It was strange how quickly silence found me again.
Hogwarts had been loud—a living, breathing entity of noise and motion. Now, back home, everything settled into something quieter. Something familiar. The snow here didn’t whisper like the drifts on the Bck Lake shore. It smothered sound completely. The countryside surrounding the Rosier estate was covered in white, the trees burdened with frozen weight.
I liked it better this way.
Lyra met me at the door the moment I stepped through the arching bckwood gate, bundled in three yers of wool and wearing mismatched gloves. She practically collided with me in a hug.
“You didn’t owl me you were coming today!” she said, eyes alight.
“I don’t need to owl you when you’ve been watching from the window since sunrise.”
She stuck out her tongue and clutched my hand anyway.
“Come on! Mum made cocoa. And she said I could stay up te because you’re home.”
She dragged me into the manor as if afraid I might vanish like a dream. Kuro padded behind us like a shadow, tail swishing, ignoring the snow with feline disdain.
The House, and the BooksThe Rosier family estate wasn’t a castle, but it was built with old magic in its bones—vaulted ceilings, narrow halls that whispered at night, and ancestral paintings that blinked too slowly. It smelled like winter spice, parchment, and old bloodlines.
Mother greeted me with her usual mix of restrained grace and overwhelming warmth. Anna Rosier—née Crke—still carried the softness of a Muggle woman who'd married into a world stranger than fiction, and she wore her discomfort with wizarding society like a well-kept secret.
“Welcome home, Caelum,” she said, arms around me for a moment too long. “You’ve grown thinner. Are they feeding you properly?”
“I’m studying more than eating.”
She gave me a look. “You always say that.”
Later, after Lyra fell asleep on the rug beside the fire and Kuro curled into the folds of her bnket, I retired to my room. A package sat waiting on my desk, wrapped in pin brown paper and bound in twine. No card.
Father’s handwriting on the wax seal.
Inside were four heavy tomes. Two were about magical theory—dense volumes with Latin titles and long passages written in spell-script. The others were stranger: Perception and Magical Consciousness, and Occlumency Through Sensory Extension.
Not typical first-year reading.
I opened the second one, and my eyes narrowed. The author detailed how wandless spells could be generated by intense internal visualizations—intent projected as structure. I remembered the way my Mangekyō allowed me to trace magical patterns, how they yered in space like delicate spiderwebs. These books weren’t instructions.
They were keys.
The Knock That Shouldn’t Have HappenedIt happened two days ter.
I was elbow-deep in notes, reconstructing a magical formu I saw used during Charms css when the knock came at the front door—loud, mismatched, too enthusiastic to be anyone normal.
Then came the sound of Lyra screaming down the corridor.
“CAEL! CAELUM! THERE ARE CHILDREN HERE. FOR YOU!”
I blinked.
Children?
By the time I got to the front entrance, Lyra was bouncing in pce, hands waving as she tried to drag in three figures through the door—all snow-covered and grinning.
Jake, Desmond, and Nathaniel.
Jake was waving a bag of sweets in one hand and holding a crooked wreath in the other.
“Surprise, ya bastard!” he shouted.
“You’re not supposed to be here.”
“And yet,” he said, stepping inside like it was his second home, “here we are.”
Mother appeared behind me, blinking in disbelief.
“Oh—my. Are these your schoolmates?” she asked.
Jake puffed up with pride. “Yes, ma’am! We’re Caelum’s best mates. He’s never said that, but it’s obvious.”
Desmond added, “We convinced our parents to let us stay nearby for a few days. Jake wouldn’t stop writing letters about it.”
“And then Nathaniel forged a permission slip,” Jake whispered loudly.
Mother looked at me like I’d suddenly grown a second head. “Caelum. You… have friends?”
I sighed. “Apparently.”
She ughed softly, a sound I hadn’t heard in years. “Well then. I suppose I’ll make extra cocoa.”
A Strange Kind of WarmthThat night, my house felt more alive than it had in years. Lyra clung to Nathaniel like he was a new toy, asking endless questions about Hogwarts, Gryffindor Tower, and why Jake talked so loud. Desmond brought a deck of enchanted pying cards and taught Lyra how to cheat at them, which she picked up armingly fast.
Jake wandered around the house with too much curiosity, asking questions I had no intention of answering.
“So… this is where you grew up?” he said, looking at the old paintings. “These people all look like they hate children.”
“They do.”
He grinned. “Bet you made them proud.”
“They’re dead.”
He blinked. “...Cool.”
Later, when Mother set out food and sat across from me with the flicker of candlelight on her features, she said, “I haven’t seen you smile this much in years.”
“I haven’t smiled,” I replied.
“You did. Just once. When Jake dropped that pie on himself.”
I didn’t respond.
Because she was right.
Father's ReturnHe returned just after midnight.
Cassian Rosier entered the house like a storm kept barely at bay. He didn’t knock. He never knocked. His coat was still heavy with snow, eyes shadowed beneath a Ministry-standard travel cloak, the scent of ink and Parliament still clinging to his shoulders.
He froze in the entryway when he saw the four boys asleep near the fire—Jake halfway inside a bnket fort Lyra had constructed using every pillow she could find.
His eyes shifted to me.
“Friends?”
I nodded.
“And you allowed them here?”
“They allowed themselves. I tolerated it.”
He stepped past me and looked down at them, one by one. I didn’t miss the subtle shift in his brow, the minute twitch of the corner of his mouth.
“Well,” he muttered. “They look… loud.”
“They are.”
Mother appeared behind us. “He’s had a wonderful few days.”
He met her eyes, then mine again. “I see.”
A beat passed.
Then he pced a hand on my shoulder—brief, solid, not quite warm. Just real.
“That’s good,” he said quietly. “I suppose… you’re growing after all.”
[End of Chapter 19]
