Chapter 14
Trial of the Mind

After climbing down from the top of the tower, Draco led them through a different route than they had walked earlier that morning. Instead of taking them towards the main corridor where it sounded like everyone was gathered together for lunch, his route took them through a quieter portion of the castle and then out onto the grounds.

Hermione looked around the empty lawn and the edge of the forest nearby and asked, "This 'someone' isn't a talking tree or anything of the like, right? Because I don't know if I'm ready for that."

The question caught Draco off guard, and then he laughed. "No talking tree, though if this world had one I'm sure he'd like to be one. He's a wizard, though he isn't given the respect he deserves for what he does around here."

The follow up phrase 'just like me' was unsaid but still clearly heard.

A path has been cleared through the forest, the dirt tamped down by the passage of innumerable feet, and a short walk down that path revealed a greenhouse that looked as though it had been carved from a single block of glass. Sliding a panel door to the side, the blond waved them inside.

By now Harry was becoming accustomed to the wizards' constant use of magic to make things bigger in the inside than they had any right to be, but not even Draco's storage tent has been this packed with stuff. The stuff in this case being, unsurprisingly, plants. Shrubs with leaves of silver and gold that tinkled in a nonexistent breeze. Vines that reached out tendrils towards them that Draco quickly pulled Dudley away from. Short trees bearing orange fruits that lifted the branches they were attached to as though it were only their stems that kept them from floating into the sky. Harry wandered deeper into the greenhouse and stopped when he found a plant with thick, green tentacles waving gently in the air. "Hey, Draco? Are malboros a wizard plant that escaped into the wild during the Transition?"

"Not a chance. They're purely a Gaian monstrosity. Thank Merlin, too. If they existed on Earth, I think we could have kissed the Statute of Secrecy goodbye before it ever came into force." Draco pushed his way through some branches and stopped in his tracks when he saw what Harry had found. "What the devil is that?"

"That's what I wanted to ask you. I've never seen a malboro sapling before, but Dudley and I turned around and ran like hell the last time we saw one that was full grown. I have no idea what their lifecycle or whatever looks like." Because few people really wanted to tangle with a giant plant that spewed toxic fumes and then ate whatever animals it killed, and those who did were either the world's greatest Adventurers or enormous fools.

"I don't think it looks like this. This looks like an experiment gone dreadfully wrong," Draco muttered. "Neville! Where are you?!"

"Draco, is that you?" a voice called out from what Harry had to assume was the rear of the greenhouse. Branches were pushed to the side to reveal a young man with sandy brown hair and a round, babyish face that was liberally smeared with dirt. The smile on his face fell as he took in the sight of the other Adventures. "Oh. I, er, I didn't know you were bringing company."

"Nobody you need to be worried about. Harry, Dudley, Hermione, this is Neville Longbottom, one of the only people I had on my side growing up here. Neville, these are some other Adventures I ran into while I was scavenging. They were interested in seeing just what our world looks like."

"I can't imagine the old man was happy about that," Neville said with a grimace.

Draco shrugged. "He's never happy when I start demanding money."

They must be talking about Dumbledore, Harry realized belatedly. For a moment he has thought Draco and Neville were talking about Draco's father.

"I thought you said all the wizards you grew up with hated Gaian magic?" Hermione asked, looking back and forth between the two wizards. "But if Neville was your friend growing up…"

Draco's face twisted into a strange expression at her question, but Neville just let out a soft laugh. "Don't use the word 'friend' around Draco. I think he's allergic. Anyway, he wasn't wrong. I'm not really a wizard. I'm just a Squib."

"A what?"

"A non-magical child born to wizards. And he's not one," Draco continued hotly. "You're as much a wizard as anyone else here. You wouldn't be nearly as good with all these plants if you didn't have magic."

"Still not enough of a wizard to be deserving of a wand though, am I? He's told you about how rare wands are, I guess," Neville continued after glancing at their faces. "With so few of them, my grandmother thought it best our family's wands go to other children who can actually use them. I can't say I really mind that much though, to be honest. If I were a wizard, I'd have to be in class right now rather than getting to play with my plants all day."

"Wait, wait, wait. Class?" demanded Dudley. "You look like you're the same age we are. Why would you still be in class?"

Neville shot him a puzzled look. "Hogwarts lasts for seven years. We don't finish our education until we're eighteen."

Harry turned to Draco for an explanation, which made the Sorcerer flush with embarrassment. "Once I saw how things were headed, I didn't see much point in staying. I dropped out midway through fourth year." Harry and Dudley both snickered at that, and with his face turning even more red the blond turned to the side and jabbed a finger at the odd tree Harry had found. "That's not what I wanted to talk to you about. First, what in Merlin's name is that?"

