The feast carried on with laughter and chatter echoing across the enchanted hall, but Adrian hardly touched his plate. His mind was elsewhere—cataloging, analyzing, dissecting every detail around him.
The Great Hall itself pulsed with enchantments: temperature regulation woven into the walls, anti-illusion wards humming softly at the edge of perception, and the enchanted ceiling shifting seamlessly to mirror the stormy skies above. Adrian's gaze wandered to the professors seated at the dais. Dumbledore, smiling faintly yet watching everything with predatory eyes. Severus Snape, his expression carved in disdain as he swept his sharp gaze over the students. Filius Flitwick, cheerful but with an aura of precision.
Every one of them was powerful, but also flawed.
And flaws could be used.
"Not hungry, Atlas?" drawled a boy beside him. Blonde hair, sharp features, arrogance etched into every word. Draco Malfoy.
Adrian tilted his head slightly, eyes calm but unreadable. "I eat when I'm done thinking."
Draco blinked, thrown off balance for the briefest moment, before smirking. "Thinking, huh? You'll do well in Slytherin. We value cunning."
"I value results," Adrian corrected smoothly, cutting a slice of roast beef with deliberate precision. "Cunning without results is just wasted effort."
Some of the nearby first-years chuckled.
Draco's smirk faltered.
///
The Slytherin common room was a cavern of green lanterns, stone walls, and the slow, constant ripple of the Black Lake outside its windows. Adrian stood apart from the crowd that night, his hand resting casually on the banister of the staircase leading to the dorms. The others gossiped, boasting about family names and magical lineages, but Adrian listened in silence.
'So much arrogance, so little substance,' he thought. 'Children clinging to the shadows of their fathers.'
Still, he did not scorn them outright. Allies were useful, even weak ones. A pawn, after all, could become a shield or a distraction on the board.
Classes began the next morning.
Adrian excelled almost immediately, though not in ways that drew direct attention. In Charms, while others struggled to make feathers lift, Adrian adjusted his wrist subtly, letting the incantation flow with precise modulation. His feather soared higher and steadier than the rest—but he allowed it to falter just before Flitwick's eyes turned toward him. Enough to be competent, not yet enough to reveal the full depth of his ability.
In Potions, however, subtlety was impossible. His memory and rational control over ingredients made his brew not only flawless but elegant. The potion shimmered faintly, far purer than Snape had asked for. Snape's gaze lingered on him, sharp and suspicious.
"Remarkable… for a beginner," the professor said softly, though his narrowed eyes betrayed something more: curiosity.
Adrian met his gaze evenly, his lips twitching into the faintest smile. "Thank you, Professor."
He knew better than to bask in praise. Attention was dangerous. But he also knew: to be underestimated was a weapon in itself.
Adrian played his role well: polite, intelligent, never overreaching. But beneath the surface, he was testing limits—his own.
It was in Defense Against the Dark Arts- The lesson was a farce—Quirrell's stammering made the class laugh more than learn. His emotional side—the part of him that had always hated chains, always fought against being controlled—burned with fury. For a moment, he wanted to rip him out with his bare hands. 'I came here to study magic, not to read the fu*king textbook, sigh…' Instead, he smiled faintly and lowered his gaze, hiding the storm behind his calm exterior.
The first weeks at Hogwarts blurred together in a haze of lessons, whispers, and shadows cast by candlelight in the Slytherin dorms. But for Adrian Atlas, the surface-level bustle of classes was nothing compared to what consumed him most: the study of magic.
Every day was a new test, and Adrian treated each like a researcher gathering data.
In Charms, Professor Flitwick's cheerful enthusiasm masked the precision of the discipline. While others mispronounced Wingardium Leviosa and ended with charred feathers, Adrian dissected the spell as though it were an equation.
Intent + Incantation + Gesture + Will = Effect.
He broke it down piece by piece, testing subtle variations. A sharper flick of the wrist produced unstable lift; too soft a tone weakened the spell entirely. Within a week, he discovered something others hadn't: control was less about force and more about resonance. The wand wasn't pushing — it was aligning.
One night, in the common room, he whispered the spell without moving his lips, his wand twitching barely an inch. His quill rose silently into the air. He held it, suspended, the same thrill rushing through him as when he'd first bent objects with his mind at the orphanage.
The same happened in Potions; his memory made him precise, but precision alone wasn't enough. Stirring clockwise three times, then once counterclockwise, he noticed a shift — the liquid shimmered more brightly, as though the ingredients responded to rhythm as much as heat.
Snape's dark eyes narrowed. "Atlas," he murmured, his voice like velvet laced with venom. "Did I tell you to stir counterclockwise?"
