Rowan woke to a pale wash of dawn on the dormitory ceiling and the soft, irregular breathing of boys who had learned the beds in one night and decided to trust them. For a while he lay still, charting the small sounds—the shift of sheets, the scratch of a trunk lid as someone fumbled for socks, the distant thrum of pipes before the castle warmed itself. His hand found the wand under the pillow, rested there, and then withdrew. He did not need it yet. He just needed to know it was where he had left it.
Curtains parted in staggered bursts of red. Seamus yawned in a way that infected two others; Dean said good morning like the word had a grin built into it. Ron muttered about a missing tie and then produced it from under his pillow with a guilty look, as though the tie had crawled there on its own. Harry was quiet, quick with his laces. Neville moved carefully, Trevor's box secured and set on the trunk like a fragile truth.
"Breakfast?" Dean asked the room at large.
"Yes," Rowan said, and the day began.
They stepped into corridors that still held the hush of early morning. Portraits peered out and whispered to one another about new names already forgotten. The stairs behaved, as if the castle had decided the first day should belong to children, not tricks. When they reached the common room, a handful of older Gryffindors were already gathered around the notice board, comparing timetables and moaning in advance about homework. The air smelled faintly of embers and polish.
They spilled into the main artery of the castle with other streams of first-years, all pulled toward the same mouth of light. The Great Hall was bright in a way evenings could never manage—sun through high windows, a sky-ceiling that admitted it was daytime and nothing else. The floating candles were still there, their flames smaller, polite in morning. The tables were set with porridge, fruit, toast that exhaled butter when pressed, pots of jam in ruby and amber.
Threads rose gently above the room, not the fierce weave of last night, but a lingering lattice, like the pattern on a lake after wind. Rowan sensed them without staring: faint lines from cup to hand, steadier lines from teacher to timetable, bright, quick strands between friends who had decided to be friends before they could have reasons.
McGonagall moved through the hall like a line under a sentence—quiet emphasis wherever she passed. She paused at the Gryffindor table long enough to lay a pile of schedules like cards in a winning hand. "Remember your books," she said, nearly to herself, and moved on.
Rowan scanned his timetable. Double Transfiguration after breakfast. Charms in the late morning. Potions after lunch. A day that began with strictness, curved into precision, and dropped into the deep pools of quiet work. It felt right.
He ate because hunger was a rule he obeyed. Toast, porridge, an apple tucked away for later without thinking. Hermione took her seat opposite with a stack of books far too tall for the hour and began a small campaign to explain the schedule to Neville, who was pretending he didn't need an explanation and failing nobly.
"Double Transfiguration," she said, tapping the line as if the words could be trained to stand straighter. "Professor McGonagall is strict but fair and extremely accomplished. You must read instructions thoroughly. She is not forgiving about carelessness."
"I can pay attention," Neville protested.
"You can," Hermione said, softening. "And you will."
Rowan folded his schedule into the inside pocket where he kept things that mattered. The second movement under his normal breath set itself to a patient tempo. The day felt like a question asked in the right order.
—
They climbed to the Transfiguration classroom in a knot of first-years tightened by anticipation. The door stood open. The room beyond was airy and precise: rows of desks; tall windows; a blackboard washed clean so completely that it reflected the light; on each desk, a single matchstick laid across the grain, aligning with it as if it had been taught manners.
Professor McGonagall stood at the front as if she had been there since the stone was first asked to be a wall. Her gaze touched each face once and left no doubt that she would remember it.
"Good morning," she said.
The words carried cleanly, unadorned. She spoke of Transfiguration not as a parlor trick but as an exact discipline—dangerous when done without attention, rewarding when done correctly, the language of change written in laws, not whims. Her voice never rose. The room did.
"Your first exercise," she said at last, indicating the matchsticks, "is to introduce yourselves to the work. Wood to metal. Shape altered. Mass reconsidered. Hair-thin detail paid for in patience. You will not rush. To do so courts failure more permanent than a bad mark."
A ripple of solemnity chased the light across the room. Quills were set aside. Wands appeared in careful hands.
Rowan rested his wand on the desk, letting the wood touch the wood, listening. Threads gathered—the faintest lines from the matchstick's fibers, the more eager strands that lived habitually in the wand. He did not speak yet. He watched how the two reached for each other in potential. Not emotion—structure.
