Sorry, been doin' a lot more readin' than 'ritin' and 'rithmatic of late, I think I've churned through a couple of million words worth of other writers' stories since my last update. I particularly enjoyed jamcreynolds' Blinded by Lies (I told her I'd out her as a reason ;^), as well as The Sinister Man's Harry Potter and the Prince of Slytherin and Lady Khali's Well Groomed Mind, but there have been a few others that were fun too.
Usual disclaimers, no rights to anything from JKR's stories.
As Albus knew he would, Gilderoy Lockhart jumped at the chance to be able to say he was the Boy-Who-Lived's Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, especially when he got to assign his own books as the text books, he didn't even bother reading the contract Albus put in front of him, he signed it before he could change his mind. Albus had to shake his head at the fact that the greedy little bugger had assigned all of his books as the required texts, but he shrugged it off, as it was no skin off his nose if the brats' parents had to pay more, and in fact it made him money because his company published Gilderoy's books, just as it had the Harry Potter books that were now banned. Of course they didn't include that little detail in the Daily Prophet article, just the fact that the Text books had changed because Gilderoy's course was radically different from the tired old course the year started with and the text books were available from Flourish and Blotts.
Gilderoy was on Cloud Nine, being announced as the Boy-Who-Lived's Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher had garnered him more attention than he'd ever gotten him before this and he was raking the galleons in as a result of his brilliant idea to assign his entire collection of written works as the text books for all Hogwarts students. He was willing to bet that that wasn't really what Albus had been thinking of when he agreed to let him assign his books as the text books, but it fitted into the written agreement so he couldn't do anything about it now. The wizards who came shopping with their wives and children usually objected to how much the full set of his books cost, but luckily most of them were tied up at work and what he'd picked up from Albus and Severus at Hogwarts made it easy to control the witches….. well some of what he'd picked up from them anyway.
The business proposition that was made to him a couple of days after the Prophet Article came out was an even more exciting proposition though, as he was given Five Thousand Galleons to take an enchanted diary with him to Hogwarts, with the promise of another Fifty Thousand if he managed to get it to Amelia Bones' niece and got her to activate it by writing in it…. Possibly even more if he managed to do so quickly (the intermediary who contacted him had implied that the ones commissioning this may be prepared to go as high as twice that to see their son quickly freed of the broken heart he was currently burdened with). Apparently there was a love-lorn young wizard (who must remain nameless for now, of course) who was quite smitten with Miss Bones and desperately wanted to court her, but he was being prevented from even speaking with her.
The young wizard's parents had apparently come up with the brilliant idea of purchasing a pair of enchanted diaries and getting one of them to Miss Bones so that the young lovers could use them to communicate, and when they saw the article about him becoming Hogwarts' new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher they realised that this would be their best opportunity to get one of the diaries to Miss Bones. Never let it be said that Gilderoy Lockhart didn't do his all to support true love!
(And all that lovely gold, but pulling this off would give him the basis for a new book that had the potential to outsell all of his adventure books, and it would actually be based on something he had done for once! Of course there would be no mention of the more concentrated form of Severus' oestrogen optimised variant of Horace's Contact potion that the diary's covers would be coated with to ensure that the Bones witch would would succumb to the compulsions cast on the diary to make her write and be more susceptible to what she read in the diary once she handled the diary so that the young wizard got his wishes granted quickly, as that would take away from the romance of the story…. But Gilderoy helping two young lovers overcome the forces trying to keep them apart? That would be a winner.)
Albus fobbed off all the complaints about Gilderoy assigning all of his written works as every student's required text books with…. "Alas, while it might appear a tad excessive, there is nothing I can do other than request that he reduce the list, as it is the Professor's right and responsibility to assign the text books for the course they teach, and Gilderoy insists that all the books listed are required for his course." He was pissed off that he was being bothered with all those idiotic complaints when he had more important things to deal with…..
The day after Halloween, all of the Flamel heirlooms, tomes and the like that he'd… acquired from the Flamels over the last eighty odd years had suddenly disappeared. At the time, he took that to mean that the Flamels had suddenly died and everything was automatically recalled in preparation for the reading if Nicolas' will. He didn't know what had killed them, the only thing he could think of was that Tom had managed to get away with the Philosopher's stone and used it to create an Elixir of Life… and when he did so the Philosopher's stone had somehow turned the Elixir of Life it had created under its previous master to poison. This was a flimsy theory, granted, but he had been rather more tied up in planning what he was going to do with the vast fortune he had just inherited from the Flamels at the time than working out what had killed them.
The problem was that that had been over a week ago and he was bemused and more than a little miffed, because he had not seen hide nor hair of whoever the Flamels' solicitors (or whatever they were called over there) were, or any word from the goblins about receiving the inheritance he was due, in fact the goblins in Gringotts London had told him that they had nothing at all to do with clients outside of Magical Britain. Owls to Gringotts Paris went unanswered and when he went to the trouble and expense of purchasing an international portkey to go and see them in person he was told in perfunctory broken English that he'd have to make an appointment to see the Flamel Account Manager, but he was very busy at the moment so it would be a while before he'd be able to make the time to see him. This was all very suspicious and he was beginning to wonder whether those thrice damned goblins had found some way to claim the deceased estates of their clients if the named beneficiaries didn't reside in the same country that their clients had, because that was the sort of thing those filthy little creatures would do if they had half a chance.
