Hogwarts had always been alive.
Lately, it had started to feel angry.
The stone remembered. It remembered screams, green light, falling bodies. It remembered the crack of collapsing towers and the thunder of giants' footsteps. It remembered basilisk venom and phoenix tears and a boy who walked into the forest ready to die. Harry walked down the corridor between the Great Hall and the Grand Staircase, trailing his fingers along the wall. The stone under his skin felt cold and weirdly tense, like muscle before a punch landed.
Third time today.
The chill raced up his arm once more, blooming behind his eyes. His vision flickered.
For half a heartbeat, the candles in the sconces became torches, iron brackets spitting blue fire. The portraits were wrong: not of plump witches and dozing wizards, but of armored figures with spears that crackled with lightning, dogs made of shadow at their heels. The air didn't smell like wax and parchment but like ozone after a storm and blood on hot stone.
Then it snapped back.
Candles. Familiar portraits. A wizard who looked like he hadn't moved since the seventeenth century yawned and scratched his nose.
Harry dropped his hand from the wall.
"Great," he muttered under his breath, "completely normal. Love that for me."
He didn't tell anyone about it.
He had stopped telling people things like this a while back.
It had been a year since the Battle of Hogwarts. A year since the forest. A year since he'd walked back into the castle, Voldemort's body at his feet, and watched the world label him a symbol again.
Savior. Chosen One. The Boy Who Lived.
The man who now had to attend mind-numbing Ministry meetings and smile when they used him to sell unity.
He tugged his cloak tighter around himself. The corridor was cold; late autumn wind slid through the cracks in the castle like a thief.
From the Great Hall behind him came the low rumble of conversation, clink of cutlery, occasional bursts of laughter from the returning students. Hogwarts had reopened "properly" only a month ago. First- and second-years who'd never even been to school before ran around wide-eyed and too loud. It would have been sweet if Harry didn't flinch every time a spell backfired and someone laughed.
He had a room of his own now, a weird compromise: not quite a student, not quite staff. McGonagall had called him a "special resident" with a pinched expression, as if the words tasted strange. It was better than Grimmauld Place and better than London. The castle was home, even when it hurt.
Especially when it hurt.
He took the narrow staircase up toward the old Charms corridor. The portraits thinned out here; the stone felt older. War damage had been repaired, but not well. Harry could still see faint scars where curses had gouged the walls, dark veins spider-webbing through the granite.
At the landing, the corridor forked.
Left led toward the Charms classroom. Right sloped downward into one of those semi-forgotten stretches of Hogwarts that clearly existed on the map and yet professors pretended not to see.
He should have turned left.
He went right.
The farther he walked, the quieter it became.
The giggles and shouts from below faded. His footsteps echoed in the narrow passage. Dust hung in the air, visible in the thin shafts of cold sunlight cutting down from slit windows high overhead.
He didn't exactly know why he kept doing this, wandering into parts of the castle that didn't show on the Marauder's Map the way they used to, stopping whenever the stone felt strange. It wasn't like he was an Auror yet. Officially, Kingsley still had him on "extended recovery leave," with the sort of careful tone that meant: You are too valuable to break further.
Un-officially, the Ministry used him as a brand logo.
Appear at a press conference. Smile at the camera. Give a speech about reconciliation. Shake hands with people who, two years ago, would happily have watched him die.
The very thought of returning to London for another one of those days made his teeth clench.
So he had stayed here instead. With the angry stone.
His scar didn't throb anymore. That was something. But every now and then, the castle itself felt like it wanted his attention.
The corridor ended. Or at any rate, it seemed to.
Harry frowned.
He'd been here before.
Last week, he'd walked this exact path and turned back when he hit the blank wall. Today, the same wall looked… wrong. Not visibly. But the air in front of it shimmered in a way you wouldn't notice unless you'd spent your teenage years dodging invisible Dark Lords and cursed artifacts.
Harry stopped a few feet away. His breath fogged in front of his face. It wasn't that cold a day.
He slipped his wand from his sleeve.
"Lumos."
Light flooded the stones. The wall was smooth, like it had been conjured as one piece. No cracks. No obvious doorframe. Just a patch of darker stone in the middle, roughly the size of a person, like a faint bruise in the rock.
"Reparo doesn't fix like that," Harry muttered.
He stepped closer. The chill deepened. The hairs on his arms stood up. His wand tip hissed faintly, the magic reacting to something in the room.
