The next day was sunny, and the rays glinted blindingly off the snow as I awoke in Sergius' bed.
He was sound asleep, snoring, head lolled onto the arm still lying under me. I moved slowly and quietly out from under the duvet, then crawled on the soft furry rug over to where my suitcase was lying open.
I had stowed his present away last night in a gift bag he'd handed me from the closet, so there was no need to hide the contents now.
I rooted around for my muggle studies book and pulled on a sweater, feeling a deep chill as I was no longer nestled tight next to his immense body heat. I propped the book up in my lap and turned through the pages as quietly as possible - although I was sure nothing could possibly wake him through those snores - to the chapter on basic muggle inventions of the nineteenth century.
The forward was all about electricity, which I resolved to never really understand (seemed like magic to me) and flipped right past it to the third page: Television. I looked up at the little black box across from me and down to the moving picture in the book.
They didn't look at all alike. This one had only a few buttons below its mouth, while the one in my textbook had large dials and ears on top, and no mouth at all!
I reread the entire page before puffing the air out of my cheeks and tossing the book aside. That wasn't going to be any help. I took out my wand and, clearing my mind; taking some time to sit up perfectly straight, focused my energy on making the television speak.
I had no charm for that, and was very wary of being experimental with words, lest I say something of dangerous meaning, so I tried to practice silent magic.
Eventually I dropped my wand, too, and wished with all my will for the machine to turn on, but nothing worked.
I stood up, frustrated and bemused.
"What's wrong with you then?!" I exclaimed, jabbing a finger at it.
Suddenly the face - or screen, rather - flickered to life and sound came booming out of its sides. I screamed and stumbled backward, startled by its sudden comeuppance.
The same shadowy figures we had seen the day before were there still, almost like a portrait. But unlike a portrait, it seemed to be continuing from where it left off. The muggles had found a way to stop time! Good for them.
Then, from the floor, I became enthralled in the scene: a pale man was looming in the doorway where a young woman was fast asleep. He had long teeth and pointed ears and was very thin and tall. When he bent down, placing a clawed hand on her breast and bit her neck I realized this was a muggle interpretation of a vampire. I watched on in awe.
So enraptured by the film I was, I didn't notice Sergius' snores had ceased behind me until a finger curled around my hair; swirled lazily on the back of my neck. I looked back to see him smiling sleepily down at me.
"Good morning, beautiful," he said, stretching his great arms above him and letting out a roar of a yawn. I clambered up to the corner of the bed and continued watching the little television intently.
The woman's eyes opened and she seemed to have changed instantly somehow. A pair of fangs were sprouting between her lips.
"This vampire isn't real...?" I asked him, my eyes still glued to the screen.
"No," he answered. "That's an actor. He's just pretending."
"What about her?" The woman was now drifting, ghost-like, around the room.
"Her too." I studied them.
My essay for muggle studies first year was based around muggle stereotypes and legends surrounding magical beings and beasts, but Professor Burbage insisted I only choose one in particular since it is such a broad subject. I chose witches, or Wicca, as the muggles called us, because it was the most relevant at the time.
"You don't have to take muggle studies, then, do you?" I asked, still entranced by the ghoulish muggles on screen.
He chuckled and sat up behind me.
"No."
The film showed a glorious sunset, although not coloured, before the television screen went black for several minutes, then it spit out the rectangle Sergius had fed it the day before. I reached out and snatched it quickly, lest it try to bite my fingers, and inspected it carefully.
"Is this what it felt like when you left the muggle world? Was everything frightening and strange to you?"
"Wonderful and strange," he responded. "I guess I'm lucky, I belong to both."
I nodded my head vigorously, sure he was quite right; very lucky indeed, then very slowly and gently placed the prism in his hand. He laughed.
"This is called a tape. It's plastic, just like..." He looked around the room. "Like your suitcase; like the handle. It's not alive."
"What about the people?" I asked, not quite believing I couldn't bring harm to them by touching the device they were kept in.
He sighed and scrunched up his face.
"This isn't like a portrait. They're not conscious; they can't see us. It's a recording."
I squinted my eyes at him but nodded as if I understood. I had never found muggles so complex before. Charity Burbage would be delighted when I got back and demanded more time in class. I wanted so desperately to understand.

At breakfast that morning I told Sergius and his parents the story of how Fred and George had bought me a blood flavoured lollipop from Honeyduke's once that was meant for vampires. They thought it was cherry, but I wasn't cruel enough to let them taste it. I gave it to Hagrid should he ever need it. He came across more magical folk and creatures than I ever did.
Sergius' parents were inquisitive and happy to hear anything about their son's new school.
"Is this castle bigger?" his father asked.
Sergius replied in his native tongue but I saw him nod his head. Then he said something to his mum and turned to me.
