The Gryffindor first-year dormitory was exactly what Felix had expected and nothing like what he had expected at the same time.
Five four-poster beds lined the walls, each one draped in red and gold hangings, each one with a trunk already sitting at the foot and a small window beside it looking out over the dark grounds.
The room was warm and cluttered in the way that all boys’ dormitories are cluttered, even on the first night, before anyone has had time to make a mess.
It smelled faintly of woodsmoke and clean linen and something Felix couldn’t quite name.
Fred and George had claimed the two beds nearest the window.
Lee Jordan had taken the one next to them.
Jonah Stewey had picked the bed closest to the door, which Felix suspected was a deliberate choice — the one that would let him see who was coming in and out.
Felix took the remaining bed and sat down on the edge, looking around the room while the others unpacked.
Fred had already thrown half his trunk onto the floor and was digging through it with the single-minded determination of someone looking for something specific.
“What are you doing?” George asked.
“Looking for the thing.”
“What thing?”
“The thing I brought.”
“You brought a lot of things.”
“I brought one specific thing.”
“You’ve said that three times now.”
Fred surfaced from the trunk holding a small cloth bag and grinned.
“Found it.”
“What is it?” Lee asked.
Fred opened the bag and tipped it onto the bed.
A handful of small, round objects rolled out — dark and slightly shiny, the size of marbles.
“Every-Flavour Beans,” Fred said.
“But not the ones from the shop. These are the ones from home. Mum makes them.”
“Your mum makes Every-Flavour Beans?” Jonah asked, and there was something almost reverent in his voice.
“She makes a lot of things,” Fred said.
“Mostly things we’re not supposed to have. She confiscates them, and then she makes more, and then she confiscates those too. It’s a whole system.”
Lee reached for one of the beans and inspected it.
“What flavour are they?”
“Unknown,” Fred said.
“That’s the point.”
Jonah looked at the beans, then at Fred, then back at the beans.
“What happens if you get a bad one?”
“You’ll know,” George said.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only answer.”
Jonah took one anyway, and Felix watched as he popped it into his mouth and chewed.
His expression shifted through about four different emotions in the space of two seconds, and then he swallowed and sat down heavily on his bed.
“Liver,” he said.
Fred and George burst out laughing.
Lee was already reaching for another bean.
Felix sat back and watched them, and for the first time since arriving at Hogwarts, he felt the day settle properly into his bones.
Later, when the others were asleep, Felix sat up.
He had brought one of Andros’s notebooks with him — not the largest, not the most important, but the one he had been reading before leaving Falker Manor.
He had tucked it into the bottom of his trunk wrapped in an old cloth, and now he pulled it out and set it on his lap, opening it to the page where he had left off.
He had read most of it already.
The foundations of dueling, footwork, stance, defensive movement, casting angles, the importance of controlling space and reading an opponent’s intentions before they cast.
It was all there, laid out in Andros’s precise handwriting, and Felix had absorbed it the way he absorbed everything — carefully, methodically, without letting it go to waste.
But he had not reached the end.
The end was different.
The last few pages of the notebook were not instructions.
They were something else — something Andros had written not as a lesson but as a record of what he had discovered.
Felix had skimmed them once before leaving home and had not gone back, because he had been focused on the basics and the basics had been enough.
Now, sitting in a dormitory at Hogwarts with four other boys asleep around him, he turned to the end and began to read.
Of all the branches of magic a duelist may study, there is one that stands above the rest, and it is the one most often neglected by those who believe power is measured in the strength of a curse.
Felix stopped.
He read the line again.
Transfiguration.
He kept reading.
It is not a weapon.
It is the raw language of change, and everything in this world is subject to it.
A spell cast at you is not a spell — it is matter and intent, and matter and intent can be rewritten.
Turn fire into water and the flame dies in your hand.
Turn thunder into birds and the storm answers to you.
Turn rain into lightning and the sky becomes your weapon.
Turn a pebble into a lion and watch your enemy learn what it means to be hunted by the ground beneath his feet.
There is no end to what transfiguration can do, because there is no end to what can be changed.
A duelist who masters it does not fight with spells.
He fights with reality itself.
He does not counter his opponent.
He rewrites him.
Most wizards never understand this.
They learn a handful of forms, pass their examinations, and spend the rest of their lives casting the same spells they were taught as children.
They think transfiguration is a school subject.
They are wrong.
It is the only subject that matters.
The mind is the limit.
Nothing else.
— Andros Falker
Felix sat very still.
He read the passage a second time.
Then a third.
Then he closed the notebook and set it on the bed beside him, and looked out the window at the dark shape of the grounds beyond.
