For one wild, glorious moment, Harry thought he had beaten the Basilisk. He saw it rear up at the mirror, meet its own gaze, and time itself seemed to pause for a moment in stillness.

Then the snake's coils churned, its head swung towards Harry. Had his Invisibility Cloak hood fallen off? Did it track by scent? Was it the broom? There wasn't time to consider. Harry shut his eyes and dived blindly to the left as it sprung out and leapt at him. Furious hisses lashed out at him from behind sharp teeth and sinister forked tongue: "Kill you...let me devour...destroy you...come this way, little prey."

Harry didn't have time to converse with the snake; he bent double on his broomstick and clutched the handle tightly.

Thank Merlin for his skills as a seeker.

Harry felt in his body the steepness of his dive and the pull of his turn. He cracked his eyes open – the Basilisk and its deadly eyes were behind him, for the moment – and managed to skim along just above the unforgiving stone floor.

"Of course its own reflection would fail to kill it," the calm, analytical part of his mind whispered while his body made its desperate escape. "It moves through water. Travels through Myrtle's bathroom. It must see its own reflection every time it wakes."

Yet he had no more time to think. He heard the predator snap, and miss. Frustrated hisses rushed out of the snake again, but Harry was focused on other things. A stale blast of warm and rusty breath brushed past him. Too close for comfort. A metallic scream grated below, a gust of air whooshed past his feet, but he had no time for shivers. Adrenaline pumping and without looking back, Harry shot spells in its direction and hoped some would hit.

"Petrificus Totalus! Incarcerous! Incacerata! Bombarda!" Flashing lights shot from his wand and bounced off the Basilisk hide harmlessly.

Harry's blood boiled, the exuberance of the fight flushing through him.

"Incarcifors!" – succeeded, but snap! – did not last long. "Sectumsempra!" A sound like nails on a blackboard reached his ears, the Cutting Curse also bounced futilely off the impervious Basilisk hide. His broomstick swooped up high, up into a corner of the Chamber, and accelerated again as Harry dodged another of the Basilisk's lunges by the skin of his teeth.

"Vipera Evanesca!" He muttered a bad word, "Worth a try. Densaugeo! Yes! Did it work? – Oh damn, bad idea, bad idea," he imagined the deadly fangs engorging behind him. "Finite! Impedimenta! Tarantallegra!"

Harry had barely time to wonder how he had failed to learn spells to fight against beasts and creatures.

Heart thumping, he threw a handful of transfiguration spells behind him and hoped something would work.

The air whooshed pasts his ears while he kept up his manic pace, the heavy sound of Basilisk coils letting him know precisely how close behind the monster was. Harry wanted to aim for the mouth – the mouth or the eyes – since the scales were so spell-resistant. He glanced at the shadows on the floor below him, but they didn't really help. Too many torches: too many shadows. He desperately wanted to glance back to see where the giant snake was.

But he couldn't look back. Harry hoped desperately for luck to be on his side. He'd be better organised next time, he promised himself, a blasting curse shooting out of his wand while he cornered.

More prepared. Better planning.

The Chamber seemed to close in around him; the Basilisk moved so fast, his broom had barely any space to escape.

Cold air brushed past his heated cheeks like Death's reaching fingers. A slip of freezing wind rushed beneath his collar and travelled down his spine. He almost welcomed it – he was so hot with adrenaline, unbearably hot with the heat of life.

He refocused his mind.

Harry flashed across the underground chamber, adrenaline flushing his system, wand dancing. He streaked through the air like a dark spectre; in the raging light of many torches, his multitude of shadows rippled over rock and stone. Rapid-fire spell work was causing flashes of light to sputter and spark across the Chamber, the walls flaring radiantly with reds and blues, gold, white and violets; with each flare of light, all the huge columns grew heavy shadows and cast uncountable silhouettes that flickered wickedly on the floor.

Stonework shone and shadowed grimly with unworldly angles.

Hogwarts seemed to hold her breath.

Finally – finally – the stupid chickens did their job.

A lucky rooster, having been neither killed nor squashed in the wild chaos, finally crowed cheerfully from the other end of the Chamber. He was echoed by first one, and then another surviving featherbrain.

