Galleons, Sickles, Knuts

Lyrics

The marble is cold. White and cold, under a high, echoing dome.
Diagon Alley sunlight does not follow you in here.

July thirty-first, nineteen ninety-one.
A boy, eleven years old today, stands blinking.
The giant at his side, Rubeus Hagrid, clears his throat.
Points a thick finger at a high stool.
At the goblin scratching numbers in a ledger.
Hagrid says, "It's easy enough."
But the numbers are wrong.
The numbers have angles.
The numbers don't add up in tens.

Seventeen Sickles of silver to a gold Galleon.
Twenty-nine Knuts of bronze to a single Sickle.
The goblins keep the count.
Their fingers are long and clever.
They know the weight of every promise, every coin.
They built the vaults. Of course they did.

Down we go.
The cart screams through caverns, past sleeping dragons.
Past vaults that hold secrets older than the bank.
To Vault 687. His vault.
The key turns. The door dissolves.
And inside... not numbers. Not a statement.
A mountain. Piles of gold, heaps of silver, stacks of bronze.
His parents' legacy, in a language he can't yet speak.

Seventeen Sickles of silver to a gold Galleon.
Twenty-nine Knuts of bronze to a single Sickle.
The goblins keep the count.
Their fingers are long and clever.
They know the weight of every promise, every coin.
They built the vaults. Of course they did.

Why seventeen? Why twenty-nine?
Prime numbers. Indivisible. Stubborn.
Like the magic itself.
It isn't meant to be easy.
It's meant to be separate.
A world that runs on trust in small, fierce creatures
who believe all treasure is rightfully theirs in the end.
A system designed to remind you, with every purchase,
that you are somewhere else now.

Seventeen...
Twenty-nine...
It's easy enough.