"Oh! That. A walking plant stumbled into the grounds a few months back. Dumbledore managed to kill it, but it had some flowers on its, well, head-bit that survived. I wanted to see if I could breed it with one of the plants from Earth. That was the only one that took." Neville shrugged. "Right now I'm just waiting to see what kinds of things it can do."

"This is the only hybrid that survived?" Hermione asked with interest. "What did you cross it with?"

"A tree from back home called a Whomping Willow. It is well known for reaching out and hitting anything that attacks it."

"Or anything that gets near it. Or anything that looks at it funny," Draco grit out through clenched teeth. "It was the most dangerous plant in the Wizarding World. And you decided it was a good idea to breed it with the most dangerous plant on Gaia. Neville, what were you thinking?!"

"Mistakes were made, okay?"

"Not to interrupt," Dudley interrupted, "but the tower?"

Draco sighed. "Right, right. As much as we need to have a talk about you making a malboro–Whomping Willow hybrid," he said with another glare at Neville, "that wasn't the main question on my mind when I came out here. We were on top of the astronomy tower when we saw what looks almost like a guard tower in the forest. I wondered if you knew anything about that."

"The Towers? Not much, but I'll tell you what I do know."

"Hold on. Towers?" Harry asked, stressing the plural.

Neville nodded. "Towers. Three of them. They all appeared overnight. It was, oh, six months ago or so? I remember it was the same time the wards started failing, and Dumbledore took down several that the Board of Governors felt were the least important in order to conserve magic. That was not long before this malboro found its way here, come to think of it."

"I knew Hogwarts was running out of magic, but I didn't think it was this bad," Draco said quietly. "This is the first I'm hearing about them taking some of the wards down, too."

The one-shoulder shrug Neville gave was accompanied by a self-effacing smile. "It's amazing sometimes what people will talk about in front of you when they are busy pretending you don't exist. Anyway, about the Towers. No one knows where they came from, what they do, or even what's inside. Flitwick and Dumbledore both tried to search one, but they couldn't so much as unlock the door. Brooms failed when they got close. After that, everyone just ignored them."

"Typical wizards," Draco said with a roll of his eyes. Turning to Hermione, he said, "You wanted something to explore while we are waiting on Dumbledore. Now we have something."

"It does have more appeal than searching a castle that's been used as a school for who knows how long."

"A thousand years," Draco and Neville said in unison.

"It was a figure of speech," the Stellis said with a sigh.

After grabbing some bread and jerky to munch on from a communal larder on the first floor, Draco led them not immediately to the grounds but instead to a courtyard just a single wall away from the outside. They climbed the ladder bolted to the inside of the wall and stood on the narrow walkway on the top. "That should be the tower we saw from the astronomy tower," Draco said, pointing out a row of stone teeth just peeking out from above the trees. "Neville said they're all around the castle, so if we climb to the top, we may be able to see one of the others. We just have to get inside."

"Even if we can't get in, maybe we could climb up the side to the top," Dudley pointed out. "Just because your flying broomsticks don't work doesn't mean we can't get on top some other way."

"Fair enough." The Sorcerer shielded his eyes and looked again at the tower. "It didn't look like it was that far away, either. We should be able to get there and through the whole thing pretty quickly."

"And just like that, you've jinxed it," Harry muttered, earning a sympathetic nod from Hermione. "Come on. Let's see just how bad this is going to be to deal with now."

The line between the grounds and the forest was clean and abrupt, and Harry looked askance at it. It was Hermione, though, who asked the question. "Is this where the wards end? Or is it an artificial boundary?"

Draco nodded at the second question. "Artificial. The wards extend for several hundred more meters. This has always been the dividing line between the castle grounds proper and the Forbidden Forest."

"The Forbidden Forest." Harry eyed the trees with curiosity and confusion. He and Dudley had been in plenty of forests far scarier and more forbidding than this. "Why was it called that?"

"I've only heard rumors from how it was before the Transition, but supposedly there were centaurs and werewolves and monsters living in the forest. I don't know how much I believe that," Draco added with a frown, "because I've seen wizards try to fight. If there were dangerous beasts running around, they would have cleaned out the school. Not to mention, I think the Transition wiped out what monsters were there in the first place. That's why it's called what it is, though."

Surprisingly, nothing moved about in the forest trying to kill them, and the rest of the walk to the tower was fairly boring in all honesty. Soon enough, a stone wall became visible between the trees, and the cylindrical tower was revealed. It was not that large, only three stories at most and perhaps a dozen meters in diameter. The walls themselves were smooth, the rocks polished to a dull sheen and with mortar that looked as though the tower had been laid just yesterday. Climbing up would be next to impossible, not that there could be that much of value within the tower unless the floors were covered with gold.

