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The Triwizrad dueling tournament had finally drawn to a close. Each of the three ancient academies of magic had, in its own way, achieved the goals it had set when the contest began.
After much discussion among the headmasters, they reached a rare accord: the tournament was not to be a one-time spectacle but would henceforth become a permanent tradition, held anew each year.
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While many of the young witches and wizards of Hogwarts were still fast asleep, dreaming blissfully in their beds, the visiting students of Beauxbatons and Durmstrang had already risen, packed their trunks, and gathered beneath the watchful eyes of their professors and headmasters. Without fanfare, they slipped away in the pale light of dawn, their departure marked by quiet footsteps and muted whispers.
The castle, once again, returned to its familiar peace.
Classes under Sargeras resumed their steady, measured rhythm, as though the excitement of the tournament had been nothing but a passing storm. Yet the students, still brimming with restless energy, were far from settled. They seized every spare moment and hurled themselves back into dueling, as if the fire lit by the competition had only grown stronger.
Now they dueled to earn points, striving to climb the ever-shifting ladder of the duelists' ranking board, each eager to see their name etched higher than before.
Professor McGonagall, however, was far from pleased. She soon realized that Quidditch practice had been pushed aside, neglected in favor of this frenzy of spellwork. What had once been hours spent perfecting broom formations and team strategies were now being consumed by wand-waving challenges in the dueling platforms.
Meanwhile, the seasons themselves were shifting. The bitter cold loosened its grip, and warmth crept gently back across the land. Fresh blades of grass pierced the thawing soil, and the Forbidden Forest cloaked itself once more in a mantle of green. With the snow receding, the wildly popular game invented by Kestrel, the chaotic "Snowman Battle Royale," came to a natural end.
But Kestrel herself was not idle.
Far from it, her mind seemed to brim with one strange invention after another. In those weeks she devised new and bewildering ways to test her fellow students: one game had them leaping from the Astronomy Tower, forced to hurl spells in mid-fall before cushioning themselves at the last possible moment; another required them to tunnel through the earth like gnomes, waiting for the perfect chance to collapse the enemy's fortifications from below.
The students groaned and sweated, cursing her brilliance, yet they threw themselves into her schemes with a kind of gleeful exhaustion. Complaints and laughter came in equal measure, and no one could resist joining.
It was on such a day that Kestrel, eyes alight with mischief and excitement, came running to Sargeras with a request that was unusual even for her.
"You mean to say," Sargeras asked, his voice flat and expression completely blank, "that you want me to freeze the surface of the Black Lake again?"
Kestrel bobbed her head up and down so quickly it looked like a chick pecking at rice.
"Reason," Sargeras said curtly, unwilling to waste more words.
At once, Kestrel's face lit up. Her hands flailed animatedly as she launched into an enthusiastic explanation of her latest invention: a grand event she called the "Black Lake Ice Obstacle Race and Magical Duel Tournament," a spectacle that blended chaos, sport, and spellcraft into one.
Sargeras listened in silence, his brows drawn into a frown. He endured the torrent of her near-fantastical descriptions with strained patience, and when she finally finished, he fixed her with a stare, as though regarding some rare and inexplicable creature that had appeared before him.
"Uh… what is it? Did I say something wrong?" Kestrel's voice wavered under the weight of his gaze, her unease plain.
"Your so-called… 'Black Lake Ice Obstacle Race and Magical Duel Tournament,'" Sargeras repeated her words slowly, weighing each one, "what exactly is its purpose? Which skills do you intend the students to train through it?"
"I… well… maybe… overall ability?" Kestrel stammered, her eyes darting back and forth as if searching for answers. "Quick thinking, precision in spellcasting, creating chaos, solving problems…"
Sargeras listened, considering her response. For all its wildness, it was not entirely without merit. Her earlier inventions had seemed like nothing more than games, yet the results had been surprising. At the very least, the young witches and wizards had managed to pick up useful lessons from them.
After a pause of reflection, he finally gave a reluctant nod.
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The following noon, Sargeras and Kestrel stood on the banks of the Black Lake. The early spring wind still carried the sting of winter, and it whipped at the edges of his black robes.
Kestrel stood at his side, her eyes shining as she stared at the calm, endless surface of the water.
"Ready?" Sargeras' tone was flat, as though he were asking about the weather today.
"Always!" Kestrel nodded with eager force.
Without another word, Sargeras drew his wand. The motion was smooth, as natural as breathing.
The tip of his wand pointed steadily toward the wide lake, and at once, a surge of power gathered there, strong and tightly contained.
"Glacius Maxima!"
The instant the incantation left his lips, there was no thunderous explosion. Instead came a sound that seemed to crawl beneath the skin, a sharp, spreading crackle of ice — "ka-cha, ka-cha, ka-cha" — echoing everywhere at once.
Pale blue frost burst outward from the wand's tip like a living plague, racing in every direction across the surface of the lake.
The water, so still a heartbeat ago, seemed to seize and harden in an instant.
Where the frost touched, liquid became crystal.
The freezing was not slow, not gentle. It was as if an invisible giant hand had slammed down a pause upon the world, forcing the lake into sudden stillness. The ice surged forward, sweeping outward as though nothing could stand in its path.
In the space of only a few breaths, the waters near the shore were claimed. What had once been dark, rippling depths transformed into a flawless white sheet, smooth and gleaming like polished glass beneath the pale light of morning.
