FicWad

The Harry Potter universe is the creation of J.K. Rowling. This is fanfiction. The standard disclaimers apply.


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Into the Glade, Part 2


Her story began very, very long ago, somewhere in the hills of the Greek mainland. She didn't remember how she came into being. She did not have a name—names could be useful for communicating with humans, and humans certainly gave names to gods and the like sometimes. But names were still a human thing, suitable for beings who didn't think in terms of the whole of each other in one go, who couldn't look into each other's minds. Certainly she got called various names over the years—most of them good—but, like clothes, they weren't really her problem.

She had always had her cave and her spring; in her memories the cave looked much the same as this one. Humans came to her, and she would take the form he saw now, sit on the banks, and talk to them. She looked happy—positively happy. Her face showed a whole world of expressiveness compared to what he had seen so far.

She liked people. They liked her, and they made each other happy. It had been extremely simple. Many of them were quite taken with her; and nearly all of them, men and women alike, wound up laying in her arms. She had no concept of "sexuality" as a separate aspect of social interaction—it was no different to her than smiling or laughing. If someone desired her physically, her magic leapt in response. If they did not (although they usually did), that was fine too.

Over the years, as the area was settled and converted to agriculture, more and more came to visit her. This made her happy. They treated her with respect, mostly, and became her friends. If any became obsessed, she would tweak their minds to keep things from getting out of hand.

She healed the sick in mind and body, and did so almost absentmindedly, as a friendly act when interacting with her visitors. Her neighbors were very healthy; they made better lovers that way.

In the early days, when her first language was still that of the people around her, she learned to write, spending sweet summer days lying on the grass with the local scribe, scratching the overly-complicated glyphs into the dirt and laughing.

Not everyone was friendly—in one of her earliest memories, a group of fifty men came marching up her hill, holding spears and dressed in coats of bronze. She looked into their minds and did not like what she saw, so she froze them all in place. Their leader, she left standing to watch as she simply knocked them off the hill with her magic, as one would brush crumbs from a table. She never saw any of them again, although that sort of confrontation repeated itself occasionally. Once every few generations was usually enough. She could take care of herself, and mostly life alongside of humans was good.

Charlie wondered if she had met others of her kind—other nymphs or gods? He was surprised that the answer was a clear 'yes'.

She had been very young, or at least this was one of her earliest memories. It was mid-afternoon on a hot day near the end of summer. No humans had come anywhere near her since the previous noon. This was mildly unusual.

Without her having sensed them first, a group of two women and two girls walked out of the woods at the base of her hill, and approached her spring. The leader wore a knee-length tunic, and had a bow, quiver, and three javelins strapped to her back. The other three wore jewelry and carried things, but were otherwise nude.

The second woman of the group was carrying a small wild boar—maybe six months old—that had been recently killed.

The nymph brushed across their minds, finding them like smooth stone. All four of them looked up; three of them startled, the leader amused. That was exciting, possibly the most exiting thing that had ever happened to her, since she was sure now that none of these visitors were human.

She wasted no time taking human form and greeting them. All were well-mannered and pleasant. They had spent the day hunting nearby, had sensed her, and come to visit. She was delighted and thanked them.

The leader had expected to be immediately recognized, and seemed pleased not to be. The nymph had only worked it out a few days later, with the help of her thoroughly awed human neighbors—the huntress was Artemis herself. In legend she had many followers; the three with her that day were an oceanid, carrying the boar, and two nereids, which the villagers explained had been charmed by Zeus himself to appear nine years old in perpetuity. All had been allowed to leave their waters by some powerful magic of the Olympians.

Artemis had been straight and to the point—she was irritated by men, humans and gods alike. She had no interest in their romantic advances, but was continually having to reject them, often, wrathfully, and violently. Human women were too weak to be interesting. She found the goddesses of her own power to be, with few exceptions, unbearably annoying. Her followers were off-limits to her for various magical reasons. The nymph was a very pleasant surprise, and acceptable in the eyes of Artemis.

The huntress lay down her weapons and removed her tunic and sandals. She ordered her followers to cook the boar, and asked the nymph to resist. The nymph, willing to do nearly anything to please her, promised to do her best.

They wrestled on the grass. Artemis finally got the nymph thrown over her shoulder, a position from which she was having trouble wriggling free. She was carried into her cave via the stream. By the time they reached the inner pool and Artemis was up to her breasts, there was enough water to slow things down and make her slippery. She could have changed to water, or used magic, but that was not how the game worked, and would have meant taking her hands off of this beautiful, naked woman who had come to see her. This way was much more fun.

When they approached the back wall and Artemis was about to go for the underwater passage, the nymph pushed herself off the rock, toppling them both over into the water. In her own spring, she was like a fish, and stronger than she was outdoors. The more powerful goddess wasn't used to wrestling in water, nor really to sexualized wrestling that was friendly and consensual. In seconds, she found herself horizontal and sideways in the water with the nymph's legs locked around her waist. She didn't need to breathe, but being held underwater was obviously something to fight back against. Unfortunately for her, she could reach neither the surface nor anything to push off against besides the nymph herself.

The nymph liked it that way, since in an effort to gain leverage, the other goddess had curled around her and resorted to grabbing her ass. She returned the favor, making herself possibly the only living thing to have done that and remained living. Well, she had been asked to resist! She decided that meant resisting forceful advances, not her own urges, and managed to take advantage of her captive's flailing legs to lodge her hand firmly between them.

She was fast, and Artemis wasn't expecting her to have the temerity to try it. So she was able to work her thumb all the way in and, for about ten seconds, move it and her fingers in slow, circular motions while screams of indignation came, muffled, from below her. This, of course, left her distracted and imbalanced, and Artemis took advantage of that to escape, grab her by the wrists, and start pushing into the underwater passage to the heart of the cave.

This was an increasingly difficult journey, since the nymph's power increased every step of the way. The huntress, though, was enraged to have become the hunted, and was determined to take her prey in its lair. What followed was a lengthy underwater struggle filled with thrashing and infuriating, opportunistic groping, and hampered by the close rock walls that the nymph could brace herself against. Finally the nymph was pushed backwards into the main chamber of her cave. This was at least a hundred feet across, extremely deep, with a few rocky islands and narrow shores. It was ringed by doorways, tunnels, and alcoves, all holding the nymph's innumerable secrets.

Suddenly Artemis found herself in the open water, far from the surface, shores, or any sort of firm footing. The nymph, on the other hand, had only grown stronger. This was as far as the battle could be pressed using physical strength alone. The nymph had found many clever ways to store up her magic, and by drawing on it could have kept even an Olympian pinned between her legs almost indefinitely. If Artemis had resorted to magic, or dropped her human form, it would of course have been another story, and the nymph could only have hoped to make a good show of delaying the inevitable.

This, though, was a very human sort of struggle, with very human goals, and it would have constituted cheating to change the terms just to avoid embarrassment. Besides, the nymph's fingers inside of her felt very, very good. She was far too aroused to do anything other than declare it a draw and move on to more interesting activities.

Several hours were then elided from the story, to Charlie's disappointment, as they revealed far too many secrets. But at the end of those they emerged from the cave, happy and energized, to find the boar sectioned, spitted, roasted, and waiting for them. It was an excellent meal, and after it the nymph took all four visitors into her cave for the night.

Again, Charlie was given very few details, except that the handmaidens of the huntress were apparently off-limits to men, their mistress, and many other entities, but not actually off-limits to her. They had been given for the night to the nymph as a reward. They were not Artemis' only gift to the nymph (and she would not say what the others were, except that she still possessed them all). They were, however, a very, very nice gift.


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The hunting party had left the next day. That was the only time the nymph remembered meeting others like herself. She had trouble feeling sad about that. It was a good memory. But time passed, and it had now been a long, long time since that experience.

