Chapter 8: Founders' Relics
The tunnel was narrow and the ceiling so low that Beth had to bend over to fit. It sloped downwards for a long time before it leveled out and remained flat. The floor and walls were thick with dust and cobwebs stretched across their path.
Beth tried to duck around as many as she could but the path of the tunnel forced her straight through several extra thick and dusty ones.
"At least we know that we're the first ones to come down here." She told Balboa as they fought their way through.
They finally came to a halt in front of what Beth thought was a wall at first but she held her wand higher and realized that it was a closed door. She could see the glitter of gilded letters and the silver head of an emerald-eyed serpent gleamed at her.
She passed her wand back and forth trying to get the an idea for what the whole of thing looked like when two large torches on either side suddenly sensed her presence and flared to life. The sudden bright light made Beth shield her eyes and Balboa howled. She blinked several times, trying to see past the glare of the light reflecting off the metal of the door.
When she had finally banished the last of the colored spots from in front of her eyes she looked up at a large set of double doors. Each door had two sets of initials of each of the founders. Godric on the hinge side of the left door and below the gold and ruby eyed lion was Salizar's dull initials around which was coiled the silver emerald eyed serpent. Rowena's initials were at the top of the other door and flying nearby was a bronze eagle with blue sapphire eyes, below was Helga Hufflepuff's black badger with shimmering yellow diamonds set in its eyes. Beside each set of initials was a gilded inverted triangle inside which were engraved several words.
Down the middle of the doors on either side of a small gap were engraved words: "The way will open only to one who knows our ideals well. Pick the one we most hold dear and your way will be clear."
Beth looked inside Salizar's triangle. There were several words, "Pure blood, power, Parseltongue," and several others were inscribed there. She looked over at Helga's: "Hard working, cheerful, equality, unity," along with several others.
Beth stood in front of the door thinking hard. It would do her no good to turn back and try to do some researching on each of the founders. There was no saying where the bricks that allowed access to this tunnel would be when she tried to come back.
She stared up at the door. She didn't want to know what would happen to her if she guessed wrong. She couldn't simply stand in this tunnel all night either. She took a deep breath and made her best guesses. She tapped "Loyalty," in Godric's triangle, "Intelligence," in Rowena's, "Power," in Slytherin's, and "Hard work," in Hegla's.
There were several tense minutes of total silence. Then the torches snuffed themselves out and the door slowly opened with a long grinding sound.
"We did it!" Beth told Balboa as she once again raised her wand and walked forward into the chamber.
The room was lit by several crystals that were suspended from the ceiling and the room was dusty and empty except for a long table with several objects laying across it. Beth stepped forward, her heart soared. The first thing she saw was a large chalice with the initials H.H. on it. She picked it up quickly.
"Look, Balboa!" She said. "He didn't get her cup after all!" She stared at the chalice for a few moments before it struck her that it didn't feel magical in the right way. She had picked up Godric's sword once and a strange power had thrilled up her arm. It had been the same feeling when the sorting hat had been placed upon her head. The chalice didn't send any thrill of power through her hands. She hefted her wand and tapped the rim. In a flash of yellow light the cup changed from ornate to a simple and badly carved wooden cup.
"It's a fake…" She said dejectedly. She set it back in its place and with another flash of yellow light it changed back into an ornate chalice. Beth blinked and looked down the table. She noticed a sword encrusted with rubies. "That's impossible." She said reaching for it. "This is in Dumbledore's office!" She tapped it and a moment later she was holding a rusted old fencing rapier. She put it back in its place and it changed in a flash of red light back into the image of Godric's sword.
"They must all be fakes!" She said in an awed voice, noticing now that there were several copies of Helga's cup, as a matter of fact there was a cup, locket, sword, and shield for every founder in a different place along the table. "They're all decoys!" She told Balboa. The cat meowed, a strange sound that echoed oddly through the chamber. "You-Know-Who doesn't have any of the relics after all!" She shouted into the silence. She could see the spaces on the table where the relics were missing. "If the chamber had been dark, or if You-Know-Who hadn't looked carefully he would've just taken the fakes!"
She looked around, wondering if there was anything else in this room that might give her a clue as to where the real Relics might be hidden. Beth walked around the table and began to examine the walls. Through the dust she could make out what she thought was another door on the back wall but it was locked securely. She brushed away the dust and thick cobwebs to reveal the words.
"Only our trusted messengers may call and pass."
She tried every spell she could think of and yelled every word that she thought might open the door but they remained stubbornly closed. She noticed that through the dust there were several scorch marks on the door. It seemed that someone else had tried to get through the doors a long time ago and from the look of it they hadn't been successful.
"We'll have to come back." Beth told Balboa sadly. "We have to figure out how to open these doors. We just have to get those relics to fight You-Know-Who." Balboa stared at her with bright yellow eyes.
They made their way back into the tunnel and the door closed securely behind them. Beth walked slowly up the tunnel and once she reached the top she tapped the solid wall with her wand. After a tense moment it opened onto a different wall than the one Beth had entered through.
The Owlery was full of owls now and through the glasses windows Beth could see the first traces of the sunrise. She hurried back to her room to try and make it look like she had spent the whole night in her bed and not in dusty old tunnels.
The next day Beth found that it wasn't as hard to stay awake as she feared it would be, she found instead that she had a hard time paying attention in her classes. She was too busy trying to think of how to get through the second door. The answer seemed painfully obvious. She needed an owl to get through the door. But how could she convince one of the school owls to follow her through that dark passage?
She could try to enchant it but post owls were already intelligent and enchanted. If she tried to fool one there was no telling what it might do. She tapped her quill against her parchment and tried to think through Professor Binns' steady droning voice.
She had wanted to get herself an owl but that's when Balboa had decided to walk into her life. She couldn't blame the cat after all, the darn thing did seem pretty intelligent, but what she needed right now was an owl not a cat. Balboa seemed to hear her and let out a low growl and kneaded her thighs with his claws.
She longed to tell Dumbledore but he was assuming that she was carrying on with her research to learn more about how to unlock the vault and what might lie inside of it, not exploring it by night. No, he'd probably forbid her to go into it again and maybe even refuse to give her any more material to research, or even worse, report her for being an unregistered animagus!
Beth stared down at the diagram that she was partially concealing with her hand. What if there was another way in, a different tunnel that would lead beyond that sealed door? "No," she thought with a tiny sigh. "They wouldn't have built two ways into the Vault." She stared at the lines of writing above the diagram. "Only the trusted messengers or one like them." She read in a whisper.
She pondered those words for several moments. "If only I could do the transformation again." She thought, "Although I guess a falcon isn't much like an owl."
Another intriguing thought was that the Founders or someone who had come after them had left behind false relics. It was ingenious really, transfiguring old things to look like the relics and to make so many copies of them. It worried her a bit.
How could You-Know-Who have been fooled by those false relics? "Maybe he was so elated to get as far as he did that he didn't care?" She wondered to herself, absently scribbling a few dates that Professor Binns repeated a few times, as if to make sure that everyone had gotten the chance to copy them down.
There was also the chance that he had never been able to touch one of the real relics and so he wouldn't realize that he was holding a fake. Beth wondered if the transfiguration spell would hold up to whatever spells that he would've tried.
She gathered up her books as the class ended, bid farewell to Hestia and Jonquil and went up to her Divination class.