Silent Authors
Late January, 5th Year
The castle was already asleep by the time Hermione reached the seventh-floor corridor. Shadows stretched long across the stone, softened by the dim flicker of enchanted sconces. She walked past the stretch of blank wall once. Then again. On the third pass, the door appeared—plain, wooden, curved at the top like it always was now.
She stepped inside.
The Room of Possibility had already arranged itself as a study hall touched with warmth. A long oak table waited in the center, parchment scattered across its surface, and one of the mirrors hummed faintly in the far alcove, its frame etched with shifting runes.
Hermione didn’t head toward the mirror right away.
She shrugged off her bag, pulled a stack of notes from inside, and sat down at the table to review edits for the latest curriculum brief—something half-measured and safe enough to pass through McGonagall’s hands without setting off Umbridge’s alarms. But before she could uncork her ink, she saw it.
A single sheet of parchment. Folded twice. Resting at the edge of the table nearest the mirror. No seal. No markings.
Her pulse caught.
She reached for it slowly, smoothing the creases with one hand. The ink was dark. Fresh. Still sharp around the edges.
She read the first paragraph.
Then the second.
By the third, she knew.
The essay wasn’t signed. The mirror network didn’t require it. That was the point—it was protected. Anonymous. You whispered Specula Veritas, touched the frame, and the room decided if you were sincere enough to read, or brave enough to submit.
But anonymity couldn’t hide voice and this one was unmistakable.
Structured, incisive. Cold at first glance—but underneath it, burning with control. It dissected the assumptions of magical merit with surgical precision: debunking the purity clause in the 1746 Hogwarts Charter, tracing how certain dueling assessments favored legacy spell forms, quoting three sources she’d only ever seen referenced in the restricted archive.
One paragraph lingered longer than it should have:
Inherited privilege masquerades as merit when institutions reward preservation over potential. The illusion of worth, repeated often enough, becomes indistinguishable from truth.
Hermione’s fingers tightened slightly around the parchment.
She read it twice. Then a third time, slower.
He hadn’t signed it. But he didn’t need to.
She didn’t copy the entire thing. Just a line—maybe two—into the margin of her own notes, the words bracketed neatly and followed by a small, curved mark. Not a name. Not a citation. Just space.
The original she left on the table.
When she stood, she touched the mirror frame once before leaving, fingers grazing the rune that glowed faintly beneath her palm. It pulsed in answer. The magic was still listening.
And somewhere—he was still speaking.
Two nights later, the newest reform essay whispered its way through the castle.
Not literally—though sometimes the enchanted parchment system made it feel that way. One student touched ink to parchment with the activation glyph, and the script would replicate, vanishing and reappearing on pre-linked sheets passed quietly between trusted hands. House boundaries didn’t matter to the spell. Intent did.
Hermione’s intent was clear.
The piece was shorter than usual—just two pages. Tightly reasoned. Quietly furious. It addressed the shifting criteria in Magical Aptitude evaluations, the selective rewriting of spell histories, the way some voices were given authority and others were given detention.
At the end of the second paragraph, just beneath a section on examination bias and policy contradictions, she added it.
“Merit that depends on silence is not merit. It is obedience.”
— Anonymous
No attribution. No explanation. Just placement.
By breakfast, half a dozen copies had already changed hands.
Dean returned his annotated version before lunch—three phrases underlined, and that quote bracketed twice in ink.
Sharp. Honest. Risky he’d written in the margin. Keep it.
Luna, ever whimsical, circled the quote and added five silver stars around it, then drew a small thestral hovering above the word obedience. Beneath it, in looping lavender ink: Some truths arrive quietly. But they arrive.
Theo’s reply was more measured. His handwriting tight and upright in the margins: What defines “merit” if not the system itself? Who chooses which silence matters? But he didn’t cross it out. He didn’t challenge the author–simply engaged.
The Slytherin copy came back without edits. No additions. No notes. But Hermione recognized the handwriting that had transcribed the original—sharpened edges, slanted right, steady even under pressure.
Draco Malfoy had read it. He didn’t say a word, but on the last page, just beneath the quote, someone had drawn a faint, diagonal line. Just under it. A marker, not a strike.
Hermione tapped her quill once against the edge of the page and said nothing either.
By Thursday morning, the frost had set in. Not on the windows, but in the air of the Defense classroom itself—quiet, dry, brittle around the edges.
Professor Warrick stood at the front, coatless as always, his sleeves rolled to the elbow like he was about to take apart something delicate. He didn’t speak immediately. He rarely did. Instead, he uncapped a piece of chalk, tapped it once against the board, and began to write in small, deliberate script:
Ethics of Compliance in State-Controlled Spellcraft
A Theoretical Framework
The word theoretical was underlined—twice.
