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The incense in Professor Babbling's private chamber always smelled like a contradiction—sweet and bitter at the same time, like memory laced with regret. It hung in the air alongside burning runes and glowing parchment, an aroma that had seeped into every surface and layer of stone in this forgotten room beneath the Charms corridor. Rows of half-burned sigil charts hung from enchanted frames, pulsing faintly with unfinished enchantments. Runes spiraled up the walls — layered in languages older than language, all shimmering faintly beneath wards designed to repel the curious and the unworthy.
This wasn't a classroom. It was a sanctum. A forge.
And tonight, I was the metal.
Professor Babbling circled me like a hawk studying a wounded prey, wand and rune-knife in hand, both glinting with experimental enchantments. Her eyes burned with the sort of focus that came from too much knowledge and not nearly enough sleep.
Something I'm sure I'll start having too, what with the woman's need to plan these classes post dinner, often going late into the night.
Originally, I had expected a class or two during the weekends with plenty of homework, or worse, for the woman to just drown me in pointless trivia of rune work until a year or two had passed, before even beginning to teach me the real stuff I wanted from her. Instead, she had scheduled as many as four sessions every week - after dinner — to work with me for hours while she worked on her own scripts. It did cut into my Hermione-time, but the occasional breaks did let me swim in the dreams of the students all around.
I sat cross-legged in the middle of the rune-etched circle, tracing Elder Futhark on stone with a wand of elm soaked in basilisk venom — her idea of a training aid. The slab before me bore concentric rings of runic scaffolds: Tiwaz, Gebo, Isa, and Thurisaz, flaring faintly with retained energy.
"I asked you to stabilize a dual-bind using Isa and Uruz," Babbling said, voice sharp and clipped. "You didn't. You built something completely different."
"It held," I said, not looking up. "The energy didn't escape."
"That's not the point!" she snapped, rounding me again. "You stabilized it using a Thurisaz push-rune and Tiwaz inversion. That's war-magic, Potter. Combat-bindings. That's not how you work structure."
I shrugged. "It just felt... familiar. Like I've seen it before somewhere. The shapes fit together like puzzle pieces."
She paused mid-step, eyeing me carefully. "And yet you didn't recognize that Tiwaz inverts the directional flow when paired with Isa unless paired with Sowilo?"
I shook my head. "I knew it worked. I didn't fully know why."
Babbling groaned. "You're like a Rosetta Stone scribbled by a mad god. You know combinations that shouldn't be possible for a student your age, but you don't understand the fundamental mechanics."
"That's why I'm here," I said, finally looking up.
She sighed and pointed toward the northern wall. "Up. We're going back to the roots."
I stood, legs stiff, but my mind was humming with unfinished patterns.
With a sweep of her wand, Babbling cleared the board and began sketching foundational Elder Futhark forms — Fehu, Ansuz, Kenaz, Raidho. The arrangement glowed faintly, reacting to her touch as she underlined anchoring lines.
"This," she said, tapping the middle, "is the Runic Tree of Casting. Every ward, trap, seal, and enhancement flows from its logic. I don't care what you've intuited — if you don't know this, you're dancing in a thunderstorm with an iron rod."
I stepped forward. Something about the symmetry of the runes felt familiar — as if I'd stood at the edge of this pattern before, half-blind and frostbitten.
"Which rune begins alignment?" she asked.
"Ansuz," I replied. "The breath of intention. The rune of divine speech."
She nodded once. "Containment?"
"Isa. If stillness is needed. Eiwaz if you need internal anchoring and transitional layering."
She arched her brow. "And instability in resonance?"
"Laguz. But only if emotional pressure is involved. If not, you redirect through Sowilo."
Now she looked almost delighted. "You're speaking like a runesmith, Potter."
I gave a modest shrug. "Doesn't mean I understand it all. Just that... it fits together. Like remembering a song I've never heard."
She paced again, slower this time. "That's because your instinct is ahead of your education. You've seen results without absorbing theory. You need context. Not shortcuts."
I nodded. "Then take me deeper."
She did.
We spent over an hour walking through bind-logic and stabilization lines. I learned to construct compound forms from the ground up using Jera-Ingwaz loops and Perthro-Berkano dampeners. We tested compatibility pairings: Mannaz-Eiwaz-Gebo, Tiwaz-Algiz, Raidho-Kenaz, and more.
At one point, she tossed me a crumbling matrix fragment—seven runes crammed into an unstable triangle. "Fix it."
