Waiting for the Polyjuice Potion to brew proved to be annoyingly dull. More often than before I caught myself daydreaming about finally reaching this next trial, wondering what it could possibly contain. The boredom was thankfully alleviated by Sebastian and I's continued research on his relic - we were now in the process of putting together plans for experiments to determine what it could do and what the dark sacrifice might possibly be - as well as my own continued work on my ancient magic abilities. He'd also finally managed to mail out his crest and a letter to his sister, disguised as a box of treacle fudge from Ominis.
On Tuesday, Professor Onai predicted that a blizzard would roll through the area beginning early Wednesday evening. Many of my classmates tittered in excitement until she reminded us that curfew was still curfew, and there would be detention for any student caught going outside to play in the snow before the blizzard's end on Thursday morning. It was enough of a threat to make most of them settle down, but I simply rolled my eyes - clearly these lesser students were terrible at sneaking out for some fun, or so pathetically weak-willed if a detention was enough to deter them.
And just as I thought, upon discussing it with them both Sebastian and Ominis were up for a late-night romp in the snow. I'd expected it from my best friend, but hearing Ominis say how much he looked forward to it was definitely a pleasant surprise. He'd always struck me as such a stick-in-the-mud.
The next day during Beasts class, Natty, Poppy and I were grouped together to tend to the Thestral pens, on account of the three of us being able to see them. Poppy seemed to almost visibly vibrate with nervous energy as we made our way over with a couple buckets of sheep blood-soaked feed and a number of horse blankets.
"You look as though you wish to say something," commented Natty. Poppy's eyes slid over to her, and suddenly I could see they were filled with worry.
"The poachers got to my gran," she sighed. "Someone must have recognized me in Horntail Hall, and... they got to her."
"Oh... uh..." I squirmed uncomfortably. "...She's okay, right?"
"Oh, she's fine, thank goodness... she says I should've seen the looks on their faces when she caught the first one and Transfigured him into a fish, and our pet Kneazle Fauntleroy pounced on him at once," she waved a hand nonchalantly, almost with a fond grin. The pride was but momentary, however. "...But they were at her house- our house! They assumed I'd sent the egg there. She said they took the whole place apart looking for it, screaming that we'd cost them everything."
"Fauntleroy, huh?" I grinned. That was a pretty good name for a Kneazle.
"You mean to tell me your grandmother fought back against the poachers?" Natty blinked in surprise.
"Of course! My Gran can be quite terrifying when she needs to be..." Poppy's eyes darkened. "That first poacher was the luckiest among them. Even those that escaped with their lives will never be... quite the same again."
...
Even though I was quite warm in my woolen school uniform and cloak, a powerful shiver ran down my spine. Suddenly I think I knew exactly where Poppy got her stone-cold battle demeanor from.
"...I don't think I wish to know," Natty grimaced. Poppy closed her eyes as her shoulders slumped.
"Oh, but I should have known... I underestimated the poachers. And now another creature's in danger!" she sighed.
"What do you mean?" asked Natty.
"The poachers refused to leave empty-handed, so they took valuable journals that Gran had discovered when she was researching rare creatures. One of them contained theories about a secret hiding place of the Snidget, long thought to be extinct."
"A Snidget?" I hummed in thought, trying to remember what I knew about them from Beasts class... which wasn't much. All Professor Howin had ever mentioned of them was that they used to be used in Quidditch matches in place of the Golden Snitch that eventually replaced them... a rather terrible fate for such a small, fragile creature.
"It's a small bird with golden feathers," she explained. "It's incredible... it has rotational wings that allow it to dart quickly in any direction. In fact, the Golden Snitch in Quidditch is based on the snidget, which, barbarically, was actually used in the sport hundreds of years ago."
"Ah, right," I grimaced. "...And I bet you want to make sure those poachers don't go anywhere near those birds, huh?"