Across the aisle, Hermione inhaled, eyes narrowing as she read and reread the instructions she had already memorized. Ron's wand knocked his matchstick off the desk and he caught it with palm and apology. Neville's fingers shook a little, steadying as he set his wand flat and told it the day would be reasonable.
Rowan raised his wand very slightly and moved it through a shape that the threads seemed to suggest rather than he inventing it—an arc tightened at the end, a point assumed rather than imposed. He did not force the word. He invited the matchstick to remember needle. The wood shivered as a concept more than an object, grain reconsidering itself the way water does in cold.
The tip went silver first—a small bright dot, then a line of brightness eating its way inward. The wood narrowed and lengthened. A head formed, precise as breath held correctly. The matchstick left behind its old self like a husk that sank into the new shape. The needle finished quietly.
He lifted it. It was not perfect—the eye too small by a breath you could feel with a fingertip—but it was a needle. It carried weight and seriousness. It reflected light without boasting.
Rowan set it down. He felt no triumph. Only a click, inside, that meant a statement had completed its grammar.
"Mr. Von Vey," McGonagall said.
Her shadow had arrived before her. He looked up. She took the needle without asking, brought it level with her eye, turned it as only a master turns a tool: with the expectation that it will reveal something under simple motion.
"Well done," she said, and the room decided as one whether those two words were rare or often used here. "It lacks nothing essential and indulges nothing extraneous."
He nodded once.
She set the needle down. "Since you have introduced yourself satisfactorily, you may proceed to something that requires finesse over show." She glanced at the window ledge. A small beetle had chosen to be there, considering sun. She set a thimble beside it with a light tap. "Either will do," she said. "In either direction."
Rowan glanced at the beetle. Its tiny armored back threw off a tight, orderly thread. The thimble offered a domed ring of silver that hummed faintly along the room's general key. He chose the thimble to beetle not because it was easier—both were intricate in different ways—but because metal into living form asked for gentler speech.
He breathed. He let the wand's tip hover just above the thimble and traced a shape in air that was almost nothing—a hint of curve, a promise of leg and joint. The silver softened, not visibly at first; he felt it soften in the threads, like a knot's decision to listen. He gave it structure: six points of articulation, the gentle doming of the wing cases, the minuscule suggestion of antennae. No rush. The silver flowed, weight distributing as if obeying a remembered rule.
A beetle stood where the thimble had been, legs splayed for balance, antennae tasting new air. It did not dart. It stood, then took a deliberate step, then another, finding the boundary of the desk as a cliff to be avoided.
Rowan held still. So did McGonagall. Students around them reduced their own movement by instinct, as if an animal in the room required quiet. The professor lowered one finger very slowly. The beetle turned toward it, curious but not alarmed.
"Reverse it," she said, voice careful of small things. "No harm."
Rowan nodded. He lifted his wand a fraction, turned the curve of the last motion back on itself, and the creature went dream-soft at the edges, shining, folding inward like a thought that yields. The thimble returned, only a shade more polished.
McGonagall breathed out in a way that did not acknowledge breath. "Continue," she said, then, after a half-step, added just for him, "and do not get bored."
He did not. He touched a few more matchsticks into needles, each a little cleaner, then took the trickier path—needle to matchstick without splintering, grain reknit as if cut wood could remember sap. It could, if asked properly. The threads agreed or refused with such honesty that the work became a conversation Rowan had wanted to have all his life.
Around him, the room found its rhythm. Wand tips shivered, some too quickly, some hardly at all. Half-needles appeared: blunted ends, fused eyes, dreadful little daggers that would stab stitches rather than find them. There were gasps when something half-worked; there were groans when something wooden became a metal comma and refused to be straight. Hermione's first needle had a lovely point and an unhelpfully closed eye; her second found the hole with an engineer's pride. Neville coaxed the tip bright, then lost his nerve and had to be talked back into it by his own patience.
McGonagall moved among them with precise encouragement shaped exactly to the fault in front of her. To one: "If you mean the intent, your wand will follow." To another: "You are not icing a cake." To a third: "Your finger, not the wand, is doing the work. Reverse that."
