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The land remembered.
She remembered when the mortals curled her into mortar and plucked her into stone. How, eventually, it was all laid up in a complicated cairn.
Humans had left such markings on her before. Small stacks of pebbles to track the footfall of stags from pools, of children to homes. But they called this cairn a castle. And humans didn't follow as much as flock to it.
Its birth alone shifted everything about the landscape. The limbs of her young firs leaned further north in search of light. Its persistent umbra threw valleys that once grew sun-loving ferns into darkness—now only bed to moss and decay. The sunken caves of her lake looked through panes of clear sand into carved spaces called rooms. Human children, in matching pelts, sat beside fires. Their heads buried in dry leaves—" books, reading, students," her mermaids muttered.
The castle felt like some young, brash mountain that had bloomed across her visage. Its magic was new, bold. It threw all her rhythms off with its love for extempore. She'd always known ancient melodies that rose and fell with the light, the constant lap of lake against shore. Had felt the way the humans would seek her magic out around bonfires with dance and chants. But this still, rocky crag was alight—popping, fizzing, beautiful with new magic. Its improvisation took words and turned her ancient magic into glinting blades—spells. So many for each student to throw in jest, rage or joy. Every day, some new release was mined out of her.
She couldn't help but be curious about the castle and the little ant-like mortals that lived within it. The sinuous eels in the lake would listen to the humans whispering and report back to her. Her fauna crept into the castle at night. They saw wondrous things. Coves of cotton, built by humans for shelter, for sleep, for pleasurable things that made absolutely no sense at all. A room where they had mirrored her sky to float above them. She had asked the rocks if she could move them slightly—allow the natural sky to stream into the hall. The castle shyly declined. Instead, every night she sent her emissaries to help. Mist to soften the magic and thunder to keep time.
Sometimes, she took from her castle.
Mortals swam in her lake, unaware of how she lurked all around them. Sometimes, she'd draw one down, just to know what they felt when they saw her true grandeur. She'd show them undulating lights, let them float easy in deep water tides, guide them through cave after cave, take them to one of the eight feet of the squid, until their limbs fell still with tiredness and their faces seemed rested.
In her forest, she would take them into brambles and meadows filled with aconite. She'd watch as they tasted the petals and took peaceful, long-lasting rest. Tender shoots of grass would soothe them on as fungi slowly wore away at their insides.
The castle gave her something too: names.
Black Lake—for the way the large, inky squid deepened the water. The Forbidden Forest—for how scared the humans seemed of her creatures. Lover. Trickster. Destroyer. For all the things she did to the ones the castle loved.
And she learned that the castle called itself Hogwarts. A nonsense name for her pretty little idiosyncrasy.
Over time, her roots grew thick and strong again. They ran under sweeping lawns and returned to hold hands with foundations of stone. They knew they were once of the same body, and it seemed natural that they would, once again, fall together.
They all lay together like lovers who knew death was nothing but a door. She would tell the castle about the kelp—how it was waving up at the towers in joy. The lake would whisper about rain-soaked kisses. And the castle would tell her of the humans, their miseries and small victories.
When she looked back, she would say it was good then, that neither she nor her lake knew how to feel human things like jealousy yet. Because it was clear that the castle danced first for its people. Threw on new costumes, faded away with misuse, opened awnings and hallways. Tirelessly changed to be good to those it called home.
When it was all too late, in some fire or storm, she would tell the lake that she wished she had stopped it all back then. She should have known better, she would cry. She, who had never changed for those who belonged within her, had watched her lover do the very same. Her young cairn, too naive, couldn't yet see that no matter where it twisted its stairwells and what walls it tore down, humans would come one day and rip into it. Mortals did not have the patience she had; she would sigh. They just couldn't let rock erode and crack its own way into profound change. Then, the lake would soothe her brow and remind her that neither the castle nor its people had had enough time.
She found that this love hurt. To love someone so enchanted by someone else. To recognise that she was, in a way, also in love with the mortals.
She learned that humans were vast. Limitless with both love and cruelty.
They used sticks to etch their names into her sand and giggled as waves washed them away. They lay with each other on her grassy knolls and pulled more of themselves forward. Some bled their stories into her, others joined her in marshes and bogs as ash. Many chose a final sleep, safe under her earthen blanket. With every grave came another full life she lived. Every time someone's consciousness flowed back through her tendrils of mycelia and vines, she became more divine.
This was what land became to men—a god that they would fight for, die into. She had heard of it from her friends before. But when mortals lived upon her, she got to witness firsthand the shape of divine transformation. Worship, it seemed to humans, was tender, meaningful obliteration.
This was why perhaps she tolerated the way humans walked upon her. Tolerated each fence and field as an offering. A map, a village, another—just temples to their romance. As hamlets grew around the castle, and it twisted further and further in their service, she also knew there was a separation happening in her soul.
Water once ran a single thread from cloud to leaf, down root. It flowed through nectar—from mouth to mouth to mouth until it reached her lake and rose to sky. Now the thread took a circuitous route through a human loom. And she could not control the warp or weft. As the castle melted into her soul, she forgot where her waters went. They emerged in a leaf and then, years later, were deep in the lake.
Fragments of herself gained dark wounds—a shore where a boy cleaved his mortal soul in two for the first time. Some gained love—a tree where a boy turned into a dog and chased a wolf—twin tails brushing every tree, howls that sang of eternity. And ancient dells sat empty, waiting for her to release her lake in rivers of anger.
But first, she would learn sorrow. The pain of a boy lying himself down to die among her roots. She would feel how his dying heart called for the lake, the castle, her ground and named it all, at once, home.
She would watch him die and the cairn crumble. She would watch the lake swell with sadness until its streams drowned out the small plants of the forest floor—it came back to her, like a child into his mother's arms.
But even as their home collapsed, humans breathed for it. They trusted it and died for the castle. For her.
So she decided there would be time to properly gorge herself on fury.
First, she had to help the humans find her stones, build their cairn. She needed to watch as they whispered love and dedication to every single piece. And as she built herself back, it no longer felt like she'd been cleaved, only raised.
Later, she would hold the lake and castle and promise them this. That if the boy who died had not had his resurrecting pebble, she would have gone and retrieved him from the dark herself.
She would always remember, she swore, how happy it made the castle to feel boats of children float home once more. Her waves would turn a tendril of some girl's hair. She would sneak one bright, true star into the ceiling of her castle, wink at an incredulous child over pudding. Then send a curious critter through the kitchens to wait, and nibble on what was left of banoffee pie.
The moment was for loving small things. There would be time for her to flood with fury later. She could remember that, too.