Writer of the Aether

Like Fire and Moonlight - Chapter 8: Night Conversations

Harry stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, water droplets slowly sliding down his still-wet hair as he tried, for the hundredth time, to understand exactly what had happened in Hogsmeade. He had had fun – with Slytherins. Something that, until recently, would have been completely unthinkable.

He ran his hands through his hair, trying to fix it, but soon gave up when the stubborn strands fell back over his forehead as if they had a life of their own. He sighed and stepped a...

Like Fire and Moonlight - Chapter 7: The Pumpkins of Hogsmeade

Harry didn’t know exactly why, but Halloween always brought him a nagging feeling, as if something bad were about to happen. Maybe it was the gloomy atmosphere that took over Hogwarts during that time of year—the shadows stretching down the corridors, the hollow suits of armor seeming to whisper ancient secrets, and the cold wind howling against the castle windows as if the stone itself were mourning something long forgotten.

In any case, he knew this day would be different. It was ...

Like Fire and Moonlight - Chapter 6: Peace Between Enemies

Gryffindor’s victory over Hufflepuff brought Harry a sense of relief he hadn’t felt in a long time. The deafening roar of the crowd still echoed in his ears as he landed hard on the pitch, his legs slightly unsteady after the intense flight. His teammates landed just behind him, red robes billowing like flags in the wind as they all gathered around him, their faces flushed with effort but lit with wide, triumphant smiles.

Ginny was the first to reach him, her face still glowing with...

Like Fire and Moonlight - Chapter 2: The Worst Possible Partner

The trio reached the Prefects' Compartment just as the train rounded a tighter curve, the sound of metal wheels screeching against the tracks filling the air. Despite Hermione’s complaints, Harry hadn’t been able to resist stopping in the corridor for a quick chat with Amelia Baxter, a girl he used to date, which had delayed them by a few minutes.

When they entered, they noticed that all the other prefects were already seated. Harry recognized Hannah Abbott and Ernie MacMillan, the ...

Like Fire and Moonlight - Chapter 5: Broomsticks

Harry woke to the faint light of dawn filtering through the red curtains around his bed, the muffled sounds of his dormmates shifting in their beds and the hurried footsteps echoing from the corridor outside. He blinked a few times, his eyes slowly adjusting to the dim light, his heart already beating faster with the anticipation of what the day held.

It would be his nineteenth game as Gryffindor’s Seeker, yet the familiar wave of anxiety still hit him with full force, as if it were h...

Like Fire and Moonlight - Chapter 1: The Best Last Year

The car swayed slightly as it passed over a rough patch in the road, and Harry adjusted his backpack beside him, feeling the cold leather against his leg. He glanced out the window, watching the facades of old buildings, bicycles propped against curbs, and the hurried red buses. The Muggle world felt more real here, with its noise and haste, almost as if the streets of London were trying to hold onto the last few minutes of freedom he had before disappearing behind the barrier to Platform 9 �...

Like Fire and Moonlight - Chapter 4: Small Surprises

The days at Hogwarts began to pass in a frantic rhythm, the mornings growing colder and the leaves on the trees around the castle turning shades of orange and red as October pushed on. Harry barely noticed the time slipping by, caught up in a routine that seemed to consume every hour – demanding classes, Head Boy duties, and endless Quidditch practices.

Between his nightly patrols with Daphne, which always seemed to stretch longer than expected, and the strategic meetings with the Gry...

Like Fire and Moonlight - Chapter 3: Ghosts of Exes Past

Harry woke up the next morning before anyone else in the dormitory, Ron’s soft snores still echoing around the circular room of the Gryffindor Tower. He sat up slowly, rubbing his eyes with the backs of his hands, his messy hair falling over his forehead as he tried to shake off the lingering fog of sleep. The faint morning light filtered through the arched windows, casting long shadows over the unmade beds and open trunks.

He dragged himself out from under the covers, his bare feet t...

To Be Seen - Chapter 14: What She Doesn't Say

The Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom felt colder that morning, the high, narrow windows cut into the thick stone walls letting in thin, slanting shafts of grey light that stretched long across the rough, uneven flagstones, the air sharp and dry, the faint, bitter scent of old smoke and scorched parchment still clinging to the cracked, uneven walls. The desks were arranged in tight, precise rows, the chairs scraped unevenly against the stone, the faint, nervous shuffling of feet and the...

To Be Seen - Chapter 13: Two Shadows, One Fire

The Great Hall was already full when Harry entered, the long tables lined with students hunched over their breakfasts, their faces pale in the slanted morning light, their voices low, their laughter too thin to reach the high, arched ceiling. The enchanted sky above shifted slowly from deep blue to grey, thin streaks of cloud catching the faint, hesitant light of a sun that seemed unwilling to commit to the day. The faint clatter of cutlery and the muted rustle of parchment folded into the he...

