Chapter 1
If Harry hadn’t been so overwhelmed by everything—by his classes, by his first friend, by the stares, by Hogwarts—he would have listened when the Headmaster announced the forthcoming guests from the Five Nations. As it is, he was so relieved by the news distracting everyone away from the Boy-Who-Lived? Harry Potter? Does he have the scar? that even days after, he associated the event with a strange pang that he thought might have been relief.
Arriving from, something something something, Immortal Five Nations, something something, Battle Magic—
Cool though everything about the Wizarding World was, the words ‘Five Nations’ and ‘Battle Magic’ still spoke to something in Harry. As it did to everyone else in the Great Hall, apparently. The explosion of excitement was enough to make the Headmaster pause.
“Merlin,” Ron said, his eyes huge and thrilled. “Battle mages. In Hogwarts!”
Harry would’ve loved to learn more, but they had to dash off to Potions and, well. Snape had a knack for killing joy.
By the time the actual visit took place, Harry and much of Hogwarts had almost forgotten about it. They had other things to focus on, distractions from the distraction. Halloween, the first Halloween since Harry learned about just what Halloween meant to him, was bad enough. The stares and whispers that had died down over the past weeks came back seemingly overnight.
And then there was Hermione dashing off in tears and the heavy burden of guilt. Of being torn between staying loyal to his first friend ever, and the uneasily certainty that Ron had done something (Do not bully the weak. Do not insult people. Be careful with your words. Talking behind other people's backs is—) forbidden.
While the Halloween decorations may have been distracting enough to make him almost forget about Hermione, they weren’t enough for him to miss that the head table hosted three more men than usual. Fortunately, the strangers hadn’t escaped the notice of the other Gryffindors, either. This meant there was enough gossip flying around that Harry could eavesdrop without drawing attention to himself (something he didn’t think he’d ever be comfortable about, especially given the last few weeks of unwelcome scrutiny).
“Of course I recognize him. He was on the cover of Magical Policy Magazine last year. That’s Master Xing Shen next to the Headmaster, the ICW ambassador from the Five Nations,” Percy Weasley explained importantly, while Harry tried to chew more quietly to listen. “I suppose the other two are the Five Nation Battle Mages. It’s an honor to have them visit, of course. The Five Nations are the oldest and last of the Magical Empires. They have a great deal of sway in the ICW, even if they’re isolationist at best.”
For all the alleged importance of Master Shen, it was the youngest of the three that most eyes were turned to.
“He’s beautiful,” breathed a third year.
It was true. Harry, like the rest of the Great Hall, couldn’t help sneaking looks at him. He’d seen beautiful faces on the cover of Aunt Petunia’s magazines of course, but they’d never seemed like real people to him. This man was undoubtedly real, in a way that filled Harry with inexplicable delight. Of course he was beautiful. But even more importantly: Harry felt the absolute certainty that this man was good. No. He was the best.
“That ribbon he’s wearing means he’s from Gusu,” someone said.
Several girls sighed longingly.
“We learned about the Five Nations in primary,” said one of the Muggleborn second years. “I didn’t know they had a Magical government.”
“You didn’t learn about the Seven Immortals?”
“Those are the patron gods of the Five Nations, yeah? My mum’s part of a prayer circle for Jiang Yanli. She’s really into the New Age stuff.”
“They’re wizards,” said Angela Johnson, the third year sitting across from one of the Weasley twins.
“Get out.”
Part of the conversation was lost to Harry then, as Ron urged him (with his own mouth full of food) to twy bif o’ham oopfs sowwy mate heah hafa napkin. He dabbed at his face with the napkin, trying not to taste the secondhand meat on his face. His attention turned back just in time to hear:
“—actual immortals, Professor Liu said.”
“Don’t be stupid. They’d have to be thousands of years old. That kind of magic doesn’t exist.”
An immediate argument kicked off among the upper years.
Harry cast a baffled glance at where Hermione usually sat, half-expecting her to chime in eagerly with questions and details that would explain things. But of course, she wasn’t there. Guilt made his stomach sink.
Fortunately, Johnson broke away from the argument to explain to the second year, “They’re mixed Muggle and Magical. You’ll cover them this year. There’s a whole section about them in History. Not taught by Binns,” she thought to add. “Professor Liu comes in just for that. She’s an attache at the Five Nations embassy in London.”
“She’s brilliant. I wish she taught all of History,” her friend said, to the enthusiastic agreement of her yearmates.