"No, Professor," Adrian replied smoothly. "But the instructions suggested consistency. I was testing whether inconsistency might improve the yield."
A dangerous pause. Then, unexpectedly: "Ten points… to Slytherin."
It was the first time Adrian saw respect flicker in Snape's eyes.
Yet in Defense Against the Dark Arts, boredom consumed him. Quirrell's stuttering lessons insulted his rational mind. A subject that should have been fire and steel was reduced to timid theory. Adrian left each class seething.
That very frustration drove him into secret practice. Alone in the dorm or an empty class, he recreated defensive barriers he'd read about in advanced texts. It took him weeks of headaches and nosebleeds, but by the end of September, he could raise a flickering shield of translucent force against a hurled book.
"Pathetic… but it's a start," he whispered, hand trembling from the effort.
By the second month, Adrian realized Hogwarts was two schools in one: the official one, with homework and recitations — and the hidden one, which belonged only to those who hungered for more.
Adrian hungered.
He bought ink by the bottle and filled notebooks with theories of magic. He charted how emotions fueled his spells. One night, unable to sleep, he tried to pour joy into his wand. To his shock, the tip flared with golden sparks, gentle and warm. His chest tightened. So it was true… magic wasn't just science. It was soul. A will. Giving frome.
In the library, he devoured texts beyond his years: Magical Hierarchies of Transfiguration (noting that matter resisted change unless willed into a new "truth"), Intermediate Arithmancy (discovering spells were numbers at their core, vibrating frequencies), Warding Fundamentals (scribbling diagrams of runic protections into margins)...
The librarian, Madam Pince, eyed him with suspicion more than once. But Adrian smiled politely and returned every book in perfect condition — while summarizing every page.
Emotion warred with logic constantly. The rational part of him logged data meticulously. But the emotional part whispered: You're touching the divine.
As the air grew colder and frost painted the windows, Adrian attempted something bold: wandless magic.
He sat in his dormitory, candles flickering low, his wand lying on the bed beside him.
"Focus," he whispered, closing his eyes. He imagined the quill rising — not because wood and feather obeyed him, but because the very essence of movement bent to his will. His fingers twitched. The quill shuddered.
Then, with a surge of effort, it lifted — an inch, two, then hovered steady. Sweat poured down his temples, but for the first time, he felt both magics — wandless willpower and structured magic — merge.
He laughed, softly, breathless. "Yes… Yes, that's it. My will…"
It wasn't much. But it was his.
The next day in Charms, when Flitwick demonstrated a complicated locking charm, Adrian's wand flick matched perfectly, almost unconsciously. The door clicked shut with a snap so clean even Flitwick blinked.
"Well done, Mr. Atlas!" the professor squeaked.
Adrian bowed his head politely.
The more he learned, the less he slept. Nights became hours of whispered incantations, of sketching runes onto parchment, of testing the limits of transfiguration by reshaping coins into pebbles and back again.
Every success was fire in his veins. Every failure was a knife in his pride.
One night, his attempt to stabilize a flame sphere collapsed. Fire licked across the desk, nearly setting his notes alight. He smothered it with trembling hands, heart hammering.
For a long moment, he stared at the charred edges of parchment.
Then he smiled. "Closer… I'm getting closer."
Emotion drove him. Rationality guided him. But both sides of him were now tangled in obsession.
Adrian's abilities could no longer be hidden. He excelled in class, but it was the subtle things — the way his spells carried more force than expected. Snape watched him like a hawk. Dumbledore's gaze lingered too long at feasts.
And Adrian?
He smiled politely, but inside, he was bracing himself.
'They'll all try to control me, ' he thought.
But as he sat in the library one warm evening, quill scratching across yet another page of notes, he felt something else too.
Hope.
Wonder.
The thrill of possibility.
For all the manipulation, all the dangers lurking in shadows — this was still a world of magic. And Adrian Atlas, orphan, anomaly, second-chance soul, would master it all.
Not for glory. Not for power alone.
But because he could.
Because he must.
Because he wants to.
Nights in Slytherin were the most dangerous. Whispers floated in the common room, alliances forming, rivalries brewing. Adrian kept to himself, but his books—far more advanced than the school list—never left his hands. Arithmancy, ward theory, even fragments of alchemical texts, transfiguration… You name it. Where others his age struggled just to understand their yearly curriculum, Adrian was pushing forward; his adult mind did not just read, it understood in ways that were far superior to even 7th-year students. The only limitation on Adrian is the lack of time. 'I estimate that by the speed I am advancing, I would finish my 7-year school curriculum by the end of the year.'
