The crystal hummed. Not the cheap, electric whine of a malfunctioning power supply — a deep, living vibration that tasted of iron and storm and something older than blood. It encased me like a second skin: clear as glass, cold as the inside of a glacier, and impossibly strong. Time inside it did weird things. Moments stretched and collapsed; my heartbeat became an echo in a corridor of sound. For whatever reason, my body could not move. My mind, however, was not so restrained.
If you've ever read about hypothermic states or suspended animation, you know the literature: metabolism slows, consciousness thins, the brain runs on a fraction of the signals it normally would. My doctorate had a chapter or three on that; my undergraduate had lectures I'd slept through. None of that helped. What I had instead was a flood of memories that were not mine and yet fit around my current self like a set of hand-me-down robes that somehow smelled of my childhood.
I could have been terrified. I was, in places, but curiosity — the same trait that had driven me through tensor calculus and three exhausting years of a physics doctorate — had its claws in me even now. I did what scientists do when faced with an anomaly: I observed, catalogued, and tried to make a hypothesis.
The first memory arrived like a photograph slipping into focus: a high-ceilinged bedroom with stone walls and a window that looked out over a manicured lawn dusted with frost. There was a cradle by the hearth and a woman with tired, kind eyes holding me. I had her face in the next fragment — hair pulled back, laugh lines at her eyes — and the name: Evelyn Potter. My first breath, the way my fingers curled, the way my mother's voice said, "She's ours" — I felt it all as if I had lived it.
I was the first-born. I was a Potter.
There were rumours, murmurs that clung to my childhood like cobwebs. The village gossipers said I was a squib. They said it with pity and a kind of embarrassed sympathy, which always irritated me even as a child. It shaped how people looked at my family and how they whispered behind curtains. The Potters' first — a squib. Imagine that.
In these memory-frames I lived the small humiliations and the not-small kindnesses of growing up as a supposed muggle among wizards. I remember lessons in how to curtsy for dinner guests, a governess who taught me calligraphy, and the ache of wanting a wand of my own. I remember the cupboard under the stairs — not an attic drama, just a small room with old trunks — the smell of parchment, the secret thrill of finding an old family trunk full of maps and notes and a small, folded piece of embroidered cloth with the Potter crest.
What my childhood lacked in explosive magic it made up for in stories. My family read. We read as if words were oxygen. The Potter library was dangerously large for a house that liked to keep secrets. History tomes, fairy tales, a battered, dog-eared edition of A Beginner's Guide to Charms (stains on the margins where someone had tested out a spell on a teapot), and, tucked under a false bottom, a slim volume of runes that I would return to again and again.
Time moved on. My memories threaded themselves like beads across a string: private lessons with the old tutor who smelled of pipe smoke and lemon; a childhood friend who plucked flowers and told fortune-telling stories; the sting of not belonging at school events full of practiced magic. All of it built toward one persistent ache: the lack of a letter, the absence of Hogwarts in my adolescence. By the time I was almost sixteen, the whispers hardened into a narrative: the Potter child is a squib. Poor Evelyn.
Then my sixteenth birthday arrived in the memory-set like a page torn cleanly from its book. There were candles set on the table. There were guests. And then — a knock at the door.
The letter should have been impossible. It arrived late. The wax seal bore a crest I'd traced in the runic book more times than I could count. The owl that delivered it was gaunt, its feathers ruffled, its eyes suspiciously human. The words inside were fewer than I expected and more consequential than any textbook formula: Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry — pending evaluation. There was a footnote: Attend at once; do not delay.
The world tilted after that. There was a carriage — the memory is cinematic, like a game cutscene I had played until every detail was etched into my muscle memory — and a man with a walking stick and a face like a map of small decisions: Professor Eleazar Fig. In the sequence the carriage lurched across cobblestone while the sky tore open and fire belched in the distance. Dragonfire. Screaming. People scattering. The city around us folded in on itself, and somehow, even in those flashes, I understood that this was not an ordinary entrance exam. This was a test by trial: raw, violent, impossible and merciless.