A whisper brushed the back of his mind. Not words. Just… intention. A tug.
Come through.
He swallowed, his throat suddenly dry.
"Yeah, that's not ominous at all."
It would have been smart to go tell McGonagall. Or Flitwick. Or literally any qualified adult.
Instead, he reached out and laid his hand flat against the cool stone.
The world flipped inside out.
It didn't feel like Apparition.
Apparition was a yank, a squeeze, a violent push through a too-small space. This felt like falling sideways into a memory.
Cold water, black as ink, rushed over his skin. For a second he couldn't breathe. His lungs burned; his muscles locked. Something pressed in all around him, a massive weight, like an ocean trying to compress him down to nothing.
He then stepped forward and out.
The corridor was gone.
He stood in a circular chamber he had never seen but somehow knew.
Torches burned in iron brackets along the walls, blue-white flames casting sharp shadows. The ceiling arched high overhead, smooth dark stone carved with runes he didn't recognize. The air was thicker here, heavy with the metallic tang of old magic and something else, like the smell of a storm rolled in and never left.
At the center of the room, set into the floor, was a stone disc maybe ten feet across. It was made of a darker rock than the rest of the chamber, veined with faint silver lines that pulsed slowly, like something breathing. Etched into the disc was a sigil: a serpent devouring its own tail, encircling a tower, encircling a single, stylized eye.
Harry's stomach lurched.
He knew that symbol.
He had seen it in his dreams.
He had seen it on a banner held by armored men on a field of glass, on rings worn by wizards who bowed to him, on the breastplate of the man who sat on a throne of wands and looked out over a city burning.
His own hand twitched, phantom weight pressing against a finger that wasn't wearing a ring.
The air buzzed. There was the soft click behind him.
Harry whirled, raising his wand.
The corridor entrance was gone. Behind him was just solid stone.
"Right," he said to the empty room. "Perfect. Trapped in a mystery vault under Hogwarts. Brilliant decision-making, as usual."
His voice echoed off the walls, almost instantly swallowed.
No doors. No visible exit. Just the strange disc on the floor and the feeling that the room itself was watching him.
The buzzing in his ears intensified. It wasn't sound, not really. More like… pressure. A presence pushing softly at the edges of his thoughts.
Come closer,
He stepped toward the disc, one cautious pace at a time. His instincts screamed at him, old battle reflexes waking up. This was a trap. This was something old and dangerous.
He continued walking.
Standing at the edge, he looked down. The silver lines running through the stone weren't random. Now that he was closer, he could see they formed intricate patterns, layer upon layer of sigils and circles.
"What are you?" he gasped.
The answer slid up from the stone into his mind.
Mine.
His knees hit the floor.
Pain lanced through his skull, white-hot and absolute. It wasn't like the scar pain. That had always been sharp and external, like someone stabbing at the surface of his head. This was inside, like his brain was being peeled open.
He let out a hoarse sound, fingers digging into the carvings on the floor. The torchlight flared.
The chamber disappeared.
He stood on a balcony of black stone, high above a burning town.
The night sky churned red and purple, clouds twisting around a pale, enormous moon. Dragons wheeled through the smoke, their scales catching the light from fires below. Spires of obsidian and crystal rose from the ground, glowing faintly with runes. Lightning leapt between them and struck enemy lines on the ground, turning figures into ash.
Hundreds of wizards fought in the streets. Their spells weren't the neat bolts and jets Harry was used to; they were raw, wild phenomena, walls of shadow that swallowed people whole, pillars of flame taller than the Great Hall, chains of lightning that leapt from soldier to soldier.
The defenders wore black armor worked with the same serpent-and-tower sigil as the disc. The attackers wore a dozen different crests and colors, united only by the chaos of their assault.
Harry looked at his hands.
They weren't his. The fingers were longer, calloused differently. A heavy iron ring, set with a sliver of something like condensed starlight, gleamed on the left hand. A wand, longer and darker than his holly wand, hummed in his grip like a living thing.
He knew this body. It fit too well. The weight of the ring, the balance of the wand, the way his muscles tensed when he leaned over the balcony.
He knew the city too.
He had never seen anything like that in his life.
A voice spoke behind him. Smooth, rich, carrying over the roar of battle with zero effort.
"They broke the eastern shield. As expected."
Harry turned.
