Chapter Text
The Great Hall had never been so quiet during a speech.
A toad-pink woman with a lace bow at her throat cleared hers—delicately, like she was trying to startle a bird—and began to talk about standards. About tradition. About how children were best served by memorising what their betters had decided was safe. Words like improvement and reform did a slow, prim march between the candles.
Harry watched the staff table while the candles hissed and the Hall breathed. McGonagall’s mouth had become a line. Snape looked as though someone had spilled vinegar in his tea. Dumbledore folded his hands and let the new Defense professor’s platitudes stack up like neat, pink pamphlets in the air.
Ron leaned toward Harry. “Reckon she eats kittens or just glares them into behaving?”
Hermione didn’t shush him. She was listening in that way she had when she was filing an argument into drawers.
When the speech ended, applause rose like lukewarm porridge. Ginny clapped twice, her eyes did a quick lap of the Hall—doors, staff table, Filch—like she was clocking wind before a shot. The twins were already whispering. Neville stared at his plate as if trying to remember what appetite felt like.
Later, when the towers had turned to ink and the castle creaked the way old places do when they’re settling into the new year, a figure slipped through corridors under a Disillusionment charm. Gloved fingers pressed parchment to stone. Charms whispered. A small monogram appeared in each corner—two capital R’s drawn back-to-back so their spines touched, the curves making three neat hoops like the idea of Quidditch without saying the word.
By morning, the castle had homework.
The Syllabus
Education is the deliberate practice of telling the truth and surviving the consequences. If you prefer a friendlier definition, try this: education is the rehearsal you do so reality doesn’t eat you alive. The opposite of rehearsal is pretending. The opposite of education is obedience.
If a corridor goes dark and something inside it wants your wand more than you want your breath, a decree will not protect you. If fear knocks on your chest in the middle of the night, a noticeboard cannot tuck you back in. If a person in authority says “don’t worry,” the responsible reaction is not to stop worrying. The responsible reaction is to ask, “What do I need to learn?” and then learn it until it sticks even when your hands are shaking.
Hogwarts is a school, not a museum. We are not exhibits, and our professors are not docents guiding a quiet tour through dangers we are meant only to admire from behind a rope. We live here. We will live after we leave here. The castle should teach us how.
This year you will be told that discipline is more important than practice. You will be told that silence is a kind of safety and that questions make rooms dangerous. These are false statements. Discipline without practice is management. Silence is not safety. Questions are the only way to find the edges of a lie. If someone tells you the opposite, test them by asking for a demonstration.
Worked thought experiment (this will not be graded, but life will examine you later): Two students attend Defence. One copies a list of wand movements and writes a paragraph on “the ethos of shielding” and earns an O on the essay. The other stings their arm on a mild hex and learns what it feels like to hold a Protego long enough to block a second jinx; they misspell ethos. When the corridor goes dark, which student has a better chance to walk out with a friend?
There is a form of teaching that feels like humiliation. It is not teaching. There is a form of authority that treats curiosity like a threat. It is not education. There is a form of rule that wears a bow and calls itself “for your own good.” It is not safety.
This is not a call for chaos. It is a call for competence. Demand practice. Demand clarity. Demand that your school be a place where learning is louder than fear. If a rule prevents you from learning the thing that keeps you alive, the rule is wrong. Fix the rule or go where you can learn.
Homework (practical, not philosophical): write down three spells you could cast today to (1) shield, (2) disarm, (3) escape. If you cannot name them, ask someone who can. Pair up. Practice where it is safe and quiet. Learn loudly. Help someone smaller than you. Do not apologise for wanting to be ready.
Take notes. This will be on the exam.
— Required Reading
The article lay on the Gryffindor table like it had grown there overnight: one crisp sheet on top of every plate, cream-coloured, neat black ink, a narrow border that made it look suspiciously like it had been cut straight from a book. The masthead—Required Reading—sat at the top in clean serif letters that could have belonged to a respectable publisher or a very tidy murderer. It was the italics that made people pause. They read like something official, something meant to be kept.
