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Which only soured his mood further.
"Just six more years, no, five and a bit. Barely over five," Snape muttered under his breath, ntally counting down the ti until Ian would finally leave Hogwarts. For the first ti in many years, he found himself genuinely wishing for ti to pass faster.
Lunch ended and Ian had uncovered nothing useful. This surprised quite a few of the young wizards nearby.
"Horcruxes don't just sprout legs and wander off, do they?" Ian muttered to himself. Feeling the need to deepen his understanding, he retrieved Revealing the Secrets of Advanced Dark Magic, a book Aurora had gifted him, and used the lunch break to read.
Ti spent in study had a way of vanishing before one noticed.
That afternoon, sunlight stread through the lofty tower windows of Hogwarts, casting long, dappled shadows across the stone corridors. Not wanting to be late, Ian arrived at the Potions classroom just a step behind Aurora.
Uncle Snape was about to begin the first lesson of the year. And Ian, despite everything, still felt he ought to give Snape so respect.
"Lirim, what are you doing in a second-year classroom?" Ian asked abruptly, as he was about to take the seat next to Aurora. His eyes had just landed on a figure who, by all logic, shouldn't have been there.
"Do you know what a privilege is?" Lirim didn't even look up as he spoke in a detached voice.
Strangely enough, none of the second-year students seated nearby seed the least bit concerned about his presence. They offered no questions, no reactions, almost as if the boy were invisible or as if his conversation with Ian hadn't even occurred.
"Snape agreed?" Ian's question carried a note of skepticism.
"He couldn't exactly refuse," Lirim said, finally glancing up at Ian with a faint smirk. "Just like most people here."
"You didn't co to lunch in the Great Hall?" Ian hadn't seen him there. It only added to his suspicion, this curious little ghost from the Ollivander family was high on his list of potential diary thieves.
Especially since the boy had been spotted near the blood ssage the previous night.
"Do you think that food is even edible?" Lirim flipped a page of his book, voice casual but clearly unimpressed by the house-elves' recent culinary experints.
"Actually, I thought it tasted pretty decent," Ian replied earnestly.
But,
"Heh. You'll find out tonight," Lirim said, a mischievous glint in his eye. The look on his face was one of delighted foreboding, which imdiately gave the nearby students a bad feeling. Several instinctively placed a protective hand on their stomachs.
"Are you saying I'll get food poisoning?" Ian thought back uneasily to the lunch he had just eaten.
He had sampled quite a few of the house-elves' latest innovations.
"Have you ever seen a rainbow-coloured, wriggling Ollivander?" Lirim asked, now clearly enjoying himself. "No? Well, you will tonight. Best hope Hogwarts' plumbing charms are up to the challenge."
That confird it.
"Is that a prophecy?" Ian asked, raising an eyebrow. His private bath ant he didn't particularly fear a toilet-related catastrophe. He was more intrigued by how Lirim could be so certain.
"It's called life experience," Lirim said, chuckling softly.
He returned to his reading, just like any typical Ravenclaw, nose buried in a book. Except that his book was anything but typical. The cover bore a rather ridiculous title: The Muggle Princess and the Seven Little Goblins.
It looked like a bizarre cross between a fairy tale and a satire.
Ian couldn't help but feel curious. Ever since his access to the Twilight Realm, he'd started paying more attention to fairy tales and magical folklore. They often held more truth than one would expect.
"Is it any good?" he asked.
"Mm."
Lirim didn't look up, but nodded. "Although the ending is a bit tragic, the Muggle Princess ditches the seven goblins and runs off to live with a Giant. But it's understandable. I an, how can little goblins compete with a Giant? If I were the princess, I'd pick the Giant too."
There was sothing oddly pointed in the way he said it.
But Ian couldn't catch any real evidence of a deeper aning.
"..."
This peculiar fairy tale was certainly reshaping Ians' view of Muggle storytelling.
And Lirim wasn't finished.
"If you enjoy that sort of tale, you should try Snow White. Now that's a story every young wizard ought to read. The seven little dwarfs with skin like soot aren't any less impressive than the Giant in Muggle Princess."
"Of course, the prince's obsession with a corpse is downright unnerving." It was difficult to imagine what sort of upbringing would lead an eleven-year-old wizard to deliver such literary comntary with such enthusiasm.
"??????" Ian couldn't tell whether this was the original plot or so deranged twist added by later magical scholars for their own amusent.
He still associated Snow White with his absurd senior from the Twilight Realm.
The mory sent a shiver down his spine.
"Not a fan?" Lirim caught Ian's uneasy expression and looked even more entertained. "If you don't like that one, I've got a tale about the Frog Prince."
This sounded like yet another version twisted so far into the realm of magical horror it might well rival a Cthulhuesque vision.
Ian decided not to give Lirim the satisfaction of ruining his childhood mories.
So,
"The Frog Prince is actually a rather good story. I've always liked him. Frogs are small, sure, but the Frog Prince is sothing special. You eat one frog, it's gone. But if you kiss the Frog Prince and turn him into a proper prince… that's als sorted for weeks."
He preemptively destroyed his own nostalgia, leaving Lirim with nowhere to go.
Admittedly, it was an excellent strategy.
Lirim was montarily stunned into silence.
"??????"
The blond boy, who just monts ago had been smugly teasing, now wore a thoroughly confused expression, more bewildered than Ian had been during the Snow White discussion.
"I've never lost a duel of absurdity quite like this."
Ian ruffled Lirim's slightly tousled hair in triumph and returned to his seat beside Aurora, arranging his books for their first lesson of the new term.
"I heard frogs can lay between five hundred to two thousand eggs in one go. Why not have the Frog Prince father a few generations? That way, you'd have an endless supply of royal frogs to eat."
Aurora interjected just then. She must have overheard the entire exchange and had apparently begun contemplating matters no sane witch ought to ponder.
"!?"
It was poetic justice, perhaps.
Faced with the German girl's wildly inventive reasoning, Ian was at a loss. "Don't… don't male frogs not lay eggs?" he asked, trying to nudge the conversation back toward biological reality.
But,
"I know a spell that can make soone hermaphroditic," Aurora replied with perfect sincerity, even offering to copy it down for him.
"!!??"
Ian had no words. He could only accept defeat in silence.
His social navigation spells had failed catastrophically. Fortunately, before Aurora could go any further with her staggering ideas, a familiar black silhouette swept into the classroom. Snape had arrived.
This particular Potions room was colder than the rest of the castle, the chill brushing against their robes, a side effect, perhaps, of Nicholas Flal's castle-wide air-regulation enchantnts being calibrated a touch too low.
Likely, the low temperature was intentional. It helped preserve potion ingredients. Ian had seen Uncle Snape during the sumr holidays; he'd spent nearly all of it restocking the potion stores.
The cabinet was now bolstered with several layers of protective enchantnts, and even its locks had been replaced with the highest-grade Goblin-forged security chanisms money could buy, though Ian knew they wouldn't hold up long against a skilled Alohomora.
"Today, we'll be brewing a thoroughly unremarkable potion, utterly devoid of value: Herbicide," Snape announced coldly, as he strode to the front.
He scanned the room and paused slightly at Ian, a flicker of caution crossing his otherwise impassive face, before turning to his lectern.
(To Be Continued…)
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