The doors opened, and the sound met Rowan like warmer air from a different season.
Not a roar. A layered murmur, a moving thing, rippling along stone. The first-years stepped through and the room gathered them without hurry. Boots ticked and scuffed. Robes brushed. A girl in front of him reached for a friend's sleeve and missed, then found it again, relieved.
The Great Hall rose around them, not built so much as revealed. Four long tables ran the length of the room, their surfaces laid with plates and goblets that reflected light from candles floating at an easy height—small flames steady as if the air had been taught to hold them still. Above, the ceiling was not a ceiling. It was the night. Black-blue, deep, precise, alive with stars he could name and some he could not, arranged where the sky had placed them thirty minutes ago.
Rowan slowed a fraction. He felt it first at the edge of his sight, in the same place you notice a rain change before it arrives: threads. Everywhere. Finer than hair and brighter than wire, moving in arcs above the tables, in lines between shoulders and plates, in faint drifts toward the high table. Some hummed with a brightness that felt like laughter held back. Some were steady as a pulse in a wrist. He kept his face still and let the room show him itself.
At the far end, on a dais just high enough to name itself, sat a line of teachers. Robes that remembered their own weight. Faces arranged to watch and not rush. And at the center—
Dumbledore.
He did not have to be pointed out. The threads made that unnecessary. They did not tangle around him. They did not swarm. They arranged. They flowed, gathered, curved as if in a tide, not in chaos but in a pattern with rules. Lines from student to teacher, from stone to wand, from candle to draft, drew near and then swept onward, all acknowledging something like gravity anchored in a single person. The man himself seemed to feel none of it, or else he had lived so long in its shape that feeling and not feeling were the same.
Rowan's eyes lingered a heartbeat too long. Dumbledore's gaze, moving without haste across the first-years, paused where Rowan stood and held, not catching him, just seeing. A tilt of the head so slight it might have been a trick of the floating light. A notice. Then the gaze moved on, and the threads returned to their quiet work.
They gathered near the front. McGonagall stood by a small wooden stool polished by a thousand nervous backs, and a hat that looked like it had heard too much and kept all of it.
She called the first name. A boy stepped out, walked with steps that did not trust themselves yet, sat, and disappeared under the hat. Sometimes the hat shouted at once. Sometimes it thought, the wide brim shifting as if it had preferences and the child had other ideas. Each time, cheers rose from a particular table—red, yellow, blue, or green—rising and falling as the first-years scattered across the hall.
Rowan did not keep count. He let the names wash past. He let the hall press itself into memory: the odd dark vein in a flagstone; the way a goblet rim caught a floating candle and made haloed circles on the plate beside it; the hush that ran down the tables when a certain name was called, the hall's sound dipping briefly as if taking a breath between notes.
"Granger, Hermione," McGonagall called. The girl with the fast words and determined hands strode up, sat, and the hat spoke quickly: "Gryffindor!" She sprang up and went left to the red table, hair catching a rolling candle in a way that made the flame look briefly like a thread itself.
"Longbottom, Neville." The boy with the toad—Trevor, rescued, then tucked—walked stiffly to the stool. The hat considered him longer. When it called "Gryffindor!" the cheer went up with a relief that wasn't his alone. Neville's shoulders loosened. He half-tripped going down the steps and found himself upright by luck or the stone's kindness.
More names. A Lavinia, a Blaise. A boy whose shoes squeaked each time he shifted and who winced as if it were a private betrayal. A girl whose family half rose when she was named, then sank back when the hat sent her away from them toward a table that did not share their color. The hall took each decision as if it had always known it.
"Potter, Harry."
Rowan heard the whisper roll before he saw the boy—sound moving faster than bodies, like a wind that slips under doors you thought you closed. The dark-haired boy with round glasses and a scar half-hidden under his fringe walked to the stool. The hat barely paused. "Gryffindor!"
The burst from the red table came into Rowan's chest as a small pressure, a wave off the lake's shore. Hands thumped wood. A pair of twins stood to applaud as if congratulating themselves. Harry sat, cheeks bright, features held in the particular stiffness of someone grappling with being seen. The table around him surged with welcome.
"Von Vey, Rowan."
The name opened a space around him. Not quieter—just precise. Rowan stepped forward. He knew the feel of eyes when rooms had them. He walked without looking at anyone but the stool.
