However you looked at it, from whatever angle you tried to make peace with it, walking out into the damp morning chill was no pleasant experience at this hour.
The two days of steady drizzle had finally stopped but Harry had barely stepped off the bottom of the marble staircase and out through the castle's main doors before he felt his eyelashes and the loose strands of his hair turning damp with the lingering mist still hanging low over the grounds.
Most of the gathered students clustered thickly around Professor Rahansen as the group began moving, peppering him with an ongoing stream of questions about what this mysterious new class was actually going to involve, while Harry, Hermione, and Ginny hung back at the rear, walking slowly and maintaining the loose appearance of three friends deep in an entirely unrelated conversation.
The plan, so far, was working exactly as intended.
Trailing near the back of the group themselves, Draco and his two companions barely spared Harry so much as a glance in passing before hurrying to catch back up with the main cluster of students moving toward the treeline.
"So, what exactly are you going to do?" Harry asked, keeping his voice low.
"Just watch, Harry—"
Ginny tossed her bright red hair back over one shoulder and smiled at him, full of untroubled confidence.
In truth, whatever she had planned, it clearly wasn't complicated.
Ginny's eyes swept casually across the moving crowd of students until she located Ron somewhere near the front, walking beside Lavender.
"Hey, Ron, I forgot to tell you something—Mum sent me a letter yesterday!"
Ginny called it out, waving one arm at Ron, who turned around looking faintly dazed by the sudden interruption to his own conversation.
She set off toward him at a brisk pace, with just the right touch of urgency in her step, hurrying along through the loosely packed crowd and under Harry's carefully tense, watchful attention, her swinging arm brushed, apparently entirely by accident, against Malfoy's elbow as she passed close beside him.
"What do you think you're doing, you stupid cow!"
Malfoy jerked his arm back violently, as though he'd been physically shocked by the contact, snarling the words at Ginny with a viciousness that seemed wildly disproportionate to the brief, glancing touch that had provoked it.
It wasn't that Harry hadn't expected some reaction from Malfoy—that had, after all, been the entire point of the incident. But a reaction this violent, was more than he'd actually bargained for when he'd asked Ginny for the favour.
And in the startled second it took Harry to fully process the outburst, Ginny had already responded in kind.
With a sharp, decisive whoosh, Ginny had her wand out and levelled at Malfoy's eye, her face was gone cold as frost while her gaze sharpened.
"Who do you think you're talking to, Malfoy!"
The chain reaction that followed was instantaneous.
The moment Harry came properly back to his senses, he found he'd already drawn his own wand, and Ron came tearing away from Lavender's side entirely, roaring something incoherent as he pushed through the crowd toward his sister.
They weren't the only ones reacting with anger, either—Fred and George, along with several other Gryffindors who counted themselves on good terms with the Weasleys, all closed in fast from various directions.
Naturally, the cluster of students gathered around Malfoy showed no sign of backing down in response.
"What's going on here?"
Professor Rahansen reacted quickly, pushing his way through the rapidly forming crowd and hurrying over toward the centre of the disturbance, his brow furrowed as he took in the two clearly divided factions now facing off against each other.
The young witches and wizards of Hogwarts had considerably more fight available in them than he'd anticipated for a first meeting.
"That idiot hurt my hand!"
Malfoy clasped his left elbow against his own chest, glaring venomously at Ginny though notably, he didn't quite dare repeat the insult he'd flung at her a moment before.
"Hurt your hand?"
Harry already knew exactly what had actually happened. The corner of his mouth twitched.
"Aren't you making rather a lot out of this, Malfoy? Ginny just walked past you—she barely even brushed your arm in passing."
Malfoy's gaze snapped up and locked directly into Harry's green eyes, his own grey ones were flickering with something and the anger that had been sitting across his face a moment before strangely drained away.
"Would you like me to take a proper look at it, Mr. Malfoy?"
Professor Rahansen, having taken in the whole scene asked the question gently.
"No need—"
Malfoy seemed to realize this wasn't the moment to keep pressing the matter with everyone watching. He muttered something under his breath, then turned his face away coldly and stalked off.
"Smart move, you little scrap of trash."
Fred sidled up next to Ginny and tossed the line out, but Malfoy only faltered a half-step before continuing on without stopping to respond.
"I won't have anyone using language like that toward a classmate, in my class or otherwise. Mr. Weasley, was it?"
Professor Rahansen's expression darkened slightly as he turned to address Fred.
Though clearly unconvinced, Fred didn't seem to want to openly defy the new professor on his very first morning of teaching, so he nodded with reluctance, and let the matter drop.
Satisfied by the response, Professor Rahansen nodded back once and returned to the front of the group.
"So? How'd it go, Harry?"
A moment ago, Ginny had been glaring at Malfoy with what looked like genuine hatred and fury. But the instant the surrounding students stopped paying close attention to the three of them, her expression flipped entirely, transforming into something bright and expectant.
She turned to Harry with a look that was practically begging for credit.
"Did you figure out what you wanted to know from that?"
The sudden, whiplash shift left her brothers thoroughly baffled, watching her with matching confusion. Ron shot Harry a sidelong glance, utterly lost as to what had actually just happened beneath the surface of the argument.
