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The enormous clock on the wall ticked steadily, each second slipping away like grains of sand in an enchanted hourglass.
The Ouroboros symbol that had appeared on Ian’s hand after emerging from the depths of the Hogwarts dungeons pulsed faintly, as if breathing in sync with the passage of time— tied, in some inexplicable way, to the enchantment of Quietus.
November 30th.
The final day of November. The eve of December. A date Ian should have passed weeks ago, yet here it was, presenting itself once again, as though time had doubled back on itself.
“What in Merlin’s name is going on? Am I trapped in some kind of Temporal Loop? A cursed Pensieve? A botched Time-Turner accident? This is starting to feel like something out of a Binns lecture— repetitive, dreary, and utterly terrifying!”
His heart stuttered for a moment before resuming at a breakneck pace. A wave of unease settled over him, his expression contorted into the same kind of horror one experiences after a late-night encounter with The Tales of Beedle the Bard’s darker stories.
It was as if he had seen a ghost—
Not the Hogwarts kind, either.
Ian had always been fascinated by tales of time anomalies. He’d devoured every account of magical time breaches he could find. In theory, the idea of experiencing one himself had seemed thrilling.
However—
As the old saying goes, “Be careful what you wish for, lest you find yourself ensnared in a web of your own making.” Hypothetical musings on time’s mysteries were one thing— living through them was quite another. And at this moment, Ian found no joy in his predicament.
“I’m not going to be stuck in this loop for centuries, am I?” Panic was beginning to take root, twisting in his gut. No rational wizard could wake up to such an absurdity and remain calm.
His knowledge of magical theory was vast, yet even he had to admit that, when it came to time, the Department of Mysteries kept its secrets well-guarded. Hogwarts’ library, for all its impressive collection, contained few in-depth tomes on temporal magic, leaving Ian with a distressingly incomplete understanding of what he was up against.
He had spent countless hours in the Twilight Zone— an obscure, magical space between worlds— questioning Professor Morgan about the nature of time. But that had been mere academic curiosity. Now, the problem was his own, and the stakes were far more dire.
“Professor Morgan’s Hourglass of Fate might help me, but I don’t even have the means to craft one right now!” The young wizard groaned, running a hand through his already disheveled hair.
“Why does my Christmas have to be so cursedly bizarre?” The chamber around him remained eerily still, the flickering torchlight casting unsettling shadows that should have evoked warmth—but instead sent a chill creeping down his spine.
“What are you blabbering on about? It’s not Christmas yet.”
The portrait of the rather daft Sir Barnabas the Barmy looked down at Ian in bemusement, his painted brow furrowed as he tried to make sense of the boy’s obvious distress.
What was the fuss? Surely it wasn’t over cleaning a bathroom?
Hogwarts lavatories were far better maintained than those of the Middle Ages, after all.
“What do you mean it’s not Christmas?” Ian glanced at the clock again, clinging to the desperate hope that perhaps the Weasley twins had meddled with the timekeeping charms.
However—
The world was not so kind.
“Did you fall asleep in the Room of Requirement again?” Barnabas mused, his expression one of growing suspicion. “I understand your excitement for Christmas presents, but you’ve got several weeks yet.”
“I did not sleep too much! Damn it— this has something to do with Salazar Slytherin, I just know it!”
Ian’s face paled as his eyes drifted back to the ominous Ouroboros mark on his hand, its soft glow whispering secrets only time itself could comprehend.
If Ian tried to convince himself that the strange occurrences had nothing to do with Salazar Slytherin, he wouldn’t believe it for a second. The mark on his hand had not faded since the moment it appeared.
When it first manifested, Ian had felt a deep sense of unease, it was an instinctive discomfort he had dismissed at the time. He hadn’t expected his sixth sense to be so terrifyingly accurate.
The Ouroboros, also known as the “serpent devouring its own tail,” was an ancient symbol representing an eternal cycle, an endless loop.
It signified infinity and recurrence.
This emblem carried a multitude of interpretations, it was deeply rooted in magical traditions, mythologies, and alchemical studies, where it held a particularly profound significance.
“I should have known I was walking straight into a trap!” Ian muttered darkly. He had no idea what Slytherin’s so-called “selection” entailed, but one thing was certain— the founder, dead for a thousand years, seemed to take great pleasure in playing tricks on people.
Why now?
Why not earlier?
Why not later?
Why, of all possible moments, did this have to happen on Christmas Day?
