XXX

Story: [Riley the Demon-Bird]

Summary: Voldemort causes the demon-apocalypse. Animagus!Harry survives, but gets a bit weird in the head. Then he ends up summoned back in time to an alternate dimension, gets genderbent, and builds a Cool Tower (TM).

Genre: Friendship?

XXX

Demons are a complicated existence to explain. A demon is a demon, there's not really any better way to explain them than that.

Perhaps the first thing that should be understood about demons is that magic worked differently for them. Both in the sense that they could use magic that a wizard would never be able to do, but also in the sense that magic used on them tended to go a bit wonky.

A spell that would explode a street, instead turns all organics in the area into fragile glass, or sputters and disappears with no effect, or hits them with all the force of a toddler throwing a tennis-ball, or rebounds and blows up the caster instead.

Magic just didn't quite work right around demons. Until you figured out how it went wonky.

For all of its seeming randomness, there was a certain pattern to it. Harry would've never been able to explain it, because it was almost entirely instinctive. But the truth of it was that magic worked just fine around demons, after you'd spent enough time around demons to get a good grasp of it.

Unfortunately, demons were violent creatures more interested in devouring the souls of their surroundings than in teaching magical theory to someone. Which meant that the only way to get that kind of experience was to fight demons. To fight a lot of demons. For a long time.

The problem with that was that fighting demons tended to do wonky things to the person fighting them too.

Demon-blood was a powerful thing. The kind of thing that could twist and warp magic that it touched all by its lonesome. And if you fought enough demons, well-... When you couldn't rely on your spells to always work, the sensible option was to find some other way to kill them, because demons didn't stop until they were well and truly dead.

A gun might work, though Harry had never really had the opportunity of trying one. He'd settled for a sword. It'd been easy enough to get the Sorting Hat to spit it back out, and having been doused in basilisk-venom the way it'd been, it'd worked like a charm.

Unfortunately, a sword required getting close to a demon, and then stabbing or slashing them. An action that very easily saw the user splattered with its blood.

In truth, Harry wasn't even sure if 'normal wizards' would ever be able to understand how magic worked around demons. He'd been drenched in demon-blood and it'd still taken him weeks of constant attacks before he started seeing the patterns.

Voldemort had always been a sore loser, and with his horcruxes being hunted down, the man had gone off the deep end. Harry still didn't know what the man had expected to happen, when he opened a path for the demons to enter their world.

Perhaps he'd thought that they'd obey him out of gratitude, perhaps he'd thought that he could control them, perhaps he'd just wanted to know that the world wouldn't outlive him.

Ron had died within the first year, Hermione didn't make it to the third winter, Harry had lost count of the winters after the first six. He was fairly sure that he could remember another ten-or-so winters after that though. He just didn't know which one was which, or if he'd forgotten any others.

The demons had overrun the British Isles within a few weeks, and by the Hermione finally died, they'd long since stopped finding survivors in the other parts of the world. The muggles had fired their nukes, and had only really managed to poison the air and turn the winters crueler.

Hermione's death was what had finally pushed Harry to – half-starved as he was – start to eat the demons he killed.

At this point, Harry didn't know if he even classified as 'human' anymore.

Regularly bathed in demon-blood, with his only food being the flesh of the demons he killed, and constantly fighting onwards for the sake of his own survival-...

Harry didn't even know why he was trying. Everyone he knew and loved were dead, the world he'd wanted to protect had long since been destroyed, and all he was succeeding with was delaying his own death. Or perhaps he just wanted to kill as many demons as possible, out of some sense of vengeance?

Harry peered down at the group approaching, tilting his head. Perhaps he just couldn't imagine facing his loved ones, having both failed to protect them, and been so warped in the process that he doubted that he'd ever have been able to recognize himself.

Despite his smaller size, it was easier to keep his warmth when he was in this shape. His fluffy feathers were a lot warmer than whatever ragged clothes he'd manage to conjure for himself before they inevitably fell apart.

Harry pushed off from his perch, and spread his wings.

The reaction was immediate. "Bird!" Panic spread through the group as some tried to run for cover, and others braced themselves for a fight.

Harry twisted around a spear, and used his lethally sharp feathers tear open the demon's throat with his wing, even as his claws sank into the skull of another, the force of the impact combined with venomous claws sharpened to pierce steel cut through him like a warm knife through butter.

Two dead out of eight, Harry twisted and with a beat of his wings a limb with a sword was severed, allowing him plunge his beak through their ribcage and rip out a chunk of their heart. Three down.

Harry's claws flashed out and sliced through a fourth demon's throat, neatly decapitating them. Four down.

The others were running.

If he'd been able to, Harry would've scoffed. Cowards and weaklings both. The next four were quickly chased down and killed. It wouldn't do for them to alert something stronger. Harry really disliked having his meals interrupted midway through.

XXX

Saying that Ron broke first was unfair. Technically not untrue, but massively unfair.

Ron had always been the person with the most to lose. And then he lost it. The fact that he'd managed to keep on kicking for as long as he did was impressive, considering that they hadn't had the faintest clue what they were up against.

Harry wasn't going to dismiss Ron's sacrifice, even if it'd proved completely and pointlessly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. As far as Ron had known, his sacrifice would have meant something, and he'd been willing to gamble what little he had left on it.

And then he'd died. He'd died a crumbled mess of a human being, violent and hateful, and too drowned in pain to recognize friend from foe.

But saying that he'd 'broken first' was unfair.

Hermione never broke. She just kept on sharpening her edge until she didn't have any blade left. Worn away from having to constantly lean into her own ruthless streak. And then she was gone too.

Ruthlessly practical, she'd tried to preserve her corpse in death, so that Harry wouldn't starve.

It could be said that that was what broke Harry, but he hadn't really had anything left to break at that point. He'd just looked at her well-preserved corpse, understood her reasoning, and decided with a shrug that if it'd come to that he might as well just eat the demons instead.

It wasn't like Hermione would last forever. She'd been all skin-and-bones by then, same as him. Better to find a food-source that was sustainable.

Turns out, Harry's survival-streak was a lot deeper than he'd ever really considered.

Surviving the Dursleys had never exactly been easy, and it'd required a certain amount of stubbornness, but he'd never really thought about it. He'd known that he might have a tendency to go poking his nose into things, and that he could never just stand by and let someone get hurt.

But as the world burned, and everyone he loved were slowly drowned in the ash, Harry just... adapted.

The world was a hellish rendition of violence and blood and death and warped magic, so he killed and he killed and he killed and-... And he found a weird kind of peace in that.

Harry was the person who hunted the demons, on this world filled with nothing but demons. He was their boogeyman, and once upon a time the thought might've horrified him. To spread nothing but fear and death in his wake, it was exactly the kind of thing that he'd never wanted to become. Once upon a time it would've intoxicated him, to reap vengeance against the demons who'd slaughtered everything he'd ever held dear.

Nowadays it was just... the way things were. No more interesting to him than his animagus-form having been so warped by demon-blood that he didn't really need anything else to kill demons.

As far as he could tell, his appearance as a shrike hadn't changed at all. At least, beyond a certain glean to his feathers.

Sometimes, Harry wondered if he was as much a demon as the ones that he hunted. Though he couldn't ever really bring himself to care about it. It was what it was, or it wasn't what it wasn't. Worrying about it was pointless.

XXX

Harry blinked awake, except he hadn't been sleeping.

He was in a room. The room was lit by candles arranged in some kind of pattern. There was a young human girl in front of him, a child. The girl was naked, and bleeding from a chest-wound, but she was still breathing. There was a man in black robes standing to one side of the room. The man's magic smelled nasty, a putrid greed mixed in with a stagnant pool of swamp-water.

"I have summoned you, Great One!" The man shouted, voice hollow with delusional pride.

Harry ignored him, focusing instead on the young girl. She wasn't speaking, but she met his eyes, and that was enough.

There was a circle painted in her blood underneath his feet, and it was pressing down upon him. Binding him. But though she was the tool that had been used, she was innocent. A victim.

Harry wasn't sure if he could transform back from his regular bird-shape. And even if he did, it'd been so long that he doubted that he'd really be able to form the necessary words to communicate with the girl.

But thankfully, words were never a necessity.

Harry was trapped in the circle, same as the girl. But they were trapped for different reasons, and together there was a chance.

He suggested survival, she countered it with the half-maddened fury of vengeance. He suggested a partnership, she demanded a price for her everything.

She was a girl of extremes, and she'd already made her peace with death. She didn't want survival, she just wanted the pain to stop, and for the cause of it all to die.

And so Harry granted her wish.

A step, a movement that wasn't physical, a warping of magic beyond any that he'd ever attempted.

And then he opened his eyes.

His hands were small, the wound on his chest was already healing, and the man in black robes were screaming. Then the man in black robes stopped screaming. The silence was... satisfying.

And with that, the last lingering remnants of the girl's soul slipped away. Viciously content.

Harry looked around the room once more, trying to decide what he was supposed to do next.

He wasn't sure where he was, but this place had people in it. People and magic. The man in black had even spoken English. That implied that there might still be civilization here.

Harry hummed thoughtfully as he recalled that murder was frowned upon. It could be seen as having been done in 'self-defense', but that still felt like a complication that Harry didn't want to deal with.

With a shrug of Harry's shoulders, the man in black was dissolved into a brownish sludge. He should probably make sure to collapse the building somehow, maybe light it on fire too. But there was no need to make it easy for anyone to guess that there'd still been a person inside.

After that-... Well, he still needed to figure out where he was. Oh, and-

Harry flexed his hand, briefly marveling a bit at how tiny it looked, and conjured a robe for himself.

It wasn't exactly a good robe, and it would definitely fall apart if someone threw a bit of fire in his direction, but nudity was another one of those things that were frowned upon. And the fabric ought to be perfectly adequate for a warming-charm to stick to, if Harry could recall how to do that without lighting something on fire.

Conjuration wasn't the only skill that he'd neglected over the years.

XXX

London looked just the same.

Or rather, London looked just like it'd done when he'd still been a child. Cars and traffic-jams, people everywhere, magic hidden away on the other side of a small pub.

Harry wasn't sure what he was supposed to feel about that.

It was as if he'd traveled back in time, though he knew that that wasn't the case. Time-travel wouldn't be able to work on these kinds of scales. Hermione had researched it very thoroughly during those first few months, when they'd still had hope of saving the world.

This world and his world were different, some kind of sideways-parallel to their reality. Also, the newspapers all claimed that it was the last of September 1991. So... a sideways-reality that lagged behind in time, somehow?

Considering that Cornelius Fudge was the Minister of Magic, Harry felt it safe to assume that Voldemort was still around, in some capacity.

So, in the interest of stopping this world from descending into the hellish reality that had been his own, Harry really ought to kill the man before he could get any clever ideas about demons.

There was-... Harry frowned in concentration. There'd been a Ring, a Cup, an Amulet, a Diary, a... Diadem? Oh, and Nagini and Harry's scar had been one too.

The Ring should be easy to grab. It was in a shack out in the middle of nowhere. The Cup was in Gringotts, so Harry would have to figure out how to break in without having to ride out on the back of a dragon. He didn't want Voldemort to have time to realize that his horcruxes were being hunted down.

The Amulet was in Grimmauld Place, where it was being watched by a house-elf. And whilst Harry was fairly certain he could win in a fight against-... What was its name again? Kreek? No, Kreacher, that was it. Harry was pretty sure he could kill Kreacher without too much fuss, but it might be-... No, actually, Harry didn't care at all.

If Kreacher got in the way, he'd just kill him. He didn't need to risk potential complications down the line. Killing Voldemort was more important.

So, the Ring and the Amulet shouldn't be too much of an issue. The Cup was off-limits until Harry was sure that he'd be able to break in without notice. The Diadem was in Hogwarts, and Harry wasn't sure how he'd manage to sneak in without the Map. Nagini was... a late addition, Harry was pretty sure.

That left the Diary, which was in the Malfoy home. Somewhere. Harry vaguely remembered that Draco had accidentally revealed the location of 'Dark objects' to him and Ron at some point, but he couldn't for the life of him remember what that location might've been.

All he knew was that it'd find its way to Ginny by the time she started Hogwarts, next year.

Maybe Harry could delay sneaking into Hogwarts and grab both the Diary and the Diadem at the same time, next year? He didn't like delaying it like that, but it'd give him more time to think about how to get into Gringotts without getting caught.

Not that Harry had a lot of faith in his ability to plan things. Their plans had fallen apart, way back then. And Harry hadn't actually followed a plan beyond selecting a 'favored target' and killing that demon first for... over a decade by now. He was pretty sure he was out of practice.

So, since he was already in London, he should probably take care of the Amulet first.

Which was how Harry found himself standing outside Grimmauld Place, warily trying to remember if he was forgetting anything.

There was a possibility that some other family had inherited the house, or that Sirius hadn't ended up in Azkaban and had remodeled the whole thing. But none of that seemed very likely. Even if Sirius had somehow dodged Azkaban, he'd hated the house too much to be willing to return to it outside of some kind of emergency.

Harry shrugged, and rearranged the simple robe that hid his nudity from the world before-... Actually, wait. Was it her nudity now?

Harry was Harry, but Harry's body was currently that of a preteen girl. So, if it was a reference to Harry's body, shouldn't it be using a female pronouns? Or did Harry being male 'in soul' outweigh that? Actually, was Harry even 'male'? He'd never really thought about it. Gender had never seemed all that important when they'd been fighting for their lives throughout most of their time at Hogwarts, and it certainly hadn't become more important to Harry after spending most of the years since as a bird.

Harry honestly felt more like a bird wearing human skin than he felt like a 'male' or 'female'.

Also, Harry probably shouldn't be using the name 'Harry' any more. Not only would it raise eyebrows considering his female body, there probably was a 'Harry Potter' in this world already, and Harry didn't really want to be associated with him. Mainly because it'd make a lot of people pay attention to him, when he was trying to kill Voldemort without anyone realizing it.

He should probably come up with some kind of other name to use, and he should probably put some real thought into the whole gender-thing as well. It'd be awkward to end up with a name that didn't match the gender he'd decided on, after all.

Harry frowned to himself. He couldn't remember there being any spells or potions that let someone permanently change their gender. So trying to be a 'male' would likely be complicated long-term.

Well, it would be, if Harry didn't just abandon this whole idea and go back to his bird-form. Nobody would care about how he referred to himself if he was a bird. Mainly because nobody would be able to understand him, since he'd be a bird.

But being a bird was only really good for lethal magic, not for things like sneaking through Gringotts and the like.

Harry looked down at their naked feet and hummed thoughtfully. They'd definitely need a new name, and they could probably delay the whole gender-conundrum by picking one that was 'unisex', and then not using either male or female to refer to themselves.

It wasn't a perfect solution, but it'd be less of a bother than trying to explain that Harry was at this point effectively a demon wearing the body of a preteen girl as a meat-suit.

Less likely to result in people trying to attack them to 'rescue' the girl as well.

Minor existential crisis averted, Harry – they'd have to find a better name later – walked up to the door to Grimmauld Place, and knocked.

There was no need to try to break down the door, when Harry could just get Kreacher to open it for them.

They'd have to kill him afterwards, of course. To make sure to tie up any loose ends. After all, Kreacher was obsessive enough in his madness that he might try tracking down the 'thief' who stole the Amulet, and it was entirely possible that he wouldn't exactly be quiet about it, which would mean that Voldemort would in all likelihood find out about it. And that wasn't a risk that Harry wanted to take.

Also, in case Harry was wrong and somebody else opened the door, then at least Harry would know that the Amulet was more defended than expected, and that it might've been moved by the new residents.