The hat slid down, smelling like old cloth in a dry cupboard and something faintly spicy like a book's binding. The hall dimmed to a warm brown behind its brim. Rowan placed his hands, one on each side of the stool, and did not grip.
Ah. The voice in his head was a plank across a stream: firm and old. Quiet. But not to hide.
"I don't need to be heard to know where I am," Rowan said. He didn't move his mouth. It felt like thinking out loud to someone who had been listening longer than he had.
Mmmm. You look. Long. Past first meanings. You weigh. You wait. And when you move—
"I mean it."
Aye. A split second where the voice warmed by one degree. Not timid. Not obedient by nature. Careful by design. Plenty in you for Ravenclaw. A pause deep enough to drink from. Plenty for Slytherin, too. Steel in quiet sheaths.
"No," Rowan said.
Why not?
"I don't climb for the sake of climbing."
A Gryffindor thought.
"It's also true."
Truth does not mind where it stands. The voice rearranged itself, considering. You are fierce. Quieter because you see more, not because you fear. You choose when speaking matters. When you act, you do not ask the room's permission.
"I pick my moments."
Aye. And you'll pick them when danger calls. Not to be clever. To be right. The brim shifted, the cloth's weight settling like a judgment that had already been made. It had better be—
"Gryffindor," the hat said aloud.
Sound came back like a tide returning.
He lifted the hat with both hands and passed it up into McGonagall's waiting fingers. For a breath, something unfroze in her face: a small lift at one corner of her mouth, a contained glow in her eyes, a relief that did not require words. Then the glow folded back into her usual line, and she moved on to the next name.
Rowan went left, the red table reaching for him. Hands patted shoulders, a place opened. Neville made room with the sort of gladness that had nothing to do with Rowan and everything to do with having someone he recognized sit near him. Across, Hermione sat straighter, a pleased "I knew it" barely hidden under the way she smoothed her napkin.
He took a seat. The bench had the faint warmth of a thousand boys his size. To his right, empty space waited like an unasked question. To his left, a boy with neat hair and careful hands nodded once, then returned to his plate as if keeping track of everything he ate was part of a private ritual.
The Sorting went on. Rowan did not watch every face. He let the hall teach him its grammar. Threads rose and fell, many faint, some bright with the electric steadiness of lifelong friendships about to discover their first test. He watched a thin line form between two girls placed in different houses; it stretched like a string between windows across a narrow street—tense, but durable. He saw a thread snap quietly when a boy sat at green and his family at blue kept their hands folded in their laps. The boy looked down. The snap left no mark on his skin, but the air in front of him felt different. Rowan stored the sensation away without reaching for it.
Dumbledore rose when the last name rang and the hat slumped back into its dignified shabbiness. Silence came easily to the room, an animal that returned to a hand it trusted.
"Welcome," the headmaster said. "Old friends, new friends, and all those who might yet be both." His voice belonged in the hall the way water belongs in a riverbed: shaped by it, shaping it in return. He did not speak long. A handful of rules. A caution about the forest. A remark about corridors that had their own opinions and professors who had stricter ones. Then a small, grateful lift of his hands.
Food appeared.
It did not arrive with flash or fuss. It was simply there, cresting on platters, settling in bowls, easing into serving dishes with the certainty of meals planned by someone who understood hunger and the day's pattern. The smell changed first—roast and thyme and butter, yeasty bread that knew ovens and hands, gravy that had chosen the correct thickness and stayed there. Steam rose and curled and decided not to trouble anyone's glasses.
Rowan let the table's rhythm find him. He took bread, a slow scoop of potatoes, a shared reach for carrots with the boy beside him that resolved without either of them withdrawing. Across, Hermione managed to pour pumpkin juice for three people at once, her expression focused not because it was difficult, but because she had decided not to spill and then didn't.
Names arrived in the quiet-loud way of dinners. "Seamus Finnigan," said the boy with careful hands at Rowan's left, Irish in his vowels. "Dean Thomas," said the boy opposite Rowan with a smile that took the measure of a room first and only then offered itself. "Lavender," said a girl with hair pinned like she intended to dance later even if there was no dancing. "Parvati," said the girl beside her, chin high, eyes alert.