“Where did this come from?” Lavender asked, pinching the edge between two pink fingernails. It didn’t smudge.
“Same place last night’s homework came from,” Seamus said. “Out of nowhere.”
Hermione had already read hers twice through by the time Harry sat down. He reached for the pumpkin juice, then noticed the sheet, then noticed that there were sheets on every place up and down the table. He set the jug down and read the first line, and something opened—like a window caught for months and finally, finally pushed.
Ron leaned over his shoulder. “What’s this, then? ‘Education is—’ Oh, bloody—this is going to get someone in detention.”
“Only if someone admits to printing it,” Hermione said without looking up. “And you don’t get detention for reading.” She folded her copy along the border with neat, precise fingers, like she meant to keep it in a folder. Harry watched her mouth twist when she reached silence is not safety. He could hear Umbridge’s syrupy voice saying precisely the opposite in a dozen different ways.
Ginny slid onto the bench across from them, eyes flicking over the masthead once and then away, like she was checking a broom strap before a match. “It’s good,” she said, as if commenting on the weather. “Short. Useful.” She tucked her copy under her plate as Umbridge swept past and smiled at no one.
Across the hall, the Hufflepuff table had gone quiet in that listening-not-talking way. Two second-years were tracing their wands along the words, as if there were a charm hiding that would turn into a toffee when you found it. Over at Ravenclaw, someone had already produced a quill and was annotating. The Slytherin table rippled with whispers; Pansy Parkinson scoffed—then folded her sheet once and slid it into her bag like a receipt she might need later.
Malfoy didn’t look up from his plate. “If it needs a decree to be dangerous, it isn’t,” he said, bored.
Professors along the top table looked like someone had delivered a surprise birthday cake that might explode. McGonagall smoothed a stack of napkins with the same care she used when an essay mattered too much. She flattened one so perfectly it might as well have been a signature. Flitwick peered down the staff table as if he were trying to spot which of his colleagues had invented the charmwork. Snape lifted his copy once, glanced at a single line, and set it down with surgical disdain without turning the page. Umbridge, decked as usual in pink and something enthusiastic, did not take a copy at all. The seat before her was empty; her plate remained untroubled by scrambled eggs. A prefect carried a sheet toward her. She blinked, smiled with teeth, and waved it away.
“Of course,” Hermione murmured. “She won’t read it. She’ll ban it.”
“She’ll ban the paper,” Ron said, flicking the corner of his with affection he would never admit. “Bet you a Sick—no. Bet you my pudding.”
“You’d bet pudding against Umbridge?” Seamus said. “You’re reckless.”
Harry folded his copy carefully, slid it between Transfiguration and Potions in his bag, and felt a small, stubborn relief. The line about humiliation had found a place in his head and sat down like it always belonged there.
“Who do you reckon wrote it?” Dean asked, trying to sound not-curious and failing.
“Reads like a Ravenclaw wrote it,” Padma said across the table, chin in her hand.
“Or a Ravenclaw stole it from a Hufflepuff,” Michael Corner shot back, grinning. A ripple of laughter ran along the bench; even Hannah Abbott, passing behind them, smiled at that.
“Someone who’s tired of being treated like they’re made of glass,” Ginny said, stealing a crust from Ron’s plate. “Glass breaks. People train.”
There was a beat of silence. Then Seamus gave a low whistle. “Blimey, that’s sharp. Sounds like something the column itself would say.”
“Or like a Gryffindor trying to sound clever,” Pansy Parkinson called from the Slytherin table, loud enough to carry. A few sniggers answered her, but Blaise Zabini only shrugged and went back to reading his copy, unreadable.
“Whoever it is,” Neville said quietly, “they’re right.”
The group nodded, and the question drifted off, unanswered and heavier than before.
