The wind had a voice that night.
Harry felt it before he stepped beyond the perimeter—the kind of cold that didn't belong to weather, but to memory. The house had once belonged to a minor pureblood family—quiet, reclusive, disappeared during the war. But something had begun leaking through the wards. Children in nearby homes were sleepwalking into the fields. Birds stopped flying overhead. And last week, a trainee Auror had walked into the cellar and forgotten her own name.
Harry Potter stood before the threshold of the crumbling house, wand at the ready.
"Tracking charm's active," came Hermione's voice through the enchanted comm-pin in his collar. "You've got a three-minute window before resonance spikes again."
"Copy," he muttered. "Going in."
The door fell apart the moment he touched it. Not broke. Unwove—like a spell forgetting how to be solid. Dust swirled in geometric spirals, tracing unseen sigils along the air. He passed through the empty hall, boots crackling over dead floorboards, until he reached the parlor.
That's where it happened.
A book was open on the mantle. No dust on it. No age. Just there—waiting. Its cover bore no title, only a single raised symbol: a broken wand curling into a circle of thorns.
"Visual confirmation," Harry whispered. "Book. Symbol unknown. Magic feels… familiar. But wrong."
He reached out.
The instant his fingers brushed the cover, a force punched through his mind.
The world flipped.
⸻
He stood in Hogwarts.
But it wasn't his Hogwarts.
Everything was… older. Wilder. The halls were shifting in impossible patterns, alive with gold threads. Children moved through corridors wearing robes of deep indigo. They weren't holding wands—they were singing spells into the walls. No one looked at him.
Except one.
A girl with pale eyes and ink-black braids. She stood in the middle of the Great Hall, alone, surrounded by mirrors. She pointed at him—not past him, not through him—at him.
"You don't remember me," she said. "But I remember your name. The one they took from the book."
"You were supposed to break the Circle."
"Instead, you became their blade."
⸻
Harry's back slammed into the parlor wall.
He collapsed to his knees, gasping.
"Harry? What happened?" Hermione's voice crackled.
He blinked—hard. The book was gone. Only the symbol remained, etched into the stone behind the mantle. Still warm. Still watching.
"I saw… Hogwarts. But not Hogwarts."
He looked down at his hand.
The veins beneath his skin had shimmered briefly—like silver ink in the shape of a circle coiled around a wand.
"I think we've found it," he whispered. "I think the Circle's waking up."