By Halloween (or Dísablót, as it was known on Vanaheim), they still hadn't learned to swordfight. Three class periods a week, and Fandral managed to fill nearly every moment of time with stories of his and his friends' heroism. Sometimes they'd get a weapon down from the wall and pretend that that day they were finally going to get to swing them around, but the Asgardian would quickly get distracted by something, anything about the lesson and be off on another story. The other years said they had pretty much the same kind of thing going on in their own classes.
He was an enthralling storyteller, but Harry was beginning to wonder if he was a total fraud who didn't actually know how to swing a sword. The closest they came to practicing combat was when Harry got enlisted to come up in front of the class and help Fandral act out some bit of storytelling that needed visual aids to understand positioning in the fight. He was starting to consider just trying to run the guy through in their next mock duel to see if he'd accidentally succeed.
It didn't help that only Dean and a few of the other guys seemed to even notice. The girls still seemed completely taken with the handsome hero, and even the students that didn't spend each class swooning at his pretty face were largely happy that his class required zero homework. They'd even each won a ton of class participation points just from helping Fandral segue to another topic in his stories.
Harry grudgingly admitted one class with no homework was Odin-sent with his new sports commitments. Oliver Wood was a harsh taskmaster, and had quickly filled every spare moment of Harry's time with quidditch practice.
At its root, the game was pretty much just basketball or soccer played with small teams in midair, but Harry's role was special and somewhat complicated. He was what was called the seeker, and his main role was to essentially serve as a mobile distraction. He wasn't allowed to touch the main ball used to score goals, but could move to foul passes between the rival team. Similarly, the team members (beaters) charged with using bats to direct the aggressive secondary balls (bludgers) would get fouls called if they hit him, so he could run a dangerous game of trying to interpose himself between the opposing beaters and his own teammates.
He was also meant to be looking for an elusive tiny golden ball called the snitch, the catching of which ended the game. But it tried hard to not even show itself until the scores were getting pretty high, and he didn't want to catch it when his team was down in points. Vanaheim had toyed with a point bonus for catching it, and interdimensional competitions sometimes used the rule, but that was generally considered unfair after centuries of iteration. Half the time, a seeker would chase after the snitch purely to block the rival seeker from catching it while their team was ahead.
Part of Wood's obsession with training Harry was that one of the rival seekers in question was Draco Malfoy, whose father had followed through on buying the entire Slytherin team Nimbus-made brooms. The Gryffindor quidditch captain was hoping to make up with skill the disadvantage they'd face in their first match of the year due to the brand new brooms of the opposition.
By letter, Aunt Pepper had resolutely told Harry he wasn't allowed to just buy all his friends new brooms. She wisely cautioned that doing so would not help his desire to keep a low profile and not be thought of as a rich celebrity.
Mostly, Harry was just hoping that Wood calmed down some after their match against the Slytherin team, which was scheduled for a week after the Halloween feast.
At least the days the Gryffindor second-years had a light class load didn't really overlap with the other members of the quidditch team, so Harry had some time to do homework. Well, it was also time where Dean drilled them mercilessly on their martial arts and wandless spellcasting. They were almost producing more than just mostly-harmless motes of light, and were hoping to basically only be a year behind their wand-based casting. Using wands, they were beginning to learn the rudiments of manipulating space in their spellcasting class, and Harry had dreams of talking the Masters into giving them sling rings early so they could teleport themselves from their homes to London.
"I think we're really close to getting an energy whip," Hermione said, tired after their afternoon exercises before the Halloween feast. "The sparks are starting to cohere."
"It's so much easier with the wand," Harry complained. "You just think about the whip and it… whips."
"And that's why so many stay on Vanaheim, I guess," Hermione shrugged. Notably, the Patils had been going to fewer and fewer of the extracurricular study sessions. They still showed up for classwork, but were starting to see the hard road ahead of them to learn to do magic in the style of Kamar-Taj, and didn't seem to like it. Lately, it had mostly just been the three of them doing martial arts and wandless magic.
Dean shook his head, annoyed, as they walked through the portrait barrier into the Gryffindor common room. "If Fandral ever lets us actually fight, they're all going to regret getting out of shape."
