Chapter 7: Slytherin's Rules (Patreon)

Hundreds upon hundreds of white candles floated silently beneath the Great Hall's vaulted ceiling, spilling soft golden light over the four long House tables below.

At the Slytherin table, the mood had been lively after the Sorting. The moment Raven Capet sat down, a subtle stiffness crept into it.

Directly across from him, Draconia Malfoy was still frozen in that rigid, slightly reclined pose.

Those clear, watery gray-blue eyes were fixed on Raven, her pale little face flickering between white and red, her pearly teeth nearly drawing blood from her lower lip.

That bastard... actually got into Slytherin!

And he had the nerve to sit right across from me!

"Hey, Parkinson, pass me the pumpkin juice."

Draconia forced her gaze away, her chest rising and falling. She snatched up her silver knife and fork with fingers that were a touch too hasty, trying to cover the turmoil inside her with a show of carelessness.

Pansy Parkinson, seated beside her, hurriedly passed over the goblet. Her wary eyes swept over Raven a few times, then she leaned close to Draconia's ear and lowered her voice. "Nia, is that the Capet? I heard his family fell apart ages ago, that even their Gringotts vault is nearly empty. I really don't know why the Sorting Hat put him in our House..."

Pansy's voice wasn't loud, but in this quiet corner of the table it carried clearly.

Raven didn't so much as lift an eyelid.

Once the lavish start-of-term feast had appeared out of thin air on the golden plates, he simply and quite naturally took up his napkin, spread it flat across his lap, then picked up his silver knife and cut a piece of perfectly cooked roast beef.

His movements were elegant and unhurried, his back ramrod straight. The distance of his elbows from the table's edge and the angle of his knife were flawless down to the last detail.

It was pure-blood etiquette branded into the bone, and it carried an even deeper, more restrained antiquity than the carefully polished manners of Malfoy Manor.

On Draconia's other side, Daphne Greengrass raised an eyebrow slightly.

As a daughter of one of the Sacred Twenty-Eight pure-blood families, Daphne was cool and aloof by nature. She'd had no interest at all in this "fallen pure-blood," but the unruffled composure Raven showed now brought a flash of undisguised surprise to her eyes.

Just then, heavy, dragging footsteps sounded above the table.

A tall, fierce-looking upperclassman strode over. His broad face was coarse as a troll's, his two protruding front teeth made him look especially savage, and a gleaming silver prefect's badge was pinned to his chest.

Fifth-year Slytherin prefect, Marcus Flint.

"First-years." Flint stopped beside the first-year section, braced both arms on the table's edge, and looked down on the newcomers from his full height.

His gaze paused on Draconia first, and he put on a stiff, polite smile. "Welcome to Slytherin, Miss Malfoy. Governor Lucius sent a letter to the House just last week. Here, the Malfoy name will be looked after very well."

Draconia lifted her chin slightly and gave a prim nod, though from the corner of her eye she couldn't help drifting toward Raven again, plainly showing off.

But when Flint turned and his eyes landed on Raven, that polite smile vanished without a trace, replaced by naked scrutiny and arrogance.

"As for you, Capet."

Flint bared his teeth, his voice low and gravelly. "The Sorting Hat sat on your head for a full three minutes, and now the whole school is laughing at us. Slytherin has no use for wavering cowards, and none for parasites who coast on their ancestors' leftovers."

A few upperclassmen around the long table let out low snickers.

Crabbe and Goyle giggled along like fools, and Pansy wore the look of someone settling in for a good show.

Draconia's heart skipped a beat. She'd dreamed of watching Raven get humbled, of seeing that insufferable jerk from Diagon Alley bow his head to Slytherin's rules.

But now that she actually watched Flint bully him, a bigger boy pressing down on a smaller one, an irritation and awkwardness she couldn't explain even to herself stirred deep in the young lady's heart.

...That idiot Flint, what does he know? Even Father praised the magic inside Raven. And this oaf dares to provoke him head-on?

Under everyone's gaze, Raven gracefully swallowed his beef and dabbed the corner of his lips with the napkin.

He set down his knife and fork, raised his deep black eyes, and looked calmly at Flint's blunt, fleshy face.

"Prefect Flint."

Raven's voice wasn't loud, but it had a strange penetrating quality that cut cleanly through all the whispering around them. "If I'm not mistaken, when you cast the Plate-Cleaning Charm over the table just now, your wrist shook past the standard fifteen degrees, and you pronounced the Latin incantation Tergeo with a soft, Welsh-tinged accent."

