Deep night. The wind around Ravenclaw Tower moaned like some ancient instrument left to weep.
Inside the dormitory, soft snores rose and fell in irregular waves.
On the bed nearest the window the curtains had not been fully drawn. Pale moonlight spilled across the floor, outlining the silver-white silhouette of Lucian sitting cross-legged.
He was not asleep.
Or rather, he was performing a maintenance deeper than sleep.
In heart-phase vision the black storm inside his chest—once called an Obscurial—was being forcibly compressed by sheer will. The violent energy that had torn at blood vessels was now being combed, straightened, re-woven into impossibly fine deep-grey filaments that drifted slowly along the eight extraordinary meridians.
An operation of extreme delicacy. No room for the slightest error.
Like aligning every displaced fibre in a shattered millennium-old masterpiece.
"Exhale…"
A single breath stretched over three full minutes. A faint metallic sheen briefly shimmered around him.
At that moment a rustling came from the next bed.
Terry Boot—the slightly twitchy half-blood boy—mumbled his way upright and shuffled toward the bathroom, rubbing sleep from his eyes.
He passed Lucian's bed.
And froze.
Moonlight carved the scene into something almost holy and utterly terrifying: Lucian sat motionless, eyes closed, air around him subtly warped. His pale face wore an otherworldly, indifferent calm. Worse—several thin threads of black mist, snake-like and docile, were sliding gently into his nostrils.
"M-Merlin's beard…" Terry's teeth chattered. Sleep vanished. "Lucian? What… what are you doing?"
The mysterious field collapsed at once.
Lucian opened his eyes. The wildness in those deep-grey irises vanished, leaving only stillness.
He turned his head toward the terrified roommate. No panic. No embarrassment. His tone was as casual as discussing tomorrow's breakfast.
"I'm sorting fragments."
"Fr-fragments of what?"
"You may think of it as giving my magical circuits a thorough spring clean." Lucian lay back down and pulled the covers over himself. "An Eastern meditation technique. Aids sleep. Would you like to try?"
"N-no thanks." Terry swallowed hard, staring at the face that clearly said do not approach, then bolted for the bathroom.
Silence returned.
Lucian gazed at the star chart on the ceiling and did the mental arithmetic.
"One hour fifty-eight minutes. Current limit."
The absolute maximum his body could currently endure.
Inner-alchemy was, at root, anti-entropy: converting chaotic, high-entropy Obscurial energy into ordered, low-entropy grey magic.
But this vessel was too fragile.
Like a cracked, low-grade porcelain bottle. Force too much dense mercury inside and the whole thing would shatter. He could only repair—and convert—a tiny fraction each day.
A project measured in years.
Exhaustion rose like a tide. He closed his eyes. Consciousness dropped into darkness.
…
He dreamed again.
The dream was shattered, kaleidoscope fragments.
childhood memories of this body…
Cold stone chamber. Complex alchemical array.
"Hold on, Lucian! This is the last glory of the Ashford line!"
Cassius Ashford's voice—obsessive, almost manic.
In the dream Lucian lay bound to the altar while molten metal—unfiltered primordial magic crystals excavated from some ancient ruin—was forced into his spine.
"A mortal shell cannot bear the legacy of the gods…"
"Then remake him! Rewrite his magical pathways!"
Agony.
Soul-deep agony.
Dream-Lucian watched with cold clarity as the boy's originally healthy meridians snapped under the violence, then tangled inextricably with the invading force into a knot that could never be undone.
Not a natural Obscurial.
A man-made ruin.
"So that's it…" The dreaming Lucian observed dispassionately. "In pursuit of so-called pure-blood evolution, they took a perfectly good blank porcelain piece and fired it into slag."
…
His biological clock woke him at six sharp.
Lucian opened his eyes. No morning grogginess—only crystalline clarity. The dream had deepened his understanding of the hatred etched into this body, but revenge held no interest.
For a restorer, the sharpest mockery of a clumsy destroyer was to repair the ruined work until it surpassed its original perfection.
He rose. Washed. Dressed.
When he stepped out of the Ravenclaw common room the castle still lay wrapped in morning mist.
The corridor to the main keep was empty save for the crackle of wall torches.
He walked slowly, gaze sweeping both sides.
The castle breathed—but it was gravely ill.
Passing a medieval knight portrait: the knight snored inside the frame. Lucian paused—not at the figure, but at the frame's edge.
"Severe varnish oxidation. Magical conductivity lag. Background pigment already flaking."
Farther on, a suit of empty armour creaked shrilly without being touched.
His brow furrowed. In heart-phase sight the lubrication charm at the knee joint had degraded by forty percent.
"Excessive damping on the drive shaft. In three months that leg will simply fall off."
He resisted the urge to draw his wand and cast a perfect Reparo. That was Filch's job—though the Squib would probably just wipe it with a rag.
Carrying that quiet concern for a building on the verge of structural failure, he reached the main staircase on the fifth floor.
For Hogwarts first-years, the true nightmare of the first week was not Peeves or Filch.
It was the stairs.
One hundred and forty-two staircases. Some wide, some narrow. Some changed destination on Fridays. Some simply vanished a step halfway up.
Right now the marble flight before him rumbled, preparing to detach from its landing and swing toward a dead-end corridor.
Hermione stood on the platform ahead, resigned, waiting for the reset.