It seemed to Harry that the whole world paused for a second in anticipation. Still unable to look behind himself safely, Harry cocked his head and strained his ears with bated breath. Would it work?

The heart-stopping moment passed, and time snapped back with a vengeance. An almighty crash sounded behind him as the pursuing Basilisk landed badly, and Harry retreated up high, behind a distant column, while the thunderous, rolling death throes of the monster worked out.

Furious hissing rattled around the room, and Harry needed no parseltongue to understand the Basilisk's fury and rage.

"...King," it seethed, while its coils surged and ebbed. "Triumphant...destroy...kill..."

From his place of relative safety, Harry listened in awe to the sound of the Basilisk's death. Sharp cracks and heavy thuds echoed around the dimly lit chamber. Harry imagined the huge coils thrashing into the stone floor. A lone stone fragment skittered into his view on the floor below. He pictured the monster throwing its body into the ground so hard that it was breaking the rock up. There was a heart-stopping cringed at the sound of scales scraping past stone. It was worse than nails on a blackboard: like hearing the full horror that scratching up his old school blackboard always threatened, but never quite managed. A full-body shiver ran the length of his body, and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up in primal instinct. More plunking in the distance sounded like other stone fragments raining down on the floor.

Then a change: A monstrous thunder reverberated through the room.

The castle itself seemed to shudder, and centuries-old dust rained down for the ceiling like decay from the heavens. Beneath the monstrous shudders and terrible noise of huge, heavy stones shattering, Harry realised with a hitch in his breathing that the powerful body had forced over one of the enormous stone pillars that supported the Chamber ceiling. Would it collapse?

Although all of this had happened too fast for Harry to properly process, now it seemed that time was slowing right down. Small fragments of rock bounced and tinkled across the hard, stone floor.

Shrapnel littered his view.

Harry waited and waited, but still the monster refused to be still.

At some point in time, the hissing had stopped, but it still wasn't dead. Harry heard it thrashing mightily for long minutes, while Harry still hovered anxiously up in his hiding place.

The hood of his Invisibility Cloak had fallen off, Harry noticed idly. Probably because of the quidditch dives. His attention was caught by a change in the noise.

A long pause – silence – and he was startled again as the seizures spasmodically returned.

Once, twice, three times.

He checked the time. While knowing his perception of time was off, Harry was still startled to see the tempus spell telling him that only twenty minutes had passed since his last check. He had left Myrtle's bathroom perhaps an hour ago, total. It was a quarter past three in the morning.

By the time the silence stretched out unbroken, Harry had calmed his breathing and slowed his heart rate. He was ready for the next challenge.

"Accio Luggage!" he muttered, and his familiar grey dragon-leather trunk came whistling towards him. From the final five roosters still sleeping in his third compartment, he woke up one rooster at a time and floated them quickly over and around the area where he had heard the Basilisk thrashing. When one rooster returned dead, Harry waited a further ten minutes and tried it again. The third rooster returned, grumpy but alive, and Harry finally dared to circle closer.

With his gaze fixed firmly close-but-not-on the poisonous green body, he dared to lower his broomstick to the floor and, in the wakeful darkness, dismount his broom to walk on trembling legs.

His footsteps clicked softly as Harry dared approach the huge body from behind and poke it with a stab of magic.

Nothing moved.

He tried it again, a stronger thrust of magical strength near the small end of its tail, and was finally convinced of its death.

Working quickly, Harry levitated a large sheet over its head, where he thought its eyes would be – he could not see its face from behind, and didn't want to risk post-mortem petrification – and it was only a moment's work to fly over to the head and use his wand to sever one of its fangs.

The densaugeo had done a magnificent job, to Harry's belated dismay. The deadly, venomous fangs protruded menacingly from the dead Basilisk's jaw even beyond the large sheet that covered its eyes. Four front teeth looked to be the size of horrendous, curved mammoth tusks. The others reached merely the size of a sabre or less. He landed his broom relatively close and severed a small one with a sharp slash of his wand. The fang clattered to the stone floor, and he summoned it carefully over.

In the silence of the Chamber, Harry clambered off his broomstick, retrieved the diary from his pocket, and laid it carefully on the floor. He stumbled to his knees, Basilisk fang held gingerly between finger and thumb.