'This wasn't too exaggerated,' he thought, after all, his adult mind, inside a young body, plus the advantage of having a free knowledge source like the Lilberay…
Magic, he realized, was neither holy nor corrupt. It was a tool, raw and infinite, limited only by the will of the one wielding it.
\\\
The castle had moods. Adrian had begun to sense it after weeks of prowling its corridors under the cover of night. The portraits whispered when they thought he wasn't listening. The staircases shifted just enough to test his patience. And the walls… the walls hummed with something alive, as though the stones themselves breathed.
Adrian had taken to walking alone after curfew, his wand hidden in his sleeve, a book levitating beside him under a careful charm. Tonight's subject was Intermediate Magical Theory, but his eyes flicked from the page to the walls as though searching for something.
"Emotion triggers magic…" he muttered under his breath, recalling his own experiments. "But what about intent? What about need?"
The words echoed strangely, carried further than they should. Adrian frowned. He followed the echo down a long corridor he didn't recognize. Three times he passed the same tapestry — a ludicrous scene of trolls in tutus attempting ballet.
He stopped. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled.
"This is it," he whispered. He counted the paces, turned once more, and there it was again: the trolls in tutus.
But this time, opposite the tapestry, a door gleamed faintly where there had been only a blank wall. Adrian's fingers hovered over the handle. His rational side screamed for caution — Hogwarts was not kind to the reckless. But something inside him pulsed with warmth, almost like recognition.
The door opened silently.
He stepped inside.
The chamber was vast, candlelit, and impossible. Shelves stretched high overhead, laden with tomes in languages he couldn't recognize. Tables were arranged neatly, each with cauldrons, glass vials, quills, and parchment. But what drew his breath away was the far wall — a mirror-like surface that rippled as though made of water, reflecting not his body but his thoughts.
"…So it answers need," Adrian whispered. His voice shook with wonder.
Adrian made the Room of Requirement his sanctuary. He learned its rules: he had to want it truly for it to appear, he had to be specific, but not too specific, and above all, he had to respect its silence.
At first, the Room gave him practice dummies and spellbooks. Then, when his hunger for knowledge grew sharper, it gave him stranger things: alchemical texts thought lost for centuries, runes that glowed when touched, even a black-bound book that whispered of wandless magic, books that taught Mind Arts and Dark Magic that could probably give him a one-way ticket to Azkaban.
He tested everything. Levitation, precision cutting charms, and binding spells. He discovered he could push his mind further inside this place — the Room seemed to dull the pain, to sharpen his clarity. He did not know if it was an illusion, but he felt that learning here was better in terms of efficiency.
Adrian wasn't the only one prowling Hogwarts at night.
One evening, as he slipped through the corridor toward the tapestry, a voice rang out behind him.
"Atlas."
He froze. The voice was low, silken, but carried authority like a whip. Snape.
Adrian turned slowly, masking his racing pulse.
"Professor." His tone was even.
Snape's eyes narrowed like blades. "You walk the halls at night too often. Curiosity may be the mark of intellect… but also of arrogance. Both have a tendency to end poorly."
Adrian inclined his head. "Understood, sir."
Snape stepped closer, his black eyes gleaming. "What is it you're seeking, Mr. Atlas? Knowledge? Power? Or something else?"
For a moment, Adrian considered lying. But something in Snape's expression — suspicion mixed with… recognition? — made him hesitate.
"Understanding," Adrian said simply.
Snape's lip curled. He said nothing more, but his gaze flicked, just once, toward the tapestry. And then he swept away, robes billowing.
Adrian's blood ran cold. He knows. As someone who already began training in Oclamncy, he could feel Snap's mind reading through eye contact, bypassing almost every wall in his Oclamncy. 'It's too difficult to train it on your own to the Highest level in such a short amount of time.' He sighed internally, but he didn't panic too much.
'He might know that I have been practicing magic, but how? where? he does not. After all, it's not strange to have a diligent student.'
Besides, Adrian wasn't stupid enough not to shield the Room of Requirement with Oclamncy, after all, where else is he supposed to get advanced knowledge from?
Adrian divided Oclamncy into 2 stages:
The first is controlling one's emotions, disciplining the mind, and organizing your thoughts into a maze that you build inside your mind. At this level, one can detect when someone is trying to read their mind and create a shield with their magic around it, enabling them to deflect mind-reading and protect their memories. This is also the stage that the majority of wizards are stuck in. Adrian liked to call it the beginner's stage.The last stage is called Mastery. It is A mastery of a wizard's mind. Allowing a wizard. To fully control their memories, their shield of mind, and even allowing them to alter their own memories, creating false memories, misleading mind readers, and more. It also adds the benefits of creating 'fake evil thoughts' that could be used as a trigger to dark magic.