I studied it briefly. "The Thurisaz is misaligned. It's positioned as a conduit without Sowilo for heat balance. It is consuming the energy it should protect."
Babbling blinked, then laughed—genuine and just a little manic. "Correct."
She clapped once. "You're not guessing, are you?"
"Sometimes I am," I admitted. "But most of the time, it's like walking through a house I've only visited in dreams."
Babbling was not amused.
By the time I left her chambers, the castle had long gone quiet. The torches burned low in their sconces, mimicking my movements a heartbeat too late. I moved slowly through the corridors, my fingers brushing the cold stone wall as I passed.
There was a feeling of expectation in the air. The kind of hush you get just before a prophecy is spoken, or a name is drawn from a flame.
The Goblet of Fire still pulsed in the Great Hall, even if I couldn't use it. Its magic had leaked into the very bones of the castle. Shimmering. Feeding off the school's emotions like a vampire in a ballroom. I could feel its presence even when I wasn't near the Great Hall. It didn't just want names. It wanted ambition. It wanted conflict. It wanted a climax.
I could feel the threads. Some students writhed with ambition. Others pulsed with anxiety. A few shivered in fear.
They might be sleeping, but their dreams were mightily loud.
The feels, the structure, in the way a person's subconscious chooses where to build a door and where to leave a wall unguarded. Some students dreamed like children — messy, loose, full of colour and contradiction. Others dreamed like prisoners — sparse, repetitive, always circling the same memory, the same fear.
The Spindle stirred inside me, echoing faintly, as if tasting the emotional cocktail drifting through Hogwarts like incense. Even as I walked, I shifted from one dream-thread to another— no spell, no chant, just will and the map I'd been building every night since the start of term.
Parvati's dream had been all silk and suspicion — a ballroom of mirrors and whispered conversations she couldn't quite understand. Seamus dreamed about teeth. Draco's dreams were bloodless, pristine. Sterile, really. But he still built a throne at the centre of them, even if no one ever came to kneel.
Susan Bones dreamed of me — always me. Her obsession with me was pinpointed, like an unsheathed blade. Just a little tug here and there, and she could become my Bellatrix. The redhead packed quite the bit of punch behind her spells, but it was really her obsession at proving herself on par, if not better than her aunt that made her interesting.
Romilda Vane? Her dreams were velvet and hunger. She wanted me. More than a notch up her belt. That made her easy to bait, and dangerous to trust. Lavender? Wrapped up in her own self-perception. Beautiful to look at, like a rosebush grown in a glasshouse full of mirrors.
They were all being shaped — by fear, by ambition, by that burning, whispering chalice in the Hall.
It was becoming harder to charm my way through the castle.
Not impossible. Just… harder.
The passive charm of an incubus — that warm, slow pull that made people lean closer without knowing why — it still worked. In theory. But theory was a fragile thing in a place like Hogwarts, where walls had ears and portraits had memory.
Where Dumbledore had spies.
Dumbledore was waiting for me to slip. Waiting for me to use my incubus powers. Properly. Actively. He was too smart to corner me outright. He wouldn't stop me. He'd simply wait, build pressure, stir the fire from behind the scenes. Let the student body fracture further and further, watching me stand in the center of it all.
Because if the castle was breaking — if factions were forming, tempers rising, whispers sharpening — it would make my options simpler. The ones who hated me, the ones who adored me, and the ones in the middle.
The fence-sitters.
He was serving me bait. To start choosing sides. To flare my Allure in the common room. To walk down a hallway and make someone confess something they didn't mean to. To touch a shoulder, say a word, and leave someone enchanted. Pressing my influence. Dominating a faction and crushing dissent before it had time to think.
He wanted to see it. Study it. And then he'd use them to confirm the parallels his mind drew between me and Tom Riddle.
So I didn't use the charm — not like that. Not in the waking world. Not with eyes watching.
I was waiting. Waiting until I could learn to finally navigate the powers of Lecherous Shrine in dreams. A realm where there were no witnesses.
There, I could charm. I could tempt. I could influence as slowly or violently as I liked. And no one would see. No portraits. No house-elves. No omniscient Headmasters with phoenixes perched over their shoulders.
Just me. And them. Naked minds. Vulnerable souls.
That's where I'd play the game.
Where the eyes couldn't follow.
The air in the alley had that damp weight it got just before the autumn rain — heavy, but scented with cinnamon from the bakery across the lane. Emmeline stirred her tea clockwise, out of habit, watching Harry across the table, as he fiddled with a cup of something citrus and strange.
