◇◇◇
The Black Lake at dawn looked less like water and more like polished iron.
The air was bitterly cold, the kind of Scottish autumn chill that bit right through standard-issue wool cloaks. Harry stood at the edge of the water, his breath puffing in ragged, exhausted clouds. He was shaking, though whether from the temperature or the sheer, bone-deep exhaustion, it was hard to tell.
Arthur stood ten feet away, a smooth, dark stone turning idly between his knuckles.
"Again," Arthur said, his voice flat, carrying effortlessly over the gentle lapping of the water.
Harry dropped his hands to his knees, gasping. "Arthur... I can't. I can't focus."
"Then keep your eyes open," Arthur replied. He tossed the stone. It didn't arc through the air; it shot forward with the speed of a fired bullet, propelled by a silent, wandless Depulso.
Harry barely threw up his wand in time. "Protego!"
The stone shattered against the hastily formed shield, the kinetic force still enough to send Harry staggering backward into the icy shallows.
Arthur walked slowly toward the water's edge, looking down at Harry, who was currently dripping wet and glaring up at him with a mixture of resentment and desperate trust.
"You're relying on the shield," Arthur said, crouching so his gold-ringed eyes met Harry's. "A Shield Charm will stop a jinx, Harry. It will stop a Bludger. It will not stop a stream of concentrated dragon fire. If any dragon breathes on your Protego, it won't break the spell—it will melt the air inside the bubble, and you will boil in your own skin."
Harry swallowed hard, the color draining from his already pale face. "Hermione said the Summoning Charm—if I can just get my broom—"
"Getting the broom is step one. Surviving long enough to mount it is step two," Arthur interrupted. He stood back up, his black hair catching the pale, anemic sunlight. "Dragons do not think in spells, Harry. They think in territory. Hunger. Threat. To them, you are a rat in their nest. You cannot out-power her. You can only misdirect."
Harry climbed out of the water, shivering violently. "How?"
"By understanding what she's looking at," Arthur said. "When she draws breath, the temperature around her jaw will drop for a microsecond before it ignites. That is your window. You don't block. You move. And you do not look her in the eye."
Arthur turned his back to the lake, staring up at the distant, imposing silhouette of Hogwarts.
"Tomorrow," Arthur said softly, "the arena is going to be deafening. The crowd, the noise, the heat. It will paralyze you if you let it. You have to narrow the world down to just the beast and the broom." He glanced over his shoulder.
Harry gripped his wand, his jaw tightening. The panic was still there, but Arthur had given it a shape, a structure to cling to.
"I'll get the broom," Harry promised, his voice shaking but resolute.
Arthur nodded once. "Then let's practice the Summoning Charm while I throw rocks at your head again."
◇◇◇
The roar of the crowd was a physical weight, pressing down on the rocky enclosure like a suffocating blanket.
November 24th had arrived with a sky the color of bruised iron.
Arthur Damian Reeves did not sit in the stands. He stood in the deep, damp shadows beneath the faculty scaffolding, where the cheers of the students above vibrated through the wooden beams and down into his bones. His uniform collar was turned up against the wind, his hands buried deep in his pockets.
To anyone else, he was just a student avoiding the noise.
In the hollows of his mind, the fragments were restless.
Arthur closed his eyes, driving a mental wedge between their voices and his own consciousness, tuning them out.
The cannon fired a fourth time. The crowd's roar swelled into a hysterical crescendo.
Harry Potter stepped out into the jagged, rocky arena. Against the towering jagged stones, he looked impossibly small.
At the center of the enclosure, guarding a clutch of real eggs and a single golden one, Vaelithra waited. Because why not? If the universe was going to punish the boy, it would naturally give him the apex nightmare.
The double-headed Spiketail was a mountain of black, obsidian scales and spiked malice. She didn't just roar. She vibrated with a primal, maternal fury that slammed into Arthur's dormant Beasttongue like a physical blow across the stadium.
[This one?], the left head sneered in his mind, the thought tasting of sulfur and cracked bones. [At least he's better looking than the other boy.]
The dragon's thoughts were jagged spikes of pure heat. Arthur winced in the shadows, a brief flash of yellow bleeding into the faint gold threads of his black hair before he forced it back to neutral, gritting his teeth.