Hermione, already halfway down the parchment in her notebook, adjusted the angle of her quill. She’d seen where this was going before he spoke.
Most of the class sat up straighter. A few—Ron, Lavender, one of the Slytherin girls—blinked like they hadn’t read the board at all.
Warrick turned.
“Today’s question,” he said quietly, “is not about dueling. Not about hexes. Not even about defense.”
He let the pause stretch.
“It’s about power.”
A rustle moved through the room—chairs shifting, ink being uncapped, parchment creasing under sudden weight.
“When the Ministry defines your curriculum, what does it teach you to value?” he asked, voice still even. “What does it punish? What does it reward?”
Hermione’s hand rose automatically.
“Yes, Miss Granger?”
She didn’t look around the room. She didn’t care to.
“If spellcraft is restricted to what is politically safe,” she said, her voice steady, “then it becomes a tool of reinforcement. Not learning. Not growth. It’s containment.”
A few students glanced toward the back of the classroom.
Umbridge, in her usual seat near the wall of mirrors, didn’t look up from her clipboard. But her quill paused—just for a second.
Warrick inclined his head, like he was tipping a hat only she could see.
“An excellent observation,” he said. “Now let’s reframe.”
He flicked his wand at the chalkboard. The writing shimmered, shifted, and resolved into a single question, inked in sharp black:
What do systems reward when truth becomes dangerous?
The room stilled.
It wasn’t just silence—it was pressure. Like something in the air had thickened.
Hermione didn’t raise her hand this time. Neither did anyone else.
Across the aisle, Seamus leaned back in his chair and exhaled slowly. Dean stopped writing mid-sentence. Even Luna—who never seemed unnerved by anything—tilted her head at the words as if weighing them against the air.
Umbridge’s smile had thinned. Her quill moved again. Slowly.
Hermione felt Draco’s presence before she turned to glance. He hadn’t said a word all class. Hadn’t looked up from his notes. But now, his quill hovered above the margin of his parchment, unmoving.
Thinking.
Hermione could see it in the tension of his fingers—he was writing something he didn’t know if he could even say.
Warrick, still facing the board, tapped it once with the end of his wand. The question faded without fanfare.
The class breathed again.
But Hermione kept the words—wrote them down in the top corner of her notes, circled them once, and didn’t speak for the rest of the hour.
Across the room, Draco copied them too.
She didn’t see it.
But she felt it.
The Slytherin common room sat in low, flickering light—the hearth pulsing with lake-green flames, casting shadows that twisted like thoughts you couldn’t quite pin down. The water beyond the windows moved in slow undulations, the kelp barely stirring. It was quiet. Too quiet for early evening.
Draco sat at the far table, spine straight, head bent over his notes. He wasn’t studying so much as… maintaining the appearance of it. A Defense theory text lay open in front of him, half-marked in pencil-thin ink, though the same page had been sitting there for twenty minutes. He kept rereading the top paragraph without absorbing a word.
Across the room, Blaise stood with one shoulder pressed lazily against the mantle, a half-empty glass balanced in his palm. He hadn’t touched it in some time. The fire behind him snapped and hissed, but he didn’t flinch. His gaze was fixed on Draco—steadily, deliberately, like he’d been rehearsing what to say long before the silence made room for it.
“You can lie to us,” Blaise said, voice low but cutting clean through the stillness. “But don’t lie to yourself.”
The statement didn’t rise nor press. It landed.
Draco didn’t lift his head. His quill paused briefly, just enough to betray that he’d heard it. Then resumed its quiet glide across the page—though the line he drew curved, then wobbled, then stalled.
Blaise didn’t move. He didn’t need to. He’d said enough.
The fire cracked. A chair creaked somewhere to the right.
In the far corner, Theo looked up from his place on the rug, knees drawn up, a sheaf of parchment braced against one leg. He wasn’t reading. Hadn’t been for a while. He watched the exchange—without surprise or judgment. Just stillness. A quiet ledger in his eyes, slowly filling.
Draco’s jaw flexed once. He turned the page in his book like it meant something.
“Careful,” Blaise added, softer this time. “Keep at it long enough and you’ll start believing you don’t care.”
That got a reaction. Something shifted behind Draco’s eyes, brief and visible. Like a flicker of flame catching on old ash. He blinked once, slowly, then dipped his quill back into the ink.
The page in front of him remained blank.
The silence he left behind wasn’t defensible.
It was hiding.
And everyone in the room knew it.
