"The gate does not open with a key. It opens with memory. With fear. With the truth you do not want to name."
The Unseen Begins to See
Hogwarts had gone strange.
Not broken. Not in chaos.
Just… wrong.
The torches in the third-floor corridor flickered even when there was no draft. The moving staircases sometimes took longer to rotate, as if resisting. Ghosts hovered longer than usual in doorways, looking over their shoulders.
And for three days in a row, the enchanted ceiling of the Great Hall displayed no stars.
Only clouds. Thick. Shifting. Watching.
Professor Chang had said it was "atmospheric interference." No one believed her.
Least of all Albus.
Because every night, in his dreams, the stars spoke.
The Grove Returns
He walked beneath the white trees again.
The Grove of Names.
But now, it was... different.
The names on the trunks were no longer silent. They whispered to him, voices overlapping like the rustle of leaves in windless air.
"He's close.""It opens inward.""The mirror forgets but the root remembers.""You shouldn't have said her name."
Albus turned a slow circle. The trees arched high overhead like cathedral vaults.
In the center of the grove stood a mirror—not the one from the Hall, but something older. Taller. Cracked. The frame pulsed faintly, as though alive.
His own reflection stared back at him.
But it didn't move when he did.
And its eyes were black.
The Song of the Taken
She appeared from the shadows behind him.
Leora.
But not the Leora he remembered.
This version floated inches above the ground. Her skin was pale as parchment, her lips bluish with frost. Her eyes glowed white, and her hair billowed even though there was no wind.
She opened her mouth.
No words.
Only song.
A low, aching melody that seemed to rise from the soil itself—something between mourning and memory.
Albus felt it wrap around him like fog.
He couldn't breathe.
Couldn't move.
He wanted to speak, but—
"She dreams beneath."
The words echoed through the grove, not from her—but from every tree.
Then: the ground split open beneath him, and the roots reached up.
Albus woke screaming.
Convergence in the Tower
Fiona and Scorpius found him in the Astronomy Tower the next morning, hunched against the wall, still dressed in his robes from yesterday.
He hadn't slept.
Not really.
Not anymore.
Scorpius hesitated before sitting. "You saw her again."
Albus didn't answer.
Fiona knelt beside him and unrolled a scroll she'd been working on—an old Slytherin family tree she had painstakingly pieced together from three restricted texts and a seventh-year's Arithmancy thesis.
She pointed to a branch near the bottom, half-erased and crossed out.
"Morrigan."
"Who is she?" Albus asked, voice hoarse.
Fiona's fingers trembled slightly. "A failed heir. Exiled from the Slytherin line two centuries before Hogwarts was founded. Her name was struck from the records. But she left… something behind."
Scorpius frowned. "A gate?"
"No," Fiona whispered. "A seed."
The Pulse Beneath
The castle trembled again at noon.
Not violently.
Just enough to be noticed. Enough to feel it in your bones.
Students stumbled in corridors. A bookshelf collapsed in the library. Every enchanted broom in the Quidditch locker rooms lifted three inches off the ground, hovered for five seconds, then dropped at once with a thud.
And in the Hall of Reflection?
The Mirror Gate hummed.
Fiona, Albus, and Scorpius stood before it that night, all three cloaked and silent, their reflections distorted and wavering.
The other mirrors had long since gone dead.
But this one... this one showed movement.
Shapes behind the glass.
Too far to make out.
But one of them had wings.
Crossing Over
Fiona had been studying the gate for days.
It didn't respond to spells. Didn't reflect light normally. It was a thin veil—not between rooms, but between worlds. She believed it accessed a liminal space between consciousness and reality.
A dream-space.
Albus stepped forward. "I have to try again."
Scorpius put a hand on his arm. "Last time you went in, you came out with blood on your sleeve and a rune burned into your chest."
Albus looked down at his arm.
The rune was still there.
Not burned on.
Burned in.
"I think she's calling to me," Albus said. "And I think Morrigan is starting to listen."
Fiona didn't argue.
She stepped back.
And Albus reached forward.
The mirror's surface was cold.
Then hot.
Then—
Gone.
The Dream Below
He stood in a world without sky.
The ground was bone. The air was ash.
And above him towered a structure that looked almost—but not quite—like Hogwarts. Like its memory. A place that remembered being a school, and had become a prison.
He moved without walking. The castle shifted around him.
Through a broken corridor. Past glass staircases. Through a chamber of floating candles made of bone.
Then he saw her again.
Leora.
Now chained to a throne of thorns and mirrors.
But she was smiling.
Not at him.
At something behind him.
A woman stood there.
Tall. Pale. Lips sewn shut.
Hair like falling snow. Eyes like glass cracked from within.
Morrigan.
She didn't speak.
But Albus heard her.
In his mind. In his blood.
"The Fifth is beneath.""The others were doors. I am the key.""You do not understand the name you carry."
Albus opened his mouth to respond.
But the castle screamed.
Back in the Real
He awoke in the infirmary again.
Fiona sat nearby, eyes hollow.
Scorpius was pacing.
Madam Pomfrey had placed four magical wards around the bed. Two were already flickering.
"You were gone for almost an hour," Fiona said. "But to you… how long?"
Albus stared at the ceiling.
"Days."
Scorpius turned. "What did you see?"
He hesitated.
Then:
"Morrigan."
Fiona's breath caught.
"She's real," Albus whispered. "She's alive. Somewhere between the gates. And she's building something—out of memory, out of magic. Out of names."
He sat up slowly, wincing as the rune on his chest flared again.
"She's using the gates to feed. Every one we open strengthens her."
"And the Fifth?" Fiona asked softly.
Albus looked at her, eyes haunted.
"The Fifth doesn't lead into the earth.""It leads through time."
The Last Line
That night, the journal wrote again.
But not in silver.
This time, it bled black ink.
So dark it stained the parchment.
One sentence.
A name.
"The name you forgot was never yours to carry."
Underneath it:
The mark of the Fifth Gate.
And next to it, smaller—
"She walks soon."