The man standing beside him looked like he'd been carved out of shadow and moonlight. Tall. Dark hair pulled back, streaked at the temples with silver. Eyes an unnatural, glowing green, not like Harry's. Brighter. Inhuman. His armor was black metal, etched with runes. A cape of something scaled and iridescent whipped in the hot wind.
Harry knew his name before anyone spoke it.
Azelar.
No, that wasn't right. That was the old tongue version. In Harry's mind it translated a dozen ways.
Sorcerer King.
Lord of the Bound.
Keeper of the Tower.
Dark Lord.
Not Voldemort. Older. Bigger. The word dark felt too small.
Azelar, Harry smiled. He could feel the expression on a face which wasn't his.
"They'll push harder now," Azelar said, his voice Harry's voice but smoother, more controlled. "Fear makes them stupid. It's almost a shame."
The other man inclined his head. "Your orders, my lord?"
Harry felt the thought rise, uncoiling like a lazy snake: amusement, annoyance, cold calculation.
"Hold the Tower," Azelar said. "Let them throw themselves against it. When they realize brute force won't work, they'll send their precious heroes. The ones who think they can twist time and fate."
He raised his wand. The air in front of the balcony rippled.
Down below, a ring of light flared open in the center of the city, a circle etched into the very streets, the same serpent-and-tower sigil scaled up until it encompassed entire squares. Runes ignited along its circumference, bright as lightning.
"They think time is a river," Azelar murmured. "Flowing in one direction, easily rewound. They forget rivers can flood. Rivers can drown."
He tapped the balcony rail lightly.
Power surged.
The ring of light erupted, a column of force slamming into the sky. For a heartbeat, the entire world seemed to hold its breath.
Then came the screams.
Not from the soldiers. From reality.
The sky tore.
Harry saw it then: strands of time, glowing threads stretching in all directions, intersecting the city, intersecting him. Some frayed. Some knotted. Some already snapped. The column of power grabbed those strands and twisted.
Somewhere, in some other when, someone tried to use a Time-Turner and found the universe suddenly wrong.
Az'elar laughed softly.
"Let them come," he said. "Let them throw their future at me. We'll see whose eternity breaks first."
Harry wanted to scream. To move. To do anything that wasn't standing here, wearing this monster's skin, feeling this horrible, detached calm while people died in waves down below.
He couldn't.
He was a passenger in his mind.
Azelar turned away from the balcony and walked back through a grand hall lined with statues. Each statue was of the same man, of him at different ages, holding different artifacts. A wand. A sword. A book. A sphere of light.
As he passed each statue, their eyes lit up. Magic poured from them into him in slow, lazy pulses.
"Bloodline anchored," someone said from the shadows. A woman, or something shaped like a woman. Her hair moved in nonexistent wind; her eyes were slits of white. She wore robes that seemed made from the night sky. "If you fall, you will rise again. Bound to the Tower. Bound to this land."
Azelar inclined his head. "I know."
"You could still turn from this," she said, almost conversationally. "Seal the rift instead of tearing it wider. Abandon the old bargains. Choose mortality."
Az'elar laughed again. The sound was beautiful. Harry hated it.
"I already chose," he said. "Long before this night."
He raised his ringed hand. The sliver of starlight in the iron band flared, bright enough to hurt.
The thing beneath the city, the thing that was the city answered, the Tower.
Magic like nothing Harry had ever felt roared upward. It made Voldemort's Killing Curse feel like a schoolyard charm. It made Dumbledore's greatest feats look like parlor tricks.
This wasn't spellcasting. This was command.
Reality distorted.
Harry felt it tear.
He felt something break and scatter, like glass flung out across an infinite floor. Shards of time, shards of self, shards of memory.
Shards of him.
He jerked back into his body with a slam.
He was on his hands and knees on the stone disc. His breath came in ragged gasps. Sweat dripped from his hair, stinging his eyes. His wand lay a few inches away, light still burning at the tip.
The torches in the chamber flickered wildly, flames stretching sideways as if bent by a wind that wasn't there.
His heart pounded, his hands shook.
Slowly, Harry pushed himself upright.
The silver lines in the disc beneath him glowed brighter now, a dull, steady pulse synced to his heartbeat.
He stared at it.
"Okay," he said, voice hoarse. "What the hell was that?"
No answer. Just the quiet hum of old magic.
He didn't need an answer, really. His brain was already supplying one, piecing together fragments he didn't know he had.
