(Cassian POV)
The hospital wing had stopped feeling like a place and more like a season.
Cold on one side.
Warm on the other.
And he and Roman were trapped somewhere in the middle, trying to pretend they weren't watching their best friends slip deeper into… whatever this was.
Cassian hadn't slept properly in days. There were dark circles carving themselves under his eyes, hair always mussed, shoulders tense enough to snap. Roman looked better, but only because he hid it better — older bloodlines trained for composure did that.
The private room was warded so thickly even sound felt muffled. But Cassian could still hear the faint hum of magic buzzing under the floorboards — constant, restless, alive.
He sat beside Shya's bed, elbows on his knees, staring at her face.
She didn't look peaceful.
No one could ever call that peaceful.
Her cheeks were too pale, lips slightly parted like she was holding her breath. A faint frost had formed on the pillow beside her cheek, lace-thin and glimmering blue.
Talora lay only a few feet away, but her bed was the opposite climate entirely — warm enough that Cassian could feel the heat from here. Roman was half-dozing beside her, a book open on his lap, but the book wasn't being read.
No one was reading anything.
A soft sound drew Cassian's attention.
—a wilted potted plant on the bedside table.
He frowned.
It was one of Pomfrey's herbal diagnostics — charmed to react to patient health.
But it wasn't wilting anymore.
It was blooming.
In January.
Cassian leaned closer.
A single purple bud pushed out of the stem with a trembling shiver, then opened into a perfect blossom.
Roman looked up sharply. "Is that—?"
"Talora," Cassian said quietly.
Roman followed his gaze to the other bed. Talora lay still as stone — but her fingers, curled loosely on the sheets, glowed faintly gold beneath the skin. The air near her shimmered with warmth.
"Shya's side is doing it too," Roman murmured.
Cassian twisted in his chair.
The frost on Shya's pillow was growing.
Slow, steady.
Spreading into delicate branching patterns that crept outward in spirals of silver-blue.
Breathtaking.
Terrifying.
Cassian swallowed hard.
"You think this is… good?" Roman asked.
"No."
"You're sure?"
Cassian ran both hands through his hair. His voice came out hoarse.
"I don't know anything anymore."
A silence stretched — the familiar, heavy one that had settled here since the moment they found the girls. It wasn't peaceful. It felt waiting.
Roman shifted in his chair. "You know… everyone else thinks they're at home for the holidays."
"Good," Cassian muttered.
"Dumbledore's orders."
Cassian tensed. "He's hiding something."
Roman didn't deny it.
In the long pause that followed, Cassian stared at Shya again, watching frost lace across the bedframe inch by inch. He whispered, voice cracking despite himself:
"Come back, Shy."
Roman said nothing — but from the corner of Cassian's vision, he saw Roman's hand tighten over Talora's.
The boys weren't crying.
Not yet.
But the room felt like it wanted them to.
The changes began softly — almost politely — slipping into the world like a whisper no one remembered hearing.
January 8
Snow still blanketed the castle, but something was wrong with it.
Roman noticed first when he went out for air.
The path outside the hospital wing had two climates.
On the right:
Snow melted in neat, perfect circles — warm enough that steam curled lazily upward.
On the left:
Frost thickened in crystalline sheets, spiderwebbing over stone like frozen lace.
He crouched, touching one side.
Warm.
He touched the other.
Ice-burn cold.
Roman exhaled slowly. "Tally… Shya… what have you two done?"
The wind stirred the trees — and even that was strange.
Every branch closest to Talora's side of the hospital wing
was budding.
In January.
Every branch closest to Shya's side
hung dead.
Stripped.
Grayed.
Roman stood very still, unease creeping up his spine.
January 9
Creatures felt it.
Not all — just the old ones.
A unicorn herd pressed closer to the Hogwarts boundary than they ever had in winter, noses lifting, drawn by a faint warmth pulsing from somewhere inside the stone walls.
A Thestral clacked its teeth and turned its skull toward the castle, wings fluttering once. It sensed death — but not death as an ending.
Death as a door.
A passageway.
A shift.
A pulse.
The forest whispered.
Something's waking.
Two somethings.
Two old things.
January 10
The magic didn't stay contained.
It rippled outward — faint, subtle, like the wake of a stone dropped into a lake.
In Tibet, monks tending mountain shrines paused, turning as incense smoke curled unnaturally toward the west.
In Rajasthan, a desert shrine's candles bent in unison toward an unseen force.
