Chapter 101: Wrackspurts
The next morning, in the Great Hall of Hogwarts.
Sunlight poured through the massive stained glass windows and spilled across the four long tables, but it brought Harry no warmth at all.
The reckless excitement from last night had gone cold, like a cup of tea left out overnight. Bitter. Nauseating.
The moment he walked into the Great Hall, every gaze seemed to land on him like a searchlight.
Some students whispered. Others pointed openly.
"Look, that's Potter. I heard he almost crashed into the Whomping Willow and broke it."
"Flying a car to school. That's actually brilliant."
Only now, after calming down, did Harry realise how reckless and stupid last night's so called bravery had been.
He had almost killed himself and Ron. Worse, he had nearly cost Mr Weasley his job.
He was not some powerful rule breaker.
He was just a troublemaker who had caused an enormous mess and now had to walk with his head down.
Harry huddled at the Gryffindor table, wishing he could bury his face in his bowl of porridge.
Ron, sitting opposite him, did not look any better. His face was as pale as a ghost.
Just then, a storm of beating wings filled the hall.
Hundreds of owls swept into the Great Hall.
A large grey owl, looking half unconscious, suddenly dived headfirst into Ron's milk jug, splashing both him and the table.
Ron's eyes widened in horror when he saw the red envelope tied to the owl's leg.
The envelope was smoking.
"Oh, no..." Ron groaned in despair. "It's a Howler."
"Open it quickly!" Neville Longbottom shouted, clapping his hands over his ears. "If you don't, it'll explode!"
But it was already too late.
The four corners of the envelope caught fire, and the red parchment opened wide like a giant mouth.
"RONALD WEASLEY!"
Mrs Weasley's roar, amplified a hundredfold by magic, instantly shook dust from the ceiling of the Great Hall.
Cutlery across the hall rattled.
Every conversation stopped. The entire Great Hall fell into dead silence, leaving only the frantic screaming of the letter.
"HOW DARE YOU STEAL THAT CAR! I AM ABSOLUTELY ASTOUNDED! IF YOU STEP OUT OF LINE AGAIN, WE'RE BRINGING YOU STRAIGHT HOME!"
Harry felt his cheeks burn.
Although the letter was scolding Ron, every word felt like a slap across his own face.
The Weasley family had been so good to him, yet he had done something like this. He might even have cost Mr Weasley his job.
Harry kept his head low, as if that could somehow lessen his guilt.
Then, like a flash of lightning, Tamara's warning words from before crossed his mind.
Harry's head, which had been about to sink even lower, froze in place.
He could not hide.
He absolutely could not let her see him as a joke.
Harry clenched his teeth, forced down the urge to run, and made himself look up.
Even though his cheeks burned and his eyes trembled with shame, he did not shrink away.
Across the hall, at the Slytherin table, Tamara was elegantly slicing a grilled sausage.
Even amid the deafening noise, her movements did not falter. She only frowned slightly, as if displeased by the shrill racket.
Her gaze cut through the crowd and landed coldly on the rigidly seated saviour.
"Heh."
A very faint sneer escaped her lips.
She saw Harry's flushed face, his trembling shoulders, and his hands gripping the edge of the table.
In the Dark Lord's eyes, this series of reactions still counted as nothing more than incompetent endurance.
"Look at him. He is holding back tears."
Tamara's thoughts were full of mockery.
"Faced with public humiliation, he neither dares to fight back nor vent his anger. He just sits there like a punching bag."
"This meaningless stubbornness has no deterrent power. It only makes him look even more like a clown holding his breath."
The Howler finally finished its tirade and tore itself to shreds.
The Great Hall remained silent.
Several seconds passed before someone burst into laughter.
Harry took a deep breath and loosened his cramped fingers.
He turned his head and met Tamara's mocking black eyes.
This time, he did not look away in embarrassment.
He stared back expressionlessly across the long table.
Tamara raised an eyebrow, then withdrew her gaze, no longer sparing another glance for her so called arch enemy.
"Boring."
Herbology class.
The air in Greenhouse Three was damp and muggy, thick with the earthy stench of soil and fertiliser.
Professor Sprout stood at the front, demonstrating the newly unearthed Mandrakes.
Their cries were not yet fatal, but they were still enough to make one's head spin.
Tamara stood in the back row with a blank expression, wearing a pair of fluffy earmuffs.
She had no interest in these plants that looked as if they had crawled out of some curse.
Rather than repotting them, she was far more interested in the somewhat withered Fanged Geranium in the corner of the greenhouse.
That was a necessary ingredient for many advanced Dark Arts potions.
Moreover, Hogwarts clearly had not yet wasted the budget on theft proof charms for every greenhouse.
At last, the bell rang.
The students rushed out of the greenhouse as if escaping prison, tossing their mud covered dragon hide gloves into buckets.
Tamara deliberately slowed her pace.
She waited until everyone had left, and even Professor Sprout had carried a pot of Mandrakes back to her office. Only then did she leisurely finish packing her things.
She did not leave.
Instead, she turned toward the deepest part of the greenhouse, the restricted area for dangerous plants.
The air grew even hotter and damper. The light dimmed.
Just as Tamara was about to pluck a few leaves from the Fanged Geranium, she stopped.
Someone was there.
From behind a row of enormous plants that looked like octopus tentacles came a faint, dreamy voice.
"...Could you give me my shoe back, please? My mother gave it to me..."
Tamara narrowed her eyes.
She walked over silently, and the sight before her made one eyebrow twitch violently.
A first year girl with messy blonde hair and carrot shaped earrings was standing barefoot on the muddy ground.
Luna Lovegood.
That mad Ravenclaw girl.
Although school had only been in session for two days, her name had already become a joke at the Slytherin table.