By the end of the double period, Rowan had a neat line of shining needles, each margin-lovely. The beetle slept like a folded coin. His work was not perfect because nothing is; it was complete because he had stopped where stopping belonged. When the bell released them, McGonagall nodded once in his direction: a private punctuation mark.
In the corridor, the buzz surrounding him was warm but not smothering. Hermione matched his stride without asking. "How did you—" she began, then adjusted mid-sentence, "—what did you look for?"
"The point," Rowan said. "Then the hole. Then the metal deciding to be thin."
"That's… yes," Hermione said, approving and mildly frustrated by an answer that held no steps she could write down. "Well, it's very good."
Neville hovered on Rowan's other side, face bright with a pride he didn't want to claim out loud. "My third needle," he said quietly, "pierced cloth."
"That's the job," Rowan said.
Neville's smile stayed all the way down the stair.
—
Charms felt different from the first breath. The classroom lively in a way Transfiguration refused to be; shelves full of objects that might take offense if pointed at incorrectly; a sprung wooden floor that wanted to be stood on. Professor Flitwick, small and keen-eyed, climbed a stack of books to see his class better and be seen by it. He greeted them with the informal ceremony of a conductor introducing an orchestra to its first rehearsal.
"Magic likes clear intention and neat pronunciation," he told them, cheerful as a bell. "The rest is practice—and luck—and sometimes your neighbor." He flicked his wand and a stack of feathers drifted from an open cupboard, settling onto each desk in a tidy snow.
"The Levitation Charm is kinder than it sounds," he said. "You are not wrenching things up; you are showing them an easier way to be where they would like to go."
He demonstrated without drama. Feather lifted, hung, drifted down like a new idea that had decided to stay. Then they were invited to try.
Rowan's Vey Sight hummed awake the moment half a dozen wands moved at once. Threads snarled and unknotted around syllables. He felt the way a good incantation made space in air rather than slashing it. The movement of the wrist—small circle, precise flick—left a bright ring in the threads when done correctly. Hermione reproduced that ring on her second attempt; the boy to Rowan's left painted a sloppy spiral that did nothing but tire the air.
Rowan breathed, stepped into the second movement, and asked the feather to get lighter before he asked it to leave the desk. He shifted the wand in an arc that matched the thread's preferred curve rather than the chalked diagram. "Wingardium Leviosa," he said once, vowels crisp, consonants unhurried.
The feather rose. Not with a lurch— with a decision. It hung there, a palm's breadth above the desk, threads around it long and vertical like the lines rain makes on glass. Rowan guided it higher, then held it. The feather waited, as patient as a held breath. He let it down. It settled without complaint.
Flitwick, who had been clapping for someone at the far side of the room, turned as if the air had tapped his shoulder. His eyes went from Rowan's wand to the feather to Rowan's face and back. "Very good," he said, in the tone of a craftsman who recognizes an apprentice who already knows which tools are sharp. "Again."
Rowan did it again, then varied it a little to feel the edge of control—higher, slower, a detour to the left. Hermione, glancing over, adjusted her grip and found a smoother rise; her satisfaction was unhidden and deserved. Neville, spared the feather for a matchbox after a small mishap, managed a wobbling lift that left him flushed and grinning.
Flitwick moved among them with bouncing approval and small corrections that mattered: a fingertip repositioned, a syllable softened, an elbow lowered. "Magic is a language," he said at one point, almost to himself and mostly to Rowan. "You, I think, have been listening to its grammar for some time."
Rowan nodded once, as if to a statement about weather that had proven accurate.
By the end of the lesson, the room's air felt stirred but clean, like a field after wind. The threads around everyone's wands were brighter by a shade that meant use, not stress. As they packed their things, Flitwick called, "Mr. Von Vey?" and when Rowan looked up, the professor added, "We will have work for you, later, that likes hands as careful as yours."
Rowan inclined his head. Praise felt like a tool too; it had to be held correctly.
—
Lunch was a blur of voices and the clatter of cutlery for the simple reason that everyone had something to say. Gryffindor's corner of the Great Hall vibrated with retellings: McGonagall's strict praise, Flitwick's buoyant approval, the matchstick that had turned into a very dangerous fish hook and then refused to become anything else. Hermione annotated a conversation two benches down without inserting herself into it; Neville looked as though he could gently levitate his entire plate from gratitude alone.