"Gran wants me to stay out of it," Poppy nodded with a conspiratorial twinkle in her eye. "But I know she's devastated that poachers might go after the snidgets if they still exist."
"Oh... if they ever fell into the poachers' hands, they could make far more money with them than they ever could with dragons," Natty swallowed.
"Their feathers and eyes are incredibly valuable," Poppy nodded in agreement. "That's why they're believed to be extinct - they were hunted out of existence by wizardkind. If the poachers found some now, I can't bear to think about the horrific ways they'd be bred and killed for profit."
"Did the journals have any clues to where these snidgets might be?" I asked.
"Gran says the journals were a bit cryptic, which is good... Perhaps the poachers won't be clever enough to find the birds," she hummed as she tapped a finger on her chin... for a moment she looked so adorable that I almost forgot how unhinged she really was. "From what she recalls, the journals only noted that the key to finding them 'lay in the moonlight'. Gran thinks it can be narrowed down to a handful of locations."
"Well, we had the element of surprise on our side when we broke into Horntail Hall... they'll probably be expecting us if we go looking for the snidgets, too," I mumbled, raising a hand to my chin.
"We'll need allies," suggested Natty. "Others who hate the poachers enough to help us... who value creatures as much as-" Suddenly Poppy gasped loudly.
"Merlin's beard! You're a genius! The centaurs!" she shouted happily. "They'd want the snidgets protected at all costs!" I couldn't help but flinch; this was not where I thought this discussion was headed at all, and evidently, neither did Natty.
"What?! But the centaurs are not fond of wizardkind in the slightest!" she argued. "They already didn't like us wandering around their territory in the Forbidden Forest when we were searching for Horntail Hall! If we ask them for their aid, it is likely they'll think we are searching for the snidgets to hunt them ourselves!"
"Yes, we'll need to be careful in how we approach them... tensions with them are high," Poppy nodded slightly in agreement. "Still, I think they may be our only hope... Let me think on it. I'll let you know as soon as I have a plan," she finished boldly as she turned to me. While Natty tried to reason with her I sighed in resignation... again I'd been roped into one of her illogical adventures.
...Well, if anyone had the best chance against a centaur among the three of us, it was definitely me. They seemed to have taken notice when I followed my pony instincts and imitated their mannerisms. And if push came to shove, I could certainly handle an assault from their primitive weapons. How sad that they haven't even invented or appropriated crossbows yet.
Of course, something like this would take some time to arrange - the centaurs were an elusive bunch. I returned my attention to feeding and brushing the thestrals, already thinking of ways I could subdue them without angering Poppy too much.
~
The skies grew dark with a green glow that afternoon, and just after dinner appeared in the Great Hall, snow began to fall in thick flakes from above. The wind howled and rattled the stained glass windows from both inside and out as the ceiling above mimicked the predicted blizzard, though the snowflakes melted away into nothing long before falling onto the tables. Many of the other students abandoned their meals and ran outside to celebrate, only to be ushered back inside by well-meaning but overbearing professors. They repeatedly insisted how dangerous such weather was, to which I scoffed.
Maybe if electricity and power lines were a thing in this world, or even in magic-saturated areas... which they weren't. Not to mention this world surprisingly had no analogue for the Windigoes that haunted the Frozen North of Equestria; now those were definitely not spirits to be trifled with.
It was difficult to wait for the snow to accumulate and the weather to calm. I followed the boys' advice on waiting until late at night to go outside - most of those foolish enough to get caught by the prefects or professors only waited until an hour or two after curfew, or even more stupidly, snuck right out immediately. Instead we sat in the common room, talking, drinking strong teas and admiring the steady, healthy growth of Ominis' runespoor as the hours passed.