Flint's expression locked up, a flash of bewilderment crossing his fierce eyes. "What nonsense are you spouting?!"

"As a result, the rim of the goblet you just cleaned still holds three micrograms of dried wine residue."

Raven said it as flatly as if stating the most obvious fact in the world. "Slytherin values purity and power, but that doesn't mean Slytherin values crudeness and ignorance. Back in the tenth century, the first admonition Duke Salazar Slytherin carved into the castle dungeons was: 'He who commands magic must first command the smallest details of himself.'"

Raven tilted his head slightly, regarding the fifth-year prefect with something that wasn't quite a smile, his eyes a bottomless frozen pool. "A fifth-year who can't even control the pronunciation and magical circuitry of a basic household charm... before demanding that others follow the rules, perhaps you should borrow a second-year copy of Basic Incantation Phonetics Standards from Ravenclaw and study up."

"Pfft—" On the far side of the table, the ever-composed Daphne Greengrass failed to hold it in. She hid her mouth behind her silver fork, and a very faint laugh slipped out.

The upperclassmen who'd been enjoying the show traded glances, their snickers freezing on their faces.

"You... you dare lecture me?!"

Flint felt hot blood surge straight to his head. His face flushed crimson, and his right hand darted instinctively toward the wand at his waist!

But the instant his fingers touched the handle—

Raven, sitting upright across from him, hadn't so much as lifted a hand.

Yet from the depths of those deep black pupils, a crushing wave of magical pressure, nearly tangible, surged silently out of the void like a cold tide and locked precisely onto Flint!

It was a chilling killing intent, woven from the [Abyss of Magic] and the lingering aura of the thestral-feather wand.

The temperature in the air seemed to plunge several degrees in that single second.

Cold sweat soaked Flint's back in an instant, every hair on his body standing on end. The hand that had been reaching for his wand might as well have been frozen solid. It stopped dead in mid-air, unable to draw it even half an inch!

This eleven-year-old first-year... the dangerous aura rolling off him reminded Flint, faintly, of the old-school pure-blood Dark wizards he'd glimpsed deep in Knockturn Alley last year!

"Flint." From the direction of the staff table, a cold, low voice, like the deepest note of a cello, drifted through the Hall's clamor.

Severus Snape's hollow, fathomless black eyes had turned toward them at some point, his black cloak casting a huge shadow over the back of his chair. "The welcome feast is for eating, not for displaying your embarrassing wand quick-draw on the House table. If you've energy with nowhere to go, I wouldn't mind sending you down to the dungeons tonight to deal with three buckets of poisonous slugs."

"...Yes, Professor Snape."

Flint shuddered like a man granted a pardon. He shot Raven a vicious glare, though a lingering terror now lurked in the depths of his eyes, then slunk away and hurried back to the far end of the long table.

A probe that would have terrified an ordinary first-year had been dissolved by Raven entirely, without a sound.

The first-years around the table now looked at Raven in a completely different way.

Crabbe and Goyle hunched their necks and didn't dare chew their drumsticks loudly. Pansy quietly shuffled behind Daphne and didn't dare utter another idle word.

Raven's expression didn't change. He picked up his knife and fork again and cut another piece of beef, as if nothing had happened.

Across from him, Draconia was completely dumbstruck.

Her small hand gripping the goblet had gone white at the knuckles, and her watery gray-blue eyes were full of disbelief.

Even she, sitting right across from him, had faintly sensed the icy pressure that spilled from Raven a moment ago. It was absolute power and unfathomable depth.

What is wrong with this guy? He's from a fallen family, he even tore up the engagement with me... so why is he so calm? Why can he overpower everyone, even in Slytherin?!

The young lady's competitiveness and grievance tangled together once more. Yet at the same time, a flutter she herself refused to admit quietly sprouted a tiny shoot in the deepest corner of her heart.

In Raven's mind, the System's prompt sounded, restrained and precise.

[Ding. Distortion detected in the Slytherin pure-blood group's perception of the host. Preliminary prestige established.]

[Causality Reversal Points +180.]

[Total Reversal Points remaining: 2030.]

Listening to the crisp chime of points being deposited, Raven swallowed his last bite of dessert, and the corner of his mouth curved in a barely perceptible arc.

As the feast drew to a close, Dumbledore announced the school song and dismissed them.

The first-years lined up behind the prefects and filed across the marble staircase toward the dark, damp dungeons. Raven's steps were steady and unhurried.

Slytherin's rules?

From tonight on... my rules are the rules!