“How can they be mixed? What about the Statute?” asked the second year, frowning.
Further down the table, a couple of fourth years cracked with laughter while Towler looked disapproving. “They refused to agree to it. Of course, they were powerful enough that nobody could force them. The ICW put a spell around the Five Nation borders so visitors would gradually forget after they left if they saw anything magical. Still, there are violations all the time, and the Five Nations arbitrarily rip it down from time to time so the ICW has to put it back up again—”
“Who’s going to tell the Five Nations what to do?” interrupted one of the Weasley twins, buoyantly. “They’re run by the greatest Dark Lord that ever lived.”
Harry sprayed cider in Ron’s face.
Severus hated everything.
He disliked feasts on principle, with the stupidity and excitement they engendered in the already empty-headed dunderheads, but Halloween was special in his list of hatreds. Down at Gryffindor table, the Boy-Who-Lived was stuffing his smug face, celebrating his own fame with the rest of his nitwit house. True, it was the day the Dark Lord was vanquished, but the cost of defeating him, the loss of everything he had ever loved: most days, he wasn’t sure it was worth it.
“Master Dumbledore mentioned that you were working on a solution to the Wen Sizhui Challenge, Professor Snape?” said the young man sitting next to him.
And then there was the other reason to hate this Halloween in particular.
“It’s curious that my old friend Xing chose to visit this Halloween, of all times,” Dumbledore told Severus privately, a month previous.
“No doubt he’s curious about the Boy-Who-Lived, like the rest of the idiot public,” Severus sneered.
“If it was anyone else, I might believe that. But he was never impressed by our troubles or interested in Harry. Or how he survived the Killing Curse. The Five Nations apparently have ways around it already. I’ve never been able to determine what.”
The practices of the cultivators—what the West incorrectly bundled under the infuriatingly inaccurate title “Battle Mages”—were a well-guarded mystery. They allegedly included immortality among them. Voldemort had sent several emissaries to the Yiling Patriarch in the hopes of stealing that infamous Dark Lord’s secrets. None of those well-bred, pure-blood emissaries had ever returned. In Severus’s opinion, this was no loss to the wizarding world.
He’d spent enough time wandering through the torturous paths of Dumbledore’s thinking, unfortunately, to know what the Headmaster was obliquely driving at. “The Yiling Patriarch would hardly reject all of the Dark Lord’s messengers and then decide to avenge him ten years later. There is no— no fraternity of Dark Lords.”
“The Yiling Patriarch is not the only one of the Seven Immortals,” Dumbledore reminded him gravely. “Simply the most powerful.”
By which Severus was meant to understand that the Light-bearing Lord, the greatest Light Lord history had ever known, might have some interest in the Potter spawn. Why? Was Dumbledore imagining his blasted prophecy child might be a threat to the Yiling Patriarch? The narrative of the six Immortals battling that great Dark Lord through millenia was, Severus knew through his correspondence with Five Nations compatriots, a story created and popularized by Western wizards who had Opinions about how magical alignment should behave. If he read between the lines correctly—and he was fairly certain he had—the eternal war between the Light-Bearing Lord and Yiling Patriarch involved more wrestling between bedsheets than spellfire exchanged across battlefields.
Still, he spent a brief, amused moment imagining a faceless wizard in white hurling the flailing Potter brat at the head of an equally faceless wizard in black. It was an image that would help him endure the next example of idiocy Potter brought into his Potions classroom.
Dumbledore let the conversation end there, smugly certain Severus would investigate the situation. Unfortunately for him, Severus was too much a Slytherin to fall for such insultingly obvious gambits. In fact, he grimly put it out of his mind, dourly satisfied with the command he had over his own curiosity.
And he successfully continued to remain indifferent and incurious until today.
“Please make our guests feel welcome when they arrive,” Dumbledore had said during the morning meeting, that irritating twinkle for once absent. “Master Shen is an old friend and incidentally a renowned herbalist—” he nodded at Sprout, who was beaming and bobbing her head with excitement, “—and while I’m not acquainted with the two accompanying him, I know that Master Yan at least has a growing reputation in Magizoology. He tells me that his other companion dabbles in Potions.”
Yan Dong, at least, would have had something of interest to say. His books, scrupulously translated by his publishers, had provided Severus with some fascinating ideas and food for experiments over the last few years. The puppy Dumbledore had placed next to Severus, however, with his ‘dabbling’ in Potions, promised no such intellectual stimulation.
