Rita's soul did indeed begin to weep, silently and in grief.
Once torn from her gaudy, mediocre body, Rita's soul was like a lone phantom lingering in the world. Desolate soul-tears slid from her jaw and vanished midair.
The clear sky suddenly dimmed a little, turning into something like a bright overcast. That abrupt darkening made people's hearts jolt.
There were no banks of cloud.
But the world began to "rain".
Professor McGonagall stood in the "rain". Diagon Alley bathed in the "rain". The entire British Isles, and parts of Europe and North America, were likewise bathed in this "rain".
This rain did not fall from the sky; it was not part of the water cycle.
It was not made of water molecules and dust.
Professor McGonagall felt a chill to the bone. She stared intently at the "raindrops" falling in front of her. They were appearing out of nowhere, squeezed out of the void itself: short, fine, translucent glass-colored lines drifting in the air, able to pass through anything without leaving a trace.
When one of the "rain-threads" passed through her palm, an indescribable dampness spread out.
What was soaked was not flesh and blood.
This was a rain that fell upon souls.
Every shock, terror, fury, sorrow, confusion, intoxication, admiration—every emotion—was washed away by this uncalled-for drizzle.
Skyl stood where he was, head tilted back, taking in this "downpour" with his eyes. Professor McGonagall noticed that none of the raindrops were actually touching him, as though he were wearing an invisible raincoat.
"de Lin, where is this rain coming from?" The words rasped out of her, hoarse and sore.
Professor McGonagall saw the long table of the press conference twist in the rain. She saw the images of Rita Skeeter in those magical photographs blur, like stains being washed off the film. On the front page of the Daily Prophet, the headline article smearing the transfer student de Lin slowly turned into an advertisement for racing brooms.
She watched that mass of a witch's body floating in midair slowly become an African hyena with brown fur and black spots.
Professor McGonagall gradually found she could no longer recall Rita's face.
As a master of Transfiguration who had carefully studied Skyl's papers, she knew these abnormalities meant that history was being rewritten.
Standing in the "rain", Skyl was in an excellent mood. He answered her doubts, his tone uncharacteristically exalted, as though spreading truth and gospel. "These are the thought-strings of the world. They're the memory-core of history. Right now, we're standing in the soul of the universe."
"The… soul of the universe?" A childlike smile appeared on Professor McGonagall's aging face. She accepted this explanation, and was deeply moved by it. "How beautiful…"
"Professor McGonagall, watch this rain carefully. Even if you can't remember any of this. The most dazzling spectacle in this universe isn't the birth of nebulae, nor the riot of colors on a living world, but this downpour that falls when history is buried. Today, the British Isles are weeping for you. Rita Skeeter, your name will be forgotten by the world—but your sacrifice lets me lift a corner of the thick curtain hiding magic's source."
People say the past cannot be changed.
No. The universe has never actually declared such a thing. It has merely hidden the way to alter history deep behind its most secret roots.
To touch those roots, there are two paths. Either remake yourself, raise your soul upward, and approach that greatest truth; or shoulder the sin of defiance, wound the roots, and force them to expose themselves.
This was not Skyl's first time doing this. Compared to the last time he used Eternal Transfiguration to alter a certain purple turban—an act with very little impact on history—erasing a living person carried far more serious consequences. Especially when it came to someone as "active" as Rita Skeeter. Though she had contributed nothing of worth to the wizarding world, the traces of her existence, the resources she consumed, the articles she fabricated and the influence she amassed—everything that gave her life its particular hue—together formed a tangled debt.
Now, Rita's existence had been wiped away by Eternal Transfiguration. She had never been born, had never lived upon this land as a human witch. In her place, there was now a random dog.
How would history make up for the blank she left behind?
Skyl did not know the answer. But he would remember that everything about Rita had once truly existed.