Languages changed, people changed, clothes changed, and their religion changed. Her immediate neighbors revered her to the very end, and would have protected her with their lives should she have ever needed it. She was not immortal—merely powerful and unaging—if she were severely wounded in her human form and had ventured too far from her stream, her magic might not be enough to save her.

Once she had been regarded by all as a minor deity. Now, more and more her kind was seen as a thing of evil, because theirs was a power alien to humans, not under their control. She could make no sense of human religion—she just knew that there were those who would kill her if they could.

Humans sometimes had magic, yes, and sometimes they were descended from her kind (yes, she supposed she could have children, but had never bothered to do so), but since Artemis and her nymphs, she had seen no evidence that any beings like herself remained. She became fearful, and spent her time diffused in her spring, taking human form only in the presence of visitors, and only after looking into their minds. Her neighbors still came to see her, but they, too were fretful. She would take them into the safety of her cave, where her power was greater, before losing herself in her desires with them. The cave, in those memories, was a large complex, going far into an unearthly world of delicate stone and crystals, populated by strange creatures that lived off of magic alone.

A foreign woman had come to her spring one day. Her Greek was broken and accented, her clothes odd, her red hair exotic here. A neighboring farmer had talked to her, seen that she was magical, and decided she was trustworthy. He gave her directions to the hill, telling her to look for a beautiful girl.

The woman had introduced herself as Helga Hufflepuff.

The nymph brushed away, or simply ignored, Charlie's surprise, and continued.

Helga was simply here on vacation. Greece was beautiful, the food was delicious, and she had been collecting both recipes and cuttings of fruit trees. Meeting the nymph was an unlooked-for surprise.

The nymph became friends easily—it was natural for her. If someone meant her well and was friendly to her, she would like them, and her expectation that they would like her back was almost always rewarded. Helga had been no exception—the plump, energetic witch had been far more interesting than any visitor in ages. Certainly she hadn't really been used to talking casually to a naked woman, but she was incredibly adaptable, and got over it quickly. Talking to her was a joy. Helga was bubbly, so the nymph was too.

Helga talked about plants, and found the nymph surprisingly knowledgeable for someone who had never been more than a few hundred feet from her home. The nymph was able to discuss magic and history. She could speak, read, and write five languages which Helga could not.

Helga and her friends were building a school of magic back in Scotland, and she told the nymph all her ambitious plans for it. It sounded idyllic. The nymph liked children, and they always liked her back. Children always saw that she was friendly and kind, and never mistook her for any sort of malicious spirit.

Helga said that back home, sometimes magical children had a hard life, especially when they were born into non-magical families. She didn't give details, but hinted that the school was also meant to be a truly safe place. The nymph felt for them.

Then came the Hogwarts of the nymph's own imagination; drawn from Helga's memories, but still looking forward to when the castle would be built and the children arrived. She saw them all, dressed like Helga, laughing and talking with the same charming accent. They played on the moors and swam in the loch, and explored the castle—which would be grand and beautiful, and surrounded by all the wonderful things Helga would plant there. And throughout it all would be magic—not just her own, but all the amazing, fascinating things that humans in their infinite creativity could devise.

And she saw herself there, with them, one of them, happy. There would be no one who wanted to hurt her, no reason to hide in her cave. And she would keep the children safe. Helga had no idea what the nymph could do—no human had ever known, nor had she ever tested her own limits. It was enough to say that in her element she was immensely powerful—if she could be there to help Helga and her friends, with them all working together it would take a determined god—something vastly more powerful than human wizards—to bring harm to the school.

She wanted this so, so badly. She wished with all her being that she didn't have to be stuck in these hills, bound to her stream, that she could just follow this woman home. She said so, expecting Helga to laugh and shrug at the oddities of fate.

Helga Hufflepuff did not think like that at all.

Helga Hufflepuff did not waste time worrying that something was impossible.

Helga Hufflepuff cheerfully jumped in and started working out how to make things possible. She was utterly fearless in the face of monumental tasks or insanely tricky magic. Certainly she was careful, in the manner of a carpenter who measured twice and cut once—she wouldn't knowingly take irrational risks. She just whittled down her problems until their solutions no longer involved taking irrational risks.

And so she started straight in asking the nymph how her magic worked, and she got answers. The nymph was keenly self-aware, at least about that sort of thing. The nymph convinced Helga to stay in her cave for the night, instead of pitching her tent outside. They stayed up talking for hours, and it was clear Helga had some viable ideas for moving nymph, cave, and spring to Scotland in one go.

The nymph thought Helga was pretty, and her excitement and gratitude were overwhelming. She held her hand, and touched her arm, but never initiated anything, because Helga had not been interested. Charlie raised an eyebrow, and was mentally brushed away with a 'wait, let me finish'.

The next day, Helga had said goodbye with a warm hug, and continued on her tour of Greece. She promised to come back in precisely three weeks, after she had a chance to do some research, to see if the nymph was still interested.

The farmer had come up to check on her after that, and she told him about Helga's plan to move the spring, and how it was getting more and more difficult to stay. He had nodded gravely, and she had felt bad for him, and he had spent the night in her cave. Word spread, and he was followed by a steady stream of well-wishers, come to pay their respects. Some brought gifts to remember them by, some had cried. She had lain with nearly all of them at some point, and now did so once more with as many as she could. She was very busy.

Sometimes more than one arrived at once; she had them all join each other, there in the cave, in the water, on the grass under the sun or stars. She was a goddess, and she had unfailingly treated them with the utmost kindness for thousands of years. Anything was okay if she asked them to do it, and she never hesitated to ask, if they all desired her. She dearly loved having more than one lover at a time—she would take as many as she could, and it had always been wonderful, because she was able to help everyone past their reservations and differences.

Charlie wondered how forcibly she "helped" them. She was confused, and moved on.

On the morning when Helga was due to arrive, she had shoo-ed people out of her cave, explaining that she had to meet with someone, and that she was not to be disturbed today, but that she wouldn't leave without warning them, and someone should come check on her tomorrow. And Helga had arrived on schedule, and asked the nymph a bunch of probing, careful questions, trying to make sure they both really wanted this. Then she set about measuring the extent of the underground caverns and spring, casting a water-breathing spell and having the nymph give her a tour. Helga was determined to keep it all intact for her friend, and in fact did not think it could safely be moved any other way. When they had arrived back at the surface, Helga went straight to the base of the hill and began her work.

She conjured enormous walls of charmed stone in a ring extending far from the hill, leaving gaps in places for the last visitors. She had spent many days on it, with the nymph sending visitors away the whole time. When she was done, Helga asked once more if the nymph really wanted this. Once more, she said she did. They agreed on a date; the final ritual would take place in ten days time. Helga fetched a farmer for her, and departed to finish the work on the Hogwarts side.

The nymph had never explicitly asked for anyone to come to her or to bring her anything, but she felt after all this time it was probably okay. She told the man to summon everyone he could find who had ever met her, and for them to bring everything they would need to stay for nine days and nights.

It was like watching a conductor of a two-hundred piece symphony of human desires. They brought tables of food, wine, tents, blankets, instruments—Charlie had never seen or imagined anything like it, nor had she. And she knew them all, and would miss them all. She wanted very badly for them all to be happy and to think well of her. She was sweet and earnest, and her spirit sung with joy.

Charlie only understood some of what followed. She was in all their minds at once, watching, talking, making requests (which were never denied), changing things as she thought necessary. If they desired her, they were included, without respect to age or marital status or any other human consideration; all she knew or cared about was that she was making them happy. Which she was, without a doubt, because she made sure of it.

The first few images had left Charlie turned on, although they had disturbed him as well. She reached over and took his cock in her hand, trying to make him happy, too, as she related her story.

