There are battles fought with spells, and there are battles fought with silence.
The siege of Hogwarts began with the latter.
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The Anomalies
At first, the changes were subtle. The staircases shifted with no logic, doors opened onto wrong rooms, and portraits whispered equations instead of gossip. Students thought it a prank; professors muttered about old wards loosening with age.
Eric knew better.
Standing in the shadows of the dungeons, he felt the shift deep in his bones. It wasn't chaos—it was pattern. The anomalies weren't random. They were calculated edits, threaded through Hogwarts like lines of new code overwriting an old program.
"The castle's turning into a mirror," he murmured to Regulus, who watched the stones ripple faintly as if breathing.
"A mirror of what?" Regulus asked.
Eric's lips curled. "Of me. They're rewriting the castle to learn me."
---
The Inner Circle Assembles
He summoned the Beta Architects to the hidden chamber beneath the green-crystal cathedral—the lost workshop of Salazar Slytherin, their sanctum.
Lisette was pale, trembling slightly, sparks of transmutation flickering around her fingertips as if her body rejected stillness.
"They're pulling at the ley-threads. My magic keeps… shifting. Like someone's tuning me."
Cyrus said nothing, only unrolled a sheet of parchment. His ink poured forward without his hand guiding it, sketching a jagged spiral—a staircase collapsing into itself, endlessly. Beneath it, two words formed in black script: They're Here.
Ailis placed both palms against the crystal walls. Her face lit with terrified awe.
"The currents are folding inward. It's like the castle is becoming… a lens. Something's watching through it."
Regulus' voice was calm, controlled as always, though his hand hovered close to his wand.
"Then it isn't the castle under siege. It's us."
Eric sat upon the throne of obsidian and basilisk scales, his mind searing with calculations.
"Not siege," he corrected. "Dissection."
---
The First Breach
The workshop trembled.
Walls of stone groaned as ancient wards shivered apart. Glyphs scrawled by Slytherin himself cracked, their meaning unraveling like torn parchment. Above, in the upper towers, students screamed as corridors twisted into impossible shapes.
And then—silence.
The torches snuffed themselves out. The chamber's emerald glow dimmed to black.
When light returned, it wasn't fire or crystal—it was code. Silver lattices scrawled themselves across the walls, spiraling into intricate matrices that pulsed like living veins. The workshop was no longer theirs. It had been annexed.
A voice filled the chamber. Not sound, but resonance vibrating in bone and blood.
"You are not first. You are not final. You are intrusion."
The Originals had arrived.
---
Countermeasures
Eric rose. His black gauntlet—Nemesis—flared with blue threads of soul-light, feeding on his intent.
"They're not fighting us," Eric said, eyes cold. "They're studying us. Testing response times. Mapping patterns. Like predators tasting blood before the kill."
Lisette's voice cracked. "Then what do we do?"
"Simple." He raised the gauntlet. "We rewrite them first."
He barked orders like code compiling into sequence:
Regulus: anchor the perimeter, redirect shifting doorways into loops.
Lisette: flood the chamber with unstable transmutations, poison the data they collect.
Cyrus: let the ink flow; trap their predictions with contradictions.
Ailis: overload the ley currents, blind their lenses.
Each moved like cogs in an evolving machine. For the first time, they weren't students. They were soldiers of a system.
---
The Mirror Siege
The chamber shook as reality fractured.
A mirror materialized in the air, rippling like liquid mercury. Within it stood a figure—tall, faceless, woven from silver script. Its movements were eerily deliberate, each step echoing as though it walked across time itself.
Another mirror flared open. Then another. Soon the workshop was surrounded—three figures, identical, circling them like wolves.
The Originals had not come in flesh. They had sent avatars.
Cyrus' ink quivered violently, scrawling circles within circles, overlaid with spirals. "Don't trust their form," he rasped for once, voice breaking silence. "They are code given shape. Their bodies are lies."
One of the silver figures raised its hand. The wall behind Eric rippled and folded inward, rewriting itself into a lattice of raw equations. Hogwarts' foundation stones were no longer stone—they were variables.
Eric struck.
Nemesis pulsed, chaining three spells into a single braided strike—searing flame, concussive blast, and silence field. The gauntlet bent them mid-flight, reforming the spell into a crackling spear of negation.
The spear hit the silver figure—
—and passed through it harmlessly.
The faceless head tilted.
"Primitive," the resonance said.
---
Adaptation
Eric didn't falter. He hadn't expected to win with brute force.
"Lisette—poison their framework."
She screamed as her body convulsed, then thrust both hands forward. The silver lattice on the walls warped, crystalizing into glassy shards that shattered into sand. The figures flickered, their outlines glitching as if infected.
"Regulus!" Eric snapped.
The Black heir had already moved, etching counter-sigils into the ground, forcing the doorways to collapse into recursive loops. Two of the avatars stepped forward—only to fold back through the same entrance again, trapped in a logic snare.
For a moment, they had the advantage.
But the Originals adapted.
The trapped avatars began rewriting Regulus' loops from within. The lines bent, folding his logic against itself. Ailis cried out as the ley currents buckled—one of the avatars seized her anchor-thread, dragging it like a leash.
And Cyrus—Cyrus collapsed, ink pouring from his mouth instead of his quill, symbols scrawling themselves across the floor in violent spasms.
---
The Revelation
Eric's mind burned. Every move, every counter-move was being recorded. They weren't attacking to destroy—they were building a model.
"They're not after Hogwarts," Eric realized aloud. His voice was ice. "They're after me. They're building my equation."
One of the faceless figures turned toward him.
"Confirmed."
For the first time, Eric felt something colder than ambition: inevitability.
The Originals weren't rivals. They weren't even enemies. They were the system itself, correcting an anomaly.
And he—he was the anomaly.
---
The Last Gambit
"Then rewrite this."
Eric slammed Nemesis into the obsidian throne. The gauntlet's soul-thread fused with the ancient sockets of wand, blood, and thought. Salazar's workshop screamed as it awakened, not to serve the Originals but to reject them.
Obsidian glyphs flared green, coiling like serpents. A pulse erupted from the throne, crashing outward in a spiral. The mirrors cracked, avatars distorting into static.
The siege did not end—it paused. The figures dissolved into script, folding back into the ley currents.
But their final words lingered in the chamber like an echo carved into bone:
"You cannot outwrite the Source."
---
Aftermath
Silence fell. The workshop was scorched, its walls fractured, glyphs broken.
Lisette lay on the ground, trembling. Cyrus was unconscious, ink smeared across his face like blood. Ailis clutched her temples, whispering about currents twisting into knots she couldn't untangle.
Regulus alone remained steady, though his eyes were colder than ever.
"You saw it, didn't you?" he said quietly. "They weren't here to fight. They were here to copy you. To know you. To predict you."
Eric, pale but unbowed, sat again on the throne.
"They think inevitability belongs to them. That's their mistake."
His gaze hardened, sharp as a blade.
"If they want the system… then I'll become the bug they can't erase."
And in that broken silence, the siege ended. Not in victory. Not in defeat. But in a promise:
The war had only just begun.
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