By the time Harry reached the uppermost levels of the tower, evening had begun settling fully across the estate.
The dying sunlight filtering through shattered windows painted the ruins in deep gold and shadow while the lake below darkened steadily beneath the approaching night.
Harry’s nerves tightened with every passing minute because the spirits return after dark.
Harry cautiously guided the Nimbus upward through the broken remains of the tower’s final staircase shaft until he finally reached the highest surviving floor.
The room had once been large, perhaps a study or an observatory, but now only fragments of it remained.
Collapsed walls opened directly toward the darkening sky while old furniture lay rotted beyond recognition beneath layers of dust and ivy.
Wind whispered softly through broken stone arches, carrying the distant sound of water from the lake far below.
Harry scanned the room carefully.
Nothing.
No clues.
No hidden ritual chambers.
No cursed artifacts dramatically waiting atop pedestals.
Harry felt mildly disappointed.
After all that buildup, he had expected at least one ominously glowing object.
Then the last traces of sunlight slipped beneath the horizon, and the atmosphere changed immediately.
Harry felt it before he fully understood it.
The air grew heavier, colder, as though invisible water were slowly flooding the ruins and pressing against everything around him.
Then a pale light appeared near the far side of the chamber.
Harry froze instantly.
The light floated silently above the cracked floor, small at first, no larger than a candle flame.
Slowly it brightened, silver-blue and soft, casting long ghostly reflections against the ruined stone walls.
The glow slowly began to take shape.
A woman emerged from the light.
Young.
Beautiful.
Dead.
Harry’s breath caught in his throat.
She looked perhaps nineteen years old, dressed in the faint translucent remains of medieval noble clothing.
Long pale hair flowed weightlessly around her while soft blue light shimmered beneath translucent skin.
At first glance, she resembled an ordinary ghost,but then she smiled and every instinct Harry possessed screamed danger.
Because something about her was wrong.
Not visibly monstrous but wrong all the same.
She smiled too calmly, too politely, like someone pretending very hard to be sane while standing one bad day away from murder.
The hairs along the back of Harry’s neck rose instantly.
The woman inclined her head gracefully.
“I am Lady Edith Ashford,” she said softly.
Her voice lingered through the ruined chamber a moment longer than it should have, the echo stretching unnaturally against the cracked stone walls.
Harry swallowed.
“…Harry Potter.”
“What brings you here, young one?”
“I came to uncover the truth behind this tower.”
“A rather dangerous interest for someone so young.”
She drifted closer; she didn’t walk, she glided.
Her pale figure hovered inches above the ruined floor, untouched by dust or broken stone.
Instantly, every muscle in Harry’s body tightened.
For several long moments, silence filled the chamber.
Edith began to speak, quietly and calmly, as though reciting memories she had repeated to herself far too many times.
“Two summers ago, ships arrived from the far east carrying spices, porcelain, silks, and countless marvels unseen in these lands.” Her gaze unfocused slightly.
“But among those wonders came disaster.
The sailors fell ill first.
Then the sickness spread across the kingdom.”
A faint bitterness entered her voice.
“My family possessed ties to… powerful individuals.
Because of that, our lands remained untouched by the so-called Black Death.”
Her eyes darkened.
“Our neighbours were not so fortunate.
At first they merely feared us.
Then they hated us.”
The temperature in the chamber seemed to drop.
“They accused us of consorting with dark powers.
Of bargaining with devils.
Of bringing the plague ourselves while shielding our own blood from it.”
Edith’s expression remained calm, but something underneath it felt terribly fragile.
“When the anger first turned violent, my father brought us here, to this summer tower, believing time would cool their fear.”
A hollow smile touched her lips.
“It did not.
Eventually, someone discovered the rats carried the plague.”
Her voice softened further.
“So the villagers filled boats with thousands of them and sent them drifting toward our shores, hoping we would die slowly as they had.”
The air around her dimmed.
“But hatred is rarely patient.”
She stopped moving entirely.
“So one night…”
Her eyes met Harry’s.
“…the villagers came.”
The shadows in the chamber deepened unnaturally.
“They broke through the gates.
For the briefest moment, genuine warmth crossed her face.
“Father always believed fear could not truly erase a person’s humanity.”
The warmth vanished.
“He was wrong.”
Harry remained perfectly still while she spoke.
“The servants died first.
Then my father.
Then my brothers.
Then everyone else.” Her expression stayed eerily calm.
“I heard them screaming below while the tower shook.”
Edith’s translucent fingers tightened slowly together.
“I had heard stories,” she continued quietly.
“Stories about what angry men do to women when civilization dies for a night.”
Harry felt cold.
Real cold this time.
“So I went to my father’s study,” Edith whispered.
“And I drank poison.”
Genuine sadness crossed her face.
“I thought it would kill me.” The ghost looked toward the ruined windows overlooking the dark lake below.
“It did not.”
The silence stretching afterward felt unbearable.
“It was not poison,” Edith continued eventually.
“Only a powerful sleeping draught.
A paralysis tonic used by healers.” Her voice grew quieter.
“They found me unmoving and cold.
They believed I was already dead.”
Harry already knew how this story ended.
And suddenly, desperately, he wished he did not.
“They left me there,” Edith said softly.
The pale glow surrounding her flickered weakly, like candlelight struggling against unseen wind.
The calm composure in her voice began to crack.
“When I awoke…” She faltered slightly, the words catching painfully in her throat.
“I could still feel everything.
I could hear everything.”
Harry’s fingers tightened unconsciously around his wand.
“I could not move,” she whispered.
“Not even properly breathe.”
Her eyes lowered toward the ruined floor beneath her feet.
