Everything He Sees - By Sabiha Atturkhan

Written By: Sabiha Atturkhan

Category: Mystery & Thriller

Competition: Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026

Sabiha Atturkhan presents a captivating piece titled "Everything He Sees," an exploration of mystery and intrigue set in the iconic halls of Hogwarts. As part of the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026, this work falls under the Mystery & Thriller category, drawing readers into a tale where power, secrecy, and perception play crucial roles. Through the eyes of Heaven Marshall Snape, we navigate a world where the ordinary is infused with the extraordinary, and the unseen holds immense power.

About the Work

"Everything He Sees" is a masterful blend of suspense and subtlety, woven into the familiar yet enigmatic setting of Hogwarts. Atturkhan's narrative style creates a tense atmosphere, where the unseen and the unsaid carry as much weight as the visible. The story delves into themes of observation, control, and the unseen forces at play in a world where magic and reality intertwine. Rich imagery and a keen sense of foreboding keep the reader engaged, inviting them to question the true nature of power and influence.

Everything He Sees

Original Submission by Sabiha Atturkhan

EVERYTHING HE SEES

Mystery & Thriller

by Sabiha Atturkhan

There are headmasters who run schools. And there are headmasters who run everything else from inside a school. Albus Dumbledore was the second kind. He had been at Hogwarts for fifty years. In that time, he had learned that the most useful form of power was the kind that looked, from the outside, exactly like kindness.

Heaven Marshall Snape had been told this before she arrived. She had not needed to be told twice.

— ✶ —

The Hat sat on her head for six seconds.

She counted. Six seconds was nothing — she had heard of the Hat deliberating for minutes, had heard her father describe it in the flat careful voice he used for things that mattered: it reads what is there, and what is there is what you are, so be careful what you are when it touches you. She had spent three years learning to be careful about exactly that.

What she had not prepared for was the thing underneath the Hat.

Not the Hat’s own ancient awareness — she recognised that, the dry accumulated intelligence of something that had been sorting children for a thousand years. This was something else. A pressure at the edges of her Occlumency shields, delicate and patient, the way water is patient with stone. Testing without force. The way you test a door before you decide whether to open it.

Her shields held.

The Hat said Slytherin and she walked to the table without hurrying and behind her Occlumency walls she filed one fact with the precision her father had spent three years teaching her: the Sorting is not only the Hat. Something else was present. Something that was interested in what it found.

She sat between Draco and Blaise. Neither looked at her directly. Both had noticed.

— ✶ —

Hogwarts was older than its headmaster. This was the first thing she understood about it, walking its corridors in the days that followed — the specific quality of a building that had been here before anyone currently living and would outlast all of them. The stones held centuries of children. The staircases moved with the slow deliberateness of something that had its own logic and had simply never bothered to explain it.

The portraits watched.

Not as a metaphor. They watched with the specific attentiveness of things given one job and committed to it, their painted eyes tracking movement with a precision that the living eyes of teachers and prefects did not match. She felt their attention the way you feel someone standing behind you — not sound, not sight, but the change in the quality of the air. She did not look at them directly. You did not give the portraits your face to examine if you could help it.

The castle felt occupied at a level below the ordinary human traffic of five hundred children moving through the same corridors every day. Something ran through it the way a current runs through water — invisible, present, and moving in a direction. She filed this without naming it yet. The castle is not neutral. The castle is an instrument. Learn its logic before you assume it is not watching.

— ✶ —

He never appeared.

This was the thing she kept returning to, in the spaces between lessons, in the moments she was supposed to be doing something else. He never appeared. She did not see him in the corridors, did not pass him on the stairs. The headmaster’s tower was simply a tower, its door simply a door, the stone gargoyle outside it still and silent every time she walked past.

And yet.

The Defence Against the Dark Arts professor stopped her after the second lesson. Kind eyes. The particular warmth of someone who has been briefed to be warm. He asked about her summer — not generally, specifically. I understand you spent the summer at Malfoy Manor, he said. Did you enjoy it? As though the information had been provided in advance. As though someone had thought it worth noting down.

She said yes, it had been lovely. She said nothing else. His kind eyes moved over her face looking for something and did not find it.

The Bloody Baron drifted through the Slytherin common room on the third evening, which was normal — he was the house ghost, it was his territory. But he paused near the corner where she was reading, and his hollow eyes carried something that was not quite the Baron’s own ancient contempt. Something that was using the Baron’s presence the way a hand uses a glove. She returned to her book. She turned a page she had not read.