Knocking on the door was just a neat solution to all of Harry's problems.

Harry greeted the grizzled house-elf that opened the door with a smile, relieved to know that the amount of unforeseen complications would be minimal. With that established, a quick burst of magic saw Kreacher's head be cleanly severed from his body.

It would've been nice to have the elf point them in the right direction of the Amulet, but trying to convince him to cooperate would likely be more trouble than it was worth, since Harry would probably have been forced to kill him afterwards anyway.

Harry stepped over Kreacher's body and into the house, letting the door swing close behind them.

They had a horcrux to find.

XXX

Horcruxes were... remarkably fragile things, once you figured out the trick to it. All that Harry needed to do was twist their magic so and then crack it there and suddenly the soul-anchor was broken beyond repair.

Destroying the Amulet was honestly much simpler than finding it. Grimmauld Place was a reasonably large house, filled with nooks and crannies, and for all that Harry had once upon a time been able to find Voldemort's horcruxes in the dark that'd been when he'd still had his scar. Now Harry's best bet was to sniff out what smelled 'Darkest' among the piles of junk.

It being Grimmauld Place, everything smelled Dark. So it'd taken Harry several hours.

Actually destroying the thing was honestly rather anticlimactic.

Harry hadn't destroyed a horcrux since back when he'd still been perfectly 'wizard-like' and had been forced to rely on basilisk-venom to melt through its magical protections.

Now Harry could do that with a flick of their wrist and a glare.

Having cleaned up any signs of breaking into the house, and dissolved Kreacher's corpse into an unrecognizable stain in the basement – that could easily be blamed on any number of things – Harry had gone looking for the Ring.

A wand clearly wasn't actually necessary for this kind of stuff, and it wasn't like Harry had a clue what they'd use money for even if they somehow acquired lots of it. They'd lived completely separated from society for over a decade, the fact that they even recognized English as a language at all was probably impressive in its own way.

No, better to deal with the Ring before anything else.

Which was how Harry ended up picking apart the wards on the shack with confused incredulity. This was the horcrux that'd crippled Dumbledore beyond recovery. But the protections didn't even smell half as well done as the ones Hermione had been using to ward their campsites for the night, back when Ron had still been alive. And she'd only gotten more vicious afterwards.

It was like someone claimed to have designed an impenetrable fortress, and then built the whole thing out of cheap plywood, and used duct-taped to keep it together. It was honestly a little bit insulting, and made Harry sincerely wonder about Dumbledore's abilities with a wand.

Harry could easily remember that the man was an amazing duelist, but if he'd been taken down by this, then Harry didn't think that they'd ever be able to respect the man again. This was just too pathetic. In fact, it was so pathetic, that perhaps it was some kind of trap?

Harry kept that brief candle of hope for their respect for Dumbledore all the way until the Ring was destroyed with a simple flick of their wrist. Perhaps hoping that the Ring's destruction would be what finally triggered some kind of amazingly undetectable trap that would see Harry fight for their life.

But, of course, nothing happened. The shack's pathetic defenses remained pathetically useless, and the horcrux continued to be unambiguously destroyed.

Harry sighed, and fed another shred of their childhood wonder into the wood-chipper that was their life-experiences.

Still, with the Ring and the Amulet gone, that only left the Cup, the Diary, the Diadem, and the scar.

Three out of four would be at Hogwarts by next year, and the fourth was hidden away in Gringotts.

Though, considering how utterly pathetic this particular display of magic had been, Harry got the feeling that perhaps they were overestimating how much trouble breaking into Gringotts would be.

After all, Voldemort managed to do it. In fact, even the three of them had kind of managed it, as teenagers, before everything went to hell.

So, for all that Harry couldn't quite imagine how to break into Gringotts, once they actually saw the bank, that confusion might very well change substantially.

On a more immediate note, Harry should probably find some kind of shoes, because it'd already become October and the weather wasn't going to get any warmer. Even if it was positively balmy in comparison to the memories of huddling down in the nuclear winter.

There was a difference between Harry's bird-form's ability to survive the cold climate, and their new preteen human body's ability to do the same. And Harry didn't feel entirely comfortable with the idea of trying to transform.

Not until they'd gotten used enough to this body to not mangle it beyond recognition if they needed to switch back from being a bird. This body had been a gift, after all. It'd be rude to discard it just because Harry couldn't be bothered to invest in socks.

XXX

Between a twist of magic that would stop anyone from getting too suspicious of the barefoot young girl in a slightly tattered robe, and a pair of dextrous fingers that wouldn't accidentally kill anyone who might be scratched by them, pickpocketing a few muggles was easy.

Harry did try to limit the theft to people who looked like they'd consider the loss of money as an inconvenience instead of a disaster, but to be entirely honest everyone looked well-off to Harry's eyes.

They were wearing clothes that at least dampened the cold, they looked liked they'd slept sometime this week, none of them looked like they were starved to the point of breaking-... Harry understood that they were judging the people around them based on a very biased set of criteria, but there wasn't really a lot that they could do about that.

They tried to only steal from people who'd survive the loss, but if they didn't survive it then... well, they wouldn't survive it. Harry needed the money, and it wouldn't be the first time they'd walked over human corpses instead of demonic ones.

Even if it'd been a great many years since they'd spotted a human alive enough to cause problems.

Regardless, with their funds secured, Harry turned their attention to their attire. Paying for a pair of shoes was a bizarre experience, but it still left them with enough money to continue with their plan.

Namely, to go to Gringotts and trade in some muggle-money for wizard-money.

It had less to do with any desire to have wizard-money, and more as a very clear excuse for visiting Gringotts and seeing what the bank was actually like.

Muggle-shoes and a tattered robe on a preteen girl wanting to exchange money? It might raise a few eyebrows, but not any more eyebrows than what would be raised if Harry showed up without any shoes at all.

It wasn't like they could count on 'magic' to keep anyone from thinking too deeply on Harry's appearance, after all. Wizards were rather resistant to that kind of stuff.

Harry wasn't quite sure what to expect from Gringotts. For it to be filled with goblins, for the railways underneath to have both magical traps and beasts, and for the railways themselves to be a maze.

But were the magical traps as flimsy as Voldemort's shack? Were the magical beasts as pathetically cowardly as Hagrid's old dog? Were the goblins any more observant than the average muggle? And was the maze they were so proud of filled with breadcrumbs to lead the way?

Harry wouldn't know that until they really tried to push their way through, and they probably shouldn't do that any time soon.

If they were waiting for the next year before going after Hogwarts and the three horcruxes there, then they had plenty of time to sit back and think of a way to get inside the bank without causing a mess.

They should also probably put some thought into how to deal with the scar, when it came to that.

Harry doubted that it'd be any more complicated than the twist-and-flick that'd be enough to destroy any other horcrux, but since it was attached to someone's face there should probably be a plan-B in case that didn't work.

But as Harry found their way past Gringotts' doors, they were a bit distracted from their thoughts about it.

Gringotts wasn't cheap plywood held together with duct-tape, but they'd built stone-arches and covered the entrances with silk.

It was... a very bizarre kind of experience.

Harry could see a clear path into the railway-system. In fact, they could see the railway-system through the thin silk that was supposed to obscure it, and trying to find the Lestrange-vault in that 'maze' took barely a few minutes, barely enough time to move up one space in the line.

So Harry looked around some more, and-... And then Harry had a thought, and simply poked a tiny sliver of magic through the silk, sending it weaving through the veils, until it reached the horcrux inside of the vault.

And with a flick of magic, it came undone.

Harry stepped up to the counter, paid what was likely an exorbitant exchange-rate, received their galleons, and walked back out of the bank.

Harry was still in shock by the time they made it halfway down Diagon Alley, because that was just-... How was the magic of this place so pathetic?

XXX

Having defeated the 'powerful magic' of Gringotts with little more than a flick of the wrist, Harry was understandably confused.

After all, Harry wasn't-...

Until the demons had come, Harry had never been all that amazing with magic. There'd been some intuitive grasp of it, but Harry Potter had very rarely learned any kind of magic beyond what his classes demanded of him.

That changed with the demons' arrival, because every tiny speck of magic that Harry could get his hands on might give him the tiniest edge against them. But even then Hermione had massively outpaced him in her research.

Until Hermione died, and Harry resorted to living almost exclusively in bird-form.

After that, Harry was the person with the most magical knowledge by default.

Demons didn't understand wizard-magic because it didn't work like their magic. Or at the very least, no demon would've ever been able to learn how to use a wand or any of their spells.

The magic that they did have was more along the lines of fire that burned cold, or the ability to spit acid, or any other number of magic that made no sense at all to wizards.

In light of that, Harry was probably close enough to a 'demon' that they might classify as the only 'demon' with an intrinsic knowledge and understanding of wizard-magic.

Keeping that in mind, perhaps it wasn't so strange that Harry could use their existence as a demon-like individual to warp the wizard-magic around them however they pleased.

Harry still wasn't sure what that actually meant long-term, but it did give them an explanation for why everything magical seemed to be so pathetically unimpressive in defending itself against them.

That did however make Harry curious about how powerful of a defense that they could create.

They hadn't really bothered with those kinds of defensive measures for the better part of a decade now, simply traveling from place to place, hunting demons. It could be an interesting way to pass the time until the Diary arrived at Hogwarts.

Though that obviously led to Harry trying to think of somewhere 'inconspicuous' for them to turn into an impenetrable fortress. It wouldn't do to build it somewhere where the wizards would immediately notice and start trying to poke at it. Or the muggles for that matter, though they were usually easier to bypass with this kind of stuff.

Having put a bit of thought into it, Harry finally decided to just go out a bit into the Atlantic ocean.

Water had a somewhat numbing effect on magic, and nobody actually cared enough about the big oceans to try and detect magic there. As long as it wasn't next to Azkaban or something. So it was a pretty good place to start, provided that Harry figured out a way to get there.

Harry could steal a rowboat and keep it afloat with magic, but that still left it floating on top of the waves in a way that would inevitably make actually trying to make it into an impenetrable fortress laughably awkward.

But trying to build it at the bottom of the ocean wasn't really feasible either. Water's effect on magic might be rather minor in most cases, but a couple of thousand feet of the stuff pressing down on it? There was no way that it wouldn't collapse any wards that Harry created, sooner or later.

And that was a 'sooner or later' that was measured somewhere between 'minutes' and 'weeks'. So it clearly wouldn't work as a way to pass the time.

A better way might be to just... throw down a pole or something and then extend it to the point where it reached above the surface, and then build a fortress on top of it. But that was very convoluted, and that pole would also likely be eroded by the water, even if not in quite the same way.

So no building on a boat, no building on a pole, no building underwater-...

That really only left building underground, or to actually create an entirely new island from scratch.

Considering that Harry didn't have the faintest idea how badly an underground-underwater environment might effect magic, and that Harry by their nature – as a bird – really didn't approve of underground places?

It looked like Harry would have to create their own little version of Atlantis.

It'd probably take them a couple of weeks at least?

XXX

Creating an island was... complicated.

Specifically, the deeper the ocean surrounding the island was, the more difficult it became to create an island.

It was comparable to 'creating a mountain' only with the added complication of having to spend a bunch of effort reaching the bottom in order to continue building it upwards. And the deeper the ocean was, the deeper you had to go to begin building, and the taller you'd have to build the mountain.

Harry was also reminded that – even without the aquatic demons roaming about – the ocean was a miserable place to be.

On the surface it was always windy, in the water it was always chilly, and the deeper you went the darker and more crushing the pressures became.

Harry was of the opinion that nobody really needed this much pointless water. A nice river or a small lake? That's what water should be like. The kind of water you could watch over from a comfortable tree-branch, and then swoop down and eat anyone coming down for a drink.

But if Harry wanted to make an impenetrable fortress that wasn't immediately detected and poked at by literally everyone, that was the kind of thing they'd have to put up with.

The first challenge was to get down to the ocean-floor, which required a lot more effort than a bubble-head charm, but after cobbling together a barrel and using magic to reinforce it, the pressures at least wouldn't be an issue. As long as Harry stayed within the barrel at all times.

Which forced them to make the barrel see-through so that they'd be able to actually use it. Along with an emergency-buoyancy-measure in case the magical reinforcements started to come apart.

It was something of a death-trap, to be honest. But Harry had already decided that they'd be doing this, so there wasn't much use in complaining about it.

That said, it worked surprisingly well, and within an hour of drifting slowly downwards they found themselves on the ocean-floor. At which point they could actually get started on the bigger problem. Namely, the creation of the island itself.

After all, 'creating mountains' wasn't really the kind of thing that wizards did. Hiding mountains away from muggles and other wizards? Sure. That wasn't even all that complicated, for all that it took some time to set up. Even destroying a mountain wasn't exactly unheard of. But creating a mountain? That wasn't the kind of thing anyone did.

That said, the process wasn't all that hard, in theory. All Harry needed to do was to convince a volcano to erupt into the shape of a mountain.

Unfortunately, that was also the problem, in that volcanoes erupted when they damn well wanted to erupt, and then they erupted however they damn well pleased.

Thankfully, Harry wasn't limited to what wizards could and couldn't do, because Harry was a demon. A wizard-like demon perhaps, but the more Harry thought about it the more obvious it became that they really weren't a wizard anymore.

If being splattered with a bit of demon-blood is enough to twist your magic, what would 'eating nothing but demon-flesh for well over a decade' do to someone? The answer was blatantly obvious, for all that Harry had always been very successful at not-thinking about it.

Harry wasn't sure they had any wizard-magic left in them, for all that their demon-magic usually managed to mimic it without issue.

In the end, what Harry was or wasn't, wasn't really all that important. What was important was that Harry's rather unique nature made 'controlling an erupting volcano' surprisingly uncomplicated.

All they'd needed to do to trigger the eruption was 'drilling' an approximation of a piercing-spell into the ocean-floor until the heat started breaking out. Then they just needed to 'pull' on the heat to broaden the entrance and 'twist' it to keep it contained like an underwater tornado.

They did have to keep reinforcing the barrel after the first few minutes of the eruption however, because they'd somewhat neglected to remember that volcanoes got really hot.

A minor oversight.

XXX

Harry's new island was... very bare-looking.

It was really just a hunk of rock about eighty-feet across, and was barely above the waterline.

That was still plenty of space for Harry to make their impenetrable fortress however, which had led to Harry hemming and hawing about what that kind of fortress should look like.

They'd gone to all this effort of making sure that the island was secure, and they were going to go to even more effort to make sure that it was warded to Harry's fullest ability. It stood to reason that they should design it so that it looked good.

For all that Harry still had fond – if very hazy – memories of the Burrow, Harry wanted something more impactful than that.

A tower was pretty much a necessity, considering how much space they had to work with, but there were a lot of ways to design a tower.

Should it have stained-glass windows? Arrow-slits? No windows at all? Should it be made from the same volcanic rock as the island? Marble? Wood? Gold? Glass? Should the roof be flat? Tilted? Pointy? Should they just turn it into a giant tree that they could partially hollow-out? Continue the volcanic eruption in order to make a mountain and then carve out the tower from that?

There were a lot of options to choose from, and Harry didn't exactly have any experience with architecture.

So, Harry just made a few tiny 'examples' to see which ones looked better.

The giant tree would be kind of cool, but the way the tree grew could end up influencing the wards in unpredictable ways, and if Harry tried to keep it alive they'd have to constantly 'prune' the insides to keep them from growing shut over time. So, kind of neat, but very impractical.

A wooden tower lacked the... 'gravitas' that Harry wanted from it. So that was scrapped.

Gold felt tacky, and glass just felt kind of silly.