The nymph had no real grasp of human notions of pacing and narrative structure. Her happy, disordered memories of orchestrating a nine-day orgy had gone on for a long time, and resulted in Charlie coming in her hand several times along the way. He had actually lost count. She had left it to dry on his chest where it landed; presumably if he had expressed any preference, she would have gone along with it, but she seemed to like having the physical evidence.

So at last the fated day arrived. The villagers had all said their goodbyes, things had mostly been cleaned up, and Helga was busily completing the wall and putting some final touches on her charms. She explained the nymph's part several times—it essentially involved channeling her power and authority through Helga, to swap an ellipse of land—from the sky to the depths—here in Greece with one on the Hogwarts grounds. Charlie watched in fascination; he was now the only living human to have witnessed one of the founders' magic so directly.

It had all gone off smoothly. Helga had been upbeat and confident the entire time, and although it clearly took a combination of knowledge, skill, and power which no modern wizard now had access to, it had looked easy when it actually happened. One moment they were looking at the rolling hills of Greece, and the next they were looking at the moors of Scotland, with the vast foundation of Hogwarts behind them.

Helga's friends—Rowena, Godric, and Salazar—had all been there to help on the other end. Charlie gasped as he saw them—a little younger than in their pictures, working together, all clearly still friends. They had greeted both Helga and the nymph warmly. She had giggled at their reactions to a naked woman, regarding it all as the charming shyness of foreigners who would soon get over it.

At first everything was wonderful. Her hill and spring were a ways from the castle—technically not any further than they were now—but there was no forest there. No one had wanted to risk messing up the foundation, and anyway without the forest the grounds were visibly big. So she hadn't given a second thought to her distance from the school.

At first everyone had gone out of their way to be nice to her, and she had glowed in response. She learned to speak a little English (Anglo-Saxon, really; it was incomprehensible to Charlie), though not to the point of true fluency. Everyone else got used to speaking to her in pictures, and they met in the middle, linguistically speaking. Things got done.

The founders had _consulted_ her about the castle's magic, and she had been helpful. Really helpful. Charlie was surprised at how much she had contributed. He was surprised, too, that there were many, many things built into the castle, at least originally, that he had never heard of—multiple swimming pools, tiny, meticulously-landscaped courtyard gardens, beautiful stonework and sculptures now presumably hidden, an aviary, a fish pond . . . it was mind-boggling. He watched in her memory as Hogwarts grew, wing on wing, floor on floor, courtyards, bridges, halls, stairs—all with their own magic, all part of the castle's magic, all far more complicated than he could have imagined.

When she had first arrived, she had been about as sexually satisfied as it was conceivably possible for anyone or anything to be. Far more than she had ever been before, in fact. It left her free of distractions, so it was just as well that no one had seemed interested in her then. Oh, everyone clearly saw she was pretty, but pretty in a human sort of way, not like a goddess. She hadn't paid any attention, since she was busy being excited about things like the insanely complex interplays between architecture and wards.

She had arrived in the summer. The fall leaves were beautiful, as were the winter snows which followed. Spring came. She was beginning to feel antsy.

A nymph can't effectively masturbate. Oh, they can get themselves more and more turned on, and they certainly might do that, but they can't come. They need a human for that, and can only reach their own orgasm when the human reaches theirs. (Nymphs obviously would not have designed themselves that way, but didn't get to choose.)

Largely the four founders worked by themselves, building with magic in an hour what would have taken laborers many weeks. They all had families who sometimes came to visit, though, so the nymph occasionally had other humans to talk to. Rowena was widowed, with a teenage daughter, Helena, who lived in London and never visited. Godric and his wife had one son, a few years younger than Ginny, who lived with him and his wife in Hogsmeade, and played around the construction sites to the extent he could get away with it.

Salazar, too, had a wife, and a daughter and son—both in their teens—back home on his hidden island in the fens; he apparated home at night, and sometimes brought them to work with him. Salazar made sure his children were polite to the nymph, and made a point of introducing them, but it took many months before he seemed comfortable having them see her naked. In the meantime she had rolled her eyes, they had giggled, their parents had twitched. She liked the Slytherins. Charlie was stunned by this view of them; once again, she made him wait.

Helga had been through three different husbands, and had more children than the nymph had managed to keep track of. The ones who came to visit were a set of three daughters, ranging from Charlie's age to a little younger (although, if pressed, the nymph could root through her near-perfect memories and work out someone's numerical age, it was ordinarily one of those weird human things she didn't concern herself with). Helga's three daughters were intrigued by this beautiful girl on the grounds, who helped their mother so much, and who stood around naked in the snow.

And she, in turn, had talked to them in their minds whenever they had come near enough. She had a range of several hundred feet—more, if she pushed herself—and humans were very focused on verbal communication. So Helga had no idea this was going on. The girls certainly weren't going to tell her. Anyway they giggled all the time no matter what happened, so there wasn't any suspicious behavior to give them away. They could sit on a rock and watch the stones fly into place, appearing to be talking amongst themselves, all the while asking the nymph—somewhere diffuse in her spring, as unobtrusive as she could be—every sort of question about her past.

The nymph happily showed them any memories they wished, and they loved it. The sex, the different fascinating people, her relationships with them, the view of the Greek countryside from her hill, the bits of the inside of her cave that weren't secrets, how she fought off hostile soldiers and hid from zealous clerics and missionaries. Mostly they wanted to hear about the sex. They thought the nymph was pretty, and they knew she would do anything they wanted, if they wanted, which they were ambivalent about. She hadn't tweaked their minds or knowingly done anything to draw them to her—she would never do that to the truly ambivalent.

What she did do, though, was ask her own curious, gossippy questions. Did they masturbate? (Sometimes. Not as skillfully as they could. She gave them some ideas.) Were there any boys they liked? (Not really, but they would enthusiastically and in detail debate the merits of any and all boys they had ever met.) What about girls? (Giggles. No conscious thoughts.) Surely, though, they had at least experimented with each other? (Shock, more giggles.) She became their close friend. They trusted each other. Anything Helga said at home, she heard about.

Charlie wondered why she bothered talking to someone, even mentally, if she could just read their minds to learn what she wanted. The founders had all had the same thought, and in fact disapproved of her riffling through anyone's memories. They had asked her not to do it to them. To her, this was like saying it was okay to make eye contact with someone so long as you didn't look at their nose. It was weird, awkward, exceedingly difficult, and showed a total lack of understanding of how conversations worked. The fact that humans did not share her method of communication was their problem, not hers.

The girls had no problem with this—they had just asked her all their questions about it at the outset, bluntly, until they were satisfied as to how it worked. And that was that. Of all the adults, though, only Salazar, the accomplished legilimens, had any sympathy for her. On those occasions he talked to her mentally, he had been entirely "fluent" by her reckoning, and a true pleasure to converse with. When she asked him about his friends, he gave a sad, sympathetic smile and shrugged. What could you do? They would never get it. Again, Charlie was surprised to see the man with a caring, human side, and again he was brushed off, this time perhaps with a touch of defensiveness on her old friend's behalf.

One day the youngest daughter asked her about privacy charms. The nymph told her everything she knew, not bothering to investigate why. She didn't always nose around further, especially with good friends she knew well, with whom she needed no extra context to use mental speech.

Two days later the girls were back on their rock, talking. She, too, had been watching the construction, and had talked to three of the four founders just that morning. She saw that the girls were sitting close together, shoulders touching, looking brighter, as if something good had happened. She asked them, and got giggles, and a little embarrassment, followed by mental images of the three of them in their bedroom.