On the fourth day Draco found her in the library and sat down without preamble and said in his most neutral voice that the Charms professor had asked about his father’s summer. Who he had seen. What he had done. Draco had answered with the precision of someone whose father had been preparing him for exactly this since he was old enough to understand what conversations were for: Lucius Malfoy had been at the Manor, had hosted guests for business purposes, Draco had not attended the meetings. All true. All useless.

On the fifth day Blaise appeared from behind a bookshelf and said, without looking up from his Potions text, that the Headmaster had called him into his office. First week. He wanted to know about Blaise’s mother’s most recent marriage. Whether Blaise was comfortable at home. Whether he had any concerns he wanted to discuss. He was very kind about it.

He’s always kind, Heaven said. That’s how he does it.

— ✶ —

On the sixth day she walked past his office.

Not deliberately — she was going to the library, and this was the most direct route and she had decided long before arriving that the most dangerous thing you could do was change your route because you were afraid of something. You walked where you had always walked. You did not let the geography of fear reshape your movements.

The gargoyle was still. The door was closed. The corridor was empty.

She walked at her usual pace, her hands at her sides, her Occlumency shields at their full height — walls within walls, the architecture her father had spent three years helping her build. Not because she was weak without them. Because being strong and being invisible were different things and she needed both.

She was level with the door.

She was past it.

Ten steps past it, fifteen, twenty —

And she felt it.

Not the pressure of the Sorting. Something quieter. The simple awareness, arriving through the soles of her feet and the back of her neck at the same moment, that something on the other side of that closed door had noted her passing. Not suspiciously. Not with alarm. The way you note the weather. The way you check the time. A fact filed, a name marked, a presence logged in some vast and patient record that had been accumulating entries since before any of the children currently walking these corridors had been born.

She continued to the library.

She did not hurry.

— ✶ —

That evening, in the alcove they had claimed on the second day — narrower than the one at Malfoy Manor, smelling of different dust, but theirs in the way that spaces become yours when you need them — the three of them took inventory.

Heaven told them about the Sorting. The pressure beneath the Hat, the testing quality of it, what her shields had felt against their edges. She told them about the corridor, the thing she had felt passing the closed door.

Draco told them about the Charms professor. Blaise described the office visit — the particular warmth of the questions, the way the kindness had a shape to it, like a room arranged for a purpose, pleasant to sit in, not safe to be honest in.

A silence settled between them, the kind that meant they were all thinking the same thing.

He’s everywhere, Blaise said finally, and he hasn’t looked at us once.

This was the most frightening thing he could have said. Because it meant the looking was happening through other mechanisms — the professors, the portraits, the ghosts, the castle itself — all of it moving in one direction, feeding information to a single point. At the centre of it, an old man behind a closed door who had no need to appear because he had arranged the world to come to him.

You don’t fight something like that directly, Draco said.

No, Heaven said.

So what do we do.

She thought about her father the morning she left for the train. The expression he wore when he could not say what he meant directly and said it in other ways — in the set of his shoulders, in the grimoires he had spent eleven years preparing, in the specific quality of his stillness when something mattered.

You give him a performance, she said. Careful. True where it has to be true. Empty where it matters.

She looked at both of them. The portraits in this section of the library were landscapes — no faces, no eyes. She had chosen the alcove partly for that reason.

We’ve been doing this our whole lives, Draco said.

Yes.

Then we already know how.

— ✶ —

The castle settled around them. The library was quiet. Somewhere above, in a tower behind a closed door, something patient and very old continued its work — filing, noting, accumulating, watching through a hundred pairs of borrowed eyes.

It did not need to hurry.

It had been here for fifty years.

It believed it would be here long after they were gone.

It had not yet met the three of them properly.

— ✶ —

Category: Mystery & Thriller

Author: Sabiha Atturkhan

About the Competition

The Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026, hosted by Hashtag Kalakar, celebrates diverse voices in literature, showcasing talents from around the globe. This prestigious event invites writers to share their unique narratives, delving into various genres and themes. The competition serves as a platform for both aspiring and established writers, fostering a community of creativity and literary excellence.

We extend our gratitude to Sabiha Atturkhan for sharing her intriguing tale, "Everything He Sees," with the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026. Her work enriches the competition with its depth and complexity, offering readers a glimpse into a world where every glance and gesture conceals a hidden story. We look forward to seeing more from this talented author in the future.

About Hashtag Kalakar

Hashtag Kalakar is a creative platform dedicated to providing artists, writers, singers and other creative talents with opportunities to showcase their work and reach wider audiences through competitions, features and creative initiatives.