It was an absolutely wicked sense of humor.
“While it’s true this lavatory was designed by Slytherin himself, I fail to see how your toilet-scrubbing duties are his doing.” Sir Barnabas the Barmy still seemed convinced that Ian’s behavior stemmed from some particularly nasty punishment assigned by Snape.
Had the boy gone mad from cleaning toilets? Barnabas wasn’t a complete fool, but he was certainly incapable of guessing the truth.
No point in explaining anything to the portrait.
Even if Ian ran straight to Snape or Professor McGonagall right now and declared that he had traveled back from the future, they would dismiss him outright.
“The use of Time-Turners is traceable. What I’m experiencing isn’t.” Ian had read extensively about their restrictions and mechanics.
He knew this much.
His displacement in time had nothing to do with a Time-Turner. This was something deeper, an older and more elusive kind of magic, which led Ian to some rather unsettling theories.
“Magic that was never passed down…” He glanced at the mark on his hand, recalling what the bronze eagle had once hinted about Slytherin’s secret experiments in the Chamber of Secrets.
It all made sense now.
“He was researching time itself… and he actually succeeded.” Ian could scarcely believe it. The idea that a simple mark, left behind a millennium ago, could disrupt the wizarding world’s understanding and control over time was nothing short of astonishing.
Could Professor Morgan achieve something like this?
Ian highly doubted it.
“Or perhaps… I didn’t travel through time at all. Maybe I just fell asleep in bed…”
This entire ordeal was so far beyond Ian’s expectations that he almost preferred to believe it was all some bizarre, convoluted dream.
“Smack.”
Ian struck the edge of the portrait frame with his palm.
“Does that hurt?” He asked, watching as Sir Barnabas flinched back in shock.
“Are you daft?” Barnabas sputtered indignantly.
He had been about to scoff that portraits don’t feel pain when he caught sight of Ian reaching for the enchanted pigments used to restore magical paintings. Barnabas yelped and clamped his hands over his face in horror.
“It hurts! It hurts terribly!” He wailed, his performance rather impressive.
Perhaps it was the memory of once being thumped by a troll, or perhaps he simply had a natural flair for theatrics, but Barnabas’s depiction of suffering was quite dramatic. At that moment, he would have rather faced an actual troll than risk Ian tampering with his portrait. Every painting in Hogwarts had heard the rumors about Ian’s “zombie dog.”
“Then I’m not dreaming…” Ian murmured, rubbing his hand where he had secretly pinched himself. But he needed to be thorough— eliminating every unlikely possibility was key.
This wasn’t a dream.
Even so, Ian was still struggling to accept the absurd reality unfolding before him.
“Could it be that I have a Seer’s bloodline?”
Ian’s attempt to rationalize the situation was growing increasingly desperate. He knew that true Seers had the ability to perceive glimpses of the future, and the strange déjà vu of the past weeks suggested that this wasn’t the first time he had experienced these events.
Much like the arrival of the Grim Reaper— no, no, not the Reaper. It is more like those cryptic Seers described in magical biographies, the ones who foresaw events by living through them firsthand.
“That would almost make sense, but predicting every single detail weeks in advance? Even our Defense Against the Dark Arts professor isn’t that powerful.”
Ian glanced at his personal notes. All the knowledge and skills he had honed over the past few weeks remained intact. But then again, who was to say that memory couldn’t be retained even inside a prophetic illusion?
“Or maybe I’ve somehow fallen into a parallel timeline!” He knew full well that he was grasping at straws. The most logical explanation was that he had been ensnared by Salazar Slytherin’s magic. Sighing, he pulled out his wand, determined to test whether Slytherin’s time magic had the power to reset reality itself.
This wouldn’t be a difficult experiment.
It only required a spell he had recently mastered.
“Expecto Patronum!”
A surge of silver light burst from Ian’s wand, swirling and solidifying into the shape of a teenage girl.
“At least the Twilight Realm remains unchanged.”
Ian exhaled in relief. The successful manifestation of Ariana confirmed that the ring he had given her still existed. If time in the Twilight Realm remained untouched, then Slytherin’s magic hadn’t rewritten everything.
That, at least, was something.
Not only did this reveal the limits of Slytherin’s magic, but it also meant Ian could endure the seven-day cycle and eventually seek help from his mentor in the Twilight Realm.
“I just don’t know whether I’m stuck in a single-day loop or a repeating cycle leading up to Christmas.” He fervently hoped it was the latter.
