The girls' bathroom was in ruins.
Splintered wood, shattered stone, foul water flooding across cracked tiles.
The stench was unbearable—rotting filth, sour sweat, and something far worse.
The mountain troll roared.
Its massive club smashed another stall to pieces.
"Move, Ron!" Harry shouted, dragging his friend aside just as the weapon crashed down, cracking the stone floor where they had stood seconds earlier.
They were cornered.
Exhausted.
Terrified.
Their levitation attempts—broken wood, loose debris—had done nothing. The fragments bounced harmlessly off the troll's thick hide.
From inside the last intact stall came Hermione's muffled sobs.
The troll had lost patience.
It raised its club again.
Higher.
Higher.
Harry and Ron hit the wall behind them.
No room left.
The weapon descended—
And time fractured.
A presence appeared.
Silent.
Effortless.
Lucian Thornwick stood between death and its target.
He did not rush.
Did not shout.
Did not draw a wand.
His eyes, calm and deep as still water, regarded the troll as one might regard an inconvenient obstacle in a hallway.
He raised his right hand.
Fingers outstretched.
"Gravity Reversal."
The words were quiet.
But reality obeyed.
A subtle vibration spread outward—soundless, invisible, yet absolute.
The air shifted.
The space around the troll distorted.
And then—
The club stopped mid-swing.
Not because it was blocked.
Because its weight vanished.
The troll's enormous body lurched.
Its feet lifted from the floor.
All at once, the creature lost gravity's claim.
A one-ton monster became weightless.
It drifted upward like an absurd, oversized balloon.
"Urrh…?"
The troll blinked in confusion as the ground fell away beneath it.
It flailed instinctively.
That only made things worse.
Without weight to anchor it, every clumsy movement sent it spinning slowly in midair. The club slipped from its grasp and floated uselessly toward the ceiling before tumbling back down in slow descent.
The twelve-foot brute rotated helplessly, limbs thrashing in meaningless arcs.
It looked less like a terror of the dungeons—
And more like a grotesque marionette abandoned by its puppeteer.
Harry stared upward, frozen.
Ron's jaw hung open.
Hermione emerged slowly from the stall, eyes wide beyond comprehension.
Their fear had evaporated—replaced by something even more overwhelming.
Disbelief.
Lucian adjusted his hand slightly.
The gravitational field shifted.
The troll's spin halted abruptly.
Then—
Pressure returned.
But not downward.
Sideways.
The invisible axis twisted ninety degrees.
The troll slammed violently into the far wall with a thunderous crack of stone, leaving a web of fractures across the surface.
Before it could recover—
Lucian closed his fingers.
The gravitational vector inverted again.
Up became down.
Down became impact.
The troll crashed headfirst into the floor with crushing force.
The tiles shattered.
The air burst outward in a shockwave of dust and debris.
Then stillness.
The mountain troll lay unconscious, embedded in broken stone.
Silence consumed the ruined bathroom.
Harry's heart pounded in his ears.
Ron whispered faintly, "Blimey…"
Hermione's voice trembled.
"What… what was that?"
Lucian lowered his hand.
He examined the damage clinically—the wall fractures, impact depth, structural yield of troll physiology.
Energy output acceptable.
Control stable.
Resistance threshold moderate.
He seemed almost thoughtful.
"Field stability remains within tolerable variance," he murmured to himself. "Organic mass response is consistent with projected models."
The three first-years stared at him.
They did not understand the words.
They barely understood what they had witnessed.
To them, magic meant incantations.
Wands.
Sparks.
Struggle.
What they had seen was something else entirely.
It was as though the rules themselves had bent.
Lucian finally looked at them.
"You should return to your common room," he said calmly.
As if this had merely been a minor inconvenience.
As if a mountain troll had not just been turned into a helpless object in a child's experiment.
In the corridor beyond, rapid footsteps approached.
Professors.
But inside the shattered bathroom, amid broken stone and drifting dust, three children stood in stunned silence—
Their understanding of magic forever changed.