"Explain what houses are to her."
"Oh, uh..." I thought he was much more capable of explaining things to his barely bilingual parents but I did my best.
"There are four groups at school, and you stay with your group until you graduate. So you eat and sleep and go to class with your group,” I explained.
“Your group depends on your personality, whether you’re cunning or brave or smart or kind...Sergius and I are in different groups and different years, but we..." I trailed off embarrassedly, but thankfully she didn't notice and cut me off.
"Sergie is in smart group, yes?" Then she smiled proudly at him. I laughed as he muttered something to his mum.
“Nei, jeg er slags i den beryktede en, er Candie i intelligente huset.”
"Oh, Candie smart one!" She gave me a knowing grin.
We spent the rest of the morning trying to teach her how to pronounce 'Slytherin'.
After tea Sergius pulled me aside.
"So you ready to go out today?"
I nodded.
"Are you sure? We won't be back for a while." I thought quickly about what I was wearing; what I would need. I had a scarf and my wand was in my coat pocket.
"I'm ready."
We set out through the blinding mixture of sun and snow and waded over to the village.
It was at least twice the size of Hogsmeade, but muggles tended to build sideways rather than up, so instead of the teeteringly tall and narrow buildings one would find in a magical community, these were all very short and fat.
A vast grey lake started just on the edge of the town.
We strolled through the sleet covered cobblestone and passed along the storefronts; butcher shops and muggle winter wear; televisions and appliances; knick knacks and toiletries. Then we came upon a building that everybody else seemed to just pass by, like they couldn’t even see it.
It was the tallest in the village, standing high and stoic like a clock tower; thin as a lighthouse. It was pitch black with a large circular window at the very top, and a small set of double doors almost protruding onto the pedestrian walkway. The muggles just walked right around it without realizing they were avoiding anything.
Sergius stopped in front of it and held the right side door opened for me. I stepped in to find nothing.
It was a barren room that reminded me of the Shrieking Shack, with a spiral staircase in one corner, leading up I suppose, to the upper floors and attic. Sergius shut the door behind him and looked around. I did a couple turns.
“This was an unplottable place for witches and wizards?”
“It’s still unplottable, like the Leaky Cauldron; like Durmstrang. The muggle-repelling charm hasn’t worn off yet since whoever put it here bewitched it last. I heard it was a bookstore, then a coffee shop. The last proprietors died years ago and nobody bought it. Nobody comes here.”
I nodded and let him take my hand, guide me round and round up the twirling steps, all the way to the top, where the sunlight poured through into the room in a dusty haze. It was warm and so high up; so disconnected from the muggle world below. From any world.
We looked out the window, onto the lake, and at its twin on the other side that wasn’t visible from the cobblestone streets. Sergius pointed out a cliff rock, upon which laid the ruins of a castle.
“There it is.” He paused. I stared at it for a while before it clicked.
“That’s Durmstrang?”
“Yup.”
He nodded and squinted his eyes at the glinting snow outside the window.
“Why can’t I see it? The real it?” I asked, feeling like a muggle; not privy to wizarding secrets.
“It’s unplottable except for those invited in. Even for a clever little witch like you.”
I tilted my head and watched the ruins for a while; the way it reflected off the semi-frozen lake, willing it to appear for me. It didn’t. The crumbling structure I saw on the horizon would not change.
We laid our coats down on the blanched floorboards and laid next to each other, talking and laughing; kissing for hours.
“This is the exact opposite of the Shrieking Shack,” I said, smiling at him.
“Oh, okay,” he replied, rolling on top of me and playfully biting my neck. I squealed with laughter and pushed him off.
“No!” I shouted through the giggles. “I mean because we’re in an attic instead of a basement. In a muggle village. Actually alone…”
We hadn’t spoken about Professor Lupin since it happened. He shrugged.
“Well, nobody’s going to interrupt us this time,” he said, biting my sleeve. I laughed and rolled onto my stomach while he ran his hand up and down my back.

As we left the tower, slipping unnoticed back into the muggle streets, we started off toward the lake - but not before stopping for some lunch.
We ducked into a shop and sat by the frosty window; ate cured pork fat on dense slices of bread; garlic cloves and green onions with salt; hard boiled eggs. Sergius paid with muggle money: an assortment of paper slips and very tiny coins. He let me study them for a couple minutes before becoming impatient and pulling me out of the shop.
The air got colder as we approached the edge of the lake; the snow clearing from the shore to reveal smooth, round pebbles. The water’s surface was glittering with snowflake-like fractals of ice.
It stretched out farther than I could see, and I knew on the other side of the volcanic rock holding Durmstrang’s ruins was another just like it. But we didn’t have a broom. Even if I wanted to see the castle; even if I had been invited, there was no way to get there other than flying - or apparating, of course.