"I can hear you, you oversized moth", Arthur muttered under his breath.
Harry raised his wand, his voice barely carrying over the din. "Accio Firebolt!"
Nothing happened immediately. Vaelithra's left head snapped toward the small boy, her jaws unhinging. The back of her throat began to glow a terrifying, blinding white.
"Move, Harry", Arthur willed silently.
Harry dove behind a massive boulder just as a jet of fire turned the rock face to slag. The heat washed over the stadium, making the front rows recoil in panic.
Harry was brave—Arthur would give him that. But bravery didn't make you fireproof. And Vaelithra's right head was already calculating his next movement, her neck coiling back to strike the moment he broke cover.
Arthur let out a slow, measured breath. This was going to hurt, whether it worked or not.
He closed his eyes. The gold-white rings around his brown irises flared brilliantly beneath his lids.
He reached past the roaring crowd, past the containment wards erected by the Dragon Keepers, and threaded his consciousness into the arena.
The Arcane Core in his chest pulsed, a heavy, suffocating rhythm that demanded to be let out in an explosive wave of frost or force. Arthur forced it down, compressing the raw, volatile power into a single, needle-thin frequency of Beasttongue.
He found Vaelithra's mind. It was like touching the surface of the sun.
[Listen,] Arthur projected, in a heavy, cold wave of absolute, commanding stillness.
The Spiketail jerked. Both massive, spiked heads snapped upward, golden, slit-pupiled eyes searching the stands. [Reeves? What are you—?]
[Look at the eggs,] Arthur pushed, letting a fraction of his Cryomancy bleed into the mental link to soothe the dragon's boiling, frantic rage. [Let him take the fake. It's dead metal.]
It was just a nudge. A momentary distraction. But it cost him.
A vein throbbed visibly at Arthur's temple, glowing faintly silver beneath his pale skin. The air around him warped, dropping ten degrees in a single second. Frost spider-webbed across the stone wall he was leaning against, crawling up the wood of the scaffolding. Blood, hot and metallic, began to trickle slowly from his left nostril.
Out in the arena, Harry's Firebolt shot down from the castle, zooming into his waiting hand. Harry mounted it and kicked off into the air. Vaelithra, momentarily disoriented by the chilling, authoritative presence in her mind, hesitated for three seconds.
It was all Harry needed.
The crowd erupted into absolute hysteria as Harry lured the dragon into the sky, diving and weaving with a reckless, breathtaking grace that belonged only to a natural Seeker.
Arthur severed the connection with a sharp gasp, slumping heavily against the frost-covered stone. His chest heaved. Manipulating an apex predator without a wand was like trying to hold back a flood with bare hands. He wiped the blood from his lip with the back of his sleeve, his breathing ragged.
"Bleeding for Gryffindor glory, Reeves?"
Arthur didn't jump. He simply turned his head, forcing his breathing to slow to a controlled rhythm.
Professor Snape stood a few yards away, stepping out of the gloom. A heavy scowl was etched into his sharp features. But Snape wasn't looking at the sky where Harry was currently outflying the Spiketail.
He was looking directly at Arthur.
Snape's dark, heavy-lidded eyes tracked the faint, dissipating frost on the stone wall behind Arthur, then drifted to the gold rings still fading in Arthur's irises.
"I did nothing," Arthur said, his voice flat.
"Didn't you help him?" Snape asked, his voice dangerously soft, slicing through the ambient noise of the crowd.
"Maybe she just doesn't like the taste of Gryffindor," Arthur replied, meeting Snape's stare without flinching.
Snape didn't smile. He stepped closer, his black robes billowing slightly in the draft.
"You have always possessed a certain... cunning, Reeves," Snape said quietly. "But do not insult my intelligence."
"I'm just watching the tournament, Professor."
"Are you?" Snape tilted his head, his gaze dissecting the boy before him. "Then why are you sweating in the freezing cold, wiping blood from your face like a boy who just barely survived a duel?"
Before Arthur could formulate a suitably biting response, the atmosphere in the shadows beneath the stands violently shifted.
It wasn't the ambient, weather-driven cold of November. It was a vacuum.