The city. The battles. The Tower. The ring. The word eternity like a curse, like a promise. The feeling of tearing time like paper.
These weren't just visions. They weren't some random nightmare the chamber had shoved into his head.
They were memories.
His
Not Harry Potter's. Not the boy from the cupboard under the stairs. But something underneath that. Something older. Something that had been waiting.
He struggled to his feet. The world swooped for a moment and then straightened.
He grabbed his wand and pointed it at the wall.
"Open," he snapped.
Nothing happened.
Of course it didn't. Because why would a mystery ancient vault respond to simple English and impatience.
Harry dragged a hand over his face, tried to steady his breathing, and forced himself to think.
Magic liked structure. Hogwarts liked intention. If this place was tied to him or to whoever he used to be it had rules. It just wasn't going to explain them in a friendly brochure.
He closed his eyes.
The buzzing in his head intensified again, a low thrum that wasn't entirely unpleasant now that the first wave of pain had passed. It reminded him of standing too close to the Hogwarts wards or touching a powerful artifact, like the Sword of Gryffindor or the Pensieve.
He focused on the intention that rose instinctively:
Let me out.
The sigil at his feet flared.
The silver lines on the disc raced up the walls like veins. The entire chamber pulsed once, hard, as if the castle had just taken a huge breath.
Then the wall in front of him shimmered and dissolved, showing the corridor outside.
Harry plunged through before it changed its mind.
The moment he stepped back into the corridor, the temperature jumped. The dust, the half-broken stones, the familiar narrow windows, it all snapped back into mundane focus. Behind him, when he whirled around, there was just the same unremarkable blank wall as before.
No door. No shimmer. No sign of anything.
If he hadn't been shaking, if his heart didn't feel like someone had grabbed it in a fist, he could almost have convinced himself he'd imagined it.
Almost.
He leaned back against the opposite wall, the rough stone pressing uncomfortable patterns into his shoulders.
"Brilliant," he muttered. "Absolutely brilliant. Random secret chamber under Hogwarts that gives me past-life horror flashbacks. Sure. Why not."
His laughter was short and ugly. It died quickly in the empty corridor.
Voices drifted faintly from far below, students heading to class, teachers organizing schedules, the normal churn of life continuing like the world hadn't just tilted.
Harry stared at the wall where his hand still tingled from touching the stone disc.
He should tell somebody.
McGonagall would listen. Sort of. She'd be concerned. She'd try to lock it down, throw up wards, summon experts. Hermione would go full research mode, vanish into the library with stacks of ancient books and reappear forty-eight hours later with bloodshot eyes and a stack of notes. Kingsley would summon an emergency security meeting like this was some new form of Death Eater comeback.
They'd all act like this was a thing separate from him. An object. A location. A problem to be contained and studied.
Harry knew better.
It wasn't separate from him. It had been waiting for him.
He could feel it now, in the back of his mind: a door cracked open, a room full of memories he hadn't yet let himself look at. The vision on the balcony had just been the first thing that pushed through.
"You're losing it," he told himself under his breath. "You're traumatized. This is brain damage. Or some nasty leftover from Voldemort. Or…"
Or what?
Or he had been someone else once. Someone who thought eternity was a toy to break. Someone whose magic had scarred time so deeply that the echo of it still lived under this school.
Someone who hadn't died. Not really. Just… reset.
He lifted off the wall and straightened.
Good.
Maybe he was losing it. Maybe he wasn't. Either way, pretending nothing had happened wasn't going to work. He'd spent his entire childhood being gaslit about magic. He wasn't about to start doing it to himself now.
But he also wasn't going to march into McGonagall's office and say, Hi, Professor, so I think I just accessed my memories as a pre-historic Dark Lord who weaponized time. Also there's a living magic disc under your school.
He wanted information before he let anyone else touch this.
He needed control.
The idea slid through him quietly, unexpectedly.
Control.
The word tasted… good. Solid. Not like "destiny" or "chosen one" or "sacrificial protection." Not like being herded toward death with everyone making speeches about bravery.
Control meant he decided what would come next.
"Step one, then," Harry muttered. "Figure out what that place is."
The stone beneath his feet hummed softly, as if to approve.
He didn't go straight back to his room.
His hands still shook a little but his head was beginning to clear. The vision had left a sort of afterimage behind his eyes, dragons over burning towers, strands of time like glowing nerves, but it was fading.
