The first snow at Hogwarts always arrived unnoticed, descending quietly in the stillness of night.
By morning, when the first faint rays of sunlight pierced through the clouds, the world had already donned a silver-white robe. The castle spires, the treetops of the Forbidden Forest, the Quidditch stands—every sharp edge was softened under a gentle cover of snow, and the earth and sky alike glowed with purity.
Outside, the cold was bitter enough to freeze dripping water into icicles, yet that chill never breached the Gryffindor Tower. Instead, it seemed to feed the fire leaping in the common room hearth—and the students' uncontainable excitement.
No one knew who started it first.
Perhaps Fred, or maybe George—one of them used a silent Accio to snatch up a handful of fresh snow from the window ledge, packed it swiftly into a ball, and with a gleeful cry, hurled it at an unsuspecting target.
"Hey!"
That shout became the trumpet of war.
The warm and cozy common room instantly descended into chaos. More students joined the uproarious fun, waving their wands and conjuring snowballs with the simplest spells. The air was filled with the hum of incantations, shrieks of dodging bodies, and peals of laughter whenever a snowy missile struck home.
Snowballs traced white arcs through the warm air: some found their marks, bursting coldly against robes; others veered wide, smacking into heavy tapestries with muffled thuds, or colliding with bookshelves, sending dust drifting down.
The entire room brimmed with merriment.
Alan did not join.
He stood alone at the great floor-to-ceiling window, his back to the riot of laughter behind him. The firelight cast a long shadow of his figure, while the snow's glow from outside outlined his features in sharp relief. His expression was calm, a stillness utterly out of place in the chaos.
The world of snow beyond the window—with its perfect silence and order—seemed far more captivating to him than the disorder inside.
"Watch out!"
Lee Jordan ducked clumsily, narrowly dodging a snowball that whistled past his ear. It struck the stone wall behind him, shattering into a spray of ice crystals. He brushed snow dust from his shoulder with a shudder, then spotted Alan standing in the corner.
Curious, he went over.
"Hey, Alan. Why aren't you playing? This is rare fun—much better than burying yourself in those giant tomes all the time."
Alan's gaze never left the window. His voice was calm, as if stating a law of physics.
"I don't find interest in such disorderly parabolic motions."
Even as his words fell, the holly wand in his hand gave the slightest flick.
No incantation. No flash of light.
Lee Jordan instinctively followed his gaze. In the next second, his grin froze. His mouth slowly fell open in shock—wide enough to swallow a Golden Snitch.
Outside the window, three snowballs were floating silently in midair.
They weren't haphazard lumps, but spheres of near-perfect symmetry—uniform in size, density, and shape, their surfaces smoothed as if by precise polishing.
An invisible Levitation Charm was holding them aloft, but this was no ordinary charm.
Unlike the wild chaos of the snowball fight inside, these three spheres hovered in stillness, waiting—as if poised for the conductor's first gesture.
Then, under Alan's silent command, they moved.
It wasn't flight.
It was a dance.
A ballet dedicated to snow and silence.
The three snowballs became three masterful dancers, performing a waltz in the air. One ascended gracefully, while the other two traced perfect overlapping ellipses around it. At times, they came so close it seemed they would touch, yet always slipped past in the final millimeter, undisturbed down to the last crystal.
At other times, they broke apart, racing along complex geometric paths, each trajectory invisible but exact, leaving behind a sense of unseen precision.
The entire performance was smooth, elegant—mathematical in its rigor, artistic in its harmony. No tremors, no collisions, no loss of control.
This was far beyond anything the basic Levitation Charm was ever meant to achieve.
And what made it even more chilling was that Alan was not straining—he still had attention to spare.
He turned his head toward the petrified Lee Jordan and explained in a calm, professorial tone, as if lecturing on a simple calculus problem.
"The essence of this spell is not in levitation itself. It lies in splitting your own mental focus into multiple threads of execution."
Lee Jordan swallowed hard. He didn't understand the term, but he could feel the terrifying weight behind it.
Alan's eyes returned to the snowy ballet outside, his voice carrying clearly to Lee—and to the other students who had grown quiet, drawn to the spectacle.
"You must construct an independent set of control commands in your mind for each target you want to control."
As he spoke, one snowball abruptly broke away from the waltz and began spinning rapidly on its own—while the other two continued their flawless paths, completely unaffected.
"And then, your mind becomes the central processor—" Alan's tone remained calm, steady.
"Switching rapidly between threads, issuing unique commands to each: movement, rotation, acceleration. And none of the instruction sets may interfere with one another."
"...while still maintaining overall coordinated operation."
Every word Alan spoke was crisp and distinct.
And outside the window, the unbelievable "snowball ballet" precisely demonstrated his theory with every movement.
At some point, the ruckus inside the common room had completely died away.
No more spell-casting.
No more shrieks.
No more bursts of laughter.
The students who had been flinging snowballs at each other one after another stopped their play. They dropped the half-formed snow clumps still in their hands, their expressions shifting from confusion—
to shock—
to utter, frozen silence.
As if drawn by an invisible force, they slowly gathered toward the tall window.
Every gaze was locked on the three snowballs dancing outside, and then, almost against their will, flicked toward Alan—the calm, detached orchestrator of it all.
A spell that every first-year could master in just a few lessons.
A simple charm they had been using moments ago to throw snowballs for fun.
Yet, in Alan's hands, it had been elevated into a breathtaking work of art.
This was no longer mere magical technique.
This was crushing, overwhelming control—terrifying in its precision.
Splitting focus once was normal.
Splitting focus twice already marked a prodigy.
But Alan had just flawlessly controlled three independent targets at once—
and even had a fourth thread to calmly explain his method to them in real time.
In that moment, the hazy impression they had all carried of Alan Scott—that "brilliant, incomprehensible genius"—suddenly crystallized.
It became clear.
It became specific.
And it became… impossibly distant.
It was the despairing kind of distance one felt when mortals looked up at the stars—able to see the light, but powerless to ever grasp or comprehend what lay beyond.
Under the weight of every eye in the room, Alan lowered his wand.
Outside, the three graceful ballerinas of snow performed their final curtsy, then silently, slowly drifted back down to the snow on the ledge. They melted seamlessly into the ordinary white drift—
as if the breathtaking performance just now had never existed at all.