Severus had the entirely spiteful desire to rip Dumbledore’s beard off hair by hair. It was an old wish. He grit his teeth.
“Like any Potion Master worth his salt, I’ve spent some time on them,” he said grimly to the boy. “I’m surprised you know of it.”
The boy—Lan Yuan, he’d been introduced—simply smiled sweetly. It made an already attractive face even more so. Severus’s teeth itched to bite him. “Wen Qing recently published a treatise on the impact of the Human Genome Project and how it might help solve the problem. Have you seen it?”
By habit, Severus sneered, but for the first time all day, his interest was piqued. Wen Qing the Immortal was the greatest healer to ever live. The treatise in question had driven him out into the Muggle world for the first time in years to learn what they were up to. It had been an educational summer.
Expecting little but hoping for even the smallest of distractions on this awful day, he admitted that he had read it. Of course he had. No one calling himself a Potion Master would miss any publication by Wen Qing. Grudgingly, he forced himself to continue the conversation by saying, “Am I to presume you have thoughts on the subject?”
Lan Yuan’s smile brightened.
Contrary to all expectations, Severus enjoyed the next half hour. For all he only professed an ‘interest’ in Potions, Lan Yuan had a grasp of the subject that beggared belief. The boy looked barely old enough to shave, and yet he had theories and ideas that would have given even Severus’s Journeyman Master pause.
If Severus had been younger, he would have been either eaten alive by jealousy or delighted beyond reason at finding a kindred spirit. As an older, debatably wiser man, he let himself enjoy the rare pleasure of meeting an intellectual equal. Perhaps even a superior. It took all of ten minutes to forget that he was speaking with a youth and to start treating him like a peer. More, from time to time he had the irrational sense he was speaking with a true mentor, the likes of which he had never been fortunate enough to have.
Half an hour after the meal began, Silvanus Kettleburn, seated on Lan’s other side and up to now engrossed in conversation with Minerva, drew his attention with a question. Severus took the opportunity to scribble some notes for later consideration on a transfigured napkin.
Aurora Sinistra leaned over to bump companionably against his shoulder. He spared enough of his attention to glare at her.
“You two are growing rather chummy,” she said, smiling in mischief. “I was expecting you to send him to his room, crying for his mother. He’s a lovely one, isn’t he? I take it he’s not a complete dunderhead after all?”
“He should be a Master already,” Severus said flatly, attention split between his notetaking and the interesting discussion Lan was having with Kettleburn regarding xiezhi herds in Qishan. “I can’t imagine why he isn’t one yet, unless it’s that his brewing is catching up to his theoreticals. Once it does, he’ll be awarded a Silver Cauldron in under a year.”
“Severus, dear. Is it possible that you approve of him?”
Irritating woman. With dignity, Severus said, “Unlike my colleagues, I am capable of recognizing intelligence when I see it.”
She smothered laughter behind her napkin. “Don’t look now, but Albus is twinkling at you.”
With reluctance, he turned his gaze to Dumbledore. He immediately regretted it. Dumbledore met his eyes and raised his glass in a silent toast. Sure enough, that damned twinkle was out in full force. Like a pleased father seeing his infant son walk for the first time, Severus snarled internally, his mood immediately plummeting.
No. He refused to let Dumbledore ruin this small joy as he’d destroyed so many others. Curling his lip in disgust, he returned to his notes and his careful eavesdropping.
Astonishingly, Lan Yuan was more than holding his own against Kettleburn’s enthusiasm. He handled himself with a serenity beyond his years—and, Severus realized listening to him, a mastery of the subject as well. A genius in potions as well as magizoology? True, the two studies were related, as was herbology. It wasn’t unheard of. Still, he found his suspicions stirring.
“You have an interest in magizoology as well?” he found himself asking, as Kettleburn released Lan from his clutches.
The young man smiled. “I have dabbled.”
“Like you dabble in potions?”
Lan inclined his head gracefully.
“Master Yan is developing quite the reputation as a magizoologist,” Severus hinted broadly.
“He is,” Lan said, his smile gaining a hint of pride. “He will be releasing his third book this winter. Your Master Newt Scamander is preparing a forward to the English translation now.”
Severus experienced a desire to pinch the bridge of his nose. He glared at Lan, who definitely looked amused now. He knew perfectly well what he was about. “Just how old are you, Mr. Lan,” he articulated distinctly. “If I may be so bold to ask.”