The marble looked kind of interesting, but it kept reminding Harry too much of what little they'd seen of Greece before it all burnt to the ground. It felt less like they were designing 'something new' and more like they were trying to copy someone else's work. Which was annoying.

That left the part-of-the-mountain idea, so with a shrug Harry restarted the volcano and got to work.

The end result of that eruption was a towering spire of black rock that didn't at all look like a tower. So Harry spent some time carving away weird outcroppings and smoothing out its sides, until finally it gave the very nice effect of a black obelisk jutting up out of the ocean in a wonderfully unnatural way.

After that, Harry just needed to hollow out the inside of the tower and make it habitable, and then get started on the 'impenetrable fortress' part of the equation.

Seeing as they were on an island, the sensible thing was to include a few underwater-spires and a bit of wind-enchantments to whip any ships in the area straight into the lethal shallows. So, even if it didn't technically have anything to do with making the place as impenetrable as they'd originally planned, Harry set out to do that too.

After all, just because you had wards didn't mean you shouldn't put up a fence around your backyard. Some things were just a bit too obvious for Harry just skip them, even if they didn't really contribute to the point.

More interestingly, after having spent even more time expanding the mountain-spire that made up the tower's base, just so that the underwater-parts could be properly supported without immediately being washed away in the first bit of rough seas, Harry came up with a nifty bit of magic.

By partially hollowing out a spire, and then enchanting the insides of it with a particular twist of magic, Harry could actually almost entirely negate the eroding effect that the ocean was having on the magic.

It didn't stop it completely, but that could be solved by just creating a 'wire' back into a central location. It was like a great big wind-up clock. Almost.

And with the partially-active volcano under their feet, it wasn't actually all that hard to bypass needing to 'wind it up' manually. Well, Harry had to briefly summon Fiendfyre straight into the volcano, and then twist it around the enchantments, and-... In truth, it was probably not all that dissimilar from building something on top of a nuclear bomb, and then using that to power your light-bulbs.

A bit unstable, and not entirely unlikely to explode into a proper volcano with enough force that it messed with the movements of the tectonic plates, but really convenient.

From there, it just became a combination of various repellent-wards along the utmost edge of Harry's new ship-destroying reef, to go along with some of Hermione's more tame 'hiding wards'. Enough to make sure that nobody had any foolish ideas, or that anyone sailed into the mess accidentally.

So, with that done, Harry started on making sure that all the different variants of space-tunneling magic would simply dissipate-... Actually, from some of the way those wards tingled, Harry would bet that it also disintegrated anyone unlucky enough to be inside of that space-tunneling. As in, trying to Apparate inside would disintegrate you into pieces smaller than a grain of sand, and scatter you all across the area.

Making a face, Harry put a layer of 'bouncing' redirections for space-tunneling outside of them, so that they'd have to really be trying to break through before they were disintegrated for their efforts.

But that bouncing-redirection was a bit overly hesitant about the effects, so Harry twisted it sideways a bit, so that they'd instead launch themselves straight into the ocean. Depending on the 'force' used, that should do anything from dunk the person a few dozen feet down into icy waters to send them spinning all the way into the ocean-floor, where the pressure would squash them to death instantaneously.

And of course, Harry had to tweak it a little bit to make sure that nothing was being accidentally excluded by the ward. It'd be annoying if something could just ignore the thing.

Having thus covered space-tunneling magic, and ships, that left 'flight' and possibly someone with a 'better' ship.

The ship was solved by Harry messing with the buoyancy of the water around the island. All they needed to do was have a small but constant stream of gas-bubbles mixing with the water. The end result was a supernaturally windy reef, filled with lethal spikes, where even a volleyball would sink like a stone.

Then Harry remembered that if it kept leaking gas like that, it could end up smelling really nasty, or it might affect the weather somehow.

Thankfully, the way Harry's flight-ward worked also helped to recapture any of that escaped gas. Mostly through the way the wind was kind of blowing any fliers into the waves in a wonderful bit of sideways-reality-bending.

After all, there was a pretty big difference between an 'air' wind and a 'magic' wind. And thanks to both Harry's neat trick with the always-powered enchantments and how close the underwater-spires were to the surface, Harry could even feed it into a constant loop of 'downward force', by simply having it go 'upward' through the tower.

It did mean that if someone could fly high enough they'd be able to simply land on top of the tower – provided they remained exactly above it at all times – but seeing as the tower was fairly tall and that the magic-wind carried on upwards for another couple of thousand feet, Harry wasn't overly concerned about it.

That didn't mean they shouldn't try to patch the gap in the armor however, so Harry gave the magic-wind a bit of a twist as it rose and-... And apparently that didn't just create inhospitable winds, but also messed with the weather-pattern by trapping a large quantity of moisture from moving.

In other words, it made it always-cloudy, so Harry shrugged and made another twist to encourage a bit of electronic instability, which made the clouds very enthusiastic thunderclouds. Neat. That would definitely make it harder for anyone to travel directly down.

Having finished with the basic part of complicating how to get to the island, Harry finally got started on making the actual defenses.

XXX

Albus hummed thoughtfully to himself as he inspected the first series of letters to be sent out.

There was always a bit of worry involved in the addresses, seeing as Hogwarts would use their 'current place of sleep' to write them. And it wasn't entirely unusual that that place wasn't 'safe in their own bed'.

It was a sad thing, when it happened. But even if Albus couldn't actually interfere directly with that kind of thing – because of both the Ministry and the Board of Directors – he could at the very least check.

He recognized a few names, from Molly's daughter and youngest, to the daughter of Xenophilius. But a lot of them were muggleborn, and some were from large enough family-names that he couldn't quite remember whose child they were.

Though obviously, the latter category had declined immensely since Voldemort's rise to power. He might've claimed to be fighting against muggleborns, but it was clear to anyone with eyes that the people dying had been wizards, pureblooded or not.

Albus sighed as he was once again reminded of the truth that Voldemort hadn't died back then. He'd doubted it from the start, but he'd still hoped that he was wrong. Though Merlin knew how the man had managed to survive a rebounding killing-curse.

Shaking his head, Albus focused back on things he could – maybe – do something about, reading through the rest of the addresses.

And came across a rather peculiar one.

It was addressed to... nobody. There was a blank space where a name should've been. And the address itself was stranger still. It didn't look like an address, but rather like a warped splotch of ink.

But it was among the finished letters.

Albus blinked stupidly at the letter for a long while, wondering what in the world it might mean. Then, out of sheer curiosity, he tapped the letter with his wand and-...

Hogwarts shuddered, its wards grinding together in a noise that echoed straight into Albus's teeth. The wand in his hands grew hot in a way that the always-cool Wand had never been before.

The ink-splotch rearranged itself into a series of words.

'The Ocean Tower'

A peculiar address long before any of the other foreboding things came to mind. It also didn't say anything about where this mysterious 'no name' student was sleeping, which-...

'Riley Azalea'

The name faded into view as if it'd always been there, though the handwriting still looked... 'off' to Albus's eyes in a way he couldn't quite explain.

Frowning to himself, Albus tried every detection-charm he knew, trying to discern what in the world had just happened.

It was almost like Hogwarts had been fighting to 'reach' the address, only for it to suddenly have the 'name' given to it. Which was absurd, because Hogwarts was sitting upon a leyline, and had been for hundreds of years. Albus was certain that even should a student have been living their entire life inside of a Gringotts bank-vault, Hogwarts wouldn't have had any trouble with addressing their letter appropriately.

But it clearly had struggled.

And Albus certainly hadn't ever heard of any towers in the ocean before. Which begged the question where such a tower might be. It was possible that this 'Riley Azalea' had been born in Britain and that Hogwarts had therefore entered them into its books, but that they'd then moved somewhere very far away.

That didn't account for the rest of the strangeness, but it would explain why Albus hadn't heard of such a place before.

If it was somewhere outside of Hong Kong, and warded to the point of absolute absurdity, perhaps it really would've given Hogwarts this kind of struggle, but it still felt extremely excessive.

Albus momentarily debated whether to add a tracking-charm to the letter, just to figure out where the owls would bring it, but if this 'ocean tower' really was so heavily warded the person who'd done that might not appreciate him sticking his nose into things.

They probably wouldn't appreciate the owl either, but there was such a thing as 'mitigating the offense', so Albus would try to keep his big nose out of things. For now.

He was definitely looking forward to young Azalea's arrival however.

It was always so wonderful when he found a mystery that didn't involve the safety of the world.

XXX

Harry noticed the poke into the wards on their tower with a kind of fascinated confusion.

It was some kind of clairvoyance-spell, but it was powered by something so heavy that it was making the outer wards shiver, and there was a twist to it that felt like eternity and decay.

Harry frowned as they twisted part of the anti-clairvoyance-ward to check where in the world the spell was coming from, only to find themselves gaping when a Hogwarts-letter came into view.

Written but not addressed, pushing and pushing against an immovable wall-...

Harry-... No, the girl whose body Harry had been given-... This was her Hogwarts-letter.

And Hogwarts was trying to send it to Harry.

Harry hadn't really put a lot of thought into how they were supposed to break into Hogwarts in the coming months, but considering how pathetically easy it'd been to bypass the wards of Gringotts, Harry just hadn't been able to work themselves up to any kind of sincere planning on the matter.

But this would bypass the need for a bypass. And it would let Harry mingle with other students without sticking out like a sore thumb.

It was really convenient. Even if it did come with the possibility of being stuck sitting through classes. Not that Harry remembered any of those classes, so it might be interesting.

Harry focused, trying to think of what they could give to Hogwarts that wouldn't reveal anything peculiar.

The address was easy enough. Harry had been calling it 'the Ocean Tower' in their head for ages. But a name?

The letter wasn't addressed to Harry but to the former owner of Harry's current body. And Harry had never really gotten around to finding out her name, seeing as it wouldn't really matter. Except now it actually might matter quite a bit, because Harry wasn't sure if Hogwarts would accept a different name than the one it'd been planning to write before Harry had entered the picture.

Unfortunately, Harry couldn't actually find out what the girl's name had been, because Harry didn't even have the faintest clue where to start looking, and whatever trail there might've been would've long since gone cold.

So Harry would have to just... invent a name, and hope for the best.

A name that wasn't just the name of a former classmate, because that wouldn't go over well.

Harry took a deep and steadying breath. And then 'Riley Azalea' breathed out, confident in their new name.

Riley twisted the anti-clairvoyance-ward enough to send Hogwarts the name that they'd definitely always had.

And then they held their breath for another moment as the text faded into existence on the letter.

Only then did the poke stop, and it happened quickly enough to leave their head spinning.

Riley held their aching head and reconsidered if keying themselves directly into the wards like this was worth that kind of sensation. It'd alerted them about Hogwarts in a way that'd been very useful, and it would likely be useful in the future as well, but Riley's head was hurting now and they weren't feeling overly charitable even to perfectly logical arguments.

In all likelihood they'd also come to regret picking a name in the five-or-so seconds they'd had to decide on one, but that too could wait.

'Riley' was enough of a unisex name that it shouldn't be a problem if they decided to be 'one or the other' at some later point. And 'Azalea' was-... Honestly, Riley didn't have a clue where that one came from. They were pretty sure that it was a flower of some sort, but they had no idea what it was, what it looked like, if it was used for something, or if it 'meant' something.

It did end up feeling like very 'name-like' though, and they'd already decided on it so there wasn't any point in thinking too much about it.

Riley Azalea, a 'muggleborn' living entirely on their own inside of a foreboding obelisk hidden behind impenetrable wards. That they themselves had made.

Riley was pretty sure that they ought to be keeping quiet about a lot of that.

XXX

Rather than trying to let the owl pass through the wards, Riley did the sensible thing and went out to meet it in their rowboat.

The letter looked a lot like they remembered it, with the exception that the name looked a bit crooked, and that the books for DADA were-... Actually, these had been the books for Harry Potter's second year, hadn't they? Riley had almost completely forgotten about 'Professor' Gilderoy Lockhart.

Riley wasn't quite sure what to think about that. Or what they ought to do about it.

The man was a fraud, a shameless narcissist, and the kind of person who'd hospitalize school-children for the sake of his own survival.

All-in-all, Riley figured that the man had deserved what he'd gotten, for all that it was a nasty way to end.

That said, perhaps they could be more proactive about letting things get that far. Riley certainly wasn't going to let the Diary run free, so that meant that nobody would drag the man down into the Chamber of Secrets to save Ginny. And without that, he wouldn't ever end up Obliviating himself with Ron's broken wand.

So, rather than sit around and twiddling their thumbs, Riley should probably do something about that. To make sure that he wouldn't continue running around Obliviating people in order to steal their 'great deeds'.

Riley wasn't even sure if the people he was stealing memories from recovered, or if they ended up much the same as he had.

Riley didn't actually know what that proactive thing should be. Should they just kill him? Should they expose him somehow? Should they drop him in the Forbidden Forest and see if he survived?

Riley had a lot of different options, for all that they weren't really sure if they'd be capable of performing a lot of them. Killing Lockhart would be easy. Killing him in some kind of 'undetectable' way? Riley wouldn't even know where to begin. He was a very public figure, and he was very reluctant to go anywhere 'isolated', so trying to disappear him the way Riley had done to that Dark Wizard when they first arrived in this world was... unlikely to be on the table.

Also, now that Riley had spent some time thinking about it, for all that it would be very hard to find the guy on behalf of there not being a corpse, there was every possibility that someone might be able to find a lot of traces of 'weird magic' in the area.

Obviously, Riley was highly unlikely to be suspected of 'being a demon' or something, but it was undeniable that killing Lockhart would inevitably be some kind of massively public affair. And Riley really didn't want to deal with that.

That left exposing him. But Riley had some very distinct memories of nobody listening to them when they were younger. Kids were kids, proof or no proof. If it came down to the 'highly respected' Gilderoy Lockhart, and some muggleborn girl? Nobody would believe them.

Or at least, nobody would be willing to put their necks on the line in order to help Riley bring him down. Which amounted to just about the same thing.

So, if Riley tried to kill him, it would be trouble. And if Riley tried to expose him, it'd be just as much trouble.

That really only left kidnapping him in his sleep and dropping him on top of an acromantula-nest. Which felt like it would inevitably raise a lot of eyebrows.

Actually, wasn't Hagrid responsible for those spiders? Wouldn't having them kill off Lockhart mean that they'd get a lot of attention by the Ministry? That sounded like a recipe for disaster, considering how cheerful the Ministry could be about throwing people into Azkaban 'to be seen doing something'.

So, no kidnapping Lockhart and dumping him in the Forest either. Geez, this was already proving more complicated than breaking into Gringotts.

Rather than think any more about it, Riley just shrugged and started buying the things the list said they'd need.

Cauldron, clothes, books, trunk, protective gear, it was all fairly easy to get their hands on. Just another muggleborn wandering around, even if this particular one was unattended.

And then came their wand.

Riley kind of expected that the wand would be difficult, but in reality they just needed to twist their magic a bit sideways and-... And suddenly Ollivander was convinced that the wand in question was the right one for them.

Riley supposed that it was the difference between someone whose magic always operated on a single 'wavelength' needing to have a wand that matched that – or a wand that was grudgingly willing to acknowledge the individual for some other reason – in comparison to someone who could just match their 'wavelength' to that of the wand.

Riley was pretty sure that Ollivander would be furious if he found out about Riley just bypassing the 'the wand chooses the wizard'-stuff, but Riley also sincerely doubted that there'd be anything in the man's shop that properly suited their magic.

If something operated that close to Riley's current wavelength, they'd have felt it, possibly from the other side of London. But they hadn't, so they just matched the wavelength of some random wand in one of the man's boxes, and off they went.