Rowan ate and listened, storing the cadences of this new community the way he had always stored patterns. The threads in the hall were brighter than morning, burnished by success and the pride of survivable failure. He did not indulge in either. He put an apple in his pocket again. A rule.
When they rose, the air shifted cooler as the flow bent toward the dungeons. Potions kept to the underplaces of the castle, as if the world preferred its slow transformations be done near stone and water. Hermione fell into step with him as a matter of course; her stack of books had mercifully decreased by one.
"Same table?" she asked. It was not a request. It was an assumption that he would not mind.
"I don't," he said.
The corridor sloped. Tapers burned with a steadier flame here, reluctant to dance. The classroom was deep and shadowed, lit so that glass shone and liquids admitted their colours honestly. Shelves climbed the walls, each lined with jars whose contents were sediment and shapes and strange greens that made the eyes suspect their own honesty.
Rowan's Vey Sight did something it hadn't done all day: it settled lower, hanging near the floor the way mist does in valleys. Threads ran from ingredient to ingredient in short, intimate lines. Some held close to their jars like perfume to cloth. Some reached impatiently for their usual partners. It was quieter than a Charms lesson and thicker than Transfiguration—a web of readiness waiting to be asked correctly.
Students took places at paired benches. Rowan chose one in the center row with room for two. Hermione slid into the place beside him, opening her book to the first page as if it still needed to be convinced to be useful.
The room hushed before footsteps entered. Professor Snape's presence altered the space like a change in weather pressure: not seen at once, felt at once. He reached the front without the preamble of clearing a throat or announcing himself. His eyes measured the class less like a tally and more like a weighing.
He spoke of potion-making not as cookery but as a discipline of patience, precision, and obedience to sequence—magic reluctant to be rushed, easily ruined by noise, sensitive to heat and pride. He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. When he asked if any of them imagined they could bottle fame or brew glory, he did it in a tone that seemed to ask whether any of them had ever read a book properly. Several spines straightened for reasons other than posture.
Rowan listened and thought of threads: how some combinations sang and some snarled, how heat could make a line brighten until it snapped, how a single wrong leaf could tangle a brew beyond saving. He did not enjoy being spoken to as a suspect, but he did not take it personally. The room took it personally for him.
"Page ten," Snape said at last. "A simple infusion. We will see if you can manage not to offend water."
Parchment hissed. Cauldrons took heat. The room began to fill with the thin, sour-sweet rise of steeping roots and crushed leaves. Rowan's fingers hovered over their ingredients. Hermione named each one under her breath as if to conjure their better behavior.
"Chop the asphodel," Hermione said, taking the knife with decisive fingers. "Not too fine; the instructions say—yes—coarse enough to keep the starch from clouding the infusion."
Rowan arranged the pieces she passed him according to how their threads clung to the blade—freshness showing as a quick, bright line, older roots dulling in a way only he would sense. He set the best to one side without explanation. Hermione did not ask why he discarded the others; she simply slid them back into the jar with a small nod, as if they offended her personally.
"Stir counter-clockwise until it clarifies," she read.
Rowan watched the threads crisscross above the cauldron as steam gathered. Counter-clockwise drew the strands into a tidy spiral; clockwise broke them into messy angles. He set the spoon and let his wrist find the slow, even path, not an inch more, not an inch less. Hermione checked the color and gave a brisk approving sound.
They added flower heads one by one, waiting between each as the liquid's surface went from sullen to glass-smooth. Each bloom left a small ring of thread around itself as it surrendered what it had. Rowan waited for the ring to vanish before nodding for the next. Hermione, quick to test hypotheses, matched his rhythm without ever being told there was one.
At the bench to their right, someone dumped half a jar in at once and turned their cauldron into a sulking swamp. At the front, Snape said nothing, which was worse than anything he might have said.
"Stir," Hermione murmured.
"Now the heat down," Rowan said, and it might have sounded like guessing if not for the way the threads at the liquid's edge were starting to fray. She adjusted the flame. The fraying stopped.
Snape's shoes moved without noise. He appeared at their elbow long enough to look into the cauldron and at their hands. His eyes rested on Rowan's face for a breath that felt like two. "Miss Granger," he said, as if reading a roll in a tone that carried both annoyance and acknowledgment. "Mr. Von Vey."