Harry was just opening his mouth to answer when Hermione who had been watching the entire exchange unfold with a cool, appraising eye throughout got there first, cutting smoothly across whatever he'd been about to say.
"Whatever you've figured out, Harry, this isn't remotely the place to discuss it."
"What exactly are you two playing at?"
Ron narrowed his eyes at both of them.
"Later—"
However badly Harry wanted, in that moment, to share his newly confirmed suspicions about Malfoy with his oldest friend, he followed Hermione's usually sound advice and held his tongue.
To the students of Hogwarts, watching Gryffindor and Slytherin clash over some minor provocation was about as ordinary and unremarkable as the weather.
What had just happened between Ginny and Malfoy barely registered as noteworthy against that long, established backdrop, and the general chatter of the queue resumed within a few minutes as though nothing had occurred at all.
What the students were genuinely curious about was why Professor Rahansen had gone to all this particular trouble to march the entire third-year-and-above population of Hogwarts directly into the Forbidden Forest for a class about, apparently, sitting quietly and thinking.
Hagrid's cabin, perched at its familiar spot near the very edge of the forest, already had a thin curl of smoke rising from its chimney.
Fang, Hagrid's enormous dog, lay sprawled in front of the cabin door, yawning drowsily at the passing students without bothering to lift his head more than a few inches off his paws.
Thud!
A loud, sudden crash came from somewhere inside the cabin, startling Harry badly as he happened to be looking directly at it in that moment, though Fang, lying undisturbed by the door, seemed thoroughly, completely used to such noises by now. The dog simply covered his head with both front paws and settled back in for some further peace.
'Had Hagrid finally managed to break that enormous bed of his?'
The thought flickered briefly through Harry's mind, and then, in the space of a single blink, everything went abruptly dark before his eyes as the forest. By the time he'd properly come back to himself, blinking against the sudden gloom, he realised he'd already crossed some invisible threshold and entered the forest proper.
They followed Professor Rahansen along a narrow path that had, evidently, only just been freshly cleared, pushing deeper into the trees one uneven step at a time.
The weak, struggling morning light couldn't properly penetrate the thick, layered canopy stretching above, and the Forbidden Forest remained heavy with its familiar gloom despite the hour; more than a few nervous students had already pulled out their own wands without needing instruction to light the way forward through the deepening shadow.
After roughly ten-odd minutes of steady, careful walking, the front of the line finally slowed and then stopped moving.
Harry let out a breath of genuine relief at the pause. He braced one hand against a nearby tree trunk to scrape a thick layer of accumulated mud from his boots, then scrambled up onto a convenient boulder using both hands and feet, holding his glowing wand high up to get a proper look at whatever lay ahead of the stalled queue.
"All right, here we are—"
Professor Rahansen's voice carried back clearly through the trees to the students still walking in behind him.
"Everyone, gather in close. Oh—you can spread out properly, there's no need to crowd together like this, there's plenty of room."
What came into view before the students, as they walked forward and the trees finally began to thin, was a two-storey wooden cabin with a steeply slanted roof which was clearly newly built, judging by the still-fresh colouring visible across its exterior planks.
In front of the cabin lay a stretch of cleared levelled ground, though it wasn't standing entirely empty. Neat rows of seedlings had been planted across it in lines, each one standing roughly a foot or so tall.
At Professor Rahansen's direction, the students slowly spread themselves out across the cleared space.
Harry hopped down off his boulder and tried to push his way forward through the loose crowd toward his friends, only to find he'd already gotten "separated" from Hermione, Ron, and Ginny in the general shuffle as a cluster of Hufflepuffs had closed in on both side of him instead, leaving him stranded some distance from his usual group.
Professor Rahansen alone stepped directly into the middle of the seedling patch itself. He looked out over the crowd of students, his expression was welcoming.
"Meditation Class—to be honest with all of you, that particular name doesn't really capture the full scope of the ancient art I'm actually about to teach you here. But aside from that name, I don't think there's a more fitting term available within your own language for wizards to properly use—so Professor Watson suggested I simply go with it."
His voice drifted through the surrounding forest, made even more serene by the faint, ethereal birdsong filtering down from somewhere in the canopy above them.
"Before the formal lesson properly begins, you're all welcome to ask me anything you'd like. I'm genuinely happy to clear up whatever confusion you're carrying first, before we start."
"We don't have a textbook, Professor Rahansen, or any reference material at all that I've been able to find. How are we supposed to actually study for this class?"
Hermione's well-trained right hand shot up immediately, her voice resounded across the clearing.
"I'm afraid a textbook wouldn't be of much help to any of us here, Miss Granger. Every piece of knowledge you'll receive in this particular class will come directly from me, spoken aloud, in person."
Professor Rahansen said it plainly.
"And I should also tell you all now, before we begin properly—unlike every other course currently taught at this school, my Meditation class isn't divided up by year group. There is only the Introductory course, and the Advanced course.
No matter what year you happen to be in currently, every single one of you will start together, in the same Introductory course. As for the Advanced course, however—"
Professor Rahansen looked out slowly over the sea of bobbing, attentive heads scattered across the clearing before him, and said, with calm honesty:
"—that is reserved only for those among you with a genuine, natural talent for this specific art. It is not something you can simply earn your way into through effort alone. Honestly, it's entirely possible that not a single one of you currently standing here will end up meeting the requirement for it."
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