I step into the castle and the air snaps—the old magic of Hogwarts prickling along my skin like a warning. It matters nothing. I have turned more storms than this place can throw at me.
Professor McGonagall is first to meet me in the corridor, eyes flint and voice like a bell. She moves with the precision of a true transfigurist—crisp, deliberate, honed by decades of practice. For the first few exchanges I amuse myself letting her strike and parry; it is a pleasant reminder of the rigor of her art. Her changes are clever, but they're small adjustments on a language I speak fluently. I answer with a compact cascade of shape-work that folds her own defenses against her: a pillar here, a binding form there, neat, surgical. She finds herself pressed into a corner, breath quick, and then the pressure eases—no shattered bones, no screaming theatrics—only the quiet dark of sleep settling over her eyes. I consider the options: subordinate, ally, or patient for study. Either way, she is useful.
Slughorn and Flitwick come next, two very different kinds of nuisance. Slughorn arrives with bluster and a tincture of theatricality, sloshing about his potions and his contacts as if that alone will save him. I admire the man—once my teacher, once my friend—and so I do not waste him with cruelty. A careful, invasive touch at the edge of his mind unthreads the small lies and self-importance; he slumps, lucid but unable to resist as I lay an obliging ward around him. He will wake bruised in his pride but intact in body, and I will decide later whether he will be recompensed with a place at my table or kept quiet in a warded guestroom.
Flitwick is the smaller, quicker problem. He hurls chaff and charm after charm with the frantic energy of someone who believes speed will substitute for depth. I let him exhaust himself against an elegant transfiguration: a swirling, contained shell of water that surrounds him like a globe. It is not intended to drown; I am not a butcher. Instead it is a classroom in miniature—pressure, disorientation, the lesson that not all assaults are met with a mirror. He struggles, coughs, and then his limbs grow still as unconsciousness takes him. When I withdraw the shell, he lies slumped but breathing, eyes closed; later, he will remember the feel of being overmatched, and he will understand what I am capable of.
I do not relish these moments, though I do not flinch from them. Power is a language; sometimes you must speak in terms that are blunt enough to be understood. I leave the professors contained, treated, and bound with wards that will not hurt but will ensure compliance. Hogwarts still stands, but the tone has changed. Dumbledore is the only obstacle that still balances on the edge of equal strength—and I will sharpen my advantage in time. For now, every fallen resistance is a lesson to the rest of the castle: the future I build will be efficient, unforgiving where needful, and inevitable.