Until the love that mattered. The one to end them all, the one whose coals would never cool or lose their spark.
This thought offered James no consolation, however. He had found his one perfect love, the one whose fire would forever burn. And further, he now knew that she loved him back. Yet even that golden, pristine love would end with one of them walking away forever, never looking back.
He sighed, long and hard, and the sigh was half shudder.
He didn’t remember walking back to the Gryffindor tower and falling into his bed. He barely even remembered saying goodbye to Millie. All he remembered was the feeling of emptiness, of having been, if not loved, then really, really liked, and then losing that affection forever, with nothing to replace it with.
It wasn’t a nice feeling. But, as James went into the last, breathless, portentous weeks of his Hogwarts career, he had an idea that it was possibly the most grown-up feeling he had ever yet known.
Spring settled over Hogwarts with languid extravagance, freshening the air, melting the snow, unlocking the lake from its pall of ice, and breathing green buds throughout the Forest and grounds. This was greeted with renewed excitement and energy by most students, though not by James himself, who felt the mingled weight of Petra’s impending departure, and the uncertainty of her dark plan, along with the more general worries about the continued erosion of the Vow of Secrecy and the magical world in general.
Part of the reason that Norberta’s appearance in London hadn’t made greater news, James now knew, was that stories of the breakdown of wizarding boundaries were becoming increasingly commonplace.
Thousand-year-old safeguards and protections were gradually discovered to be weakening or broken entirely. This was met with dismay by the Ministry, with increasingly feverish articles by the wizarding press, and with secret, dark glee by certain unsavoury denizens of the magical world.
Every morning’s post brought more worrying news: Werewolves were prowling small Muggle communities with growing boldness, testing ancient boundary hexes and finding them threadbare or entirely gone. Mainstream Muggle news outlets mostly ignored such fantastical stories (for the time being), but tabloid papers and local news programs picked up the slack, giving breathless, incredulous reports of attacks by “unusually large and vicious wolves”.
Some eyewitnesses swore that the beasts walked on hind legs like men, and even used fragments of human speech. Other eyewitnesses, horribly, never lived to tell their tale. Murders were few and scattered, but horribly violent, striking terror in rural communities unlike anything they’d known in modern times.
The news from Romania was possibly even more unsettling.
After hundreds of years of quiet reformation, small communities of vampires were reportedly renouncing their Pact of Blood Temperance, refusing long-established voluntary blood depositories and returning instead to ancient midnight hunting practices. A team of Harriers had been assembled to confront the leader of one such community, a certain Count Domn Orpheus, only to be ambushed themselves by the Count and his guard. Three harriers had been bitten, bled, and then carried by their retreating mates to the nearest hospital some seventy miles away.
There, the three died, only to reawaken the next morning under the veil of the undead, hissing, befanged, and starved for blood.
Via the Shard, Zane informed James that his old mate from Bigfoot House, Wentworth Paddington, who was part vampire himself (though none would ever guess it), had been taken out of school by his parents in preparation for moving back to Romania. This was not because they intended to abandon their own Blood Temperance, but to get out of America before the rumours of “extranatural interment camps” came true.
The news from within the Giant communities was spotty, but equally worrisome. Many tribes had retreated from their ancestral communities, but clumsily, leaving behind copious evidence of their habitation. Muggle explorers were discovering giant footprints, tribal cave drawings, and even burial mounds. International magical response teams were dispatched to the sites to scrub as much evidence as possible, and obliviators did what they could to erase memories and alter reports.
Still, some leaks of giant-related material had proved impossible to contain. One Muggle explorer had actually dug up a giant skull from its burial mound and was displaying the ghastly object (purported to be five feet in diameter with a weight of nearly five stone) to any and all photographers and television news cameras. For now, as with the werewolf sightings, these reports were mainly met with skepticism from major media. But those in the magical world knew that such fortune couldn’t possibly last forever.
Perhaps most disheartening of all, wizarding thieves had begun targeting Muggle homes and institutions. Where magical safeguards had once made it impossible for adult witches and wizards to deliberately use their powers against Muggle establishments, now petty magical criminals easily thieved banks, vaults, and wealthy manors, all with increasing confidence, knowing that the magical community was too occupied to stop them, and Muggle locks and alarms were no match for their wands.
One particularly audacious heist of the United States gold reserve at Fort Knox was only thwarted because the American Magical Integration Bureau had shown the foresight to erect foe-glasses in their secret offices in that and similarly sensitive locations. The organized gang of witches and wizards, led, sadly enough, by a certain Luckinbill Fletcher of Herbertshire, was only temporarily captured. They eluded authorities en route to Fort Bedlam prison, vowing that next time no “hand-me-down magical trinkets” would stop them.
As a result, the Ministry of Magic had determined that the Magical Integration Bureau’s use of physical guards was worthy of consideration. Thus, as a “temporary safety measure” (or “desperate last resort” according to Scorpius), thirty particularly essential magical locations around Europe had been deemed Code Red High-Risk and fortified with twenty-four hour watchmen.
Hogwarts was one of those thirty.
“We have been kindly asked,” Merlin stated at the official announcement one Thursday evening at dinner, “that we not refer to our new watch as ‘guards’, since that term is feared to imply a certain,” he peered down his nose at a parchment in his hand, “‘antagonistic and/or fear-based response, rather than a mere benevolent vigilance for the welfare of all, both magical and otherwise.’”