How long have I been waiting outside this office? An hour? Two? Three, even?

Is this even an office? She pointed me in this direction, but all I can see is a great stone eagley type thing. And it's looking right at me with its eagley type eyes. Creepy…

Hermy wouldn't use dark magic, would she? No… Maybe she wants to protect me or Harry, teach us some spells that would be sure to knock out the competition (literally). No… It's not possible…

Footsteps. Someone's coming.

I twiddle my wand between my fingers and turn my head sharply to the end of the corridor, almost dropping it when I see who is coming towards me. She warned me about him, especially since he's been coming to our ship in the dead of the night to talk to Karkaroff.

Snape.

"Mr. Krum." He begins, stopping in front of me with his hands behind his back and a sly smirk spreading across his face. "Late evening walk? Or…"

"I need to talk to the Headmaster. Now." God, he is terrifying close up. C'mon, be brave, Viktor.

"I'm afraid the professor is bus-"

"I'm not busy, Severus. In fact I've been waiting for Krum all afternoon." I turn to see Dumbledore looking down upon me from several steps up a staircase that replaced the creepy eagle statue.

Wait. When did the eagle move?

He signals me to enter and I slowly walk up the stone stairs and walk through a large, oak door, then sitting on a strange wooden seat by a revolving silver orb.

"Professor, I didn't plant any dark magic! I swear!" I say desperately as he holds up his wand to the light and wipes off a smudge. "Hermione would never do this, you know that!"

"Viktor." He holds up a hand to silence me.

"I've been studying all day. I wouldn't do that to her!" I'm almost shouting now in frustration. Calm, Viktor, calm.

"I know." A voice whispers behind me.

Hermione stepped out from behind a bookcase, holding several books in her hands and shoving them on by one into her satchel that was already bulging.

"I needed to make it seem like that. Like you'd betrayed me and you were using the dark magic." She continued as she dropped one on bewitching ('Bewitching Your Best Friends and other Friendly Fouls!' by Martha Fedrovna)

"What?" Why would she do such a thing? For what reason?

"I have no interest in using dark magic, but someone does."

"Woah woah woah. What?" I splutter. After buttoning her satchel and tossing it next to the bookcase she looked up to me, pushing a piece of frizzy hair out of her eyes.

"I found several sheets of relatively decaying parchment in use for a binding spell."

"A binding spell?"

I look around to see Dumbledore dusting the top of the silver orb with the tip of an index finger and it fell into his palm. After changing colour from steel to bubblegum pink to indigo, he blew gently on it. Like a giant bubble it bounced off the walls and slowly stopped in the air in another crevice of the office, next to rather old, shrivelled hat that glared at the orb with a sour frown.

"A binding spell," he begins, clapping his hands together to get rid of the dust, "is a spell that locks away a secret, creating a type of contract between the caster and the object in use. Someone used such magic to prevent an object from displaying its secrets. Any wizard can do a simple spell for it to reveal what lies behind it, for example, a bewitching, etc.

"However, in this case, it was a darker form of such a spell. Almost impossible to break using light magic. It is no simple feat, especially on an object with numerous powerful protections."

"And the object in use?" I enquire.

"The goblet of fire."