The boats finally nudged against the stony shore. First-years clambered out in a noisy scramble of wet shoes and nervous laughter, crunching over loose gravel.
Hagrid lifted his enormous lantern, did a quick headcount, then pounded on the castle's massive oak doors. They swung inward at once.
A tall witch in emerald robes stood waiting. Hair pulled into an immaculate bun, expression severe.
In Lucian's sight she was different from the loose, flickering auras of the children around her. If Hagrid's magic burned like wild brushfire, Professor McGonagall's flowed like a precisely woven net—tight, disciplined, every strand accounted for.
So far, the most rigorous wizard I've seen in this world, he noted silently. High marks.
McGonagall's gaze swept the group. It paused—briefly—on him.
Hard to miss. Among the dripping, dishevelled newcomers, this boy stood bone-dry, not a speck of mud on his polished shoes, coat pristine. The cleanliness carried an almost clinical distance, as though he had stepped straight out of a private study rather than crossed a pitch-black lake.
"Welcome to Hogwarts," she said crisply.
While the others whispered anxiously about what kind of "test" awaited, the wall behind Lucian blurred.
Two dozen pearly, translucent figures drifted straight through the stone.
"Aaah—!"
Several yelps. Ron ducked behind Harry.
Lucian didn't flinch. Didn't even blink. He simply adjusted his glasses and locked eyes on the one ghost floating directly past him—the one with silver bloodstains darkening his ragged robes.
The Bloody Baron.
In heart-phase vision there was no horror, no menace. Only faint, flickering after-images: soul residue projected weakly into the material plane. They could think. They could speak. But they could not cast magic. Magic required living vitality as fuel, and these flames had long since guttered out.
They were, Lucian realised, the loneliest watchers in the wizarding world.
Without an ending in death, life loses all forward tension.
The Baron halted abruptly.
Slytherin's ghost was infamous for his brooding menace—even Peeves feared him. Yet now something made his spectral form shiver.
The bespectacled boy wasn't staring in fear. Or curiosity.
He was dissecting.
The Baron's already ghastly face stiffened. Then, without a word, he veered sharply away, giving the strange newcomer a wide berth.
"Now form a single file," McGonagall returned. "Follow me."
The Great Hall doors opened.
Thousands of candles floated overhead. Four long tables gleamed with golden plates and goblets. Above, the enchanted ceiling mirrored the night sky.
"That's bewitched to look like the sky outside," Hermione whispered to Harry beside her. "I read about it in Hogwarts, A History."
Lucian glanced up.
Extremely sophisticated meteorological simulation spell—broad coverage, real-time synchronisation.
But…
His gaze sharpened on the northwest quadrant. Several stars there twitched with a tiny, mechanical stutter. An aging array node, data transmission lag. A dead pixel that refused to refresh.
Another entry for the repair list.
McGonagall placed a four-legged stool at the front. On it sat the famous hat.
Lucian waited patiently.
"Hannah Abbott!"
"Hufflepuff!"
…
The line shrank.
"Lucian Ashford."
A brief murmur rippled through the hall. The Ashford name—silent for thirty years—still carried weight among the old families.
At the Slytherin table Malfoy went white, staring daggers and silently willing the stool to collapse.
Lucian walked up the dais without hurry.
He regarded the pointed hat on its stool.
Worn brim. Stained fabric. Layers of ancient dust and unnameable grime.
As a restorer with a pronounced aversion to filth, his brow creased.
No mildew-proofing. No moth-repellent treatment whatsoever…
He lifted one finger, pinched the tip of the hat as delicately as though retrieving a dead rat from a rubbish bin, and—with visible reluctance—placed a conjured snow-white handkerchief over his own hair before finally setting the thing on his head.
The hall went very quiet.
Darkness descended behind his eyes.
Then a small, puzzled voice spoke inside his mind.
"Hmm… interesting. Very… difficult to access."
It probed, searching for purchase. "I'd like to see your desires, your fears… but all I find is… a wall?"
"Firewall," Lucian replied calmly in the shared mental space. "Don't prod so clumsily. Your probes are inelegant."
"Hey! I'm the Sorting Hat! I have the right to—"
"You suffer from severe logical bloat," he cut in. "A millennium of accumulated student emotional fragments has filled your memory almost to capacity. Your cognitive pathways are choked with noise. Without a deep format and purge, your self-awareness will collapse within fifty years."
The hat went silent. Two full seconds.
Then, in a slightly trembling falsetto:
"What… what are you going to do?"
"If you permit it, I can trim the extraneous threads. Excising perhaps thirty percent of redundant memory would—"
"No! Don't touch me!" The hat shrieked in his head. It had never encountered a student who tried to perform neurosurgery on it.
"Slytherin! You have ambition!"
"Too filthy. Present-day Slytherin is merely a vassal of power, not a lineage of pure seekers."
"Gryffindor! You have the nerve to threaten a hat!"
"Too noisy. I dislike noise."
