Harry stood in the Gryffindor line with Neville at his shoulder and kept his hands still.
The Great Hall had taught him how to hold posture. The Black Manor had taught him why it mattered.
To their right, Hufflepuff kept a tighter formation than it used to. Ravenclaw stood quiet, eyes lifted toward the sky. Slytherin looked like they were waiting for inspection, which meant they probably were. The faculty had placed them in rows that could be read by any visitor with a sense for discipline.
Visitors were coming from Beauxbatons Academy of Magic and Durmstrang Institute.
The Tournament had returned, and Hogwarts was being watched again.
Harry looked past the students to the lake and let memory run back to September 1993. He could still remember the first time he saw the castle under the light of the moon, like a promise and a warning. He could still feel the excitement of that moment.
He breathed out softly.
His personal life had changed, but not in the way people liked to dramatise. He had friends. He had parental figures who were present. He had a godfather who paced like a caged animal and refused to talk about certain subjects. None of that compared to what had happened outside the grounds.
Witches and wizards were not hidden anymore.
Mana users were the new term, and the mundane world used it with the same ease it once used the word myth.
Harry's mouth tightened as he remembered seeing Professor LaSombra on television.
A vampire duchess sitting under studio lights and speaking with the neat confidence of a historian. The broadcasters had treated her like a novelty, then like an authority. The public had eaten it up.
He wondered, not for the first time, whether that had been Heir Black's idea.
Corvus had become a shadow in his life since the Animagus ritual at the end of his third year. Sirius never gave details. Sirius only repeated the same line when pressed.
Something big is coming.
Something to shake the world we know to its roots.
Harry had stopped asking after the third attempt. Sirius's eyes always went cold, and Alice always watched Harry as if he was picking at a wound.
Neville shifted his weight and glanced toward the horizon.
Harry followed the look.
A shape appeared in the sky, distant at first, then growing. It moved fast enough to make younger students fidget.
Headmistress Rosier stepped forward. Her robe hem did not stir despite the wind.
"The Beauxbatons will arrive by carriage," her voice carried cleanly over the lines. "And Durmstrang arrives by a ship. You will not gawk like tourists."
A few fourth years swallowed. Harry kept his face neutral.
The flying carriage descended in a controlled glide and settled with a soft thud that sent a tremor through the ground. A door opened.
Madame Olympe Maxime stepped down first.
Her size made Harry feel smaller. Her posture made him feel irrelevant. She surveyed the lines with the calm of a woman used to being obeyed.
Her students followed in ordered elegance. Their uniforms looked warmer than Hogwarts robes and far better tailored.
Then a blonde stepped into view.
Harry felt something brush the edge of his mind like warm breath. It did not break him. It did not even sway him properly. It still made his occlumency tighten on reflex.
Around him, the younger years reacted worse.
First and second years stared too long. A handful of third years forgot how to blink. In the upper years, the ones with the luxury of occlumency held their shields and forced their eyes forward. Most succeeded while some failed quietly.
The blonde noticed anyway. Her gaze skimmed the lines and held a small amusement.
Two rows down the line, Baboon Weasley forgot how to breathe.
His mouth parted. His shoulders drifted forward as if something had hooked him by the collar. He took one step without meaning to.
A prefect behind him hissed his name.
Ronald did not respond.
The allure pressed harder against him than it had against anyone else. His habit of calling everything he could not understand Dark Magic has cost him learning Occlumency as well. A flush crawled up his ears and into his hairline. He lifted a hand in a vague attempt at what might have been a wave.
Fleur's eyes passed over him without pause.
The dismissal hit harder than the allure.
Ron blinked as if waking from a dream and realised most of Gryffindor and Hufflepuff had seen him. His jaw snapped shut. He folded his arms and tried to look like he had meant to stand that way all along.
Harry did not comment. Neville leaned in again, voice barely controlled. "Is she the Veela?"
Harry kept his voice low. "I think so, better clamp down those shields."
Neville nodded and followed the advice.
The lake bubbled after a moment.
At first, it looked like a disturbance. Then the surface split as something wooden and massive rose from the depths. A war galleon surfaced, dark hull dripping water in sheets. The sight made the lake feel suddenly not so great anymore.
A gangplank lowered and slammed into place.
Igor Karkaroff stepped down with the confidence of a man who believed his arrival was part of the performance. His coat looked heavy enough to count as armour. His students followed in thick cloaks, walking in unified steps.
They did not look like children; they looked like cadets.
Behind Karkaroff, a tall and thin boy stepped onto the gangplank last.
Viktor Krum.
Even before his name passed through the lines in whispers, the recognition moved. Slytherin straightened. Hufflepuff craned subtly. A few of the upper-year girls evaluated him with open calculation.
Ronald forgot Fleur entirely. Two of his three braincells started to order him to swoon.
His head snapped toward the Bulgarian Seeker and shouted his name. Awe replaced embarrassment so fast it looked rehearsed.
"That is him," he breathed, not caring who heard. "That is Viktor Krum."
Krum did not smile, nor did he acknowledge the murmurs. His gaze moved once across the gathered students and settled on nothing in particular.
Hogwarts felt examined from two different angles at once.
Harry's eyes flicked over his own house again and forced a conclusion.
Hogwarts now stood between discipline and elegance.
Whether that was enough remained to be seen.
Karkaroff approached Headmistress Rosier and bowed with the correct degree of respect. His lips brushed the back of her hand as etiquette demanded. He repeated the act with Madame Maxime, then straightened with a smile that did not warm his eyes.
