Location: Hogwarts, Greenhouse Five
Time: September 28, 1:12 AM
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Neville Longbottom hadn't slept in three nights.
Something was wrong with the roots.
Greenhouse Five sat on old leyline paths — quiet ones — used for passive magical growth. The plants here were usually the calmest in the school. But over the past week, every single root-bonded specimen had started to twitch in its soil. Some refused to bloom. Others changed shape overnight.
Worse, the Dirge Vines had begun growing backward — spiraling toward the castle walls instead of outward into the sun.
That never happened.
Neville knelt beside one now, brushing soil away from the base. His wand hovered near the plant, casting soft pulses of diagnostic light.
Red.
Then violet.
Then… black.
His eyes narrowed.
Black meant memory residue — not poison. Not decay.
Forgotten magic was buried here.
⸻
He reached for his trowel when the floor beneath him shivered.
Not an earthquake. Not a tremor.
A reverberation — like the castle had just spoken a word so old and so deep that it couldn't be heard with ears, only felt in bones.
Neville stood up fast.
His reflection shimmered in the glass panes of the greenhouse — only for a fraction of a second, his face not his own. A ghost image, overlaid: a younger man in black robes, wearing a pin shaped like a cracked wand in a circle of silver.
Then it vanished.
⸻
His wand buzzed with sudden heat.
The compass stone on his desk — an old artifact gifted by Luna — began to spin erratically.
Then it froze, pointing not north… but downward.
Into the earth.
Beneath the greenhouses.
Toward the sublevels of the castle that were not on any map.
⸻
"Hogwarts," he whispered, "what are you doing?"
The torches flickered.
A new glyph burned into the wall near the greenhouse door — not carved, not painted.
Grown. Out of ivy and root.
A symbol he hadn't seen in twenty years, but still remembered from Luna's old notebooks and half-banned Concord reports:
A broken wand.
A circle of thorns.
Wandbound.
Neville stumbled back, heart racing.
He tapped his comm-pin, voice shaking. "Hermione. We have a situation."
⸻
On the other end, her voice was instantly alert. "What is it?"
"I think… the kids," Neville said, "are about to uncover something the castle spent centuries trying to forget."
"And the castle just stopped trying to hide it."