"Rowan," Rowan said, when asked, adding nothing. Neville, across, added "That's Rowan," as if he had been delegated, which seemed to suit them all.
Conversations forked and rejoined. Someone at the far end tried a story about a cousin who had been bitten by a teapot; three people talked at once about whether that was possible. A second-year farther down explained the trick to not turning your sleeve into soup when reaching for gravy. The prefect standing behind them smiled without looking as if he had heard the same advice in the same phrasing for ten years.
Rowan ate without comment. He watched hands—how often they returned to plates, how they hesitated before platters they didn't know, who passed first and who waited. He watched faces—moments when eyes went bright and when they went briefly far away. He listened to the way relief took up space in people just as hunger emptied it, and how laughter, when let in, made room for more.
"Where are you from?" Dean asked to fill a small gap after a bowl changed hands.
"South," Rowan said.
Dean waited for more. Rowan met his eyes, not unfriendly, just finished. Dean grinned like a person who had expected that answer and filed it as a puzzle for later.
"You ever been on a train before?" Seamus asked, trying for an easier opening.
"Yes," Rowan said.
Neville coughed a laugh into his goblet. "He's like that," he told Seamus apologetically, as if Rowan were a kettle that didn't whistle so you had to watch the lid.
Hermione leaned in slightly. "Did you read Hogwarts: A History?" she asked Rowan, and her voice warmed with the hope of a shared library. "Most people don't, but I thought—well—since you pay attention to things, perhaps—"
"I haven't," Rowan said. "Yet."
"Oh." She did not deflate. She rearranged her expectation. "Well, I can loan you my copy. There are parts the author gets wrong, obviously, but the sections on the founding are very thorough. And there's a bit about the ceiling—I think it's the best explanation of how the enchantment works without the actual incantations."
Rowan glanced up. The star-sky had shifted—the moon had lifted a fraction, a cloud drawn thin like a scratch of chalk. "I'd like to see it," he said. He meant the book, and also not only that.
Hermione's mouth made a pleased shape she forgot to hide. "Good," she said, as if welcoming him into a pact he hadn't signed but already kept.
Dessert appeared with soft authority. Treacle tart that broke with a sigh. Apple crumble whose top had understood crispness. Ice cream that stood up for itself and did not collapse at being noticed. Rowan took a small square of tart and stopped before he wanted more. The old rule of orphans: leave a little, not because anyone asks, but because sometimes tomorrow needs it.
The talk around him leaned toward stories. Not the ones about families and summers—those would come later—but the ones you tell because a name sits on a bench three places down and you are not yet sure what to do with it.
"Harry Potter," Seamus said low, half in awe and half in the tone that teenagers use when something famous lives in their neighborhood. "That's him."
Dean eyed Rowan as if to see whether he flinched at the name. Rowan didn't. He watched Harry laugh at something Ron said and put his hand on his own goblet, rotating it a quarter turn so the handle pointed the same direction as the plate's pattern. A neatness for no one but himself.
"They say he survived You-Know-Who," Lavender said in a hush that still went far. "When he was a baby."
"They say lots of things," Parvati answered, not unkind. "Let him finish his pudding."
Seamus persisted, because he was Seamus. "But it's true. My mam says. The curse bounced back. No one's ever—"
"—survived the Killing Curse," Dean finished, not to show off but because he had to complete the shape of the sentence for it to leave the table. "No one."
Hermione had gone quiet. She glanced at Harry, then down at her spoon, then at Rowan, then back to her spoon. Rowan did not offer an opinion. It wasn't his story to speak.
"Dumbledore's why You-Know-Who fell," a second-year put in farther down, voice certain with the doctrine of older siblings. "And now he's back—Dumbledore, I mean—and that means we'll be just fine."
"Dumbledore's been here all along," Parvati said, patient. "You just didn't have to think about him when you were ten."
Rowan looked toward the high table. The threads around the headmaster still moved in their quiet pattern—not sleeping, not flaunting. Timeless things don't show off; they inhabit. For a breath, Dumbledore's gaze passed near their end of the red table, not stopping on them so much as including them with everyone else. A sense, again, of being accounted for. Rowan returned his attention to the tart.
He kept to the edges of the conversation. He let others fill the gaps. He made room where a jug needed to go and passed a bowl to someone who'd reached too late and had given up. He asked Neville, at the right moment, about the greenhouse his gran kept, and nodded while Neville described a plant that made a small, indignant squeak when pruned. "You have to be gentle," Neville said, nearly a whisper. "Or it remembers."