He went towards the library.
If there was one place likely to have even a scrap of information about ancient magic towers and serpent sigils that weren't Slytherin's usual branding, it was Hogwarts' library. Or whatever fragments of the Restricted Section had survived the war.
As he walked, Hogwarts shifted around him in that subtle way he'd come to recognize, not physically, but in its mood. The walls felt less tense. The air didn't bite as sharply. It wasn't warm, exactly, but the sense of coiled anger he'd felt earlier had eased.
He snorted softly.
"You like that, don't you," he said to the empty corridor. "You like me going down there."
No answer. Just the quiet thrum of a centuries-old magical castle minding its business and absolutely not being sentient in any way the Ministry could write regulations about.
He passed a group of second-years on the stairs. They went instantly silent when they saw him, eyes widening.
"Um morning, Mr. Potter," one of them stammered, clinging more tightly to his books.
Another one elbowed him. "He's not a professor, idiot."
"He lives here," the first hissed back. "That counts."
Harry attempted a smile that was for the covers of the Daily Prophet. "Morning. Don't be late to class."
They grinned nervously and bolted past him, chattering the moment they thought he was out of earshot.
"Do you think he still has his Invisibility Cloak?"
"D'you think he could teach us that Patronus thing?"
"I heard he killed You-Know-Who twice"
The words faded behind him.
The library doors loomed ahead.
Inside, the smell of parchment and dust wrapped around him, weirdly comforting. Madam Pince lurked behind her desk, eyeing him with the suspicious respect she reserved for people who had definitely broken rules in the past and might do it again.
"Back again, Potter?" she said, voice dry. "Try not to destroy any rare tomes this time."
"That was one book," Harry said automatically. "And it tried to eat me first."
She sniffled.
He slipped past her and into the stacks.
Hermione had once tried to teach him how to love libraries. He still didn't. But he liked what libraries represented: hidden knowledge, answers you weren't supposed to have, patterns someone had carefully tried to bury under a mountain of boring titles.
He headed for the older sections. Not Defense Against the Dark Arts, not Transfiguration, not even the general magical history shelves. The deep history. The dusty stuff almost no one read. Pre-Hogwarts. Early civilization. Occult theory.
He scanned spines as he went.
Concerning the Early Wizarding Settlements of Europe.
Deep Magic and Primeval Wards.
A Brief History of Magical Cataclysms, Vol. II
That one he pulled out.
He carried it to an empty table near the back, away from students cramming for Charms essays. As he sat, he realized his hands had stopped shaking. The focus of the hunt of having a task he chose steadied him.
The book creaked when he opened it. The pages were a heavy, yellowing parchment. The ink glittered faintly, enchanted against fading.
He skimmed the table of contents.
Most of it was disasters he didn't recognize: the Sundering of the Three Rivers, the Silence Over Samarkand, the Long Night of the Pyrenees. All catastrophes where magic had gone catastrophically wrong.
Halfway down the list, his eyes snagged on an entry.
"On the Fall of the Tower-Cities and the Shattering of Time."
His fingers tightened on the edge of the page.
He flipped to the chapter.
The first cartoon almost gave him a heart attack.
It was crude, in thick ink lines, but the structure was unmistakable-a tall, black tower rising from the center of a city, surrounded by rings. Above it, stylized strands, like threads, crossed and knotted. At the tower's base, etched prominently, was a symbol.
A serpent eating its own tail, coiled around a tower, coiled around an eye.
He stared at his nightmare, drawn in a book printed centuries, maybe millennia, ago.
A cold, hollow feeling opened in his chest.
He began to read.
There were, in the ages before Hogwarts, cities the like of which the modern wizarding world has forgotten. Built where lines of power crossed, their towers reached not only into the sky but into what lay above and beneath it. From these towers, the Lords of the Old Magic sought not merely to wield power, but to bind it: to chain time, to fix fate, to anchor their souls beyond death.
Chief among these was the city scholars now call Eterion, though its true name is lost. It was ruled by a sorcerer whose titles are many and whose name is argued over still. Some call him Azariel, some Azelar, some only "the Eternal." It is said he opened the first deliberate wound in time.
Harry's mouth went dry.
"Azelar," he whispered.
The book didn't respond, obviously. But the castle did. He felt it-just a faint shift, as if the wards had shivered.
He continued reading.