Then he stopped.

"No need to slip up now, and accidentally poison myself to death," Harry mumbled to himself with a morbid, slightly hysterical giggle.

After a quick pause, he returned to his trunk and pulled out his Herbology gloves, made from a fine, strong dragon-hide. He pulled them roughly over his hands. A deep breath, both hands clutched tight around the engorged tooth, a pause. Then with one smooth movement, Harry stabbed it straight into the heart of the diary that was still slowly but surely consuming Fred's soul.

A piercing, unearthly scream broke the silence. Ink erupted from the wound in the diary in surges, splashing over Harry's hands, running over his knees and robes. In his mind's eye, Harry saw the pale figure of Ginny's body lying prone of the Chamber floor. He heard the phantom of Tom Riddle's smooth whisper in his ear. Harry shivered and blinked.

He was in the Chamber: he'd come alone.

Goosebumps were raised all over his skin, each hair on Harry's arms stood straight and frigid. Harry tried to block his ears to the shrill hatred and rage that pounded futilely against his mind.

The shriek went on and on, before finally cutting away suddenly, without a whimper or gurgle.

Harry's ears rang in the sudden stillness.

With a long sigh that was almost a groan, Harry jerked the fang back out of the book and blinked in dismay when his sudden loss of tension caused the room to spin. He sat wearily back on his ankles.

Fred was safe. Hogwarts was safe. He once more had time.

He tilted backwards suddenly, and sprawled over the grimy, painful floor. The basilisk fang clattered to the floor, slipping from suddenly loose fingers. Harry lay back, arms sprawled, and stared blankly up, up into the shadows of the ceiling.

Sharp rock fragments and gravel dug into his back painfully, but he didn't mind. Instead he lay there for one long, peaceful moment as the tension drained out of him. The furious, panicked heat began to drain out of his body, and Harry felt his sweat cooling on his skin. Feeling returned to his arms and legs.

Distantly, the sharp spikes of the rocks he was lying on began to register, to hurt.

It felt good to be alive.

Finally Harry realised that his fixed gaze could no longer see the high ceiling, and that light in the Chamber had returned to a dimmer, calmer ambience. He blinked, and returned back to himself.

Painfully, Harry levered his shoulders up and rolled to the side. His arms shook with the effort, to Harry's surprised disbelief. He must have pushed himself harder than he realised. His fingers were cramping, from what he wasn't quite sure.

His startled gaze stared blankly about the chamber. When the hazy sight met his eyes, Harry fumbled off his glasses and rubbed them roughly against the fabric of his robe.

Hopefully cleaner, he jammed them back on his face and tried to focus this time.

What was the damage?

The torchlight, Harry noted, from the wall fittings was slowly dying back to the dim flickering that had spluttered to life when he entered the room. Shadows were returning to coat the room in a mysterious blanket of darkness.

The centre of the room was dominated by the huge corpse of the deadly serpent, half wreathed in shadows, half gleaming in the light. It lay prominently across the cold grey floor, surrounded by rubble and the remains of the column it had destroyed. Smaller chunks of stone and debris were strewn around the Chamber. A few stray rooster feathers resettled as the air stilled, and Harry spared a stray thought for their valuable sacrifice. The statue of Salazar still towered over the room, but his mouth remained open and Harry thought, with an inappropriate snort, that the resulting gormless expression was a fitting tribute to his legacy.

Harry suppressed the urge to giggle.

It was a satisfying monument for the death of his muggleborn-cleansing agenda.

He sat still for a while, letting the adrenaline work its way through his system. He couldn't help but stare, blank staring, as the size of the Basilisk, as its huge mass in comparison to his own, began to register.

Had he killed that? Had he fought it on purpose?

Harry sat there and stared and let the vastness of the realisation settle over him like a cloak. He'd fought that. He'd chosen to fight a Basilisk.

…He'd won.

He didn't have time to feel pride blossoming because of his triumph. Instead, what began to sink in was the craziness of his plan and sheer gall he had shown. Had he thought himself up to the task? Hubris kills, he remembered Hermione saying. He felt the knowledge deep in his bones now. How had he lived last time, Harry wondered?

Oh, that was right, a small voice in his mind noted absently. Fawkes had done most of the fighting for him.

