Chapter Text
This is where it ended:
Helga Hufflepuff was an old woman now, the fiery colour of her hair faded to dull grey by the passage of time. Her eyes were not as keen as once they had been, perhaps, her hands not quite as steady, but her mind was as sharp as ever it had been, and so when her stepdaughter Aethelinda, now quite old herself, heard what had happened she could scarce believe it.
They scoured the Forest looking for the body, for the loss of the last Founder’s magic was evident in every stone of the castle, every blade of grass on the grounds, and no-one could imagine Helga Hufflepuff leaving her students through anything but her death.
The beautiful room at the top of the tower from which the four Founders of Hogwarts had run the school for as long as anyone could remember felt strangely empty without Helga there. Her things had all been packed away and marked with names and bequests for students, friends and family scattered across the Isles, and a heavy sheaf of parchment was left on what had been Helga’s desk with instructions for her successor. With hindsight, it was clear she had known she was dying.
As near as anyone could work out, Helga had left the castle early that morning and headed towards the Forest, disappearing into the treeline like smoke on the wind. The centaurs had not seen her, and she had not emerged. They never found her body, although her black cloak was found near the furthest fringes of the Forest, the brass badger clasp that she had used to fasten it melted almost entirely out of shape.
Aethelinda and her stepbrother Gareth dealt with her affairs, as was their right, and it was not a week before the new head of the school moved into the Founders’ office. Helga Hufflepuff had no funeral, but her passing was marked by hundreds.
And the world turned, and the time of the Founders was gone.
*
Or maybe that’s wrong. Maybe it ended far sooner than that, for gods and men knew that Hogwarts was at its greatest when its four Founders were all together, and that had not been true for decades before Helga Hufflepuff’s presumed death.
It ended, some say, like this:
The argument was an old one, almost as old as Hogwarts itself. Older, possibly, for Salazar Slytherin’s distrust of Muggles had been well-known for almost as long as the school had been open. It didn’t get serious, however, until about ten years after the school was founded, when the wizarding town of Trevena in Cornwall was burnt to the ground by a Muggle mob. Magical communities all across the Isles heard of what had happened and shuddered. It bore too many similarities to what had happened in Eulestadt, where the Muggles had been led by a magbob who had been educated in the town, determined to ‘cleanse’ Eulestadt of its magical population with fire and blood.
Slytherin had been at Eulestadt, had been part of the group that had been sent to hunt the magbob leader of the massacre down. He took the burning of Trevena as a vindication of everything he’d ever suspected about Muggles, and responded in kind.
They couldn’t take the Muggles’ children, Slytherin said. Not yet. Not until they could be sure of protecting them. There had already been attacks on the carts they used to bring the students north, and the protection of those students they already had must be their priority for the time being. Until such time as they could be sure of repulsing any Muggle mob that tried to march on their school, until they had enough grown and skilled wizards and witches to defend them. And then…Not one wizarding child left in Muggle hands. Not one child left to grow up alone and terrified, not knowing why they could do the things they could. Not one more. He had no shortage of supporters. For all his fellow Founders’ idealism, there were far too many in Hogwarts and its environs who had seen Muggles roused to fury and knew all too well what the usual result was.
No-one could really say what had passed between the Founders on the last night Salazar Slytherin had been seen, except that he had stormed out of the Great Hall in a towering fury after yet another argument between the four Founders, and disappeared off into the grounds, his habitual black clothing making him almost impossible to spot in the darkness outside. That was the last anyone saw of Slytherin, and after a while it got around the school that he’d left for good. Probably gone to start his own school of the Dark Arts, a few of Gryffindor’s students muttered to each other, when they were quite sure their teacher was out of earshot. But as weeks and months and finally years passed and no such school appeared, the rumours grew wilder, until no-one was left who remembered the events as they had been.
*
Or maybe that’s wrong, and it ended far, far later than that, when Salazar Slytherin’s early writings were finally uncovered and used to justify purges and butcheries every bit as bad as those that had driven him to such extremes. When the words of a young man burning with rage at the loss of friends, teachers, companions, acquaintances were treated as gospel and used to justify ends and means they had never been intended to support. Bits of the original writings were disregarded and lost, sometimes purposely so, in order to support the opinions of those who cited them; new passages were mysteriously ‘discovered’ and added to the text to support this argument or that and thus the truth was overwritten entirely.
*
But endings are strange things; no sooner do you think the story is over than a thousand more threads reveal themselves. It could be said that the Founders lived as long as their school continued. To say this would, of course, be wildly inaccurate by most reckonings, but nonetheless, one could say it. Beginnings, now, beginnings are about as hard to place as endings, but a good deal more subtle in being so. Where do you say someone really began? With birth? Conception? The circumstances under which that conception came about? And when one brings time travel into the equation…well, one might as well give up entirely. But I have resolved to tell this story, and told it must be.
This is where it began:
By the time Professor McGonagall reached Gryffindor Tower the storm had all but dispersed entirely. Strange, considering how long it had been raging, but then, it had come down suddenly and cleared up about as quick. By the time she got through the Fat Lady’s portrait half of Gryffindor appeared to be congregated in the common room, all carefully avoiding the four chairs nearest the fire, and the blackened, burnt silhouettes still smoking on the chairs and hearthrug.
The Weasley Twins were sitting off to one side, pale as ghosts and uncharacteristically silent. Every so often someone would shoot a glance in their direction, and look away quickly, not wanting to see the devastation on the twins’ faces. A pair of broken glasses lay askew next to the fire, the frames seemingly melted out of shape. On one of the chairs sat a copy of Hogwarts: A History so badly burnt as to be almost unrecognisable.
