The walk back from the Divination tower felt like a slow march toward an existential crisis. Lee Jordan looked as though he'd seen a ghost—or perhaps, more accurately, he'd seen his own funeral.
"I don't get it," Lee muttered, his voice hitting a frantic, high-pitched register. "We spent forty minutes staring at tea leaves that looked like soggy bits of moss, and she tells Fred he's got the 'Grim' in his cup? A sign of death? Honestly, why do we even pay tuition for this?"
"You're really going to let her get to you?" Albert asked, not breaking his pace. He navigated the moving staircases with the casual confidence of someone who had already memorized the entire castle's pulse.
"She does it every single year," Albert added, his voice projecting just enough so the small groups of students trailing them could hear. "Since Sybill Trelawney crawled up into that tower, she's predicted at least one student's doom annually. It's her version of a welcome banquet. It's flavor text, Lee. Not a forecast."
Fred, who had been looking appropriately grim, suddenly brightened. "Wait, she does this every year? And nobody's actually dropped dead?"
"Not a one," George chirped, throwing an arm around his brother. "You're safe, Fred. You'll be annoying us well into your eighties."
Lee still looked skeptical. "But what about the prophecy itself? The way she sounded... it felt different."
"Prophecy? Please." Albert scoffed, his eyes scanning the corridor ahead. "If she could actually pull the veil back on the future, she wouldn't be teaching a class of eleven-year-olds how to identify a 'wretched dog' in a tea cup. She'd be playing the lottery or advising the Minister. Everything up there is a cold read and a bit of theatrical flair."
The twins shared a look, their respect for Albert's cynicism bordering on reverence. To them, Albert's word carried more weight than any dusty textbook or frantic oracle. He was the only one who seemed to treat the school not as a temple of mystery, but as a complex machine that could be dismantled and understood.
"Enough about tea leaves," George said, checking his watch. "We've got Transfiguration now, followed by Magical Creatures and a double dose of Potions. My brain is going to be liquid by five o'clock."
"You two head on," Albert said, stopping near a heavy oak door. "I've got an Arithmancy lecture that overlaps. I'll meet you there."
"You're skipping Arithmancy?" George asked, his brow furrowed.
"Hardly. I have a 'method,'" Albert said, offering a tight, enigmatic smile. He stepped into the shadows of a nearby restroom, locked the stall, and waited until he heard the coast was clear.
He pulled the golden chain from beneath his robes. The Time-Turner hummed against his skin, the sand within it glowing with a faint, rhythmic heat. With a single, precise rotation, the world lurched. The roar of the castle grew distant, replaced by a strange, metallic thumping in his ears as time folded in on itself. He stepped out of the stall, his body feeling slightly heavy, and made his way toward the eighth floor. Room 7A.
Arithmancy was a different beast entirely. It was, in many ways, the secret language of the magical world. While Divination was all smoke and mirrors, Arithmancy was the cold, hard logic of probability. As he walked, he almost collided with a familiar pair of red-headed brothers—Ron and Harry—who were currently looking about as lost as two house-elves in a library. Filch was hovering nearby, his face purple with rage.
"Students are strictly forbidden from the fourth-floor corridor!" Filch was screeching. "Caught you red-handed, you little miscreants!"
"We were just trying to find the Transfiguration room," Harry said, his voice quiet but defiant.
"That's a bit of a stretch," Albert said, stepping out from behind a suit of armor. Filch jumped, clearly annoyed by the interruption.
"And you, Anderson?" Filch spat. "Don't tell me you're 'lost' too?"
"Just heading to Arithmancy," Albert said smoothly, ignoring the caretaker's glare. He turned to Harry and Ron, his expression half-amused. "If you're looking for the Transfiguration classroom, you're about three floors too high. Straight down the hall, past the armor, take the secret passage behind the tapestry of the knight—not the one with the horse—and you'll land right at the entrance. And for heaven's sake, stop wandering into restricted corridors on your first day. It's an amateur mistake."
Harry looked at Albert with a mixture of suspicion and relief. "Thanks."
"Don't mention it," Albert said, walking past them without looking back.
He reached the Arithmancy classroom just as Professor Viktor was beginning to sketch a massive, complex set of numerical matrices on the blackboard. Arithmancy, at its core, wasn't just fortune-telling; it was the rigorous mapping of events to numerical values.
"Arithmancy is the math of the soul," Viktor stated, his voice dry and authoritative. "If you cannot handle basic logic, do not bother trying to predict the outcome of a curse. You will only blow your own hands off."
While the rest of the class sat there, eyes glazing over as they tried to reconcile the equations on the board, Albert was already done. He watched as Shanna struggled to align her variables, while Katrina, seated beside her, chewed the end of her quill in pure, unadulterated frustration.
Albert, meanwhile, simply tapped his fingers against his parchment, the final results already calculated. It wasn't magic—it was just high-level algebra disguised in a velvet cloak.
"Mr. Anderson," Viktor said, pausing his lecture to walk down the aisle. He snatched Albert's parchment from the desk. He scanned it for a long, silent moment, his expression shifting from skeptical to genuinely impressed. "Perfect. And done in what? Three minutes?"
"It's basic probability, Professor," Albert said softly.
Viktor grunted, his eyes narrowing. "Basic to you, perhaps. The rest of this class is still trying to figure out which end of the quill is for writing." He leaned in closer, his voice dropping. "Stay after class. I have a recommendation for you."
When the bell finally rang, the room erupted into a mix of groans and sighs. Katrina stood up, her jaw set in a line of pure annoyance as she glanced at Albert's clean, finished parchment.
"How?" she asked, her voice sharp. "I've been staring at the board for an hour, and I'm still on the first variable."
"It's just math, Katrina," Albert said, gathering his things. "If you'd spent as much time with a multiplication table as you did worrying about your tea leaves, you'd be finished too."
She gave a frustrated huff and stormed off, her robes billowing behind her. Shanna lingered, looking at Albert with a mix of awe and annoyance.