He hadn't said much.
She was doing most of the talking — summarising the last forty-eight hours like she was filing a report.
"...So the Director went straight to the Department of Mysteries," she said, tone clipped. 'Used her rank. Her badge. Even her damn wand. And they shut her out cold. Refused her access to Goblet records, or anything to do with its history of enchantment. Claimed it was classified."
Harry raised an eyebrow. "Above hers?"
She nodded. "Which is absurd. The Director of Magical Law Enforcement doesn't get barred from magical artifact assessments unless someone high up wants her gone."
He didn't interrupt. That was rare.
"So we shifted focus. If they won't let us near the Goblet, we target the ones who brought it. Bagman's the softest one — no mental shields, no discipline, and always three steps behind the lie he just told."
Emmeline leaned back, exhaling. "Hestia's already working on his recent Gringotts transactions. Bagman is a known hustler and gambler. We might have something to blackmail him with. The Director is also looking for leverage. Honestly, the only issue is that as a fellow organiser, there will be eyes on the fool."
"Dumbledore's."
"Yes, and we'd like to avoid that."
"What sort of information are you expecting to find? I mean, the Triwizard was supposed to happen anyway."
She took another sip. "The Director thinks that Voldemort might have had an ulterior reason behind getting you into the tournament back in your timeline."
"But Voldemort is…."
"Sealed away, but that didn't stop him from possessing her and Granger," said Emmeline. "Her words, not mine."
Harry opened his mouth to say something, but then likely reconsidered it. After several moments of silence, he said. "I might have a way to get that done. Ballsy, but it just might work. Maybe, on someone much higher up on the chain than Bagman."
Another sip. "Do share."
"Remember that night at the party? When everything went south, and then, I got my hands on this relic called Oneiros Spindle?"
"Barely," she admitted. She had brief flashes of Harry looming over, wings as large as angels and crimson as desire itself. She remembered him showing her the pleasures of the flesh unlike anything she had ever before. She faintly remembered him mentioning a Relic, and warning them that it would require donating some of their power, and then —
Darkness.
"What is it?"
"This."
It didn't appear so much as arrive. One instant, Harry's hand was empty. The next — reality folded.
Between his thumb and forefinger, something floated. No flash, no sound. Just presence. A sudden, absolute wrongness wrapped in elegance.
At first, her mind flinched.
The object wasn't shaped so much as implied — a spindle-like form that somehow existed in full view yet refused to obey perspective. It appeared tiny — thumb-sized, delicate — and yet she couldn't focus on where it ended. Her vision bent around it like it had depth in the wrong directions.
A four-dimensional object, suspended in three-dimensional space.
Her stomach turned.
The spindle glimmered, shifting layers of midnight black, smoke-violet, and iridescent silver that flickered like stars caught mid-death. Along its surface ran images, symbols, faces — too fast to process, too slow to ignore. Each glimpse suggested she almost understood them — and then the understanding recoiled violently, like a hand from fire.
Emmeline clutched her temples.
Her Occlumency shields warped, humming as if under pressure from the inside. Her mind wanted to make sense of it. Assign structure. Categorize. But the more she tried, the more the shape of her thoughts twisted.
Her heartbeat accelerated. The room felt wrong. Gravity flirted with her sideways.
And then the sound began.
Not music. Not a vibration either. It was akin to a hum layered with whispers — as if time itself was speaking, but in reverse and from below. A heartbeat stretched through sleep. A language of dreams that predated language.
And he just held it there — witnessing it.
"What is..." she choked, eyes watering. "Harry, what is this thing?"
"The Spindle," he said, voice reverent. "The thread that binds all dreams. The gate. The lock. The wound."
It didn't make sense. And yet she knew it was true.
Emmeline staggered a step back. She wasn't afraid — not exactly. Fear was a human reaction.
This was something else.
She forced herself to look at it again. Forced her Occlumency to stabilize, her breath to slow. Her will to return.
But even stabilized, even compartmentalized — she knew she would never forget the way space bent when the Spindle moved. The way her mind had tried to build a fourth wall of logic — and failed.
This wasn't magic.
This was something deeper than magic.
And Harry — Harry Potter — was holding it like a child might hold a dying star.
Emmeline looked back up at him.
He hadn't changed. Same face. Same steady gaze. But he looked… distant. The way mountains looked distant even when you stood atop them. Like he was rooted in something far larger, something that stretched through dreams and time and gods.