"Ah. Old enough to dabble, Professor Snape, but young enough to occasionally be unwise."
"Yes, your dabbling. And what is your actual field of study?"
“I am currently a lecturer and post-doctoral student at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst,” Lan said, utterly unruffled.
Severus suffered a moment of blank disassociation. “I beg your pardon.”
“The University of Music and the Performing Arts. In Vienna.”
“You are a musician.”
Lan inclined his head, his smile unwavering.
“A musician at a muggle school.”
“Mm.”
Severus bit down on a bright flash of frustration at the sheer waste of this genius mind. A musician. He breathed carefully, clamping down on his temper. “I see,” he said. “And what causes a musician who dabbles in potions and magizoology to visit Hogwarts?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know yet.”
One of Severus’s eyebrows inched up. “And when will you know?”
Just beyond Lan, he caught sight of Master Yan rising to his feet, face upturned to stare at something in mid-air. Beyond him, Minerva looked up in the same direction and paled, her wand whipping out. Severus followed their gaze, even as his colleagues exclaimed in alarm.
A few meters before the head table, a black ... hole was forming. Thick, dangerous looking arms of black and burning red smoke lashed around its edges. A sense of deep malevolence, the likes of which even Severus had never felt before, washed across the room.
Screams rose. Aurora swore, even as students started scrambling away across tables and benches. Severus was standing in the blink of an eye, war-trained instincts leveling his wand at the portal. Dumbledore and Filius were only slightly faster than him in throwing up a shield. Their edges overlapped in a hum of gold.
Beside him, Lan pushed back his chair and rose. He didn’t raise a wand. Too mild, he said, “I believe the answer is ‘imminently.’”
The next few seconds were chaos. Without warning, a figure robed in black and red whirled through the hole, dropping the few meters down as lightly as though gravity was a matter of whim rather than a necessity. A heartbeat later, another man touched down, this one in immaculate white and pale blue robes, the white ribbon around his brow an indicator of Lan affiliation. He practically floated between vicious tendrils of gray and green.
Neither of them bore wands. Instead, they wielded swords. Cultivators. Severus’s blood ran cold.
The red bolt of a stunner shot at the intruders, wild. Aurora. She never could keep her head under stress. The cultivators shifted, avoiding it with laughable ease and barely any sign that they’d even noticed. With snarls almost unheard under the students’ screams, the ribbons of gray and green coalesced into sharp teeth and rotting bodies. In form they resembled horribly mutated lynxes. Their eyes glowed red.
Even as he failed to recognize them, even as the two cultivators began whirling through the creatures with sharp swords and devastating strikes, Severus cast his most powerful restraining spell at the closest creature. It did nothing. The swift follow-up spell likewise splashed harmlessly against a smoky flank. Whatever Dumbledore and Filius were casting likewise had no effect. If anything, the creatures seemed to be eating the magic. Growing.
Fuck.
Filus’s hasty casting grabbed the closest empty table and tipped it, forming a barricade between the battlefield and the screaming, panicking students. Dumbledore and Severus were swift to assist. Beside Severus, Lan gracefully sprang up a good ten feet and stopped there, hovering in mid-air as he swiftly sketched characters of pale blue flame into empty air. Severus recognized none of them before Lan somehow sent them flying at the student body.
The glowing characters flew to the Hufflepuff table and froze there, flaring up almost too bright to see. A split second later a not-lynx slammed into a pale blue barrier, thwarted in a lunge at a flailing second year.
The cultivator in blue and white paused between efficient dispatching of the creatures to send his own fiery characters against the Slytherin table barricade. Another not-lynx hurtled into it a few seconds later, thrown into it by some act of Black and Red Robes.
The background noise of students screaming had dimmed, somewhat. Some of the prefects were finally calling them to an orderly retreat, the sharper of them realizing the barrier protected their side of the hall.
But not, as it happened, the side where the faculty stood.
Severus was rusty after years of peace. His attention faltered, briefly drawn by Black and Red Robes gutting a creature, then whirling to wave and shout joyfully in recognition at Lan Yuan. In Severus’s distraction, he missed the creature that leaped for him, its maw agape in a rotting, fanged snarl of malevolence.