In his pride, the Eternal Lord awakened forces that even his mastery could not fully control. He built vast machinery of spell and stone the Tower-Cities to capture the flow of time, binding it in circles and sigils. For a while, he succeeded. His city prospered beyond measure, its people walking paths between days as others walk a country road.
Yet to bind time is to strain against the world's most ancient law. The more tightly he wound the threads, the more they resisted. When his enemies mages of the free lands brought war to his gates, he drew upon the full might of his Tower.
The wound became the rift.
Those who might have witnessed this catastrophe, few must have survived, left no reliable accounts. We know only echoes: that the sky tore, that dragons fell frozen from the air, that wizards walking elsewhere and elsewhen found themselves unmade. Time shattered, and the shards scattered across the world.
Eterion fell. Of the Eternal Lord's fate, nothing is certain. Some say he died in the cataclysm. Others whisper his soul refracted with the shards, to be reborn again and again, drawn always to places where time runs thin.
Harry leaned back.
The words blurred for a second, his vision glossing over with something that wasn't quite tears and wasn't quite shock.
Reborn, again and again, drawn to the places where time runs thin.
Just as it was a snag in history that never could complete its healing process. A problem the world kept trying to solve by rebooting the same soul into different lives.
He thought of Privet Drive. Of the cupboard. Of Hagrid's giant shadow in the doorway. Of stepping into Hogwarts for the first time and feeling like he'd come home to something he'd never known before.
Drawn to places where time runs thin.
Hogwarts hadn't been just a school. It had been a magnet.
Madam Pince's soft shuffling at the front desk sounded suddenly very far away.
Harry read the last few lines of the chapter.
Some claim that, beneath certain strongholds of magic, one may still find remnants of the Tower-Cities: vaults of living stone, discs that remember their master's touch, chambers where the air tastes of thunder and time. Such tales are, of course, superstition. It is impossible that any trace of such wild magic could survive into our safer, more regulated age.
A harsh laugh escaped him before he was able to check it.
"Oh yeah," he muttered, "Definitely impossible."
He closed the book gently, fingers lingering on the illustration.
So. There it was. Not proof, exactly, but close enough. The vision hadn't just been the chamber messing with him. The Tower-Cities were real. Azelar was real. And Harry had just activated a disc of living stone beneath Hogwarts with nothing but his presence and a half-formed thought.
He could believe that was a coincidence.
Or he could heed the obvious.
Harry Potter, Boy Who Lived, was wearing someone else's ghosts.
He slowly stood up, the chair scraping against the floor.
If Madam Pince had caught the expression on his face when he'd closed the book, she didn't say so. She just watched him, her eyes narrowed, like she could feel a rule being broken, somewhere.
He stepped out of the library and into the corridor.
Students flowed around him, laughing, arguing, dropping quills and picking them up. Someone bumped his shoulder and mumbled an apology, then did a double-take when they realized who he was.
Harry barely registered them.
His mind roared. A past life as a dark sorcerer wasn't something he'd ever wanted. It wasn't comforting. It didn't explain away his trauma or his choices. But it did give him something new: A pattern. Voldemort hadn't been a singular disaster. He'd been a small-scale experiment in eternity compared to what Azelar had done. The wizarding world had spent the last few years acting like defeating one snake-faced fascist had "fixed" everything. It hadn't. It cut deeper: the rot was older. He could walk away. Pretend this was some academic curiosity and try to build a normal life. Train as an Auror. Settle down. Go to the Burrow for Sunday dinner and let time blur everything into nostalgia. He could. Or he could follow the tug at his feet and rediscover each last shard of what he used to be: learn it, master it, apply it. Use it on the Ministry officials who smiled too easily. On the families who cared about blood only when it was convenient. On the world that had cheered him for surviving and then tried to stuff him into a neat little box labeled "hero" and "marketable face for unity." The thought slid in, quiet and poisonous, and weirdly… honest. And if it was destined to tear open again anyway, wouldn't it be better for the person holding the knife to be one who understands sacrifice and loss? He stopped halfway down the stairs. Outside, through a high window, the grey sky thickened. Clouds rolled together, bruise-dark. One single, low rumble of thunder rolled across grounds, too early in the season for a proper storm.
The wards on the castle vibrated along his skin, just a tiny bit. Harry shut his eyes. "Fine," he whispered, more to himself than to anyone else. "You want my attention? You've got it." He opened his eyes. Far away, deep beneath it, the foundation stirred, the Tower.