They shared a room anyway—one bunk bed and another single—and it wasn't like they had never slept in the same bed before. The youngest had always been a little closer to the nymph, perhaps out of gratitude for giving her a full share of attention, when the rest of the world paid more to her older sisters. Or maybe she just felt some kinship. (The nymph, for her part, never cared why someone liked her—it just meant that the world was as it should be, and that didn't require second-guessing.) The youngest had teased her sisters for some time now about the nymph's questions about experimenting with each other. The other two had responded, coming up with more and more graphic scenarios to joke about. They thought it was hilarious. They had hundreds of scenes from the nymph's memory to draw on, and those were some of the hottest out of several millennia, coming from a being who was very sexually active. So the girls had plenty of material to prime their
imaginations.

The youngest took to going nude when in the privacy of her bedroom, in imitation of her friend. She teased her sisters about wearing pajamas on hot summer nights, and sometimes about wearing clothes if they didn't have to. (Unbeknownst to the youngest, this had sometimes had the effect of making the older girls deeply self-conscious about particular items of clothing, so that their wardrobes become more and more constrained. The nymph could make no sense of any of this, and had not intervened.) Having done without clothes at night, she took it a step further, becoming more and more obvious about masturbating, talking to the others all the while and making herself incredibly turned on by it.

They were close sisters. They would never tell on each other, or do something that actually upset the others. They were too comfortable with each other to really be bothered by the youngest, especially as she went very gradually, making sure boundaries had already moved on before pushing further. So eventually they just watched her openly, before getting themselves off quietly under the covers.

One night one of them took the teasing just a little further, and another called a bluff a little more brazenly than before, and the third egged the other two on with a little more supportive enthusiasm than she had heretofore expressed, and it was enough. From then on, the three of them wound up in the same bed night upon night, acting out everything the nymph could suggest.

And she did make suggestions. Not requests, not orders, not any sort of messing with their heads. Just sharing her own experiences. She was thrilled for them, because they were all so much closer now, and simply overflowed with infectious joy and energy. Sure, she wished someone would come for her, but she never complained for fear of pressuring someone, and in any event, overall her life was quite good.

Helga never noticed anything odd about her daughters' good moods. She, too, was not one to second-guess happiness, a trait the nymph had deep respect for. The time came, though, in the second December of her time there, when the girls had not come to visit for several days, and the four founders had all found various reasons to stay out of her range. She was attentive enough to be mildly worried, but had no idea what might be wrong.

It was a cold night, and there was snow on the ground. The nymph had retreated to her spring, which was then and had always been as magically warm as it is now. She felt the youngest girl approaching at a run, her distress palpable as she did her best to get the nymph's attention—she was screaming and crying in her mind. The nymph was horrified, and shot from the cave in her figure of water, casting warmth in the girl's direction and throwing up every ward she knew behind her, until the girl had collapsed in the mouth of the cave. The nymph, at last taking human form, carried her in the rest of the way.

The girl seemed inconsolable, even in her arms. Unsure about her privacy magic, the nymph swept her up once more, told her to hold her breath, and swam with her further back into the cave. Helga might have been able to move the hill, but she had used the nymph's own power to do it. Apollo himself would have a hard time getting at anything all the way in here, if the nymph were determined to protect it. The girl was as safe now as she could possibly be.

She was wearing only a torn nightgown, had cuts and frostbite on her feet, and was on the verge of hypothermia. The nymph had never even heard of frostbite or hypothermia, but fortunately they were mild, and she was able to cure them almost with a thought. The girl, who had never touched the nymph before, was now crying against her breasts.

After a few queries, it was clear she didn't want to go over the story herself, and told the nymph to read it from her memory. She and her sisters had done that frequently when they were feeling lazy, but never before because they were too distressed by a memory.

Four days prior, in the afternoon, when they had nothing else required of them and thought their mother was at the castle, the girls had dragged their narrow mattresses to the center of the room. They had not heard their mother return to the house, and they had forgotten, or not bothered with, any sorts of privacy charms. Helga had heard something and come to investigate.

She opened the door with no warning. Her three daughters were locked in a triangle, each with their face buried in the vulva of the next, squirming, bucking, moaning. She stared in speechless horror, compounded as they failed to notice her for five, ten, twenty seconds? The girl wasn't sure. Helga had screamed, hexed them apart, put them in body-binds, conjured clothes onto them, moved them and their mattresses to their separate beds, and locked the door behind her.

The rest the nymph had filled in later from the minds of the adults -- Helga had called the others away back to Hogsmeade, where the nymph couldn't hear. There was a desperate huddled conference. Helga had asked Salazar to look in her daughters' minds; he had (correctly) explained it was almost certainly pointless, since one of the first things the nymph would have done with a friend was to make their mind impervious to legilimency. It was trivial if you were a minor goddess, he explained, exasperated, and asked Helga what on earth she had expected to have happen, bringing a genuine nymph to the Hogwarts grounds.

Apparently the bringing of the nymph's cave and spring had been presented to the other founders as a fait accompli, without Helga really asking them whether they thought it was a good idea. They had trusted her, and were now regretting it. At no point did any of them question that a Bad Thing had happened. When Salazar suggested that the daughters might have done it without their minds being controlled in any way, this was greeted with anger and indignation. It was easier to blame the nymph's magic than to accept the thought that mother and daughters might have genuinely divergent values.

Helga had come home and lectured her daughters at great length, or at least screamed at them. Then she cried, and wondered out loud where she had gone wrong. Finally, appearing to have a change of heart, she said she was willing to forgive them, as she knew they couldn't resist the nymph. They were forbidden to leave their room, of course, and would eventually be moved far away where they would be safe. Helga had not asked them for, nor had she wanted to hear, their version of the story.

She had taken away their shoes and warm clothes, and locked their door, opening it only to bring them food. The youngest, unable to stand it any longer, worried about her friend, and thinking the snow would muffle the sound of her escape, had climbed out the window and made a break for it.

After the memory was done the girl had stunned the nymph by pulling herself together and saying she would have to go back. She had just wanted to say what had happened, and that she thought her mother was the only one at fault, and that the nymph had done nothing wrong. But she also didn't want her sisters and herself to be an excuse for her mother to cut the nymph off from future students. So she had to go, and would probably not be coming back.

Nymphs cannot cry. They are physiologically unable to. Perhaps they were created by something who never anticipated the need, because here was a creature designed to be liked by everyone. Perhaps they spontaneously arose from the magic of prehistoric collective dreams and desires, and there was no place in those for crying women. Maybe they had possessed the ability once, but it atrophied from non-use.

For the first time in her two millennia or more of life, she was truly sad. She felt hurt and betrayed by Helga. She couldn't comprehend what had gone wrong. She was scared that no one would be allowed near her, that she wouldn't get to be part of the school at all. Maybe she would be moved again? She wasn't keen on taking her chances with the missionaries.

For a painfully long while the only response the youngest daughter got from her friend was incoherent anguish, and now it was her turn to worry and hold the nymph, whose body was wracked with the spasms of sobs that could not come.

The nymph had reluctantly sent the girl back into the night, but not without casting protective warming charms on her, and giving her every magical gift within her power to give. She could do more things than seal a mind against legilimency.


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The next day Helga had stood on the castle and used an amplification charm to call her from her cave. She came. The nymph didn't need a special charm to speak loudly. She could project.

It was not really a conversation. Helga vented her frustration on the nymph, calling her names, accusing her of betrayal. The nymph, in near-incoherent rage, and forced to use regular speech, had screamed so loudly so as to be heard miles away. She was heard by wizards who knew what she was, and were afraid. She was heard by muggles, who had no idea, and were also afraid.

In her distress she fell back into the language she knew best.

The mountains echoed with words unspoken in over two thousand years, as one of the last few native speakers of Mycenaean uttered the vilest curses she knew at the cruel, deceitful woman who hurt her friends and made her own daughters cry. For a few tense hours her language was anything but dead, and the moors and valleys rang with the wailing of a goddess wronged.

