The carriage climbed into the Highlands, the air growing thin and sharp with the scent of pine and ancient rain. Beside Dumbledore, Anakin sat in a state of hyper-awareness. He wasn't looking at the scenery; he was feeling the surroundings, he could feel the atmosphere virtually flooded with the Force the closer they got to the castly.
He could feel that there was something waiting for him there, Anakin didn't have any visions or clear direction, just a feeling of anticipation and eagerness.
As they crossed the outer boundary of the Hogwarts grounds, it happened.
The air didn't just change; it shuddered. Anakin felt a massive, silent bell tolling within his own chest. The wards—the ancient, sprawling web of protective magic—didn't just acknowledge his presence; they recoiled and then surged. The glowing barrier surrounding the castle grounds becoming visible as a massive influx of energy radiated up their surface.
Inside the carriage, the wooden panels groaned and shuddered. The lanterns flickered a violent, electric blue before turning a deep, bloody violet, transitioning through the colour spectrum. Dumbledore gripped the edge of his seat, his eyes wide.
"The threshold..." Dumbledore whispered, his voice strained. "The castle is reacting to you as if you are a siege engine or a harbinger of doom. I have never felt or heard of the castle acting like this in all it's history. However there is no feeling of alertness, no it's more like an overly eager puppy or some kind of relative" Dumbledore looked off into the distance as he keyed into the wards.
Moments later Dumbledore sat back in shock, his face white as he glanced to Anakin, "what is this?" the urgency and anxiety in his voice making Anakin stare back and recline back into his seat, his own energy flaring instinctively to meet the pressure.
"It's not an attack, Dumbledore. It's a synchronization. Your house is recognizing a master of the house." A smirk spread onto his face in response.
When the carriage finally pulled into the courtyard, the reaction became undeniable.
The moment Anakin's boots touched the flagstones, a low, tectonic hum rose from the ground. It wasn't a sound, but a vibration that rattled the very teeth in Dumbledore's head. High above, the gargoyles didn't just shift; they snapped to attention, their stone heads turning in unison to track Anakin's movements.
The massive oak doors of the Great Hall, absent of any assistance, swung wide open with a thunderous boom, as if the castle were gasping for air.
"It's empty," Anakin noted, looking into the shadowed expanse of the Hall. No students. No chatter. Only the long, vacant tables and the heavy silence of the summer break. "It's between terms?" Anakin looked to Dumbledore for confirmation and upon getting it turned to look into the gaping maw of the school between the doors.
"Then where is the pulse coming from?" Anakin spoke aloud
"Under the school," Dumbledore replied, curiosity on his face, looking at the stone walls which seemed to be pulsing with a faint, rhythmic light. "But it is restless. You have stirred something that has been dormant for centuries."
Anakin moved up the stairs and while Dumbledore moved towards the staircase and most likely his office Anakin didn't follow. He turned toward a narrow, unassuming archway that led down— towards the very foundations of the castle, opposite the massive doors leading into the great hall.
"Professor, my office is this way if you'll foll—" Dumbledore started, but stopped when he saw the look on Anakin's face. As Anakin moved towards the door Dumbledore got another shock at the very existence of the door. For in all the years Dumbledore had been at Hogwarts as a student, teacher and then Headmaster, he has never heard of any whisper regarding the door, let alone see it himself.
Anakin moved with purpose. He felt a pull that was visceral, a thread of the Force that was thicker and more "pure" than the magical chatter of the upper floors. They descended past the base of the castle and passed into the bedrock Hogwarts was built upon, into a section of the castle where the stones were larger, rougher, and older.
They reached a dead end—a wall of solid, unyielding bedrock where the castle met the mountain.
"This is the foundation," Dumbledore said, his breath hitching in the cold air. "There is nothing here but the earth."
"No, there is something, something familiar, it's almost like….." Anakin reached out and trailing off he channeled the Force, his fingers hovering inches from the rock. He didn't use a spell. He didn't speak. He reached into the core of his being, drawing on the amplified, raw energy of this world, and pushed.
