still open for another hour, and there was a book he had been meaning to read for a while— Wanderings of a Tree in the Alps, an odd little "travelogue"-style volume he had stumbled across entirely by accident, filed under Herbology for reasons that weren't obvious from the title alone.
He found it eventually, wedged between two considerably drier texts on soil composition, and settled into a corner table to read through the first chapter, more out of curiosity than any real academic need.
It turned out to be exactly as strange as the title promised. The narrator— a Norwegian spruce, apparently, though the book never explained how a tree had come to dictate its memoirs to whoever had transcribed them. It opened with several pages on the indignity of being a sapling, overshadowed on all sides by older, more established trees that it described, with evident and lingering bitterness, as "insufferable."
An entire chapter was devoted to a single particularly bad winter, recounted with the dramatic weight other authors reserve for a war, in which the tree had lost an entire limb to snow load and spent what felt like several pages mourning it.
Then there was the goat.
The goat arrived roughly forty years into the tree's account— a persistent, opinionated animal that had apparently taken to scratching itself against the trunk every spring for the better part of a decade, an act the tree recounted with the exact tone of a long-suffering neighbor who refused to move away.
It returned again this year, the tree said, in a passage Aegeus found himself rereading for the sheer commitment of the outrage, as though four decades of my patient tolerance had earned it nothing but the confidence to return. The lightning strike, when it finally came in a much later chapter, was described almost with relief.
He got through two full chapters before the librarian's pointed throat-clearing reminded him the library was closing, and reluctantly checked it out to finish later, mildly disappointed he wouldn't get to find out whether the goat ever came back for a final confrontation.
It was on his way back to Gryffindor Tower after that— book tucked under one arm, still faintly amused by the tree's account of its own suffering— that he found the corridor near the base of the staircase blocked by three people who were clearly not there by accident.
Peregrine Derrick was leaning against the wall with the casualness of someone who had rehearsed his pose, Lucian Bole a step behind him, and a third boy Aegeus didn't recognize hovering slightly off to the side with the look of someone who had been forced to go along rather than invited himself.
"Granger," Derrick said, pushing off the wall. "Rumor has it that you have been getting private lessons from Vance."
"Yeah? What else have you heard?" said Aegeus plainly.
"They say you also got knocked flat on your back." Derrick's mouth curved, not quite a smile. "Bit of a letdown, don't you think? All that fame, and one proper duel puts you in your place in five seconds!"
Aegeus looked at him for a moment. "Is that it?"
That wasn't the answer Derrick had been fishing for, and it showed— a small flicker of annoyance crossing his face before he covered it. "You got nothing to say?"
"He is older and more experienced. It's normal for me to lose."
"Funny," Derrick said, "because that's not what everyone's been saying about you all term. Golden boy who even challenged a professor."
Challenged a professor? Who do they think I challenged? He thought for a second, then smiled despite himself. Do they think I challenged Professor Snape?
He knew enough from his short time here to recognize that Snape wasn't a man anyone crossed lightly. The fact that the rumor mill had elevated his interactions with Snape into a duel of wills with the Head of Slytherin was laughable.
Derrick's jaw tightened when he saw the smile.
"You think you're so good," he said, quieter now, the earlier performance dropping slightly. "Good for a Mudblood, maybe. You have read a few books, know a few spells, and now everyone thinks you're something special— You're not."
"For what it's worth," Aegeus added, turning smoothly toward the staircase, "I don't think about you much at all. I suggest saving yourself the trip next time."
He'd made it two steps before Derrick's voice cracked out behind him, stripped of whatever performance had been holding it together.
"Everte Statum!"
Aegeus turned in time to see the burst of light already halfway to him— no real strategy behind the cast, just a first-year's blunt aim. He sidestepped it easily. The spell slammed into the stone wall behind him, throwing up a faint spray of sparks and dust.
He didn't have time to say anything about it before Bole and the third boy both raised their wands at once.
"Flipendo!"
"Locomotor Wibbly!"
Two spells, from two directions, closing on him at the same moment— nothing like Fairweather's clean, single-line effortless combinations, but three opponents are very different from one, no matter how amateur they are.
He dropped low under the tickling jinx, letting it pass over his shoulder, and pivoted hard to catch the Leg-Locker on his forearm instead of his knees. It wasn't textbook. It wasn't even particularly graceful. But it worked, and he came up out of the crouch with his own wand already rising.
"Expelliarmus."
The disarm caught Bole clean, his wand spinning out of his hand and clattering somewhere down the corridor. Bole stared after it, astonished at how fast he had been disarmed.
Derrick, furious now that his ambush hadn't produced any result, tried again— "Locomotor Wibbly!" — rushed and sloppy, and Aegeus was already moving before it finished.
But it clipped him anyway. And for some reason, he didn't feel the full effect, that was the second one to hit him, and he could barely feel it, just enough that his left leg buckled slightly under him, unsteady rather than fully locked. He staggered, caught himself against the wall, and stayed upright— his wand raised, breathing hard.
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TO BE CONTINUED
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