As Ian weighed his next move, an incredulous voice interrupted him.
“You have a human-shaped Patronus?!”
Barnabas the Barmy, the portrait who had been silently observing from his frame, suddenly gasped in astonishment at the radiant figure before him.
“Merlin’s beard! A human Patronus! This will be recorded in history alongside the legendary Andros the Invincible!” Barnabas’s shock was understandable. In all his years hanging in Hogwarts, he had never once heard of a wizard producing a Patronus in the shape of another person.
“My Patronus is far more powerful than Andros’ giant specter,” Ian retorted, despite the anxious weight pressing on his chest.
The time loop was unsettling, but it had not yet plunged him into true despair. As long as the world didn’t descend into chaos, Ian believed he could figure out a way to set things right. After all, Salazar Slytherin, a founder of Hogwarts, wouldn’t have created a time trap purely to torment a single wizard from the future… would he?
Even if— hypothetically, Slytherin had harbored sinister intentions, there were countless other ways to wreak havoc. Ian could list at least three hundred different curses more effective than trapping someone in a temporal cycle.
“‘The Chosen One’… That eagle said something about being chosen… Could this time loop be a test? If so, what am I meant to accomplish in order to pass it and break free?”
Ian frowned in deep contemplation as Ariana’s spectral glow cast dancing reflections on the walls around him.
Then, the Patronus spoke.
“Ian, I’m washing fruit. Have you returned to the mundane world?” Ariana floated lazily through the air, her voice filled with the casual curiosity of a mischievous sprite.
She drifted curiously through the dimly lit corridor, her gaze sweeping over the ancient staircases and railings. This school- Hogwarts, is the place she had longed to see for so long, and she was finally here, and she could explore it at last.
“It’s even grander than I imagined.” After floating about in wide-eyed wonder, Ariana returned to Ian’s side, her expression alight with excitement.
“Forget about Hogwarts for now, Ariana; I think this time I’ve really run into a ghost!” Ian said urgently, noticing the puzzled look on her face.
Seeing her confusion, he quickly clarified, “I mean it! It’s different from when I was a child. The so-called ghosts I saw back then weren’t real, but this time, I’ve actually been tricked by one! A real one!”
Ariana blinked, her fingers instinctively reaching for the spectral sword at her waist, the very one that materialized when she took on her Patronus form.
“Do you need me to deal with some ghastly specter?” She asked, her voice brimming with eagerness rather than fear.
“Pandro said I’m quite powerful in this state. I might not just handle spirits— I could probably take down a dragon if I had to.” It seemed Pandro had been filling her head with rather dangerous confidence.
“Merlin’s beard! What in the name of all magic is happening?!” Barnabas, still gawking from his portrait, had not yet recovered from his shock.
“Your Patronus spoke! It can actually talk!” The usually unflappable portrait was practically hanging out of his frame in sheer disbelief. “That’s not normal, little wizard— something about you is very wrong!”
“…”
Ian raised his wand and, with Ariana in tow, quickly jogged away from Barnabas’s portrait. If this Hogwarts was some kind of alternate magical reality, he had no intention of witnessing the terrifying sight of Barnabas crawling out of the frame like some cursed creature from a horror story.
“Let’s find Dumbledore!” Ian decided, changing course toward the Owlery.
He recalled that on this particular night, Albus Dumbledore was supposed to be engaged in a heated— if absurd— wrestling match with Aberforth up in the Owlery. Faced with such a bizarre and pressing magical dilemma, Ian’s first instinct was to seek out Hogwarts’ Headmaster.
And that, surely, was the right call. After all, Dumbledore’s knowledge of obscure and powerful magic far outstripped Ian’s own limited experience.
Besides—
With Ariana at his side, he felt a little more hopeful. Maybe, with her cheering him on, Dumbledore would not only solve the mystery of the Ouroboros mark on Ian’s hand but might even humor her by answering a few advanced Arithmancy problems while he was at it.
“Wait, aren’t you supposed to be presenting me as a Christmas gift?” Ariana asked, tilting her head in confusion. Ian had mentioned something about her making an appearance, but he hadn’t exactly explained the situation properly.
She turned her attention to the multitude of owls nesting above. “So many of them!”
“He’s not here!” Ian muttered in frustration. His luck wasn’t holding— Dumbledore was nowhere to be found, and the Owlery was eerily silent, as if whatever had transpired earlier had already come to an end.