The roar of the screaming crowd seemed to mute, as if someone had thrown a thick, suffocating blanket over the world. The hair on Arthur's arms stood on end. The Arcane Core in his chest contracted with a sickening jolt, sending a spike of pure, unadulterated warning straight into his nervous system.
"Arthur." Ardyn's voice was suddenly devoid of all its usual clinical detachment. It was sharp. Urgent. "Look up."
Arthur's gaze snapped away from the Potions Master, tracking upward past the scaffolding, past the cheering students in the lower boxes, up to the very highest tier of the stadium where the shadows clung thickest to the canvas roofing of the VIP box.
There was no physical shape there. No cloaked figure. No glowing eyes.
But Arthur felt the smile.
He felt the sleek, oily satisfaction dripping down through his mind. It tasted like ash and ozone. It felt exactly like the courtyard at Ilvermorny right before the lake exploded.
Vaelric.
Arthur's breath caught. His hands balled into fists, his knuckles turning white. His heartbeat quickened. Fear? His hair immediately flared a stark, furious white at the roots, the gold threads burning like lit fuses as his Metamorphmagus traits reacted to the sheer, primal surge of threat.
"Reeves?" Snape's voice cut through the static, suddenly tense. The professor had noticed the shift in the air, the way the shadows seemed to bend unnaturally toward Arthur. He followed Arthur's line of sight, his hand dropping instinctively toward his wand. "What is it?"
"Nothing, Professor," Arthur whispered, the words tasting like copper.
A massive, echoing cheer shook the stadium—Harry had secured the Golden Egg. The crowd's hysteria shattered the vacuum, rushing back in a tidal wave of deafening sound.
Arthur blinked, and the suffocating presence in the rafters was gone. The shadows were just shadows again.
But the message had been delivered. Vaelric, his nemesis, wasn't a continent away anymore. He had crossed the ocean. He was in the castle.
Arthur looked back at Snape, his eyes now a hard, unforgiving brown ringed with burning gold. The red faded from his hair, replaced by the dead, heavy black of absolute resolve.
"Good luck with the rest of the day, Professor," Arthur said, his voice stripped of all its usual sarcasm, leaving behind only the cold reality of a soldier addressing another.
◇◇◇
The roar of the stadium didn't sound like cheering to Harry. It sounded like the ocean trying to drown him.
He hit the rocky ground of the arena floor, his knees buckling the moment his boots touched the dirt. His Firebolt clattered against the stones. The golden egg was clutched so tightly to his chest that the metal ridges were biting into his forearms, but he couldn't force his hands to let go. He was shaking—a deep, violent tremor that started in his teeth and rattled down to his frozen toes.
He had survived.
But as the adrenaline began to bleed out of him, leaving behind a cold, hollow exhaustion, Harry knew the truth. He hadn't won. He had been spared.
Around him, the arena was a theater of controlled chaos. Dragon Keepers, Charlie Weasley among them, surged forward with heavy iron chains and stunning spells, shouting hoarse commands. But Vaelithra wasn't fighting them. The massive double-headed Spiketail was shaking her massive heads, blinking her golden slit-eyes at the sky as if trying to shake off a sudden, blinding migraine. She didn't look defeated. She looked profoundly confused.
"Potter! Here, quickly!"
Professor McGonagall's hands were on his shoulders, unexpectedly gentle as she steered him away from the smoking craters and toward the Champions' tent. Harry let himself be guided, his vision blurring at the edges.
The interior of the medical tent smelled sharply of burn paste, antiseptic, and nervous sweat. Madam Pomfrey descended on him instantly, muttering dark things about the Headmaster's sanity as she shoved a vial of Calming Draught against his lips.
Harry choked it down. The shaking eased, but the cold in his stomach remained.
He looked across the tent.
Cedric Diggory was sitting on a cot, half his face smeared with a thick orange paste where the Swedish Short-Snout had nearly taken off his ear. Cedric caught Harry's eye and offered a tired, respectful nod. But there was a tightness around Cedric's mouth, his brow furrowed as he replayed the match in his head.
"I thought you were toast, Harry," Cedric said, his voice quiet beneath the noise of the healers. "The way she reared back... I've never seen a dragon do that. She just froze. Like someone threw a bucket of ice water over her brain."
Harry swallowed hard, his throat tasting of ash. "Yeah. Lucky, I guess."