By the time they both gave it up as useless, the sun was on the horizon. The castle and grounds, snow-covered and suddenly quiet, were bathed in a pale purple light. Until now the nymph had thought of this beautiful place as her new home. Now she wasn't sure.

Salazar had intervened on her behalf, and throughout the winter he and his family were the only ones who would speak to her. He relayed messages between the nymph and the other founders, cutting out anything inflammatory as best as he was able, given that he was mediating between a being who could read his mind and friends who were brilliant enough to make their own inferences. The peace was maintained.

Nymphs don't need to eat, but can do so, and enjoy the experience in the same ways humans do. Realizing this, once a week the Slytherins brought a picnic lunch to her cave, sharing their food with one who did not need it in a pointed message to everyone—nymph and the three others alike—that their conflicts were resolvable, and that the Slytherins would take no part in making it worse.

He simply believed her when she said she had not manipulated the girls, and had only offered them thoughts and memories. He understood how that worked, how knowledge could change someone. Of course it could be enough to make them rethink what was important to them! The human race would never have gotten this far if things didn't work that way. He didn't judge Hufflepuff's daughters—he saw they were sweet, clever girls, well on the way to being powerful witches, and they meant harm to no one.

He tried his best over that winter to explain the sensibilities of his human friends when it came to sex. He did it carefully, thoughtfully, explicitly, and in collaboration with his family. He never once shied away from conceding when humans were irrational, nor did he ever call into question the good intentions of the nymph. He explained how fear made some people want to control others, and why sex was such an important aspect of that. He went into details of things the nymph had, if she were to be honest with herself, heretofore avoided thinking or learning about.

He explained that sometimes one individual, however in the right they may be, cannot easily coexist with a broader society without great compromise and personal sacrifice. He respected the value of coexistence, though. It was a good thing, if it could be managed. He would do his best to reconcile her with his friends.


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Spring came, snow melted, flowers bloomed.

It was a late evening in May. She had been sitting on a rock near her spring, smelling the blossoms from Helga's apple trees.

The castle was mostly finished, and they were talking about things like classes, and landscaping, and how her spring would fit into the grounds when they were done. She hoped there would still be apple trees near her.

Rowena and Godric were speaking to her again, thanks to Salazar's painstaking efforts to win them back for her. Things seemed to be improving. She had hope, and, for now, she was at peace.

Salazar's patronus, which she had never seen before or since, came to her then. A streak of light from the southern sky, bright like a flying star, fell before her in the shape of a silvery serpent. Wake up, it had said in his voice. Go to the mouth of your cave. I will soon need your help.

She had run, then, her human form unnaturally swift, and stood there nervously for a full minute more. He had used something like a portkey, then, bringing himself and seven others with him. They were children—Ron's age, Ginny's age. Each floated on a conjured stretcher, unconscious, covered in the worst burns she had ever seen. Some were barely alive. Salazar's clothing was singed, and she was afraid for him, but he waved her away, both physically and mentally, asking her to wait.

Heal them, if you can, he had said, keep them asleep and ease their pain. Do not look into their minds until I have returned to explain.

Then he set the stretchers down and apparated away.

She stabilized them all, but she knew it might take months for them to fully recover. She could cure many things with a thought, and accelerate natural healing as well, but these children had lost too much blood, too much flesh. Far too much. She would not let Charlie see. She didn't like to remember it herself. She could ensure the natural healing would actually happen, though, which was far better than Salazar could have done on his own.

She had wondered why he didn't take them to a human healer. Maybe those weren't very good, maybe he didn't trust them? She saw later in his mind that she was simply who he had thought of first; she chose to take that as a high compliment.

She had followed his instructions faithfully. If he thought he should explain things to her himself, he probably had excellent reasons. He did not return that night. He did not return the next day. She took the children far into the cave, and stayed there with them for another night. The sun had set the next day before he arrived, collapsing at her cave mouth, haggard, exhausted, emotionally dead. He didn't resist when she carried him, too, back to safety with the children.

She lay him down, and sat placing his head in her lap. Under the circumstances, he had the good sense not to protest.

It had been pure happenstance that he had been able to do anything at all. A merchant, traveling to a far town, had gone to a pub, told stories. Another merchant was there, and remembered, and the next afternoon was in his shop when Salazar came in. The merchant had reacted nervously to Salazar's black robes, many rings and amulets, and odd mannerisms. A little too nervously. Just enough to make it worth seeing what was going on in his mind, on the off chance it was anything important. It was. Salazar had spent the next few hours frantically tracking down the traveler based on the drunken memories of other pub-goers, at last finding him, and thus learning his home town—too late!—after the sun had already begin to set.

Salazar apparated into the middle of the town square. The children had been tied to stakes, surrounded by logs, set on fire, left to burn to death as the crowd cheered—Charlie had read about it in history books. The nymph had not.

In a panic, Salazar had taken mere seconds to flatten the crowd and douse the fires. He created a simple perimeter ward—just enough to give him time to work. Stomach churning, one by one he carefully cut the children down, levitated them onto stretchers. Most were already unconscious from pain, smoke inhalation, or loss of blood; two were not. He let them sleep. The crowd, on their feet once more, was screaming, cursing him, calling him the devil.

Once he had gotten them to the safety of her care, he went back, took down his wards, and once more flattened the crowd. He held his emotion in, showed no anger, even to himself. Expressionlessly, methodically, one by one, he started stunning people. Oh, he didn't hesitate to use spells that would throw them back a few feet, but they weren't inherently lethal. The townspeople threw rocks at him, then fired arrows. He blocked projectiles easily, whirling to face their source, taking them out before the others. It wasn't a fair fight by most standards, but it was a fight. He could have slipped up and been overpowered. When the crowd broke and ran, he pursued them, hunting them down throughout the night, one by one. He cast a giant warming spell on the town square (the irony was not lost on him) and lined the bodies up there.

When he was sure no one was left conscious within a ten mile radius, he began his investigation. One by one he woke them up, read their minds, determined their part in all this. Most were bystanders, useful only for finding the true movers behind the atrocity. He found them, and was horrified.

Salazar paused in his tale, thought for a moment, and went into a tangent about, of all things, Merlin. One version of the Merlin legends has him being the child of an ordinary woman and an incubus. Whether this was true or not is beside the point, Salazar explained, and he thought it was probably untrue. In this legend, though, Merlin's mother arranged to have him baptised immediately at birth (no, Salazar couldn't clearly explain what that meant either). The point was that by working the wizard into muggle religion, he was made acceptable to muggles, but magic itself was still presented as stemming from evil.

Something similar had led to the children being burned. There were in those days no large wizarding schools in Britain—it was still a bit of a primitive place, compared to the continent. Magic was taught either in small, informal groups, or through a master and apprentice system. In this town there had been an old wizard who had taken as pupils any children showing magical talent. All here were born to muggle parents, and there had been a lot over the past fifteen years or so. A cohort of them—five—had been taught by the old man from the ages of ten to eighteen, and then the man had died.

While he was alive, he had done a lot of good for the people, and between that and fear, the town leaders had not dared to say a word against him. Once he had died, the machinations began. The children, now nearly adults, had seen which way the wind was blowing, and "found religion", so to speak. They claimed the old man had been manipulating them, and that they were now free of him. Had they not done so, they would have been ostracized -- if not killed -- themselves, as public opinion in the town had swung against magic for the time being. They had nowhere to go. Captive to muggle society, pressured by their families, they began to believe their own story. By the time Salazar found them, they truly thought magic was the power of evil working through them.

People's memories of the old man grew warped, and, in part due to his former pupils' stories, he was now seen as having controlled the town. The lies had grown increasingly fanciful, and even when the five former pupils knew they were lies, they backed them up out of fear.