By lunch, the castle had learned to carry the sheet like a talisman. Copies appeared pinned to noticeboards, tucked between stairwell stones, stuck by a discreet Adhesive Charm inside bathroom stalls. The more Umbridge’s pink notice about “unauthorised publications” sprouted like fungus on the walls, the more the neat cream pages multiplied beside them. Someone had got the tone exactly right; there was no shouting in the ink. It was so calm it made the rules look hysterical.
Colin had already asked three people if he could photograph the page to ‘make a study reference,’ and been told no twice and yes once. He didn’t seem disappointed. “I like it better in hands,” he said, and kept moving.
In Charms, Professor Flitwick glanced at the neat rectangle on the edge of a desk and did not say anything. “Partner drills,” he announced instead, and for the first time that term, he had them stand and actually cast rather than recite theory. After class, Michael Corner muttered that maybe the anonymous writer had a point, and Padma Patil said she’d been making the same point for three years and nobody listened then, and then she smiled apologetically at Flitwick’s back.
On the second-floor landing, a knot of Hufflepuffs, Ernie, Hannah, and Megan, read in a circle, trading out loud the homework instruction like it was a dare. “Shield, disarm, escape,” Ernie said. “I can shield, all right. Disarm’s rubbish. Escape…”
“Feet,” Hannah said. “Always remember you have feet.”
“You’d think that would be obvious,” Ernie said, looking down at his. “But somehow…”
“You can also escape by refusing to be prey,” Luna observed, drifting into the circle like a friendly moon. She’d tucked her copy into the spine of a Charms text as if it had always lived there. “Predators prefer silence. It makes them think they’re clever.”
Myrtle, listening from her favourite tap, drifted through the wall to look at a copy someone had stuck at eye level. “It’s very serious,” she said dreamily. “Very… educational.” She dabbed at her empty eye with a spectral handkerchief. “They should put my name on it.”
“It already has everyone’s,” Luna said, as if that settled ownership.
The teachers’ lounge, that afternoon, smelled of tea and rain and a quiet argument wrapped in two polite voices. Professor Vector had one of the sheets folded back against the teapot, using it as a coaster in a way that suggested she was also sneaking a glance at it with every sip. Professor Sprout had earth on her sleeves and a smear of soil on her cheek and read with her whole mouth, tugging one corner between her teeth when she reached this is not a call for chaos. It is a call for competence. Binns, who did not come to the lounge, did not read his copy, which had drifted through the wall and lay on a table as if hoping the table would absorb it.
“I do wish,” said Professor Sinistra to no one in particular, “that the person who wrote this would also make a timetable for sixth-years that doesn’t require an hourglass.”
McGonagall set her empty cup on the sheet and then moved it, realising, and then glared at herself for caring where the ring sat. “It is not wrong,” she said, which was, coming from her, the same thing as a full-throated endorsement. “It is also not wise.”
“Most true things aren’t,” Sprout said.
“It will cause a fuss.”
Sprout smiled. “Good.”
Flitwick tapped the border of the page. “Typeset, not hand-copied,” he murmured. “Clever student—or a very bored ghost.”
“If it’s a ghost, she has impeccable kerning,” Vector said, not looking up.
Professor Sprout said it didn’t matter which, as long as the training started.
At dinner, Umbridge announced Educational Decree Number—she did not say which number, and no one cared—stating that “any materials not expressly sanctioned by the High Inquisitor” would be confiscated. Her smile looked like it had been varnished on. Filch stood at the back with a cardboard box as if hoping someone would toss him a ball.
“You may, of course, continue to enjoy the school-sanctioned periodicals,” Umbridge trilled. “The Daily Prophet, as always, is a friend to learning.”
Someone at the Hufflepuff table coughed “liar” into a napkin. It sounded like a hiccup. Umbridge’s eyes went thin anyway.
“Any copies found on persons will be—oh, don’t be shy, Mr Filch—yes, collected. For safety. We think of safety first, don’t we?”
“That’s shite,” Seamus muttered into his sleeve.