XXX

Riley hadn't spent a lot of time thinking overly much about what was different between this world and the one that they'd come from. Or at least, the way that world had been before it was overrun by demons.

They'd known that some things were likely a bit sideways from what they were used to, but beyond checking that the horcruxes had still been there and that he was 'dead' in the eyes of the public, Riley hadn't really bothered with it.

Perhaps the Harry Potter of this world had been killed. Perhaps Neville was the Boy-Who-Lived. Perhaps a whole bunch of other things were true. Riley didn't know, and couldn't really bring themselves to care either.

Voldemort needed to be killed before he got any funny ideas about summoning demons. That was Riley's only real goal.

Riley would also very much prefer to avoid being the subject of a lot of attention, because that stuff was really bothersome. Life was much better when you could spend it perched comfortably in a tree and snack on anything tasty that came along.

That said, it was kind of interesting how many tastes Riley had forgotten over the years. Demons all tasted the same. Blood and magic and violence. Sewer-rats tasted a bit dull in comparison, being mostly bones and fur. Not to mention the novelty of eating food whilst in a human shape.

Riley didn't have the jaw-strength required to just crunch down on the bones without a care, so they'd started trying to cook them instead. It usually turned out burnt, and Riley could vaguely remember that 'spices' were important for taste, but honestly the burning fur and fat was an interesting taste all on its own. Riley wasn't sure why you'd need more than that.

They'd briefly considering buying some kind of pastry, just to compare the tastes, but that stuff was just-... Where was the meat? It was as ridiculous as rice, or potatoes. What was the point of food that wasn't meat? Might as well just chew grass.

So, rather than think too deeply about it, Riley had simply reveled in the ability to pick and choose from lots of different meats that they could eat. Sewer-rats were easy to come by, and thanks to the Ocean Tower, so were fish. Birds were interesting, but they caught on quickly and had quickly started moving away from anywhere Riley went to hunt them, so they always required a bit of a trek. Riley had also grabbed a few rabbits and a fox, but those guys were rare.

Riley definitely remembered there being things like sheep, cows, goats, and other cattle-things. But they hadn't actually found a farm, and all the meat in the muggle-stores smelled like plastic in a way that made even Riley's stomach turn.

There was barely even any blood left in the stuff.

However, going back to the main point. Beyond the demon-invasion, Riley hadn't really put a lot of thought into how this world was different than the one they'd come from.

Which was why the sight of 'the Potter family' made them double-take.

They'd known that lots of things could be different, but they hadn't really been prepared for things to be different. In Riley's eyes, Harry Potter would always be an orphan. The idea of him having a loving family – even a younger sister – was absolutely bizarre.

It took Riley a few seconds of blinking, and a quick shake of their head to turn their attention back to the important parts.

Harry Potter was the Boy-Who-Lived. He had a younger sister who'd be in the year below Ginny. The Potter family was by all accounts a happy one, even if they were a bit on the reclusive side of things. Harry Potter was blatantly famous, but seemed to be... an okay-ish person. Riley at least wasn't getting any Lockhart-vibes from him. Just an ordinary kid.

Riley wasn't quite sure what to make of that, but thankfully they didn't have to have an opinion about any member of the Potter family. Because Riley was Riley Azalea, and had literally nothing at all to do with any of them.

Just another unimportant muggleborn who wasn't worth paying any kind of attention to.

XXX

Despite Riley's confusion about the Potter family being alive and well, and Riley's uncertainty about what to do with the Lockhart-situation, September arrived, and so Riley made their way onto the Hogwarts' Express.

The train had some magic to it, but honestly it wasn't all that much. Mostly, it was just things that would lessen the need to repair it. Durability-charms on the wheels, some kind of lubrication-charm to keep everything working smoothly, and some kind of fire-charm that probably had to do with the fuel?

It felt less like a 'magical train' and more like a train that had been slightly modified with magic for the sake of convenience, which made Riley wonder how old it was.

Steam-trains had been around for... a long time. Riley didn't actually know, but it was probably well over a century. And Riley was curious if the spells had ever needed to be refreshed or not. Or if the train was even used outside of bringing people to Hogwarts.

The name suggested that it wasn't, but names could be changed with a color-changing charm so that wasn't really something worth paying attention to.

Still, there was a certain clear feeling of nostalgia to see the Platform once again. It reminded Riley of happier days. Or earlier days at least, Riley had been pretty content with their life of hunting demons for food as a bird.

If Riley ever got bored with it, they'd just needed to change things up a bit and be more inventive about how they killed the demons. A comfortable situation, for all that the time leading up to it had been filled with suffering and loss.

Once they hadn't had anything left to lose, life had nearly managed to be pleasant. Even if they still missed their old friends sometimes.

Riley shook their head and concentrated on getting their trunk onto the train. It was awkward to lift, not to mention frustrating to not use magic to accomplish it. Muggleborns shouldn't be able to charm their trunks to be feather-weight, so that was a no-go.

And for all that Riley had toyed around with all kinds of magic in order to create their impenetrable fortress, they were still in the body of a prepubescent girl, and they hadn't exactly been lifting weights in their spare-time.

Maybe they ought to change that? It'd be nice to have a bit more muscle in case of emergencies.

Despite Riley sensibly deciding to arrive early, a lot of the compartments were already occupied. That said, they did manage to find one in the end, and with a brief and carefully hidden bit of magical cheating, they even managed to stash away their trunk.

After that came the waiting.

And the waiting.

And the waiting.

More and more families arrived at the Platform, more and more children bordered the train. A few vaguely familiar faces peered into Riley's compartment, but nobody tried to join them. Likely looking for their own friends, or too nervous to start up conversations with an unfamiliar face.

A part of Riley couldn't even manage to be surprised when Luna Lovegood claimed another seat in the compartment, cheerfully waving goodbye to her father through the window.

She didn't ask for Riley's name, and Riley didn't ask for hers.

In fact, they didn't talk at all. And that was... comfortable.

Luna focused on a book about magical animals, and Riley... took a nap.

By the time they woke back up, the train had arrived, not a word had been exchanged between them, and Riley was once again certain that Luna was a good friend.

Then came the boat-ride where one of the kids fell in, and was rescued by the giant squid in the lake, before they were all confronted with the Sorting Hat.

Riley hadn't really put any thought into the Hat, which in hindsight felt like something of an oversight.

It was supposed to be able to read the mind of the wearer, and Riley's mind was probably very different from most children. Not to mention that it was then supposed to Sort them into a suitable House, and Riley didn't really have a clue what kind of House that would be.

Riley had no interest in Slytherin. It'd be filled with people who hated muggleborns, which sounded like a hassle to deal with. Also, their mascot was a snake, and Riley had a real hard time taking those things seriously. It'd be like someone making their mascot a slice of ham or something. Was it supposed to be ironic?

Riley didn't particularly want to imagine being part of Ravenclaw either, for all that Luna would be there. They'd never been overly fond of riddles, or of studying things. Also, they were named after a raven, with an emblem of an eagle, and as a bird Riley took a certain degree of personal offense to that. All birds were not interchangeable. That's why shrikes were the best. Riley ought to know, they'd been one for well over a decade.

That left Gryffindor and Hufflepuff.

Riley couldn't exactly say that they were all that thrilled about the ideal of 'bravery' that it represented, because bravery was really just recklessness, and recklessness had gotten a lot of people killed. Not that they wouldn't have died anyway, considering the overwhelming force of the demons, but there was a limit to the amount of collateral-damage that Riley was willing to pretend they didn't see. And bravery had very rarely managed to stay within those limits.

Also, gryphons were silly things. Too stupidly bulky to move gracefully through the air, effectively making themselves nothing more than 'convenient steeds' for people who were too useless to fly on their own.

Riley honestly couldn't remember a lot about Hufflepuff, but at this point it was the least offensive option available to them.

Badgers were okay.

XXX

Albus felt his usual polite smile become a bit more genuine as he spotted the young 'Riley Azalea' for the first time.

She was a tiny thing, though most first-years were, and in truth she really didn't look remarkable at all. Albus knew enough to know that he had no idea what an 'ugly' child would be, and so by that metric he wouldn't really know what an 'attractive' child would be either. They were children, tiny little things still in the midst of struggling to grow into bigger things.

So it was theoretically possible that the young girl was in fact clearly destined to be a 'looker' and would draw the eyes of everyone around her. Or she might be ostracized because the children decided that she was 'ugly'.

Albus would never understand children. He was very proud to have been allowed to witness the growth of so many young people over the decades, but he could safely say that children were a mystery far beyond the well-touted mysteries of magic.

That said, there was no clear indication of Miss Azalea being on either end of the spectrum. Just an average girl. A muggleborn like so many others.

The Sorting Hat took a bit of time to think about it, but sent her off to Hufflepuff fairly quickly.

Albus was still very curious about whichever place that she'd visited that had caused such strain on Hogwarts' attempt to address her letter, but he supposed such mysteries might solve themselves in due time.

It was in truth likely greatly more entertaining to come up with ever-more-wild theories for it, than to actually ask and be given what was likely an incredibly mundane reason. After all, the simplest explanations were usually the correct ones. As long as they accounted for all of the variables, of course.

Another mystery brought to Albus's attention, and one which was really quite a lot more important than the curious peculiarities surrounding Miss Azalea, was a certain house-elf. A house-elf who likely belonged to a Dark family, and who'd gone out of his way to attempt to explicitly warn Harry Potter away from arriving at Hogwarts.

He hadn't succeeded, because the young Mr Potter was a stubborn sort. The kind of person who couldn't stop from poking his nose into things, especially when he thought that some kind of injustice or other unpleasantness was happening.

The boy had very sensibly gone to his parents, and his parents had in turn gone to Albus.

Unlike last year, Albus wasn't trying to bait a Dark Lord into attacking the school in an attempt to prove to the world that Voldemort was still very much something they needed to deal with. He'd been hoping that if he could drag Voldemort before the Minister, he could maybe convince Cornelius that it was vitally important for him to investigate everyone who had once been involved with the Death Eaters.

It would've been an excellent way to start an investigation on a large variety of people who'd gotten away by claiming the Imperius-curse. After all, if they'd been forced to join their ranks under the spell, then perhaps they'd also been forced to hide away some key part of Voldemort's seeming immortality as well.

Unfortunately, Albus hadn't been very transparent about his intentions with young Mr Potter and his friends, who'd decided to charge in after Quirrell. And whilst it was heartening to see that Mr Potter was still defended by whatever power had once upon a time turned that Killing-Curse back on the Dark Lord, it wasn't quite so pleasant to realize that the boy had just burnt one of his professors alive by touching him, because it was the only way he could survive.

Children shouldn't have to kill people to survive. Even if Quirrell had been barely holding onto his own life by drinking unicorn-blood of all things. Albus wasn't sure if Quirrell really classified as 'alive' by the time the confrontation had started.

Nonetheless, without any plans of that sort from Albus's side of things, he was at a loss to guess what the house-elf might be referencing.

It wasn't that someone was planning on assassinating Harry Potter, or Albus himself, because the wording seemed to be clearly hinting at the entire school being a 'place of danger'.

Maybe someone smuggling in a dangerous animal? Or a dangerous artifact? Or someone planning an outright siege?

The dangerous artifact seemed to be the most reasonable of the options, but Albus wasn't quite sure what kind of artifact would manage to endanger an entire school.

A cursed item generally just killed the person trying to touch it. It wasn't the kind of thing that could be left in a hallway somewhere and still endanger more than a single random person. Not like those 'bombs' that the muggles had dropped during the war.

If anyone tried to smuggle in an entire trunk filled with Dark artifacts, Albus was fairly certain that they'd be caught. Whilst most such artifacts were by their nature designed to be 'undetectable', that was really only true for as long they were being left undisturbed on their own. The moment you started shoving dozens of them into a sack, even people with only the barest sensitivity to magic would start to notice it.

So whilst it seemed like a Dark artifact would be the obvious answer for the house-elf's claim of 'danger', Albus couldn't really see how. A dangerous animal being smuggled in would make more sense from that perspective, but the only one physically capable of doing that would likely be Hagrid.

Albus wasn't overly thrilled about some of the man's interests, but he also knew that Hagrid would never willingly endanger anyone. Accidentally endanger them? Absolutely. It was hard for someone like Hagrid to empathize with a small – and very fragile – child. But Hagrid was also sensible enough to try and keep his 'pets' away from the students, if only because he didn't want anyone to find out about them.

So, it was possible that someone had given Hagrid a new pet in the hopes of it wrecking havoc at the school, but Hagrid was in truth about as subtle as a sledgehammer, and Albus had asked if he'd found something 'interesting' in the Forest lately.

The man hadn't so much as blinked, but had later accidentally hinted at how much he missed 'Norbert'.

Albus was very happy that young Mr Potter and his friends had helped the man with that particular problem, because if Albus was forced to step in he would've likely ended up having to be 'official' about it, or it'd be his head on the chopping-block. And raising a dragon at Hogwarts, was very much the kind of thing that could see Hagrid sent off to Azkaban.

Not to mention the political scandal of it all. Albus was always toeing a thin line of trying to make people a little less cruel, and that always had fierce opposition. Both from people offended that they'd need laws to do what was surely just common decency, as well as from people who absolutely didn't appreciate the possibility of being punished by the law for what they considered to be their human right to be however cruel they pleased.

A Dark artifacts would never manage to endanger a whole school. A dangerous creature wouldn't be able to enter the school without the aid of people that wouldn't be lending that aid. Which really only left someone trying to lay siege to the castle, and that was such a blatantly ridiculous idea that Albus didn't know what to do about it.

XXX

Riley wasn't quite sure what to think of the Sorting Hat.

It'd tried to dig into their head, so they'd just... not let it do that. Holding the tendrils of magic at bay by simply grabbing them gently and moving them slightly to the side, like one might do to an errant house-cat.

But it'd still been able to talk, and had resorted to simply asking Riley for their preferred House.

So Hufflepuff it'd been.

After that, Riley had been exposed to a lot of children trying to strike up conversations. Which was confusing, because Riley had no idea what children were supposed to talk about.

Quidditch? The political climate of Italy? Good hunting-spots for sewer-rats? Sex?

Riley could vaguely recall something about quidditch being important, but couldn't for the life of them recall why. It sounded about as interesting as politics, or sex. But Riley could reluctantly guess that 'sewer-rats' wasn't something that interested most children.

After all, Riley couldn't remember having any conversations about sewer-rats before the demons had come. Which in hindsight had clearly been a massive oversight. It'd taken them years of effort to develop the necessary skills to hunt them consistently, and that could've been solved if only they'd spent some time talking about it beforehand.

In the end, Riley had chosen to simply keep their mouth shut. They tried to 'nod along', but in truth they'd already stopped listening within the first minute so that didn't quite work out. And Riley... honestly wasn't entirely sure how to 'smile'.

In their defense, it's hard to smile with a beak, and even before that they hadn't necessarily had a lot to smile about.

Thankfully, it didn't seem to matter much, and most everyone left them alone after Riley stared at them blankly for a few minutes. Or an hour. Riley had mostly been thinking about how much they missed decent food, because the Welcoming Feast had seemingly been entirely based around potatoes and sweets.

Riley had barely found any meat at all. Just more of that blood-drained stuff that tasted like old shoes.

Which meant that Riley would probably have to spend the night hunting for any sewer-rats that might live in the castle, just to keep from starving, and that was going to be a massive pain in the arse.

Still, it probably wasn't socially acceptable to hunt and eat sewer-rats anyway, so it was probably for the best that Riley waited until night. And it wasn't like Riley was new to the concept of being hungry.