"This place seems determined to disappoint me," Hermione said with a sigh.

"You wouldn't be the first one it did that to," Draco replied. "We might as well try the door, though. We're already here."

Walking around the tower's base, they soon came to a flat expanse of stone set in an archway. At the top of the arch was set a large blue gemstone the size of a dinner plate. If they could pry it out and get it to a jeweler, Harry suspected they could make a handsome profit off it. It would make it up for all four of them being stuck here. The door itself, if that was what the flat stone was, appeared impossible to open as it lacked handle or hinges or even a break where it would swing in or out.

As they approached, writing faded into view on the stone.

"The Trial of the Mind," Hermione read. "Only those who can discover the secret to this tower are worthy of the treasure within."

"Discover the secret, huh?" Dudley asked before giving the stone sign a thump with his left fist. "What's the secret, how to get in—"

The Knight cut himself off as their Marks all tingled and burned. Harry looked down at his hand to find his own Mark glowing faintly, as though embers were drifting through the design just under his skin. He attention was drawn back to the door when he heard the sound of stone grinding against stone, and the door slid down into the ground to reveal an enormous room far larger than the tower could possibly hold.

"I'm really beginning to hate the whole 'everything's bigger on the inside' thing you wizards have going," Dudley groused.

"We do use it for everything, don't we?" Draco said, not even trying to hide his smile. "Now I understand why Dumbledore and Flitwick couldn't open the door no matter what spells they tried. There is no one in Hogwarts who has a Mark. It's like the doors were meant only to be opened by Adventurers."

"Which, since they're within the wards, strikes me as really weird. Aren't those things supposed to keep Gaia out?" Harry asked.

"Yes, but remember what Neville told us. They took down some of the wards to conserve their magic. That might have been enough for these towers to appear, and it makes me very curious just what treasure is in here waiting for us."

The stepped into the tower and looked around at the larger space. Their footsteps echoed in the enormous space, the only other noise present being a bubbling, crackling sound coming from waist-height trenches that turned the floor into a simple maze. A glance into them revealed that they were fulled with either lava or molten metal; regardless of which it was, not something Harry wanted to swim in. Looking up, he saw that there were not any real floors throughout the the tower, just stone slabs linked together almost like a catwalk. "Maybe the secret is how we climb up from the different platforms?"

"Somehow, I don't think that will be our main problem," Hermione said, her eyes focused on something in the distance. Harry looked up to try tracking her gaze, but all he could see was the ledges and slabs. "There are switches and plates on the underside of those catwalks. I don't know how we're supposed to access them, though, especially if the brooms wizards use to fly around don't work."

The boys exchanged long looks. "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it, I guess," Dudley said after a beat. "Worst case, we stop and climb down and give it up as a bad job."

"Looks like we'll find out right now," Harry pointed out. Their current path took a swing to the right, and from there it split again. One path led to more turns and twists, and the other was a straight shot to a raised disc set into the floor. The quartet walked down that path, weapons out and ready for whatever monster was inevitably going to attack them. The disc itself was marked with a large icon that resembled a bird in flight, its wings curved downwards to form a crescent.

"I… guess we're supposed to step on it?" Draco asked.

Harry shrugged his shoulders. No one else had any suggestions either, and the four of them surrounded the presumed floor plate. "On three," he said. He did not know what this was about to do, but it was probably for the best that they all hit it at the same time. "One. Two."

The other Adventurers tensed.

"Three."

They jumped in unison and landed on the plate. It sank flush against the floor with barely any resistance. The stone walls let out a grinding noise as if there were gears hidden within, and then the grinding stopped.

"Well," Dudley said after a brief pause, "that was anticlimactic."

Predictably, that was when their feet lost their grip on the floor.

The Adventurers fell upwards, rocketing past ledges where more plates were now visible. A walkway at the very top of the tower hurtled at them at high speed. Harry braced himself for the impact, but when he hit it was like falling into the softest pillow in existence.

A loud sigh came from Draco. "Thank Merlin for cushioning charms."

"Thanks for that," Hermione said breathlessly. "I don't think we would have survived that otherwise."

"It wasn't me." The three of them looked at the wizard in surprise only to find him shaking his head. "I'm serious. I think the floors are enchanted with it already."

A thick splat came from further down the platform, and they looked over to find that the lava in the trenches had its sense of up and down affected just as theirs had been. The molten rock that had been simmering sedately was now pouring out and splashing several of the platforms on its way down to them. Harry watched the stream flow off the sides of the platform on which they stood and into the bowl that made up the ceiling of the tower.