The logic behind witch-burnings never made sense to those being burned, and this event was no exception. A scenario had been concocted in which it actually seemed like the morally necessary thing to do to burn these children alive. Everything about it seemed like a farce, and could have passed for comedy, up until the bitter, fiery end. To Salazar's increasing horror, the more he read the minds of the people, the more it became clear that those same five young witches and wizards had been at the forefront of the movement for the burnings. They had been co-opted, become oppressors of their own kind. Or they would have, if the children had all been magical. Two of them were. The other five were muggles. It was unclear if anyone in the town had actually known this—all were so deluded, and their behaviors so strange, that it made no sense to Salazar how the children had been selected.

It didn't really matter in the end. All were just as injured, just as unable to return to their lives, just as bereft of friends and family.

When he had learned as much as he had the stomach for, Salazar was at a loss. He wasn't even sure who to be angry at, other than muggles in general and their cursed irrationality. If there had been one single determining factor—the church, the town elders, the gossip-mongers, the former pupils, the political factions that conveniently used the situation to their advantage—if there had been one key thing he could change, he would have done that. But there wasn't. It was all a tangled thicket, an impassable swamp of stupidity from which sane men could not emerge unscathed.


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This is when the arguments between the founders began in earnest. Salazar's position was that muggleborns could not be trusted. There would be other wizarding schools. Let them go there. Build our own society, keep our own people safe. When new families could be integrated in, that was wonderful. But why did it have to happen at Hogwarts? Why? They had all agreed the school was to be a mighty fortress as well as a place of learning—all foresaw that the day might come when the children of magical Britain needed a sanctuary from the outside world. Why bring the danger here? What were they thinking?

The nymph sympathized with Salazar. She had to—she knew that she, too, was here as a refugee, and that the people of that town would have burned her alive, too, if they could. On the other hand, the muggleborn students might need protecting from their families, too. Surely the school was big enough, its magic powerful enough, that something could be worked out?

If she had been allowed to help, to mediate, to be in the midst of things, she could have stopped conflict in its tracks. Put my spring within the castle itself, she wanted to say, I can do this better than any of you. I will help the children make friends with one another. I will keep the children safe! She knew it would never be agreed to, no matter how much she begged or reasoned with them.

The other founders simply did not trust her. As the castle came to completion, they compromised. The landscaping had yet to be done. Helga had so much she wanted to keep on the grounds. The nymph missed her friend, and wanted to at least be near the flowers she had planted. Humans' lives are very short. Today's drama was intense, but would be over in an eye-blink, and she would soon be left with only memories. Awkwardly, they devised Hufflepuff's Glade. It was truly a thing of beauty, breathtaking in both ambition and execution—she had reminded herself of that, seeing it through Charlie's eyes.

Charlie watched in awe at the memory of the founders, as they pushed and folded the earth like ever so much clay in a child's hand. And then Helga had brought her specimens here, and delineated their little spaces, and seen to it that still today it would conform to her vision. The canyon walls replaced the horizontal with the vertical, and much of it was within the range the nymph could comfortably walk to. She could even see the school, if she walked to the top of the hill and looked back. It would be a bit of a trek for students to get to her, but her home was now a place of beauty surpassing any she had ever seen in memories. Students would come here at every opportunity. Things would be okay. She allowed herself to relax.

She had never seen Hufflepuff's daughters again. She had no idea what became of them. Salazar's visits had tapered off, too—he was busy, and more concerned with his own conflicts over muggleborns than with her problems. When he came, he seemed to think the other three had forgiven her, or at least forgotten her because he was a bigger thorn in their side. Once more he gave his familiar shrug and smile. Who knew?


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The beginnings of the forest were planted that spring as well. Saplings stretched from her mountain all the way to Hogsmeade. The lake was put into its current shape. Magical animals were slowly arriving, either on their own or introduced from far away. She couldn't enter their minds—humans were special—but they were no less exciting for that. She saw her first unicorn and her first hippogriff; Charlie smiled at the memory of her delight. The grounds were suddenly interesting.

Godric's young son thought so too. No longer were they chasing him out of the way of flying stones. He was now exploring the woods. Godric had settled for a stern warning to avoid the nymph. "Nose beans," said Charlie, then tried to explain it to her in pictures. She looked puzzled, but happy to have him talking to her.

The boy had, in fact, come straight to her once the Glade was formed. He was then about Ginny's age, maybe Ron's. He was like a miniature version of his father—curly blonde hair, worn to his shoulders. Fearless and curious. Dignified, mostly, without ever taking himself too seriously. Fair-minded, mostly. Like all children she had ever known, he had never bought the line that the nymph meant him harm.

It was only two days after the glade was put in place—mid-June—when he came splashing up her stream, barefoot and muddy. She sent him a quick mental greeting. She wanted very badly to have another friend, but dared not push her luck. She also knew that Helga would be coming and going for the next year or more, as she moved her plants into place.

Like Charlie, he had come straight up the canyon, staring upward the whole time. He came to the end and was thrilled to find the hidden staircase. He tried climbing the next cascade directly; to Charlie's embarrassment, he went up it like a monkey, then kept going, until he was outside her cave. He stood in the pool, staring at the cave mouth for several minutes, then loudly asked if he could come in. She had sent a feeling of welcome to him, and he had found her sitting on the edge of the inner pool, feet dangling in the water.

It was dim in here; she created some light. He found her really, really pretty, and simply told her so. She smiled, pleased. It was the first outright compliment she had gotten . . . in this country, ever, actually. She told him so. He was shocked. She told him if she were Salazar, she would shrug like so . . . they both laughed.

He had then asked her something she was—to Charlie's surprise—almost never asked. He had asked why she wasn't wearing any clothes. She recalled Salazar's careful explanation of British sensibilities. They had seemed exceptionally silly to her, but she had understood the part about not being able to change a larger culture without a lot of work. She asked him why he thought she wasn't wearing any.

His guess, that she just had different customs, was precisely correct.

He asked many more questions.

No, the adults here hadn't asked her to put clothes on, out of a combination of politeness, fear, and an expectation she would not go along with it. No, she probably would not have agreed, had they asked -- it would look ridiculous if she did, and she would feel embarrassed. Well, she wasn't human, was she? No, really, she wasn't. She looked human because somehow or other nymphs came into being alongside humans. Yes, but dogs did too, and no one makes dogs put on clothes. Yes, she could wear clothes. Yes, she even owned them. Could he see? Not now, maybe later, she was private about that. Yes, she supposed that was the reverse of most humans, but didn't see how that should change things. No, it was almost never a problem back home in Greece.

His father had told him that was because she had just enchanted the people back there, and that she had enchanted the Hufflepuff sisters, which was why they had to go away. No, he hadn't gotten any details. Did she enchant them?

What did he think that meant? He wasn't sure. No one would tell him. Would she?

That was difficult. She was unsure what to say: What would fall under the girls' ideas about privacy? What about the adults? She could tell him things she did to them, but those had nothing to do with why they got sent away. Sure, that seemed okay.

She asked if enchantment meant using magic to make some change in someone directly. That definition suited him. She had organized their minds to make them unable to be read, and did various things to make them healthier and resist some other magic.

Why would that make them get sent away? It didn't—that was because of something else. What?

She explained that the girls had asked her a lot of questions about her life before coming to Hogwarts, and that she had answered everything they asked her. Now, she was at least two thousand years old, perhaps much older—no, she wasn't sure exactly—but it meant she had seen a lot of different things during her lifetime. And some of those weren't things the adults were happy with the girls seeing. Yes, she had showed them the memories like pictures.

And she supposed she had said some other things, too, that along with the memories, had given the girls ideas for things they could do that the adults weren't happy about.

So she helped get them in trouble?

Yes, but not on purpose! She didn't know the adults would react like that!

Yes, things were different in Greece. She thought it was because people there didn't expect her to act like a human, so she didn't violate their expectations and upset them . . . actually, that was the best explanation she had come up with yet. She thanked him.