"Fine! Fine! I know exactly where a specimen like you belongs!" The hat sensed an invisible scalpel nearing its core array. Panic. "Since you love poking at bloody truths and structures so much—RAVENCLAW!!!"
The final word cracked like a scream of deliverance.
Lucian removed the hat. Almost absently, he brushed a stubborn old oil stain from the brim.
The hat gave a violent shudder in his hand.
Polite but enthusiastic applause rose from the Ravenclaw table.
He walked over and sat. Several older students started toward him, then thought better of the cool aura surrounding him and retreated.
Perfect.
But the quiet lasted only moments.
A girl with long, curly hair and a gleaming "P" badge extended her hand.
"Welcome to Ravenclaw. I'm Penelope Clearwater, prefect." Curiosity lit her eyes. "The Hat took quite a while with you. It usually sorts Ravenclaws very quickly."
"Perhaps my neural pathways are… somewhat circuitous." Lucian shook her hand once—firm, brief—then released.
The feast began.
Golden plates filled instantly with food.
Around him students fell on roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, chattering about families and spells.
Lucian was satisfied with the result.
Only from the tower of truth could one map every crack in the castle's foundations.
…
His gaze drifted past the heaped plate to the staff table.
At the centre sat an elderly man wrapped in an almost blinding cocoon of magic.
Terrifying concentration of power—yet already past zenith. At the edges of that solar brilliance clung faint threads of black rot. An old curse, perhaps. Or the scar of some massive backlash.
To the right: Professor Quirrell, tense and sweating.
In heart-phase sight he was a cheaply made vessel forcibly stuffed with two souls. Beneath the purple turban another face twisted, leaking viscous darkness that slowly devoured its host's vitality.
Harry winced, hand flying to his scar.
Severus Snape's black eyes were fixed on Lucian.
He had noticed the Ashford boy during the Sorting…
Snape's gaze dropped to the long, elegant fingers currently sectioning a steak with surgical precision.
"Ashford…" he muttered. "Let us hope you are not as great a fool as your father."
Lucian felt the stare.
He lifted his head. Across the length of the hall their eyes met.
Very deliberately, he raised his goblet in silent salute to the Potions Master.
Headmaster in decline. Professor possessed. Foundations rotting. Ceiling leaking…
He placed a perfect bite of steak in his mouth.
"Truly… fascinating."
The plates vanished. The school song was sung—mostly off-key, with the Weasley twins dragging it out to the tune of a funeral march.
…
After the feast the prefects led the first-years to Ravenclaw Tower.
Unlike other houses, there was no password—only a bronze eagle knocker.
It spoke as they arrived:
"Where do vanished things go?"
The first-years exchanged uncertain glances.
Penelope opened her mouth to explain.
A calm voice answered from the back of the group.
"Into nothingness. Or, more precisely, they are transmuted into the dust that constitutes new things. Matter is neither created nor destroyed—only form changes."
Lucian stood at the rear, notebook still in hand.
The knocker paused two seconds.
"Reasonable."
The doors swung open.
Penelope turned, surprised. "That was… an exceptionally philosophical answer. Most people say 'into non-being'."
"That's the poet's reply." Lucian stepped inside. The common room was round, airy, suffused with starlight and the scent of old books. "I am a craftsman."
The spiral staircase to the dormitories was narrow and steep.
He pushed open the heavy oak door.
Dry air washed over him—aged parchment, cold high-altitude wind.
No warm red-gold glow like Gryffindor. No dank lake-bottom pressure like Slytherin. Ravenclaw dormitories were pure, rational cold tones.
Five four-poster beds fanned out, each with slender copper posts. Midnight-blue silk hangings fell from the canopies like frozen waterfalls, catching faint silver in the moonlight. The carpet was the colour of the night sky, embroidered in bronze with intricate stellar trajectories; stepping on it felt like walking among constellations. Arched alcoves lined the walls, crammed with inherited textbooks and peculiar alchemical models that cast jagged geometric shadows in the lunar light.
Lucian crossed to his bed. His fingers brushed the cold window ledge.
One of the highest points in Hogwarts.
Through the great arched window the entire ancient castle lay exposed—an enormous dissected skeleton offered up without reservation to the craftsman's gaze.
Directly below: the vast black mirror of the lake, almost deathly still save for the occasional ripple where the Giant Squid turned in its sleep, fracturing moonlight into heart-stopping depths. Farther out, the Quidditch pitch was nothing but lonely tower silhouettes.
And beyond that—the Forbidden Forest.
From this height the endless black sea of trees looked like a breathing abyss lying in wait. Canopy rising and falling in the night wind like a dark tide, encircling the castle. Centaurs, unicorns, older secrets. Untamed primal magic—wild, dangerous, seductive.
Wind moaned outside the window, carrying the low whispers of ghosts circling the spire.
A poet would have spoken of loneliness and night.
Lucian Ashford stood at the glass, looking down at the school of magic.
The first night was over.
His journey as a wizard had only just begun.