LJ-050 · Places · School years
The Forbidden Forest
The castle's dark wood: detention, centaurs, spiders, and the school's habit of putting danger just off the lawn.
The forest is the school's other campus. Students are banned from it and then sent into it. That contradiction is almost a thesis. Hogwarts keeps the wild close enough to use as punishment, lesson, and plot engine.
Inhabitants include centaurs who resent being managed, and creatures the castle would rather classify than understand. The forest is where the tidy house system stops being the only map.
This sketch stays at the edge of the trees. It does not retell the nights spent inside them.