She exhaled.
"You're not using magic, Harry," she said. "You're using something else entirely."
Harry tilted his head, the Spindle still rotating in the space between his fingers, casting glimmers into the air that bent away from them as though afraid.
"I'm using what was given to me," he said. "Or maybe what was always mine."
'But what can it do?" she breathed. "What… is it?"
"A relic of Dream itself," Harry said. "It doesn't just allow passage. It governs the architecture of dreaming. Not like the way prophecies work, I think. This is... raw dream logic, compressed into a spine — a pivot around which everything subconscious turns."
He rotated it once in the air. Space rippled.
"I found it — or maybe it found me — when I first stepped too deeply into the unconscious world. Since then, I've learned to use it. I can use it to enter dreams, thread them. Interlink them. Shape and structure them. If I've understood it right, it's the door, the key, the lock and the map to every mind on Earth."
Her mouth ran dry.
"I don't really know how to explain how it feels, Emmeline," he said, a tinge of reverence in his own voice. "Here at Hogwarts, it's like a vast web of dreams and dreamers. And I'm the spider, crawling into their minds, touching the depths of their subconscious, playing with it, sometimes trying to leave something behind. Take a memory. Alter a reaction. Wake them up none the wiser."
"Because once you wake up, the dream dissipates."
"Exactly. We spend roughly a third of our lives sleeping, and in sleep, we dream. Subconscious inspiration and creation that happens every day, in every sleeping mind in the world. And yet, we remember none of it."
Emmeline frowned. Something about his words brought forth a seemingly normal event she had witnessed happen several times over the past few days. "Harry, by any chance, did you try that on the Director?"
A lopsided grin formed on his face. "You figured that out instantly, huh?"
"I'm assuming it was to test for any lingering remnants of His influence."
He nodded. "I needed to make sure she wasn't compromised. I entered her dreams night after night. Slipped into her subconscious, whispered riddles in the dark, and handed her clues she'd forget upon waking. Necromancy. Ancient spells. Lore about incubi. My past life. In some dreams, I shared things even you don't know. In others, I revealed facts that would make Voldemort scream in rage."
"And?"
"She's clean."
Emmeline shook her head slowly. "She's had nightmares. I thought it was just the stress from the Ministry."
"She never remembers, does she?"
"No," Emmeline admitted. "Only fragments. She told me once it was like walking into a room and forgetting why you entered it."
She paused. "Harry… are you seriously considering employing this… technique on Ludo Bagman?"
"Do you have a better idea in mind?"
"No, but there's like a hundred different things that could go wrong, here. I mean, have you actually ever extracted any detail from people that they don't want to reveal?"
"...sometimes?"
"Not good enough," Emmeline told him flatly. "And there's a stark difference between infiltrating the subconscious of a teenager at school with hormonal cesspools for minds, and a working Ministry bureaucrat. Not to mention the hundreds of confidentiality oaths, consents for self-obliviation, and memory-blanks that they have."
"It's Ludo Bagman."
"And he's in charge of the tournament," Emmeline stressed. "I can bet you my wand arm that he's been strung through a dozen different vows to prevent him from betraying any secret. What did I tell you? The Department of Mysteries refused to entertain the bloody DMLE Director. Think they'll let Ludo Bagman just blabber away like that?"
"He isn't exactly blabbering. It's —"
"In a dream, yes," said Emmeline, fisting her hands. "But Harry, it's the same as performing Legilimency on a prisoner. You go into their mindspace, past whatever protections they have in place, and extract information. Even in a dream, you cannot allow him to be lucid enough to willingly break his oaths. His magic would prevent that. The only way to go about doing it would be to create a setting where your target believes he is not breaking any oaths in the first place while also giving away the information you want."
Brown eyes met green.
"But then, you already know that, don't you?"
Slowly, a small grin began to form on his lips, the frown vanishing completely. "Yes."
Emmeline rolled her eyes. "What do you want from me?"
"It's like you said," Harry laughed. "I need to create a setting where my target believes he's not breaking any vows, not countering any magic he might have been subjected to, yet give me what I want. So I need an Architect to design and create that for me."
Emmeline narrowed her eyes. "I —"
"Look," said Harry. "I'm way out of my league, here. You're a sixth-level Occlumens and a seventh-tier Legilimens. You know more about psychic architecture than anybody else I know, except for, maybe, Amelia herself, but she isn't a Lilim like you are."