"I'm sure he'll ease us into it," Hermione countered. She was still as smitten with the Asgardian teacher as anyone else. "He knows that we haven't had the opportunity to practice. And we're learning so much. He's such an excellent orator."
"Surprised you're not mad there's no homework," Harry told her, sharing an eye roll behind her back with Dean.
"His style is based on oral testing," she shrugged. "We're certainly earning plenty of points from discussion in class, and I'm sure he'll take that into account when assigning grades. I mean, I do hope that he'll give us a big research presentation or two to present to the class, of course."
"It's supposed to be a weapons combat class," Dean grumbled.
Neville was working on something in the common room, books laid out in front of him as they walked through, and Harry asked, "Hey Nev, getting a jump on homework?"
He nodded, "I'm tired of Snape constantly bullying me in class. I want to get this essay right." He paused and seemed to be drawing on his courage, eyes down, and asked, "Are you going to the feast tonight?"
"I guess so," Harry shrugged. "Why?"
Neville explained, "Sir Nicholas talked me into going to the Deathday celebration instead. With the school ghosts. And I don't want to go by myself. I figured, since you don't really want to celebrate…"
"Oooh, a Deathday!" Hermione added. "That might be more interesting than the feast. I knew the ghosts had to come and go from Niflheim some years on Dísablót, but didn't realize that the living could be invited. Is it in the castle?"
Neville nodded, "Somewhere in the dungeons. Sir Nicholas is going to take me down when it's time."
"So it's just ghosts going through a portal to Niflheim?" Dean checked. Hermione nodded so he said, "I'm… going to choose the feast, if that's okay with everyone."
"Save us some food?" Harry suggested, and Dean nodded his agreement. He glanced over to where he could see a lock of red hair peeking from around the side of a high backed chair turned away from them and asked, "You want to come, too, Ginny?"
"Eep!" the youngest Weasley said, the stray bit of hair disappearing as she crouched back down from eavesdropping. In the past two months, she had continued to be tongue tied around Harry.
"It's really quite okay," Hermione added.
"Umm. Maybe. Luna might want to come too?" the girl's voice emerged from behind the chair.
"Sure?" Harry shrugged. He wasn't sure who Luna was, other than knowing she wasn't one of the other Gryffindor first-years. "That's okay, right Nev?"
Their year-mate nodded a little pathetically, seeming overwhelmed that this had turned into a whole outing when he'd just been looking for a little moral support. "I guess so. I don't want everyone to miss dinner, but if you want to go…"
"That's settled then," Hermione nodded importantly. "Ginny, go tell this Luna about it and let us know if you're both going. We'll meet back here in an hour?" She was just guessing that the Deathday would begin around sunset.
"Luna" turned out to be a tiny pale girl with hair almost as blond as Malfoy's, a dreamy expression, and a necklace made of mead corks. Harry thought he'd seen her around at the Ravenclaw table. "You sure you want to go into the dungeons with bare feet?" he asked, noticing that she wasn't wearing shoes.
"Oh, all my shoes have gone walking off on their own right now," she said. "But I'm getting used to it, and I'm sure it won't be too bad."
"Let me get you a pair of shoes, Luna," Ginny insisted. "I'll be back."
"Ginny takes such good care of me. And my feet," the new girl observed as Ginny ran back through the portrait. "Oh, do you not have to answer a riddle to get into your common room?"
"Do you for yours?" Harry asked.
"Oh, yes, every time. So much less secure than simply being keyed to the wards, but Rowena Ravenclaw wanted her dormitory open to all those who sought knowledge."
Hermione's eyes widened as she realized that they could visit the dorm if they could just answer a riddle. "I wonder why Padma never mentioned that?"
"I'm probably not supposed to have said," Luna shrugged. "Most of the older students don't like the idea of other houses using our library."
"You have your own library?" Hermione asked.
"A small one," the blond girl shrugged. "Only slightly bigger than what he's carrying."
Neville shrugged with some effort as she pointed at him, his satchel clearly bulging, "I think I'll just sit and work on my homework, if this isn't too interesting."
Luna looked like she was about to comment, but Ginny came out of the portrait hole with a pair of shoes and a small journal. "You also have books. Were we supposed to bring books?" Luna asked.