Then again, Riley definitely remembered that there were giant spiders in the Forbidden Forest, and-... And Riley couldn't actually remember if they'd ever eaten a giant spider who wasn't a demon of some sort. They should probably check that out at some point.

Regardless, Hufflepuff in general seemed mostly okay-ish. Riley didn't really have any interest in trying to make friends with anyone, and honestly wasn't really sure if they'd be sticking around at Hogwarts for more than a week.

Riley was here to destroy three horcruxes at once, not to 'be a student' or whatever. They weren't even sure what they were supposed to be learning. How to do magic? Riley could do more magic with their left toe than most people could with a wand.

Depending on how obnoxious pretending to be a child turned out to be, Riley might stick around, just as a way to keep from getting bored. It wasn't like this world had any demons they could entertain themselves with hunting, and Riley was planning on keeping things that way.

Just because Riley had been perfectly fine with that kind of world, there at the end, they could acknowledge that it very much wasn't an ideal scenario.

So they were going to kill Voldemort before he had the chance to instigate it. And then Riley would... do something.

Riley just couldn't imagine what that 'something' would be.

XXX

Lessons turned out to be... weird.

Wave your wand like so, speak some words like so, and magic.

Convincing something to levitate was easy, destroying something was even easier than that. Conjuration was something Riley could do in an emergency for simple things. But 'cheering charms'? Transfiguration?

The magic just didn't make any sense.

Unless they wanted Riley to take the magic and force-... Except nobody else had to do it like that, Riley could tell that they didn't have to rip apart someone's mind in order to 'make them happy', and that they didn't have to somehow rip something away from 'what it was' in order to transform it into something else.

Riley could transform a match into a needle. But it'd be the kind of needle that didn't belong. A needle more unnatural than something conjured, and possibly 'leaking' un-reality all over its surroundings.

It was frustrating, because Riley could distinctly remember having once been good at transfiguration. That's how they'd become an animagi, once upon a time. But it'd been so awkward to use against demons that they'd long since stopped bothering with it.

It was a bit like conjuring a bomb on top of them, and then expecting the conjuration to somehow remain instead of be washed away like the morning mists. At least conjuration could still be used for things like creating temporary tools. Transfiguration was just useless all the way through.

So lessons were a bit weird.

Some things were pathetically easy for Riley in comparison to the other students, other things they couldn't do, and still others left them on an even playing-field. Herbology didn't really care about magic, as long as the correct tasks were performed in the correct order.

Potions didn't work like that though. Riley performed the exact things that the recipe demanded, and then it was a toss-up between an okay-ish potion or an unmitigated disaster.

Riley was really starting to sympathize with Neville. Herbology was pretty nice, and Potions was just awful.

Having Snape glaring down at them, sneering about things, didn't really help matters.

Riley kept having to remind themselves that Snape was probably not good for eating. All those potion-fumes was very likely to leave him highly unappetizing. And Riley was far too used to starvation to be willing to kill something and then not eat it.

Maybe they could leave his corpse hanging from a tower or something, to drain away the nastiness? But that likely meant that it would just be dried out meat, just like the stuff the house-elves were making for dinner.

Riley could remember cardboard that'd tasted better.

As for the horcruxes, Riley didn't really want to go after the Diary blind, and from the times that they'd spotted Ginny in the corridors, the girl didn't keep it on her person. Riley's reason for this was that going after a horcrux in 'Gryffindor Tower' could just as easily translate into going after Harry's scar. And that felt like the kind of delicate work that Riley didn't want to just poke at through a bunch of wards.

So Riley was putting their horcrux-hunt on hold for a little bit. It wasn't like anything dangerous would happen until Halloween, which was still over a month away.

Their Housemates had also started to make attempts to 'include' Riley in things. Which was weird.

No, Riley didn't want to eat candy, because it tasted like plastic grass. No, Riley didn't want to play games, because Riley wanted to take a nap before hunting for actual food. No, Riley didn't need help with their homework, because they'd already done it and-...

Actually, considering how much red ended up on the returned homework, Riley got the feeling that maybe they did need help with their homework, if only to figure out how to lie convincingly.

Magic was magic, twists or no twists. And trying to write out how it worked based on some 'law' that some idiot decided made sense in the 1400s was just completely and hilariously pointless.

Riley could disprove every single one of those damn laws, all on their lonesome. So why should Riley listen to what those idiots had to say? Or explain their opinions and how it totally worked like that? Fuck you.

Riley didn't need help with their homework, they would do it on their own terms, and when they got kicked out of Hogwarts for failing all of their classes, then Riley could murder and eat everyone who annoyed them, and then fly off to find a comfortable branch to perch on.

That was a much better plan.

XXX

"Her essays are atrocious." Minerva agreed.

"A bit inconsistent about wand-work." Filius continued, looking amused. "Sometimes it's almost like she's a Seventh-Year, other things she can't get a grasp on at all."

Severus scoffed. "The only times she manages to not ruin a potion is when she's not the one making it."

"Not everyone is suited for Potions." Pomona frowned at him, a bit defensive.

"But everyone should at least be willing to read the course-material." Minerva pointed out with a frown of her own.

"Oh she's reading it." Filius interrupted, sending her a glance. "She just disagrees with everything they have to say about magic. It's really... quite something."

Albus perked up. "Disagrees?"

Filius sent him a grin, before with a flourish producing a folded piece of parchment from somewhere. "It's an interesting read, even if she's unfortunately wrong."

Albus took the offered parchment and unfolded it, reading through the brief essay.

It was indeed... quite something.

She was writing as if one of the founding pieces of magical theory was a ridiculous bit of make-believe that nobody had ever tried to oppose out of sheer stupidity.

In particular, she disagreed with everything from the point of speaking a spell, or of waving a wand, to the idea that transfiguration had any uses whatsoever.

Albus was guessing that he'd found a large part of why Minerva in particular seemed so cross with the young girl.

The essay wasn't badly written, for all that it'd been quite some time since Albus last read essays written by First-Years. Very clearly formulated, and the logic seemed reasonable enough, even if the conclusions were absurd.

Wand-motions were very important because they helped to channel magic in-... Albus paused, realizing that he was in fact directly quoting the same person that Miss Azalea was calling an 'self-important and unimaginative hack with no abilities in practical magic'.

Perhaps he should attempt to question the theory behind it? If her logic was consistent, and Albus's disagreement with her argument came directly from the fact that she was disagreeing with already-established notions, then perhaps-... Perhaps a small experiment was well-overdue.

It'd been quite some time since Albus had really tried to do anything like that, and Miss Azalea in particular was a very interesting case.

Time would tell if any of her ideas panned out, but far be it for Albus to dismiss something like that out-of-hand, when the alternative was so much more interesting.

"She's certainly an interesting one." Albus agreed with Filius, a cheerful twinkle in his eye.

"Albus, please. The girl is already refusing to learn, don't encourage her." Minerva glared at him, likely – and correctly – assuming that Albus would very much appreciate the opportunity to sit down and talk with the girl over tea.

He got the distinct feeling that Miss Azalea was the kind of person who wouldn't at all be intimidated by a personal conversation with the Headmaster. And he was already curious about the girl from the incident with her letter.

"You wound me, Minerva. I'm merely curious about why she's decided to believe herself to be correct on this subject." Albus didn't mind that his innocence was clearly faked. That was part of the fun.

"Because she has delusions of grandeur, obviously." Severus sneered.

"She does not. She's a perfectly sensible young girl." Pomona looked just about ready to sock him on the nose.

"'Sensible' is not the word I would use." Minerva interjected, looking like she'd bit in something sour. Possibly from agreeing with Severus on anything at all.

Filius hummed thoughtfully, blatantly ignoring the byplay. "There's nothing wrong with a bit of eccentricity, though I do hope she'll take her essays a bit more seriously in the future."

Pomona huffed at Minerva and Severus who both looked unrepentant, before shaking her head. "Speaking of eccentrics, how is Miss Lovegood doing? She seems to be having some problems making friends?"

And the conversation veered off once again, to another First-Year student.

A shame Gilderoy couldn't be there, but apparently everyone had accidentally forgotten to invite him. Again.

They really ought to fix that, one of these days.

XXX

Riley's first lesson with Gilderoy Lockhart went... about as well as could be expected.

Riley wrote various variations of 'can't remember' on all the questions on his little ego-quiz, got called out on not having read the material, and told him to his face that she had no memory of any such book existing in the first place.

This went on for quite a few rounds, with Lockhart slowly cottoning onto the idea that Riley perhaps was trying to make some kind of point from how often 'memories' were mentioned.

By the end of the lesson, he had a wild look in his eyes. As if he was being hunted by something.

It was fun.

Not as fun was Riley's first encounter with Mrs Norris that night, when they were on their way out of the castle in the hopes of maybe tracking down an acromantula for a midnight-snack.

The cat just didn't seem to be willing to catch a hint. And Riley was seriously considering eating it.

It was just a cat. Nobody important would miss it, really.

Well, Filch would miss it quite a bit, and the man was paranoid enough that he'd go after every student in the vicinity. Riley wasn't sure if he'd actually attack people, or if he'd just find some other way to make everyone miserable, but the assumption was that whilst nobody would mourn Mrs Norris' sudden demise, everyone would be quite peeved about it.

Best not to risk it.

Still, with a small twist of magic, Riley turned themselves mostly-invisible, and then rearranged their scent-trail to go on a bit of a merry chase across the castle.

Mrs Norris couldn't do anything to a student other than fetch Filch, and Riley didn't care if Filch was turning the castle upside-down trying to find a student he couldn't track. Riley just needed to visit the Forest for a bit, find some spiders to eat, and then sneak back inside. Easy enough, it wasn't like Riley wouldn't know where the scent-trail was going, after all.

Riley wasn't entirely sure how long it'd take them to track down a spider, but they probably wouldn't need more than an hour or two. Including eating and returning to the dorm, Riley estimated that they'd be able to get maybe two or three hours of sleep.

That wasn't... entirely sustainable. Unless Riley wanted to start taking naps throughout the school-day, which could cause a bit of a stir. Falling asleep in the middle of class was very much frowned upon, and outside of class there was usually some busybody who'd want Riley to sit around rolling their thumbs during 'dinner' and stuff.

Riley wouldn't mind attending dinner if they actually served edible food during them. And that would also help with their current issues with lack of time for a proper sleeping-schedule.

Unfortunately, Riley distinctly remembered that eating 'raw meat' was another one of those things that were frowned upon. And for all that 'charred rat' was an interesting taste, that was mostly because of its oddly crunchy texture, rather than anything nutritional.

There might be some possibility that Riley could have a talk with the house-elves about it, but they got the feeling that there'd inevitably be some kind of misunderstanding in the process.

Perhaps they'd assume that Riley's desire for 'raw meat' was a threat to give them raw meat or to become raw meat. Perhaps they'd decide that Riley was under the influence of some kind of curse, and start trying to break them of it, which would inevitably result in Riley defending themselves by murdering all of them. Perhaps they'd immediately recognize that Riley was in fact a demon-bird inside of a witch-body, and start screaming for help, forcing Riley to murder all of them. Or perhaps they'd just tattle to Dumbledore about it, and then Riley would have to kill him, which sounded like a massive pain in the arse.

No, for all that it was very inconvenient, it was much better to continue hunting for food out in the Forest.

It wasn't like those spiders would depopulate themselves after all, and Riley could distinctly remember that that might've become a long-term problem if the demons hadn't arrived and murdered everybody.

So really, they were keeping themselves fed and providing society with a valuable service. It was the best of two worlds.

XXX

Albus knew that Hagrid was a good man who wouldn't hurt a fly, but sometimes he was also viscerally reminded of how Hagrid had no understanding of the safety of his surroundings.

Of course Albus had known about Aragog and his brood. It was hard not to know about an acromantula-infestation, even if Hagrid was trying to sweep it under the rug. In fact, Hagrid being himself, him trying to sweep it under the rug just made it all the more obvious.

Albus very much didn't approve of the acromantulas, but he also knew that there'd be no way to really remove them from the Forest now that they'd settled there. Not unless Albus was willing to torch the whole Forest.

Acromantulas reproduced quickly, could eat pretty much anything, and were very difficult to kill even from an early age. What this translated into was that trying to cull the population was doomed to failure.

The best thing that could be done was to 'fence them in' and hope that they remained satisfied with the parts of the Forest that 'belonged' to them.

Considering that acromantulas ate humans if given the opportunity, and that they were unlikely to remain 'contained' indefinitely, and that they lived in a Forest right next to a school, and the fact that despite explicitly forbidding entrance into the Forest some students still wandered inside without supervision?

Albus really didn't like the fact that Hagrid was so attached to the damn things.

Unfortunately, he couldn't change what he couldn't change. The best he could do was try to keep a lid on things until they inevitably blew up in his face.

Albus took a deep breath. "Are you sure that it's not just the centaurs trying to reclaim land again?"

Hagrid huffed. "There have been traces all over Aragog's territory, not just along their border with the centaurs. And the bodies... they're being eaten. No centaur would do that."

"Isn't acromantula-flesh considered poisonous by most things?" Albus asked, trying to think of anything else that could cause this.

He might not like the acromantulas, but if something was hunting and eating them then Albus would prefer to know that whatever was doing that was only a threat to the acromantulas specifically. If it was some kind of giant spider-eater who happened to pass by, then Albus would silently applaud its efforts and have a celebratory drink when the last of the acromantulas disappeared from the Forest.

On the other hand, if it was something that would hunt things indiscriminately, then there was the risk that they'd go after the students sooner or later. So Albus would prefer to know what he was dealing with.

"Aye." Hagrid nodded solemnly. "Toxic enough to melt through a wizard's stomach in a few minutes. Not a lot of things could handle eating one, or would want to. There's easier prey in the Forest."

"Is it attacking anything else?"

Hagrid shook his head. "No. Not yet anyway."

And that was the dangerous part of it. If only there was some way to make sure of what it was that was attacking the acromantulas-...

There was a brief knock, and then Filch burst into his office.

"Headmaster! One of the little bastard-students Confounded my cat!"

Albus sighed. It wouldn't be the first time a student took out their frustration with the 'tattletale cat' by attacking it. Though, normally that type of frustration was solved by trying to kick it, rather than the much more sensible 'diversion' that this would've been.

Perhaps a Ravenclaw? Or a Slytherin? A Gryffindor would've kicked it, and the Hufflepuffs never seemed to have any reason to be out after curfew.

Albus motioned for Filch to bring the poor cat to him, so that he could reverse the spell. At least this part of things would be easy.

Except... there wasn't a spell.

The cat glared at him, clearly offended, but as Albus continued poking at it, he could only come to the conclusion that there weren't any spells on her at all.

"Are you sure?" Albus glanced up at Filch. "Perhaps it was merely the Weasley-twins leading you on a merry chase?"

"There wasn't anyone there!" Filch barked back. "She fetched me, and I looked, and she found someone, but there wasn't anyone there! Not even anyone invisible!"

Albus made a thoughtful noise. "Well, if the spell has already been reversed, it was done very well, because I can't find a trace of it. How did you check for invisibility?"

Albus wasn't exactly surprised when he found that Filch had been very thorough. Even without magic to aid him, the man was very good at tracking down students after dark, and he took a certain amount of pride in the knowledge that even magic wouldn't be enough to hide someone from him.

Despite that, there hadn't been any trace of someone around the spot that Mrs Norris had indicated. And yet there were also no traces of any kind of Confundus-charm being used.

Albus always did enjoy a good puzzle.

XXX

Acromantulas were pretty easy to kill.

