The morning after the midnight duel was thick with unspoken tension. News travelled through Gryffindor Tower with the speed of a lit fuse: Potter, Weasley, Granger, and Longbottom had lost Gryffindor a staggering fifty points each. Two hundred points, vanished in a single night. The collective groan of the House was a palpable thing. The four of them were pariahs, ostracized at the breakfast table, glared at in the common room.
Ariana observed the fallout with the detached air of a sociologist studying group dynamics. It was, as she had predicted, a self-correcting problem with natural consequences. Harry and Ron were sullen and defensive. Neville was terrified. But it was Hermione who reacted most strangely.
Her initial "I told you so" attitude quickly curdled into something else, something sharper and more personal. Her frustration and embarrassment at being caught seemed to require an outlet, and since Harry and Ron were her co-conspirators, she turned the full force of her indignation on the one person who had refused to be drawn in.
"If you had just come with us, or at least tried to talk them out of it properly, none of this would have happened!" she hissed at Ariana as they walked to Herbology, her voice a low, furious buzz. "You just sat there. You didn't care at all!"
"Caring would not have altered the outcome," Ariana replied calmly, not breaking her stride. "Their decision was made. My presence would only have resulted in an additional fifty-point deduction for Gryffindor."
"That's not the point!" Hermione retorted, her face flushed. "The point is loyalty! The point is friendship! We're all in the same House! We're supposed to stick together!"
Ariana stopped and turned, her periwinkle eyes coolly assessing the overwrought girl. "Loyalty is not synonymous with enabling poor judgment, Hermione. Friendship does not require participation in strategically unsound ventures. They made a choice. They are now experiencing the consequences. That is the nature of learning."
The cold, impeccable logic of it seemed to incense Hermione even more. This became her new refrain. For days, she found ways to criticize Ariana. It was no longer about the duel; it was about everything. Ariana's quietness was aloofness. Her perfect spellwork was showing off. Her advanced reading was an arrogant refusal to engage with her peers. It was a relentless barrage of petty complaints and pointed remarks, a clear manifestation of Hermione's own insecurity and a budding jealousy towards a girl who seemed to achieve with effortless grace what Hermione had to fight tooth and nail for.
Ariana endured it all with the serene indifference of a mountain weathering a summer squall. Hermione's emotional outbursts were data points, symptoms of an intellect that had not yet learned to govern its own anxieties. She was a tangled knot of potential and insecurity, and Ariana had neither the time nor the inclination to untangle her.
The tension came to a head on Halloween morning, in Charms class. The lesson was the Levitation Charm, Wingardium Leviosa. Professor Flitwick, perched on his customary pile of books, demonstrated the "swish and flick" wand movement with gusto. The students were paired off to practice on feathers.
"Wing-gar-dium Levi-o-sar," Ron snapped his wand, waving his arms around like a windmill. "."
"You're saying it wrong yourself!" Hermione retorted, her voice tight with frustration. Her feather was lying stubbornly on the desk. "It's Levi-o-sa, not Levio-sar! Make the 'gar' nice and long"
Beside them, Ariana watched the feather on her own desk. She didn't bother with the swish and flick, a physical mnemonic for those who couldn't grasp the pure Intentio. She simply focused her will, visualizing the feather lifting, weightless and compliant, and whispered, "Wingardium Leviosa."
Her feather rose gracefully into the air. It didn't just float; it danced. With minute, silent
applications of her will, she made it perform a slow, elegant pirouette, then trace a perfect figureeight in the air above her desk before bringing it to a gentle, motionless hover. It was another display of silent, effortless mastery.
Professor Flitwick clapped his tiny hands in delight. "Superb! Another masterclass in charm-work, Miss Dumbledore!"
Ron, witnessing this, let out a groan of frustration, coupled with Hermione's nagging. "No wonder she hasn't got any friends," he muttered to Harry, loud enough for Hermione—and Ariana—to hear. "She's a nightmare, honestly."
The words struck Hermione like a physical blow. Her face crumpled. She shoved her books into her bag, and with a choked sob, she ran from the classroom.
The rest of the class fell into an awkward silence. Ron looked slightly guilty but mostly defiant. Harry looked uncomfortable. Ariana, however, was already running a different set of calculations. She knew what was coming. She knew from the story that Hermione would spend the rest of the day crying in the girls' lavatory. She knew a troll would be let into the dungeons during the Halloween feast. She knew Quirrell was the culprit. And she knew that Harry and Ron, upon realizing Hermione didn't know about the troll, would go after her, resulting in a confrontation that would cement their friendship.
This was a key nexus point in the timeline. The original story required that confrontation. It required Harry and Ron to save Hermione.
But Ariana had a different set of priorities. Her first priority was mitigating unnecessary risk to Harry. Sending him, an untrained eleven-year-old, to fight a fully grown mountain troll was a fundamentally stupid and dangerous idea, regardless of the outcome in the books. Her second priority was her own developing objective: to test her abilities against a significant, tangible threat in a controlled environment. The troll was a perfect opportunity. It was a problem that required a decisive, powerful solution.
She needed to isolate Harry from the situation, and she needed a valid, unassailable reason for her own absence from the feast. The two problems had a single, elegant solution.
After Charms class, as students began chattering excitedly about the feast, Ariana approached Harry. Ron had already stomped off, still muttering about Hermione.
"Harry," she said, her voice soft, pulling him away from the flow of traffic in the corridor.
"Oh, hi, Ariana," he said, looking slightly distracted.
"I was thinking," she began, her expression serene, but her periwinkle eyes holding a rare, gentle warmth that was reserved almost exclusively for him. "Today is Halloween. It was… the day your parents died, wasn't it?"
Harry froze. The excited buzz of the school faded into a distant hum. No one had ever mentioned the anniversary to him before. The Dursleys certainly hadn't. His friends, caught up in the novelty of a magical Halloween, hadn't even thought of it. For the first time, someone was acknowledging the deep, personal sorrow of the day, not just the public legend of the Boy Who Lived.
"Yes," he said, his voice barely a whisper.
"A feast and a celebration… it doesn't seem appropriate," Ariana continued gently. "I was
wondering if perhaps you would prefer to skip it. We could go to the kitchens, get some food there. And then maybe… we could go up to the Owlery. And you could tell me about them. What you know of them."
The offer was a lifeline. He had been dreading the loud, cheerful feast, the forced jollity that would feel so hollow on a day like this. He had been planning to endure it, to put on a brave face. The thought of spending a quiet evening in remembrance, with the one person who seemed to understand him without needing explanations, was an overwhelming relief.
It was an act of profound, intuitive kindness. And it was also, in Ariana's coolly logical mind, a perfectly executed strategic move.
"I… yeah," Harry said, his voice thick with emotion. "I'd like that. I'd like that a lot. Thank you, Ariana."
"Of course," she said. "We can meet in the Entrance Hall when everyone else goes into the feast."