Professor McGonagall ordered the assembled Gryffindors up to their dormitories as soon as she decently could, and then her instincts from her Ministry days took over. She checked the common room over briskly, and was startled to find that, aside from the silhouettes burnt into the armchairs and the obvious heat damage on the hearthrug, there was no sign that anything out of the ordinary had happened there.
Professor Dumbledore took the news badly, but that was entirely expected. He’d never made any secret of his affection for Potter. Professor Snape’s reaction was far less predictable. He’d gone as pale as paper when he’d heard the news, and McGonagall had to wonder whether he felt any sort of residual protectiveness for Lily Evans’ son after all.
She couldn’t dwell on that, though. There were letters to be written, families to be notified, essays to be marked, anything to keep her from dwelling on the fact that Harry Potter, Hermione Granger and both Ron and Ginny Weasley were in all probability dead.
*
Or maybe that’s wrong. Maybe the beginning came earlier. Maybe it began like this:
On a bright, crisp September morning towards the end of the tenth century, the morning after a storm, four young people were found unconscious on the hillside, their clothing rent and charred and tattered, but they themselves mysteriously unharmed. The villagers who found them were naturally suspicious, but also naturally practical, and all four of the strangers looked wealthy. If there was money to be made from assisting them, then that was all to the good. If there wasn’t…well, it wasn’t as though bringing them to Acton the healer would be terribly much inconvenience anyway.
When the four of them awoke, they identified themselves as Godric, his cousin Helga ferch Matilda and their companions Rowena of Ravensroost and Gríma Fen-Born. Fanciful names, some of them, but nothing to raise an eyebrow at, and the fenlander boy at least had gold. The people of the village that would come to be called Ottery St Catchpole shrugged their shoulders and took the strangers’ money, and that was the last anyone thought of it.
*
No matter where the story began, or where the story ended, the barest bones of it were thus:
That on a stormy September’s night four young people ranging in age from fourteen to sixteen disappeared from the Gryffindor common room. That on a stormy September’s night four young people ranging in age from fourteen to sixteen appeared on the hills outside a village that would come to be named for one of their number.
That those four young people would go on to found a school that would last over a thousand years, and have half a hundred adventures even before that. That fear would divide the four of them, driving one away forever, and that the school would not be right again until the rift was mended.
*
“You said you would keep Lily Evans’ son safe!”
The headmaster’s office was dark and forlorn-looking, and the man himself little better. Dumbledore looked every one of his hundred and fifty years, and the twinkle in his eyes had gone out.
Severus Snape sat in the chair opposite Dumbledore, his head in his hands and his greasy hair hanging over his face like something out of a Gothic novel. A broken man.
“Do you think I don’t remember, Severus?” Dumbledore asked quietly, voice made sharp by grief, “None of us could have predicted that this would happen. Harry was never meant to die this way.” Nor Miss Granger, nor the two youngest Weasleys, either. He had always known there would be losses in this war, and that those closest to Harry would be the most at risk. He had steeled himself for it, even as he fought to prevent it, but even he had not thought the first deaths would come so soon. And that Harry would be one of them – he had always known that Harry had to die, but he had held out hope that his fate could be mitigated, that the intermingling of his blood with Voldemort’s would tie him to this world closely enough for him to escape his fate. He had not anticipated how much it would hurt when Harry was gone.
“What will you do now?” Dumbledore asked, watching Snape closely, “There is no reason for you to remain at Hogwarts.”
Snape laughed, but there was no mirth in it. “Afraid I’ll turn?” he shook his head, “No. If I can’t protect Lily’s son, I can at least avenge her murder.”
“You needn’t stay for that,” Dumbledore said kindly, “I can send you on other work, away from the school.”
“No. The Dark Lord wishes that I remain close to you, in order to report on your actions more closely.”
Dumbledore nodded, and the two sat in silence for a few long minutes, neither one looking at the other. Presently there came a tap on one of the windows, and Dumbledore went to open it.
Fawkes soared in, and as he did so one red-and-golden feather fell from his tail and landed on one of the delicate whirring instruments scattered across the room on spindly-legged tables, which emitted a cloud of silvery-blue smoke. As Dumbledore watched, the smoke twisted itself into strange symbols, as unintelligible as Linear A.
“Ah,” Dumbledore murmured, picking up the feather to run it through his fingers. “Severus,” he added, looking over his shoulder, “It appears we may have spoken too soon.”
Snape looked up, his eyes wide and wild with hope.
*
It was Firenze who found Ginny Weasley’s body on the furthest fringes of the Forest, and risked the ire of his fellow centaurs by taking her to Hagrid’s hut, only to find that Professor Grubbly-Plank, who had been tending to Hagrid's charges in his absence, was already occupied by the unconscious but whole body of Harry Potter, which she had found near the borders of the Forest on the Hogwarts side. They were rushed to the hospital wing with almost unseemly haste.
Ron Weasley was found slumped against the gateposts, drenched from the night’s rain and with his clothes in burnt and bloody tatters, such that none of the Hogwarts house-elves could recover them. It was strange, though, for when he was brought up to the hospital wing there was not a mark on him, nothing to justify the amount of blood they found on his clothes.
Hermione Granger terrified Professor Flitwick almost out of his mind when he went into his office that evening to find her lying spread-eagled across his desk, out cold and still as death.
The four of them took over one end of the hospital wing, their bedside tables laden with cards from friends and family. The Hogwarts rumour mill went into overdrive with theories about where they had been and what had happened to them, with theories ranging from the mundane to the outright ridiculous and covering every possible point in between. The Ministry made all the necessary noises about security and three new Educational Decrees were passed before lunchtime the next morning, and amidst all the confusion no-one even noticed the peculiar hum in the air, the castle’s reaction to magic that had been gone for centuries being abruptly returned.
This is how it continues.