The bedrock didn't open like a door. It dissolved.
The stone vaporized into a fine, silver mist, revealing a passage lined with a smooth, dark glass that hummed with a deep, subsonic frequency.
They stepped into a chamber that defied every rule of Hogwarts architecture.
It was vast and cathedral-like, but there were no pillars. The ceiling was a perfect dome of translucent crystal through which the moonlight filtered, turning the air a ghostly, shimmering indigo. The floor was a single slab of white marble, inscribed with a singular, massive rune—a circle intersected by a vertical line, glowing with a steady, white light.
At the center of the room stood a raised dais. On it rested a simple, unadorned stone basin filled with a liquid that didn't look like water, but like molten silver—pure, liquid Force.
Dumbledore walked to the edge of the circle, his face pale. "I have studied every map, every secret passage, every legend of this school. This room... it doesn't exist. It has never existed in our history."
"It was hidden," Anakin said, his voice echoing with a new authority. He walked to the basin. The liquid began to swirl as he approached, tendrils of energy rising to meet his hands. "Your 'Founders' weren't just wizards, they weren't just like me. They were architects of the energy itself. They didn't want this used for petty tricks or schoolboy charms. This is a place for the Force.
The feel of this place, it's older, more ancient than the castle. Almost like the castle was built to cover this up. Yet the Force in this place has joined with the castle, an almost symbiotic relationship."
He looked at the walls. They were etched with diagrams of the human body, showing the flow of energy not through wands, but through the nervous system—a martial, biological understanding of the Force that predated the "Magic" of the modern era by millennia.
"The castle hid this because no one since before the Founders could speak its language," Anakin realized. He looked at Dumbledore. "You use the Force as a tool, and to an extent they did too. Whoever built this place used it as a state of being, just like the Jedi and Sith, it was a very part of their being."
Dumbledore traced a hand over the glowing rune on the floor. "This is... staggering. It changes everything we know about our origins. I will need months of research to even begin to understand the implications of this chamber."
"You do your research," Anakin said, sitting on the dais. The indigo light of the dome intensified, centering on him. "I'm going to use it. This is where I will teach your warriors, Dumbledore. In the one place in this castle that remembers what a warrior actually is, maybe the build up of ambient Force could help me connect them in a way different from the norm."
Dumbledore stood in the shadows of the doorway, watching the man from the stars sit in the heart of the mountain. He realized then that the "Hogwarts" he knew was only a thin veil over something much more ancient, and much more dangerous.
"Breakfast is at eight, Professor Skywalker," Dumbledore said softly, his voice echoing. "I suggest you prepare yourself. The rest of the faculty will not be as... accommodating as the stone." Turning to make his way back to the castle proper Dumbledore missed the response, or lack of response from Anakin.
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Dumbledore's footsteps faded into the distance, leaving Anakin alone in the indigo glow of the sanctum. The silence here wasn't empty; it was pressurized, heavy with the weight of millennia.
Anakin sat on the marble dais with his legs folded beneath him, before the basin of liquid silver. As he closed his eyes and allowed his breathing to sync with the subsonic hum of the room, he didn't seek the "Magic" of the castle above. He reached for the Force.
The moment his consciousness touched the liquid surface, the sanctum didn't just vibrate—it remembered.
The indigo light flared into blinding white, and Anakin was torn from the present. He was no longer sitting in a basement in Scotland; he was drowning in a rapid current of forgotten history.
The First Flash, A jagged, storm-lashed cliffside, thousands of years before Hogwarts existed. A man stood against the gale. He was tall and broad-shouldered, wearing robes of a design Anakin recognized with a jolt—heavy fabric armored with bronze-like plates, a style from an era of the galaxy almost forgotten. The man's brown hair whipped in the wind, but his gaze remained fixed on the horizon. His eyes were a piercing, electric blue, harboring an intensity that felt like a physical weight..