Beside him, Aurora shrieked. Severus snapped to attention too late. His wand snapped up uselessly as the creature dove through their shields as though they weren’t there at all. Nothing he cast would be in time, even if any of the non-Dark spells did work. A split-second’s horror gripped him—a quiver worth of ice bolts from Filius and an equally swift Light spell from Dumbledore did nothing whatsoever—when suddenly, pale purple light glared across his sight. A sword sliced cleanly across the creature’s neck, sending its body skidding in two pieces across the serving platters.
Stunned, Severus tracked the sword’s graceful flight through the air. It dove across another two creatures, cutting off the foreleg of one and decapitating another before curving back through the air, returning to the hand of— Lan Yuan.
Lan Yuan the musician. Severus bit back a wholly insane urge to laugh.
In the time it took for Lan to reclaim his sword, the last of the creatures had been handily dispatched by the two intruders. Black and Red sketched his own set of glowing characters at several of the smoking bodies, which promptly went up in violent black flame. This prompted a few more screams from the students, but the fires died away swiftly, leaving nothing behind but the scorched imprint of the corpses.
Blue and White raised his hand, some long, stringed instrument shimmering into view under his fingertips. He plucked a few notes. Power thrummed through the hall in a swift, sharp breeze, cutting through the lingering miasma and cleansing the air. Severus felt an old weight lift from his shoulders, lightening his spirit. It felt like being run through by a patronus.
His eyes narrowed, even as the instrument faded away. Another musician. A musician who could do magic with his instrument.
Well. That certainly implied some things about Lan Yuan.
Lan was already greeting the two intruders, bowing over his sword and clasped hands. Black and Red Robes bounced at him, all excited chatter and affection. Blue and White Robes, on the other hand, was far more formal. Able to focus on their appearance for the first time, Severus bit his tongue. The man was inhumanly beautiful, an icy perfection where Black and Red’s own keen good looks were all warmth and easy charm. ‘
The other two guests from the Five Nations were also making their greetings, bowing with a depth that set Severus’s mind racing.
“Friends of yours, Master Shen?” Dumbledore asked from his place, stern in a way he rarely was.
“In a manner of speaking,” Master Shen said, sounding shaken.
Lan’s approach preempted whatever Shen might have said. A few quick words were exchanged—it sounded like Chinese, though Severus wasn’t fluent enough to understand it and by the looks of it, neither was Dumbledore—and then Lan was introducing politely, “My relative, Master Lan Zhan. And his spouse, Master Jiang Ying.”
Some more Chinese conversation followed, this time including Master Shen and Master Yan. Severus didn’t dare risk legilimency, but he had the distinct impression that the new Lan was dissatisfied somehow, despite the fact he was an obvious occlumens. Jiang Ying, on the other hand, made a dramatic face and practically flung himself on Lan Yuan.
Severus immediately felt tired.
The new cultivators were fascinating.
With the immediate danger gone, the students had herded into a wall of excited awe around the battlefield, kept at bay only by Snape’s snarls, McGonagall’s vocal disapproval, and more pertinently, some sort of barrier that Professor Flitwick had popped up. Harry couldn’t tell what anyone else was doing, but he could hear just enough to know the cultivators were talking in their own language.
One of the Ravenclaws—from the Five Nations herself, by the sound of it—was explaining quietly to her friends. She wasn’t translating, exactly, but providing a general idea of what they were discussing. Harry caught a phrase or two as he skirted around them—”He’s telling his relative that this is all an accident, but how happy he is to see him well,” she said, which wasn’t exactly wrong but also wasn’t exactly right. He could tell she was doing it on purpose. The bulk of his attention though was on what he could hear of Master Jiang’s excited questions and Lan Yuan’s increasingly flustered answers.
Harry grinned, ducking his head to hide his expression. Master Jiang was the best. Sizhui could always use a little riling up.
“This is amazing,” Ron shouted in Harry’s ear, unexpectedly grabbing onto him. Not used to being grabbed in any way that didn’t result in pain or punishment, he flinched wildly and shrank in on himself. Ron didn’t notice. “Did you see that flying sword? I want one of those. Do you think they have shops for those outside the Five Nations?”
“I don’t think you can just buy a sword. They’re not like wands.”
“Think they’d let us hold theirs?” Ron asked, unheeding.
Harry flinched again, jerking out of Ron’s grasp entirely. Ron didn’t notice, already forcing his way ahead through the crowded wall of students blocking them from the cultivators.
With a small sigh, Harry edged away and climbed on top of one of the Gryffindor benches. When that didn’t take him high enough, he hopped on the table instead, joining several other upperclassmen craning their heads to get a better view of the excitement. He wasn’t tall enough to see much around them, but he could just catch a glimpse of shining black hair and a red ribbon.