'Currently I am at the first stage, so that is why he picked something out of me, huh…'
From then on, Adrian used the Room sparingly, with both awe and caution. He told no one. But sometimes, he caught Snape's eyes on him in class — sharp, knowing.
That night, as Adrian lay in bed, his wand resting beside him, he stared at the ceiling of the dormitory. His rational mind mapped out the years ahead: the skills to master. But his emotional side—the boy who still carried the weight of two lives—felt something else. A thrill. A spark of wonder. The same wonder he had felt when the bricks of Diagon Alley shifted open.
\\\
Life was good for Adrian. He stayed quiet. He didn't have trouble with other students. Every time trouble came to him, he simply avoided it or found an excuse to avoid it. Group activities or friends… He didn't see himself as one of them. How could he?
What mattered to Adrian was mastering magic. It did not matter to him the looks that the other Slytherins were giving him. It did not matter to him that boys like Draco Malfoy were spreading nonsense about him. As for being close to the Golden trio? Nah, Adrian saw no benefit in that, at least not now.
The months blurred into a rhythm of lessons, whispered secrets, and nights stolen by candlelight study. Adrian slipped between the roles he had chosen with meticulous care: the polite student, sharp but not threatening, and the hidden prodigy who bent magic into shapes it had never been meant to take.
Winter melted into spring, and Hogwarts changed with the seasons. Icicles that clung to the stone arches gave way to blossoms in the courtyard. Exams loomed over first-years like thunderclouds, but for Adrian, they were little more than formalities. Every question on parchment, every wand movement required, had long since been tested and perfected in the Room of Requirement.
Yet he never flaunted his skill. In Transfiguration, he allowed his matchstick to turn to silver, but let it remain rough around the edges. In Charms, his levitation was smooth, but never quite as graceful as he could achieve. In Potions, he brewed to perfection, but added just enough hesitation to look mortal.
Only Snape noticed. Snape always noticed. His sharp eyes lingered longer with each passing month, though he said little beyond his usual clipped remarks. Adrian returned the looks calmly, though beneath his façade, his mind worked furiously.
'He sees through masks. Perhaps not all of them, but enough.'
The end of the year brought the whispers of danger to the castle — a troll in the dungeons, shadows around the third-floor corridor, rumors of a stone that could grant immortality. While other students panicked or speculated wildly, Adrian watched quietly, analyzing.
Two names kept circling the rumors like vultures: Dumbledore… and You-Know-Who.
This world's history, its curses, its battles… they are not just tales. They are warnings.
The final feast arrived, and banners of scarlet and gold draped the Great Hall. Gryffindor had stolen the House Cup, thanks to last-minute points awarded to Potter and his friends. Slytherins muttered curses under their breath, their smug certainty shattered.
Adrian sat among them, unmoved by their outrage. The glittering candles reflected in his calm brown eyes as he cut neatly into a slice of pie. Draco raged beside him, Pansy shrieked in disbelief, and yet Adrian only smiled faintly.
When the feast ended and the banners faded, Adrian followed the line of students back to the common room one last time. He paused at the threshold, eyes drifting to the black water pressing against the enchanted glass. Shadows of serpents drifted lazily through the murk, their movements hypnotic.
He exhaled slowly. 'A year. One year, my path is set. I've touched power, knowledge, and danger. And they've begun to watch me — Snape, Dumbledore, perhaps others.'
But none of that mattered as much as the truth he carried within himself. The boy who had once been an orphan, a nobody, had carved a foothold in a world of magic. He had studied, he had tested, he had survived.
And he was only just beginning.
Adrian looked at the enchanted notebook in his hands, and a smile involuntarily appeared on his face. 'Coping the books from the R.O.R( Room of Requirement), to this notebook turned out to be smart after all.' The notebook looked simple, black with no cover or name writing on it. Only those who understood enchantment know that this simple-looking notebook is far from simple.
It was created by Adrian after his encounter with Snape. He thought, Why not simply ask the R.O.R. for access to all books that ever appeared in the school? It was such a simple action, yet it brought Adrian access to knowledge even the professors did not want them to have. Under the use of a copy spell, Adrian copied the knowledge into this notebook. "This notebook allows a person to copy a large number of pages into a single book without increasing its weight. With it I will be able to continue my studies even during the summer vacation."
The Black Lake shifted outside the window, a serpent's shadow gliding past. Adrian's eyes followed it until it vanished into the depths.
A smile touched his lips.
Year One was finished.
Year Two would be the time the real game began.