Location: Hogwarts, Ravenclaw Tower – Private Study Loft
Time: September 27, 3:36 AM
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Dara Patil didn't sleep much anymore.
She told her friends it was just the pressure of being both a fourth-year and an Unspeakable-in-Training — but in truth, it was the dreams.
She kept seeing a door with no frame, floating in a field of glass. She would walk through it, and find herself bleeding threads from her fingertips, each one glowing and connected to other people she didn't recognize.
And always, in the dream, someone was cutting the threads — whispering, "Not this time."
Tonight, she woke up with one of those threads wrapped around her hand — literally.
A shimmering silver cord, as thin as hair, glowing faintly in the dark. It vanished the moment she sat up, like it had only existed when her heart was still half in sleep.
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Dara didn't scream.
She didn't panic.
She reached under her bed, unlocked her spell-locked case, and retrieved the shard.
It was the one relic she'd smuggled out of the Department — not as theft, but as a test. Something they had told her to study quietly during her Hogwarts term. Officially, it was "non-responsive." Just a broken piece of mirrored crystal found buried deep beneath the Ministry archives.
But Dara knew it was more than that.
Because sometimes — when she was touching it — she could hear her mother's voice, even though her mother had been dead for five years.
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She held the shard in her palm now. It was cool, not cold. Smooth, except for the jagged edge at the top, where it had clearly broken off from a larger piece. It shimmered faintly when she whispered to it.
"Show me the threads."
The shard didn't glow.
But her hand did.
Three thin silver filaments shimmered into view, just for a second — like glowing veins crawling up from the crystal:
• One pulsed weakly, heading northwest — toward the Slytherin wing.
• Another throbbed, pulling downward, toward the lake.
• The last… pointed straight up. Into the air above the tower. Into the stars.
And then they faded.
Dara exhaled, shaking.
"You're not just a shard," she whispered. "You're a map."
She lifted it up again and caught a glimpse of her reflection in its mirrored edge — only… it wasn't her.
It was a girl with white eyes and a crown of thread, bleeding light from her hands.
⸻
The shard cracked in her hand.
Not fully — just a fracture.
But now, something had woken up inside it.
A whisper echoed in the study loft — not in sound, but in pressure. It wasn't from the shard.
It came from the school.
From the foundations.
From the lake.
"The Circle will rise," it said.
"Unless the Threadbearer cuts the weave."
Dara dropped the shard.
It didn't fall.
It floated.