Neither spoke. Hermione kept her spoon moving. Rowan kept his gaze on the surface of the brew, which had taken on a clarity that was not water's, something finer than that and more demanding. Snape made a sound that could have been approval if stripped of every syllable and walked on.
They finished early without rushing. Hermione decanted the infusion into a vial as if it were expensive. Rowan folded the cloth they'd used to dab spills at once and set it to one side with a sense, unbidden, that the cloth would prefer not to be stained without purpose.
"Thank you," Hermione said after Snape had passed to terrorize the other half of the room. It was simple gratitude, sharpened by the surprise of being grateful.
"For what?" Rowan asked.
"For not being…" She hunted for a word and found one that did not require apology. "Careless."
"You aren't either," he said.
She smiled in that contained way she saved for praise she believed and didn't wish to show off about. "I do try."
When Snape called for them to stop, their bench did not smell of disaster, and nothing had boiled over. He walked the aisles collecting vials with a face that had never in its life been impressed by first years. When he reached theirs, he held Rowan's infusion up to the light, turned it once, then set it down with the flat quiet of something that would not be criticized today. He said nothing to them or to anyone. He did, however, take five points from a pair who had produced something that could possibly etch glass and probably boots.
The bell released the room like a lid taken off a pot. Voices rose and then were trained by the corridor's colder air into thinner lines. Hermione exhaled so long it might have been two exhales. "We did well," she said, sounding surprised at her own pleasure.
"You did," Rowan said.
"We," she insisted, and he let her keep it.
They went up out of the low light back toward the day. The castle felt roomier after the dungeons, the air granted some of its sweetness back. Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws tangled politely on landings, then separated like rivers that had mis-met their banks. Above them, the ceiling had resumed its warm blue tones, as if the sky approved quietly of children learning.
By the time they reached the Great Hall for the evening meal, Rowan had stored so many patterns he could have stacked them like plates. How McGonagall's praise was a tool sharp enough to cut away self-satisfaction. How Flitwick's delight made magic stand up straighter. How Snape's silence could be an instrument that tuned a room to exactness through fear or respect or both. How Hermione's precision met his instinct where they blurred, and neither had to shout to make a thing right.
He sat with the others and let the evening fold around them. Seamus attempted to levitate a fork in a way that made the fork consider rebellion; Dean confiscated it kindly. Neville told a story about a plant that held grudges but could be placated with warm water and compliments; Parvati listened like a future arbiter of great taste in greenhouses. Harry contributed a small, dry line at just the right moment that made Ron snort pumpkin juice and then pretend he had meant to do it. Laughter made the red table one thing again.
Rowan ate and did not rush. The second movement under his first kept perfect time. If he looked up—if he let himself—he could see faint currents of thread tracing the hall again, brighter now than morning, softened from last night's brilliance. He did not press on them. He let them be. Power, he was seeing, wasn't always in the pulling. Often it lived in what you noticed and chose not to disturb.
When they were dismissed at last, he followed the stream back to the tower. The stair whispered a complaint then decided to be generous. The common room glowed with the same fire as last night, which felt like proof that some things could be counted on twice. He paused at the notice board long enough to read a sign that asked for volunteers to mind second-years' owls on Fridays. He memorized the date without deciding why.
Up in the dormitory, boys were boys: a tangle of complaints about blisters and quills and a rumor that the Charms classroom became an ice rink in winter. Rowan washed his hands and the day with them. He slid the wand under the pillow and felt the threads in the room adjust by a hair's breadth, as if acknowledging that the tool had returned to its place. The bed held him like it had practiced.
He lay on his side and let the day line up: the matchstick's first shimmer to silver; the feather agreeing to be light; the potion clearing like a thought clarified by better words. He saw the teachers again in outline: McGonagall's spine as a ruler; Flitwick's hands as parentheses; Snape as a straight edge laid down the middle of a table to keep recipes from wandering. He filed away what each demanded and what each offered in exchange.
Sleep arrived not as a curtain but as ocean—regular, forgiving. He went under without struggle. The wand waited under his pillow. Somewhere down below, embers made their private negotiations with ash. The castle kept breathing: stone and story, rule and exception, children and their careful firsts.
Tomorrow would ask more. Rowan found himself ready in the way a quiet person can be fierce—still until it matters, then moving exactly as far as needed.