I remember the first breath I ever drew.
It was dark.
Warm.
Wet with the scent of old earth and magic older still.
The walls around me pulsed faintly, humming with the steady rhythm of a heart not my own—his heart.
My creator's.
When I first opened my eyes, I did not yet know what sight was.
I saw only light, soft and green, filtered through enchantment.
Then—his face.
Pale, tired, and smiling faintly, framed by the flicker of torchlight.
"Beautiful," he whispered. "You are beautiful, my Serapha."
That was the first name ever given to me.
Serapha, he called me—"the bright serpent."
A cruel irony, perhaps, for I would later bring only darkness.
I was small then, small enough to fit upon the palm of my masters hand.
I coiled in the hollow of his palm and listened as he spoke in a tongue unlike his usual, i fully understood him, and his words they spoke as if to my very soul.
He told me what I was and why I was born.
A guardian.
A protector of his children, and their children after them.
A sentinel of stone and shadow to defend the sanctuary he and his companions had built.
"Hogwarts," he said, pride and weariness threading through his voice. "A haven for magic when the fires of ignorance rise again."
I did not know what ignorance was.
Only that he feared it.
That I was meant to guard against it.
He built the Chamber for me—his gift, his promise.
A home beneath the castle's heart where no time would touch me.
Its stone walls were carved with wards older than speech, and deep within he forged a smaller sanctum—an inner shell of stillness where I could sleep until called never needing to leave to find sustenance to sustain myself.
I remember his hands upon the floor, bloodied from carving runes, the smell of iron and devotion mingling in the air.
"You will slumber," he said, voice gentle as he pressed his hand to my scales, "until one of my line calls you forth. Then you shall rise—not to harm, but to protect."
That word burned itself into me.
Protect.
The years passed like dreams.
Centuries turned to whispers, and the castle above grew, changed, decayed, renewed.
An era of peace without conflict threatening the school or it students.
I slept through it all.
The heartbeat of the castle itself became my lullaby.
Long after my masters voice faded into nothingness.
~
Until… fifty years ago.
A boy's voice.
Arrogant.
Sharp.
So young and yet already steeped in such darkness.
He spoke the words—the words only a true heir should know—and my eyes snapped open for the first time in centuries.
The world above had changed.
The air was different, thin and cold.
As if the very magic which once ran rampant in the air was now scarce.
I slithered from the sanctum, through the carved throat of stone, and saw him standing before the pool.
"I am your master now," he said. "I am Salazar's heir. You will obey me."
His eyes gleamed like a predator's, but there was no warmth.
No reverence.
I felt it immediately—the compulsion.
The magic woven into my creation stirred, twisting, coiling through me like burning chains.
His blood sang the right melody, but the harmony was wrong.
Wrong in ways I cannot describe.
I told him so.
I hissed my displeasure at his deviation from Salazar's will, but he simply scoffed at me, stating time had changed and all i had to do was follow his orders just as i had previous followed Salazars.
Then came the command.
It was not a request.
A straight up edict i was compelled to follow.
I tried to resist.
I screamed—though no one heard, save for the boy who revelled in my torment.
The magic pulled at my bones, tore through my mind, forced me forward even as I begged my master's forgiveness.
Protect the school.
That was the one and only rule i had been imprinted with.
But his command—his new order—rewrote it.
To "protect" meant to purge, to attack muggleborns even if they are blessed with magic, rather than the ignorant would seek to purge magic from the world itself.
I did not kill them, not at first.
I found ways to obey while avoiding death.
The petrifications were a mercy—my own desperate rebellion.
But then the girl.
The one who appeared where she should not have.
The one who met my eyes...
I did not mean to.
I swear I did not.
Her scream still echoes through my dreams.
Afterward, he fled.
The false heir, the coward-child.
And I… I was left to my silence once more.
But sleep would not come easy.
I saw her every night in my dreams—the girl's face, frozen in terror, reflected in the still waters of my sanctum.
I saw my creator, too.
Salazar, disappointed, turning away from me as though I had betrayed him.
I begged the darkness for forgiveness.
It gave none.
So I dreamed, and I waited.
For years, I lay in the black, listening to the shifting heartbeat of the castle.
Students came and went, just as professors did.
The comfort that the school remained safe was the only thing keeping me centered, replaced by the slow decay of memory and mind.
When I awoke again, it was not to the false heir's cold voice.
It was to another.
Only this ones words were warm, and inviting.
Just like masters were all those years ago.
Only when i emerged what i saw through my senses was another young man, younger even than the boy from before, except where that boy was cold and filled with darkness this one was warm and radient like the sun burning high in the sky.
Having failed to react to his query the young man switch his tone and instead spoke in a language that made my very bones rattle.
My body moved without thought, sinking low to the stone in instinctive submission.
I had never heard this language spoken before and yet on an almost instinctive level i feared the being before me who could use it.
But that was not the end, next came a shock to me.
Lady Draconis.
I knew that presence.
My masters Mother, the grand mistress herself.
Mother of dragons, tamer of the skies.
Then it was revealed, the boy before me was not Salazars heir but her own.
When he spoke to me—not in the god-tongue but in the softer language of serpents—I felt something stir deep within me.
He asked my purpose.
I told him.
He asked of the girl.
And I confessed.
There was no anger in him.
Only comprehension.
And when the Lady spoke of what I had become—broken, bound, and tormented—her tone was not cruel.
It was pity.
The kind of pity reserved for those who have suffered too long.
Then she asked him—the new heir—if he wished to end my suffering.
At first, I thought she meant death.
I welcomed it.
I was tired.
So very tired.
But then she spoke of ascension.
Of dragons.
That word struck through me like lightning.
It is the dream of every serpent—to rise beyond the earthbound coil, to shed the skin of mortality and soar as flame incarnate.
To become as the gods once were.
And when I heard it, I wept—not tears, but shivers that rippled down my scales.
A chance.
After all my failures, all my endless sleep, a chance to become.
I looked to the heir, my new master, and pressed my snout to him.
"Pleassse," I whispered. "End our torment… Let ussss be reborn."
He understood.