“Couldn’t you invite me in?” I asked as we slid pebbles across the ice.
“I thought so,” he replied somewhat embarrassedly, “that’s what I wanted to do when we went out today. But apparently not anymore.”
“So you can’t see it? Just like the muggles? Just like me?”
He nodded.
I squinted up at the pitch dark stone atop the rock and wondered if there was anyone looking down at us from inside.
Schools like Durmstrang used unplottable charms not only to keep it’s location hidden from trespassing muggles, but to hide its secrets from the wizarding world. Fifty years ago, Gellert Grindelwald, an infamous dark wizard, rose to power through the protection and secrecy that Durmstrang allotted. Since then, it has maintained its secrecy, but there hasn’t been word of another dark force quite like his being nurtured behind its walls. No one knew why.
“What does it look like?” I asked inquisitively.
“The castle? Not much different. It’s repaired to the point you can’t see through it, like now, but it’s the same size, colour. We don’t have colourful banners everywhere like Hogwarts. Everything’s pretty dark and muted.”
“Do you have ghosts?” I asked, thinking fondly of Peeves and Nearly Headless Nick. He looked at me in surprise.
“Of course, Nerida Vulchanova,” he replied, furrowing his brow in confusion.
The name struck me as the one he had mentioned earlier when his mother was telling me the story of his acceptance to Durmstrang. I realized he thought I knew something I didn’t and became deeply curious.
A ghost had come to his house to speak to his muggle parents? Or had she died after he began attending school and stayed on to teach, like Hogwarts’ History of Magic teacher Professor Binns?
The blank confusion must have registered on my face because Sergius stopped walking and we both froze to stare at each other.
“Do you know anything outside of Hogwarts?”
I frowned and stared harder at him.
“Do you know who Nerida Vulchanova is?”
I puffed out air and watched it swirl in a haze in the cold.
“Founder of Durmstrang?” he continued.
“We don’t have a class all about Durmstrang at Hogwarts,” I replied icily. I’d asked and prodded him many times to tell me about his school and the north; I didn’t deserve to be treated like an idiot now because I didn’t know these things. He took my hand in his fingerless gloves and we walked all the way along the shore to the other lake while he told me the story; the history of Durmstrang Institute.
“In the 1300s Nerida Vulchanova founded Durmstrang. She rebuilt the ruins of Ny Ålesund Rock and started a school for Wizardry. It was originally only open to residents of Norway but spread across Eastern Europe. As Fred and George could tell you, since they’re so obsessed with Quidditch, Viktor Krum was a Durmstrang student from Bulgaria.
Durmstrang accepts the widest area of students in the world - Hogwarts accepting only those from the United Kingdom; Beauxbatons only french speaking witches, albeit worldwide.
Nerida vanished one winter not long after expanding the school, and since nobody knew what had happened to her or what her wishes would have been, the Duelling professor, Harfang Munter, took over as Headmaster and started making radical changes to the school.”
Sergius paused on this for a second before continuing on.
“He closed the school’s acceptance to muggle-borns and started focusing on martial magic: dark arts, duelling; experimental spells. He went so far eventually as to stop admitting witches and favouring students who were pure blood. His descendants continued to master the school until the 1940s when Gellert Grindelwald rose to power.”
He turned to look at me with a hint of a grin.
“But you know all about that. When Dumbledore defeated him, Durmstrang’s dark secrets were aired to the world, even with Grindelwald imprisoned in Nurmengard. There was an uproar by students and faculty, under pressure from the wizarding world, and the Munter line was uprooted. The Deputy Headmaster at the time began undoing what the Munters had done to Durmstrang over time and opened the school back up to muggle-borns; started accepting witches. But when Igor Karkaroff became Headmaster in 1980 he threatened to return to the old ways. That’s when she came back.”
He kicked a stone onto the ice and it fell through, creating a perfect little hole into the blue waters.
“Nerida Vulchanova?” I asked, tripping over the pronunciation. He knew how to say it. I felt like I shouldn’t until I’d learned, too. Sergius nodded.
“Her ghost returned after over six centuries to return the school to what it once was; what she created it to be.”
I couldn’t help but notice that he was speaking so fondly and I could tell she had his utmost respect.
“Karkaroff didn’t stand a chance. She let him stay on as Headmaster; take care of the faculty and muggle authorities; but Durmstrang is really run by her now.”
One side of my mouth turned up in a smile.
“She came to your house personally to deliver your acceptance? And your parents didn’t freak out?”
“They didn’t realize she was a ghost,” he replied. “And don’t tell them,” he added with playful menace.
“Wow,” I sighed in wonderment.
“If it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t be allowed at Durmstrang. I might never have even known I was a part of this world.”
We walked in silence after that for a long while, finally reaching the narrow strip of land between the shores of the twin lakes.