They were ambush-predators and so had some serious issues with defending themselves from ambushes, and for all that their exoskeleton made them very durable it also highlighted their reliance on internal magic to function.

Acromantulas were insects, and so didn't have proper 'lungs', which meant that they were limited in size to how much air they were able to breathe through their skin. An acromantula's magic helped to mitigate that effect, but it was done in a really awkward way.

Or rather, instead of the magic-resistance of the giants and the dragons, and even basilisks, acromantulas had a clear internal 'flow' of magic going in and out of them. Basically, it was the difference between resisting a baseball with a solid 'brick wall' or resisting it with a 'strong net'.

Both worked perfectly fine against most magics, but even if Riley probably wouldn't be able to kill a dragon until they could return to their bird-form properly, acromantulas were laughably easy to kill even without it.

Just twist the magic a little bit so, and then the exoskeleton keeping them safe became as fragile as spun-sugar. Twist the magic a further bit so, and their sticky webs slid around Riley as if they were a summer breeze. And then there was an acromantula, all served up and ready to be eaten.

Riley wasn't quite sure how many they ate like that. They'd been hungry, and whilst the sizes varied wildly, there always seemed plenty more to go around.

Until they started disappearing from certain patches of the Forest, as if they were avoiding Riley. Which they might be doing. Acromantulas were supposed to be fairly intelligent after all, and Riley had been hunting them down for the better part of two weeks now. It stood to reason that they'd caught on and tried to find some way to survive.

Regardless, even if they retreated to a specific patch of the Forest, and turned themselves into a spider-army, that wasn't really going to make them any kind of threat to Riley. They were just too easy to kill.

So Riley wasn't overly worried. A bit thoughtful, since apparently Riley's appetite might be outpacing the acromantulas' ability to regrow their numbers, but not worried.

If the acromantulas ran dry, there were other things that Riley could eat. Probably.

A bit more important was the Diary and the Scar, which Riley still hadn't gotten around to dealing with.

From bumping into Ginny during lessons, Riley could safely say that she wasn't carrying around the Diary everywhere she went, which was... annoying. And that meant that their only option would be to break into the Gryffindor-tower.

On the bright side, the tower in question was theoretically reachable if Riley just climbed the outside walls. It wasn't like anyone had warded the windows to keep people out, after all.

Unfortunately, climbing the outside of the castle was a bit awkward to explain away if anyone spotted them, and Riley didn't actually know if they could open one of the windows from the outside.

It wasn't like anyone was foolish enough to sleep with a window open in September, and breaking a glass-window would inevitably make a lot of noise. Noise that Riley might be able to suppress, but-...

Riley was pretty sure they were coming up with clever ideas and then thinking up excuses for why those wouldn't work, instead of actually trying to fix the problem. But they weren't entirely sure why they were so reluctant to poke at it either.

Was it some kind of lingering camaraderie towards Gryffindor that was preventing them from breaking into the tower? Was it the violation of privacy that ran counter to the nostalgically lingering feeling that Hogwarts was a 'safe place'? Was it that Riley didn't like to climb things out of pride, because they had wings and could damn well fly up there once they properly got them back? Was it that Riley was actively trying to avoid people that they'd once known as 'Harry Potter'?

There were a lot of possibilities, and Riley didn't really like any of them.

A bit peeved at their own indecision, Riley went up to the Room of Requirement and delicately tore the horcrux attached to the Diadem apart. Soul-piece by torturous soul-piece.

With Voldemort's pained and terrified screams still ringing in their ears, Riley felt a little bit better about things.

XXX

Riley frowned, a bit annoyed at this particular turn of events.

Apparently the other Hufflepuffs had decided that the way Riley was keeping their distance from them was that they were in fact just shy, and that the others should therefore make an effort to be 'more inclusive'.

No, Riley still didn't want help with homework. The homework was stupid, but Riley still had some pride. Even if everything got sent back red-marked, that only mattered if Riley was actually wrong, which they weren't. And pretending to be an idiot who believed any of that crap, just for the sake of 'better grades'? Riley would rather light themselves on fire.

No, Riley didn't give a rat's arse about quidditch. It was a pathetically makeshift attempt at a 'flying sport', designed to entertain people who had no understanding of the beauty of spreading one's own wings. Riley might not have access to their own wings at this moment, but that didn't stop it from being true.

No, Riley didn't want to talk about 'boys' or 'girls'. They cared about as much about that kind of stuff as they cared about the details of photosynthesis. It needed sunlight, produced oxygen, and made plants green. There, that was all that was necessary to know about it, and even that was largely pointless to know and something that Riley had learned involuntarily.

No, Riley didn't want to play cards or boardgames. They'd rather take a nap, or find a nice branch to perch on, or hunt for actual food, or rework the wards on the Ocean Tower, or stare at a wall and think about murdering people who annoyed them.

After mentioning naps, Riley was forced to endure a bunch of obnoxious discussion about sleeping-habits. Things like how certain diseases made people tired 'all the time' or what was 'optimal' for getting the most out of sleep.

If it wasn't for the fact that Riley was in fact very aware that they were risking sleep-deprivation with their nightly hunts, they would've completely tuned them out. However, there was a small chance that they'd be able to give some kind of anecdotally useless bit of trivia that would allow Riley to not have to worry about that anymore.

They didn't. But they could've, theoretically. So Riley hadn't tuned them out, and had instead been forced to listen to the whole damn discussion.

Riley was starting to vaguely sympathize with Voldemort's quest to end all of humanity. They'd still kill him, because he was a dick, and they'd already decided to stop the demon-apocalypse. But Riley did very much consider burning Hogwarts to the ground and murdering and eating everyone who tried to flee from the flames.

It was a surprisingly nice daydream. Even if Riley knew better than to try to act on it.

More and more, Riley was starting to suspect that they weren't quite suited for life 'among humans', and that annoyed them. They'd worked really hard to keep the last of humanity alive for years and years, way back in the day. And now humanity turned that around on them and tried to get on every single nerve Riley had in their possession.

Thankfully, for all of their aggressive friendliness, nobody tried to stop Riley when they escaped from the common-room and into the rest of the castle.

Riley had been spotted leaving, so should probably make sure that they were spotted 'returning' before the end of curfew, to make sure that nobody went looking for them.

However, as Riley wandered aimlessly through the halls of Hogwarts, they came across a girl who didn't have any shoes.

Riley also didn't entirely see the point of having shoes, because having claws was infinitely preferable, but apparently it wasn't a voluntary choice for the young Luna Lovegood.

Much like Riley's, Luna's Housemates were also aggressive, just not very friendly about it.

So, after tracking down the shoes, and catching a brief glimmer of past-magic on them, Riley went off to demonstrate why the only things dumber than ravens were eagles.

And it wasn't entirely because they could still remember a warm hand growing slack and cold in their own. Warm eyes turning empty and hollow.

Not entirely because of that.

XXX

Riley realized about halfway up to the Ravenclaw Tower that murdering children was probably not something they ought to be doing.

The same was true for 'maiming' unfortunately. Which meant that Riley didn't quite know how to ruin their lives in retaliation for their actions against Luna.

Riley could vaguely recall that 'pranks' were a thing, but also wasn't entirely sure where the 'limit' to things like that was. If Riley tripped them down the stairs, and they didn't break their necks, was that a 'prank' or was the possibility of serious harm enough to not classify it as such?

Also, a prank like hitting someone with a bucket of water probably wouldn't be a good way to effectively stop them from being mean towards Luna in the future.

The 'prank' needed to be something where they'd be able to realize that this was in retaliation for their treatment of Luna, but where they'd also be unable to further escalate that treatment.

With that in mind, the easiest option would probably be to just... unmake their wands or something. Wands were really important to wizards, but they could be replaced, so it wouldn't be like maiming them. Wands also played a large part in how people were being mean to Luna, so without that available to them they'd be unable to retaliate.

Riley was pretty sure that they'd be very upset and likely be trying to ruin Luna's life further as a direct result of having their wands 'broken'. But that would only hold true if they thought that they were 'safe' to do so.

And Riley was no stranger to spreading fear.

Having spent probably something like two decades as the apex-predator in a world filled with demons who trembled at the sight of them, Riley was very capable of being terrifying. Usually, they could scare a patrol of demons straight back into the main-force by simply singing a little song, and then Riley could eat the whole lot of them.

It was very convenient, and saved Riley a lot of work tracking them down. They'd gotten very good at hiding over the years.

Admittedly, Riley knew that nobody here would know to be scared of Riley's bird-song, which was frustrating. But it was what it was, and Riley had other methods.

For example, they could demonstrate how serious they were about things by killing the students' pets and then hanging them from the ceilings or something. Very easy, but doing that might upset Luna more, because she'd always liked animals.

Another option would be to drop a dismembered-but-still-living acromantula into their beds. That would definitely wake them up, but Riley wasn't entirely sure that they'd be able to keep an acromantula alive for long enough for something like that. Acromantulas were so fragile.

Maybe Riley could use the horcrux in the Diary to somehow create a flesh-and-blood body that they could then murder and hang that from the Ravenclaw ceiling. It would definitely make them scared, but it might send the wrong kind of message. More as if they weren't being targeted, since at least they hadn't been killed and strung-up.

Not to mention that it would massively stir up the professors. The same professors who, come to think about it, would likely have a lot to say about a bunch of students having their wands broken.

If everyone was suddenly on high-alert, then Riley's trips to the Forest for snacks would definitely become more complicated to pull off. Not to mention their vague plans to do something about the – at that point 'final' – horcrux.

There were options of going after the Scar first, before continuing with everything else. But again, it wouldn't feel as though it was properly targeted at the Ravenclaws who'd had their wands destroyed.

Maybe Riley could just kidnap them and drop them somewhere-... Oh, there was the Chamber of Secrets, with that basilisk.

If Riley destroyed the horcruxes, killed and partially ate the basilisk, destroyed their wands, and then kidnapped them all to dump them in the Chamber of Secrets?

That would definitely make them aware of how they were being targeted, and that whatever it was that was doing so was the kind of thing that would consider a basilisk 'food'. That ought to make them worried enough to not think about escalating their treatment towards Luna. Especially if they compared notes and realized that the only things they had in common was how they'd treated the girl in the past.

So, that was easy. Now Riley just needed to actually deal with that horcrux-problem that they'd been postponing.

It was for Luna's sake, after all.

XXX

Albus wasn't sure what to think.

It'd been an ordinary day. Nothing of any particular note, until a Ravenclaw Prefect had reported that a few students seemed to have gone missing, as they hadn't showed up in time for their lessons.

After some investigation, it became clear that the missing students were all Ravenclaws, and that nobody had seen them since the day before, when they'd gone to bed together with everyone else. A bit more of an investigation revealed that all of their non-sleepwear remained by their bedsides.

That was the first clear indication towards foul play.

It wasn't unheard of for a few students to wander down a corridor on their own and be found a day-or-so later, having gotten lost somewhere along the way. That was just Hogwarts. And it could be considered as something of a 'learning experience', for all that it often caused the individual in question a bit of trouble.

But if they'd been in their sleepwear when they'd disappeared, then they would've had to 'get lost' from their own beds. And whilst sleep-walking was a possible answer, it was a rare thing, and for so many students to be inflicted with it on the same night?

No, no matter how he looked at it, this was clearly someone's idea of a prank. Or something nastier.

Either way, a quick set of questions proved that the Weasley-twins – the ones most infamous for their pranks – had been innocent this time around. And whilst there was a lot of murmuring when Albus announced that they were looking for a group of missing students during lunch, nobody seemed to be able to offer anything more than they already knew.

Nearly a dozen students, disappearing without a trace in the middle of the night.

It-... Honestly, it reminded Albus a bit too much of the last war. The inability to trust anyone, of families disappearing and being wiped out by Death Eaters without any kind of warning.

Albus sincerely hoped that it wasn't anything remotely that malicious involved in these disappearances, but the association was there.

It wasn't until right before dinner that they received their first clue. Myrtle had flooded her bathroom again, and when Filch had angrily set out to mop up the mess, he'd spotted some kind of... 'entrance' by the sinks.

There wasn't any secret passages in the area that Albus knew of, but then he had never claimed to have explored Hogwarts in its entirety either. Regardless, that the passage was so clearly 'open' when it normally wasn't, had led to them investigating if it was related to the disappearances.

And they found the Chamber of Secrets.

There was a massive snake-skin in the hall leading up to an already-opened set of doors. And on the other side was a massive room. With an equally massive half-eaten basilisk, and in one of the corners the missing students were huddled together.

Someone had hit all of them with leg-locking curses, and-... And all of their wands had been broken.

A clean break, as if snapped across someone's knee.

Albus-...

Albus honestly couldn't imagine that this had been done as a 'prank'.

No wizard or witch would've ever broken a wand except as a deliberately malicious act. And the now-found students were clearly all very aware of it, considering how they'd all huddled together, crying.

They'd woken up in the room, and had all been rightly terrified by the giant snake until they'd realized that it was already dead. At that point they'd also realized that their legs had been spelled together, and that their wands had been left some distance away. They'd of course done the reasonable thing and crawled over to their wands, only to realize that someone had broken them. Which meant that they couldn't dispel the curse, and none of them wanted to really get all that close to the snake, even dead, once they realized that it was in fact a basilisk.

So, they'd just... huddled together and cried. Terrified at their situation, and heartbroken about their wands.

They hadn't seen anyone else until Albus and the rest of the professors had arrived.

But they did have a suspect. Or rather, they believed that they had a motive.

Every single one of them had been deliberately cruel to Luna 'Looney' Lovegood. A first-year Ravenclaw who was rather-... Well, she took after her father on many accounts, and Albus wasn't exactly surprised that she'd failed to make fast friends.

Children could be cruel sometimes.

But still, there was no way that a single first-year could've done this. So the question was then who would've been willing to do this on her behalf. Considering that she didn't have any close friends, that only really seemed to leave family-ties, and – even if he could've pulled it off, which Albus sincerely doubted – Xenophilius would never have done something like this.

It was however, still their only clue as to who could've done it. So Albus decided to ask the girl a few questions over tea.

"Oh." Miss Lovegood paused. "I suppose that makes sense."

"Do you know anything about this, Miss Lovegood?" Albus asked, keeping his face deliberately gentle. Whoever had done it had clearly crossed a line, but Miss Lovegood wasn't a suspect, and he didn't want to treat her like one.

"If they could eat a basilisk, then eating acromantulas is probably fine." She hummed thoughtfully to herself. "I don't think I've met any creature like that though."

"I see." And that was actually a good point. It was unlikely that there were two creatures capable of devouring magically poisonous-flesh roaming Hogwarts. "And have you met anyone who... was perhaps helpful about some of the 'pranks' played on you?"

Miss Lovegood tilted her head, clearly thinking about it. "There was a Hufflepuff?" She finally suggested, a little bit hesitantly. "She had very pretty eyes, and a lot of opinions about birds."

Albus sincerely doubted that a Hufflepuff was responsible for this. But he'd been wrong about horrible people before, and it was the only clue they had.

XXX

Turns out, the easiest way to deal with the Scar without risking that Riley messed with the underlying soul of 'Harry Potter' as well, was to just smack him in the face with the Diary.

Obviously, that wasn't exactly a subtle way of doing things, especially since it would be followed up by Riley ripping that soul-shard out of his head. In fact, it would likely leave him with a massive migraine.

But it would also leave him alive, without requiring any weird extra caveats.

So Riley just made sure to knock him unconscious before doing it. It was pretty easy, considering that Riley just had to climb the outside of the tower by twisting the magic to stick her skin to the stone. Then she just had to to unlock and re-lock two windows from the outside, and set up a temporary silencing-ward and knock a sleeping person unconscious.