"I thought I'd take some notes. Fandral might think it's interesting," Ginny shrugged, clearly as smitten with the defense instructor as any other girl in the castle. "Here, I think my shoes still fit you. They're sandals, but they're better than bare feet."
"Thank you," Luna said, sitting down to buckle on the sandals. "I'll give these back to you before they decide to go walking off as well."
Forgetting that she was scared to talk to Harry, while Luna was putting the sandals on, the redhead mouthed to the second-years, "Her roommates steal her shoes." She was clearly upset about it on her friend's behalf.
Hermione and Harry shared a look, resolving to ask Padma about it later.
"Greetyngs! So manie yonge ones to accompanie me to the celebration," Sir Nicholas said, moving translucently onto the stairwell through a nearby wall. "Ye have outdone thyself, Longbottom." The old Asgardian knight's head tilted just slightly off-kilter, a permanent sign of his incomplete decapitation. "Shal we goon?"
"Ready!" Luna agreed, standing up in Ginny's sandals. "Do you think there will be many of the departed visiting, sir knight?"
"Aright, this ys the nyght to visite," the ghost explained as they walked down the stairs. "Manie will come simply to change privetee and talen, while somme come to abide a tyme. For myself, I must spend a year yn Niflheim, bifore I am once agayn allowed to walk freely yn this castle."
"Tough break," Harry consoled the ancient ghost. He saw that Hermione was moving ahead to interrogate him, and decided that he could get the translation later without as much of a headache trying to parse the Middle English. Instead, he asked, "So, Luna, you and Ginny are friends?"
"We live near each other," Luna nodded. "You're Harry Potter."
"Oh, right, sorry, forgot to introduce myself," Harry agreed. "That's Hermione Granger, and this is Neville Longbottom."
"What's Midgard like?" Luna asked, an almost non sequitur. "Have you ever seen a platypus?"
"Not in person. I saw an echidna at the zoo, though. They're also monotremes." Harry was quite proud of remembering the name of the least-common kind of mammal.
"Do those have a poison claw?" she asked.
"Not sure. You're into weird animals?"
"Into? You mean, interested in? Yes. Daddy prints a newspaper mostly focused on the secret and the unusual, and we frequently go on expeditions to find new creatures. We're hoping to see a crumple-horned snorkack one of these days," the girl explained as they moved across the entry foyer and started heading for the dungeons. "But it would be neat to see Midgardian creatures as well. Komodo dragons. Ocelots. Koalas."
"Careful you don't mistake those for drop bears," Harry joked, remembering how Happy had tried to sell him on the dangers of the Australian Outback.
"Oh, no, I've already seen a drop bear," Luna waved off. "They're not so bad if you wear the right kind of hat."
Unable to tell if the girl was messing with him, deluded, or had honestly seen the inspiration for the drop bear myth on Vanaheim, Harry just shrugged. "Are you allowed to come to Earth? I bet the London zoo has a bunch of animals from all over the planet?"
"I don't think we're supposed to, since the people of your planet are allowed to be ignorant of the Nine Realms. But I'll ask daddy if we can apply to the Ministry for a travel pass. Thank you, Harry Potter. But it seems we're at the convergence," the strange girl told him.
The large room in the dungeon was nearly freezing, translucent figures of the castle ghosts milling about near the rift that was slowly forming against the far wall. Harry thought that they might be directly under the lake. With the ghosts lacking much ability to interact with the world, the room was all but barren, cold stone with a few magical torches to push back the gloom for the living. There weren't even cobwebs, as the spiders of the castle likely avoided the deathly area as much as any other living creature.
Niflheim was conceptually strange.
A core belief of most of the Aesir and Vanir was that the souls of the dead went to one of two places. Those that died a meaningful death, particularly in battle, went to Valhalla. Everyone else went to Niflheim. But, like many religious beliefs, most of that was hard to prove. Nobody had conclusively been to Valhalla and come back. And while there were clearly ghosts that came and went from Niflheim, it was impossible to be certain whether everyone else went there, or merely those who, like in Midgardian ghost stories, had unfinished business. There might even be some component of needing a convergence or other mystical connection to Niflheim nearby when you died to enable the journey.