"It makes me proud to see Durmstrang professors shaping the next generations of Wizarding Britain."
Headmistress Rosier's expression did not change. Her voice remained polite.
"Welcome to Hogwarts, Headmaster Karkaroff."
--
Far from Hogwarts, Corvus was busy. The Nest had turned Lie Wei into data.
Not the man, not his wasted life on fake martial arts, not his delusions of cultivating his tissues, blood, bones and arse, not his stolen title. His body, minus the arms and legs.
Centuries of mana absorption had altered him in measurable ways. The researchers had dissected the process, then rebuilt it in controlled steps. It took between three months and a year to teach the method properly, depending on the individual's aptitude and compliance.
The first obstacle had been volunteers.
Securing suitable volunteers has proven consistently problematic. In prior operations, the term "volunteer" was a convenient fiction, applied to prisoners and the unwilling alike; consent was irrelevant, compliance was enforced. This initiative, however, required a different calibre of subject. To preserve secrecy, candidates had to be Muggles already familiar with the existence of the magical world, capable of comprehension rather than blind obedience. The forced separation two years ago had left few viable options. One was identified: a German witch of House Nacht, who proposed the restoration of her former husband's memories. The subject, a Muggle soldier, was deemed acceptable by Corvus.
The soldier in question was a smart man. He understood the reasons behind the separation act; he considered it sad and necessary. The man agreed after restoration of his memories and what the test required of him.
Corvus respected that mentality.
Now the soldier lay on a comfortable bed within the time array. Runes traced the boundary of the chamber and held time in disciplined loops. Monitors and measuring charms hovered over his body like silent birds. Muggle scientists, Nestborn researchers and unspeakables stood in tight groups, watching and recording.
A new core formed within the soldier at the beginning of his third month, faint at first, then unstable.
It began as a distortion rather than a structure. The measuring charms registered fluctuation before shape. Mana did not settle politely. It spiralled inward in uneven pulses, dragging ambient strands through the array boundary and compressing them against the sternum.
A senior Nestborn researcher raised a hand, and the outer runes flared in immediate response. Containment recalibrated. Chronomancy had increased the rate from 1:20 to 1:30, a refinement reserved exclusively. He had granted this trait only to his chosen, bound by ironclad contracts and oaths, zealots whose loyalty was absolute.
The soldier's breathing hitched. Sweat gathered at his temples despite the controlled temperature. His heart rate spiked, then dropped as the forming core began to regulate its own intake.
Floating quills scratched across parchment without pause. Scrying lenses hovered over his chest, projecting layered diagrams into the air. The first diagram showed erratic intake. The second mapped stabilisation thresholds. A third recorded density increase relative to Lie Wei's preserved tissue samples. The Mana was infusing him layer by layer.
One researcher murmured a number. Another corrected it by a decimal point. No one argued loudly. Disagreement stayed clinical.
The core contracted sharply.
For a fraction of a second, mana flow inverted.
Three containment sigils flared at once. A pulse of force pressed outward and met the array wall instead of escaping it. The soldier's fingers dug into the sheets. He did not scream. He clenched his jaw and rode it out.
Corvus observed without intervening. Intervention would contaminate the data.
Behind the primary circle, a row of Nestborn researchers watched without blinking. They had grown up inside arrays and laboratories. None of them flinched when the sigils flared. They recorded pulse rate, contraction depth, and mana density per breath.
At the rear of the chamber, three Muggle scientists observed through reinforced viewing glass. Electrodes and mundane monitors were wired into parallel systems. Heart rhythm, neural activity, and micro muscle contractions. The data scrolled across both parchment and screen, then cross-referenced by assistants.
One of the Muggle scientists swallowed when the mana inversion struck.
He had seen men torn to pieces by artillery fire. He had never seen invisible energy try to tear a man apart from the inside.
A Nestborn witch placed a steady hand on his shoulder without looking at him and continued dictating readings.
When the core stabilised, the relief in the chamber did not turn into celebration. It turned into notation.
A researcher compared the soldier's neural scans to Wei's preserved samples and pointed out the absence of chronic distortion. An Unspeakable recorded the temporal drift and nodded once, satisfied that the array had not warped causality beyond tolerance.
Only then did Corvus allow the process to move forward.
The contraction eased.
Mana began to circulate in a loop rather than a spiral. The structure thickened and settled into a defined nucleus. Weak, yes, but coherent.
One of the monitors shifted from amber to green.
They compared the formation curve against Wei's reconstructed baseline. The soldier's core lacked the distortions caused by centuries of unrefined absorption. It was smaller, cleaner, and dangerously dependent on continued structured intake.
The process completed when the fluctuations ceased entirely, and the nucleus held steady under reduced array pressure.
Researchers peeled away from the chamber with the hunger of people carrying fresh results. Some headed to labs. Others moved toward paperwork and sealed cabinets.
Corvus stepped into the array and let the runes adjust around him.
The soldier's eyes opened.
He looked older than the last time Corvus had seen him, not in body, but in the way his gaze held consequences.
Corvus stopped at the bedside and let the silence settle.
"Welcome to the magical side."
The soldier's throat worked once. He shifted a hand and stared at it as if expecting it to glow.
Corvus placed a wand into his palm.
The soldier closed his fingers around it with care. The grip was a soldier's grip, practical and controlled.
Corvus watched the core respond. It reached toward the wand like a child reaching toward fire.
Memory restoration had already been completed. The soldier knew what he had agreed to. He knew what he had become.
He lifted the wand. His wrist steadied. His breathing slowed.
A whispered incantation left his mouth.
"Lumos."