In Tamara's memory, she belonged to the category of outliers not worth attention, a walking embarrassment to Hogwarts.
At this moment, Luna had her back to Tamara, and her situation was extremely dangerous.
One of her ankles was tightly bound by a vine, leaving deep red marks.
It was a Venomous Tentacula.
One of the more dangerous plants in the wizarding world.
Any ordinary first year would have been screaming in terror or struggling desperately by now.
But not Luna.
She did not even look at the vine around her leg.
She was looking upward, her grey eyes fixed on the space behind her own head.
There, the Venomous Tentacula's main vine, covered in spikes, had risen high like a cobra. Its thorns were aimed at her neck, ready to strike.
She saw it.
She was even making eye contact with the vine that was about to kill her.
"...You shouldn't be angry."
Luna spoke softly, as calmly as if she were reasoning with a temperamental kitten.
"There are no Nargles in that shoe. Spit it out, all right?"
Tamara stood in the shadows, watching the scene as the corner of her mouth twitched.
This lunatic.
It was not that she had failed to notice the danger. She had noticed it, and then decided to communicate with a plant.
"...Beyond help."
Tamara made her final judgment.
An idiot who tried to reason with a predator was a waste of Hogwarts' air.
She turned coldly, ready to leave.
But just as she took her first step, the accursed system appeared in her mind again.
[Warning! Ravenclaw freshman detected in life threatening danger!]
[As the future master of Hogwarts, you have a duty to correct your subjects' incorrect survival methods. Please provide assistance immediately!]
[Reward: Courage +3]
"Impossible."
Tamara replied coldly in her mind. Not only did she not stop, she quickened her pace.
[Ding! Host detected passively failing to save a life!]
[Punishment program preloading: If the student is injured or dies, the host must give Harry Potter a five second passionate hug the next time she sees him and loudly recite in public: "Oh, Harry, you are my light. It is so good to see you!"]
Tamara's footsteps stopped so suddenly that her shoes skidded through the mud, leaving a deep mark.
"...What did you say?"
[Eh, was that not clear? Let me repeat...]
"...Shut up."
Tamara gritted her teeth, cutting off the system's chatter.
A violent surge of killing intent erupted within her.
She would rather duel Dumbledore than touch that filthy Scarhead.
"Damn system...!"
"Diffindo!"
A precise spell filled with magic shot from the shadows.
The invisible blade of wind struck like a giant axe, carrying all of Tamara's fury as it slammed into the Venomous Tentacula.
Squelch!
The main vine, which had been only inches from Luna's nose, was severed cleanly. Dark green sap splattered everywhere.
The impact drove the plant into a frenzy. It twisted in pain, released Luna's ankle, and retreated into the soil.
Luna blinked in surprise.
Before she could react, a pale hand roughly grabbed the back of her collar and dragged her out from the pile of twitching severed vines like a kitten.
"Has your brain been stepped on by a Troll?"
Tamara looked down at the girl. Her voice was not loud, but it carried a chill that made the scalp prickle.
"That was a full grown Venomous Tentacula. Did you think it was your family pet? Were you planning to shake hands with it?"
She narrowed her eyes slightly, scrutinising Luna with a biting gaze.
"Is Ravenclaw's so called wisdom teaching you how to smile while feeding yourself to a plant?"
Faced with this barrage of sarcasm, Luna Lovegood showed neither fear nor shame.
She only looked at the severed vine with a trace of regret.
"Oh..."
Luna sighed softly, her voice still airy.
"You scared it away. We were just about to reach an agreement."
Tamara's motion of wiping her hand paused.
She looked at the lunatic before her in disbelief.
"An agreement?" Tamara sneered, as if she had heard the funniest joke in the world. "Its agreement was to turn you into fertiliser."
"Perhaps."
Luna shrugged, unconcerned.
She turned around, picked up a worn sneaker from the mud, patted off the dirt, and put it back on.
After doing all that, she turned her head, tilted it, and looked at Tamara with an extremely calm, almost inquisitive gaze.
"Anyway, thank you. Even though you seem very angry."
Tamara looked at the shoe in disgust, feeling as if her sanity were being dragged down by this mad girl.
"If you want to die, remember to do it somewhere far away next time."
With that, Tamara turned to leave.
"On top of your head..."
Luna's ethereal voice suddenly came from behind her.
"...there are so many black Wrackspurts."
Tamara's footsteps paused.
"They're all clustered together, flying around your head."
Luna frowned slightly, as if puzzled, and waved a hand in the air as though she could truly see them.
"They make your thoughts very noisy. Full of screaming, and a very cold static."
Luna lifted her head. For the first time, her dazed eyes seemed to focus, piercing straight into the depths of Tamara's own.
"Don't you get tired of listening to those voices all the time?"
Tamara turned around abruptly.
Her pupils contracted sharply.
In this school, even Dumbledore's gaze only carried suspicion and scrutiny.
But this was the first time someone had used such seemingly insane words to define her careful calculations of power, slaughter, and rule as mere noise.
For a moment, killing intent surged within her.
Someone who could see through disguises by intuition alone was far more dangerous than someone like Dumbledore, who relied on logic and evidence.
But when she looked at Luna's clear, almost hollow eyes, and the pure curiosity on her face with no malice at all, the red light in Tamara's eyes flickered a few times before fading.
Killing a lunatic was beneath her.
"...Mind your own business."
Tamara spoke coldly.
"Do not try to listen to voices you should not hear."
With that, she strode out of the greenhouse without looking back.
Luna stood where she was, still clutching a piece of severed Venomous Tentacula vine.
She watched Tamara's departing back, tilted her head, and sighed softly.
"There really are a lot of Wrackspurts."
She murmured to herself.
"And... she seems so lonely."
.....
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