Harry realised that his mouth was hanging open and he closed it silently.

Who in their right mind tried to fight a Basilisk alone?

Harry tried to take stock of his condition.

Now that the adrenaline was fading, Harry felt himself cool off and shiver. His grasping fingers reached out to gather his Cloak closer around him, and he awkwardly repositioned himself as he did so.

Then he frowned. There was a sharp stab of pain in his left ankle, which turned into a dull throb when he stopped moving. When he fumbled around to figure out why, Harry's reaching fingers touched swollen flesh.

Inhaling sharply at the sudden spike of agony, Harry's nose caught an odd, metallic scent. He raised his fingers up to his nose and sniffed. Wet blood.

He'd sprained or broken his ankle, and scraped up the flesh pretty bad.

Groaning a little, Harry fished about for his wand to set himself to rights. His Cloak would need cleaning, his whole body, most likely. A quick episkey made the joint feel very hot, and then very cold, but Harry's shoulders relaxed a bit when the pain began to fade.

He let go of it in a hurry almost immediately when his hands began shaking with delayed shock, cautiously dropping it away from his body. His body seemed so heavy, so tired, and he gazed around the dungeon in a daze.

What else was there to do?

Eventually, after goodness knows how long, Harry regained his focus and hauled himself to his feet, groaning and tottering like an old man. Was this how it felt to be Dumbledore in the mornings, he wondered idly while he paused, waiting for the room to stop spinning?

His muscles felt so heavy. It would be much easier, Harry felt, to go back and sit on the floor for a few more minutes.

He wavered where he stood.

Then Harry thought of bed longingly, his duties finally accomplished, and instead he stumbled over to his luggage in the gloom.

"There y'are," he slurred, once he finally swayed directly over the leather trunk. "Gotcha." He felt like a punch-drunk boxer as he stood there, waiting for the trunk to stop moving before his eyes. "Stop that. 'S better."

His wand in one hand, Harry stared thoughtfully between the luggage on the floor and the broomstick he held in his left hand. There were three things to hold, and he only had two hands. "Gotta…" Harry mumbled, "Gotta all go back. Need th' broom for the thing. Pipes."

Eventually he remembered that the luggage had a leash, and with a few instructions it was bobbing once more in his wake.

The next snag in his plan hit when Harry made it to the entrance, which he had locked with Lavendar's enlarged mirror and a very powerful spell.

He blinked dazedly at the boy in the mirror before recognition dawned: he looked terrible, Harry realised. There was a gash in his head, while dirt and sweat streaked all his clothes.

"Reparo," Harry mumbled, and blinked mildly when his clothes seemed to straighten themselves up a little. A mild cleaning spell put him further to rights. He sniffed: seemed a bit better. Eyes flickering, Harry remembered to rearrange his Invisibility Clock over his shoulders. His body disappeared once more behind the enchanted fabric and the heavy cloak settled about his body like a hug. Harry took one final look at his own reflection - disembodied head and everything - before focusing beyond, to the mirror itself.

"Alohomora."

There was an odd squelching noise that seemed very loud in the silence of the chamber as the doorway unsealed, and to Harry's dismay the huge, oversized hand-mirror began to topple, ever so slowly, towards the ground on which Harry was standing. The ponderous threat fell silently, barring only the smallest of tinkles from somewhere back in the chamber, and therefore seemed all the more deadly. His reflection disported as the mirror loomed overhead.

Harry scuttled backwards, overused muscles aching, and darted off a few more spells. A reducio flashed out, a protego flashed up, but fortunately Harry caught the falling mirror with a gentle charm and it drifted softly to the floor.

It landed at Harry's feet with the softest of clinks.

For a long moment, Harry just stood there in the silence and the solitude – wand out, staring at it – before he bent with another groan and picked it up to put in his pocket.

He wished idly that Dobby could come to the Chamber and help him out. Dobby would love to see the destruction of the snake, to help out with the cleaning…

The cleaning.

There was the slightest of noises behind him, now that Harry noted his ears had been ringing. And now they weren't. So he turned, the slow trickle of dust from the ceiling continued, and underneath the soft hiss came the pecking, poking, pointed steps of stupid chickens stalking their way across the chamber. Ingeniously, one crowed again, now that it was unnecessary, and Harry felt pure rage and frustration rise up within him that now they realised they could crow properly.