He had always been good at transfiguration.
Not in the way he was good at charms or potions — not quick, not instinctive, not the kind of talent that shows itself in the first attempt.
Transfiguration had always been different.
It had always felt like something he had to reach for, something that was further away than everything else.
But when he reached, he found it.
Every time.
It was the one branch of magic where he never seemed to hit a wall, where the limit was never the magic itself but simply how much he had learned.
He had assumed that was normal.
He had assumed everyone felt that way.
Reading Andros’s words, he began to suspect that he was wrong.
The next morning, Felix woke before the others.
He dressed quietly, checked that Kratos was still asleep in his cage, and made his way down to the common room.
It was empty at this hour — the fire had burned down to embers, and the morning light coming through the windows was thin and grey.
He found a chair near the fire and sat down, thinking about what he had read.
He did not get long to think.
The dormitory door opened a few minutes later, and Fred and George came down together, still in their nightclothes, arguing about something that Felix suspected they had been arguing about since they woke up.
“It was your idea,” Fred was saying.
“It was your idea first,” George said.
“I just agreed with it.”
“You agreed with it enthusiastically.”
“That’s not the same as coming up with it.”
“It’s close enough.”
Fred noticed Felix sitting by the fire and stopped mid-step.
“You’re up early.”
“So are you,” Felix said.
“We’re always up early.”
“You’re never up early.”
Fred considered that for a moment, then nodded.
“Fair. What are you doing down here anyway?”
“Thinking.”
“About what?”
“Transfiguration.”
Fred and George exchanged a look.
It was the kind of look that passed between them a hundred times a day, and Felix had already learned to read it — it meant they had both arrived at the same conclusion at the same time and were now deciding whether to say it out loud.
“I like it,” Felix said.
“You like transfiguration.”
“I like what it can do.”
George tilted his head slightly, the way he did when he was trying to figure something out.
“What can it do?”
Felix considered the question.
There were a hundred answers he could give — most of them straight from Andros’s notebook, most of them things Fred and George would not understand yet, most of them things he was not ready to explain.
So he gave them the simplest one.
“Anything,” he said.
Fred and George looked at each other again.
This time the look lasted longer, and something shifted in it — the way it did when one of them had an idea and the other was already halfway to agreeing with it before it had been said.
“He’s strange,” Fred said, but he said it the way you’d say something about a friend you’d already decided to keep.
George nodded.
“Completely strange. Do you think he’d help us with the thing?”
“What thing?”
“The thing we were talking about.”
“Oh, that thing.” Fred turned back to Felix, and his expression had changed from idle curiosity to something more focused.
“How do you feel about rule-breaking, Falker?”
Felix looked at him.
“Depends on the rule.”
Fred grinned.
“I knew I liked you.”
Breakfast was loud.
The Great Hall was full by the time they arrived, and the Gryffindor table was already crowded with older students who had clearly been up for hours.
Felix took a seat between Fred and George and helped himself to toast and eggs while the twins launched into a detailed argument about the best way to sneak out of the castle after curfew — an argument they had clearly had many times before, because they both knew exactly where the other was going to take it and neither of them was willing to concede.
Lee Jordan joined them halfway through, followed by Jonah, who looked considerably more awake than he had the night before and was already asking questions about the day ahead.
“What’s first?” Jonah asked, sitting down across from Felix.
Felix glanced at the timetable Fred had tossed onto the table.
“Charms.”
“Professor Flitwick?”
“Apparently.”
“Is he good?”
“He’s supposed to be,” Felix said.
“Small, cheerful, knows what he’s doing.”
Jonah nodded, and Felix could see the tension in his shoulders ease slightly.
He understood that.
Jonah was Muggleborn, and everything about Hogwarts was new to him, and there was no one here to tell him what to expect.
Felix had read about all of it.
Jonah was learning it the way everyone else did — by living it.
“Charms is fine,” Felix said.
“You’ll like it.”
Jonah looked at him.
“How do you know?”
Felix shrugged.
“I just do.”
Fred leaned across the table, and his tone had the particular quality of someone about to cause trouble.
“He does that. Says things like he’s already read the book.”
“Maybe I have,” Felix said.
“Have you?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know.”
Fred and George exchanged another look, and George leaned in.
“See, this is why we keep him. He’s not boring.”
“I’m not a pet,” Felix said.
“Course not,” Fred said.
“You’re an asset.”
“That’s worse.”
“It’s better. Assets get privileges.”
George nodded.
“Pets get walked.”
Jonah, who had been watching this exchange with the growing expression of someone who had not signed up for any of it, turned back to his breakfast without another word.