"I saw a door there," Dudley said, pointing into the lava fall. "We can't get to it now, but that was probably the way to the treasure and out of this place."

"The secret to the tower," Hermione said, looking around the inverted tower with new insight. "It's a giant puzzle. The plates flip us upside down, and the switches… I don't know what they do, but I bet we'll find out in the course of all this."

"And," Harry said, drawing the others' attention to him again, "as weird as it is, it doesn't look like there are any monsters in here. Just us."

"That's a good thing, isn't it?"

He shook his head at the Stellis's question. "Normally, I'd say yes. But right now, it makes me worried about how hard this puzzle is going to be."

The same emblem was stamped on the floor where they landed, and once they moved off of it another plate rose slightly, ready to be stepped on again. They did just that to flip the tower upright again and fall back to the ground. This time, they took the path that branched off and followed the twists and turns to a second plate. Dudley looked back the way they came. "Did we miss a turn somewhere, or are there only two plates on the ground floor?"

"No, that's all I saw as well," Harry said, looking up at all the levels above them. If there was a simple, single direction they could go, that would be fantastic, but that would not leave much of a puzzle. Either the treasure at the top was going to be mediocre, or this puzzle was about to become far more complicated.

"Let's not make things more complicated than they need to be," Draco said, seemingly reading Harry's mind. "Maybe this is as straightforwards as it looks."

Stepping on this new floor switch replaced up and down yet again, but this time they did not fall all the way to the top of the tower. They passed one layer of catwalk and landed on the next, and they all stayed where they landed until they heard the splash of molten rock against the new floor. The splash was far too close for Harry's comfort, and he looked up to find the curtain of lava pouring onto the floor only a couple of feet away. It cut off what looked to be an entire half of the platform on which they stood, leaving only a left turn leading to an alter or column at the end. Standing up, he edged away from the violently hot liquid and approached the alter. On the side facing the rest of the pathway was a dark metal lever pointing out to the side just begging to be used.

"More switches," Draco muttered.

"This shouldn't flip us again," Hermione say, looking up at the ground. "Not if that is the purpose of the floor switches. Maybe it shuts off parts of the lava?"

Dudley shrugged and grabbed the lever. "Only one way to find out." He shoved the lever upwards with a grunt.

The platform beneath them rumbled, and they grabbed onto the alter as everything started moving sideways. Looking down, they could see that theirs was not the only one moving; below them, many of the platforms higher up in the tower were shifting positions and even changing levels. One switch had completely changed the layout of the puzzle.

"Looks like we don't have to deal with the lava on this level anymore," Draco said, nodding the way they came. Sliding the platform to the side had moved them out of the path of the falling lava and revealed the other half and the floor plate on the opposite side. All they needed to do was not tip sideways and fall into the streaming rock.

The floor plate did not drop them onto the ground floor again as Harry half-expected. Instead they fell onto the lowest of the floating platforms. The place where they landed, though, did not have a floor plate like the others had. They were committed now, Harry supposed, and if they wanted to get back to the ground, they needed to solve the puzzle.

Stepping on the nearer of the two floor plates on this platform, they flipped upside-down again. They were getting more used to the constant inversions and landed on their feet this time. Dudley was about to start walking down the length of this platform, but Harry grabbed the collar of his armor and pulled him to a stop. Not five feet away, lava splashed onto the floor and and off both sides. "Try not to get fried extra-crispy, please," he reminded his cousin. "Looks like this is the wrong way to go."

They stepped on the floor plate again to return to the lowest platform and tried the other plate. They fell even farther this time, past the halfway point and not that far from the very top of the tower. Harry looked down the length of this platform and groaned. It was festooned with short side paths, each of which had a floor plate on it. "Forget figuring out the puzzle. I don't know if we'll remember how to get back to the ground."

"I do," Hermione said, and he turned around to glare at her only to find her not looking at him. She was looking downwards at the door that promised to lead them out of here. "But I would rather not spend all day working out this puzzle. Not when there may be an easier way of getting out of here. Draco, are you up to hitting us with your Float spell?"

"Float?" The Sorcerer followed the Hunter's eyes. "You want to jump off this platform and land on the far end of that one."

"If we go to the end of this platform, it won't be that long a jump. We should be able to make it without much effort."

That would certainly make their trek easier, but Harry could see one glaring problem with Hermione's plan. "What happens when we come back out and we're still stuck on the platform with a wall of lava between us and the plate will take us back to the ground floor?"

