Chapter 337: Help! This Year's DADA Professor is… Something Else.
On the staff table, Dumbledore continued. "And the second matter—this year, we welcome a new Defence Against the Dark Arts professor—"
Before he could finish the sentence.
Bang.
The great doors of the hall flew open with a force that shook the walls.
Every student in the room flinched and turned. When they saw the figure standing in the doorway, the entire hall drew breath at once.
What — what happened to his face?
Even Dumbledore's eyebrows rose. Connie stared, her voice dropping to a stunned murmur. "Merlin's beard, that's..."
The face that had appeared before them all was almost indescribably ruined. It looked as though it had been worked over with a club, or as though its owner had fallen from a great height and landed face-first. Every feature had been driven inward. His nose sat flat against his face, clearly broken more than once. His skin was threaded with the marks of rough stitching, like a torn piece of cloth someone had done their best to hold together. And above all of it, two eyes burned with a cold, festering hatred.
He looked like something that had crawled back up from the depths of hell.
The Great Hall went completely silent.
The students watched the ugly, ferocious-looking man limp and lurch his way down the aisle, too stunned to speak.
"G-good Merlin," the Hufflepuff first-year breathed, shrinking back in their seat. "Is that the new Defence Against the Dark Arts professor? He doesn't look like a good person at all…"
That same warm, gentle voice came again from nearby. "No, he's not the new professor."
"I-is that so? You seem to know a lot… so who is he?"
The answer came a moment later, in the form of a sharp cry from Connie Rosier. "Merlin! Mr Yaxley?! What on earth happened to you?!"
The man in the doorway was not the new Defence professor at all. He was the Ministry official who had come with her.
Connie could not, for the life of her, reconcile the figure limping down the aisle with the composed, well-dressed gentleman she had known just months ago. What in Merlin's name had happened to him over the summer? He looked like he'd been put through a mincer.
Yaxley forced the corners of his mouth upward. The movement pulled at the half-healed scarring across his face, twisting his features into something even worse. "Ha. Just a minor accident. Nothing serious. A few months and I'll be as good as new."
In his mind, though, the memory burned.
Falling one step behind Ethan. Being pummelled by giants as though he were a mole being hammered back into the ground. Coming within a hair's breadth of being crushed into paste. The hatred that rose in him now was beyond his ability to suppress. The giants' towering figures had become a recurring nightmare — he woke to them nearly every night.
Still, giants could not come to Hogwarts. He wouldn't have to see them again, at least not until the war began in earnest.
Ethan Vincent, he thought, the name settling in him like a burning coal. You scheming little brat. I will return every ounce of pain to you a hundredfold. I will send you to hell with my own hands.
A single Avada Kedavra was all it took. Even a student could kill the strongest wizard alive if they caught him off guard. That was the wonderful thing about magic, wasn't it?
Yaxley was quite certain that killing an unsuspecting student in the relaxed environment of a castle would be simplicity itself. The only variable he needed to account for was how to escape Dumbledore's reach once it was done.
He exhaled slowly and cast a dark, careful glance toward the headmaster. Patience. Shake off Dumbledore's surveillance first. Follow the Ministry's instructions for now — keep an eye on this new Defence professor. And if the professor really does have ties to Ethan, deal with them both at once.
With that thought settling into place, he scanned the staff table.
He frowned.
There were no unfamiliar faces.
Had the mysterious new professor not arrived yet either?
"This," Dumbledore said, his tone carrying just a trace of cool distance, "is Mr Corban Yaxley, another representative from the Ministry of Magic."
Yaxley snapped back to the present and offered a polite smile. "My apologies for the late arrival, Headmaster."
At that, the students let out a collective breath of relief.
"So he's not the new professor — he's an Auror!"
The Hufflepuff first-year relaxed visibly, breaking into a smile. "I thought for a moment that Hogwarts professors were actually that terrifying! An Auror makes more sense. Those awful scars must be badges of honour."