Professor Sinistra, while making a point that she wasn't trying to upset anyone's religious beliefs, had explained one theory that the draugr of Niflheim weren't truly the souls of the departed. Some scholars argued that the native beings of the death planet were simply entities without strong lived experiences of their own that took on the memories and appearance of those that died near them. It was dangerous and difficult enough for the living to go to Niflheim that nobody had really gotten conclusive proof of this theory, particularly since the authorities of Asgard weren't interested in funding such a mission whose success would throw the state religion into fundamental doubt.
Whether a spectral entity that remembered being you was basically the equivalent of being a soul or not was probably a question that would keep the philosophers of Earth publishing for quite some time.
Even if they weren't truly the souls of the dead, all the ghosts of the castle had shown up. In addition to Professor Binns and the four house ghosts—Hufflepuff's friar, Slytherin's jarl, Ravenclaw's lady, and Sir Nicholas—there were half a dozen other spectral figures that Harry vaguely thought he'd seen in passing around the school. Mostly, the ghosts tended to stick to the dungeons during the day, which suited Harry just fine.
"Ah, living witnesses," Professor Binns nodded, and the other ghosts gave various greetings in the largely-unintelligible variants of English they spoke. It wasn't certain whose theory was supported by the difficulty the castle ghosts had in updating their language to the times, especially since they did a lot of talking. There was little else for them to do. For as creepy as the room was, the ghosts were spaced out in twos and threes having animated chats like people would at any party.
"Did we make a mistake?" Harry whispered to Hermione.
"It'll just be like making small talk when my parents take me to their dentist business meetings," she tried to give it a positive reframe. She couldn't help but append, "But where nobody speaks English and the heater is broken."
They gave it their best effort, Luna seeming to have the easiest time chatting with the ghosts as if she spoke enough Old English to get by. Ginny gave up before the convergence even stabilized, citing that she needed to go eat and giving vague apologies as she left the room. Harry, Hermione, and Neville mostly stood around nodding politely, understanding maybe one word in six. The speech of the ghosts had a lot of the same cadence and sounds of Modern English, but comprehension was just tantalizingly out of reach.
Finally, the hole in reality seemed to reach a point where travel was possible, and they could make out vague shadows of rolling hills and stone monuments through the misty portal. Returning ghosts began to emerge, done with their timeshare in the lands of the dead. At the forefront of the pack was a girl in robes with large round glasses who didn't look much older than Harry and Hermione. She immediately locked on to Hermione and asked, "You! Nobody's messed up my lavatory while I've been gone, have they?"
"Which one's yours?" she asked.
"The girls' facilities on the second floor, right by the great stair," the ghost clarified.
"Well, one of the sinks doesn't work," Hermione considered. "But it's otherwise fine."
"That sink's never worked. Good," the ghost girl nodded. Then she noticed Harry and said, "You're cute. I like your glasses. I'm Myrtle. Come visit me in my lavatory any time." With that odd pronouncement, she sashayed off, tossing a look over her shoulder to see if Harry was watching her walk away.
He was. He'd never been flirted with by a ghost before. She grinned in triumph as she left the room.
Meanwhile, Neville had gotten trapped in a conversation with another new arrival and seemed to be flailing while trying to explain something about his homework to the ghost. They were moving over to save him when Sir Nicholas announced, "Wel! I must depart. Farewel! I shall see ye al next year."
By the time everyone had said their goodbyes, Neville had extricated himself and joined them, but it still took them another half an hour before they were able to politely make their goodbyes from the haunted cocktail party.
"That's not every year, is it?" Harry checked, as they were leaving the dungeons to see if the feast was still going.
Hermione said, "I believe the convergence happens every year, but the party only happens on years when several ghosts are switching in and out.
"I'll be sad to see Helena go," Luna suggested. "But she'll be back next year." Off of the curious looks she explained, "The Grey Lady. She's very nice, though quiet and unhappy."
Before they could follow up or decide whether to chance going into the great hall, a strange echoing whisper drifted from upstairs, "Rip… tear… kill…"
"Well that can't be good," Harry deadpanned. Then noticed everyone else looking at him oddly. "The rip, tear, kill thing?" Three still-confused faces regarded him like he was making a joke or going crazy. "You guys didn't hear the whispering murder voice?"
