The office was silent save for the soft scratch of a quill and the occasional shift of parchment beneath Draco’s hand. A stack of legislation drafts teetered precariously on one side of the mahogany desk, untouched save for a single page he’d been redrafting since morning. His tea had gone cold hours ago, and the weak sun outside his enchanted window cast a grey wash over the room, blurring the boundaries of afternoon into evening. It was his birthday, but he hadn’t marked it. There were too many things to fix—always too many. The Ministry’s proposals on wand regulation were sloppily worded, and Draco’s corrections had grown more precise, more surgical, as the hours dragged on. He barely registered the faint crackle in the air, like the ghost of lightning trapped between dimensions.

Then, a sound like glass shattering inside his skull tore through the room. The wall behind his bookshelves groaned, warped, and split—not physically, but wrong, impossibly so—and something fell through it. Draco rose so fast his chair tipped backward. His wand was in hand before he’d taken his next breath, but he didn’t speak, didn’t move. His heart pounded once, hard, and then steadied. The thing—no, the person—on the floor was breathing. No alarms had triggered. The wards hadn’t flared. Which meant whatever this was, it had cheated the protections he’d crafted with obsessive precision. His eyes narrowed, wand still raised, but he didn’t call for help. Instead, Draco stood perfectly still, every instinct stretched thin as silver thread, trying to decide whether he was looking at a miracle or a weapon.