"You!" Loki snarled as he burst into the room. "Where is it? Where's the Cloak?"
"Somewhere you'll never find it," Oleandra replied smugly. "Even if you kill me, you'll…"
Oleandra's voice trailed off. "…who are you?"
The person who had just burst into Oleandra's room was not Loki wearing Draco's body, nor was it anyone she knew. Rather, it was a beautiful girl with long, flowing, platinum blond locks; and though Oleandra could have sworn she'd never seen her in her life, she seemed oddly familiar.
"Loki…?" Oleandra asked, peering at him with narrowed eyes. "Is that you?"
The girl scowled at her. "What'd you think? The enchantment protecting the girls' dormitories from male incursion was a bit stronger than I thought it would be, so I had no choice but to take female form."
Oleandra had spent much of the summer poring over every scrap of lore on Loki she could find and she had learned many interesting details about him. The legends claimed that Loki had personally given birth to several children, mothering many monsters.
At first, she had assumed that, since the Aesir could incarnate themselves into others' bodies like parasites to pursue immortality, Loki must have descended into a woman's body once or twice. That was what Odin had been about to do to her, after all, yet now these miraculous births seemed to have been the result of some kind of gender-reversal spell. Such a thing didn't exist in the Wizarding World as far as she knew, but apparently, this was something Loki could do!
Loki snapped his fingers, and his female form shimmered for a moment before settling back into Draco's regular appearance… but Oleandra's eyes could not be fooled. He was wearing a Glamour Spell over his body.
"That's a runic façade, isn't it?" she said, frowning. "You're still a woman underneath. Are you stuck like that?"
"So that's how it is…" Loki said, eyes narrowing. "The Fae Eyes of a Greater Fairy… that's how you found the Cloak? I thought those eyes could only see through lies, but it seems they can do more than that…"
It had all happened before Loki's own birth, but from what he had heard, Borr, leader of the Aesir clan, had declared a state of emergency when the clan's Seer foretold the coming of Ragnarok at the hands of a British Fairy.
Fairies were not native to Scandinavia, and little was known of these enigmatic Magical Creatures beyond the fact that they lived on the islands to the south. Borr had sent legions of raiders to the coasts of the British Isles to capture thousands of the minor, mostly decorative variety for study— and, of course, to plunder the land to his heart's content— while entrusting his son Odin with a doomsday spell capable of annihilating Avalon.
Against all odds, Odin succeeded in his mission after facing many trials and tribulations, and Greater Fairies vanished from Britain. For reasons unknown, the Seelie and Unseelie Courts of Ireland followed suit, disappearing shortly afterwards. As a result, no specimen of a Greater Fairy was ever captured by a human, dead or alive, and the true extent of their magical abilities remained a mystery, lost to history.
"Thank you very much, little Fairy," said Loki with a snide smirk. "I did not know your kind could do that. I'll let you keep the Cloak for now, you've earned it."
And with that, he (or rather, she?) stalked out of the room, leaving Oleandra with a distinct sense of defeat, despite her having accomplished everything she'd set out to do, and more, in record time, too. Though Loki hadn't guessed everything perfectly, her attempt to taunt him had done more harm than good.
…
After finishing her essay on the theoretical interactions between Fire Salamander and Dragon blood in potions, Oleandra set aside her quill and parchment. She then pulled out Dumbledore's diary/notebook, dispelling its disguise with a spoken runeword and a tap of her wand on its cover.
She opened the thin notebook to the page concerning Ogham, clicking her tongue in annoyance at the black stain covering the section dedicated to Gort, the ivy rune. A much younger Dumbledore had spilled some wine on his notes, causing the ink to run and rendering the passage undecipherable.
"Tergeo," Oleandra muttered, pressing the tip of her wand against the ink blot.
The black smudge squiggled and danced across the notebook's pages, and for a moment, Oleandra believed she had succeeded… until her wand siphoned off the ink entirely, along with the words it had formed.
Oleandra cursed under her breath.
She had an inkling something like this might happen, given that the smudge had originally spelled out the words she had hoped to read. Though there was no real basis for her conviction, she was certain the missing section contained crucial information, even though Dumbledore's own notes stated that non-tree-based runes were less potent.
It was just a feeling, and yet… Oleandra had never been surer of anything in her life.
"Ancient Futhark runes are star magic…" Oleandra muttered to herself. "Ogham runes are earth magic… and moon magic, too, though I'm not sure why."
Had she attended Muggle school a little longer, she might have learned that the Moon was formed aeons ago, when a young Earth was struck by a colossal celestial object. Billions of tons of matter were ejected into space, eventually coalescing in Earth's orbit as its greatest satellite. Though the Moon floated in space, it was as much of the Earth as the soil beneath Oleandra's feet… and more.
In any case, Ogham runesmithing could be counted amongst the oldest and most archaic of magical disciplines, and it showed its age in every respect, in the way Wizards drew upon its powers. The essence of Ogham magic was telluric currents— that is, magic produced by nature and tectonic shifts. Practitioners are therefore at their strongest near Ley Lines (known in the East as Dragon Veins), forests, underground, or above ground during a full moon.
Even though one can find the ground anywhere beneath the sky, Ogham magic is only truly potent in the places stated above, in places of power where the ancient Druids liked to establish their Circles. That being the case, is it any wonder the ancient Celtic Druids fell to the invading Germanic tribes, whose brand-new star magic proved effective everywhere under the heavens?
"Futhark and Ogham are antipodes, cancelling each other out, but by all rights, the former should be the stronger," Oleandra muttered to herself. "Yet in my experience, my star runes have always lost to Dumbledore's earth runes… but why is that? Is it just because he was that much stronger than me?"
Be it the new runes Dumbledore had added to Hogwarts's castle-wide Anti-Disapparition Jinx to prevent her from Tree-Porting, or the runic circle on the ceiling that had tried to stop her from dropping her name into the Goblet of Fire, Oleandra's magic had always lost to Dumbledore's. Why? The answer was obvious. Dumbledore's domain was Hogwarts, and the Four Founders had built their castle at the intersection of two Ley Lines, directly atop a telluric knot, to ensure the school's magic never faded.
Here, the magic of the land was king…. but Hogwarts was Oleandra's home, not Loki's.
If she could draw upon the castle's powers and face him in the dungeons, she could not possibly lose… yet she would need to learn more about both the castle and Ogham if she hoped to achieve a miracle.
Oleandra approached her trunk and pulled out Hogwarts: A History by Bathilda Bagshot from beneath a pile of clothes. She settled into bed and began reading.
Tomorrow, on Sunday, she drowsily thought to herself, would sneak out of the castle and seek out the only people who still practised Ogham magic in the present day, according to Dumbledore's notes on silversmithing's secrets… the Goblins.