It came again, further away and upwards, hissing, "So hungry… for so long…"
"Seriously. You're not hearing that?" Harry checked again. "It's a voice talking about being hungry and killing things. It's probably the twins doing a Halloween prank, right?"
Hermione shook her head, "I'm pretty sure Rector McGonagall watches them like a hawk during the feast to make sure they don't leave or do anything."
"Peeves maybe?" Neville suggested, referencing the pranking poltergeist.
"Kill… time to kill…"
"Maybe one of the new ghosts is feeling murderous," Harry suggested. "But I guess ghosts can't really kill someone, even on Halloween, right? You're seriously all not hearing that?"
Hermione and Neville looked dubious, but Luna tilted her head consideringly and said, "Maybe it's something about you that lets you hear it when we can't. You are the Boy-Who-Lived."
Harry gave her a smile for believing him and said, "Tell the teachers maybe?"
"Tell the teachers what, boy?" echoed in an old man's voice, as Argus Filch sprung on them from the shadows of the entry hall. He was technically the school's caretaker, primarily tasked with preserving and repairing the art, but he somehow had assumed the role of hall monitor, constantly on patrol with his cat familiar for students breaking the rules. For some reason nobody had ever been certain of, he had a thick New York accent and favored wearing aviation-style glasses frames.
"Someone's playing a prank, or maybe something worse," Harry explained to the white-haired meddler. "Whispering about killing and," he faintly heard the next phrase from up the great stairway, "smelling blood." He gestured in the direction he had been hearing it from.
Filch stroked his white mustache and said, "Is that so? We'll see about that!" and then bounded off upstairs in the direction Harry was pointing at a pretty good pace for an octogenarian.
The four of them shrugged and followed the old man, interested to see what was going on. "Hopefully it's not another troll," Hermione sighed. "But I guess this year was suspiciously free of something dangerous so far." As they saw Filch gasp and walk off the landing on the second floor, Hermione said, "Oh. That's Myrtle's bathroom. Maybe it was her? I hope she's not mad about the facilities."
"It didn't sound like her, but the voice was talking about smelling blood…" Harry trailed off, embarrassed.
"Mrs. Norris?" Filch slowed to a stop, spotting the immobile body of his familiar sprawled on the floor next to the bathroom door. "Mrs. Norris!" he sobbed. "Someone killed my cat!"
"Oh no," Luna said. "Poor kitty." She took a beat, and said, cresting the stairway into view of the corridor, "They also wrote that."
Emerging from the wall above the cat's body, as if waiting for someone to be looking, fiery letters began to scorch the stone to read:
THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS HAS BEEN OPENED. ENEMIES OF THE HEIR BEWARE.
Over Filch's angry sobs, as he picked up the body of his cat, the rumble of students leaving the feast floated up the stairs. Suspiciously, the Slytherins were leading the pack, even though they had no reason not to head down to their own dorms in the dungeons. Draco's voice shouted from the head of the crowd, "Enemies of the Heir, beware! You'll be next, Mudbloods!"
"What are you even doing up here, Draco?" Harry asked, moving as if to shield the caretaker in his grief from the rest of the students who were loitering at the top of the stairs and whispering in confusion or fear.
"Library. Not that it's any of your business," Malfoy drawled, sounding completely insincere.
Before that could turn into a bigger fight, Dumbledore's colorful hat and white beard were visible above the crush. "Excuse me. Excuse me," he said, calmly but easily making a path for himself through well over a hundred students.
"Headmaster!" Filch nearly wailed. "Someone murdered my cat as a prank. I want to hang them by their thumbs!"
"My office is nearest," Fandral suggested, not far behind the headmaster, raising an interested eyebrow at the message.
"Thank you, Fandral," Dumbledore nodded. "Prefects, please clear the stairway." He took in the three young Gryffindors and one Ravenclaw and asked, "Witnesses? Very well, the four of you come with me. Argus, bring Mrs. Norris."
"What about Myrtle?" Hermione asked quietly. "She might have seen something."
"Ah. Ms. Warren has returned from Niflheim?" The headmaster poked his head into the bathroom after a polite knock and said, "She does not appear to be here presently, but I shall question her later."