The actual 'procedure' took Riley maybe thirty seconds. Just grabbing onto the resonance between the soul-fragments, and then ripping it out of the Scar.

It was actually pretty anticlimactic. But then that was sort of the point.

Harry Potter was very unlikely to think too much about waking up 'with a headache'. Especially when the rest of the castle would be searching for a bunch of disappeared students.

Ginny Weasley might have more thoughts about the Diary suddenly going missing, but she hadn't even killed any chickens yet, so she'd probably forget about it pretty soon.

On a different note, basilisk tasted pretty alright. Not the worst actual food that Riley had eaten, but nothing really worth singing the praises of. It tasted a lot like venomous snakes usually tasted like.

It was however quite big, and it was a shame to let so much of it go uneaten. Unfortunately, Riley's stomach wasn't exactly bottomless. There was a limit to how much they could eat at any specific time, and they'd wanted to get this whole mess over with quickly.

Not having a basilisk to snack on wasn't the end of the world. There were still plenty of acromantulas in the Forest.

Actually kidnapping the guilty Ravenclaws was a bit more complicated, and had relied on a lot of liberal usage of sleeping-magic. Riley had also realized that nobody would actually find them if they were dumped in the Chamber, which went against the whole point of not-killing them.

So, they left the door to the Chamber open, and then made sure that they wouldn't be able to simply walk out on their own. Breaking their wands actually really helped with that, since a single leg-locking curse would usually never be enough to hold even a first-year for very long.

Riley was honestly a little bit proud of the whole operation.

Nobody had died, several different goals had been achieved, and Riley once again proved that shrikes were better than stupid ravens.

And then of course, Albus Dumbledore decided to call Riley to his office to ask some questions about the students who went missing.

Now, Riley could just walk away. Their goals at Hogwarts had been met. They'd dealt with all of the horcruxes, and they'd also scared away the people wanting to bully Luna. There wasn't really any reason to stick around.

That said, they didn't really have a reason to leave either. And it wasn't like they had any demons to hunt in this world.

Life would inevitably get really boring if they had to spend it staring at a wall, or they didn't have anything to do other than poking at their own magic for the next century-or-two.

In a contest between what Riley would've personally preferred, they would've picked going back to their own world and continuing to hunt down and eat as many demons as they could manage. Even if the demons didn't put up much of a fight, the bloodshed was a nice and interesting break from the otherwise comfortable monotony of perching on a branch and watching the clouds.

Hogwarts had more things to do, but almost all of it was some level of headache-inducing. So if Riley could choose, they would've chosen to go back home.

However, there wasn't really a path back home, and Riley wasn't going to bring about the demon-apocalypse in this world just because it was 'home'. They'd lost too many friends to the war against the demons to ever bring them down on anyone's head, even if Riley would've enjoyed themselves.

So, Riley didn't have any reason to refuse Dumbledore, but they also didn't really have any reason to make it easy for the man.

Which roughly translated into denying any kind of involvement in literally anything at all. Even if it was blatantly false. Riley could vaguely remember something about it being important that lies had a 'glimmer of truth' in them, but it wasn't like he had any way to prove that Riley had been lying, so that seemed like a waste of time.

Riley would just deny everything and anything, up to and including 'being a student at Hogwarts'.

And if Dumbledore caught them in a lie, then so be it. Either he'd be unable to prove it and spend a bunch of time glaring at them, or he'd find some way to prove it and then Riley would just wander off into the sunset.

The idea that Dumbledore was 'scary' was pathetically laughable.

Albus Dumbledore was a powerful wizard. And the wizards had been wiped out to the last by creatures that Riley considered 'snacks'.

Riley was more worried about obnoxious weather than they were about someone going after them with a wand.

XXX

Albus wasn't quite sure of what to make of the realization that the Hufflepuff that Miss Lovegood had talked about had been Riley Azalea.

He'd been curious about her origin before, but in the light of the most recent developments, Albus decided to not take her innocence for granted.

Albus wasn't above using Legilimency on somebody, but he was also very aware of how it was technically illegal to do so. And there was a difference between using it to dig into someone's mind, and using it to listen to it.

Digging into someone's mind could sometimes be detected even by someone without any Occulemency-training, and someone skilled at it could redirect the read to something completely different. Severus, for example, was extremely skilled at it to the point where the only reason Albus would trust the man was because he'd sworn an Unbreakable Vow to him.

It was impossible to guess at what was happening inside of Severus' mind at any given point, because he hid it too well behind whatever he wanted the rest of the world to think was happening.

In comparison, 'listening' was undetectable. It didn't work on anyone with Occulemency-training, obviously, and it could even be fooled if someone was distracted by something else, but it was a perfectly safe kind of thing to do. Legally, that is. It was still a massive breach in privacy however, and Albus didn't much enjoy doing it.

That said, when trying to sort out this kind of malicious attack against several students – even if they hadn't been entirely guilt-free, considering their actions towards young Miss Lovegood – Albus was more than willing to put aside his own feelings in order to achieve his goals.

So when Miss Azalea sat down in front of him, he listened.

He listened and very quickly came to the conclusion that she was paradoxically both a very good and a very bad liar.

It was somewhat obvious that she was lying, but it was impossible to prove that she was lying. And without proof he couldn't do much of anything about it, because the girl was stubborn enough to not budge from her lies.

But the more he listened to her, the more Albus was starting to have a bad feeling.

Miss Azalea's thoughts didn't at all sound like the thoughts of a muggleborn. Nor did they even really sound like the thoughts of a child, or a teenager, or even a young woman. They sounded 'off' somehow.

It wasn't Occulemency either. Albus had seen a lot of different people with a lot of different approaches towards the idea of 'guarding the mind', and whatever Miss Azalea was doing wasn't that at all.

It felt as if she was thinking across a very badly tuned radio, her thoughts smothered underneath a static that shouldn't be there. As if she was somehow out-of-tune with magic itself.

And what Albus could hear from the girl made him... very hesitant about considering her a girl.

There was a reoccurring feeling of being 'sated', as if she'd been starving for weeks and finally found something to eat. There was some weird disconnect between her thoughts and her body, which was eerily reminiscent of Minerva when she very much wanted to do something cat-like. And finally there were the tiny sparking glimpses of a howling pit of grief and madness and violence and blood, all bottled-up and buried somewhere deep.

It all translated into the same confusing conclusion.

Riley Azalea was something that Albus had never even heard of before. And with that in mind, it was blatantly obvious that she was in fact the one responsible for the attack on the students.

But at the same time-... The fact that she hadn't killed the students-... Albus didn't understand the creature in front of him at all, but it didn't seem like it wanted to go on a killing-spree. Or, at least, it didn't radiate the same bloodthirst that Hagrid's many pets so often did.

That didn't mean that she wasn't dangerous. She clearly was. But she had retaliated against the students harassing Miss Lovegood, and she hadn't killed any of them. She'd done a horrible thing to them, and then both kidnapped and further traumatized them in the process, but she'd-...

Was it so wrong that Albus would like to assume that the small girl in front of him wasn't evil? Even if she wasn't-... Even if she probably wasn't human.

Still, he'd rather there not be any further incidents like this in the future. So, he decided to leave the girl with a final parting rebuke.

"Miss Azalea, in the future, please keep in mind that a wand is a very precious thing to its wielder." Albus tried to keep his face a mix between indulgent and stern.

He wasn't going to push her for more. This time.

Miss Azalea paused on her way out the door to glance over her shoulder at him. "Then perhaps you should go back to using your own wand, Headmaster."

And then she was gone, the door closing softly behind her, leaving Albus keenly aware of the blood draining from his face, and of his own white-knuckled grip on the Elder Wand.

XXX

Provoking Dumbledore about the Death Stick probably wasn't the most diplomatic approach, but then Riley was still a bit surprised about how they were able to leave the office without blasting their way out through a wall or something.

Also, the magic lingering on the Hallow was kind of annoying. Violence and greed, all mushed up together inside of a container that reeked like graveyard-dirt.

Riley wondered if any of the ghosts around Hogwarts would ever willingly approach Dumbledore whilst he still wielded that wand. They'd become ghosts in large part because of their fear of death after all, it'd make sense for them to avoid Dumbledore like the plague.

Riley honestly wasn't sure what they ought to be doing now.

Continue attending lessons? Poking at magic in a way that was so restrictive it might as well be trying to dry out the ocean through a straw? Continue hunting acromantulas in the Forest? Eating their way through a rapidly declining population when once they had a daily feast of tasty demons to snack on?

It was all just-... It felt so pointless.

Oh, Riley didn't regret having gone to Hogwarts. They'd taken care of their goal in eliminating Voldemort, and they'd even stopped people from being mean to Luna.

It was a good result all around, but Christmas was approaching and Riley couldn't really think of anything they wanted to do at Hogwarts now.

Everything had been solved.

Riley also couldn't really think of anything to do outside of Hogwarts either, but at least there'd be more varied things to eat. Probably.

Those were the thoughts spinning around in Riley's head as they meandered their way into their scheduled class.

Lockhart's class.

Riley glanced at the pompous man who desperately clung to fame with the terrified greed of a man drowning.

That was also a thing they should probably do something about. After all, there wouldn't be any misfired memory-spells to put an end to the man's career this time around.

Riley hummed silently to themselves as they took their seat, eyes still locked on Lockhart's form.

Killing him would be a mess. With Dumbledore already well-aware of Riley's illegal actions in regards to the Ravenclaws, a professor suddenly disappearing would ring a lot of alarm-bells.

It could be kind of fun to fight their way out of Hogwarts, the castle burning around them, children screaming, blood and death, the grim set of Dumbledore's jaw when confronted with an unstoppable monster-...

Riley discarded the idea.

But if killing, disappearing, or in some other way 'attacking' Lockhart wasn't viable, then what options did Riley even have?

Riley could maybe contact Skeeter and have her write about what he actually did for a living. But even if Riley had blackmail on the woman in regards to her animagus-form, they didn't really have a way to contact her. And for all that Lockhart was a narcissist, he wasn't stupid enough to leave around evidence about his actions, so at that point it'd just be Skeeter's word against Lockhart's.

In a way, Riley didn't mind torpedoing both of their careers at the same time, but it'd be hard to sell it to Skeeter. Especially since she could just take a few steps back, and then go interview Lockhart about it directly. Which would probably just end up with her being bribed somehow.

Riley didn't have anything to offer Skeeter that she couldn't find for herself. Excepting maybe a few secrets about Dumbledore's youth, or about what it was like to live in a post-apocalyptic wasteland overrun with demons.

And for all that Riley's experience with both things were factual, they'd likely be treated as fictional by most anyone alive, which meant that trying to convince Skeeter that it was 'real enough' for her general level of gossip-facts wouldn't exactly be easy.

So, a professional smear-campaign was likely unreachable. And since the more brute-force methods would bring down a bunch of attention on Riley in particular, that left-... Actually, what did that leave?

A non-professional smear-campaign? Was Riley supposed to spread nasty schoolyard-rumors about the man?

Riley tilted their head slightly, eyes still fixed on Lockhart, who kept glancing their way. He seemed to be sweating, which was impressive considering that it was late November, and Hogwarts wasn't exactly warm even during the summer-months.

But what would even the point be in spreading rumors? The man was blatantly incompetent to anyone with eyes, and even if every student in the school knew about it, that wouldn't be enough to get him arrested for fraud and 'unsanctioned memory-erasure'.

It was a puzzle that Riley wasn't quite sure what they ought to be doing with.

XXX

"A galleon on him cutting and running during Christmas break." Filius piped up.

"No bet." Minerva huffed. "That man is not suited for dealing with children."

Severus scoffed. "Is he suited for anything at all?"

Albus suppressed the urge to smile. He was supposed to be impartial, but Gilderoy was a difficult man to endure. "Now now, Severus. He has a very good resume."

"Considering how dreadful his writing is, I suppose that's impressive in its own right." Severus allowed. "Perhaps he hired someone else to write it?"

Albus ate a lemon-drop, very deliberately choosing not to comment on that. He might end up chuckling otherwise, and that wouldn't be at all helpful.

"And I wouldn't say that he's terrible with children." Filius interjected. "Not very good with them, admittedly. But-..."

"If you're going to accuse Miss Azalea, a First-Year, of-..." Pomona interrupted him.

"Nobody is accusing young Miss Azalea of anything." Albus hurriedly stepped in, still feeling distinctly chilled even at the mention of her name.

He hadn't told anyone about his suspicions, because the only one that he could really trust like that was Severus – thanks to the man's Vow – and even then Severus wasn't a good candidate for this type of confiding.

Riley Azalea was... something. And for all that she likely knew far too much about the Elder Wand for comfort, and that she'd likely killed and partially eaten a basilisk, she didn't seem interested in harming any of Hogwarts' students.

She did seem to have something of a grudge towards Gilderoy, and her unimpressed stares had sent the man fleeing from the Great Hall several times over by now. He would've probably been outright avoiding lunch and dinner if he could've gotten away with it.

Albus wondered if perhaps Gilderoy had a secret that he was very keen to keep locked safely away. Miss Azalea seemed to have a worrying tendency of 'knowing too much' about those types of things.

"Oh, accusing is a big word." Severus leaned back in his chair. "I have heard some interesting rumors about how she acts in his classes however."

"She stares?" Minerva guessed, looking a bit amused.

"She answers every question with some variation of 'I forgot'." Severus corrected. "Or perhaps more accurately 'I have no memory of that'."

"That's... odd." Pomona frowned. "She certainly never speaks like that during my lessons."

Albus rolled that thought around in his head for a bit, before blinking at the seemingly obvious conclusion. "Memory charms, Severus?"

"That's the going theory." Severus acknowledged with a nod.

"What?" Minerva glanced between them, clearly confused.

"Memory charms?" Pomona turned towards Severus, something dangerously sharp in her expression. "Severus, tell me that's an overactive imagination."

Severus shook his head. "No proof, but no clear counter-proof either. And it could explain how he manages to be both a Dark Creature hunter and an author, despite clearly being incompetent at both."

Pomona turned towards Albus, eyes boring into his own. "Albus. That man is not to be left alone with any student. Do you hear me?"

Albus caught some of the thoughts swirling around in Pomona's head about what a man without morals might do if they could make sure that 'no memories would remain' for their victims to point fingers about in the aftermath.

It felt like a punch in the stomach, because no.

The world was a dangerous place, and Hogwarts wasn't a perfectly sheltered oasis, but Albus would not let something like that happen on school-grounds. Not if he could do anything to prevent it.

"Of course, Pomona." And if his voice sounded a bit more hoarse than it'd been mere moments ago, then it was all the more sincere because of it.

XXX

Riley had noticed a few people acting a bit differently towards Lockhart.

Before, the professors were all doing their collective best to completely ignore him. Now, there was something like an undercurrent of hostile suspicion.

It'd reached the Prefects as well, and at least the Hufflepuffs had been told that nobody would be doing detention with Lockhart in the future. Considering how the sparks of wary curiosity seemed to have spread to the students in other Houses as well, it was likely a school-wide policy.

Riley had no idea why that would be the case. The few scattered memories of their own detentions with the man in the time-before had all been centered around using a stamp to put 'kiss-marks' on the response-letters to his fans.

Riley might've missed something though, and this world was already clearly different from their own, even before Riley's arrival.

Either way, Riley couldn't really bring themselves to care about it.

Schoolwork continued to be both boringly lackluster and frustratingly incapable of understanding how things actually worked, with most of Riley's homework being returned with a red 'T' and a bunch of arguments about what magic could and couldn't do that Riley could disprove.