Finally, just before 2am Sebastian deemed it the right time to sneak out. Under Disillusionment we all crept through the cold, dark castle, and muffled the double doors as we pushed them open. The light from the moon through the clouds dyed the sky a strange shade of brownish-purple, but it was still bright enough for us to see each other without the aid of magic. The winds had died down, and the thick, fluffy snow came up to our knees, with ever more falling softly from above. In excitement we jogged as quickly as we could manage to the empty fields just before the castle walls - we were alone, the only others outside were hundreds of feet away at the opposite end of the castle grounds. They made no effort to come any closer, so they must've been other students with the same ideas we had.
"So, what shall we do first?" grinned Sebastian, his cheeks already flushed pink from the cold.
"What else?" I smirked, right before sweeping my wand and causing a tidal wave of snow to break against his back. He screeched in frigid shock, making Ominis and I burst out laughing.
"Oh, you're going to regret that!" he warned as he giggled, his wand glowing with icy light. What seemed like fifty snowballs suddenly materialized from thin air all around him, and he laughed once as they all came flying towards us. While I leapt out of the way, Ominis simply raised his wand, a wall of snow bricks rising along with it to block the attack.
"I thought you would do something as predictable as aiming indiscriminately," he smiled as he heard and felt the impacts, then sent the wall sliding at a rapid pace towards Sebastian. He cut through it with a weak Diffindo, then grabbed some of the bricks in his magic and threw them at me. I managed to dodge most of them, but the last one got me square in the chest.
"Oh, it's on, now!" I grinned deviously, already readying my next attack. From there the three of us battled it out in a legendary snow fight of epic proportions. Ominis surrounded himself with a shield of multiple snowballs irregularly orbiting him like planets around the sun, lashing out almost like a whip as he fired, while Sebastian beamed proudly as he stood upon a rolling tuffet of snow that churned like a wave, allowing him a traveling vantage point as he summoned more of them with broad sweeps of his wand.
But neither of them could stand up to the snow ponies of myself that I formed, rearing up and whinnying as they charged at them recklessly. Within moments snow was flying everywhere as we all traded blow for blow.
"Aah! Why you little-!"
"Hahahaha- oof!"
"Oi! Don't think I didn't see that!"
"YEEEEE!!! ...You git, that went down my back!"
"And this one'll go down your front!"
"GAH!" While the lump of snow just barely missed me, I teleported quickly behind Sebastian with a lump of my own and hurled it down towards his head. He managed to see me in the corner of his vision and teleported away himself, the snow missing him by only a fraction of a second. While he and I chased each other around, Ominis' eyes widened as he realized what we were doing.
"Sebastian... when did you learn to Apparate?!" he exhaled in shock. Sebastian came to a stop just beside him, which finally allowed me to catch up to him and cram a snowball in his ear. He simply laughed as he shook it off.
"Sunset taught me," he grinned, jutting a thumb towards me. While I nodded proudly, Ominis nodded once in understanding, then turned his head towards the ground, sighing bitterly.
"I fear I'll never learn properly... hard to envision where you wish to go when you've never been able to see where it is you're going."
"Have you ever tried?" I asked. A grimace flashed across Ominis' face.
"My parents did attempt to teach me... or, I should say that's what they would say. They laughed when I immediately Splinched myself nearly in half after moving only a foot. It was quite fortunate Aunt Noctua was there to put me back together." While Sebastian merely nodded in sympathy, I bit back a curse.
Geez... you could have died, and they thought it was funny...!
"Perhaps Sunset can teach you her homeland's method of Apparition," Sebastian suggested. "It's quite simple to learn, and there's no risk of Splinching at all." For a moment I bristled at having the suggestion foisted upon me, but I quickly found myself entertaining the thought. Though the spell also required a visual component in determining your post-teleportation surroundings, not to mention Sebastian was - like me, certainly an outlier, just as talented with magic as I was - someone else might not be able to produce the same instant results.
"Er... I'm not so sure," he replied hesitantly. I found it hard to blame him, considering how poorly his first experience went.
"You don't have to if you don't want to," I offered. "Plenty of other ways to get around, after all."
