The first sign that something was wrong came at 2:17 a.m., when Hogwarts forgot how to be old.
Professor Elowen Thatch felt it before she saw it—a hollowing sensation behind the ribs, like a breath she hadn't realized she was holding suddenly let go. The torches lining the stone corridor outside her quarters flickered, not with the usual draft-induced sputter, but as if they were hesitating. Questioning themselves.
She paused mid-step, one slippered foot hovering above the flagstones.
Magic didn't hesitate.
It obeyed laws older than the castle itself. It flowed, it reacted, it endured. Even broken magic followed patterns.
This felt like a blink.
The torches went out all at once.
Darkness swallowed the corridor, thick and absolute, the kind that pressed against the eyes. Elowen's hand snapped instinctively to her wand.
"Lumos."
Nothing happened.
Her breath caught. She tried again, sharper. "Lumos!"
Still nothing. No spark, no resistance—just absence, as if the spell had fallen into a void before it could exist.
Then the torches relit.
Not gradually. Not in sequence.
All at once, with a soft, almost embarrassed whoomph, the flames returned—slightly bluer than they had been moments before.
Elowen stood very still.
She had spent her life studying magic that predated wands, spells older than Latin incantations, fragments of power scraped from tablets and bone carvings and half-mad manuscripts. She knew the difference between magical exhaustion, interference, and suppression.
This was none of those.
This was magic… recalculating.
Her door burst open behind her.
"Elowen!"
Minerva McGonagall stood in the doorway, tartan dressing gown pulled tightly around her, hair half-undone but eyes razor sharp. Behind her, the stone gargoyle at the end of the corridor was muttering anxiously to itself.
"You felt it too," Elowen said.
McGonagall nodded once. "The wards around the Headmaster's office flickered. Just for a moment."
"That's not possible," Elowen said softly.
"I am aware."
They exchanged a look heavy with shared understanding. Hogwarts' wards were layered spells upon spells, reinforced over a thousand years. They did not flicker. They endured earthquakes, dark lords, and teenagers.
A distant bell tolled—low and wrong. Not the usual crystalline chime that marked hours, but something deeper, as if the castle itself were clearing its throat.
Portrait doors slammed open along the corridor. A wizard in Elizabethan robes leaned halfway out of his frame, face pale.
"It's happening again," he whispered. "Like before."
"Before when?" McGonagall demanded.
But the portrait had already retreated, frame sealing itself shut.
Elowen swallowed. "Minerva… when was the last time Hogwarts changed its wards?"
McGonagall's jaw tightened. "After the Battle."
"Not repaired," Elowen pressed. "Changed."
McGonagall hesitated.
"Never," she said finally.
The castle shuddered—not violently, but decisively. Somewhere far below them, deep in the foundations, ancient stone groaned.
Elowen closed her eyes.
"Oh," she whispered. "That's very bad."