Only the owls remained, blinking at the two intruders in mild curiosity. The silver glow of Ariana’s form reflected in their keen eyes, making her presence seem all the more otherworldly.
“I seem to recall you saying Albus became the Headmaster of Hogwarts,” Ariana mused. “But surely he wouldn’t choose to live in a tower full of owls?”
She glanced around at the perches, unimpressed. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, but it doesn’t exactly command authority, does it?”
“…”
Ian knew that Ariana lacked a great deal of common sense when it came to the everyday wizarding world. It hadn’t been particularly noticeable in the Twilight Realm, but here, in the real world, the gaps in her understanding became much clearer.
Well.
That, and the fact that he’d told her they were going to find Dumbledore, yet had brought her to the Owlery in the dead of night instead.
“Your brothers were brawling here earlier,” Ian recalled, thinking back to what he had witnessed. It was probably around the time he’d crawled out of the dungeons and stumbled into the Room of Requirement.
That felt like ages ago now.
Since then, he’d seen the Weasley twins caught sneaking about, overheard Snape and the traitorous Quirrell whispering in the shadows, and even discovered the entrance to a hidden passageway in the disused second-floor bathroom. Several hours had passed. By now, not only should the altercation between the two Dumbledores have ended, but even the heated tempers of young men in their twenties would have cooled considerably.
“I’ll have a look.”
Ian checked Marauder’s Map, but Dumbledore’s name was nowhere to be found. Grindelwald, on the other hand, listed under his assumed name, Gilderoy Lockhart, was still in his office. Ian could see the little dot labeled “Lockhart” pacing back and forth, a sign that the Dark Arts professor was still awake.
Seeking Grindelwald’s help was an option.
However.
Dumbledore was undoubtedly the better choice. Ian had glimpsed fragments of the old man’s memories, and even those brief flashes had revealed an obsession with time, life, and death far beyond the comprehension of most wizards.
Grindelwald’s studies had always taken a different direction. And more importantly, approaching him would mean keeping certain things concealed— particularly everything related to the Twilight Realm.
After all, Ian had kept that secret from the Dark Arts professor thus far, and explaining his current predicament without mentioning it would require a level of deception he wasn’t keen on attempting.
“I think he might have gone back to Hogsmeade with Aberforth?” Ian mused aloud.
His choice of words wasn’t exactly conventional, but as Ariana’s friend— and, if he rounded up the numbers a little, an acquaintance of Albus himself— he figured it wasn’t too much of a stretch.
“Hogsmeade?” Ariana tilted her head in curiosity, floating idly in midair.
“Yeah. Aberforth usually lives there… Let’s see… There are a few secret passages that lead directly to the village.”
Ian scanned Marauder’s Map again, confirming what he already knew. Several hidden routes connected Hogwarts to Hogsmeade, the most famous being the passage beneath the Whomping Willow.
But there was another way.
The hunchbacked, one-eyed witch statue concealed a tunnel leading straight to Honeydukes. Harry Potter had used it countless times when sneaking out of the castle.
It was located in the third-floor corridor.
To enter, one had to tap the statue with a wand and say, “Dissendium,” which would cause the witch’s back to open, revealing a stone slide that led down into the passageway.
“The third floor is closest, but I think I should check somewhere else first,” Ian said, folding the Marauder’s Map and tucking it away.
“You’re awfully busy tonight…” Ariana remarked. She still hadn’t fully grasped Ian’s situation, but rather than pressing him about her brothers, she simply tilted her head and asked, “Do you need help?”
She had always been the sort to put others first.
“Not for now… I need to end the Patronus Charm first. I’ll call you up later, all right?” Ian suggested.
Ariana nodded, and as he lowered his wand, the silver glow that had illuminated the Owlery began to fade.
Now, he had to make his way down from the eighth floor. The Weasley twins were still below, no doubt enduring whatever punishment Filch had concocted for their latest mischief.
“This thing keeps flashing; it’s really annoying.” Ian scowled at the Ouroboros mark on his hand, which showed no sign of fading.
“If this is some kind of test, it should at least give me a hint.”
Ian set off toward the dungeons. As the old saying went, to break a curse, one had to find its source. The Ouroboros mark had first appeared beneath the castle, and if he wanted answers, that was where he needed to go.
Meanwhile, in the second-floor girls’ lavatory—
“It’s you! You murderer!”
Myrtle had just seen Ian speak Parseltongue. She had finally dared to peek her head out of the toilet, only to see him barging into her “private ghost room” once again.