"Right..." We all stood there in an uncomfortable silence for a few moments. Finally, Ominis decided to lighten the mood by blindsiding Sebastian with a snowball to the chest, hitting him hard enough that it knocked him flat on his back.
"Oof! You tosser," he growled playfully as he wiped away a bit of snow that had splattered onto his face. Ominis did the same to me as I laughed at him on the ground, though I didn't mind so much. I continued laughing as I flailed my arms and legs to make a snow angel.
Once I'd finished and got up to see my work, an idea came to me. "Oh, you guys wanna make snowmen?" I asked.
"That's a splendid idea," agreed Ominis as he helped Sebastian up.
"I'll make the biggest one out of the three of us," he bragged. "Snowmen are something of a specialty of mine."
"Yea? We'll see about that," I smirked. We each stood with our backs to each other, and after counting down from ten we gave ourselves a minute to assemble the largest snowman possible. My wand glowed as it swept up vast swaths of snow in a wedge in front of me, and a Geminio Charm doubled what I had accumulated. Part of me wondered if using ancient magic would be considered cheating... considering the others couldn't harness that ability, I went ahead and refrained.
After a minute passed, we ceased our casting and stepped back to admire our work. Ominis' snowman was an impressive likeness of himself, right down to the moles on his cheeks, with a snow runespoor with the most delicately-carved scales draped around his shoulders. My snowman was similar in that it depicted myself in a triumphant pose like a statue and stood fifteen feet tall.
And then we turned to see Sebastian's snowman, our faces falling once we'd seen what he'd built...
...It wasn't a snowman at all. Rather... just a part of one.
A rather... small, inconsequential, often-forgotten body part when it came to building one.
...
...
...
It was quite clearly a huge, erect snow phallus, standing about eight feet tall. Sebastian could barely contain his laughter as Ominis' face flushed bright red once he realized what he was sensing. "See? I've created the biggest snowman out of the three of us if this bit's sticking out," he snickered.
"Sebastian!" Ominis shouted as he covered his face with his hand, mortified while I rolled on the ground due to dying laughing. "We're in the presence of a lady, for Merlin's sake!"
"Hey... it's nothing I haven't seen before," I gasped for breath with a sly grin as I picked myself up. While I felt a pulse of an emotion that clearly screamed "you what?!" resonate through Ominis' soul, an even more brilliant idea came to me. "But it's not very impressive, now is it? Surely it could be... bigger?" I wiggled my eyebrows.
"It absolutely could," Sebastian nodded, his grin even wider than my own. Mere seconds later, the two of us had not only swept up all of the nearby snow in our magic, but also added Ominis and I's snowmen to the amalgamation. From a cloud of misty white rose a towering obelisk of a male organ, over twenty feet tall and as thick around as one of the castle's smaller towers, complete with boulder-sized lumps at its base. It only took a few moments gazing upon our creation for us to cackle hysterically, while Ominis simply shook his head in thorough disappointment.
"What is wrong with you two?" he scolded as he waved his wand - instead of the giant snow phallus melting away or exploding or otherwise being destroyed like I'd expected, Sebastian and I laughed even harder as more snow packed itself onto the thing in curves, smoothing out the surface and forming alarmingly-realistic veins and ridges.
"Oh, and I thought you were supposed to be the more proper and refined one among the three of us," wheezed Sebastian.
"I am. I am also disgusted by your lack of fine detail," Ominis replied straight-faced as a wedge of snow displaced itself from the very top, forming a meatus. I snickered as the wedge plopped back onto the ground, both at the sight of our combined efforts and at the thought I had.
Heh... meatus. "...I didn't know you had it in you to be so naughty," I grinned.
"Oh, please... where do you think Sebastian learned everything he knows?" he replied, a thin smile eking out from his mouth.
"You may have taught me what you know, but I've perfected it," preened Sebastian. "Mischief is but an artform, and I am its muse."
...Something about that boast didn't sound right. "I... don't think you quite know what that word means," I smirked.
