After the giant argument at the enchanting club, things were a little tense with my friends and everyone kept making excuses about availability, so we wound up skipping a few weeks. But everyone gathered back together before dinner on the last day before spring break. Colin had something to show us.

"I finally got it all working!" the young photographer told us, excitedly, showing off the large, framed photograph. It was a shot we'd taken one night when everyone was there earlier in the year. It was fully animated, and was interesting in that it didn't really repeat exactly the same way each time. It was more like the photograph had captured the essence of everyone's personalities than just being a short video.

"That's great, Colin," I told him as Penny used a sticking charm to hang the photograph on the classroom wall. "You got your mysterious darkroom fully stocked?"

"Oh, no, it came fully stocked," the boy brushed off the question, then admitted, "Figuring out the process took me most of the year, though."

"There was a fully-stocked photography dark room somewhere in the castle?" Percy asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Well…" Colin hedged, then saw he actually had everyone's attention and said, "It's really cool. I can show you?"

I nodded, curious. "After dinner?"

Luna's eyes unfocused and she looked around, explaining, "The gold ribbons want us to go now."

"Alright," I said, though several people scoffed at the girl. "We've got about twenty minutes."

"It's on the seventh floor," Colin said, heading out.

Between having to climb up a few floors and just not believing Luna or caring that much about photography, several people made excuses and just headed to dinner. Ultimately, it was just me, Luna, Colin, Hermione, and Neville.

"This is convenient," I said as we just turned right instead of left at one of the corridors that led to the Gryffindor tower entrance. "I wouldn't think there would be any rooms up here without windows." Not that there was much light up there at the moment, since the sun still set pretty early, even into the spring.

Colin stopped suddenly in the hallway. I'd been past here a few times since it was one of the routes across the seventh floor, good to get to Ravenclaw, the astronomy tower, or Dumbledore's office. A tapestry of a wizard trying to teach trolls to dance made the hallway memorable. "Okay, I have to summon the door," the boy explained, then walked determinedly up and down the hallway three times. A door materialized out of the wall on one side of the hallway.

He pushed the door open to reveal the kind of room I'd seen in movies that had a scene about developing photographs, with all the tables covered in rectangular pans, clotheslines for hanging drying pictures, and all lit by torches behind red glass. A few more photos he was working on were hung on the lines. It looked like the door would seal shut against the exterior lights, and there was even a screen he could pull across just in case someone opened the door while he was working and what looked like a door to a completely light-tight closet for removing the undeveloped film from the roll. It was a pretty professional setup, particularly for a medieval castle.

"Was this a potions lab?" Neville asked, clearly confused.

Hermione picked up on it faster, "Can this room be anything you need?"

Colin nodded. "I wound up asking the elves for a good room. They call it the 'come and go room' and they use it to store extra furniture or whatever."

Hermione brightened as she recalled something, "Hogwarts: a History has a couple of mentions of something called the Room of Requirement! It didn't go into details because I don't think anyone's ever really studied it. This is amazing! Colin! You've found what may be one of the founders' secrets!" Colin blushed over the attention from the older muggleborn.

"A room that no one has ever found, no matter how hard they looked?" I asked her, less happy about the situation. The floor's bathroom was several halls away, so it was likely they'd never run plumbing through these walls, but still. McGonagall had been so sure every room in the castle was mapped…

"Well, yes, but… you mean this could be the Chamber of Secrets!" Hermione's eyes widened.

"I think we better go get Dumbledore," I nodded.

"But I've been in here a lot and haven't seen any signs of monsters…" Colin explained as we left the room and started heading across the floor toward Dumbledore's office.

"It may be unrelated," I told the boy. "Slytherin probably wouldn't put his room this high up unless he was being extra sneaky hiding it right near the other founders' towers. But if there are magically hidden rooms in the castle they missed, they need to know. At the very least, they need to figure out a better way of searching for secrets." That all said, I also planned to come back later and search near the Room of Requirement for more of those snake glyphs I'd seen in Myrtle's bathroom.

As we turned a corner before the headmaster's office, Luna suddenly asked, "Why is that silver?" I followed her pointing finger to the curved mirror that hung at the intersection. I'd gotten so used to seeing them I'd glanced before turning the corner but not even registered that it was more reflective than usual.

"Finite incantatem," I cast, my hand and concentration focused at the mirror, and it rippled as the transfiguration ended and it returned to simple bronze. "Someone spelled it more reflective…"

"Ah! Students! To what do I owe the pleasure?" Dumbledore asked, spotting us as he stepped past the gargoyle out of his office preceded by Lockhart. "Gilderoy and I just had a meeting about his spring lesson plan, and I was on my way to dinner."

"Two things," I started as we moved into step with the two professors down the hallway, "Someone made your mirrors more reflective, and–"

I noticed Luna was turning suddenly and looking back toward the other branch of the corridor from we'd just turned off of, toward one of the corner staircases. "The gold ribbons…" she muttered.

I held a hand to keep everyone else silent and listened, hearing the sound of something large rasping against stone. I chanced a look at the repaired mirror and saw a giant shadow down the hallway. I groaned. The tiny seer was seeing the fortune wards! "Basilisk incoming!"

The obvious thing to do would have been to run ten feet back up the hallway and into Dumbledore's office, but the kids panicked and started running in the direction we were already moving, toward one of the central staircases. Admittedly, it was away from the basilisk. Lockhart was quickly outpacing them in his own haste to escape.