And without the threat of Voldemort dabbling in demon-summoning, there wasn't really a lot of things for Riley to do on the extracurricular front.

But abandoning the whole thing as a waste of time and flying off to perch on a branch somewhere was-...

It was honestly very tempting, but Riley's body was still a gift given to them, and it'd be rude to mess it up if they couldn't do the bird-transformation properly.

Riley had seen enough hints about how wizard-magic worked around them by now to be able to guess that most attempts at reversing a transformation Riley themselves had done would likely get very complicated very quickly.

Riley wanted to be a bird again, but they wanted to honor the original owner of their body by not horrifically mangling their body in a between-transformations, and that kind of thing was more likely to happen the less 'used to' a body you were. And considering how Riley still found themselves staring at their tiny pale fingers, Riley was still some ways off from transforming comfortably.

Normally, the problem for an animagus was that their animal-self was the part that they weren't used to, that they couldn't properly imagine. But that didn't mean that it stopped mattering in the reverse.

However, rather than sit around rolling their thumbs and hoping that one day they would miraculously be able to transform themselves, Riley decided to be a bit more proactive about it.

If they needed to get used to their current body, to become more aware of how they looked and how they moved, then they needed to just do that.

Which was why Riley was currently scaling the highest tower, on the outside wall, without magic to stick them to the wall.

They were barely halfway up and it was already starting to really hurt their fingers to hold onto the small gaps between the stones, but it also made them keenly aware of how long their arms were, were their feet were being placed, how many toes they had, and how sensitive their skin was to the December-winds.

Riley was freezing, and that was despite having tried to set up a twist of their magic to warm them up, so they could only imagine that they'd be pretty badly off otherwise. Though that likely wasn't helped by how there were still traces of snow and ice on the castle-walls. Not enough to be a problem on its own, since it only tended to linger in rough spots that already gave plenty of grip, but that just meant that the stones were cold enough to be 'below freezing'.

In hindsight, maybe they should've just gone acromantula-hunting again. They didn't necessarily need the food right now, but the forest was a lot warmer than clinging to the castle's sheer walls in the middle of the night.

And this body wasn't nearly as used to the post-nuclear winter as the one Riley had had before becoming Riley.

Then again, there was nothing wrong with beginning the acclimatization process early.

XXX

Riley hadn't exactly forgotten about Christmas, but they hadn't really been expecting it, either.

One day, suddenly, there was a small paper-covered box at their bedside.

Inside of it, there was a thin leather-cord with a hand-painted butterbeer-cap attached to it. A homemade necklace. And a note saying that Riley should wear it to the Great Hall, signed by Luna.

Riley didn't really see the point, but a present was a present, and Luna must have a reason for specifying when and how to wear it, so with a shrug that's what Riley did.

There weren't a lot of people left in the castle during the holiday, mostly a scattering of probably-orphans and a few very dedicated and stressed-out students who spent their time in the library. There was a lot of fancy decorations though, and the professors were all there, even if Lockhart was still making himself scarce.

Riley didn't really see the point in the decorations, nor did they see the point in the fancy Christmas-feast, because they never served anything edible anyway-...

Riley paused in their thoughts, staring suspiciously at the ham in front of them. It looked edible. Which didn't make a lot of sense, because even the meat in this place tasted like cardboard.

But then again, they weren't going to die from chewing cardboard for a bit, so they might as well try it.

It was... bland. Inoffensive to the point of being forgettable.

It tasted like food.

Riley had to pause, trying to figure out what might've changed, before remembering the necklace they were wearing.

The necklace didn't seem to have any magic attached to it. Maybe a bit of lingering stuff from some part of them having been partially in contact with magic at some point. The leather-cord had definitely been helped-along by magic at some point in its crafting-process, but there wasn't anything that could imply a taste-changing-charm or anything like that.

And yet the taste was different.

Perhaps the house-elves actually served food during Christmas? But Riley sincerely doubted that the necklace and Luna's cryptic note was unrelated to the subject.

Riley made a mental note to ask Luna about the details when she returned from the holiday. Until then, they would simply enjoy their new stroke of luck by eating the food in front of them.

Decided, Riley grabbed another helping of ham.

It was weird, eating food with cutlery, rather than poking at it a bit and vanishing the mess when people weren't looking. It made Riley feel... peculiarly nostalgic.

As if they'd taken a step towards something they thought they'd lost a very long time ago.

It made their chest ache somewhat, but Riley didn't think they'd hurt their ribs at any point so there probably wasn't any need to worry about it too much. Regardless, it didn't feel like a bad kind of ache.

Riley reached for more ham.

"Maybe you should eat something other than meat." A student suggested, glancing their way.

Riley paused, turning to stare at the student who was getting in their way.

The color drained from the student's face. "N-Nevermind!"

Riley continued to stare at the student for a few moments, in case they had any other bright ideas, but then turned their attention back to the important things in life.

Riley grabbed some more ham.

And as they ate, they spared a thought to the nostalgia of it all.

Eating food at a table with cutlery. That wasn't something they'd done since-... Since Voldemort's second rise, probably. Back when they'd been surrounded by friends whose faces Riley could barely recall.

There was a burning itch in Riley's eyes, possibly caused by some really weird spice that still made everything taste 'bland', and they had to breathe through their mouth a bit because their nose was trying to clog up in a really awkward way.

Riley grabbed more ham for their plate, despite the tears slowly beginning to roll down their face.

It felt nice, to be able to eat food among other people again.

XXX

Albus had been more than a bit surprised to see Miss Azalea begin to cry over the Christmas breakfast.

It wasn't unheard of for people to have strong and sudden reactions to things like smells and tastes. Those kinds of things were clear paths to memories after all, and memories could be overwhelming at times.

There were foods that made Albus nauseous just thinking about, despite having treasured them as 'rare treats' in his youth. Just as there were foods he'd despised back then that now always made him smile. That was just life.

Still, for all that it wasn't unheard of, it was usually a rare thing. And Miss Azalea in particular rarely emoted a lot, keeping her face placidly blank through most everything.

Albus was guessing that she had her reasons for that, even if a part of him had at times fretted over if she was even human enough to make expressions with her face. But regardless, seeing a tiny girl sobbing into the ham she kept piling on her plate-...

It tugged on the heart-strings, even if they seemed to be 'happy tears'.

Albus, had carefully kept his eyes averted, giving the girl what privacy he could without fleeing from the table, just like the other Professors – barring Lockhart, who'd predictably leapt at the opportunity to escape the castle for the holidays – with the few remaining students following their lead.

Still, whilst the girl's emotional outburst soothed a few of Albus' worries about her, it raised a not insubstantial amount of questions as well. And, beyond his cowardice, Albus had always felt that his greatest weakness was his curiosity, closely followed by his arrogance.

He was sure Minerva would have a rather different view of his various faults, but she'd definitely agree in regards to the curiosity. Albus just couldn't stop himself from thinking even if he restrained himself from investigating.

People were allowed their privacy, and so Albus should really learn to keep his big nose out of trouble. But there was nothing wrong with a few innocent questions to the house-elf about if they'd done something special for breakfast.

And had received a resounding 'no'. No they hadn't changed anything about the usual recipes. Well, except for some minor adjustments to the ham, since they didn't want to make the carnivore ill by giving them too many of the regular spices.

Which was how Albus learned about a young blonde girl – likely Miss Lovegood – having paid them a visit. And how she'd shown them a necklace and told them that it was something that people who couldn't eat non-meat would wear.

And if Miss Lovegood had been involved, then it was likely something related to Miss Azalea.

But that the girl would break out in tears over-... A dawning realization.

"I can safely say that they enjoyed your hard work very much." Albus reassured them with a warm smile, despite the pit of dread forming in his stomach. "Might I ask, how did you adjust it from how you usually do it?"

The elf brightened up at the opportunity to explain the various intricate details of their cooking. Which made it all the more painful to realize why Miss Azalea had been crying over her food this morning.

She'd been starving.

She'd been so desperate for anything edible that she'd hunted acromantulas. For months.

Perhaps she would've hunted those regardless, because she was clearly rather adept at it, and children tended to enjoy doing things they were good at. But she'd been forced to hunt those creatures in order to survive. In order to keep herself from starving to death.

Surrounded by food, and yet unable to eat it without becoming violently ill.

Albus kept his warm smile all the way out of the kitchen, and only then did he take the deep shuddering breath that he needed to. And dabbed away the tears that had immediately decided to escape with his handkerchief.

"Twenty points to Ravenclaw, Miss Lovegood." He took another deep breath and dabbed some more at his eyes, despite not having lost the warm smile on his face at all. "For being a most excellent friend."

XXX

Riley wasn't quite sure how to thank Luna for the necklace.

They knew that the necklace itself didn't actually have any magic attached to it, because they would've noticed that. But Luna had clearly done something to convince the house-elves to serve actual food for once, and Riley was very grateful to her.

Especially since apparently the house-elves were willing to continue serving actual food.

Riley didn't think that she was at any risk of running out of acromantulas to hunt down and eat, but sneaking around the castle like that was annoying when they had classes to stay awake for during the day.

Doing it a few times for some variety in their diet was one thing, but going out hunting like that almost every night was... tiresome.

And there was something oddly relieving to fiddling with cutlery and just-...

Eating in the company of other people felt like a victory somehow, absurd as that might be. And Riley wanted to make sure that Luna understood that they were very grateful for her thoughtful gift.

A return-gift was obviously something that they should try to give her, but Luna wasn't exactly an easy person to buy gifts for.

Riley's memories of the time before the demon-invasion were admittedly fairly limited, and afterwards 'gift-giving' hadn't really been any kind of priority for anyone. But the closest thing to a 'gift' that their Luna had asked for had been 'friends', and that wasn't really something you could wrap up in paper and pass along.

Riley had of course considered giving her some kind of animal, because she'd always seemed fond of strange magical creatures, but Riley also wasn't entirely convinced that they wouldn't attempt to cook and eat the animal before Luna came back and they could foist off caring for it on her.

Also, giving away an animal was something like giving away a 'responsibility' and that felt... irresponsible? Was that the word?

Regardless, the thought of giving something 'alive' to Luna made them feel unpleasant, so that idea was quickly scrapped.

Riley was also fairly certain that buying Luna flowers, or some kind of amusing knickknack wasn't the way to go either. So, that left books that Luna had never seemed all that interested in reading, useless junk that she'd – at best – put on a shelf and forget about, and something that only Riley could give her.

Riley originally hadn't been able to think of what that something might be. They could track down some acromantulas and make her a necklace of her own with their venomous teeth, sure, but that felt like it might be the kind of 'cruelty towards animals' that Luna might object to.

Riley wasn't sure if acromantulas technically classified as animals, or if it counted as 'cruel' when Riley was planning on killing them anyway for food, but they'd rather not risk it.

That left hard-to-gift insubstantial things like 'friendship', or something that was made from Riley.

Riley was pretty certain that Luna would have opinions about wearing a necklace made with Riley's teeth. And that was before accounting for how Riley was unlikely to be able to grow those teeth back.

However, Riley had lost plenty of feathers over the years. That was just part of being a bird.

Except-... Except Riley couldn't access those feathers without returning to their bird-form, which they still didn't feel comfortable doing because it might ruin the body that they'd been gifted.

But a gift for a gift was a fair trade, and Riley settled their debts.

In an effort to prepare in case something went wrong, Riley had grabbed a few extra acromantulas and brought their bodies back to the castle. Specifically, to a well-hidden room in the dungeons that Riley had extensively warded to make people avoid it.

They still had a bit over a week before the holidays ended and Luna returned, so if they screwed up they should have some time to fix it. As well as enough food to keep them going until they got it right, without having to get carted off to some incompetent idiot at the wizard-hospital.

XXX

Riley's feathers felt different than they used to.

There was less black, for one, and they were fairly certain that there were some other minor differences.

Riley had been changed.

Well, that was a bit of an awkward statement. Riley had always known that the feathers on their wings hadn't been capable of slicing apart steel, and that their claws hadn't been venomous. Not in the beginning.

That had of course changed when Riley started eating demons, and by then they hadn't really been all that fussed about more cosmetic changes.

Perhaps this is what Riley used to look like, before the demons came. Perhaps this isn't what Riley used to look like, and that it was instead heavily influenced by their new body. Their new identity.

It was hard to tell.

They were still clearly a shrike though, and the stone hissed familiarly under Riley's claws, so the important things certainly hadn't changed. They were still venomous, and their feathers were still sharp.

A few differences in coloration wasn't anything to get overly worked up about.

A bit more awkward was the way that a few feathers kept trying to linger in Riley's hair, when they transformed back.

They didn't exactly mind that, because their feathers were beautiful and deadly, and Riley would've been proud to display them for the world to see. But they were trying to keep something of a low profile, and hair-feathers were definitely a bit unusual.

Not that Riley could really figure out why that was, because everyone knew that feathers were better than hair, so they could've at least worn a few of them in their otherwise-inadequate-looking hair.

But then Riley was a bird, and they hadn't understood fashion even back when they'd been human. Or, at least, they were fairly certain they hadn't understood it. The memories were blurry at the best of times.

They'd in fact become more blurry as Riley met people again. As they wandered the halls of Hogwarts.

Before, their memories of that time was safeguarded by how radically different it was from the time after Riley became a bird. But as Riley had spent over a year now, wandering around as a human, and spent several months talking to other humans? That difference had slipped through their fingers, and the memories had started to blur.

Or well, Riley was fairly sure that that's what was happening. The alternative was something-something-brain and something-something-magic, being different from how they used to be. But even then, it would likely come circling back to the differences between their life now, and their life then.

Regardless, Riley didn't care that much.

Ron and Hermione were long since dead. The people they'd in turn once cared about had been gone for even longer. The only thing to find amongst those memories were-... Well, actually, Riley couldn't figure out why they would've ever mattered at all.

Riley was a bird. They didn't need to remember having been anything else, just as they didn't need to remember their friends of that time. There wasn't any point.

Still, Riley found themselves shuffling things around in their head, thinking about smiling faces and grim promises and heart-aching bloodshed-...

Perhaps it was a bit blurrier than it once had been, perhaps the faces didn't come as easily, the expressions not as vivid. But, even so, Riley remembered them. For now. For a little bit longer.

And they remembered a warmth that seeped into their bones, filling them up until the sky looked so clear, and the stars looked close enough to touch.

For now, they still remembered.

XXX

A/n: This was written probably right as I started to really get sick of HP in general. Harry got genderbent as a very specific point, and I had some vague idea of Hufflepuff finding out about Riley identifying as a "them" and being aggressively supportive about it (Riley gives no fucks, because they're a bird, but whatever floats their classmates' boat, you know).

But, as this fandom has kind of soured on me for a variety of reasons (mainly political) it just feels kind of yucky to effectively create "free commercial" for someone who's using "being culturally relevant" to fund a hate-movement.

I could write the most progressive and gender-friendly fics imaginable, but it's not like people who look at "1,000 new fics this year, JKR must be doing something right" are going to give a shit about what's in those fics, you know? I ain't gonna tell anyone what they ought to do, but I just don't want to waste my time and effort to do something I'm not even sure I want to be part of at all. That just feels self-defeating.

So yes, I'm quitting HP-fandom. My fics will remain up, but it's... just not worth the drain to create more.

As for where this fic in particular was going? Basically, Snape would realize that Voldemort is dead (because his Mark faded away completely), and quit Hogwarts (since he wouldn't need to be a spy anymore). Lockhart gets investigated for his many fraudulent claims, and gets arrested by aurors. And then Riley "accepts that Hogwarts has once again become 'home' ".

And honestly, I can't be arsed writing that.