Chapter 1 – The Tear in the Corridor
Jasper Hemlock had never liked the fourth-floor west corridor at night.
By day, it was just another stretch of Hogwarts: stone arches, tall windows, portraits half-dozing in their frames. At night, though, the torches along this section burned lower than they should, and the shadows didn't sit quite where the light put them.
Tonight, every torch had been extinguished on purpose.
The only light came from Professor Alder's wand.
"Stay close," the professor murmured.
His wand-tip shed a thin, silvery glow that made the stones look older, as if the light had peeled back centuries instead of darkness. It caught every nick in the floor and every crack in the wall, turning them into fine lines in a face that had seen too much.
Jasper walked half a step behind him; fingers curled lightly around his own wand in his pocket. The corridor felt… crowded, despite the empty air, like everything that had ever been here was still watching.
He'd learned in his first few years at Hogwarts that the castle was full of odd places. Hidden rooms. Secret staircases. Portraits that could be bribed. This, though—this was different.
This was where the world was thin.
They stopped at an unremarkable stretch of wall between two sets of windows. Outside, the night pressed up against the glass, all rain and sky and nothing else. In here, the hum started.
Jasper felt it first in the soles of his feet, a faint buzzing that hummed up through the stone. Then in his teeth. Then, somewhere behind his eyes, a pressure that wasn't a headache but could become one if it wanted.
Professor Alder exhaled slowly.
"Here," he said. "It's settled here again."
He sounded tired. Not the tired of a long day of teaching, but the tired of someone who'd been walking the same path over and over, trying and failing to reach a door that wouldn't open.
Jasper swallowed.
"Professor," he said, keeping his voice low, "are you absolutely sure about this?"
Alder's mouth twitched.
"No," he said. "But if we wait for certainty, we'll be having this discussion in another ten years. Or last year. Or never." His eyes softened as he looked at Jasper.
"You don't have to stay, Hemlock. Watching is more dangerous than reading about it."
"I've already read all you've written," Jasper said. "If I walk away now, I'll just lie awake trying to figure out what you're seeing that I'm not."
Alder huffed out a quiet breath that might almost have been a laugh.
"Stubborn," he said. "You'll do well in Hufflepuff."
Jasper resisted the urge to point out that he'd already been in Hufflepuff for three years. He understood what the professor meant. It wasn't exactly a compliment, but it wasn't not one either.
"Tell me again," Jasper said. "What exactly are we doing?"
Alder rolled his shoulders like he was settling a heavy cloak.
"Stabilising," he said. "Or trying to. There is a tear here—"
"I thought you said it's not a tear," Jasper interrupted. "Not exactly."
"Words fail around this," Alder admitted. "It behaves like a tear. Like… like a place where the threads of time and magic have frayed and tangled. The more it's pulled, the thinner they get. The thinner they get, the more everything around it starts to warp."
"Because of the Repository?" Jasper asked.
Alder's eyes sharpened.
"Because of whoever used it," he said. "The Repository isn't malicious. It's a tool. A dangerous one, yes, but tools aren't wicked on their own. Someone did something to the world with it. Something too big. And now the fabric is… well. You've seen my notes."
Jasper had. Diagrams that refused to stay still when you looked at them. Maps of events that seemed to overlap in impossible ways. Phrases like fixed moment, temporal tension, and Knot scrawled in Alder's cramped handwriting.
"And this corridor?" Jasper pressed.
"Is one of the places," Alder said, "where the strain shows. A pressure crack." He nodded to the wall ahead. "The tear usually sits there. Invisible to most. Loud to me."
"And to me," Jasper said quietly.
He'd never told anyone else that. He hadn't needed to. Alder had looked at him one evening in an empty classroom and said, You feel it too, don't you? and the conversation had gone from there.
"You are particularly… sensitive," Alder said now. "Most students walk this corridor and simply feel uneasy. You walk it and flinch when the world moves wrong."
Jasper grimaced.
"It does move wrong," he said. "Sometimes I feel like the floor is slightly to the left of where it looks. Or like I've already walked past a bit I'm only just seeing. Like a bad echo."
"Time trying to settle and failing," Alder said. "It's like a river that someone forced to change course. It jumps the bank whenever it can, and floods places it shouldn't." He lifted his wand. "Tonight, we're going to try to shore up the bank. Anchor it. Just a little."
