The three of them passed through the storage room wall and entered the wilderness. Night hung from the sky like an endless sheet of black velvet, the stars like scattered diamonds embedded within it. The moon was obscured by clouds, revealing only a blurred silver-white halo.
Their bodies were almost entirely transparent beneath the moonlight. Only the edges of their outlines occasionally flickered with a faint dark-silver gleam, like three translucent dead leaves swept up from the ground by the wind.
Old Nott floated at the front. His posture was the same as when he usually walked—his back slightly stooped, his pace neither hurried nor slow, his hands hanging at his sides, his fingers faintly curled.
But his feet did not touch the ground. The soles of his shoes hovered roughly an inch above the grass tips. Blades of grass passed through their bodies without bending, breaking, or even making a sound. That effortless sensation of flight brought an uncontrollable joy to Old Nott's weathered face.
Greengrass followed behind him, moving at least three times faster than he could on land. The wind passed through their bodies, without resistance or temperature, leaving only the strange sensation of having become birds. He extended a hand, and his fingertips passed through the trunk of an oak tree. It did not feel like wood. It was cool, dense, shapeless, like water.
He withdrew his hand. Nothing remained on his fingertips.
Hogwarts's walls glimmered an ancient blue-gray beneath the moonlight. The defensive wards that had slept for a thousand years in the castle foundations and deep within its stone walls faintly lit up as they approached—like a sleeping beast turning over in its dream, its eyelids trembling before closing again.
The three energy forms seeped through gaps in the walls like water through sand.