The ice thickened as it spread, its hue shifting from pale translucence to a dense, solid blue-white. Still it crept outward with steady, inexorable purpose, stretching further toward the heart of the vast lake.
At that moment, several merperson were resting lazily on the rocks close to shore, basking in the tender warmth of early spring sunlight.
Their long hair, silver-green and glimmering in the light, spilled across the smooth stone. Their tails flicked lazily against the surface of the water, sending up gentle ripples and a steady burble of contented sound.
Among them lay an elder merperson, tall and imposing, with a string of seashells gleaming at her throat. Her eyes were closed, her face tilted toward the sun as she savored this rare luxury of a "sunbath."
But then it came: a sudden surge of cold, sharp and merciless, sweeping down upon them like an unseen tide.
"Glrrrl?! (What's happening?!)"
The elder merperson's eyes snapped open. She froze in terror as the surface of the water hardened before her very gaze, turning to ice at a speed too fast to believe.
With a frantic lunge she tried to dive back into the lake, but the frost reached her first. Her head smacked hard against the forming ice, and pain shot through her as she realized the water had already sealed shut.
"Aaaahhh!" She let out a piercing, panicked cry that tore from her throat.
The others fared no better. Trapped on the rocks, they flailed in fear, their tails beating helplessly as they splashed at the encroaching ice. Their voices rose in frantic bubbles, sharp with both anger and desperation.
Silver tails glistened in the cold air, left exposed and vulnerable. They could only watch as the eerie blue-white glow devoured the lake, swallowing water after water until nothing remained unfrozen.
"Blrrrgh! (Winter's come back? We can't get under? What do we do? Someone help us!)" The elder's desperate cries echoed in frantic gurgles.
One after another, the merpersons pressed themselves against the hard surface, pounding in vain, their hands slapping against the hard ice.
On the shore, the students of Hogwarts were struck dumb, their eyes wide at the sight before them.
"Huh?" A third-year Hufflepuff rubbed his eyes as though doubting his own vision. "Am I… am I seeing this right? The Black Lake's frozen again? But it's spring!"
"Professor Greengrass did it. He froze it himself!"
A Ravenclaw student pointed toward the tall figure on the bank, where frost still streamed from the tip of his wand. "Look at him… that's incredible!"
"Bloody brilliant!" cried the Weasley twins, their eyes gleaming with mischief as they let out a sharp whistle. "And look at the merpeople! They've all scrambled onto the rocks to sunbathe. No chance they're staying in the water now, hah!"
"What on earth is Professor Lumina up to this time?"
Hermione Granger drew her robes tighter around herself, her brow furrowed as she fixed her gaze on Kestrel, who stood beside Sargeras, practically bouncing with excitement, waving her arms in delight.
"This is absolutely insane," Hermione muttered, shaking her head.
Just then, Ron came stumbling out of the castle doors, clearly drawn outside by all the racket. His arms were full of parchment and books, which he struggled to steady as he grumbled under his breath.
"What's all the noise about out here!"
His words died the moment his eyes drifted lazily across the lake… then froze. His whole body locked in place, mouth falling open wide enough to fit a dragon's egg.
"Wh–what?!" Ron's voice cracked into a squeak. He rubbed his eyes furiously, then pinched his arm so hard he let out a hiss. "Ow! That hurt! This isn't a dream?!"
He stared at the endless sheet of glittering white that stretched before him, the sun striking the frozen surface until it blazed so bright it hurt to look at. His face twisted in confusion and dread as his voice climbed higher and higher.
"Can somebody please tell me… did I lose my memory, or did I sleep through to next winter?! Yesterday this lake was all water! Harry, Hermione, you see this too, right?!"
He spun toward Harry, whose expression mirrored his own bewilderment, his features written all over with the thought that the world must have gone terribly wrong.
Hermione let out a long-suffering sigh and rolled her eyes. "Pull yourself together, Ron. It was Professor Greengrass. At Professor Lumina's request, he froze the lake for her so-called… 'ice obstacle race,' or whatever it is."
"Oh? Another new game?" Ron's eyes brightened with sudden interest, only to dim again beneath the sharp glare Hermione leveled at him.
"You know that isn't right," he said quickly, his grin vanishing as he spoke with forced conviction.
Harry, meanwhile, had his gaze fixed on the merpersons. They were pounding angrily at the ice with their tails, trapped and furious, their cries muffled beneath the frozen surface. "Whatever else we say… it really is an incredible sight," he murmured.
Sargeras, meanwhile, ignored the clamor rising behind him.
His wand remained steady, aimed toward the heart of the lake. At last, the final patch of water yielded, seized by magic and locked in unyielding frost.
The Black Lake was no longer a lake. It had become a vast, gleaming plain of white ice, stretching boundless under the morning sun, casting back a glare as cold as steel.
Slowly, Sargeras lowered his wand. The biting chill that had flooded the air seemed to draw back all at once, as though the magic itself exhaled and released its hold.
He tilted his head slightly, his eyes falling on Kestrel, who looked ready to leap into the air with sheer excitement. His voice came calm, even, and without the faintest ripple.
"There. Your skating field."
With that, he tucked away his wand and turned to leave, his robes sweeping behind him as if the matter were already closed.
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[Chapter End's]
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