Chapter 21: A Return to Shadows
To be perfectly honest, Solim had never celebrated Christmas. He found it peculiar that wizards had adopted a Muggle holiday with such fervor. The most baffling part was that even Scuol, that bastion of brutal pragmatism, shut down for a full fifteen days. For Solim, who had no cultural connection to the holiday, Christmas held only one meaning: a blissful reprieve. Fifteen days without the Cruciatus Curse. Fifteen days without the Imperius Curse. Fifteen nights where he didn't have to sleep with his wand in a death grip. It was the most peaceful time of his year.
For Harry Potter, this Christmas was shaping up to be his best ever. Any holiday spent away from the Dursleys was a victory, and he had happily signed the list to remain at Hogwarts. He wasn't alone; Ron and his brothers were staying too, as Mr. and Mrs. Weasley were visiting Charlie in Romania.
While Harry and Ron reveled in the empty castle's freedom, Solim had returned to a place he refused to call home: Selwyn Castle.
The castle was hidden on a magically-concealed island off the coast of the Isle of Man, a place known to a select few wizards as Neasto—'the unknown' in a forgotten Greek dialect. It was a name that suited it, for the island was a secret kept by the Selwyns and their most trusted associates.
Solim wasn't intimately familiar with the grounds; most of his time here had been spent within the castle walls, drilling theory and practicing spells. But he knew enough to understand that approaching carelessly was a fatal mistake.
Compared to the vibrant, sprawling majesty of Hogwarts, Selwyn Castle was a monument to grim austerity. To any Muggle who might somehow glimpse it, it would be the archetypal lair of a storybook villain. Even on the sunniest of days, which were rare in this perpetually overcast corner of the world, the light seemed to shy away from the stone. The castle existed in a state of perpetual twilight, its colors washed out to a spectrum of grey, a stark, lifeless silhouette against the comparatively vibrant landscape surrounding it.
This was Solim's inheritance. A place that instinctively repelled warmth and light. And it was where he was forced to reside until he was strong enough to forge his own path.
He stood before a statue at the edge of the grounds—the first Patriarch of the Selwyn line, his plinth engraved with the history of his ruthless life. This statue was the first of hundreds lining the winding path to the castle gates, each one a Selwyn who had left a mark on the wizarding world, for good or, more often, for ill. The path itself was enchanted; as the family's legacy—and its collection of statues—grew, the path grew longer. It now took a solid thirty minutes to walk from the edge of the property to the main gate.
Solim rode in a silent, black carriage, staring out at the stern, stone faces passing by. His mind was occupied with a single goal: how to slip into the castle's basement and his grandfather's study without being noticed. The castle housed not just his immediate, despised family, but also the families of his uncles and their various hangers-on—nearly fifty souls in total. Of that number, he could count on one hand those who did not look upon him with open contempt.
He loathed returning here. The very atmosphere, steeped in dark history and darker magic, had shaped its inhabitants into what most ordinary wizards would label 'dark.' And these people, nearly all of them his relatives, were largely Scuol graduates. Their idea of a friendly greeting was a Cruciatus Curse to the back or an Imperius Curse when you least expected it—all in good fun, of course.
To a Scuol graduate, a little bit of torture was just a way to say hello. Their resistance to the Unforgivables was so high, born from over a decade of brutal conditioning, that they considered it a game. Most of his relatives were, to put it mildly, unhinged. It was the natural product of the Selwyn ethos and the Scuol education. A normal wizard emerging from this environment would be the true aberration.
Their attitude towards Solim, the illegitimate son, was predictably hostile. The adults ignored him or spoke to him with thinly-veiled insults, only curbing their tongues if his grandfather was present. His cousins, however, felt no such restraint. It had been a common pastime for them to ambush him with spells in the corridors. That had stopped only after Solim, in a formal, no-holds-barred Black Glove duel at Scuol, had permanently removed one of their number from the equation.
"Oh, Solim, you're back?"
The voice made Solim relax; he had been a split second from drawing his wand.
"Chester? Unfortunately, yes," Solim replied with a resigned shrug.
A pearly-white, slightly transparent figure drifted through a nearby wall—a ghost. Compared to the living inhabitants, Solim got along remarkably well with the castle's ghosts, most of whom were deceased Selwyns. Chester was one of the friendlier ones.
"Be careful," Chester whispered, his voice a spectral echo. "Adelaide and his lot are rather excited that you're back. Take the route through Laboratory Three. It was empty when I passed through." He floated ahead, gesturing for Solim to follow.
"How is Hogwarts?" Chester asked as they moved.
"Quiet," Solim said, his left hand never straying far from his wand holster even as he walked. "Peaceful. It's... good."
"Anywhere is better than that other place," Chester said with a knowing look. He was perhaps the ghost most sympathetic to Solim, largely because of their shared history: Chester had also been a student at Scuol. He'd said "was," not because he was dead, but because he had been expelled before he could graduate. The reason was a secret he kept, and Solim never pressed.
"Elrond is in his kennel. I'll leave you to it." With that, Chester phased through another wall and was gone.
Elrond was Solim's grandfather. He and Solim's sister, Sylna, were the only two people in the entire castle who showed him genuine kindness. But Elrond's position within the family was… awkward. His two brothers, Lesoth and Bred, were both wizards of Dumbledore and Voldemort's caliber. Lesoth headed the Council of Elders' Hazardous Resettlement Committee, while Bred ran its Logistics Department. Many of the other Selwyns served under them.
Elrond, by contrast, was not a prodigy. While far more powerful than the average wizard, by Selwyn standards—having consumed vast resources without achieving that ultimate tier of power—he was considered a disappointment. Even Solim's ancient great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather, who occasionally visited the castle (their longevity a testament to the family's access to certain dark arts), would openly sneer at their "underachieving" descendant. This disrespect trickled down to the rest of the family. They wouldn't dare confront Elrond directly, but their scorn was palpable.
And then there was Solim's trio: a "disappointment," an illegitimate son, and a Squib sister. It was a miracle the three of them managed to survive in a place like Selwyn Castle.
Solim felt nothing for the rest of his clan. They were strangers who shared his blood, nothing more.
Elrond's expertise lay not in potions, dueling, or even alchemy (though he was proficient enough to be considered a master in the outside world). His true talent was in curse-breaking. In the wider wizarding world, curse-breakers like Bill Weasley were respected adventurers. Within the insular, power-obsessed circle of the Selwyns, however, they were looked down upon as mere technicians—essential, but lacking the raw, destructive power the family valued above all else.
Curse-breakers were masters of magical theory, spellcraft, and arithmancy. They deconstructed enchantments and invented new spells. The very "Flickering Fire" spell Solim had used on the troll was one of Elrond's own creations.
Solim summoned a house-elf to guide him the rest of the way. It wasn't that he didn't know the path, but the route to the basement was littered with magical traps that required temporary deactivation—a task beyond his current skill, but simple for a family elf.
"Alright, Zim, you may go," Solim said, setting down his trunk before a heavy, iron-banded door. "Oh, and please fetch Sylna for me. Discreetly."
The elf vanished with a pop, and the door swung inward before Solim could knock.
"Get in here," a voice grumbled from within. "I estimated you'd be arriving about now."
Standing in the doorway was an old man with keen eyes and the same black hair as Solim, though his was cut short and severe, unlike Solim's shoulder-length locks. For Solim, who had never been allowed long hair in his previous life, it was a small, personal rebellion.
"Come on, then," Elrond Selwyn said, stepping aside. "Tell me about Hogwarts."