Hogwarts Reimagined

Distance vision wasn’t Rhiannon’s strong suit, but as one of the shorter students she’d been placed near the front of the Hufflepuff column and didn’t have to peer past taller students to see that yes, indeed, the hawk-profiled young man with the shaven-sided ponytail, his red robes edged with silver, standing just a few paces behind the white-robed headmaster was indeed Viktor Krum, Bulgarian Seeker. It made some sense, Rhiannon supposed with a shrug – she’d heard Durmstrang was on the Black Sea which bordered Bulgaria, among numerous other countries – but she hadn’t quite expected an international Quidditch player to still be attending school.

Still, it mattered little. As Rhiannon leaned over to reply, she was dissuaded by a hideous screeching cacophony that rose from the lake, rivalling the whirlpool’s roar for volume but far higher in pitch, sending Rhiannon reeling again and covering her ears in pain. She could barely see, the din was so disorienting, but she could just make out what looked like an enormous grey-green wave that rose out of the lake and moved slowly, deliberately toward the shore. No – not a wave, Rhiannon corrected herself, squinting at the lake – a great line of people of some kind moving across the lake-surface towards the docks. They appeared to be the source of the terrible cacophony, wielding their voices like weapons directed at the Durmstrang and Hogwarts groups alike.
While Rhiannon had no idea what the lake-people were, it seemed Minerva did, and she motioned for the Durmstrang students and faculty to move back, along with the Hogwarts body, while she turned to face the oncoming line with her arms spread wide to show she was unarmed. Rhiannon couldn’t hear what she said, but evidently she said something, because the cacophonous din eased and the lake-people lowered their weapons – a mix of spears, staves, tridents and some that looked more like shepherd’s crooks – into more casual positions. They hovered on the water’s surface by some strange magic of their own, their skin a mixture of brown, black, green, blue and even dull purple, muted tones all touched with an iridescence like mother of pearl, and gills pulsed beneath each one’s jaw. How they were breathing air, Rhiannon did not know, but this was her first real introduction to a wholly non-human culture and it fascinated her.

“Merfolk of Loch Dubh,” Minerva addressed the throng – and immediately Rhiannon understood what was going on. She hadn’t known there was a merfolk civilisation in the Black Lake, but if there was, they were angry – a sudden whirlpool, especially one as large as this had been – must have wreaked havoc underwater. “I was given no warning of this event, only that our visitors would be arriving here. Had I known-” and here she glared at the Durmstrang Headmaster, before continuing in her even-toned address. “Had I known, I would have insisted they travel in a more considerate manner. I imagine you are here because of the underwater damage. How can we help to rectify the situation?”

One merperson, taller than the others with skin of a deep, silvery night-fern green, steely-coloured hair – at least it looked to be hair, but it might have been fins, done in braids or locs of some kind; and wearing a necklace that looked to be made of teeth that marked them out from their companions, bowed their head stiffly to Minerva in what appeared to be a sign of grudging respect. “I am Speaker Talori. The water-storm, it tore up homes. Many are injured, our flocks dispersed or dead, our gardens destroyed. As things stand, we have no sources of food and no shelter, let alone treatment for our wounded. Wizards did this – you should help us fix it.” they replied, their voice low-pitched and gravelly with an accent somewhat similar to a very old form of Scottish as they spoke, as well-spoken in English as Minerva was. An open mouth revealed pointed teeth like a shark’s, which made their mastery of English all the more impressive.

“I can only imagine the damage the maelstrom caused, and you are right – wizards caused it. Durmstrang faculty, you’re there in black, yes? Wonderful. Step forward, all of you. Along with my colleagues, you will be setting up a treatment camp on the shore and in the shallows for the merfolk injured by your travel. Argus, if you could take a message to the kitchen elves for extra food, we can set up a makeshift kitchen here on the docks so that Speaker Talori’s people are fed tonight. Tomorrow and onwards, we will go into the lake and work alongside the merfolk to rebuild their homes, re-plant their fields and re-gather their flocks. Clear?” Minerva told the Durmstrang staff firmly. They bristled and grumbled amongst themselves, but there was no arguing with Minerva McGonagall, and it was a reasonable solution – they had wands that allowed them fine control of a wide range of magic, they could fix what they had damaged in a matter of days.