"This way… oh, damn it!"
Not far in front, two Hufflepuff first-years wailed as their staircase changed its mind at the last second, grinding around to deposit them at the trophy room on the third floor instead of the ground-floor classrooms.
Lucian stood at the edge of the fifth-floor landing, calmly regarding the vertiginous, criss-crossing stairwell.
In heart-phase vision there were no mischievous stairs.
Only a vast, precise, strictly mathematical automated system.
Enormous magical gears meshed in the void with grating shrieks. But to him the apparent chaos resolved instantly into flickering streams of data.
"Base architecture follows golden spiral. Rotation angle θ approaches 137.5 degrees…"
"External perturbation variable." His gaze flicked to the still-screaming Hufflepuffs. "Estimated combined mass 310 pounds. Gravitational potential shift increases drive-gear friction coefficient."
Pupils contracted. Brain accelerated. Linear algebra flowed like water through his mind.
Each suspended stone step became a rigid body in 3D space. Every swing was a simple matrix transformation.
X_{t+1} = A · X_t + B · u_t
"State matrix constructed. Tuesday morning mana tide trough—correction parameter μ = 0.8."
"Next command prediction… Z-axis downward translation, XY-plane right rotation 35 degrees."
A floating section of staircase drifted slowly toward his platform. At normal speed it would dock in five seconds.
Lucian did not wait.
While the stairs were still two metres away—and moving fast—he stepped forward.
A move that looked suicidal.
One miscalculation and a hundred-metre drop.
"Compute relative velocity vector… solve collision equation."
But the instant before his polished shoe met empty air—
Click.
The staircase—perhaps reacting to the sudden change in load—quivered with microscopic deformation and accelerated just enough to slide perfectly beneath his foot.
Tap.
Shoe met stone with a crisp, confident sound.
Lucian continued forward without the slightest wobble in his centre of gravity. The staircase rotated again like a perfectly calibrated lift, delivering him smoothly to the fourth-floor corridor.
"Mechanical delay 0.4 seconds. Turning radius error 3 centimetres."
He walked on, mentally noting on an invisible ledger: "No. 3 drive shaft damping coefficient excessive. Recommend lubrication."
…
Transfiguration classroom.
When Lucian pushed the door open the room was vast and quiet. Morning sunlight poured through tall arched windows, dust motes dancing in the beams.
Empty.
Almost.
On the teacher's desk sat a tabby cat—posture impeccable, markings around the eyes like spectacle frames.
Lucian stopped.
In heart-phase vision: an extremely compressed, folded humanoid magical structure. Complex transfiguration runes acted like a second skin, forcibly constraining an adult wizard's body and power into feline form.
Stability flawless. Zero leakage. Textbook-level Animagus work.
"Good morning, Professor McGonagall."
Lucian gave the cat a small, respectful bow—genuine admiration for flawless craftsmanship in his voice.
The tabby's ear twitched—surprised, perhaps, at being seen through so easily. But it did not transform. Only issued a dignified "mrrrow" in reply.
Lucian said nothing more. He walked to the second-to-last row by the window and sat. Opened A Beginner's Guide to Transfiguration. His thoughts, however, were replaying last night's dream fragment of the original owner's father.
Ten minutes later the door opened again.
Hermione—hair wilder than usual, arms full of heavy tomes—looked harried.
Then she saw Lucian already seated at the back, calmly twirling his steel pen.
"You?!" Her eyes widened. She hurried over, glanced at him, then back at the door. "Impossible! I clearly saw you behind me at the landing… How did you get past that dead-end corridor?"
She had waited three full minutes on that platform, even consulted Hogwarts, A History to map the pattern.
Lucian lifted his head. The pen tapped once against the notebook's edge.
"The stairs' variation logic is essentially a Fibonacci sequence iterated in three-dimensional space. The first-layer rotation follows the golden angle. Introduce a time variable t based on the castle's mana-tide cycle…"
Hermione's mouth fell open.
Lucian continued without acknowledging her stunned expression.
"Treat each stair segment as a rigid body. Establish a spatial coordinate system. The rest is solving a parametric linear system plus basic matrix operations."
He regarded her blank face and added, almost gently,
"Once you do that simple linear-algebra problem, they're just elevators."
Hermione: "…"
As a Muggle-born prodigy she recognised every term—Fibonacci, linear algebra, matrix transformation—but she had never considered using Muggle mathematics to parse magic itself.
In that moment she looked as though a troll had just hit her over the head with a club.
Students gradually filled the room. Chatter died down.
The door burst open.
Harry and Ron stumbled in, panting.
"Thank God we made it!" Ron wheezed, hands on knees. "That bloody staircase nearly sent us to the third-floor corridor—the forbidden one! If Professor McGonagall had been—"
"Hey, Lucian—you're early. Can we sit with you?" Harry asked.
Lucian tilted his head slightly toward the tabby cat on the desk.
"Rather than cursing the stairs, perhaps sit first. The professor has been watching you for some time."
"Professor?" Ron looked around. "Where?"
The next second the tabby leaped from the desk. In mid-air it stretched, elongated—
—and landed as stern-faced Professor McGonagall.
She gave Lucian a brief, approving glance.
Then she turned to Harry and Ron with severity.
"A most impressive entrance. Perhaps I should turn you both into pocket-watches. At least then you might be on time for once."