At Slytherin, Pansy didn’t raise her voice. “If confiscation is the policy now, someone fetch her taste.”
Harry felt eyes on his bag. He looked up and caught McGonagall’s eye instead. She didn’t nod, didn’t blink—just smoothed the noticeboard parchment until the corners lay perfectly flat, the way she did when something mattered and she refused to say so.
The confiscations were half-hearted. Filch appeared in the common rooms, made a show of rooting around under a cushion, turned triumphantly with a sheet that someone had left for him behind the sofa. He dropped two into his box, missed the third resting plain as you like on the mantle, and left, muttering. The box looked emptier than his grin.
Later that night, in a corridor warmed by scurrying torches, a quiet current carried people toward a disused classroom. Harry followed Ron and Hermione because they were following the current and because the homework section had said Pair up. Practice where it is safe and quiet, and everyone seemed to have translated that into this door, tonight. The classroom had been arranged without being arranged: desks pushed back into neat walls, a space cleared in the middle, windows cracked to let in the hummed breath of late September. No one said DA yet. No one said anything at all for the first minute while they looked at each other and at their hands and at the space.
“It says,” said a Ravenclaw boy Harry vaguely remembered as Anthony, reading aloud from the copy he kept folded in his pocket, “shield, disarm, escape.”
“Protego, Expelliarmus, and… run,” said Ron, practical.
“Accio broom?” someone suggested.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Hermione said. “You can’t Accio a broom from the shed.”
“You can if no one’s looking,” someone else said.
Harry stepped into the cleared space and held up his wand. “We can at least practice disarming without anyone losing an eye.” He nodded at a pair nearest him. “You first. Lower power. No showing off.”
No one named him the leader. They didn’t need to. He kept his voice low and unassuming and tried not to be a person people looked to and failed almost immediately. Spells crackled, polite at first and then less polite. In the corner, someone set a stack of cushions against the wall. Hermione charmed a line on the floor that meant “do not cross,” and then sniped at Seamus when he stepped over it anyway and then charmed another line, just in case.
It wasn’t a class. It was better. It was the thing you do with friends when you have to teach each other quickly enough to live.
At the door, someone who had not entered stood a moment and watched. They wore the expression of a person counting: heads, pairs, spell strikes that stung and did not hurt. They waited until Harry paired with a younger student and slowed his casting to match. Then they walked away. Their heels made no noise at all on the stone.
By midnight there were twenty-three students and a pile of sweaty jumpers in a corner and a wall of chalk with two words written at the top in a neat, neutral hand: Shield. Escape. Beneath, someone had added, in messier script, Do not die. No one erased it. That, more than the decree, felt like a rule.
On the way back to Gryffindor, Harry tucked his copy deeper into his bag and felt, absurdly, as if the parchment were warmer than the rest. He imagined, in an unguarded moment, that if he opened the sheet again the words might have changed, might have added: Good. Again tomorrow.
The castle noticed. Hogwarts had a way of tilting itself around a mood. The portraits whispered. The staircase on the south side chose, for once, not to shift at the worst possible moment while two fourth-years sprinted across it with brooms and guilty expressions. In the library, Madam Pince hissed less than usual when someone copied the sheet onto the back of an old Herbology handout. Filch’s box sat by his desk, containing two confiscated copies and a dead mouse.
The next morning, the Prophet ran a small item on page seven: HOGWARTS STUDENTS DISTRIBUTE “UNSANCTIONED” PAMPHLET. The tone tried to be amused and failed into nervousness. Someone had sent them a copy. Someone always sent them a copy. The editor included a single line from the article—This is not a call for chaos. It is a call for competence.—and then added, archly, “While we admire the youthful enthusiasm for academia, we remind readers that Hogwarts operates under the guiding hand of the Ministry’s High Inquisitor.”
No one at breakfast read page seven. They were too busy, in any case, reading the copies that had somehow reappeared at every plate again. The masthead looked a fraction crisper this morning, as if the type had been adjusted. The ink held perfectly; no smudge, no blur. The border was a hair narrower. Only someone who had been watching would notice.