These "thought-strings" of the universe were now at work, weaving truth, mending the tear in the dense, heavy cloth of history. The only things affected in this process were not people's memories of Rita Skeeter. The ecological niche she had occupied in society would be filled by someone else, but that someone was destined not to be a person similar to Rita.
Thus, the reporter who interviewed the transfer student Skyl had not been Rita, but a rookie named Jennifer. They had a friendly conversation at Hogwarts. The article published in the Daily Prophet was titled "An Interesting Soul—My First Encounter with the Genius Wizard de Lin". It was not printed on the front page, but on the left side of page three.
There had been no ensuing farce, no slanging match. The students of Hogwarts had not incited their parents to send letters of complaint. Professor Quirrell had not hired wizards to threaten an unethical journalist. Nor had this public press conference ever taken place.
In Professor McGonagall's eyes, the rain was growing heavier. The thought-strings of the world surged in silence; the tides of the cosmos roared soundlessly.
The sky above Diagon Alley grew ever darker. This layer of history was being stuffed into a stout, airless rubbish sack, ready to be hurled into the abyss. A blackness deeper than the deepest night draped itself over the vault of heaven. Everything seemed to vanish into the darkness, leaving only those rain-threads shining with gorgeous light—and that transfer student called de Lin.
She watched Skyl slowly push the soul he held back into the African hyena's body. The dazed animal quickly became spirited, letting out a shrill cry like livestock at the slaughter, only to bite it off at once in terror.
Tears beyond words streamed down Professor McGonagall's face. She pleaded, "de Lin, please don't… you're a good boy…"
"Shh. Don't worry, Professor. Just treat it all as a dream. You won't remember it. All it will take is a blink and, next, you'll wake up in a classroom at Hogwarts."
The world's darkness was deeper than any dream.
To cross the limit that is darker than darkness itself is nothing more than a single closing of the eyes, a moment of vacancy—and in the end, the eyes open again, and the mind returns.
Professor McGonagall stood at the front of the classroom. Outside the windows, the early spring sunlight was gentle, pooling warmly on the lectern.
The students below her lifted their heads, puzzled by their professor's sudden silence.
Professor McGonagall brushed her fingers across her brow, then picked up right where she had left off. "...And precisely because of that, you must pay attention to everything around you. Use your powers of observation to analyze, to think about the details of things, and the way they affect their environment. Only then can you begin to grasp essential Transfiguration."
Her words flowed more and more smoothly. The young witches and wizards were deep in thought. Sunlight poured ever more brightly and warmly through the tall, latticed windows.
Class ended. Life went on. More lessons, more days, a life that simply continued. Until, one day, she went to Diagon Alley and saw a hyena pacing alone at a street corner. Its fur was filthy, scraps of candy-wrapper clinging to the corners of its mouth, its whole body radiating exhaustion.
"Why is there an African hyena here?"
"It's been around for ages. Must've been here forty years or more. For a hyena, that's quite a long life."
Professor McGonagall fell into thought. The dog suddenly rushed up to her, barking like mad, then burst into tears.
"Perhaps it's ill," she said, hurrying away from the crazed animal.
The incident left Professor McGonagall with a sense of strangeness. When she went home, the unease would not leave her. She felt, vaguely, that she had failed some obligation. Reflecting on herself, she decided that she ought to have bought the dog some food, so it could make it through the winter.
Later, when she returned to Diagon Alley, she could no longer find the dog. When she asked around, some said the hyena had wandered off; others said it had eaten chocolate by mistake and likely died in some forgotten corner.
All lives must end. For a stray dog, death is not the worst of outcomes. As for wandering—without a home, everywhere is wandering.
Sunlight lay warm and bright along the streets of Diagon Alley. In the keen chill of the spring wind, Minerva McGonagall straightened her lady's hat and walked back into her orderly life with measured steps. At night she no longer thought of the hyena's tears.
"God is in His heaven; all is right with the world." — Disco Elysium
Time to start bringing in the Elden Ring storyline.
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