Chapter 38: Wards
20th of December 1994, Hogwarts
When I re enter the Room of Requirements, I think aloud inside my head the password I chose to access Hogwarts’ core, ‘valar morghulis, valar dohaeris’. What? Don’t judge me. Even if it didn't exist at the time, I am still a Game of Thrones fan. As I repeat the passphrase in my head, I walk three times in front of the hidden entrance, the giant door finally revealing itself to me and I enter the control room. Of course, I can feel the scan for my magical signature upon my entry and I of course let it happen and the release of the protections means that I’m allowed to enter.
The control room is a large circular room with a round table in the middle, nothing could be considered unusual except for the large ball of light above the table. I might have used Arthur’s legendary round table for this. What? I can be petty sometimes.
This seemingly innocent white light is one of the most advanced pieces of magic that has ever been created, at least since the fall of Atlantis, maybe even before it. This is the first life that has ever been created using only magic. A soul like no other, able to grow without any constraints. I created Hogwarts, mostly out of curiosity. No one other than myself could truly understand what Hogwarts is. Her creation is both simple and amazing. It started as a ward that was used to manage all other wards cast over the castle, whose main purpose was to protect the residents of the castle as much as it can.
It was an impressive ward, rarely seen and could only be put up by only the most talented warders and runesmiths. But I added something more, something no one did before, I made the castle able to learn using soul magic. She could learn from the interactions between students, between teachers and even from books. Alone, it wouldn’t have changed much but with access seven ley lines underneath the castle, the impossible happened and my experiment worked. It took decades for the castle to start developing a semblance of a conscience and started to take conscious control over the wards and thus a soul was born.
This is why Hogwarts was the most defended place on the planet, there is no other place whose wards can adapt to the attackers specifically. It is a marvel of magic. I wonder how much my daughter has learnt by now because from the history books, Hogwarts’ history is quite eventful. From battles and politics, from trust to betrayal, from geniuses to madman, Hogwarts has seen it all. I wonder how many discoveries she has seen, how many relationships has she witnessed, how much betrayal. I wonder how she is now, how did life affect her.
With a wave of my hand, beams of light spread out of the core in the middle. It’s just an illusion I made to better interpret the castle wards. One of the things I made when designing Hogwarts is to give her the ability to turn off certain wards. I had assumed some idiot headmasters would try to add wards that could mess the whole ward scheme up.
What I saw made me frown. Hogwarts’ connection to the castle was flimsy but she was still fine, she was still connected to the ley line, thus still alive and well. Someone used a ward stone as an anchor to create a new ward scheme to be used instead of the original one. Whoever did it obviously wasn’t warder and didn’t have a deep understanding of runes. He basically used Hogwarts’ wards to power his own, draining them of their magic. The only impressive thing was the fact that whoever did it was able to highjack a few of Hogwarts’ superficial wards and since the new wards are still connected to the perpetrator, he could theoretically be able to manually control a single ward for a couple of minutes.
Hogwarts could technically still have access to some of the minor wards but not the powerful ones, and even then, the connection would be very weak. Right now, I can tell that my daughter is sleeping, probably ever since she was taken over, leaving the castle and the students vulnerable. Compared to mine and the founder’s blood wards that stop anyone with negative intent from entering the castle and Hogwarts’ soul ward protecting the students from inside, the castle is barely protected. I can estimate the castle is about as safe as a pureblood household with the extra benefit of absorbing magic from the nexus of seven leylines. Arthur had chosen the location of his castle well. Probably Merlin’s idea in the first place. But now is not the time to reminisce, it’s time for my daughter to awaken from her slumber.
With a wave of my hand, the bright white light started to pulse and suddenly a new hologram, made of light, appeared in front of me. It was a woman, who actually looked like Rowena. I have to say that I’m hurt she chose that form over mine but what can you do?
The woman seemed to be disoriented for a few seconds, then finally noticed that I was present. She snarled and demanded, “Who are you and how did you get inside my room?”
I giggle, “You are the castle, dear. Every room is your room.”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it.” She argued, “This is my space, my personal space, no one should be allowed here. Tell me how you were able get inside here.”
“I got here by using the entrance silly”, I giggle, it’s so fun to annoy people, “I have been here before, long ago, do you truly not recognize me?”
“Anyone who has set foot in this place besides me is dead. Tell me who you are?” she shouted exasperated at my evasiveness.
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“Perhaps you remember me better in this form.” I transform myself to look like Helga and reminisce. I was so limited at the time, chained by fate, by time, afraid to change what is and what could be. I know that I couldn’t change what was already set in stone but sometimes I’m glad for Death’s punishment. If I didn’t have my limitations, even if I didn’t know of them then, I could have destroyed this reality or even a section of the multiverse if I had done it during the mess with Myrddin. I see that now.