I looked up; we were right at the base of the ashen rock atop which held Durmstrang Institute, or to the muggles still, the Ny Ålesund castle ruins.
We laid between the lakes on the snowless rocks, heads together, bodies stretched outward either way. Normally I would have set a cushioning charm on the ground for comfort but I was getting used to Sergius’ way of life - and I liked it. He hadn’t even brought his staff, and I still can’t recall ever even seeing him use magic. He was subtle about it. Like he didn’t need it. That was a strength I’d never seen before in my wizard counterparts.
I turned and kissed him on the nose and he laughed. My eyes fluttered towards the sky dreamily and I watched the sun beam straight through the fluffy clouds.
“Tell me another story.” I said with a smile, gazing dreamily at a snow-filled cloud puffing its way over us.
He laughed again and then made a cooing sound, like he was in pain.
“Aw, you’re so adorable,” he mumbled.
Shifting onto his elbow to look down at me he continued on, finally spilling to me all the interesting things he’s seen and the adventures he’s had; all the things I’ve been dying to hear since we met; the things I’d seen in his face and in his walk; in his air of coolness, since I first laid eyes on him outside Hagrid’s hut in the fall.
“Where have you traveled? You said you travel during the summers,” I asked, placing my hands behind my head and relaxing with my ankles crossed.
He nodded and took a deep breath.
“Lots of places. Murmansk, Sofia, Stockholm, Kyiv, Praha, Bucharest. I spent one whole summer when I was 10 with my parents in Transylvania. Kept sneaking away to the dragon sanctuaries there.”
He smiled fondly at the memory.
“The Weasley twins’ older brother Charlie works with dragons in Romania! Maybe you could go visit him this year - you could have a job and receive all the proper training, I know they get loads of new species in every other week-”
He laughed. “Only if you come with me.”
I blushed and smiled; turned on my side to cuddle up close to him; bury my face in his neck. He held me like that as he continued with the story of his journeys.
“Last year, not this summer but the one past, I tried to trace my family tree; see which ancestor I may have inherited my powers from.”
I couldn’t see his face but he had lost all sense of a delightful tone, and was speaking much quieter now.
“My great-great-grandfather was a wizard from Ukraine. He had all these powers and never knew how to use them; never knew what he was. My mother said he went crazy and ended up freezing to death on his farm one winter. He thought he could create fire…” Sergius’ voice trailed off and I squeezed him a little tighter.
"What did you do this summer?" I asked, laying my head back down on my coat hood to gaze up at him.
"Worked with my Dad."
"Oh, what does he do?"
I think he knew my real question was 'what do muggles do' because he laughed.
"Uh, he builds things. Well, not really. This summer he just watched me build things." I nodded as if this made sense then went on.
"And your mother?"
"She's a nurse."
I narrowed my eyes suspiciously at him as I had no idea what in Merlin's name that was.
He laughed and answered, "A healer for muggles. Like Madam Pomfrey."
"Oh!" I exclaimed as the connection clicked in my brain, "My mother works with healers at the Ministry of Magic!"
"Yeah? What does your father do?"
My excitement wavered.
"Oh, uh, I don't really know. He moved to Brazil."
Sergius nodded his head and didn't press the matter. After a bit of silence he asked, "Was the owl from him?"
I thought of the little Christmas card and candy cane Kaia had delivered the previous day.
"Oh no, that was from my eldest sister, Nora. She's vacationing in Portugal with her fiancé this winter. They always send out the cheesiest Christmas cards to everyone they’ve ever met," I groaned.
He laughed. "Like what?"
"Ugh, last year I got a howler that sang Silent Night while at breakfast in the Great Hall - it was mortifying."
He laughed harder again and then looked down at me with a huge smile, rubbed his hand across my jacketed hip.
"So all your teachers knew you as Nora's little sister when you went to school?"
I looked at him quizzically and then shook my head.
"No, no, Nora went to Beauxbatons. It was my choice to attend Hogwarts."
"You speak French?" He stated rather than asked. I shrugged and nodded abashedly.
"My brother starts school next year. Says he's going to some French speaking school in Canada. As if."
Sergius smiled down at me again and the look in his eyes made me giggle, then he grabbed my mittened hand.
"Are you cold?"
"N-no," I stammered. I hadn't realized I was until he'd said that and now I felt a creeping chill that couldn't be ignored or reversed.
We stood up and walked tightly hand in hand, our bodies pressed close together, back to the edge of the little village. I asked him if there was a shop here where he could buy his school supplies.
"No," he answered, "I have to go to the mainland and back. My mum likes to go with me every year, it's kind of her thing."
I smiled broadly. "She likes magic."
"She likes embarrassing me," he corrected. I laughed and we strolled the rest of the way home, not once looking back at the ruins of castle Durmstrang.