changeling | Everybody's scared of this place, they're staying away...

How much do I want these shoes? Specifically the 8" Jump Boot. But somehow I feel it is not to be. Even had I the AU$200 I'd need (what's the exchange rate? Maybe I'd only need AU$150), I somehow doubt they'd come in US men's size 4 (which is my shoe size. The only shoe size I can remember. US men's 4. I think I'm somewhere between a AU women's 5 and 6 but I am not perfectly sure). I haff smaaaall feet.

I am, in fact, writing my novel, but I had to take a break and write down a piece of HP flash fiction that ended up slightly longer than I expected. As a result, I've only written a couple of hundred words of my novel today, but I've written 465 words of this damn story. By the way, if you want to correct my terminology (I'm not certain "chain molecules" is the term I mean - those of you with chemistry knowledge might know), feel free to leave me a comment. Bright sparks might spot the wossname I've nicked from Pratchett, and many thanks to the Harry Potter Lexicon, whose article here gave me a plot point, but otherwise all my own work. Anyway, it's finished, so here it is:

Stone doesn't have feelings. Or thoughts. The Hogwarts Castle knows this.

It's been collecting information. It doesn't have much to do but sit there and listen. It must have been normal stone once, it reasons, thoughts bouncing slowly through silicon synapses.

Silicon, comes back a thought from deep in the depths of the Potions Dungeon, where Professor Snape has been illicitly tutoring a couple of ambitious Slytherin seventh years in the Dark Arts, and, as a side project, Muggle science—

(Hah, interrupts a thought from the Ravenclaw wing, Ambitious Slytherins. That's a tautology.)

—Muggle alchemical symbol Si. Semiconductor. Only other element apart from carbon to be thought able to form chain molecules, and thus, in theory at least, capable of creating life—

It shouldn't have thoughts. It shouldn't have self awareness. But it supposes that all those years of curses and charms and hexes, not to mention that it was built on a battlefield with magic soaked into the ground, where Roman and Celtic wizards had fought long and hard before one overcame the other, means that it has achieved a sort of sentience. A thought from its Hufflepuff wing (which is always prone to a sort of whimsy) thinks, Some are born sentient, some achieve sentience, and some have sentience thrust upon them.

It watches the students. It listens to the classes and marvels that the students seem so bored. They don't realise what wonders are being opened up in front of them, thinks the castle. Always rushing around, never spend any time just being still, resting their foundations and just thinking. Magical History is its favourite subject. It's like having all its memories being revisited by other people. Ah, the Satyr–Centaur Alliance; I recall there was a leak in the North-West part of the dungeons that year, or The fourteenth Goblin Rebellion. Wasn't that when that chap with the wooden leg was Headmaster? Very odd gait. Tended to walk my corridors until the wee hours of the morning.

And, every so often, it dreamed. It remembered the Hogwarts that existed before it—not a real memory, not a "I remember that chap, stood yay high, greyish hair, spoke with a lisp" sort of memory, but a remembrance of once being someone else. They were inherited memories. Hogwarts had been a much smaller place, though still quite large by human standards. Built of wood and plaster, and therefore much more naturally awake. Wood had once been alive, after all, and each beam contained in it an echo, a sort of ghost of the spirit that had been in the tree.

One day, I'll move, thinks the castle. One day. But not just yet. And it yawns a bit, and stretches itself (moving a few rooms around) and goes back to its waking doze.