"So? I thought you said she's clean."
"She is, but there are advantages to being a Lilim. I can pull my Lilims into my Lecherous Shrine, so that we can plan, enchant and discuss things together. I believe the powers of the Shrine will also allow you — and the others, to remember everything that transpires in our meetings."
"You mean, in our dreams."
"...Yes."
Emmeline gave his idea some more thought. "Still, creating even a rudimentary mental landscape takes days, if not weeks of effort. To do so in just dreams is…"
"They say that we only use a fraction of our mind's true potential. That's when we're awake. When we're asleep, our minds can do nearly anything."
"Such as?" She asked, taking a sip.
"Well, let's take constructing a mental landscape for instance. You take your time, and design each aspect. But sometimes, it feels like it's almost creating itself, if you know what I mean."
"Yes, like I'm discovering it."
"Genuine inspiration, right?" At her nod, she said. "Now in our dreams, our mind continuously does this. We create and perceive our world simultaneously. And our mind does this so perfectly that we don't even recognize it. And that allows me, or rather you, to get right in the middle of that process."
"How?"
"By taking over the creative part. See you, create the world of the dream. Being inside the Shrine will give you all sorts of tools to work with. I'll bring the subject into that dream, and they will fill it with their subconscious."
Emmeline could practically see it in her mind. It would be a theoretical reversal of her day job. Instead of finding ways to intrude past the mental defences of others, she would be willingly allowing someone else to enter into her own. Only, it wouldn't be her mindscape, but a psychic construction of a real-world scenery to dupe them.
Ensnare them in. Let them think the world was theirs, and only she would know that it was hers.
How very like an incubus to be able to design such an intrusive skill for espionage! Still, that raised another issue —
"How could I ever… acquire enough detail to make them think that it's reality?"
"Well, dreams… they feel real while we are in them, don't they? It's only when we wake up that we realize that something was actually strange," he trailed off. A flicker of amusement sparked in his eyes.
"Let me ask you a question. Do you ever remember the start of a dream?"
"No, you always wind up, right in the middle of what's going on."
"So how did we end up here?"
"Well, we just came from the… uh…"
The breeze shifted, but none of the storefront signs moved. The people walking past weren't walking around them. They blurred, like memories she hadn't formed yet.
She glanced down. The silver spoon beside her saucer didn't reflect anything.
Her skin prickled.
"Think about it, Emmeline, how did you get in here? Where are you right now?"
The question pierced her like a needle of ice.
How had they gotten here?
They hadn't walked. Hadn't Apparated. Hadn't even stood up.
Her breath caught.
Where was she? What was this place? How did she even get here?
The sound came first — a low, resonant tremor, like the groaning of a glacier calving into the sea. Her teacup cracked without warning. Liquid hovered, suspended in the air like mercury, before shattering into shards of light.
The cobblestones beneath their table began to ripple, each brick loosening from its mortar and lifting slowly — not falling, but rising. Like gravity had forgotten its duty. The shopfronts bowed inward, their signs twisting into fluid symbols that melted into the sky.
"We're dreaming?"
"You're actually in the middle of your first lesson right now on shared dreaming. Right now, another version of me explaining the same to Hestia, so stay calm."
Easier said than done. Emmeline did everything she could to reassert her Occlumency, raising multiple layers to shield her mind from the underlying layer of panic that had gripped it.
Emmeline stood up as the café's walls peeled back like scrolls burned from the edges inward. The sun above pulsed, then shattered, fragmenting into countless mirrored slivers that drifted upward instead of down. The crowds vanished like smoke sucked through a keyhole. The alley unraveled in pieces — street signs curling in on themselves, doors spinning off their hinges like feathers, the wrought-iron lamp posts disassembling into golden glyphs. Then, like sand caught in a reversed hourglass, everything around her began to dissolve — not into dust, but into streamers of thought and color.
A soft wind rose. But there were no leaves. No papers. It was the sound of pages unwriting themselves.
And in the center of it all stood Harry, Spindle in his hand glowing like the eye of a god.
She turned — and the entire street folded upward like a book snapping shut.
Darkness, silence, and then —
Emmeline sprang upright, and found herself on her bed, still in her nightdress, panting like she had just been through a marathon. And in front of her, on the opposite bed, sat Hestia, with an annoyingly knowing smile on her face.
"Because a dream isn't just a dream, is it?" said Hestia.
Emmeline just gasped.