“And the rats…”
The temperature in the chamber dropped so sharply Harry saw his own breath mist faintly in the air.
“The rats were hungry.”
Revulsion twisted violently through Harry’s stomach.
Edith smiled then, small and distant, and somehow the expression was far worse than tears.
There was no anger in it.
No hysteria.
Only the exhausted horror of someone who had suffered too long to even fear it anymore.
“I could not move,” she repeated quietly.
“I could not even scream.”
The silence that followed stretched across the ruined chamber and Harry found himself barely breathing.
Then Edith lifted her gaze and looked directly at him.
“And my Cadmus never came.”
Something in her voice changed.
The sorrow remained, but now it carried something else beneath it, something sharp and festering that had clearly been growing for a very long time: bitterness.
“He abandoned me,” she whispered.
“He chose her instead.”
Harry frowned slightly.
“Her?”
“The witch.”
The temperature in the chamber dropped even more, cold rushing through the ruined tower hard enough to make Harry’s fingers ache around his wand.
“His family wanted him to marry one of his own kind,” Edith continued, her voice growing quieter with every word.
“A magical woman.
Not some mundane noble girl pretending she belonged in their world.”
Her form flickered violently for a moment, the pale light around her distorting like disturbed water.
“I waited for him.”
“I waited while the villagers surrounded this tower.
I waited while they broke down the gates.
I waited while I died.”
The wind outside began to howl through the broken windows.
“And still…”
Her expression twisted.
“…he never came.”
Harry felt his broom drift backward slightly as the air pressure in the room shifted into something suffocating and wrong.
“I loved him,” Edith whispered.
For one brief moment she sounded human again.
Young.
Heartbroken.
Then her voice warped into something cold enough to freeze blood.
“And he left me.”
The change began immediately.
Her body stretched unnaturally, limbs lengthening with horrible jerking motions as though reality itself could no longer properly contain her shape.
Shadows spread beneath her translucent skin like ink through water, dark veins blooming across her form while her elegant gown dissolved into ragged darkness drifting around her like smoke.
Her face elongated slightly.
Her eyes collapsed into empty black voids filled with faint silver light.
The chamber reacted with her.
The shadows deepened.
The stones trembled.
Wind screamed through the shattered tower hard enough to rattle loose fragments of ancient masonry.
Harry’s instincts took one look at the situation and immediately concluded that remaining here was perhaps the worst decision he had made in his entire life, which, considering his history, was honestly impressive.
Because Edith Ashford was not a ghost.
She was a wraith.
The realization struck Harry, pulled straight from the books he had spent hours studying.
Wraiths were not natural spirits.
Not truly.
They were horrors born when suffering became too great for death itself to erase.
Souls so consumed by pain, hatred, or despair that they remained shackled to the places where they had died, unable to move on, unable to forget.
Some guarded abandoned homes or ancient graves for centuries.
Others haunted battlefields and ruins, poisoning the land around them with endless rage.
They remembered every moment of agony, every betrayal, every fear, over and over again for centuries without relief.
The emotions never faded.
The pain never dulled.
Time only sharpened it into something monstrous.
And unlike ordinary ghosts, wraiths could hurt people.
Edith floated above the ruined floor now, wrapped in darkness and pale silver fire, her once-beautiful features warped by grief and fury beyond anything human.
Torn shadows drifted from her body like smoke while the air around her twisted with unnatural cold.
When she looked at Harry again, nothing sane remained in her eyes.
Only hatred.
Then Edith screamed.
The sound barely resembled anything human anymore.
It tore through the tower like winter wind mixed with shattering glass, violent enough that the ancient stones trembled beneath it.
Cracks splintered across the walls while loose debris rained from the ceiling above.
Pain exploded through Harry’s ears.
But panic shoved instinct into motion before fear could freeze him.
He snapped his wand upward.
“EXPECTO PATRONUM!”
Silver mist erupted violently from his wand, flooding the chamber in pale light.
For one brief glorious second, hope surged through him.
Then Edith slammed directly through the Patronus.
The incorporeal silver fog struck her like smoke against a hurricane.
The wraith recoiled slightly, hissing in visible pain as the light burned against her shadowed form—
And then her fury intensified tenfold.
“Oh brilliant,” Harry breathed.
“I made her angry.”
Edith lunged.
Harry barely avoided the attack by throwing himself sideways atop the Nimbus.
Her claws tore through the space where his chest had been a heartbeat earlier, leaving black frost spreading across the stone behind him.
His heart hammered wildly.
Spells flew instinctively from his wand.
“Lumos Maxima!”
“Confringo!”
“Diffindo!”
Nothing worked.
The blasting curse passed directly through her distorted body before exploding harmlessly against the wall behind.
Cutting charms dispersed uselessly through smoke-like darkness while light spells only forced Edith backward for moments at best.
She was too fast.
Harry spun the Nimbus sharply as Edith rushed towards him again, her distorted form blurring through the chamber with terrifying speed.
The tower itself reacted violently around them.
Shadows writhed unnaturally along the walls.
The temperature dropped so sharply that frost spread across the broken stone.
And beyond the ruined windows, more lights began appearing outside.
Dozens of them.
The spirits were returning.
Harry’s stomach dropped.
Absolutely not.
No heroic final stands tonight.
He needed to leave.
Now.
Harry accelerated toward the broken outer wall, intending to flee the tower entirely, but Edith shrieked again and darkness erupted outward from her body like living smoke.
The attack struck the Nimbus directly and the broom shattered.
Harry felt the wood explode beneath him before gravity seized his body with brutal force.
Then he was falling.
***
Author’s Note: The Nazgul were my inspiration for her wraith form.