Something Slipped
Hermione woke with the distinct feeling that her body had moved before her mind had caught up.
Her head throbbed dully, as if she’d slept for too long or not at all, and her neck ached from the sharp angle at which it had been bent. A half-written essay lay beneath her arm, smudged ink where her hand had slipped across the parchment. Her fingers were still curled around her quill.
The last thing she remembered was reading a section on magical pattern theory. That had been… hours ago?
She blinked at the small brass clock by her bed.
8:37 a.m.
Her heart jolted.
She was late.
But the window told a different story.
Outside, the sky was black. Not just dim — pitch black, as though the sun hadn’t risen at all. The stars were smothered behind thick clouds, or perhaps not there to begin with. She pressed her hand to the glass, confused.
No condensation. No chill. The air felt wrong.
She turned, confused, and grabbed her robe. The room was silent. Lavender and Parvati’s beds were empty. That wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was how still everything felt. No morning chatter, no sound of running water, no distant creak of staircases moving.
The world was… paused.
She stepped out into the corridor. The sconces on the wall burned, but not like flames. They were still. The light didn’t flicker. There were no shadows.
She walked quickly now, trying to shake the strange heaviness that clung to her. The portrait of a sleeping nymph didn’t stir as she passed. The nymph’s eyes were closed, her chest unmoving.
Paintings didn’t stop breathing.
Something in her told her to run.
But then—
A snap.
Not a loud one. Just the sudden return of pressure. Sound. Air.
Voices erupted around her. Laughter, footsteps, the shuffling of robes and the clatter of books. The corridor was full. A second-year bumped into her shoulder without apology.
Hermione spun around.
Behind her — nothing. Just the corridor as it had always been.
Had she fainted?
Dreamed?
She touched her temple.
Everything felt just a little too bright.
Everything moved a little too fast.
And yet she felt slow.
Detached.
Breakfast was a blur.
Harry and Ron were already at the table when she arrived, arguing about Quidditch schedules. Their voices were loud, casual, grounding. But Hermione couldn’t bring herself to join in. She poured herself tea, stirred it three times clockwise, and didn’t take a sip.
Everything tasted slightly wrong. Too sweet. Or maybe too bitter.
Ron spoke to her. She heard the words, but they took a moment to make sense.
“Oi, Hermione,” Ron said between mouthfuls of toast, “you going to stare at your tea all day, or actually drink it?”
She blinked. “What?”
Ron looked at her with a frown. “You all right?”
“I’m fine,” she said quickly. “Just tired.”
Harry glanced at her sideways. “You don’t look fine.”
“Well, thank you,” she muttered, taking a mechanical bite of toast she didn’t want. “That’s helpful.”
They let it drop. Harry returned to the Prophet. Ron continued his toast rampage. The clinking of silverware and chatter around her filled the space — too loud, too normal.
Too alive.
Something inside her stayed quiet.
Something inside her watched.
The first real mistake happened in Potions.
It was just a minor slip — an error in timing. She added the knotgrass too early in the final phase of the Confusing Concoction. The result was an inert, silvery paste rather than the intended translucent blue fluid.
Hermione Granger didn’t make mistakes like that.
Slughorn peered over her cauldron and raised his bushy eyebrows. “Miss Granger,” he said, his tone a strange mix of amusement and concern, “surely you didn’t think we were brewing scalp gloss?”
A few students snickered. Ron openly stared at her, baffled. Even Harry looked slightly concerned.
Hermione gave a tight-lipped smile. “Just… distracted.”
“Well,” said Slughorn gently, “that’s not like you. Don’t burn yourself out, dear girl.”
She nodded mutely and began vanishing the failed potion.
Ron leaned over. “Seriously, are you sick or something?”
“I said I’m fine.”
He leaned back, clearly unconvinced.
So was she.
Because this wasn’t a mistake. It was something else.
Like she was out of sync with everything.
Like the world had moved one step ahead and hadn’t waited for her to catch up.
After class, Hermione escaped to the library.
She didn’t bother with the usual tables. She walked straight to the far corner near the Restricted Section — where the books were older, the shelves dustier, and the silence deeper.