It was a mistake to use the table, he decided after a minute. He still couldn’t see anything and he was too far away now to hear anything.
Bored, he let his attention drift. The majority of the students were crowded around the scene of the action, desperately trying to catch a glimpse of it. A few were finishing their dinners, taking advantage of everyone else’s distraction to get the choice remnants of the feast. A glimpse of red hair dragged Harry’s attention to the Weasley twins, who were—
Before he’d quite realized it, Harry was tackling one of the twins away from a piece of dead yao.
“What are you doing?!” he shrieked, gathering his feet under him again to launch himself at the other one, who was frozen in the act of reaching for a smoking not-lynx leg. “Are you stupid? Were you dropped on your heads as children?"
Touching them with bare skin! Touching anything they didn’t understand or recognize without precaution or sense! Truly, mortals were maddening. Why cut short their already abbreviated lives by such stupidity?
Harry was too busy shaking the gobsmacked twin to notice everyone around them drawing back with alarm. He also didn’t notice the furor as the cultivators parted the students like the sea to approach them, or the sharp look that Master Jiang gave him before exchanging a wide-eyed look with Master Lan.
He did notice when the leg that had attracted the twins’ interest went up in a gout of red-black flame. His predominant thought was relief, followed immediately by irritation.
“Cover your mouth and nose. You don’t want to breathe it in. Being careless with your life is forbidden!” snapped Harry at the twins, crossly. They just gaped at him.
“Harry, mate,” said the one he was clutching. “You’re speaking gibberish.”
Harry frowned severely at him. A moment later, an arm fell around his shoulders and he was hauled into dark robes and the scent of ink and smoke underpinned by sandalwood. “What’s this?” said a delighted voice that he faintly recognized as Master Jiang. “A baby cultivator! Look at him, Lan Zhan. He’s so righteous! He should be a Lan!”
“Mn,” said Master Lan, looking down at him with golden eyes.
“I think he is a Lan,” confided Master Jiang, smooshing Harry’s face into his chest and twirling him exuberantly. Harry squeaked. “I know this soul. Little peanut, you’re so small! I could put you in my pocket!”
Harry flailed and extracted himself, his face flushed. “I’m not a peanut, Senior Wei!” he shouted.
“Oh,” breathed another voice.
He whirled. He found himself face to face with Lan Yuan, who was clutching his sword like a teddy bear and staring at him with huge eyes. Harry had the sudden urge to hug him, and also maybe shake him until he rattled like a maraca. He froze, uncertain which one he was going to do.
“So cute,” cooed Master Jiang, pinching his cheeks. And then his arms, with obvious dismay. “So thin. No, this won’t do at all. What are these rags you are wearing? How indecorous! Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan, this must be against the rules! Isn’t there one about modesty and attire?”
Harry swatted at him. Master Jiang just laughed.
“Mister Potter,” said another voice. He craned his head to find Professor McGonagall standing nearby, pale and rigid, with Professor Dumbledore next to her. Both were staring at him. “I was not aware that you knew the Five Nations’ language.”
“I don’t.” Harry’s brow crinkled, baffled.
“What are they saying?” Master Jiang asked, draping himself across Harry’s shoulders. Harry staggered. “It sounds very flat. Tell me what they’re saying! Don’t be unfilial.”
“I don’t—” For the first time, Harry realized he wasn’t hearing a strange language when Master Jiang spoke. As though the realization itself flipped a switch in his mind, he abruptly realized it was English that felt foreign, as though it was something he had to work to turn into something comprehensible. His head suddenly felt very, very full.
He sat down where he stood, barely registering Master Jiang’s yelp and hasty thump down onto the stone floor beneath him.
“Master Jiang, Master Lan,” said Professor Dumbledore in a tight voice. Harry distantly realized the Headmaster was holding his wand in a very pointed fashion. “I believe we should retire to my office and discuss your presence here. Perhaps Poppy could take young Harry here to the Infirmary and check to make sure he’s not taken any injuries from the earlier excitement?”
He’s trying to separate us, a warning voice murmured in his head. “I’m fine, Professor,” Harry said, in careful English. “I just remembered some stuff.”
“Oh? Perhaps that’s something you could tell—”
“I think maybe I died.”
Dumbledore hesitated.
Which was right about when Professor Quirrell banged his way into the Great Hall, shouting about a troll.