A roaring hiss echoed down the corridor as the basilisk picked up speed. "Don't look at it!" Hermione shouted, likely unnecessarily, expositing even as we fled, student robes flapping around coltish legs trying to make haste on worn stone.

Lockhart stumbled into a small classroom and shrieked in fear, slamming the door before anyone else could get in. While the guy had turned out to be a competent duelist and had been improving as a teacher, I'd never shed the idea that his books were fiction. At the very least, he'd never even written about facing anything this big and unfairly deadly. Basilisks petrified with a glance, had impossibly potent venom, and were so spell resistant that even Dumbledore would have trouble landing anything.

Of course, the headmaster had adapted to that and was transfiguring the stones behind us into bollards as we ran. Fingers of granite reached from the floor and walls to obstruct pursuers. "Did you ever redirect the fortune wards?" I asked him, worried that if the death we were trying to escape was still dumping on Lockhart, his small classroom wouldn't be much protection.

"Yes," he answered simply, his urge to elaborate cancelled out by being over a century old and trying to keep up with a bunch of teenagers running down a dimly-lit, smooth-floored hallway. The thunderous sound of the giant snake smashing through his obstructions behind us meant Lockhart must be safer than us. "Fawkes!" he gasped, and a moment later the phoenix appeared in a flash of golden fire, still young-looking after his burning day. "Save the children!" Dumbledore ordered the bird, who was probably still too small to manage multiple people in one teleportation.

The crimson bird streaked forward and grabbed Luna's robes, the blond seer having started to fall behind her longer-legged peers, and both disappeared in another flash of fire. "The stairs are blocked!" shouted Neville, who was finally starting to growth spurt into some height and had, thus, wound up leading the pack while I hung back with Dumbledore. We were soon up to where we could see as well, the stairs down somehow packed with so much detritus that even an exploding charm from Dumbledore wouldn't clear a path.

"This was planned!" I insisted, noticing the silver mirror above the corridor junction, as the kids turned right back into a hallway that led toward Gryffindor tower. No wonder the fortune wards had started directing Luna so far ahead of the event. Whoever was controlling the basilisk had expected to trap the headmaster. "It's after you!" I warned him.

Fawkes flamed back in and managed to use his currently-small wingspan to navigate the relatively narrow hallway and swoop onto Colin's back. Despite being overall more athletic than Hermione and Neville, the boy was over a year younger and trying to run with his heavy camera clutched to his chest. The two disappeared.

Dumbledore had continued throwing up transfiguration barriers behind us, and had started growing them into pursuer-facing spikes rather than simple posts, but it didn't seem to be having much effect. I really didn't want to fight a giant snake that was functionally immune to magic and able to shrug off running into granite spikes while barely slowing. The headmaster was slowing, all the magic while trying to sprint was taking it out of him.

I felt helpless to assist. Combat transfigurations were one of the things I was most limited at doing without a wand, and the blowing-stuff-up I excelled at would splash right off the thing even if I could look at it to aim without being petrified. I half considered just picking the headmaster up to run with him, but I wasn't exactly strong enough to piggyback a full-grown adult any faster than he was already going.

The winding corridor to Gryffindor tower was long and absent any obvious hiding spaces, more an alleyway between the various other structures on this level of the castle (likely a lot of which was the hidden Room of Requirement). Not that the basilisk wouldn't be able to smash into a classroom if it really wanted to. It was probably only the confined spiral staircase up to the astronomy tower that had kept it from putting its full mass and momentum against the door when we'd been trapped earlier in the year. Fawkes had managed to grab Hermione, then Neville, before we reached the end, but the basilisk was basically right on top of us.

One stray glance was all it took.

Whoever had planned this had gone ahead and transfigured all the mirrors on the seventh floor. I noticed Dumbledore's gaze flick up as we turned the last corner and then he simply stopped. Or, rather, his momentum and now-paralyzed form sent him clattering into the closest wall, but somehow his feet had been in such a position that he just lay against the stone rather than falling over. I heard the basilisk slow, hissing in what seemed like satisfaction.

"No!" I yelled, skidding to a stop. I averted my eyes from the monster or the mirror, focusing on the old man, and at least confirming that he was simply paralyzed, not turned to stone. At that moment, Fawkes reappeared, and I ordered him. "Not me! Get the headmaster somewhere safe!"

With an angry trill, the headmaster's familiar landed and took himself and the body away in a burst of flame. Not wasting any more time, I rushed the final few feet out onto the landing of the stairway down from Gryffindor tower and yelled the password at the portrait of the Fat Lady, "Lion's Mane! Then run! There's a basilisk!" I didn't know whether the portraits could be petrified, but better safe than sorry.

The portrait leaned open and I hoped the guardian imago had taken my advice as I pulled it closed behind me. I was really counting on the combination of the extra protections on a student dorm and the door's awkward position over the stairwell to keep the monster from bursting in after me.

From outside, I could barely hear the grinding of scales studded with the grit of dozens of pulverized stone barricades, and two sets of echoing hisses, as if a conversation was happening. And then, the snake wandered off. "Another point to you, Dresden," a high-pitched man's voice told me from outside the door. It was strangely familiar, but different than the wraith of Voldemort from the back of Quirrell's head. "You've denied me the old man's blood. But he's no longer here to protect you

"Enjoy your holiday, Harry Dresden. There's nowhere you'll be safe afterward."

The faint, fading, gritty slithering of the basilisk was my only clue that they'd decided to go, for now. And, why not? They had at least until the mandrakes matured to finish their scheme.

I still didn't even know what it was.