The name echoed through the Force like thunder: Revan.
Anakin watched as the living Revan raised a hand. No wand. No words. He tore the very molecules of the mountain apart, shaping obsidian and granite with the raw, terrifying precision of a Master who commanded both Light and Dark. He was carving a bastion into the earth's crust.
The Second Flash, Centuries had passed. Revan was ancient now, his mortal body failing, sustained only by his immense connection. He stood in a clearing of ancient oaks, surrounded by men in rough hide robes—the native Druids of this isle. They were trying to pull fire from the earth wildly, dangerously.
Revan, impatient, snapped a branch of yew. He forced his will into it, stabilizing the chaotic energy. He tossed it to them—a crude tool for crude hands.
Then, the scene shifted slightly. A family arrived from the Roman south, carrying satchels of tools—the ancestors of Ollivander. They understood woodcraft, but not the core. Anakin saw Revan, in his final mortal days, showing them how to bind a magical essence—a heartstring, a feather—into the wood to create a permanent stabilizer. He was teaching them to build crutches for a crippled future.
The Third Flash, More centuries fled. Revan was dead. Yet, in the center of this very sanctum, a shimmering, electric-blue silhouette stood—a Force Ghost of immense density.
Four figures knelt before the spirit: The Founders. They were young, powerful in their own right, but blind to the greater whole.
Anakin watched, mesmerized, as the ghost of Revan reached out and physically gripped a stone pedestal, his ethereal hand solidifying through sheer will. He was trying to show them how to lift it without incantation, but they could not grasp the concept. They fumbled for their wands.
"You are deaf to the music, so you must read the notes," Revan's spirit voice boomed, vibrating through time. "Because you cannot hold the fire within your blood without burning, you must shackle it to the wood."
He was teaching them "Magic"—ritual and rote—because they were incapable of learning the Force.
The Fourth Flash, The final image was tragic. A millennium had passed. The ghost of Revan was standing in the sanctum, but he was translucent, flickering like a dying candle. The connection that allowed him to interact with the physical plane was finally severing.
He looked directly at the "point" in time where Anakin sat. It was as if the ghost of the past were looking through the veil to see the man of the future.
"The cycle returns," the image of Revan whispered, his intense blue eyes softening for a fleeting second. "I left them the smoke. You must give them the fire."
As his spirit dissipated into the netherworld, the knowledge went with him. The "why" was lost, leaving behind only the "how." The deep understanding of energy faded, replaced entirely by the rigid structures of spells and wands. The world forgot it was holding fire and started believing it was merely reciting poetry.
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Anakin snapped his eyes open, gasping for air. The silver liquid in the basin was calm once more.
He sat in the silence, the profound tragedy of this world settling over him. The Wizarding World wasn't ancient; it was a post-apocalyptic society living in the ruins of a greater knowledge. Revan had tried to leave a legacy, but time had eroded it into mere parlour tricks.
He sat in the silence, his mind reeling. "You left them a survival guide, and they mistook it for a bible."
The Wizarding World was a shadow of a shadow. Revan had been the spark, but over thousands of years, his teachings had been diluted into "spells" and "charms." The Founders had been his students, but they had only captured the surface of his power.
Anakin looked at his hands. He wasn't just a professor. He was the only person on this planet who understood the "fire" Revan had spoken of. He was the successor to a legacy that predated the Ministry, the Statute of Secrecy, and even the language of magic itself.
He stood up, the exhaustion of his journey replaced by a cold, calculating purpose. He had seen the feats of the man before him—the shaping of stone, the taming of the wild magic, the birth of a civilization. Anakin Skywalker had been a General, a Sith Lord, and a Chosen One. He knew exactly what to do with a legacy like this.
Morning had broken. The staff would be waiting in the Great Hall. And for the first time in a thousand years, someone who didn't need the "crutch" was going to sit at their table.