Vault Twelve — the memory of Gringotts — felt tactile. It smelled of cold coin and old secrets. The vault itself was carved with runes older than the goblins' patience. There we found the first whisper of Ancient Magic. It was not the polite, codified magic of schoolbooks. It was visceral, like thunder that had learned to speak through bone. The air around it tasted like the inside of a bell. When I touched it, the sensation was not pain but recognition, as if the magic said, At last, a voice.
From there, my memories accelerated. The sorting ceremony arrived late — the great hall already ablaze with torches, the Sorting Hat having finished its duties. I remember my entrance: awkward, breathless, a Slytherin robe tugged around my shoulders, a whisper passing among the students — Potter? — followed by shocked silence. Slytherin. The hat's voice in my head made a different sound than I expected. It did not echo the house's stereotypes so much as name potential: ambition tethered to discipline; intent that can bend. This one… — and then it settled: Slytherin.
My teachers were an eclectic assortment of eccentrics and geniuses: Matilda Weasley, who taught with the ferocity of someone who'd been underestimated too often; Mirabel Garlick, who smelled of citrus and taught ancient runes with a patience so sharp it cut; Dinah Hecat, whose stern face hid a curiosity about theory I could have sworn was kin to my own; and Professor Eleazar Fig, who took me under his wing like a craftsman who had found a particularly fine shard to fashion. He spoke to me like a colleague — more than a mentor: challenged me, pushed me into questions I had never considered.
I remember nights that blurred: studying runes beside candlelight, translating glyphs that shifted like living equations; private potion sessions where I recalibrated cauldrons and rewrote brewing sequences as if they were laboratory protocols; classes where I learned to thread my scientific thinking through the practice of magic. My past as a physicist threaded itself into every lesson. What is a spell but an applied set of constraints in a magical system? I would think. What is a rune but an algorithm written in ancient ink?
Friendship arrived in a messy, glorious trio. Sebastian Sallow — quick, sarcastic, everything in him a dare — who laughed in the dark and pushed me toward trouble. Ominis Gaunt — quiet, precise, the kind of person who made lists for feelings and never once lied about the limits of his compassion. Natsai Onai — brilliant and reckless, a strategist who loved beasts almost as much as she loved a chaotic plan. They were not perfect, but they fit around me the way the Room of Requirement fit around whatever I needed: safe, improbable, and full of surprises.
I remember the animals — hordes of them, collected with the giddy obsession of someone building a private ark. Kneazles who tried to buy Sebastian's loyalty with soft purrs and disdain, a small herd of peculiar bats that liked to sleep in the drapery, a fox with eyes like a broken compass. We filled the Room of Requirement until it smelled like hay and ink and the peculiar musk of magical things. It became our laboratory, our sanctuary, and the place where I learned how to bind nature to will with compassion rather than command.
Side quests in the memories were like polished gems. I had learned to coax a will-o'-the-wisp out of a fen, negotiated with a grouchy boggart that preferred to be read poetry, restored a tarnished runic tablet to sing again. Those were the smaller victories I'd cheered for in the game and, apparently, in this life. They mattered because they taught me the cadence of wizarding life: magic was never just power; it was responsibility, ethics, and history folded into practice.
I met Dumbledore, younger than the portrait I had adored in my twentieth-century studies — sharp, eager, and unafraid of paradox. He regarded me with something like admiration, and in certain memory-slots he confided a rare smile. "You have a dangerous curiosity," he said once. "Guard it as you would a blade." Even then, his eyes looked older than his face, and the memory of him carried a strange gravity — like a faint warning.