"Luck? Oh please," a sharp, melodic voice cut in.
Fleur Delacour was pacing at the back of the tent, her silvery hair slightly singed at the ends, her pristine robes ruined by scorch marks. She looked at Harry not with awe, but with intense, calculating annoyance.
And then there was Krum.
The Durmstrang champion sat in the furthest corner of the tent, a heavy cloak draped over his broad shoulders. A healer was wrapping a nasty gash on his forearm, but Krum didn't seem to notice the pain. He wasn't looking at Harry with the heat of a rival, or the annoyance of a competitor.
He was looking at Harry with a heavy, solemn pity.
"Right, you're clear," Madam Pomfrey sighed, stepping back from Harry. "But I want you resting. No celebrations, you hear me?"
Harry nodded numbly. He stood, his legs feeling like they were made of lead. He clutched the golden egg—it felt less like a trophy and more like a tombstone—and pushed his way out of the tent flap.
The cold Scottish air hit him, a stark contrast to the sterile heat of the infirmary tent.
The crowds were still pouring out of the stands above, a sea of scarlet and gold roaring his name. "Potter! Potter! Potter!" It made him sick to his stomach. They thought he was a hero. They thought he had outsmarted a dragon.
"When she draws breath, the temperature around her jaw will drop... You do not block. You move." Arthur's voice echoed in his head, colder and more real than the thousands of voices screaming for him right now.
Harry stopped at the edge of the rocky path, turning his back to the cheering Gryffindors.
For a split second, he thought he saw him. A tall, dark-clad silhouette leaning against a stone pillar, melting into the pitch-black shadows just beyond the reach of the torchlight.
"Arthur?" Harry breathed, taking a half-step forward.
But the shadows shifted, and the space was empty. Arthur Reeves was already gone.
Harry stood alone at the edge of his victory, clutching his golden egg, entirely certain that the real tournament hadn't even begun yet.
◇◇◇
Arthur moved through the abandoned corridors of the third floor.
His pace was steady, a mask of Slytherin composure that held until the moment he rounded the corner into a hall lined with dust-choked tapestries and silent suits of armor.
Then, the world tilted.
His knees didn't buckle gracefully. They just stopped working.
He lunged forward, his shoulder slamming into a suit of 15th-century plate armor with a deafening, metallic clang. The visor snapped shut like a coffin lid.
He slid down the cold stone wall.
His breath came in shallow, jagged pulls.
Vision fractured at the edges — gold and grey bleeding into each other. He leaned his head back against the stone and felt his own Cryomancy leaking out of him like water through cracked glass, frost crawling unbidden across the armor's breastplate.
He coughed. Blood hit the back of his hand.
He stared at it for a moment.
"Right," he said, to no one.
The footsteps were light. Hurried. Not a professor — wrong cadence. Not a prefect either.
"Arthur?"
Elena Potter stood in the doorway, Gryffindor scarf still wound around her neck, hair windblown from the stands. She'd been looking for Harry, probably. She'd found this instead.
Her eyes went to the blood on his hand.
She crossed the distance before he could tell her not to, dropping to her knees beside him. Her hand reached for his shoulder — and Arthur caught her wrist. Not hard. Just enough.
"I'm fine," he said.
She didn't pull away. She just looked at him.
That was the problem with Elena Potter. She didn't flinch. She just looked, quietly, like she was waiting for him to stop lying.
Arthur released her wrist.
"Your brother survived," he said. "Go celebrate."
"It wasn't really a win, was it," she said. Not a question.
Arthur wiped the blood from his lip. Said nothing.
Elena sat back on her heels, studying the frost spreading across the armor beside him. Her expression shifted — something working itself out behind her eyes.
"Did you do something?" she asked quietly. "During the task."
Arthur looked at the ceiling.
"No."
She let that sit for a moment. Then: "Okay."
She didn't believe him. They both knew it. But she stood up, brushing dust from her knees, and held out her hand.
He looked at it for a long moment.
He ignored it, using the wall to push himself upright.
"Go," he said.
She went. But she paused at the end of the corridor and looked back once — not to say anything, just to check he was still standing.
He was.
He waited until her footsteps faded completely before he let himself lean against the wall again, eyes closing, the frost still spreading quietly across the stone at his back.