The drizzle went on falling, fine and ceaseless in autumn rain that never committed to being a downpour but never let up either.
Crystal drops slapped against the layered, dark-green broadleaves and bounced from one tier of canopy to the next in a long relay; after several such detours through branch and leaf, only a scattered few ever made it all the way down to actually touch the two figures standing on the forest floor below.
It was already past noon into mealtime. Somewhere beyond the treeline, the young witches and wizards of Hogwarts were pouring out of their classrooms and toward the Great Hall in a roar like tide breaking against a reef, a sound that carried even into the Forbidden Forest.
"Satisfied, Flomide?"
Bryan put away his wand, clasping his hands loosely behind his back, his expression was calm as he admired the little cabin he'd just raised from nothing. The falling rain, wherever it drifted near enough to touch him, slid aside of its own accord whenever it neared him.
He did not wait for an answer to his own question.
Flomide gave a reluctant nod, his eyes began moving slowly over the completed cabin.
The cabin already held some basic furnishings: a simple bed against one wall, a square table built from fitted planks, a hearth constructed from stacked, mismatched stone that nonetheless looked sturdy enough to hold a fire for years.
"If there's anything else you need, just tell me directly. I'll have the castle elves see to it without delay—"
Bryan paced slowly before the dim, unlit hearth, his tone was carrying an offhand tone that didn't quite match with which he'd built the place.
"You know we've never asked much of our surroundings, Mr. Watson—"
Flomide followed close on Bryan's heels through the small space, several times seeming on the verge of saying something further, only to check himself each time at the last moment. In the end, he said nothing at all, the words died somewhere behind his teeth.
Mr. Watson's manner throughout the entire morning had already said everything that needed saying.
Bryan stopped beside the cabin's single window. Through its hollowed opening, he gazed out, his eyes were cutting cleanly through the flickering, rain-darkened shadows of the surrounding trees toward the distant castle beyond with its towers veiled in drifting mist.
"At last August's Quidditch World Cup, hundreds of people died in the aftermath of my clash with her—"
Bryan said it softly. And that voice carrying not the faintest ripple of visible emotion, nonetheless overpowered the steady rustling of leaf and branch all around them.
Flomide's eyelids trembled at the words. The light in his eyes dimmed a fraction.
"She freed the Death Eater held captive in secret by Barty Crouch, the former Head of the Department of International Magical Cooperation—Barty Crouch Junior and helped Crouch Junior capture and imprison the Senior Crouch in his place, an act that led directly to the former Head's death not long after—"
Bryan went on, still entirely calm, his tone remained unchanged from the sentence before.
Flomide's naturally warm face hardened as he listened, the corners of his mouth tightened into something like a grimace, his fists curling slowly closed at his sides.
"She imprisoned the Ministry's legendary Auror, Alastor Moody, and for the better part of an entire year impersonated him as Hogwarts's own Defence Against the Dark Arts professor—tampering, in that guise, with the second task of the Triwizard Tournament in order to deliver a group of children, barely past their first steps into the wider world, directly into Voldemort's waiting hands—"
High above the small clearing, the clouds thickened further, and the distant laughter still drifting over faintly from the castle sounded suddenly more remote and dreamlike than before, as though filtering through some invisible veil separating this conversation from the ordinary warmth of the school beyond the trees.
A struggle showed in Flomide's eyes now. His lips parted slightly.
But before Flomide could give voice to whatever he'd been about to say, Bryan's next sentence arrived first and silenced him entirely.
"With her assistance, Voldemort returned fully to life. And the wizarding world of Britain was plunged into war as a consequence of her folly, Flomide."
Bryan turned at last, fully, to face the older man. His gaze looking entirely without cruelty and entirely without mercy either—seemed almost to press down on Flomide where he stood.
"Tell me, Flomide. How, precisely, is she meant to repay crimes of that particular magnitude?"
Hogwarts knew no early autumn. The deep, settled chill of late autumn came chasing hard on the heels of summer's fading heat every single year, giving the grounds and everyone on them almost no time to gradually adjust before the cold arrived in full.
There was, in the wake of Bryan's question, nothing for Flomide to say.
It was only because Britain's wizarding justice system maintained no formal death penalty that Clidona, for what she had done at the Quidditch World Cup alone had not already been sent to the gallows.
"We are willing—willing to—"
After a long, bleak silence, Flomide finally raised his head and looked pleadingly at Bryan.
"To teach wizards the arts of the Druids—that is no particular kindness you would be doing the wizarding world, Flomide—"
Bryan walked toward the cabin's door and down several wooden steps, dead yellow pine needles crying out in small, crushed protest beneath his boots with each step.
"It is, rather, the effort your own people would be making to keep yourselves from vanishing entirely from memory and relevance. In other words—it would be the wizards doing you the kindness, not the reverse."
"I won't deny that, Mr. Watson—if Lady Clidona truly did all of what you've just described, then she has sinned gravely against wizardkind, and I have no defence to offer for the acts themselves. But if she is genuinely willing to atone for them and in truth, you yourself told me she was held captive by that same Voldemort for a period—"
Flomide's expression had turned bitter, his breath was uneven now as he pressed forward, still trying, with visibly diminishing hope, to persuade Bryan toward some measure of leniency.
