Hermione read the file twice, then a third time, as if a fourth might change the pale facts on the page. The Department of Mysteries always had that way of making the impossible feel bureaucratic—neatly labeled, catalogued, contained—until it wasn't.
"The descriptions match the Ministry reports," James said, voice low. "Temporal distortions, people who come back wrong, artifacts that…remember futures that never happened. Someone's been trying to stitch history into something else."
Hermione put a hand to her forehead. "If the Time Devil is—" she stopped herself. Titles were dangerous. Names gave shape to fear. "If this is happening, we need layers: wards, anchors, and someone to track the anomalies as they occur."
"And we need to protect Nova," James said. "She's mentioned in the files. She's…important."
Hermione's expression softened, but her jaw tightened. "Important or not, we can't overreact and make her a target by isolating her. We'll need subtlety. Temporary wards, memory-safe communication, a small watch that won't be obvious to whoever's watching."
James swallowed. "Who do we tell? Teddy? Kingsley? We can't let Ministry-wide panic start another—"
Hermione's eyes were already at work, cataloguing possibilities. "Teddy will help. Kingsley…we'll tell him only if we have to. For now, a vetted circle: Teddy, you, me, and a discreet Auror liaison. And I'll call McGonagall. Hogwarts is probably already sensing this—"
At Hogwarts, the castle's disorientation had found a new rhythm: not random glitches, but a stuttering pattern, like a skipping record. The candlelight stuttered in consistent beats. Staircases moved at odd fixed intervals. The portraits' whispers repeated the same two phrases over and over, as if stuck on a loop.
Rose and Albus argued over the parchment in the library, their heads bent close.
"If it's echoing," Scorpius said, half to himself, "then something—someone—keeps trying to replay an event. Maybe the castle remembers the same moment again and again."
"Which moment?" Albus asked. "When? Who?"
"Minerva's last recorded lecture? A duel? A failed ward?" Rose's handwriting had grown frantic, tiny stars dotting the margins.
"Look." Scorpius tapped a marginal note in an old defence history that Rose had pulled down—a scribble left by some long-gone student: Do not let the clock run without witness. The ink had bled with age.
Meanwhile, Nova knew, in the slow creep of the night, that the watching was getting closer. It wasn't constant now; it came in slices—silver sparks across the sill, a soft metallic scent in the air, the feeling that the stars had rearranged themselves to see her.
She didn't tell anyone. Hufflepuff comfort was a fragile thing, and she didn't want pity. Instead she began to practice small charms she'd learned in case she needed them: dampening circles, whispers that made footprints faint, a looped knot charm that would hold a door closed even against time's mischances. Her fingers worked at the knots while her mind traced the sketches James had found in the file—golden-brown hair, silver eyes—and tried to find a face in the half-memory.
Back at the Ministry, Teddy found James and Hermione hunched over the same stack of files. He read the phrase aloud, the way people read poetry in beds of bad news: "Seeks the Five. Already affected two. One remains uncorrupted."
Teddy's face went hard. "We need to keep that one uncorrupted. That's Nova, isn't it? She's still with us."
Hermione nodded. "We create anchors. We thread them into people who can hold time steady: trusted Professors at Hogwarts—McGonagall, Flitwick, maybe Longbottom. We teach the children subtle anchors—songs, lines of text, tokens that are hard to tamper with."
"And what about the castle?" James asked. "If the Time Devil is making the place remember… how do you stop a building from believing the wrong thing?"
Hermione's mouth curved into a tired smile. "You give it a better memory. You feed it the correct sequence. You tether it to something immutable. And you keep eyes on the places where time bends most: stairwells, portrait galleries, the library, and the Shard Vault if the rumours about it are true."
Teddy took off his coat and shoved his hands in his pockets. "We'll need help on the ground. James—you go to Hogwarts. Be careful. Don't make a spectacle. Don't talk about the Time Devil unless absolutely necessary. You'll speak to McGonagall, tell her about temporal anchors, and blend it into standard precautionary measures."
James found his courage in the corner of Hermione's office, the corner where family photos and small, human clutter softened the world. "I can do that," he said. "I'll—"
He didn't have to finish. Hermione gave him a stack of instructions, a locket with a protective charm, and, beneath it, an old scrap of parchment with one line written in Minerva's hand: Stay grounded. Stay in the light.
At Hogwarts, the torches guttered and the corridors hummed, and a new entry appeared in Rose's list that none of them could explain:
—The clock in the West Tower stuck at 11:17. Time feels heavy there. Avoid leaving alone after dark.
That night, in the West Tower, the grandfather clock ticked a single, metallic tick that sounded wrong—not out of place, but out of sequence. The hands trembled, counting something no one else could see.
Down below, in the Hufflepuff dormitory, Nova slept with the looped knot charm in her pocket. She dreamed of a corridor lined with clocks, each face flashing different scenes, none of which were hers. When she woke, she found a single silver hair on her pillow.
She picked it up, heart thudding, and for a split second she thought she saw movement in the window—an undulation that resolved into a girl, far away and somehow overlapping with the night: golden-brown hair, eyes like molten coins, a smile that felt like frost.
Nova blinked. The figure was gone.
In the Ministry, the same second, a single page in the Temporal Anomalies file fluttered on its own and snapped shut. James's pen trembled in his hand. The words he'd underlined minutes earlier seemed to pulse: The Devil is watching.
And somewhere, maybe in a stitch between an old yesterday and a newer tomorrow, something that called itself the Time Devil turned its head and took particular notice of a Hufflepuff who had slept with an old knot charm in her pocket.
The game had begun.