The corridor outside Arithmancy echoed with the usual shuffle of parchment and potion-stained robes. Students spilled from classrooms in small knots of conversation, laughter muffled by stone. The scent of chalk dust and corridor polish lingered in the air like something too clean to trust.
Draco walked in practiced silence.
His satchel hung over one shoulder, the strap creaking faintly with each step. He didn’t speak to anyone. Didn’t glance sideways. But his eyes kept returning—unbidden, involuntary—to the sheaf of folded parchment Hermione Granger had tucked under her arm as she turned a corner minutes earlier.
He’d seen it before. Knew the way she carried it—close, deliberate. Knew it wasn’t just notes. Not anymore. The way she kept it steady in her grip was the way someone handled something alive.
A second set of footsteps fell into rhythm beside his.
“Are you going to admit it?” Pansy asked, her voice light as powder and twice as toxic. “Or should we all just wait for the explosion?”
Draco didn’t respond. His stride didn’t falter. That only seemed to amuse her.
“You keep staring at her parchment like it’s going to do something heroic,” she said sweetly, voice just loud enough to carry. “Maybe it should.”
They turned a corner. The corridor emptied ahead, and the only sound was the low echo of their steps against stone.
Pansy matched his pace. Her shoes clicked in perfect sync with his. Her perfume was sharp—white jasmine and mint, manufactured sweetness covering something meaner underneath.
He said nothing.
That was his mistake.
“Fine,” she said. “Be noble in silence, Malfoy.”
She stopped abruptly.
Draco walked one step ahead before realizing. He paused—shoulders tight, jaw clenched—but didn’t look back.
Pansy’s voice dropped. Soft. Sweet.
Cruel.
“I hope you choke on your conscience.”
The words landed like a spell cast without a wand. Quiet. Controlled. Deadly.
When Draco finally turned to face her, she was already smiling. Not the brittle social smile she reserved for teachers or authority figures. This one was razor-thin. Personal.
Her gaze swept him like a challenge she had no intention of backing down from.
Draco just stared back, face unreadable, the muscles at his jawline twitched.
Pansy’s expression steadied. She brushed an invisible thread from her collar and turned on her heel, the echo of her footsteps trailing behind her like a curse.
Draco remained there for another moment, the corridor colder somehow.
His fists were clenched, but it was the ache just beneath his ribs that he noticed most.
By the time Hermione returned from the stacks, the library had thinned to its last few silhouettes—two Ravenclaws whispering behind a conjured privacy charm, and Madam Pince muttering to herself behind a fortress of acquisition forms. The fire in the hearth was down to embers. Every sound—the scratch of parchment, the creak of ancient chair legs—felt amplified by the hush.
Hermione moved on habit more than thought, sliding back into her usual corner near the east window. Her books were still there, parchment exactly as she’d left it.
Except now, there was something new.
A thin volume, no wider than her hand, had been placed beside her inkwell. Its cover was slate-gray, clothbound, the title barely visible until the firelight caught it: The Power of Anonymous Voices.
She didn’t touch it at first. Just stared.
It hadn’t been there five minutes ago. She was sure of that.
Hermione glanced toward the library entrance, then over her shoulder, toward the fiction stacks.
No one.
Madam Pince hadn’t moved. The ink on her fingertips was dry from disapproval.
Hermione reached for the book slowly, her fingers brushing the worn edge of the cover. She opened it.
Inside, on the blank page opposite the dedication, a single square of parchment had been tucked. Deliberately placed—weightless.
The writing was clean. Sloping. Familiar.
The truest things often echo the longest.
There was no signature. No initials. But Hermione knew the hand.
Her thumb pressed gently against the fold. Not enough to crease it—just enough to feel the parchment answer her touch.
She slid the parchment back between the pages, carefully, then closed the book and stacked it neatly on top of her notes.
She didn’t open it again until later.
That night, the common room was dark, save for the soft glow of dying embers and the faint halo from her wand tip. She sat on the edge of her bed with the curtains drawn, legs tucked beneath her, the book open on her lap. The anonymous essay—the one she hadn’t shared, hadn’t dared to—was folded inside. She hadn’t needed to revisit it. She’d memorized the rhythm, the argument, the line about obedience that had stayed with her for days.
She read it again anyway. Just to feel it.
Then, without a word, she reached for her notebook—the one no one else saw. Her reform drafts. Her strategy diagrams. Her list of names she never shared aloud.
She slid the essay into the spine like it belonged there.
And just beneath the final line of text—Merit that depends on silence is not merit. It is obedience.—she picked up her quill.
She hesitated only briefly.
Then wrote, in ink the same shade as her own voice: Someone is still listening.