She was looking for a specific passage — something she'd read the week before in Temporal Traces in Magical Theory. It had been about the side effects of unstable enchantments related to time: displaced perception, overlapping memory, the sensation of living something twice.
She remembered the wording almost perfectly.
But the page she remembered… was different now.
The passage was gone. Replaced by something else entirely — similar, but less precise. As if rewritten. Sanitized.
She flipped back and forth, double-checking the index. Maybe she had the wrong edition? But the printing date matched. The cover was the same. Her notes in the margin still referenced the original phrasing.
She looked down at her own handwriting — “temporal misalignment = memory bleed?” — and suddenly felt cold.
How could the book change but her notes remain?
Hermione closed it slowly. Her hands were shaking.
She stood, returned the book to its shelf, and turned to leave.
As she passed one of the nearby cases, her fingertips brushed against the spine of a thick, leather-bound tome. A jolt ran through her like static.
And then she heard it.
A breath.
Right next to her ear.
She turned fast — but no one was there.
Just a cold trail down her spine, and the uncomfortable sense that she’d just interrupted something.
The air around her suddenly felt heavier. Denser.
As if the space between the books had thickened.
She backed away slowly.
Then faster.
The Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom was colder than usual.
Professor Riddle stood at the front, a single hand resting on the edge of the desk. He hadn’t started the lesson yet. He was simply standing there, perfectly still.
Hermione slipped into her seat. Her pulse was high and tight in her throat.
Riddle began to speak.
“Residual energy,” he said. “Magic always leaves a mark, even when the spell fades. Especially when it’s dark.”
His voice was smooth, deliberate, but strangely low. The students leaned in.
Hermione didn’t write anything down.
Her head ached.
The shadows in the corners of the room seemed longer than they should have been. As though the light was bending wrong.
At one point, Riddle walked past her row.
As he moved behind her chair, Hermione saw his shadow on the wall—
—lagging behind him by half a step.
She froze.
And then it caught up. Snapped into place.
Gone.
She pressed her hand to her temple.
She felt sick.
The lesson continued, but Hermione didn’t hear it.
She was still trying to understand why everything around her felt like it was unraveling, thread by thread.
That night, she dreamed again.
But it wasn’t the forest, or the mirrored room.
This time it was different.
She was standing in the center of a white, circular chamber. No windows. No torches. No exits.
The walls pulsed faintly with light — not candlelight, but something… colder.
In front of her, on a stone pedestal: a book.
Her book.
Her name was inside the cover.
The writing on the pages was hers — but not in any language she recognized.
The letters shifted constantly, like shadows in water. Every time she thought she could understand a sentence, the words changed. Melted.
She reached out to touch the page—
And stopped.
There was someone behind her.
She turned slowly.
A figure.
Tall. Cloaked. Faceless.
No threat. No malice.
Just… presence.
It raised one hand.
Not in greeting.
In warning.
Hermione stumbled back.
The book snapped shut.
The light in the chamber dimmed.
A whisper curled around her like smoke.
"You're not ready."
And then— the walls cracked.
Not loudly. Just a hairline fracture running from ceiling to floor.
Then another.
And another.
And light poured in, searing and bright and cold.
She screamed.
She woke up gasping.
Her breath came fast, shallow. Her sheets were damp with sweat. The air in her dormitory was cold, but she felt colder still. She grabbed her wand from the nightstand and whispered, "Lumos."
The glow revealed nothing unusual. Just her dormitory. Just the quiet shapes of furniture.
But she couldn’t shake the sensation that she’d brought something back with her.
She sat up fully, brushing hair from her damp forehead. The dream had felt more tangible than ever. And the figure—she could still feel its warning, like a phantom pressing against her thoughts.
Unable to bear the stillness of the room, Hermione swung her legs over the bed and rose. She wrapped her robe tighter and padded to the window.
The grounds of Hogwarts were cloaked in fog. And for just a moment, through the swirling mist, she thought she saw a figure watching from the edge of the Forbidden Forest.
But when she blinked, it was gone.
And yet, the cold remained.