To Be Seen - Chapter 12: Weight and Balance

The practice room felt colder than before. Harry’s breath curled in front of him as he stepped inside, the air sharp and metallic, the stone walls still damp from the frost that clung to the castle’s lower floors. The torch near the entrance flickered weakly, casting jagged shadows that stretched and bent like old scars across the walls. His footsteps echoed in the low dome, each step a reminder of the time he’d wasted the last time he was here — flung back against the wall, bruised, ...

To Be Seen - Chapter 11: Plans Made in Panic

The courtyard was empty except for the drifting mist from the stone fountains and the faint scrape of shoes against wet flagstones. It was nearly dusk, that brief hour when the light started to fold in on itself but refused to give way completely. The sky overhead was streaked with the remnants of the afternoon’s failed sunlight — not golden, not grey, just that in-between blue that made the castle feel both hollow and watchful.

Harry stood ten paces from an old practice dummy someo...

To Be Seen - Chapter 10: Smoke Behind the Forest

The castle had already gone dark by the time Harry left the library. The corridors echoed differently at night, like the stone had a memory of its own and liked to repeat it once the students went quiet. His footsteps rang a little too loudly beneath the high arches, but he didn’t try to soften them. He hadn’t found what he was looking for in the books anyway. The pages had all blended together into a blur of spells he didn’t understand, paragraphs about magical history that didn’t he...

To Be Seen - Chapter 09: The Study Room with Two Desks

They didn’t trap him — not exactly. It wasn’t an ambush, not with wands or corners or shouting. Just a slow narrowing of space, a tightening of voices and glances that made it clear Harry had wandered too close to something people had already decided about him. He stepped out of Defense Against the Dark Arts expecting to walk the length of the corridor unnoticed, same as usual lately. But the usual silence broke.

“Potter.”

He turned and saw Roger Davies standing with thr...

To Be Seen - Chapter 08: With Friends Like These

The Gryffindor common room had changed overnight. It hadn’t been redecorated, nothing had physically shifted, and yet Harry could feel the shape of the space pressing differently around him. The air hung thicker. Conversations paused when he entered, then resumed with an extra layer of caution, as though his presence required a recalibration of tone. It wasn’t open hostility — not yet — but a kind of collective uncertainty, like a forest gone quiet before a storm. Everyone was watchin...

To Be Seen - Chapter 07: The Boy Who Lied

October thirty-first dawned grey and chill, the sky ashen and flat over the towers of the castle, as if the world itself were waiting for something to happen but refusing to tip its hand. The grounds below were slick with mist, not the heavy silver of Beauxbatons’ arrival but the thinner kind that crept close to the ground, hugging the base of the walls and drifting between the stones like it was looking for a way in. Inside, the castle felt warmer than usual—not in temperature, but in mo...

To Be Seen - Chapter 06: They Came Through the Fog

The sun had already sunk behind the mountains by the time the students were called to the front steps. What little light remained was diffused through a layer of mist that had settled low over the grounds, softening the edges of the Forbidden Forest and turning the lake into a mirror of quiet steel. The wind carried a sharpness that didn’t belong to autumn anymore—it had the bite of something older, something that arrived without invitation and planned to stay. Cloaks were pulled tighter,...

Shadows in St. Mungo's: The Secrets of Avalon - Prologue: The Wrong Man Dies

The lift was old — not ancient like the spiral lifts in the Department of Mysteries, but dated in a different, less charming way. The walls were panelled in dull stone, scratched over the years by blunt objects, shoe heels, or bored Ministry employees with time and nothing to do. The lighting above flickered, not because of malfunction, but because the enchantment regulating the glow crystal had never been properly updated after the restructuring of the building’s magical grid. Sublevel S...

Like Fire and Moonlight - Chapter 10: Fault Lines

The stairs that wound up through the Astronomy Wing were narrower than they looked — old stone polished smooth at the edges by centuries of boots and wandering scholars, spiraling tightly without rails, the sort of climb that encouraged reflection if only because breath had to be conserved for the ascent. Daphne didn’t rush. She hadn’t meant to arrive early, but punctuality had become a habit too deeply ingrained to break, even now. Especially now. The weight of Concord expectations sti...

Like Fire and Moonlight - Chapter 09: Lines of Sight

The courtyard behind Greenhouse Three was quieter than most corners of the castle grounds — shielded by frost-tipped hedgerows and low stone walls, it sat like a forgotten annex between the glasswork and the slope toward the lake. The benches were carved from thick, pale limestone and warmed by discreet heating charms etched into their bases centuries ago. The air still carried the scent of loam and iron from the morning’s herbology class, and the sky above had lost its color — not yet ...