He could have easily cursed them, they definitely deserved it, but Harry was not that kind of wizard. Instead, he lowered his wand and turned with heavy shoulders to retrieve the remaining roosters and shove them all back into his luggage compartment.

The sleeping spell seemed hard work, now, as Harry slowly, so slowly, drew his wand-tip through the motions and then ferried them into his trunk.

His brain seemed stretched, Harry noted, as if from a distance. With the doorway now unlocked he was ready to leave, but he turned once more, with great reluctance and the feeling that his brain was bruised and significantly overused, Harry faced the darkness of the Chamber one more time.

The same steady whisper of falling dust tantalized his memory.

He should fix the column, Harry thought dimly, noticing idly that his body was going to run out of energy soon.

Ceilings collapsing, Harry distantly knew, were a thing. Happened around here.

Ron, he remembered. Ceilings hurt.

A vague worry of the Chamber collapsing was superimposed onto his brain, although Harry couldn't quite articulate the words. But if the Chamber collapsed, Harry knew, Hogwarts herself might be damaged.

His wand began glowing as Harry prepared for one final spell. Brighter and brighter his wand-tip shone, until the orange light blossomed into a burning white star. Harry stared blankly out into the darkness of the Chambers expanse, not noticing the stark shadows that fell around him, running from the brilliance of his wand.

His shoulders were heavy, his eyelids fought to close. Harry felt deep within his muscles the protests of his body, wanting to tremble, wanting to rest.

But first, he gathered up all his remaining magic. It built up, and up; the light grew brighter and brighter at his side.

Harry's willpower strained against his exhaustion; he felt thin, he was stretching…

Something inside him wanted to pop. He was dealing with masses of magic that he wasn't equipped to manage, but Harry forced himself on with the determination that made the Boy-Who-Lived famous. Something creaked inside his mind, he was well past his limits, but he had almost enough power. Somehow the heavy air of the Chamber seemed to press down on him; his knees wanted to buckle, but, at the same time the pressure helped define his edges. Beneath the pressure of Hogwarts herself, Harry found his limits as power pooled under his skin.

The magic saturated his body more intensely than Harry had ever imagined it could, forcing itself into capillaries and between cells where it had never before needed to pool: his skin became super-sensitive, each brush of the Cloak around him burned, hurting and helping him remember where his skin began and ended. His eyesight wavered and he saw for an instant parts of the light spectrum that humans were never meant to see…

The weight of the magic was crushing him, turning him inside out and forcing him to his knees. If it had been a complex spell, Harry realised subconsciously, it could have killed him in an instant, but fortunately, he had cast it a thousand times.

He knew it better than he knew himself.

Harry brought it all back together in a triumph of mind over matter and an audible snap, his steadfast will forcing the magic to overcome his limits.

"Reparo."

A massive spell roared out from his wand and swept up the debris in the Chamber with unrelenting force. Like a whirlwind in reverse, dust, gravel, chunks of wood and stone were swept up from the floor and twisted and turned up and up into the air and back where they came from.

Slowly, ever so slowly, the chunks of column that lay scattered about the floor raised themselves up, righted themselves, and ponderously joined with the whirlwind.

Harry watched the column recreate itself from its parts, barely having the energy left to be amazed at the power of his charm.

He watched blankly at the column regrew to reach the ceiling, for the huge arched vault to connect. The small trickle of dust that his subconscious mind had recognised stopped sounding, and Hogwarts herself seemed to sigh as she settled back on her foundations with relief.

Harry dropped his arm down by his side and sagged with exhaustion. He was emptier than he could ever remember being. He couldn't form words anymore, to encourage himself back to bed. He couldn't even form thoughts.

Where his thoughts, goals, feelings usually surged, Harry found only a cavernous space. He had never felt more empty, not even when he was about to die. He had never felt more alone.

He couldn't even manage a heavy sigh to relieve the tension. Instead, the whisper of a breath whistled out beneath his lips in the silence and the solitude. It disappeared into the dark.

He never did remember how he made it back to the Gryffindor Tower.