"Hehe." The warm, kind voice chuckled softly nearby. "What a generous way to look at it. Very Hufflepuff of you."
"Heh." The first-year laughed a little, embarrassed.
Then stopped.
Something felt slightly off.
That voice — the tone of it. It didn't quite sound like it belonged to a fellow Hufflepuff student.
But this was the Hufflepuff table. Who else could be sitting here?
The first-year glanced sideways — and met the eyes of the student sitting on their other side. What was in those eyes was not mild curiosity. It was raw, full-bodied terror.
Justin's face had gone white. He had flattened himself as far to the other side of the bench as physically possible, and he was trembling as he whispered, "Are — are you trying to frighten yourself on purpose? Why are you talking to thin air?"
"What? Talking to thin air? I was talking to the older student next to me—"
The words landed like a pin through a soap bubble.
And all at once, the first-year understood.
Right. They had been sorted last, placed at the very end of the bench. There was no one to their left.
Not a ghost either, apparently.
So the voice that had been answering them all this time was...
A chill shot up from the first-year's heels, tore up their spine, and burst through the top of their skull.
A soft laugh drifted down.
Cold breath skimmed the back of their neck, and a rash of cold sweat broke out across their skin.
"Don't be frightened," the warm voice said pleasantly. "I've always preferred the dead."
"Wh — whuh — waaah...!"
The poor first-year burst into tears on the spot.
On the very first day of term, they had received their first taste of Hogwarts hospitality.
"Oh, dear. I simply have a fondness for Hufflepuff and wanted to see what it was like from over here. You can't go crying to your new professor now."
New professor?
The first-year caught the word through their tears and blinked in confusion. Professor? The Defence Against the Dark Arts one?Well, if it was a professor, surely it couldn't be that frightening. This was Hogwarts, after all. Supposedly, the safest place in the world.
Maybe it was just a joke.
Gathering every scrap of courage they had, the first-year screwed their eyes half-shut and slowly, carefully turned their head to look.
The figure that filled their vision stopped them in their tracks.
Their body locked up. Their mind went mercifully blank, a protective emptiness rushing in to fill the space where understanding should have been.
Because what sat beside them could not reasonably be called a human face.
There were no features. No eyes, no brows, no nose, no mouth — none of the basic landmarks that made a face recognisable. What there was instead were rings. Concentric, layered spirals carved deep into the surface, the grooves sharp and deliberate, like a whirlpool rendered in flesh — drawing the eye inward, layer by layer, down and down into a centre that seemed to have no end.
A perfect spiral, anywhere else. Just not on a human face.
"Ah... ah..."
The first-year pupils shook. They stared up at the figure that had, at some point, risen to stand beside them—looming over them now like something out of a nightmare—and the sounds that came out of their mouths were not quite words. They were the shape of a scream, stuck somewhere in the throat.
"How is it? Beautiful, isn't it? I think this face is simply gorgeous."
The Spiral Being raised one white-gloved hand and stroked its own terrible face with an air of serene self-satisfaction, the way a perfectly ordinary person might admire themselves in a mirror.
In the Great Hall, hundreds of students sat with their mouths open, eyes dragged helplessly into those layered, looping rings, unable to look away. Even the warm amber candlelight couldn't touch the dead stillness that had settled over the room. It felt, suddenly, like standing in a graveyard.
Connie and Yaxley had both frozen where they stood.
Are we here to investigate that?
Is this actually happening?
Dumbledore was silent for a long moment. He regarded the Spiral Being — who genuinely appeared to believe it was beautiful, and was accordingly quite pleased with itself — with an expression that defied description.
I asked you to teach Defence Against the Dark Arts, he thought.
I did not give you permission to transform into an eldritch entity and contaminate the school.
"Is it... is it too late to withdraw my enrolment?"
Nobody could say who had spoken. But the voice was thick with tears, and it said exactly what every first-year in the room was thinking.
Help. This year's Defence Against the Dark Arts professor appears to be something other than human. What do we do? QAQ