“Plop!”
With a startled shriek, she dived straight back into the water. Ian barely spared her a glance. He strode to the sink adorned with the Ouroboros carving and began his investigation.
“It wasn’t left here. It must have been placed on me in the dungeon,” He muttered, frowning. No trace of active magic lingered around the sink—though that could simply be due to his own limited skills.
“Open!”
Speaking Parseltongue, he watched as the ornate faucet twisted. A grinding noise echoed through the chamber, gears shifting unseen. Within moments, the entire sink began to descend, revealing a familiar dark passageway.
Ian took a deep breath and plunged into the tunnel, his wand light illuminating the inky blackness ahead. He retraced the long, winding path that had first led him to Salazar Slytherin’s domain.
The air here felt heavier than before, thick with something ancient and watching. The torches that lined the rocky walls burned deep red, an eerie contrast to the blue flames that had once lit his way.
“Something’s changed…”
At the tunnel’s end, Ian stepped into the vast dungeon chamber, where the towering statues of Slytherin and Hufflepuff loomed over him. But now, at the chamber’s center, the bleached remains of a great western dragon sprawled across the stone floor.
“Could it be that Slytherin’s idea of humor involves pranking future students?” Ian muttered, raising his wand toward the statues.
“Move, stone pedestal!”
It was worth a shot. Whether due to luck, intuition, or magic, the statues began to shift, grinding back into place against the stone walls.
As the chamber trembled with their movement, the red candle flames flickered violently, momentarily brightening the dungeon before plunging it into shadow.
Then—
“Thank Merlin, finally! Someone is here… Little wizard, where is this place?”
A disheveled man suddenly stumbled forward from within the dragon’s skeletal remains.
Ian’s breath hitched, and he instinctively pointed his wand at the figure. A flash of green light flickered at its tip.
The stranger flinched. “Mr. Prince! You wouldn’t hex your own professor, would you?”
Ian’s grip tightened.
“Don’t be nervous, Mr. Prince. We’ve met before, haven’t we? Just a few days ago, I believe— though, hold on, you’ve grown taller, haven’t you? Or was it last month? No… last year?”
The man muttered to himself, looking utterly bewildered.
Ian wasn’t sure whether to lower his wand— or cast a stunning spell on the spot.
Ian’s hand continues to tremble.
“This… this can’t be real…”
His voice wavered even more than his grip on his wand—not out of fear or inexperience, but because he simply couldn’t suppress the overwhelming surge of emotions flooding through him.
“Expelliarmus!”
A jet of scarlet light burst from Ian’s wand. The man, who had been reaching for something at his waist, was blasted backward, his wand flying from his grasp as he crashed against the massive dragon skeleton.
“Urgh—cough, cough!” The man groaned, his body curling slightly as he coughed violently. “I wasn’t trying to attack you! I just needed to extract my memories! You must see how jumbled they are right now—”
His voice was hoarse, and his dazed eyes darted around as if grasping for something just out of reach.
“This isn’t possible…” Ian muttered, his wand lowering ever so slightly. His entire body felt stiff, as though his magic itself was resisting the reality before him.
“I should be the one saying that…” The man murmured, rubbing his chest where he had been hit. He looked up at Ian, his expression a mix of bewilderment and something else— something unnervingly close to awe.
“The sheer power of your magic… it’s just as impossible…”
Ian barely heard him. He took a slow, hesitant step forward, his wide eyes locked onto the man before him. His voice came in a whisper, thick with disbelief:
“Professor Ronnie Ehrlich… you shouldn’t be alive.”
The words hung in the air like a specter.
It was no wonder Ian’s emotions were in turmoil.
Because this— this was a man who had died. A man whose existence had been erased by time. And yet, here he stood, flesh and blood, speaking, breathing— and more importantly, alive.
Ian’s gaze flickered toward the towering stone statue embedded in the dungeon wall. The flickering green light in its eyes pulsed faintly, watching. Waiting.
Salazar Slytherin.
Ian barely breathed the name. His throat tightened as the realization struck him, sinking like cold iron into his bones.
A time loop.
No— this was more than just a mere loop in time.
This was magic beyond reason, beyond anything Ian had ever encountered.
A thousand years ago, Salazar Slytherin had done more than experiment with time. He had defied it.
And now, deep within the very foundations of Hogwarts, his legacy had reached across centuries—pulling back what should have been lost forever.
A resurrection. A miracle. A warning.
(End of Chapter)
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