So what memories had she shown the girls?

Another difficult choice, where things had the potential to go wrong in unforeseeable ways. She had talked to a lot of children his age. Her usual approach to this situation would be to carefully determine how much they actually wanted to know, and to stay within that boundary. She couldn't come up with a good reason to do things differently here.

So she asked him if he was interested in girls, and kissing, and other things like that, and he said not really. So she said everything that upset the adults was about that sort of thing. Ohhhhhh. That turned out to be enough information for now—he could safely categorize it all as 'adult things he didn't care about' and be done with it.

He asked if she would show him her cave. She said no, not now. It was one of the few things nymphs were good at saying 'no' to.

He asked her to come climbing around on the rocks with him. It had been years since a child had found her and just wanted her to play with them, and not to investigate things nymphs were particularly known for doing. It was a lovely afternoon, and let her forget all the things she was worried about.

She hadn't done anything to the boy's mind to make it resistant to legilimency. She liked the idea that someone could check and see that things were okay. At least, she thought things were okay. She wanted to ask Salazar, but he hadn't been to visit her very much. In any event, Godric was not a legilimens, and was in no way over-protective of his son, who he actively encouraged to go play and explore outdoors.

She didn't see him again for several days. The grounds were large, and between that, Hogsmeade, and the surrounding countryside, he had a lot to explore. The Glade was perfect for climbing on things and splashing around in the stream. It was a good place to find wildlife, and the nice girl lived there—the one who wasn't human, didn't have a name, and was embarrassed if she had to wear clothes. So it was a near-certainty he would return.

The next time he came, she noticed him down in the nut grove, engaged in the time-honored enterprise of trying to dam the stream with rocks and mud. She decided to tease him a little. Without revealing herself in any other way, she started increasing the flow towards the dam—creating water is easy for gods and wizards alike. The stream was now overflowing the top of the dam. He rapidly added more rocks and mud, and then went and started trying sticks. She let this continue for a bit, then dropped the stream back to its regular flow, careful not to let it become completely blocked off downstream (plants and animals lived there!).

Upstream, she gathered enough water to raise the water level by two feet for a while, and held the front of it up as if blocked in by an invisible dam of her own. Then she moved this, quietly, behind him. He was engrossed in the intricacies of getting mud to stay in place, and didn't hear the sounds of the water behind him change until it was just a few feet behind him. He turned around, jumped, lost his footing, and would have fallen backwards over his own dam if hands of water had not shot out of the stream to catch him.

This was much scarier than the wall of water or the possibility of falling, and he shrieked. The hands gently set him upright, and disappeared. She wasn't going to just show herself, now—where's the fun in that?

The wall of water wasn't going anywhere. It was simply standing there, mocking his attempts at dam-building. He cast a critical eye upon it, considering its possibilities. He knew it was a magic spring, so it wasn't like he was going to be all surprised when it did magical things. No.

Ultimately, the natural thing to do with the standing wall of water was to wade straight into it, abandoning all thoughts of civil engineering. Now he was thigh-deep in what he could see was just a block of water. His underwear would probably itch if he got it wet. He backed out, tossed the rest of his clothes over a branch, and splashed back in again. She abruptly raised the water level to his waist, then let it start rising very slowly.

On the far corner, she made the water splash, then had a hand come out of it. She made it shake itself off like a wet dog, then wave at him. She didn't want him to be scared. He waited to see what would happen next. She added another hand, near the first. Then one behind him. He moved to the center of the water, contemplating this development. Then, slower, she made a whole ring of dozens of hands, until he was surrounded.

Charlie was impressed. She was creative, playful, and did nothing remotely sexualized. She made the water form balls that rolled along the surface and that the boy could throw, playing catch with the hands. She made the hands scoot up to him and poke him on the nose, then drop out of range before he could grab them. She squirted water at him, tried to tickle him, grabbed at his ankles.

She made the water form arches, lattices, finally a dome over him. She made little rooms with walls of water, shimmering eerily in the sun, more sophisticated than any magic fountain wizards had bothered to make, then or now. She lifted him up, let him walk on water, made stairs and second floors to her building. She made a chair for him to sit in. They were near a pomegranate tree, and the chair came close enough that he tried to reach it. She simply moved it over so that he could.

So in the end she was carrying him, naked and covered in the red juice of the pomegranate he ate, up the stream on a pillar of water, dodging or ducking under branches. She set him down all the way at the end of the canyon—on the same sand where Charlie had eaten lunch—and let the desert winds dry him off. She took her human form again, and sat down next to him.

She asked if that had all been okay, and he said it was great. She smiled, relieved. She hadn't scared him too much? No! It was exciting.


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With occasional days like this, late spring gave way to the height of summer (not that seasons were perceptible in the Glade, but she could see in the distance what was going on elsewhere). The boy had lessons sometimes, and went to play elsewhere sometimes. He was the only child permitted to run around the grounds—an extremely privileged position. He knew he wasn't supposed to visit the nymph, so he maintained plausible deniability by going other places. Even his few friends in Hogsmeade never heard about her.

Once in a while Helga came to the Glade to plant a new specimen. The nymph ransacked her mind, discreetly, whenever she was in range. There were still no students at Hogwarts—the major construction was done, although most of the furnishings still had to arrive. The Founders had devised the house system. The nymph thought it was hilarious, what they did to Godric's hat. She was pleased to see in Charlie's mind that the hat still worked as designed.

Salazar stopped by, once, the whole summer. There was no real news—the other three wouldn't go along with his wishes with respect to muggleborns, and all he could see was the burned bodies of innocent children. They thought he was a snob. He thought they were reckless.

None of them discussed the nymph. It was increasingly clear that they wished to forget her—Godric's son was her only real human contact. He didn't quite realize this, but she was keenly aware of it, and tried hard both to make him happy so that he would keep coming back, and at the same time not pressure him to do so.

His friends ranged in age from a few years older than him to a few younger. They shared some lessons and generally played in the countryside in small groups. One of the older boys had been given a simple magical tent for his birthday—as far as Charlie could tell, camping out on the moors was, given the level of protectiveness of wizard parents at the time, about equivalent to his parents letting him camp in the neighbors' back yard. At least as long as he attended lessons and pleased his tutors, he was permitted to stay out overnight without much fuss or requirement to account for himself—the other boys were trustworthy, or at least enough so for Godric.

So the evening soon came when he was lying in the sand by the pool outside her cave, watching the stars come out. He didn't feel like walking home, and asked if it was okay if he spent the night here. It of course was, and he lay awake talking to her until he was ready to fall asleep. She said good night, and diffused herself back into the spring, from where she sifted through his mind while he was sleeping.

Charlie asked why she bothered to do that so much, and whether she remembered everything she found. The explanation was an image of a network of dots and lines, representing memories and connections between them. A mind, in place, preserved all those connections as actual connections, and it was easy to navigate along them. Navigation was more or less linear. She could and frequently did send a sort of tendril through a mind very, very quickly, and retain everything she found—it had the information a magical portrait would have, abstractly speaking, but it was like having it all in a room full of loose paper. Maybe she would eventually make her own connections between the pieces of paper, and remember where she put particularly interesting bits, but mostly it was slower and more awkward than just reading the mind in place. Charlie was surprised—this was a nice, clear explanation. So did that mean she knew everything the founders did?

In terms of facts, the answer turned out to be 'yes', which was stunning. She explained that he shouldn't get too excited—she could watch him play quidditch in his memories, but that didn't mean she would be any better at catching a snitch. Fair enough. Some things, like language learning, required practice for her just as they would for him.