"You'll do well in Herbology," Hermione forecast like a weatherwoman about to be proven right by the sky.
Neville blushed and looked at his empty dish as if it might defend him.
When plates cleared themselves and goblets drained, a hush passed down the tables with the neatness of a well-tied ribbon. Dumbledore stood again. A brief invitation—to work, to kindness, to not do terrible things in corridors when no one is watching. A line about music, then a line about bed. He sat, and the prefects rose like markers in a book closing.
"First-years, this way," called a tall boy with a badge that caught the light. "Gryffindor—follow me, please."
They stood in a shuffle. Benches scraped politely. Shoes discovered new ways to squeak. The wave of red and gold gathered itself and flowed after the badge through a side door that found them when they needed it.
The castle night took them in.
The corridor smelled of polish and old stone. Torches burned in sconces shaped like hands offering flame. Paintings along the walls stirred to watch them: a woman in green sighed as if she'd seen all this eighteen times before and expected to see it again; a knight in bent armor made his horse stop prancing as a courtesy and then made it prance again the moment they'd passed.
"Keep up, please," the prefect said without turning. "Stairs have opinions about stragglers."
Hermione's head turned left and right in quick hitches like a sparrow learning a new windowsill. Seamus tried to whisper something to Dean, failed, and whispered louder. Neville held onto Trevor's box as if the toad might leap out and join the portraits. Rowan kept his place in the middle of the flow and let his eyes read the long lines of the place.
Threads stretched along the stone, not like cobwebs but like long notes. Some ran from stair post to stair post, humming so faintly he felt them in his wrists more than his ears. Some were old—heavy, sunk into the mortar in the way of long stories. Some were fresh and bright: a banister that had been mended this afternoon, a charm laid on a window yesterday to persuade it not to clatter when the wind found the loose bit.
A staircase turned while they were on it. It did not do so with drama. It did so with the patient pivot of something built to move. The first-years squeaked; a portrait laughed; the prefect did not slow.
"Left here," he called, "mind the step—no, the other one—yes, that one always pretends it isn't there."
They crossed a landing where a suit of armor contained no person and yet tried to bow; the bow stuck halfway and it made a metallic apology. They passed a corridor where the air had cooled and sharpened and Rowan felt, without understanding, that a room nearby preferred to be quiet and would ask you to leave if you were not.
At last, they reached a portrait of a very plump woman in a pink dress whose smile had graduated from polite to genuinely interested by the time the group finished arriving. "Password?" she trilled, deliciously important.
The prefect gave it. The lady swung away in her frame, the canvas doing a graceful hinge, and the space behind became a round opening just large enough for a handful of nervous bodies at a time.
They went through. The Gryffindor common room was a pocket of warmth nested in stone. Reds and golds filled the space like a good laugh. A fire burned as if it had been waiting all day to be looked at. Sofas and chairs congregated like people who had known one another long enough to sit without performing. A chess set in the corner clacked a pawn's small foot impatiently and then folded its arms, if pawns had arms. Bookshelves leaned under the weight of stories that had already been read, were being read now, and would be read again later by people not yet born.
Conversations unfurled, messy and glad. A second-year practiced levitating a biscuit behind a chair while a third-year attempted not to notice. A girl in Rowan's year with tight braids pressed her hands to the fire guard as if to catch heat in her fingers and take it upstairs. Someone sat at the window seat and tried to see past their own reflection.
"Boys' stairs to the left, girls' to the right," the prefect said. "Don't switch them. They don't like that." He smiled without warning anyone twice. "Also, don't bring food upstairs. You will think you are an exception. You are not."
He let them be then, like someone who knew when a rule needed a period, not a paragraph.
Rowan stood near the center and let the room test his weight. The threads here were softer. The lines ran between chair backs and habit, between rugs and the feet that found them each winter, between the fire and the window seat where someone always fell asleep with their cheek on a book page, leaving a mark they would later pretend not to see. He felt his chest loosen by a small measure he would not have noticed if he had been talking.