“This is a fair solution, provided you keep your word... you must understand our caution, but merfolk concerns have had little weight at Hogwarts in previous years,” Talori replied gravely. They turned back to their people and conferred with two other merfolk, one whose skin was so deep a purple as to be almost black and the other a pale greyish-green. Their clothes were simple but clearly well-made and sturdy, cloth of fibres stripped from some kind of lake plant woven into loose-fitting shirts held close to the skin by straps that looked to be made of something like leather but perhaps made from cured plants rather than animal hide, and their weapons clearly had origins as tools rather than being designed for fighting, well-worn with use. Their owners were well-muscled, but even with their wholly unfamiliar body language Rhiannon got the impression that these were farmers, not fighters. And the whirlpool had just torn up their livelihoods.

The merfolk muttered amongst themselves, and at last Talori turned away from the huddle to address the rest of their people and Minerva at once, their hand clasped with that of the purple-black-skinned merperson who, by their body language, Rhiannon guessed might be Talori’s partner. “I will leave my trusted Keeper Muirgheal here with you and your people to coordinate matters of emergency stations while I and my warriors gather the weak and wounded. She is my equal, and my people will defer to her as they do me – and protect her the same.” Talori told Minerva at last, gesturing with their clasped hand – evidently Keeper Muirgheal was their purple-skinned partner. With a last stiff nod to Minerva and the staff of both Hogwarts and Durmstrang, Talori released their partner’s hand and the two touched noses in an affectionate way, before they and their contingent of followers turned and made their way into deeper water, slowly descending by way of their magic until they were deep enough to dive, the last sight of them being a scattered flash of iridescent tail fins in the last rays of sunlight.

Minerva sighed gustily, and gestured for Professors Flitwick and Tonks, along with about half of the Durmstrang faculty to head off along the shoreline towards a low, sloping pebbled bank that would be easy to bring the injured merfolk up on, while the purple-skinned Keeper followed them along the shoreline at a distance, speaking to them in a similar accent to Talori though too distant for Rhiannon to hear. The Durmstrang Headmaster, now that the tense engagement had concluded, turned to Minerva, his face red and posture furious. “You may be principal of the host school, but you can’t simply – assign my staff as you see fit!” Headmaster Karkaroff snapped angrily.

Minerva held up a hand for silence, and whatever further protest Karkaroff meant to make was cut short. “You are guests here, at my school and in this country. Lochs safe from human encroachment are already rare, and even fewer are still suitable for merfolk habitation. Speaker Talori’s people are one of very few groups of Scottish freshwater merfolk that still live, and I take our treaty with them seriously. You told us where you would arrive, but not in what manner, and the manner you chose was profoundly irresponsible and damaging to an entire hidden town of people. Since you caused this damage, your people will help remedy it – unless you would prefer I report you to the International Confederation of Wizards for improper communication of travel plans, and damage done to the environment of your hosts including harm to a community under their protection. Clear?” she told him coldly. Rhiannon had heard that tone before, levelled on Dumbledore and the Minister for Magic alike. Karkaroff had the strength of will of neither, and he quailed under Minerva’s frosty glare, slinking back into place at the head of the remaining Durmstrang staff members.

“With that settled,” Minerva continued, dusting off her robes and turning to face the Hogwarts students, “we are going to take ourselves a way back up the hill and assemble outside the castle gates to await our guests from Beauxbatons. Everyone, please take the time to clean yourselves up and straighten your uniforms, ask your older housemates if you’re not sure of the right spells.” she instructed them all, and flapped her hands at the student body in a shooing sort of motion, indicating for them all to move off in the direction she’d indicated.

The Durmstrang students stood together in a stiff sort of huddle, marked out from the Hogwarts crowd as much by their comparative cleanliness as by their red uniforms, and Minerva clearly realised she’d neglected to tell them where to stand. “Ah – Durmstrang students, form up behind our Hogwarts students there on the hill in front of the castle,” she added, and the red-robed students shuffled off along with the Hogwarts ones, red robes intermingling among the black. Rhiannon sniffed and wrinkled her nose – she thought she could smell other nonhumans, but the environment was such a mess of new smells, her nose was assailed with the salt reek off the Durmstrang students’ clothes, that she couldn’t pick out anyone in particular. And that set her on edge, leaving her itchy and irritable as she limped up the hill with her yellow-and-black-robed housemates.

