Dust motes drifted through late afternoon sunlight, suspended in golden beams that slanted between towering shelves. Somewhere above, a clock ticked. Nearby, a quill scratched against parchment in uneven rhythms.

You’d been searching for something to read. Something to distract yourself from the strange tension that had been building all week—the feeling that something was about to happen.

Your fingers brushed against a book you didn’t recognize.

It was old. Ancient, even. Bound in something that felt less like leather and more like skin—warm, almost, as though it had been alive once. No title on the spine. No library markings. Just a single symbol embossed on the cover: a spiral, twisting inward, narrowing toward nothing.

You shouldn’t have opened it.

The moment your fingers touched the clasp, the air changed. Pressure built behind your ears. The distant clock stopped ticking. The scratching quill fell silent.

And then—

The world lurched.

Your stomach dropped. The floor vanished beneath your feet. Colors streaked past—blinding, disorienting, wrong—and for a single endless moment, you weren’t anywhere at all.

When your knees hit stone, it was cold. Hard. Real.

You were on your hands and knees in a corridor that looked exactly like every corridor in Hogwarts—except it wasn’t.

The torches were different. The stones felt older. The air smelled faintly of something burning, and in the distance, someone was laughing.

A shadow fell over you.