In Harry's dormitory, the night was anything but peaceful.
Harry thrashed in his sleep, sheets twisted around his legs, his brow damp with sweat.
In his dream, the forest loomed—dark, tangled, wrong. Something screamed.
A flash of silver.
A shard of something beautiful shattering.
He saw it only in fragments: a glinting object breaking apart, black smoke tearing through the air, and Victor—blurred, indistinct—standing at the centre of it all.
The scream echoed again, sharp and hateful, rattling through Harry's skull.
He gasped and jerked awake, sitting bolt upright in bed, heart pounding.
"What… was that?" Harry whispered into the darkness.
"Yeah," came Ron's voice from the next bed, "I'd like to know that too."
Harry turned sharply. Ron was sitting up, rubbing his eyes. Across the room, Neville and Seamus were still fast asleep, completely unaware.
"Ron… you're awake?" Harry asked, looking over at him, confused about why he was up at this hour.
"Yeah," Ron said. "Your sleep-talking woke me up. You were muttering complete gibberish, and then you sat up like you'd just seen a ghost." He frowned slightly. "You alright, mate? Nightmare?"
Harry hesitated, running a hand through his hair. "I don't know. It was… weird. I saw the forest. And something breaking. And Victor—kind of. Not clearly."
"You saw Victor in your dreams?" Ron asked uneasily, not understanding why anyone would have dreams about Victor.
"Yeah," Harry said slowly. "He was in some forest. Holding something—like a fang. And there was this smoke everywhere. Thick black smoke. It was screaming. Not like a normal sound… more like it was inside my head."
Ron gulped, his joking mood evaporating. He glanced around the dark dormitory, as if expecting something to be listening.
"What was he doing in the forest?" Ron asked quietly.
"I don't know," Harry admitted. "The images were blurry. But I remember one more thing—there was some kind of headpiece. Like a crown or a band. It felt… important. I woke up right after that."
Ron sat back, rubbing his arms. "Didn't I tell you?" he said, his voice edged with unease. "Malfoys are shady. All of them. He must've done some kind of jinx on you. That's the only explanation."
Harry glanced at him. "You really think Victor would—"
"I'm just saying," Ron cut in quickly.
Harry lay back down, staring at the ceiling. "Still… it didn't feel like he was the bad one in the dream."
Although Harry wanted to understand what that strange dream meant, he simply didn't have the time.
By February, studies swallowed everything whole. Professors started piling on assignments, casually reminding them that final exams were only three months away, and the easy excitement of the first term vanished.
No more "welcome to Hogwarts" grace period—now it was essays, revision, and practice until your head hurt.
Victor and Hermione handled it without much trouble. Victor was effectively studying two years ahead, already skimming through third-year material like it was light reading.
Hermione, meanwhile, had nearly finished the first-year syllabus and treated revision as a personal challenge rather than a burden.
Harry and Ron… did not share that experience.
Most evenings found them hunched over library tables, staring at textbooks as if the words might rearrange themselves into something understandable if they waited long enough. They didn't.
Some subjects were worse than others. History of Magic was the absolute worst.
That afternoon, the class drifted into the cold, dusty classroom where Professor Binns floated in through the blackboard, entirely unaware that he was dead—or that anyone else noticed.
"…and so, in the seventeenth goblin rebellion," Binns droned, voice flat and endless, "the Wizengamot failed to take appropriate action—"
Harry's eyes glazed over within minutes.
Ron tried valiantly to take notes. His quill scratched a few meaningless lines, then slowed… then stopped. His head tipped forward and landed softly on his parchment.
Harry followed soon after. Chin in hand. Blink. Blink. Gone.
Professor Binns continued without pause.
"…which led to further unrest in the following decade—"
Hermione shot them a sharp look from the front row, lips pressed tight. Victor noticed, glanced back once, and gave a small shake of his head—as if to say they're beyond saving.
To be fair, they weren't the only ones.
Professor Binns's class had the strange ability to turn even the most well-rested student into a half-conscious corpse. His droning voice floated on and on, perfectly steady, perfectly dull—less a lecture and more a lullaby disguised as history.
Around the room, heads slowly dipped. Quills slipped from fingers.
Victor stifled a yawn, blinked twice, and then leaned toward Hermione just enough to whisper.
"Wake me up after class."
Before she could react, he rested his head on the desk and promptly went still.
Hermione stared at him.
She sighed.
"Sleephead," she muttered under her breath, turning back to her notes.
Moments later, she glanced around the classroom and realized, with mild disbelief, that Victor had been the last one awake.
Professor Binns continued, entirely unbothered, lecturing to a room full of sleeping students as though nothing at all were wrong.
By the end of the lesson, Harry had drooled slightly on his notes, Ron had somehow written the word goblin eight times in a row without realizing it, and neither of them remembered a single thing about the lecture.
When the bell rang, Binns floated straight through it, still talking.
Harry blinked awake. "Did we… learn anything?"
Ron yawned, rubbing his eyes. "Yeah. History's deadly."
They'd honestly thought they could just listen in class and scrape by, maybe even convince themselves that History of Magic didn't really matter.
That hope died somewhere around Professor Binns's third monotonous sentence. Like it or not, they were going to have to read the book.
At least some subjects weren't trying to put them into an early grave. Charms, Herbology, Astronomy, even Transfiguration—they could manage those. Potions and Defence Against the Dark Arts, though? Those needed serious effort. And possibly a miracle.
Ron leaned closer, his voice dropping to a whisper. "Harry… d'you think we should ask Hermione and Victor to teach us?"
It was the last option Ron could think of—the absolute last. Among all the first-years, those two were easily the brightest.
More importantly, they were also the closest friends Ron and Harry had. Or at least, that's how Ron saw it—especially now that desperation was setting in.
He really didn't want to fail the end-of-year exams. The very thought of his mother's reaction sent a chill down his spine. Howlers. Lectures. Possibly a lifetime ban on snacks.
Ron swallowed. If asking Hermione and Victor meant avoiding that fate… well, he'd do anything.
*****
A/N : 🔥 On Patreon, the story has already been updated up to Chapter 53 🔥
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