"And if it doesn't work?" Jasper asked.
"Then we learn something," Alder said. "Hopefully something that doesn't kill us."
He said it so calmly, Jasper almost laughed.
Almost.
Alder stepped closer to the wall. He raised his free hand, palm out, and Jasper felt the air thicken. It was like standing near a storm before it broke, the pressure building against his skin.
"Watch," Alder said. "And don't cast unless I tell you to."
"That's reassuring," Jasper muttered, but he stayed where he was.
Alder closed his eyes.
He murmured something under his breath that wasn't an incantation Jasper recognised. Not Latin, not anything they'd been taught in class. A shape of sound more than a word, something that curled through the air and made the hairs on Jasper's arms stand up.
The hum in the floor rose.
The wall rippled.
Not physically, not like stone turning to water. More like the space in front of it had become a sheet of glass that someone had just flicked. Jasper saw the reflections in the windowpanes shift out of sync with the corridor, then snap back.
Alder's jaw clenched.
"Easy," he murmured, to the air, to the magic, to himself. "Just a little tug. Back into place. That's it."
The temperature dropped. Breath fogged in front of Jasper's face. The torches, unlit though they were, flickered faintly with ghostly flame.
And then, finally, Jasper saw it.
An outline in the air ahead of Alder, thin as a hair at first, then widening. A faint line of pale light, like someone had drawn a crack down the middle of the corridor.
It didn't look like anything much. Just a vertical slit in space, shimmering soft blue-white.
But every part of him recoiled.
The hum became a roar in his bones. His heart stuttered. The corridor seemed to tilt, though the floor stayed exactly where it was.
"Professor," he said. "It's—"
"I see it," Alder said through his teeth. Sweat beaded on his brow. "Good. That's good. It means we can work on it."
The slit stretched wider, shrugging off whatever Alder was trying to do. Threads of light spilled from the edges of it like frayed fabric, reaching outward, searching.
Something brushed against Jasper.
Not physically. Not skin to skin. More like the idea of a hand, the suggestion of a grip, closing around the centre of his chest.
He gasped.
"Hemlock?" Alder barked. "Tell me what you're feeling."
"Like—" Jasper swallowed. "Like it's… looking."
"Of course it is," Alder muttered. "It recognises you. That makes this both simpler and far more dangerous."
He adjusted his stance, bracing his feet. His wand traced a slow arc, leaving a faint trail of light.
"Listen to me," he said, voice flatter now, the tone he used when instructing a classroom full of idiots who thought they'd invented Lumos. "It is going to pull. It always pulls. You must not follow that pull. Do you understand?"
"That's not very specific," Jasper said, because if he stopped talking he was fairly sure he would start screaming. "What does 'don't follow' look like?"
"It looks like standing very still and thinking very firmly about staying where you are," Alder said. "And not reaching back when it reaches for you."
The crack widened.
It was no longer just a line; it was a gap. A sliver of space through which something else was visible. Not another room. Not another corridor. Just… colour. Blue and white and a strange, deep gold, swirling in slow spirals that hurt his eyes if he looked at them for more than a second.
He knew that colour.
He didn't know how, but he knew it the way you know a smell from childhood you can't quite place. Familiar and frightening and dragging memories with it that weren't his.
He saw flashes of things as the light shifted. A battlefield under a black sky. A valley full of beasts running under a storm. Hogwarts, but not as it was now. Broken towers. Rebuilt towers. Fire.
He staggered.
"Jasper," Alder snapped. "Eyes on me."
Jasper dragged his gaze away from the slit and focused on the professor.
Alder looked older in this light. Lines carved deep around his mouth, grey streaks in his dark hair catching the glow. His wand hand shook slightly now, though it stayed steady enough for whatever spell he was casting.
"Good," Alder said. "Stay anchored. Think about the floor. The stones under your feet. The air in your lungs."
The air felt too thin. Like he wasn't getting enough of it.
"Professor," Jasper forcing the word out, "what if it pulls harder?"
"Then I break the connection," Alder said. "That's the plan."
"And if it pulls you?" Jasper demanded.
Alder smiled faintly.
"Then you learn from my mistakes," he said. "Now hush."
He turned his attention back to the tear.