With the prefects and other teachers working on getting the crowd moving, only Dumbledore, Fandral, McGonagall, and Snape wound up following the students and caretaker into the defense professor's office. Like the classroom, the place was fairly sparsely decorated, with a few pricey-looking trinkets and fine silks. The Warriors Three were used to traveling light, after all, and most of what Fandral had brought to the school were the practice weapons they never quite got around to using.
Fandral mused, "I remember something very similar happening on the eastern continent during the battle in Ouagadogou a few decades past. Of course, that was vampires, and I'd expect them to have a hard time getting into Hogwarts."
Meanwhile, Dumbledore was using his wand to cast various diagnostic magics on the corpse of the cat laid out on Fandral's desk while the students tried not to be too much of a distraction. Harry spent most of the time wondering why Snape rated being included, though he supposed the man had been involved in safeguarding the convergence on the previous Halloween, so he must have some little-mentioned role in protecting the castle.
Finally, the headmaster announced, "She's not dead, Argus."
"She's not?" the old caretaker asked. "But I couldn't find a pulse, and she's gone limp."
"Some kind of curse that defies simple counterspells and reviving charms," Dumbledore explained. "It is as if she has been rendered completely catatonic, though I detect that her spiritual energy still resides in her body."
"Very like the vampires then," Fandral nodded.
Dumbledore shrugged, "Perhaps. I do not believe any student at the school could work magic so powerful. What brought the four of you to the corridor?" he asked Harry and his friends.
Harry saw no particular reason not to explain, "We were coming back from the Deathday party and I heard something whispering from the walls about killing and blood. We thought it was a prank but were going to get a teacher and ran into Mr. Filch first."
"Only…" Hermione looked at him for permission and he nodded. As much as he didn't really trust Fandral or Snape, Harry was well-adjusted enough not to keep what might be an important clue from the teachers just because it made him look crazy. "...Harry was the only one that heard the voice. The rest of us were following him."
"Curiouser still," Dumbledore said, clearly willing to believe. His eyes strayed to the scar on Harry's forehead, but he simply said, "Please, keep us informed if you hear this voice again."
"What about Mrs. Norris?" Filch asked, some hope returning to his voice, tinged with thwarted anger at the idea that it might not have been a student.
"I shall attempt some stronger revivification rituals, and I'd task Severus with researching potions that may help. We will maintain her in her coma in the hospital wing, and, if she does not recover on her own… well, the most powerful rites of awakening take place in the spring." The headmaster left unsaid that this might not be the only such victim before such rituals became possible to cast.
"I might have some suggestions as well," Fandral added. "The victims of the vampire woke as soon as their attackers were ash in the sunrise, for example."
"What is the Chamber of Secrets?" Hermione asked.
"A myth," Dumbledore shook his head. "And a callback to a similar series of unsolved attacks some two-thirds of a century ago. Only the most likely perpetrator of those attacks should be unavailable to be involved at this time." He sent another troubled look Harry's way. "Please simply inform one of us if you have more information. Do not investigate this on your own. It could prove quite unsafe." He mustered a fragile smile and said, "Very well. The four of you should get to bed. We teachers have quite a bit more research to do before we sleep."
As they were walking Luna back to her dorm, the young girl asked, "You said it was just saying what it wanted to do, Harry? Because if Professor the Dashing is correct, there are myths about vampires and other creatures that can harm or kill you by calling your name from outside your house."
"Maybe it's a rat vampire that hated Mrs. Norris?" Harry tried to joke. For as much as the cat's apparent death was less gruesome than the battle and troll's death they'd seen the previous year, it was more shocking due to the lack of cause and sight of her owner's distress. "But, no, I didn't hear any names being called, including the cat's."
"Hmm," Luna mused. "I'll write to Daddy to see if he has any ideas. He writes a magazine about this kind of thing."
"Good thinking," Hermione nodded approvingly at the younger girl and her apparent access to an information source unavailable to the rest of them. "We should all do what research we can. It's not investigating if we just do research."
"I think it might be, technically," Harry disagreed. "But, yeah. As long as we don't go looking for trouble, research should be okay. What do you think, Nev? Ready to help us study about coma-causing monsters?"
"As long as we don't wind up having to fight it, especially on another planet," Neville allowed, eyes downcast.
Harry took inventory of his life up to that point and admitted, "I hope not… but no promises."