The story threaded to Ranrok like a tension in a taut wire. He began as whispers: a goblin king with teeth in the wrong places, a plan so patient and so ruinous that he had learned to wait generations. He wanted ancient magic for reasons that felt like a private grudge against time itself. We found his plans like bad weather moving in — in ledgers, half-burnt parchments, an uprising of constructs that smelled of melted iron. The world lurched toward him. I remember maps scrawled with routes, secret passages traced on brittle vellum, and the slow, inevitable tightening of conflict.
The final battle was not a single, clean narrative. It was a cluster of images all collapsing into one another: the attack on the castle, the goblin army a tide of iron and malice; Ranrok himself, a man who became monument and then monster, a thing of teeth and greed; the dragon — a living furnace made from corrupted ancient magic — that burst from the vault and turned the night into an open wound of flame. We fought under a sky the color of old coins, and every spell felt like a calculation with catastrophic stakes.
I remember the moment I decided to absorb the dark energy. Not for glory. Not for vengeance. For containment. For the mathematical certainty that left unchecked, Ranrok's corruption would spread like an exponential function with no asymptote: unstoppable. I can still see the data of that decision in crystalline clarity — a calculation of probabilities, expected casualties, the steep slope of risk if we tried another solution. There was no elegant equation that promised success; there was only a brutal sum of lives versus possible outcomes.
So I took it.
The surge was not like anything I could have read about in a physics paper. The corruption folded into me like a parasite learning new syntax. It tried to write over my memories, to root itself in the marrow of my sense of self. For a while I was two things at once: Luna Potter and something else that hissed under my skin and wanted to proliferate. Pain lanced across my body in a rhythm that matched the dragon's roars. I remember Professor Fig's hands on my shoulders, his face streaked with ash and tears, and the desperate, precise wordless incantations of my friends as they fought to hold the magic from spilling out. There was shouting, cries, the metallic scream of metal torn, the thunder of hoof and claw and the brittle pop of wards being shattered.
Then a barrier. It was not my idea; it was theirs — my friends, my teachers. They wrapped me in a prison of their love and expertise: wards, runic seals, enchantments layered like armor. Someone — I can't place the voice, but it was an order and a plea — cast me in crystal and froze the whole scene for a breathless sliver of time. "We will not lose you," Matilda Weasley said in a memory so burned into my orbit that I could hear the tremor in her voice now. "If we cannot heal you, we will guard you."
And they did. They sealed me in that blue crystal and left me to absorb, to become, to integrate or to shatter. For them it was a containment strategy: if the corruption could be bound to a single vessel, it could be studied, healed, or, failing all else, destroyed without metastasizing across the world. For me, the experience was a slow, horrifying calculus: integrate the corruption and risk becoming the thing that would spread it; resist and risk explosion. Their choice was to gamble on time. Their gamble was to freeze me until — until what? Until a cure? Until someone with the right knowledge arrived? Until fate changed its mind?
The last frames of memory before I fainted were full of faces: Sebastian's defiant, blood-smeared grin; Ominis whispering lists of contingencies; Natsai pulling a battered book into the seal and marking an equation with a trembling finger; Professor Fig taking one last look and promising the sort of quiet oath that has the tenor of the grave. Then, hands on the final ward. The crystal formed around me, humming a lullaby of wards and numbers, and my world narrowed to a single fact: I had chosen. Whether it was my choice or theirs no longer mattered. The energy was within me.
I blacked out after that — or so the memories said. The crystal closed. The battle's echoes faded. My friends and teachers walked away with a hollow ache in their chests and a problem to solve.
Inside the crystal, the memories continued to churn, as if I were watching myself on a loop turned up to unbearable clarity. I relived the tasting of dragonfire, the scent of Gringotts, the scrape of the Sorting Hat against the back of my head. I understood every choice I had made: the small moral toggles, the compromises, the quiet acts of kindness that made people risk everything. I understood the cost of heroism, the weight of containing a piece of darkness inside a single human heart.
And in the quiet between memories, when the hum dropped to a single tone, my scientist's brain — the part of me that could not stop pattern-hunting even as the world dissolved — started to work.