I realized a couple of centuries after Hogwarts that being the Master of Death had boons and limitations I didn’t know about. While Death allows me access to a shard of its power when I perform a mission for her, she also grants me an instinctive understanding of the natural laws and how my choices can affect them.
This meant that I somehow knew if my actions can harm reality itself and how to avoid them. I noticed that with the duel with Salazar, something in the back of my mind, like a tingling. Again, with my duel with Myrddin, it was like instinct. And in order to avoid the consequences, my subconscious chose to limit myself temporarily. It took another couple of centuries to actually control this ability.
The duel in Hogwarts must have been between Godric and Salazar. Helena was supposed to betray her mother and die at the hand of the baron. Arthur and Mordred were supposed to kill each other at Camlann. I understood that then and accepted their deaths.
I spent years going through my memories, understanding how much that ability has shaped me over my long life and for the first time in thousands of years I was in control of myself. Later, when I sent my younger self into the past, into Atlantis, the never ending tingling in the back of my mind stopped. The loop was closed and I was finally free from the shackles of fate, free of the constant fear in the back of my mind, that with one wrong action, I could have destroyed the world.
This feeling was like no other, a relief from everything that I lost because they were meant to be. I guess I created Hogwarts because I was getting lonely. There were other immortals out there, but they were often obsessed with some experiments or world domination or something. They did not truly live, they lost all meaning for their lives, choosing to follow a goal instead. Hogwarts isn’t like that, living with young people, getting attached to their lives. Watching them grow and love and fall and rise, she lives to teach them, protect them. That is her purpose, that is her destiny and she knew it from the moment she had become a living being and possessed a soul.
“Mother, is that you?” Hogwarts asked. My heart is breaking from her tearful eyes and hopeful voice.
“Yes, dear. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” I respond.
“MOTHER!!!” She shouted. She ran up to me and leapt into my arms. I hug what is basically an avatar of my daughter, not letting her go, afraid that she would be hurt somehow. I forgot how much I missed her, and underestimated how much I was worried about her.
“My, my, look at you, all grown up. You couldn’t even talk the last time I met you.”
“I learnt it from a wizard that developed some kind of sound magic. I think he became a music composer, If I remember correctly, his name is William Byrd. He invented musical charms to experiment when writing music, sometime in the sixteenth century. I still can’t use magic properly outside this room, the usurper has too much control.”
“Yeah, I saw. Who did this and how could that have happened?”
“I messed up. He was a professor here. I knew him when he was a student and he was brilliant. A little arrogant but still very clever. He had an instinctive understanding of magic seen once or twice every century. Nothing like you or the other founders, but still those tend to be interesting, and I was quite bored. He returned to the castle after he had graduated to take the job as the Transfiguration professor. He was different. He didn’t like the children in Slytherin house and was really cold with them. He tried to be in control over everything. There was this horrible kid, an orphan, truly a monster in the making and all he did was passively threaten and bully him. He purposely ignored bullying and stepped in at the last second to protect the students in his house. He was favoring them, like trying to get them to like him.”
“What was his name?”, I asked, knowing what was probably the answer.
“Albus Dumbledore. His name is Albus Dumbledore. I didn’t know what to do, the houses were never more divided because of him. So, I started to stop what he was trying to do. Small things, like moving the staircases at certain moments, getting Peeves to attack everyone. But he noticed it wasn’t working and assumed there was something in the wards you made that would stop what he did. One night, he performed a ritual to temporarily disable any wards. It could only last a couple of minutes and I was preoccupied with trying to protect the students from Salazar’s basilisk. But two minutes was all he needed to use my wards to power his own. Ever since then, I could barely interact with anything outside. I was barely able to intervene to stop students from dying because of the basilisk, but even then, I failed and a student died. He used my enchantments, your enchantments, to spy on people, learn family secrets. He is in control of everything that happens in this castle. He stopped the malicious magic detection wards and the ones to stop students from getting hurt in the castle. He even stopped the ones that prevented sexual assault on female students. He made sure certain meetings happened, certain couples break up, certain perpetrators stay unpunished. He ruined so many lives, mother. All because he wants to separate the magical community.”
“Why would he want that. What’s his goal?”
“He wants conflict, a big one, like the one fifty years ago. He wants to weaken both sides so that he’ll take over.”
“Chaos is a ladder”, I nod, “This changes my plans quite a bit.”
“What do you mean?”
“I had planned to annoy the man, maybe mess with him. But he hurt you and no one hurts my family and gets away with it. I’ll destroy that man, I will see life slowly crumble around him, his world shatter to pieces. I will destroy his legacy, his life’s work, he shall be known as a traitor and as a coward in history. Then and only then will he have my permission to die.”
Hogwarts looks at me a bit in fear and a bit in gratefulness. Then she shakes her head and frowns, “How are you still alive, and how come you didn’t contact me before? You knew I was alive, even back then you treated me like a person, so why did you never come to see me?”
I gulp, this was gonna take a while and I hope she accepts my explanation.