Severus Snape ended the lecture like a blade falling.
“Two students per cauldron. You may begin.”
His voice slid through the dungeon air, low and venomous.
The class scattered into pairs.
Elias gave Hermione a small nod—she found a Gryffindor girl he didn’t recognise—and set up his station alone.
Elias ran the steps through his head one last time.
He wasn’t a prodigy yet, not even close, but he could brew a simple boil-cure without embarrassing himself.
Probably.
Snape moved through the room in billowing black, a storm front looking for something to strike.
Wherever he stopped, a student’s hand would shake.
Ingredients would be measured wrong.
A quiet, surgical insult would follow, then a flawless demonstration that made everyone feel worse.
That pressure sent panic rippling through the cauldrons.
Younger students rushed, fumbling steps they had only just memorised, and the faster they went, the more they botched.
Snape’s commentary never let up.
“I always considered trolls the apex of intellect, Mr. Longbottom. I may need to reconsider.”
“Surely even you can recall step one, Crabbe. I said step one.”
“Is this your original creation, Miss Brown? You should submit it for peer review. The laughing would do the faculty some good.”
“The single most incompetent class I have ever had the misfortune to teach.”
He prowled another lap, sighed as if the universe had personally tired him, and then stopped behind Elias.
Silence.
Snape just stood there, watching him work.
When he finally spoke, his tone was clinical.
“Observe Sorenson’s handling of the slugs. Textbook. Two points to Slytherin.”
Elias kept his face still.
“Note the timing of his ingredient additions. Almost precise. Another two points.”
The class didn’t dare turn around.
Elias felt the weight of their attention regardless.
His skin prickled.
This wasn’t feedback—this was performance art, and he was the unwilling prop.
Still, his hands stayed steady.
The potion came together the way it was supposed to.
He’d half expected Snape to be insulted if he failed; the man seemed to have invested something personal in this particular cauldron.
Snape leaned in close, inspecting the colour, the sheen.
“That,” he said, quieter now, “is a correct aroma. The appropriate shade. Perfectly complete.” A pause.
“Slytherin gains—”
A hiss cut him off.
Then a shriek.
Neville Longbottom’s cauldron had collapsed in on itself like a stepped-on can.
Potion slopped across the stone floor, hissing and spitting green smoke.
Seamus Finnigan hopped onto a stool, a fresh hole smoking through his shoe, his big toe twitching bare.
The liquid soaked through his robes before anyone could move, and the boils erupted almost instantly—angry red welts crawling up his neck and arms.
He screamed.
The potion had done the exact opposite of what it was meant to do.
“Idiot!” Snape’s roar cracked through the room.
He flicked his wand and the spilled mess vanished, but the damage was already crawling across Neville’s skin.
Elias didn’t think.
He cast a cooling charm on his own cauldron, then lifted it and crossed the room in three strides.
Snape was mid-sentence, tormenting Harry about something that didn’t matter, when Elias upended the entire contents over Neville’s head.
The liquid splashed, and for one frozen moment, no one breathed.
Then the boils began to shrink.
The redness faded from an aggressive crimson to a dull pink.
Neville’s screams died into shaky gasps.
Snape turned.
His expression flickered—suspicion first, as if he expected sabotage, then recognition.
He saw who had moved.
His voice shifted so smoothly the class might have imagined the edge that had been there a moment before.
“Elias Sorenson. Promptly assisting a less capable classmate.” His lip curled faintly.
“Ten points to Slytherin.”
The room exhaled.
Snape swept away as if nothing had happened.
When the lesson ended, he didn’t hold Elias back.
No quiet praise, no pointed conversation—just dismissal.
Elias packed up his things, oddly relieved.
If he didn’t know better, he might suspect the professor was trying to smother him with favouritism.
He did know better.
His potions were still painfully beginner-level.
Raw talent hadn’t yet hardened into skill.
Hermione caught up with him outside.
“Snape’s favouritism is shameless,” she said, voice hot.
“He openly favours you and Harry!”
“Harry would weep to hear you put it like that.” Elias slung his bag higher.
“And me, I’m just that good.”
Hermione made a small, indignant noise, but she didn’t argue the point.
Her frustration was for the principle of it.
“If he keeps deducting points like this, Gryffindor will never win the House Cup. We haven’t won in seven years!”
“You can’t blame Severus Snape for everything,” Elias said.
He didn’t feel particularly defensive of the man, but the logic held.
“If the work is done properly, he has no excuse to take points.”
“So I should tell Harry to study more. Answer Snape’s questions correctly. Maybe then Gryffindor can earn some back.”
Elias gave her a look.
He didn’t say what he was thinking: that Snape would simply keep asking Harry questions until he found one the boy got wrong. New chapters come out on g.com first.
That felt more like the professor’s style.
The rest of the first week settled into a rhythm.
Classes filled his days.
Theory and practicals stacked onto each other, and by Friday, his brain felt pleasantly full.
Draco hadn’t tried anything.
Not a single hex, not an ominous whisper.
In the dormitory, he seemed to actively avoid Elias, which was honestly an improvement.
It nudged Elias’s opinion of the boy upward a few notches.
Pure-blood arrogance aside, maybe Draco wasn’t a lost cause.
His Seven Deadly Sins stats shimmered in the corner of his awareness, always there, always watching.
He pulled up the week’s summary.
ORIGINAL SIN STATUS
Pride [90/120]
Wrath [65/120]
Sloth [109/120]
Greed [73/120]
Envy [35/120]
Gluttony [45/120]
Lust [90/120]
Lust had climbed the most.
He couldn’t honestly control that.
Spending years in the mundane world and then walking into this one, with magic crackling under his skin and possibility humming in the air—the body had its own reactions.
Noted.
Greed crept higher too, a slow, steady hunger.
Every page he turned made his fingers itch for the next.
[Greed +1].
The thirst for magic wasn’t a gentle thing.
Sloth alone had dipped.
Regular sleep and focused study, however obsessive, counted as diligence.
Congratulations.
A single step back from the brink.
[Sloth -1].
He could almost laugh at the notification.
Almost.
Still, a thought coiled at the back of his mind, persistent and uncomfortable.
Snape’s behaviour—the points, the attention—was undeniably helpful.
But the way he went about it, the public spectacle, the way it rankled everyone else… Was that really just coincidence?
The man seemed to be prodding the students around Elias on purpose, testing the waters with a stick.
Elias closed his status window and stared at the ceiling of the Slytherin common room.
It bore watching.