The light around the crack thickened, becoming almost tangible. Threads of brightness coiled around Alder's outstretched hand, trying to wrap themselves around his fingers.
He resisted.
Jasper could see it in the set of his shoulders, the way he leaned back as if bracing against a strong wind.
The magic wanted him.
It wanted both of them.
Jasper felt that not-hand brushing his chest again, sliding down to his ribs, up to his throat, like a blind creature mapping his shape. It wasn't gentle. It wasn't cruel either. It was curious. Assessing.
It found something in him.
The hum spiked.
Pain lanced through him, sharp and white, like every nerve in his body had been plucked at once.
He doubled over with a strangled sound.
"Hemlock!" Alder shouted.
"I'm fine," Jasper lied. "It just—"
The pull changed.
It went from tugging at the edges of him to grabbing hold, sudden and absolute. The not-hand closed around his middle and yanked.
Jasper's feet left the ground.
He shouted, reaching blindly for the nearest solid thing. His hand caught fabric—Alder's sleeve.
The professor staggered, dragged a half-step forward toward the widening crack.
The light around the tear flared.
"Let go!" Alder barked.
Jasper couldn't tell if he meant the magic or his sleeve. It didn't matter; he couldn't do either. His body refused to obey. The pull was like being caught in a river current, stronger than anything he'd ever felt.
Alder snarled something that might have been a spell, might have been a curse. The magic around his wand flared gold, lashing out toward the crack, trying to hook onto the edges and hold them still.
For a heartbeat, it worked.
The pull eased—
—and then surged back with double force.
The threads of light snapped around Jasper like ropes.
He felt himself being dragged, not across space, but out of the world entirely. The corridor blurred. The stone lost its certainty beneath his boots.
Alder shifted his grip.
He let go of whatever he'd been doing to the tear and grabbed Jasper's wrist with both hands, anchoring himself to the floor with his own weight, his own magic.
"Look at me," Alder shouted over the roar Jasper could only hear inside his bones. "Jasper. Focus."
Jasper tried.
The professor's face swam in and out of view, edges smeared by light. His words came in bursts.
"Listen—this is important—if it takes you—don't—"
The rest of the sentence was torn away.
The pull became everything.
It yanked at the centre of him so hard he felt stretched thin, like he was being pulled through the eye of a needle. Colours smeared. Sound collapsed into a single, high note.
Alder's hands slipped.
For a moment, their fingers caught, nails scraping skin.
Then Jasper's grip failed, or Alder's did, or the magic decided it wanted one and not the other.
His hand slid free.
The last thing he saw of Alder was the professor's expression, caught between fury and something that might have been sorrow. His mouth formed one last word Jasper couldn't hear.
Then the world snapped.
Jasper fell.
Not down. Not in any direction that made sense. He was falling sideways, backwards, inside-out, pulled along a thread that hummed with memories that weren't his.
Images flashed past him in a blur.
The same corridor, different torches. A different boy was standing where he had been. A woman with Miriam's eyes holding a key that glowed. A goblin in a high office. A storm over a valley of beasts. A boy on a cliff with a wand raised toward the sky.
They were gone before he could grasp them.
Pressure built in his chest, then burst, like surfacing from deep water.
The light vanished.
The roar cut off.
Jasper hit stone.
The impact drove air from his lungs. For a few seconds, he couldn't do anything but lie there and gasp, his whole body buzzing with leftover magic.
No hum.
No tear.
No Alder.
Just a different sky overhead and the faint smell of soot and rain.
He rolled onto his back.
Above him, framed by brick walls and an iron gate, a carriage hovered in midair, drawn by winged skeletal horses.
Jasper stared at it, his brain scrambling to connect this moment to the one he'd just left.
It failed.
The only thing that came out of his mouth was a hoarse, incredulous, "Oh. Brilliant."
Hooves clattered. Leather creaked.
A man's face leaned into view, silhouetted against the sky.
"Easy now," the stranger said, offering a hand. "You've had quite the fall."
Jasper didn't know where he was.
He didn't know when he was.
But the hum, quiet and deep, was still there, under everything.
Whatever Alder had been trying to fix, it had just flung Jasper somewhere else entirely.
And judging by the thestral-drawn carriage waiting in the courtyard, the world he'd landed in had its own problems.
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