In the Andes Mountains, a condor flew against the wind, wings wide, chasing a current of air that felt older than sky.
But none knew why.
Inside the hospital wing's private chamber, the shifts were painfully clear.
Cassian was the first to notice Talora's transformation accelerating.
Her freckles glowed.
Not bright — just softly, like embers under skin.
When he held his hand near her cheek, it felt like standing close to a sunbeam.
Shya's transformation was opposite.
Her breath misted constantly.
Her skin shimmered faintly as if dusted with starlight and shadow.
The air around her tasted sharp — metallic.
Even the temperature spells Pomfrey cast began to fail.
Warmth near Talora's bed disrupted cooling charms.
Freezing air near Shya caused heating charms to sputter.
Magic itself was struggling to remain stable around them.
Roman stared. "We need someone who understands this."
Cassian's jaw clenched.
He looked toward the door, toward where Dumbledore had disappeared hours earlier.
"He's trying," Cassian said quietly.
"But he doesn't know enough."
Roman didn't argue.
He didn't have to.
They both knew it.
Magic this old didn't belong to textbooks or professors.
It belonged to myth.
And myth was waking up.
The storm had broken over Hogwarts at midnight.
Wind howled against the towers like an angry spirit. Snow whipped sideways, battering stained-glass windows until colors stuttered across the stone floors inside the hospital wing. Even the portraits shivered.
Inside his office, Dumbledore sat utterly still.
Not dignified.
Not serene.
Just still — the kind of stillness that comes when a human heart is too full of fear to move.
Fawkes perched nearby, feathers bristling uneasily, unable to settle.
The candle on Dumbledore's desk guttered again.
Not from the storm.
From the magic.
It bent toward the west wall — toward the hospital wing — every flame in the office leaning at the same angle.
Dumbledore closed his eyes.
That wasn't in any textbook.
That wasn't in any century of magical theory.
That wasn't anything a human wizard could control.
Every day the girls slept, the world tilted more.
Talora's warmth was spreading.
Shya's cold was deepening.
Balance — ancient, impossible balance — had chosen children.
Children he couldn't wake.
Children he couldn't heal.
Children he couldn't even understand.
And he was running out of time.
He rose abruptly, pacing, fingers grazing books, trinkets, artifacts — everything he had accumulated over a hundred years of chasing knowledge.
None of it helped.
Not one page.
Not one spell.
Not one memory.
His breathing frayed.
A man does not lose control easily after a century.
But Albus Dumbledore was close.
"Fawkes," he whispered.
The phoenix chirped anxiously.
"They are changing," Dumbledore said, voice shaking. He pressed a trembling hand to his forehead. "Becoming. Aligning with forces I have not seen since—"
He cut himself off.
Since him.
The candle nearest the door snapped in half its own flame.
Dumbledore stared at it, voice dead quiet.
"I vowed never to speak to that man again."
Fawkes hopped closer, wings half-open in distress.
"But the sigils…" Dumbledore murmured. "The sun and the moon… the runic script no living wizard could decipher…" His throat tightened. "I saw those once before. In books he stole. In symbols he carved."
The phoenix gave a soft, mournful trill.
Dumbledore's jaw clenched.
He braced both hands against his desk, head bowed, breath shaking.
"I cannot fail them," he whispered. "Not these children. Not this world."
Fawkes nudged his shoulder with his head — a rare gesture of comfort, not guidance.
Dumbledore's eyes closed.
Wetness gathered at the lashes.
Then he straightened.
Very slowly.
Very deliberately.
"I must go to him."
Fawkes let out a low, conflicted trill.
Dumbledore reached for his traveling cloak — deep midnight blue, embroidered with half-faded constellations.
His fingers lingered at the clasp.
"I hoped," he said softly, "that the world would never require his insight again."
He extinguished the candles with a single breath.
"But it seems fate is not finished with Gellert Grindelwald."
He threw the cloak over his shoulders.
Outside, thunder cracked through clear sunlight burning on snow — Talora's warmth cutting straight through the storm.
The temperature plunged at the same moment — Shya's influence pulling light into shadow.
The castle trembled.
Dumbledore paused in the doorway.
"This is beyond me now," he whispered.
And then, with Fawkes flaring his wings in reluctant acknowledgment—
Dumbledore vanished into thin air.
To seek the one wizard he never wanted to see again.
To seek the only man who might understand what the girls were becoming.