Hermione drifted toward him with a purpose disguised as loitering. "Did you see the staircases?" she asked, failing to keep her voice level. "There are a hundred and forty-two. I counted twenty-eight on the way up but that's not—well—that's not a good method; you have to account for ones that move. Hogwarts: A History says—"
Rowan nodded toward the girls' stairs. "Tomorrow," he said, not to stop her, but to keep something for it.
She closed her mouth and then opened it again to agree. "Tomorrow," she said, nodding too hard, and left him before her words got ahead of her feet.
Neville hovered as if stranded between groups. Rowan looked at him and then at a chair. Neville sat quickly, grateful not to be holding himself up by will alone. "It's warm," he said, because that was the most important thing just then.
Rowan stood for another minute and let the edges of the day set. He glanced, once, toward the door to the corridor, where, if he looked with his other way of looking, he could see in miniature a line running into the castle's long arteries and then into the night. He touched the pocket where his wand lay not to test it, but to remember his hand knew its place.
The dormitory waited upstairs behind the boys' staircase. The steps were worn more in the center than at the sides. They turned gently as if to reassure sleepers that no one would run on them at night. The door at the top swung inward on a hinge that had never once squealed in the month of September.
Five beds. Red curtains. The smell of old wood polished with habits, and of air that had met wool and come away warmer. A window set under the slope of the tower wall framed a triangle of sky. The moon's light came through and put a small right-angled piece of itself on the floor.
Trunks found their places at the ends of beds. Laughter from down the hall came and then thinned as it drifted. Boys discovered which bed would be theirs for a year by stepping toward one and discovering they had already picked it.
Rowan's bag sat at the foot of the third bed from the left. He didn't remember putting it there. He unbuckled the strap and set the bag on the trunk as if he'd had practice with these trunks for years. His wand case came out first, placed on the pillow, then his books stacked in a small, neat pile on the trunk so their weight would not indent the top. A pair of socks. A bar of soap wrapped in paper. A pencil sharpener McGonagall had given him that he placed in the drawer of the bedside table as if it were a tiny anchor disguised as a tool.
Boys talked over him and around him. Seamus told Dean about a trick with matches and eggs that made no sense. A red-haired boy at the far bed—Rowan learned later his name was Ron—complained in a cheerful tone about a hand-me-down robe that had never learned to stay the same length two days running. Harry spoke little; when he did, the others leaned in the way people do when they are learning the timbre of a new friend's voice.
At one point Harry's glance met Rowan's across the space. It wasn't a stare. It was a check, a quiet "you're there, I see you," the same small nod men give across streets when carrying ladders. Rowan returned it with almost exactly the same measure. Ron tipped his head too, friendly, already caught by another conversation.
They undressed behind curtains and in corners as boys do when modesty is only part habit and mostly courtesy. Rowan slipped his wand case under the pillow, not to hide it, but because that felt like the right distance from his hand. He lay back and the mattress recognized the weight and made a small adjustment only it would notice.
The sounds of the common room thinned to a thread under the door. A log in the hearth below shifted and made a soft drop of ash sound like pages turning. A portrait in the corridor coughed and, realizing no one had asked it anything, stopped.
Rowan looked at the ceiling he could not see for the canopy and saw the hall's ceiling anyway. He saw the night cupped in stone. He saw the threads' slow, nightly drift, longer and smoother now that the day's chatter was over—lines from boy to bed, from bed to window, from tower to ground, from ground into a larger web spread under the country like roots.
He turned his head, hand under pillow, fingers near wand. Not clutching. Close.
The day played itself again in better order. The door. The hall. The hat. The red table. Dumbledore, with threads arranged and patient, the center of a pattern that wasn't a trap but a tide. McGonagall's half-second of pride like the click of a latch catching where it should.
He let the order stand. He did not pull at it. He let it become part of the room, the way boots become part of a doorway and a certain chair belongs to the person who sits in it even when that person isn't there.
Sleep came, not as a drop but as a corridor with a light at the far end that went out one room at a time.
He did not notice when the last room went dark. He did not hear the last quiet talk in the common room below or the prefect's final laugh before bed. He did not see the moon slide along the window and step off the floor.
He breathed, long and even, the second movement at its pace. The wand under his pillow did nothing but be itself and remember where it would be needed tomorrow.
The castle held them all in its hands—old stone, older rules, new boys and girls with names to write in margins—and turned, very slowly, toward morning.