The New Marauders and the Trickster God

Chapter 27: The Aftermath

It was an hour after the chaos in the great hall. Loki and Harry were currently standing outside the teachers' lounge, waiting for them to arrive for the meeting. Flitwick was the first to come, but that was no surprise since the Ravenclaw common room was the closest.

The small man opened the door for them and told them to come in and make themselves comfortable. Harry and Loki went over to one the couches standing with a few armchairs in front of a fireplace where a fire merrily burned. Flitwick offered them something to drink while sitting down in one of the armchairs himself. Moments later, each of them had a cup of tea with lemons, milk, and sugar on a small tray in the middle of the table.

Shortly after the tea was placed in front of them, McGonagall and Sam and soon after them, Sprout also arrived followed by Snape. Surprisingly enough, Dumbledore didn't come.

"So, what was all this?" McGonagall questioned the three children. "And just how is it that you can handle a gun that well?" she said with a pointed look towards Sam.

Sam looked a bit sheepish at that question before looking over to Loki, but the pagan only snickered.

"I think we should start from the beginning then everything will become clear. First, how much do you know about the Christian religion?" Loki finally replied.

McGonagall and Sprout looked a bit bewildered upon hearing that question while Snape's face stayed blank. Only Flitwick seemed to have an inkling as to what Loki's question was about.

"All I know is that they are not that forgiving about magic," Sprout answered with a sad face. "Many of the witch hunts centuries ago stemmed from the belief that all witchcraft is inherently evil."

"Yes, they believe that for being able to wield magic, one has to make a deal with the devil," Flitwick added.

"Yeah," Loki said with a nod. "That is partly right, and it's where it gets complicated. First, you should know that the deities of any religion you can think about are in fact, real. No matter if it's the Norse pantheon, Hinduism, the old Greek gods...as long as enough people believe in them, they're real.

"So it's also the same thing with Christian beliefs. Hell exists, heaven exists, angels exist, and yes, even the devil exists. Or as he was known before his fall, the archangel Lucifer."

"But what does all this have to do with what happened today?!" Sprout interrupted him not getting what Loki wanted to tell them.

"If you'd let me continue, you'll know. The thing is that two of the archangels, Lucifer and Michael, had a massive quarrel about two millennia ago, give or take before Lucifer was declared to have fallen. This quarrel got so out of hand that a war broke out in heaven; that's where the angels usually live, and this war was so bad that it threatened all that existed. In the end, Michael banned Lucifer from heaven, and not much later captured him in a cage in the dimension that's called hell. He sealed this cage with 666 seals and made it so that 66 of those seals have to be broken for Lucifer to get out. Which seal needs to be broken doesn't matter, though the first and the last are fixed.

"It seems that a few demons from hell, and I also suspect a few angels from heaven, decided that it was time to get Lucifer out. Let him and Michael finish what they began all that time ago."

This time Flitwick interrupted him. "Wait, do you mean to tell us that this sudden appearance of violent ghosts is connected to that?" he asked.

Loki nodded solemnly. "Yes, it is. This was actually the seal called the Rising of the Witnesses. Luckily we learned about it beforehand and could stop it before it got out of hand. Still, I doubt that it will be the last seal that will influence the life here at Hogwarts," he explained with a deep sigh. "The wards around Hogwarts are strong and should protect the children against most of that will come this way, but it seems that even those wards are not going to help against everything."