"It didn't take much force on the floor plates to toss us around. I barely stepped on it last time. If I hit one with an arrow, we should be able to float back down to a lower platform and from there to the ground."

Draco looked up at the ground floor. "It would take some effort to hold the Float spell on all of us for that long, but if one of you grabbed me and pulled me along so I don't fall into lava, I should be able to maintain it."

The cousins looked at each other. "If they think they have it covered, I think we should trust them," Dudley told him.

Harry still was not sure this was a good idea, but if both Hermione and Draco thought it was doable, he did not have much he could argue against. He shrugged mentally and waved for them to precede him down the platform. "After you, then."

Hermione was right about it not being much of a jump now that they were at the end of the platform, and with Draco's magic they needed to do little more than push off the side and let gravity take them the rest of the way. Harry kept a tight grip on Draco as he lowered the both of them last, but the Sorcerer had things well in hand and needed no assistance landing on the platform. Casting a suspicious eye at the wall of lava cutting them off from the nearest floor plate, Harry followed the others into the white light shining through the doorway.

White suddenly became black, and Harry had to blink his eyes to get them to adjust. Unlike the wide, tall room they came from, this new room was the right size to fit inside the tower. It was also nearly bare. Plain stone floor and walls, and while at first glance the roof seemed to be missing, a second look revealed it to be an illusion laid over stones just like those in the walls. Windows spaced evenly throughout the walls let in fresh air. The only things within the room was a cube of blue wood – not painted, but rather the wood itself was naturally blue – approximately a handspan to a side, and above that was a white bust of a severe-looking woman wearing an elaborate coronet upon her brow.

"That… looks like Ravenclaw," Draco said in awe.

"Who?"

"Rowena Ravenclaw. She was the founder of one of the Houses of Hogwarts where students are sorted when they first start. Hers is the House of the intelligent and curious." Draco steps over to the cube and picks it up. "Which makes me wonder if this is her famous diadem." He flipped the lid off the box and stared inside.

"…And?" Harry asked after several seconds of silence.

"It's a compass." Draco pulled out a metal disc and tossed it to Harry. "Just a plain old compass. It doesn't even work!"

Harry looked down at the disc and glanced back at Draco. He did not know what compasses Draco was used to, but this did not look normal to him. If anything it looked like a clock, one with multiple hands of different lengths and a background with the same curved bird sigil as on the floor plates. The only thing that marked it as a compass at all was the letters for the cardinal directions written on the edges.

Hermione took it from Harry's hands and turned it this way and that. Then she turned her body around and walked to one of the windows. "The longest hand points towards the castle," she said, looking down at the compass again. "Draco, where is the nearest town or village from here?"

"South and just a little west. Why?"

She pulled a normal compass from her pouch and fiddled with the disc. "That is odd, but it might be useful. The letters aren't to orient you; they're to orient the compass. The two longest hands are pointing at the castle and the town Draco mentioned. I think that's what this is for: guiding you to the the nearest places where people live. Not a bad tool to have in your pocket if you get lost in the wilderness."

"And there's this," Dudley said, picking up the square of cloth the box had been sitting on. Hermione pocketed the two compasses as they all came closer to watch him unfold the square. When he was done, they looked in confusion at the rectangle. It was roughly the same size as the maps Harry had seen in shops throughout Gaia, but the lines flickered in and out of sight, never showing more than a few at a time. "I have no idea what this is supposed to be, but it's something."

"What do you think the chances are that there is something in the other towers that will make this readable?" Harry asked the group.

"Too high to be ignored," Hermione said.

Dudley folded the cloth into a small square again and slipped it in his own pouch. With nothing left for them inside the treasure room, they looked back at the doorway that again had light pouring through it and one by one walked through.

Harry looked around him when the spots faded from his eyes. They were not in the puzzle again, but now they were surrounded by grass and trees. Turning around, he saw they were standing outside the tower, and the stone slab had closed behind them. "I guess we're not supposed to go back in."

"Fine by me," Draco said before pointing deeper into the forest. "We still have plenty of daylight left. Who wants to try another tower?"

Maybe it's a good thing Neville has his bouncing episode in canon. "Squib Neville" sounds like the Hagrid of Herbology, and isn't that a scary thought?

The real reason Hermione thought to bypass the puzzle was that I got tired of trying to map out a tower puzzle worthy of Ravenclaw, and writing just what I had figured out proves that was the right way of doing it. An entire video game puzzle like that in text form would have been 5 thousand words of sheer boredom to slog through.

I finally have an answer to how long this story will be! After rejiggering my notes, there will be a total of twenty chapters (including the prologue and epilogue). So actually shorter than I thought it was going to be, but that's just how it is.

Silently Watches out.