Sometime after midnight, winds picked up and the sky clouded over. Thanks to Helga's magic, it rained slightly less, right in this spot, in order to preserve the desert climate. Rain wasn't consistently blocked, though, and the magic controlling it sometimes permitted a total deluge. This was wholly unpredictable, so she was at the mercy of the elements. There was thunder in the distance. The temperature dropped. Then, from the far side of the hill, she heard sheets of rain coming. She was able to take on her human form just in time to gently scoop the boy up and carry him into the cave before the storm arrived. It was easy enough to keep him from waking. She took the boy back to the pool, cast a cushioning charm, and set him down.

She felt bad, since he had dug around in the sand out there to make himself comfortable. She sat down, scooted over, turned him onto his side, and lifted his head into her lap. After a while she noticed he was dreaming, and was curious about it. Watching dreams was tricky even for her, and required physical contact, but she had managed it occasionally. It had been more of a curiosity, really -- she was much more interested in humans when they were awake, if only because they were usually much more interested in her, too, then.

She did something complicated—it was like the mental equivalent of her diffusing into her spring. He was in a small schoolhouse in Hogsmeade where he had lessons. There were about a dozen other children there, all of them naked. There was supposed to be a test today, and he was frantically trying to study for it from a book now incomprehensible in the dream—some combination of all his subjects. He was naked, too. Charlie laughed at the universality of that dream—even in a tenth-century one-room schoolhouse for children of wizards. The nymph was puzzled to learn it was so common now.

In any event, she had forgotten several key aspects of entering the dreams of humans. For one, she couldn't dream, so her understanding of how dreams worked was limited to her own magic for entering them. For another, she sort of merged with the dreamer's perspective, and was along for the ride. Most importantly, she would have no more awareness that she was dreaming than the dreamer had—whatever was happening would seem just as normal from her perspective. She was left with shared decision-making ability with the dreamer. This had never been a problem for her before coming to Hogwarts, for precisely the same reasons that all sorts of other things hadn't.

To her, the other students were far more interesting than the test. She looked up at them, seated at their desks, ignoring her. The girl sitting directly in front of them had wavy red hair down to her shoulder blades, and the boy had spent a lot of time looking at her back. He thought she was pretty, in a very vague sort of way, so the nymph did too, except without the vagueness. She wanted to see more, and so stood up and pushed the little desk away from her, test forgotten.

He had, over the past year, spent a lot of time ignoring the teacher while staring idly at the waves of the hair in front of him. The nymph liked touching hair, and reached out to run it through her fingers. She knew what that would feel like too, and so the dream met her expectations. Brushing the hair away exposed the girl's ear and neck.

This brought him closer to a girl's body than he had really been before. Certainly he had taken a good look at all parts of the nymph, but she had done so many non-human things that his curiosity about her was not of the same sort as it was with this girl. Touching the girl's hair was pleasant, and her neck was fascinating.

His idea of what a naked girl looked like was based on the nymph, though, so when he looked over the girl's shoulder, she had breasts and pubic hair like the nymph did; the nymph, expecting consistency, adjusted the hair to red. She was curious about the girl herself, so picked her up like a doll and set her down, sitting, on her desk. This placed her breasts directly at eye level. The boy felt weird, and vaguely uncomfortable, but for the nymph, his awkward feelings were fascinating human emotions and she wanted more of them.

Her attention was on the girl's breasts, so the boy's was too. Outside of dreams she might have made gentle suggestions with no compulsion behind them, if she were being careful. Here, a suggestion became reality, and he reached forward, running a finger over the girl's erect nipples, and then the rest of her breasts. His emotions were his own, but the feeling of skin on skin was realistic. His hands ran down her sides, thighs, knees, all the way down to her toes and back up again. He felt the inside of her thighs, brushed her pubic hair. The boy might not have been turned on by this when awake, but the nymph certainly was, so in the dream the boy had an erection.

In real life, too, she might have merely encouraged someone to explore further. The dream, though, was pure wish-fulfillment, and the nymph was an innately sexual being who had been forced to suppress her wishes for over a year now. Her desire took over the dream. The girl was now on her back on the desk, head hanging over the far side, breasts visible. It was not a complicated dream.

The boy knew more or less what a girl's body looked like on the outside, from watching the nymph. She had an excellent idea what sex was like from a man's perspective, having been in the minds of many tens of thousands of them. She stepped forward, brought the boy's cock into place, then simply pushed it in. She/he barely had time to make one or two thrusts before the sensation was too much and he was coming. He had never done that in real life, and had no idea what the sensation of ejaculating was like, but the nymph did. Her body had come in real life, too, and it wanted more. In real life, in the cave, the scent of her arousal—no doubt full of pheromones and magic—was only inches from the boy's nose. It pervaded the classroom as the boy's brain incorporated it into the dream, letting it drive him on. She pushed the boy to keep going, over and over and over.

There is only so far that magic can force a human body—even a sleeping one—through orgasm after orgasm, churning out neurotransmitters, brushing away soreness, numbness, and refractory periods, subjecting it to bursts of intense pleasure at a pace beyond anything that could happen naturally. Overwhelming sensation, whether pain or pleasure, will force the mind to engage in coping mechanisms. In this case there was a mechanism far simpler than dissociation—waking up.

As he shook himself out of the dream and became sure he was awake, the boy noticed that it was dark, that he had an erection, that he was very comfortable, that his hands were still touching skin, and that the smell of sex persisted. Next he noticed that he was wearing clothes, that his head was resting on someone's thigh, and his hands were around it too. He recognized the cushioning charm, and felt a hand on his shoulder and the back of his head.

The nymph had, while she was dreaming, managed to bring the boy's face very close to her crotch, and, still groggy from the dream and incredibly aroused, pressed it further as she regained muscle control. She was still in the mind-set of the dream, doing what she desired without thinking of anything else. For her, the natural response to the boy's position was to lean over towards him, until they were on their sides facing each other. His head rested on the inside of her thigh, her other leg thrown over him, out of the way. He did what she wanted with his tongue; she removed his pants.

His cock was small and hairless, and she could fit it entirely in her mouth without any special adjustments. He was rock-hard, and his tongue was driving her crazy, but his body had simply had enough for the moment and she was unable to make him come. She lay there, whining, gripping his ass in order to push her head onto him, making frantic swallowing motions in an effort to trigger her own release through his. She added her hand, bobbed her head, used her tongue, even bit down gently, to no avail.

Twenty, thirty minutes later she had only grown more desperate. She had his head in a vice-like grip between her thighs, pinned precisely where she wanted it, leaving him barely able to breathe. His tongue kept going. In a haze of frustration, she shifted his mouth downwards from her clit, finally having him push his tongue inside as best as he was able, in and out. She grew wetter and wetter, his saliva mixing with her lubrication. He was swallowing everything, pressing his mouth hard against her, forcing his tongue to stretch so far that no amount of arousal could have overcome the pain without magic.

He began moving his tongue faster, then moving his body, thrusting his cock into her mouth. She felt his cock grow harder, heard his breathing change, his heart speed up. She pulled him in all the way and held him there, squirming in place against her lips. The moment came, her magic hooked onto it, and she nearly crushed his head, bucking her hips. His tongue was straight inside her as she spasmed, fluid rushing over it, drenching his face, filling his mouth with the taste of her. His thrusting stopped as he went rigid. His cock twitched several times and released a drop of salty liquid onto the back of her tongue.

He screamed and pushed her away, gasping for breath, then grabbed his pants and ran from the cave. She looked into his mind—he had been oversensitized past her ability to compensate, and was unable to handle the taste of her once he was no longer turned on himself. He was also deeply embarrassed. He darted off into the stairwell to the far side of the hill, and was out of her range before she thought to stop him.

The shimmering walls had appeared two days later, indicating that space had been bent around this part of the forest.


Approximately one thousand years later, Charlie Weasley walked into the Glade and splashed his fingers in her stream.