"Against wizardkind, you say?"
Bryan stopped beside an almond-eucalyptus tree that pierced straight toward the grey sky, its pale bark caught what little light made it through the canopy. For the first time in the entire exchange, his voice carried a strong current of real feeling beneath its surface calm.
"According to my own information, the single most damnable thing she did was hand the twin-serpent staff to Voldemort."
The memory surged back through him as he said it.
At the end of that journey to the lost isle of Avalon, in the brief handful of minutes he had spent in contact with that same twin-serpent staff, the sheer, overwhelming might radiating from the artifact still, even now in memory alone, set Bryan's own heart pounding harder than almost anything else he could readily recall.
"Is that what worries you most, Mr. Watson?"
Flomide's eyes widened in genuine astonishment at this. But a few seconds later, he spoke again firlmy with sudden conviction.
"That is a relic from the most ancient times, wielded originally by the last great high priestess of our people—Queen Morgan le Fay. It would never submit itself to a wizard as vile and corrupted as Voldemort, Mr. Watson!!"
"Is that so?"
Bryan laughed softly at this, though a distinct chill ran through the sound, cutting against the gentle patter of rain continuing all around them.
"A relic… perhaps you and I see the object rather differently, Flomide."
Ignoring Flomide's urgent, half-formed further protests, Bryan started once more toward the distant castle, the conversation on this particular point evidently concluded as far as he was concerned.
In reality, Bryan had already received word on precisely this question.
Voldemort had, indeed, attempted to master the twin-serpent staff. And, exactly as Flomide had insisted, he had not succeeded in the attempt.
That outcome seemed, in the end, a perfectly ordinary result. After all, even Merlin himself—the single most renowned wizard in history had found no way to properly control the staff's power, and had been forced, in the end, to move it from the isle of Azkaban to the hidden, sealed-away land of Avalon, locking it there specifically to keep its power from corrupting the wider world.
And a thousand years ago, Godric Gryffindor himself had made the same attempt at mastery and had failed in the same fashion.
Set beside those two legendary names, the fact that both he and Voldemort had likewise failed to master the staff seemed, on reflection, only natural. Unremarkable, even, given the company.
Still, that reasonable, historically-grounded conclusion did nothing to actually settle the deeper doubts sitting in Bryan's mind.
That an object holding power drawn from some higher dimension—a relic that had defeated Merlin and Gryffindor both—should have fallen into Voldemort's hands at all, however briefly, however unsuccessfully in the end, struck Bryan as no mere coincidence. He had carried that particular feeling for some time now.
What lay behind this specific sequence of events, he suspected, was never simply Voldemort reaching for the staff on his own initiative. Somewhere beneath the visible surface of it, a deeper conspiracy was almost certainly still lurking.
Though the same sombre, unbroken grey sky hung over both of them without distinction, the two men stepped out from beneath the last of the Forbidden Forest's canopy and found themselves narrowing their eyes against the sudden, comparatively brighter openness of the grounds all the same.
Flomide studied the ancient castle now standing so much closer before him; he had never before had occasion to see Hogwarts from quite this particular distance and angle.
The towering fortress, every individual stone and every foot of surrounding ground steeped visibly in centuries of accumulated history, truly overawed him in that moment, setting something in his own nature-attuned heart trembling in a way he hadn't fully anticipated.
"I'll try—"
Bryan suddenly spoke, the sentence cut off cleanly at both ends, its full meaning were left deliberately unclear, offering no promise beyond the bare two words themselves.
Flomide blinked, startled by the sudden statement, and then, as understanding arrived, his entire face lit up with unmistakable joy. He was already drawing breath to offer his thanks when Bryan had already strode off ahead of him without waiting, leaving Flomide to hurry and catch up.
Between the grand, towering walls of the entrance hall, ancient stone flanked on both side by roaring fires that drove back the chill flooding in through the open doors from outside, Bryan's steps slowed for a moment as his gaze swept naturally over toward the Gryffindor table.
There, a small crowd had gathered, passing a small golden vial from hand to hand around a cluster of students, each one eager for their own brief turn holding it.
'Sixth year already—'
Hermione, looking anxious to get the little golden vial safely back into secure hands after its circuit of admirers; Ron, gazing at it with some longing, words apparently gathering behind his lips that he couldn't quite bring himself to actually say aloud; and Harry, his own eyes carrying that same faint trace of envy Bryan had seen across so many young faces before.
Three faces, still shedding the last remaining traces of their childhood, fixed themselves for a moment in Bryan's attention, and his gaze, watching them, grew unfathomably deep.
'This year, then.'
Bryan's eyes moved on, tracking briefly across the rest of the Hall before returning forward. Quietly, privately, entirely to himself, he confirmed the thought.
"Let's go—"
Bryan glanced back over his shoulder at Flomide, who had grown faintly uneasy under the sudden weight of so many curious student eyes now turning toward the unfamiliar visitor beside him, and said, in a tone that was notably gentler.
"Come and meet your new colleagues properly. There's no need to worry beyond the usual handful of cold faces you'll encounter—they're all quite easy enough to get along with, on the whole, once you know them a little.
Though do mind the old man with the white beard sitting in the middle of the staff table especially, I'd suggest, when he happens to smile at you."
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