Hypothesis one: I am in actual stasis. The crystal is a physical manifestation of a ward, one engineered to slow metabolic processes and sequester corrupted magic. Its vibrational frequency suggests enchantments layered with sympathetic resonance — not unlike a damped oscillator, designed to diffuse amplitude over time. The fact that cognition continues indicates that neural activity is sustained, perhaps at a reduced but viable rate. Consciousness may be preserved while the body rethreads itself around new energy patterns.
Hypothesis two: What I am experiencing as "memories" are not purely chronological. They may be residual engrams — a byproduct of the ancient magic imprinting on my neural architecture while it integrated with my soul. The sequence is non-linear because the ancient magic processes information in associative clusters rather than in time-bound sequences. Thus, events fold into each other. The continuity of self relies on integrating those engrams into a coherent narrative.
Hypothesis three: Someone will find me. Probability, based on recorded events, suggests that those present at the sealing would establish a watch, a lineage of guardians, and a log. There would also be an institutional response. If I'm right, there will be records in Hogwarts — or in Gringotts — and someone will be looking for the crystal or for me.
I catalogued these possibilities in the only language my reason trusted: bullet points made of memory and sound logic. In the crystal, there was nothing to write on, no paper, no keyboard. So I made lists in my head, each item a mantra against panic.
Eventually, a quieter thought pushed through the noise: You absorbed it. You survived. That is both a problem and a resource. If a human being could take in that corruption and still retain identity, there was something unique about my constitution — or about the way the ancient magic had chosen me. That knowledge felt like a fulcrum under my ribs.
For a long time the memories replayed: my mother's hands, the laugh lines, the Sorting Hat's decision, the look on Dumbledore's face, the grateful, exhausted clasp of Sebastian's hand as wards went up. I saw each choice and the ripples it sent through people's lives. I did not want to be an abstract hero in a margin note. I wanted to matter in a way that wasn't tragic.
So I settled on a plan — modest, because grand plans are easily deluded by emotion: endure, observe, record, and hope. Endure: keep the thread of my identity and not let the corruption overwrite me. Observe: learn what the crystal does to time, to memory, to my metabolism. Record: if someone finds me, I would need to explain who I have been and what I had done. Hope: yes, hope, practical as any axiom. Hope that my friends had survived, that they would come back for me, that the world had not folded into ruin while I slept.
There was a warmth then, something soft pressing against my thoughts — a memory, or perhaps a latent enchantment: Matilda's voice, small and fierce, saying, We will keep her safe. I turned that phrase over in my mind until it became a small talisman. It felt like a promise. It felt like a compass.
The crystal's hum rose and fell. Outside, the world moved on through whatever timeline I had momentarily left behind. Inside, I had nothing but the long, detailed catalogue of a life that had never technically been mine — and the slow, steady realization that the person I had been before the blue light — the physicist, the university-dropout-of-sleep-deprived-habits, the gamer who knew every NPC's dialogue — had been folded into this life too.
I am both. I am Luna Potter, and I am the woman who finished Hogwarts Legacy at dawn under a stack of empty coffee cups. Each identity sharpened the other. My scientist's mind now approached the mythology of Hogwarts the way it would approach a new field: with method, curiosity, and a readiness to be surprised.
I drifted between images of a life begun and a stasis not yet ended. I thought about the calculus of rescue — how much time had passed? Days? Months? Centuries? If my friends had been young then, what would they be now? If Dumbledore had once looked at me like a dangerous set of questions, what would he think of me now?
And beneath all of that was the knowledge that had started the sequence: I had absorbed the corrupted ancient magic. It was inside me. It had nearly consumed me. My friends had sealed me away. I had therefore been given a second chance, and with that second chance came a responsibility that felt heavy and luminous at once.
I would wait. I would think. I would, in the slowest possible way, plan.
Because if anything in my life had taught me, it was that when the improbable happens, you keep your head long enough to turn improbability into an experiment.