I watched the common room from a distance, a shape among many, wrapped in borrowed shadow. The castle hummed with the small noises of midnight: muffled footsteps, the far cough of a portrait, the sleepy rustle of blankets. Beneath that normalcy there was always, for me, a lattice of opportunity.
Ginny was smaller than I remembered from the other world — smaller, quieter. I had no desire to shatter her more than necessary; she was an asset, not an ornament. That meant efficiency, not spectacle.
When I moved, it was like water slipping through stone. I braided a little glamour around my hands and let evening do the rest. I took Harry's cloak — the one that had always been more myth than cloth in that timeline — and slipped it into my robes. In its place I left a common cloak, folded, ordinary. A careless swap, the sort of thing that would later be dismissed as misplacing laundry. Nobody would think to look twice.
Ginny slept with the smallness of childhood about her, hair fanned across the pillow like a careless flame. I did not wake her with force; I shaded her with a quiet charm that slid across her mind like a closing door. When she breathed deeper, I lifted her small body in my arms — an action that felt absurdly paternal until I remembered the ledger of necessity I had kept for years. This was a ledger entry and nothing more.
The Room of Requirement greeted me like an old acquaintance. It listened to what I needed and shaped itself accordingly: tonight, a hidden chamber with the hush of old libraries and the lock of places rarely used. I led Ginny inside and placed her on a soft pallet; the spell kept her dreaming, safe in a bubble of sleep until I chose otherwise.
Then I turned my attention to what had brought me here. The Room yielded a corridor I had never seen in my original worldline — a narrow passage lined with forgotten things, a place that smelled faintly of dust and the tang of magic long unbothered. I moved through it with my senses keen, careful to leave nothing like a trail. The diadem did not glow for me as it used to with other eyes; it sat like a quiet crown on a pedestal, indifferent and small.
I reached for it and felt the first warmth of that particular power — the calming wash that Ravenclaw's relic always brought. It does not make you smarter, I thought, but it smooths the jagged edges of panic and opens the mind like a window on a still morning. In this world, it had lain hidden long enough to collect a certain tarnish of neglect. That would not matter; instruments are tools, and tools are never sentimental.
The diadem was surprisingly light. I tucked it into a lined satchel and closed a sealing charm that hummed like a closed eye. When I turned back toward the quiet pallet where Ginny slept, the weight of everything I had taken — the diary earlier, this new relic now — settled pleasantly into my shoulders. The work felt inevitable, as if all my previous years of meticulous cruelty had been preparing me for a single, surgical sweep.
I watched the sleeping girl for a moment longer. My additions to her mind — the sleeping architecture, the deep, secret library of forbidden knowledge — were not yet awake. I had given her tools and tied her loyalty with a thread of bloodline and ritual. She would grow into them on her own schedule. For now, she was a child on a pallet, and I was the shadow at the head of the bed.
I slipped from the Room the same way I came: without drama, without triumph. The castle swallowed me as it always does, full of teachers and heroes and impossible optimism. I moved through its corridors humming the same small, private song I had been singing for years — planning, arranging, collecting.
Outside the walls, the world continued to hurt itself in all the ordinary ways. Inside my satchel the diadem rested against the leather: cool, precise, and very useful.
No one was the wiser. That, more than any spell or artifact, is the most valuable thing of all.