"Indeed, you're implying that you inspire mischief, and not the other way around," Ominis added with a chuckle.
"Tch... shut up, you know what I meant," he slumped over in annoyance, grumbling. While he sulked I took the opportunity to grab a lump of snow and throw it at the back of his head. "Oi! Oh, I'll get you for that...!"
We fought each other in the snow again. After about ten minutes we were exhausted and out of breath, but still laughing. I wanted to keep the memory of this night alive, so I sprayed a fine mist of water around the phallic pillar with Aguamenti so it wouldn't melt for as long as possible. Satisfied with our work, and beginning to get soaked through with snow to the point Warming or Drying Charms no longer helped, we all decided to sneak back into the castle, the cold halls surprisingly warmer than it had been outside. We passed by the portrait that led to the kitchens, tickling the pear and asking the house elves inside for some hot chocolate before heading for the common room.
We spent a while sipping our drinks in front of the fireplace, curled up on a couch with some blankets together. Despite shocking him by touching his neck with our icy hands and making him shriek, Ominis fell asleep just before finishing his cup.
Which was fine... Sebastian and I entertained ourselves for a while until weariness set in. It was tempting to simply fall asleep where I was, squished and huddled up against each other for extra warmth... I hadn't even noticed we were so close together until I caught my head bobbing onto his shoulder. At some point we'd taken to sharing a blanket and he'd wrapped an arm around me, and once I realized that I felt my heart beat harder, heating my chest like a hot coal.
"Ready to call it a night?" he smiled softly, gazing down at me through half-lidded eyes. His hair had dried out and hung messily in front of his forehead, and I... had to admit it was a really good look on him. "If we stay up much longer, none of us will be of any use in class tomorrow."
"Yea, you're right," I yawned, semi-consciously squeezing him tighter for a moment. I heard him exhale a gentle snort of contentment.
And then I felt his lips press themselves near the top of my head.
I blinked in surprise, and quickly bent my head upward to look at him; he seemed just as surprised as I was.
"Er, I... do apologize," he stammered out. "I... I don't quite know what came over me." While I could only make myself blink, inwardly I felt an overwhelming sense of glee overpowering his sense of awkward mortification.
There were times I thought back to that kiss we shared at the end of the Hogsmeade Gala... part of me wanted to go back and slap myself for thinking that was a good idea. It was a part of me that refused to be so soft, a part of me that was still convinced I didn't need him or his affection.
But the other part of me treasured the memory like it was my most priceless possession. Since then - and even beforehand - I thoroughly enjoyed every moment we spent together, even when we were simply studying in silence together in the same space. This moment right now was no different.
While I wrestled with my own mind on how to react, a faint echo suddenly whispered to me from the depths of my soul, my consciousness.
Show your real feelings... you don't have to always control the situation.
...
I... don't need to control everything.
The more I thought about it, the more that echo quieted my mind and reinforced my emotions. While Sebastian babbled on with trying to justify himself, I moved around and stretched upwards just enough to gently return the kiss to his temple. That got him to shut right up.
"Didn't know we were on those kind of terms," I grinned. He stared at me in surprise for a moment before smiling, and we stared into each other's eyes like two dumb idiots until a nearby clock chimed four times. To our right, Ominis shifted in his sleep.
"Well... time for me to get our Sleeping Beauty here to bed," he chuckled. "I'll see you at breakfast tomorrow, then?"
"Sure will," I nodded with a wink. "Gotta see what everyone will think of our... artistic vision, after all."
~
The gossip our overnight creation caused was well worth it. The boys were amused, the girls were offended, and the professors simply shook their heads as Mr. Moon melted it away in a manner that closely resembled a sexual act. Headmaster Black threatened to take away all of the House points of whomever had created such a terrible thing, effectively ensuring that nobody ever fessed up.
And yet, during Charms class, Professor Ronen shot the three of us a knowing grin.