The doors at the far end of the hall yawned open.

A draft curled across the flagstones, snuffing out three candles along the nearest aisle. Heads turned. Conversations faltered, then died.

She walked in like a ghost that had forgotten how to haunt.

Raven hair fell in limp curtains around a face that was all sharp edges and hollow valleys—cheekbones too prominent, jaw too defined, skin carrying the faint, blue-white pallor of something kept too long underground. Her robes hung like borrowed grave clothes, black and ill-fitted. Her eyes were the worst part. They were empty in a way that had nothing to do with sleep, moving across the hall with the mechanical stillness of a portrait that had learned to blink.

She did not look at the Sorting Hat. She did not look at the enchanted ceiling, with its false autumn sky bleeding gold and crimson. She walked with the measured, deliberate tread of someone counting steps between one breath and the next.

Halfway down the aisle, she stopped.

The Slytherin table had gone quiet. Pansy’s goblet slipped from her fingers and shattered against the stone floor, sending a spray of pumpkin juice across Blaise's pristine robes. He did not notice. He was staring. They were all staring—the seven of them frozen in various states of slack-jawed disbelief, their carefully curated masks crumbling like ash.

Daphne's face drained to the color of old parchment. Her sister Astoria made a small, strangled sound, a hand flying to her mouth. Pansy did not breathe. She simply stopped, her eyes wide and fixed and brimming with something that looked like the beginning of a scream.

The air curdled. The candlelight seemed to dim, shadows pooling longer and darker along the edges of the hall.

And still she stood there, the girl they'd buried, and her hollow eyes swept across them with all the warmth of a winter grave. Her gaze passed over Daphne. Over Pansy. Over Astoria. One by one, it raked them like broken glass.

Then it stopped.

On the dark-haired boy at the end of the table—the one with the hollowed cheeks and the silver ring on his middle finger. The one who had stopped mid-sentence, his goblet frozen halfway to his lips.

Beneath her ribs, something rustled. Like a snake uncoiling. Like iron thorns testing the cage of her bones.

She didn't flinch. She couldn't. That was the first thing they'd carved out of her—the flinch.

Her lips parted, and the word came out flat, a stone dropped into still water.

"...Kieran."

The name sat in the silence like a curse.

Around the Slytherin table, the masks of the most powerful heirs in Hogwarts cracked—fractured by the sight of a corpse that had somehow, impossibly, learned to walk.