firecracker ???

It had been a month since Christmas.

And nothing had changed.

The castle still glowed with warmth. The common rooms were still loud. The corridors still echoed with laughter. Classes passed in ordinary rhythm. There were essays, detentions, Quidditch scrimmages, and Gryffindor-versus-Slytherin snowball fights that ended with Sirius nearly hexing a tree for "ambushing" his godson.

Harry still kissed Lyra in doorways. Still matched Draco insult for insult. Still took breakfast with his arm slung lazily over the back of her chair and his legs stretched beneath the table like he owned the whole damn castle.

It was golden.

It should have felt eternal.

But some part of Harry, quiet and small and lodged somewhere near the scar, knew better.

Something was shifting.

It wasn't fear.

It wasn't pain.

It was anticipation.

Like the end was near, and the ground was simply giving them time to breathe before it opened.

Dumbledore summoned him quietly.

No pretense this time.

Just a folded note handed to him by Snape in passing.

Bring the cloak.

Harry knew which cloak he meant.

He didn't ask why.

By the time he reached the Headmaster's office—Snape's office, technically, but everyone knew who it still belonged to—he found Dumbledore already waiting, seated behind the desk as if he had never left.

The firelight cast long shadows.

The room smelled like parchment, old potion smoke, and the ghost of a hundred years' worth of secrets.

Harry placed the Invisibility Cloak carefully on the desk between them.

Dumbledore smiled faintly.

"I thought perhaps... it was time."

"Time for what?"

Dumbledore gestured gently to the cloak. "Do you know where this came from?"

Harry shrugged. "My dad. I thought it was a family heirloom."

"It is," Dumbledore said. "But not only that."

He reached forward, touched the edge of the cloak like it was sacred.

"It's one of three."

Harry frowned.

And Dumbledore, in his softest voice, began to tell a story.

He told Harry about the Peverells. The three brothers. The river. Death.

He told him about the Elder Wand—its path of violence and betrayal. How it had passed through hands like bloodstains.

He told him about the Resurrection Stone, lost for centuries. Destroyed now by Lyra through the ring.

And he told him, finally, about the Cloak.

The one that hid someone from Death's eyes.

Harry didn't move as the story unfolded.

"Your cloak," Dumbledore said, "was passed down through Ignotus Peverell's line. To your father. And now, to you."

Harry stared at it.

Then at Dumbledore.

"So these are real?"