Like Fire and Moonlight - Chapter 08: A Broken Line

The wind that rolled down from the Highlands wasn’t as sharp as it had been earlier in the season, but it was colder than it looked — the kind of damp, needling chill that settled beneath cloaks and along the inside of gloves, whispering at the base of your spine that spring was still far away. Hogsmeade had gathered its usual weekend crowd, students spilling out from carriages and castle stairwells with the nervous excitement of people who had not been allowed to roam for weeks. There we...

Like Fire and Moonlight - Chapter 07: Echoes and Edges

The wind off the pitch was sharp enough to sting, the kind that cut through robes and left sweat cooling too fast against skin, but Harry welcomed it. He needed the cold. Needed the silence of the sky and the blur of motion to drown out the noise that never stopped inside his head anymore — not the public version, with its clapping and commentary, but the private kind, the questions that didn’t have a source or a volume, just endless shape. He flew harder than he needed to, leaned into th...

Like Fire and Moonlight - Chapter 06: The Retreat

The Great Hall was half-full, the way it always was on mornings that hung between rain and fog — the kind of gray that hadn’t committed to being storm or mist, just a low, humming weight over the castle that made everyone move slower and speak softer. The enchanted ceiling offered no illusion of brightness; it simply reflected the truth in layers of shifting pale clouds, as though Hogwarts had decided the weather should be understood, not fixed.

Daphne sat at the far end of the Slyt...

To Be Seen - Chapter 05: Smoke Before the Storm

By the last week of October, Hogwarts had grown louder in a way that wasn’t entirely natural. The usual rhythm of school life — lectures, mischief, whispered detentions, last-minute essays — had taken on a kind of frantic tempo, as if the castle itself had started ticking toward something no one could quite name. Even the staircases seemed to change their minds more frequently than usual, shifting with a kind of twitchy indecision that left students stranded mid-landing or deposited in ...

To Be Seen - Chapter 04: Lessons They Don't Forget

The first full week of classes at Hogwarts arrived with a weight Harry couldn’t quite explain—less like a return to normalcy and more like a dream he kept waking into, only to find it still going. The castle was as grand and moody as ever, with its staircases that liked to change direction mid-step and its portraits that never stopped gossiping once they thought no one was listening. The stone walls breathed their usual damp chill, the fires hissed and cracked at their appointed times, an...

To Be Seen - Chapter 03: The Castle That Whispers

The Great Hall glowed with a kind of remembered grandeur, its high ceiling storm-streaked and flickering with distant lightning as though the castle itself were trying to echo the strange mood that clung to Harry like a second skin. The enchanted clouds rolled slow and heavy above their heads, a churning sky too theatrical to be natural, even by wizarding standards. Shadows moved with purpose in the candlelight, stretching long across the stone floor as the golden plates reflected each flicke...

To Be Seen - Chapter 02: A House Made of Smoke

The Burrow did not believe in silence, not even at dawn. By the time Harry stepped carefully out of bed and rubbed the fog of another sleepless night from his eyes, the house was already alive with the sound of overlapping voices and the unmistakable crash of something falling—again—in the kitchen. Someone was whistling a marching tune off-key in the stairwell, likely Fred or George, and the scent of cinnamon and woodsmoke drifted faintly through the cracks in the door, warm and oddly fra...

To Be Seen - Chapter 01: The World Pretends to Go On

The kitchen at the Burrow was too full of life for how dead Harry felt inside.

Sunlight poured through crooked windows and spilled like butter over the cluttered table, where half-finished toast and crumpled napkins gathered like casualties of a minor war. A kettle hissed on the stove beside a hovering frying pan that kept flipping sausages with a stubborn rhythm. Molly Weasley moved through it all like a conductor in a badly tuned orchestra, issuing spells and small scoldings in equal ...

Like Fire and Moonlight - Chapter 05: The Spark

The courtyard had been transfigured into a makeshift outdoor stage, though calling it a stage was generous. A long raised platform stretched between two elms, uneven and held together with what Harry suspected were weak sticking charms and the sheer will of Professor Flitwick, who was currently pacing along the base of it like a choirmaster preparing for some kind of magical opera. Students gathered in loose rings around the perimeter, most seated on benches, a few perched on walls, pretendin...

Like Fire and Moonlight - Chapter 04: Ground Rules

The library at night was not the sanctuary most students imagined it to be. It breathed differently in the after-hours, its grand windows blackened by the absence of moonlight, its torches guttering low and flickering as if trying not to draw attention to themselves. The aisles held onto their silence with claws, and even Madam Pince, who during the day could reduce a fifth-year to tears with a single throat-clear, had withdrawn to the back chambers, leaving the library to the kind of student...