Luna Lovegood's Arc

Chapter 8 of 19

By morning the young Snorkack slept on the blanket, calm from the sugared gurdyroot. Its mother still pressed the ward line, calling. Luna had her proof now, alive and breathing at her feet. But proof meant nothing if no one believed it. She could send owls to the papers. They would print a laugh, not a report. She had learned that long ago and stopped arguing. This time she needed witnesses. She needed someone the wizarding world would trust to say the words: it is real. She wrote three letters and sent them at dawn. By afternoon her friends came up the path. Hermione arrived first, wand out, already studying the wall of light between the stones. She had helped Luna rebuild the trap from a killing thing into a gentle one. She trusted careful work, not luck. She knelt by the young creature and touched its side. Her breath caught. "Luna," she said quietly. "It's warm. It has a pulse. This is a living animal no one has ever recorded." She looked up, eyes wet. "They'll say we faked it." Harry came behind her, ducking a branch. He had cleared this forest path with them, two hours of gentle magic through the thorns. He looked past the tent to the herd beyond the light. "Then we make it so they can't," he said. "We bring people who can't be waved off." Hagrid stepped through the gap in the stones. He kept Hogwarts, he cared for beasts most wizards fled. His word on a creature carried weight no reporter could dismiss. He crouched by the young Snorkack and went soft again. "I've seen a hundred beasts folk swore didn' exist," he rumbled. "This one's real. I'll sign me name to it. So will the school, if they see her breathin'." So they made a record. Hermione cast the spell that fixed an image in glass, then wrote down the pulse, the horn, the striped hide. Harry stood witness beside her. Hagrid pressed his great hand to the parchment and named the creature living, healthy, unharmed. Three names the wizarding world could not laugh away. Luna held the letter to the light. Her father had searched thirty years and never had this. She had it now, sealed and signed. The proof would reach the world. But as Hermione lifted her wand from the glass image, the young Snorkack stirred. The last gurdyroot was gone. It opened its mouth and cried, a thin high sound that carried past the stones. Beyond the light the mother answered. The whole herd surged against the barrier at once, harder than before. A rune cracked. Thin light flickered where the stone had held. Hagrid stared at the failing ward. "That won' hold long now," he said. "They know she's callin'. An' we're out of root to quiet her." Luna had her proof. Now the wall around it was breaking.