Someone touched Rhiannon’s hand, and she startled, before realising it was only Lavender. “Hey, easy, it’s just me,” Lavender reassured her softly. “Let me clean you up, then can you get the muck off the back of my robes? I can’t reach.”

Rhiannon shivered and nodded, hugging her robes close to protect from the chill wind blowing off the lake. Normally she’d be resistant to the cold, werewolves ran hotter than humans did, but she was soaked and the wind cut her right to the skin. Lavender drew her pale firwood wand and surrounded them both with a whirling curtain of warm air that dried them in moments. Rhiannon’s hair was now a mess, of course, and Lavender sighed and approached with her wand raised. “Exporrigo,” she murmured, running her wand gently across the curly mess that was Rhiannon’s hair. Rhiannon sighed and closed her eyes, enjoying the sensation of Lavender’s gentle fingers in her hair. It wasn’t romantic, not the way it was with Hermione or Luna, but she was a pack creature and she enjoyed the mutual grooming aspect of it, it was comforting. Grounding.

Some time later, when the Hogwarts student body had mostly cleaned themselves up and Rhiannon’s hair was free of the smell of dog, Headmaster Minerva coughed and motioned for them to form back up into their ordered rows, with Durmstrang forming another behind them. Just distantly, on the very edge of her dulled hearing, Rhiannon caught wind of a strange thrumming sound. Not an approaching hurricane like the sound of the whirlpool, this was a more natural sound – though Rhiannon couldn’t quite pick out what it was.

“What is that, a bird?” Harry Pace, who was standing a row behind Rhiannon, asked, and pointed up over her shoulder to where a black speck was barely visible against the rapidly darkening sky.

Rhiannon snorted. “Yeah, no – giant avifauna are functionally extinct, there’s no way they’d be allowed to use them for transport,” she replied drily. But Harry was half-right, she thought – that sound was wingbeats, just made by something larger than Rhiannon had ever encountered in person.

“Looks more like a house,” Padma mused, as the speck drew closer, and in all honesty Rhiannon envied her friend’s distance vision because all she could see was a smudge.

“Whatever it is, the Mac’ll have our hides if we’re all out of line again,” Sapphire Blackhorn commented. She was one of Rhiannon’s roommates that she didn’t know quite so well, heavy-set and soft-spoken despite being fairly tall for fourteen, and it seemed her fear of being punished by the Headmaster had overridden her shyness for a moment, long enough for her to speak up.

Cedric, several rows behind them, coughed and waited for their attention. “Sapphire’s got a point – Beauxbatons have a reputation for being a little particular about etiquette, so get back in your lines and hush, we can chat all we like at the feast after,” he ordered them. It was a testament to Hufflepuff House’s respect of him that they did actually fall silent, and shuffled back into their neat lines with eyes fixed on the sky as the bird-house-smudge, whatever it was, drew nearer in the twilight.

The first thing Rhiannon recognised after the wingbeats, being too shortsighted to make out the nature of it by shape, was a smell, one she was intimately familiar with as it clung to the heavy, scratchy blankets she’d long used for comfort. Horse. Magical, odd somehow, but the smell was certainly equine in nature. Now, Rhiannon could guess what the smudge was, and why Padma had thought it could be a house – it was something, maybe a carriage, drawn by winged horses. Probably Abraxans, being the largest they’d be most able to provide power for something that housed a hundred students within.

As the Beauxbatons unit drew closer, Rhiannon could now see that she was right. The ‘house-thing’ was indeed a carriage, enormous, powder-blue with gold trimmings and presumably magically extended on the inside as the Weasleys’ tents at the Quidditch World Cup had been. It was drawn by a great team of winged horses – Abraxans by the size, just as Rhiannon had guessed; harnessed in seven rows of three horses each. Several were golden with pale manes and tails, as was the perfect ideal for breeders of the species, but many were pale cream with pink skin, red and orange chestnuts or even patched and spotted with white. A few were bay, one was black, there were several greys – evidently they had been chosen for their strength, rather to match as was more traditional. Rhiannon wasn’t particularly good with prey animals, especially those so large as Abraxans, but she had some experience with them and it wasn’t hard to see the beauty in the great winged beasts, powerful muscles rippling under their sleek coats, batlike, leathery wings flexing and arching as they stooped in the sky and prepared to land.