“Someone’s got a proper press,” Dean said, half-admiring, half-wary. “Or a very good charm.”
“Or both,” Hermione said. She had slept badly and looked glorious in the way she always did when a problem had crawled under her skin and made a home. “This is typeset, not hand-copied. Look at the consistency on the serif at the R.” She caught herself. “Not that I’m condoning. Or… well.” She folded the sheet again and slid it into her bag. “Well.”
Umbridge did not speak at breakfast. She smiled instead, brittle and expansive, and then left halfway through her porridge like a person late for their own performance. Her shoes made brisk little taps down the aisle; the copies did not rustle as she passed. A few professors watched her go without blinking; the copies didn’t rustle.
That afternoon, Harry found a copy pinned inside the door of the Room of Requirement, a room he had not asked for yet but which had opened for him as if it had been thinking about him for hours. The sheet hung perfectly straight on an invisible nail. He read it one more time. The line about being louder than fear felt less like a sentence and more like a thing that lived in his throat and wanted out as light.
On his way back to the tower, he passed two second-years practicing Protego in the shadow of a suit of armour. The first spell broke early. The second hung longer. The third held long enough to make them both laugh in relief.
“Homework,” one said to the other, breathless. “We’re doing our homework.”
The suit of armour saluted, as if the castle approved.
In the evening, Umbridge’s new decree went up in the common rooms—no unauthorised distribution, no unsanctioned materials, no gatherings of three or more without permission of the High Inquisitor. Someone had copied it out in neat official ink. Someone else had, without touching a quill, made the no gatherings line ripple like heat mirage so that no matter how you squinted you could not quite make it stay still.
Ron squinted. “Is that…”
“Wobbling,” Hermione said primly, and did not smile.
“Good,” Ron said. “Rules should wobble before they fall.”
“Suppose we need a name,” Dean said later, when the corridor crowd had moved the desks back again and Harry had charmed a chalk target onto a wall. “For this. The article called itself a syllabus.”
“We’re not a class,” someone said. “We’re… study.”
“Defence Association,” said a small voice by the window, almost as a joke.
“D’you want it to spell DA?” Ron said, perking up.
“I want it to work,” said Harry, not meaning to sound like that and sounding like that anyway. He cleared his throat. “Right. Pairs again. Shield, disarm, escape.”
They worked until lights-out. They worked because a paper had told them to and because they had always known, underneath the rules and the rules and the rules, that the paper was repeating the thing the castle itself had been whispering since they were eleven. Learn loudly. Practice even when afraid. Choose each other.
When he climbed into bed, Harry propped the sheet against his pillow and read it one last time by wandlight. The border caught the light and looked almost like a frame. He turned his wand out. In the dark, the words stayed bright in his head, as steady as if someone had spoken them into the room and left them hanging in the air.
Somewhere else in the castle, hands ink-stained and steady, someone fed a tidy strip of type back into a case, checked a charm that kept the lines straight when the press was in a hurry, and did not, under any circumstances, think about taking credit for cleverness. They thought about distribution maps, about how many copies fit into a satchel without creasing, about which staircases were likely to be kind after curfew. They thought about practice. They thought about tomorrow.
The next morning would bring Decree Number Something Else and a box under Filch’s desk and a few more teachers pretending not to see what they saw. It would bring a tiny notice in the Prophet and a long whisper out in the courtyard and a very precise suggestion at the edge of a parchment: Pair up. Practice where it is safe and quiet. It would bring children standing two by two under the eyes of old stone and doing what the school had always meant them to do: learn how not to die.
For now, the castle breathed. The paper lay under pillows and in bags, pressed inside textbooks and stuck to walls. The words did their quiet, steady work. And in the Great Hall, on the table where the last evening’s plates had been, a stack of tomorrow’s sheets sat ready, the ink set, the border clean, the masthead calm as a heartbeat.