No matter the nation, no matter the era, history was always a young girl dressed however her admirers pleased, and anyone with an agenda could dress her up in whatever fantasy they favored.
There was only one condition attached. You had to be the one who'd won.
Legends about Joan had multiplied endlessly over the centuries, to the point where historians still argued over whether she'd even existed at all. Hearing the story straight from the source seemed like the only way to get it right.
She might look like a simple country girl, but Joan's gift for speech turned out to be nothing short of historic, rivaling even that infamous little mustached man from Germany. Before long she'd swept Tom and the others up completely in the telling, until it felt as though they'd been dropped straight into that brutal, war-torn century themselves.
Joan had been born in a small village called Domrémy. At thirteen she had a dream, or at least that was how Tom understood it. By Joan's own account, it had been divine revelation.
She'd seen the Archangel Michael, and the Virgin Mary besides, both bringing word from God himself, instructing her to lead French soldiers against the invading English.
So Joan left her small mountain village, left the region of Lorraine behind, and made her way to Orléans, the place that would come to define the whole of her life. To this day, people still called her the Maid of Orléans.
In the brief span of her life, Joan had never once received any formal training in magic. Everything she knew, she'd found through nothing but sheer devotion to God, feeling her way toward it blind.
Most of what she'd discovered centered on lifting the morale of soldiers and healing the wounded. Her fire-based attacks had come later, born out of fury after watching English soldiers slaughter a village, one of the few purely offensive abilities she'd ever managed to draw out.
She'd always understood these gifts as sacred miracles. To the soldiers and the king she served, though, and eventually to the Church itself, they looked like witchcraft, like magic. In France's darkest hour, no one dared question it. But once the tide of war eased and the English began edging toward negotiation, Joan's usefulness ran out just as quickly.
By rights, a wizard of her caliber should have had no trouble at all slipping free of soldiers or churchmen alike, had she wanted to run.
But the Church had turned Joan's own devotion, her love for her country, against her, guiding her through a religious trial until she walked, almost resigned to her fate, to the stake in the square at Rouen.
To keep her from truly raging, from seeing through to the truth of what was happening, the whole process had been handled with careful delicacy, practically coaxing her up onto the pyre. There had been no cruelty in it, no visible torment at all.
It took a full three hours for Joan to work her way, in halting fragments, through the whole of her short but extraordinary life, and each listener came away with something different stirring inside them.
The one thing they all agreed on, though, was that this girl was hopelessly, almost incomprehensibly naive.
Devotion to God on its own wasn't so strange. Plenty of wizards had been thoroughly indoctrinated by one belief or another over the centuries. What set Joan apart was the sheer strength backing that devotion.
But calmly accepting the stake at the end of it all, that part none of them could wrap their heads around. She'd received actual divine revelation. Whatever her standing, whatever her closeness to God himself, surely that outranked a bunch of self-appointed clergymen. So why had she ever felt bound to obey them?
Tom felt a genuine pang of pity for her, and without quite meaning to, rested a hand on the country girl's head, the way he might with anyone younger.
If he'd been the one to find Joan first, back in her own century, he probably could have talked her into anything, children included, enough to field a whole football team. Still, it wasn't too late. She looked just as easy to win over now.
Joan went rigid, unused to such casual contact, though she didn't dare pull away either, her expression filling with something close to wronged embarrassment.
"Alright. Since you're here now, there's no use dwelling on the past. Let me get you settled somewhere to live first. Give yourself time to adjust to how things work here. You might find your thinking changes along the way."
Ariana pulled Tom's hand away, eyeing Joan with open suspicion, though Joan still offered her a grateful nod regardless.
"Mr. Riddle, there's no need to trouble yourself. A haystack or a simple tent would suit me fine," Joan said, clearly uneasy with the fuss.
Tom, at a loss, exchanged a glance with Ravenclaw. The woman gave a small nod, understanding exactly what he was thinking.
The most pressing task now was helping Joan settle into something resembling a normal life. Only after that could they think seriously about her role as a teacher.
"Leave her to me," Ravenclaw said quietly.
Tom nodded, and Joan, still thoroughly bewildered by everything happening around her, was led away by Ravenclaw, Ariana trailing after them both.
One of Ravenclaw's passions had always been architecture; the very layout of Hogwarts had come from her own design. Since the learning space had no shortage of open ground, Tom had set aside a whole stretch of it as a residential district, letting Ravenclaw shape it however she pleased.
It suited Joan's new home perfectly.
The country girl had never seen anything like it. She hesitated even to step onto the carpet inside for fear of dirtying it, and Ravenclaw set about correcting those habits, one by one, from the moment she walked through the door.
Elsewhere, Tom and Andros sat sharing a drink, the conversation still circling back to Joan.
"I think I finally understand how she managed to reach this tier at her age, without a single day of proper training, without a teacher to guide her."
Andros drained his glass of something strong in one go, letting out a low sound of appreciation. "The heart really is a wizard's greatest source of power. Pure, unwavering faith became the sharpest kind of will and emotion, and her magic carries no technique at all. It's built entirely out of feeling."
Grindelwald didn't share that view. "Andros, everything you're describing rests on that absurd natural talent of hers to begin with. The world's full of devout believers. Why is there only ever one Joan?"
"Without talent, even the strongest heart in the world amounts to nothing. But turning talent into something real still takes the fire of pure conviction to bring it fully to life."
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