And land they did, in a thunder of hooves that shook the hillside and sent dust and clods of grass flying. The carriage must have been supported by magic to touch down behind them, but magic was still best operated within the bounds of physics and the horses took around a hundred metres or so to slow safely with the carriage bound behind them. When they halted, the edge of the carriage was roughly level with the Hogwarts student body with the train of horses assembled in a line out before them, all stamping and shaking their heads and flicking their tails impatiently.

The carriage door creaked open and from it emerged a woman in stately charcoal high-collared robes embroidered in a colour only shades lighter than the base fabric so they glistened in the fading light, who, as she unfolded herself to her full height, stood taller even than Hagrid. Against her formally colourless garb, the unfamiliar woman’s hair glowed a deep rich auburn and her eyes, set under stern brows, were a clever dark brown. This could only be the Headmistress of Beauxbatons, and as far as first impressions went, this woman commanded a lot more attention than Headmaster Karkaroff had. Her students were dressed neatly in a much more formal, old-fashioned uniform than the Hogwarts robes, and Rhiannon felt distinctly scruffy as they filed out of the carriage and formed a neat set of rows behind their principal.

“Welcome, Headmistress Maxime,” Minerva greeted the tall woman with a much more genuine bow than she had afforded Karkaroff, stepping forward for a slightly mismatched handshake. “For all my misgivings about this tournament, I am delighted to share our school with our overseas magical kin. I hope that Beauxbatons in particular will help guide our school into a new age of acceptance and diversity.”

The Beauxbatons Headmistress, Maxime as she had been called, smiled a crooked smile and bowed politely over their clasped hands. “Laying it on a little thick, Minerva?” Rhiannon heard her whisper, too low to be heard by a regular human, and she snickered to herself.

“Oh, hush, it might be a bit thick but it’s a fair point, you are the only one of our three schools with inclusive policies,” Minerva whispered back, again inaudible to anyone with ordinary hearing, before she straightened up and gestured expansively to the students of all three schools. “Now, I’m sure you’re all sick of standing around out here, it’s getting dark so why don’t you all get on inside for the feast. Students from Durmstrang, Beauxbatons, I assume your teachers have informed you prior which Hogwarts house you will be staying with for your time here. We’ve made room for you at the five house tables, and I expect our students to make you welcome – on pain of detention.” she announced, followed by a little ripple of laughter at her wry joke. The Hogwarts students were all well aware of Headmaster McGonagall’s expectations, and the punishments for falling short of them – which would be made all the more embarrassing by the fact that they were really very simple and reasonable expectations.

Minerva adjusted her grip on her wand and loosed a fluttering yellow orb of light that sailed across the students’ heads towards the castle, and from behind them there was a thunderous grinding sound as the great entrance doors creaked open under the power of the Headmaster’s spell. In a movement that had been drilled into them for a solid week, the Hogwarts students all turned as one to face the castle and split down the middle of the Miremark column, creating a neat pathway that their guests could walk through once the Durmstrang students had entered.

Evidently Minerva gave them some sort of signal, for the red-clad Durmstrang teenagers turned and filed into the castle – not half as neatly as the Hogwarts students’ lines, but Rhiannon supposed they hadn’t been drilled in it. She wondered why she cared about that sort of petty one-upmanship and decided it was probably because with their scruffy uniforms, it was nice that they had something over the other schools. She liked her pack to be strong – and while she didn’t normally think of the whole school as her pack, they were a little that way in this particular instance.

Now that the Beauxbatons students had arrived and everyone was drying out, Rhiannon couldn’t help at least trying to search for other nonhumans. She inhaled deeply, and sneezed almost immediately, then wrinkled her nose in irritation. The perfume Lavender had used to conceal her wet dog smell also foiled her senses – there might be other nonhumans out there, she thought she could catch a hint of animalian smells, but the pleasant fruit-and-musk scent thoroughly prevented her from finding anything more specific. Perhaps that had been Lavender’s intention, she thought grumpily – she couldn’t growl at any nonhumans she couldn’t find, and Lavender must have known she wouldn’t risk growling on suspicion. No, Rhiannon decided with a sigh as she watched the Beauxbatons students file inside in neat lines, she’d just have to wait and see who ended up in her dormitory room and sort things out from there. She was fourteen, not four. She’d resisted the silly urges to urinate on the walls thus far, however much she felt like a wolf she had to behave like a person, and that meant smiles, not growling. New people were always scary, she reminded herself, but most of them were potential new friends. Why should she view other nonhumans any differently?