Chapter 1
Elena stared expressionlessly into the mirror at the ghost gazing back. She reached up and gave her sodden hair a sharp tug, as though testing whether the miserable apparition might feel pain.
The face was that of a short, stout young woman, forever fixed in an expression of profound gloom. Long, lank black hair hung about her shoulders like wet curtains, never quite drying. Thick, pearly spectacles obscured half her face, magnifying the sorrowful eyes behind them.
Five mischievous spirits—neither proper ghosts nor quite living—circled her with gleeful malice. Peeves and his ilk, with their broad, impish faces and gleaming round eyes, bobbed in the air, pulling grotesque faces.
"Fat Myrtle! Ugly Myrtle! Poor, blubbering, moping Myrtle!"
"And spotty Myrtle, too!"
Elena's face remained impassive as she drifted out of the girls' lavatory, past the rows of chipped porcelain toilets and dripping taps. She had been in this peculiar place for three days now.
Only a short while ago—though time already felt slippery—she had been reading some interesting stuff, when all of a sudden she lost consciousness and when her awareness returned, she was no longer herself. No longer even human.
Peeves pursued her relentlessly, hurling mouldy peanuts that passed harmlessly through her translucent form. The poltergeist never tired of the game.
"Moaning Myrtle, the one they whisper about! Myrtle who hides and sobs! Gloomy, unwanted Myrtle!"
Another soul—faint, residual, and utterly wretched—wailed inside her mind. Tears streamed down her cheeks in an unstoppable flood. The body shuddered with the urge to rise into the air, to wail piteously, to plunge headfirst into the nearest toilet bowl and send a great splash cascading over the tormentors.
Elena drew several deep, steadying breaths (though breath was no longer necessary). She shot upward, passing through ceilings and stone as though they were mist, leaving the persistent poltergeist far below. She emerged on the sixth floor of the vast castle.
There she paused before a statue of a rather vacant-looking wizard named Boris. Turning left, she drifted to the fourth door and murmured the password:
"Fresh pineapple."
The door swung open. A magnificent rectangular bath chamber lay beyond—white marble gleaming under enchanted light. A hundred golden taps lined the pool's edge, each handle set with a different jewel: ruby, sapphire, emerald, amethyst… They shone like captured stars.
On the wall hung a painting of a mermaid, who tossed her tail languidly within her golden frame and cried in exaggerated outrage:
"Myrtle's come to spy on the prefects bathing again!"
Elena ignored her. On her first bewildered visit, she had answered back. The mermaid, evidently starved for company, had launched into a recitation of her entire family tree.
Elena drifted into the empty pool. She could not turn the taps—her fingers passed through them like smoke—so she simply floated in the still, clear water, methodically cleansing a body that could never truly be dirtied. It was a stubborn habit, a remnant of the living self.
If she could no longer be human, at least she could still bathe.
As she scrubbed, her gaze fell upon the faint mark on her left wrist.
A tattoo—vivid, almost alive—of a small bronze balance scale. The very same artefact, shrunken and etched into her ghostly flesh, complete with every speck of verdigris.
Heat prickled along the mark. A whisper of knowledge unfurled in her mind.
The artefact had fused with her essence. Its true name was 'Libra Fati'—the Scales of Fate.
And it carried one single, precious charge: a chance to tip the balance. To turn weakness into strength. Defeat into victory.
That lightning strike, she now realised, had not sought her. It had sought the scales she carried.
Dripping ectoplasm, she rose and floated to the third chamber—a quiet prefects' retreat, warm and steam-scented, free of chattering portraits. Here she had taken to resting.
Suddenly the Compass of Knowing Fate'—that strange inner mechanism born of her old divinatory skill—stirred within her mind.
She folded her legs beneath her in mid-air, closed her eyes, and let it turn.
The compass had eleven spokes: Divination, Physiognomy, Astrology, Planchette, Lots, Character Reading, Natal Astrology, Dream Interpretation, Aura Reading, Harmonics, Omens, Nursery Rhymes.
It settled, trembling, on 'Planchette'—the ancient art of spirit-writing, of receiving messages from beyond.
Fragments flickered through her thoughts:
Hogwarts… Myrtle… the day before Christmas… slip past the password… cause of death… the Serpent… petrification… path to freedom…
Her eyes snapped open.
Planchette, in this world, had become a conduit for hidden truths.
To escape this wretched form, she must fulfil the lingering wish of the soul she inhabited: discover the true killer of Myrtle Warren, and exact vengeance.
Left to her own searching, it might have taken decades. But the compass showed her glimpses: a colossal serpent, twenty feet long, gleaming venom-green, thick as an oak trunk, slithering drunkenly through the castle's pipes.
Its eyes—great yellow lamps—brought instant death to any who met them directly. Indirect glances—through water, mirrors—turned flesh to stone.
The monster feared one thing above all: the crow of a rooster.
Tomorrow was Christmas. The castle would empty of students. Most had already gone.
To break free of Hogwarts' ancient wards that bound spirits to these walls, she must shed this body tonight. She must complete Myrtle's unfinished business before dawn.
Many fan-theories abound, and those who follow this tale closely… well, they say fortune favours the bold this year!