While he was anxious to get his hands on the Flamel fortune though, the part of his inheritance he was most desperate to get his hands on in a hurry was the title of Baron Flamel, Head of the Junior Noble and Ancient House of Flamel (there was a Flamel among the scores of wizards who William the Conqueror had used promises of English Baronies to bribe into supporting him in the Normal Conquest of 1066 and the title ended up with Nicolas as the last of the Flamel bloodline), because he was starting to see where the real power in their world was and that Noble and Ancient title was the only thing he could think of that might have any chance of saving him when Bones dragged him in front of the Wizengamot for his part of what happened on Halloween. What Dumbledore didn't realise was that the family had agreed that he would have difficulty keeping up the fiction of being a warrior of the light without a phoenix companion and it would be much easier to destroy him without the sheeple of Magical Britain standing by him because of that image, so they had decided to wait a while before dragging him in front of the Wizengamot.
Lockhart was quite put out when he arrived at Hogwarts to find that neither Harry Potter or Susan Bones would be attending his Defence Against the Dark Arts classes. Dumbledore had used Harry Potter as the main bait to get him to agree, but now he was being told that that Potter had never attended the regular Defence classes. He hadn't told him that Horace had returned to replace Severus either, but at least he only liked young boys so he'd only need to worry about keeping Albus happy. The Bones witch not attending his classes would be a problem, as what he'd thought would be simple, have a word with her after class and pass her the present that her secret admirer had been prevented giving her, was obviously going to be much more work, but the 50-100,000 Galleon prize was enough to make it worth his while.
He lucked onto a way to get to the Bones girl about a week later while he was watching her (surreptitiously in his mind, but Pomona had caught him at it and she was keeping a close eye on him because the attention he was paying her smacked of inappropriate interest in young girls in her mind) in the Great Hall, because she was apparently good friends with a pretty little Third Year Ravenclaw who was in his classes. It only took a slight modification of his previous plan to get the diary to Bones, he had a word with Penelope Clearwater after class and explained that Miss Bones had a secret admirer in the school who was rather smitten with her, but the group she was always with wouldn't even let the poor boy talk to her. He told her that he'd come across the boy in a distraught state up on the Astronomy Tower one night and had had to promise to find a way to get his present to Miss Bones to stop him throwing himself off the tower in despair….. He hoped the boy would be bright enough to play along if the Bones girl asked him about this story, or that she'd think he was too embarrassed to admit it.
It was all Penny could do to not cringe, her Dad was Muggle-Born so she'd been raised in the Muggle world and Stranger Danger was flashing in her head from what she'd been taught at school as she listened to this creep waffling on. It might be important to know just who was trying to get to Sue though so she pretended to go along with him.
"Oh that's so sad Professor. Is there anything I can do to help?"
"It's very good of you to offer Penny…... Actually….. now that you mention it, there may be something you can do. You're a friend of Susan's aren't you? Perhaps you could give her his present for me? I'm sure that Susan's young wizard would be ever so grateful, just as I am!"
He gave her what was no doubt meant to be an enticing smile and wink, but it just came off as lascivious and dirty.
It was hard for to keep an innocent and helpful smile on her face because that look made her stomach turn. Ewww! You filthy old pervert! I'll do this for Sue, just to make sure that you never go anywhere near her.
"Of course Professor, I'll give it to her straight away!"
"Perhaps it would be better to wait until you're alone with her Penny, after all, we wouldn't want the ones who are stopping him talking to her to take the present from you before you can give it to her, would we?"
"Oh no! I hadn't thought of that! That would be terrible! Don't worry Professor, you can rely on me. I'll make sure to give it to her in private."
She knew she was laying it on pretty thick, but she was confident he'd fall for the dumb blonde act, after all, the term could have been created to describe him!
He held her hand in both of his and gave her another one of those smiles and winks after he handed her the wrapped diary. "You're such a sweet girl Penny. I know I can rely on you, and I'll be sure to show you just how grateful I am when I have a chance..."
At that moment, what Penny was grateful of was the bell for the next class, because it gave her the excuse to jerk her hand out of his and blurt out "Oh no! I'll be late for my next class! I have to run Professor!" as she ran out of the room. That pervert was so disgusting! She was only thirteen for god's sake! And while she was well aware that some girls were slags at thirteen, she most definitely wasn't one of them!
That night, she sat on her bed with the curtains drawn and silencing charms on them. She cast the spell for detecting compulsion charms and the like she'd found in a book over the parcel but the spell didn't show anything (the Contact potion amplified amplified the effect of the compulsion, but it also sealed it in so that it only worked by contact and couldn't be detected by the usual spells) so she unwrapped it and found a diary, with a note to Sue explaining that this was an enchanted diary that would allow them to talk to one another without anyone else finding out.
She grabbed a quill and ink well and asked the obvious question. 'Who are you?'
There was a short delay before the response came back. 'I'm Tom.'
The staff and family at Hogwarts were waiting for the punch line, because Dumbledore managing to replace an incompetent possessed by Voldemort with someone even more incompetent, and the assigned text books which cost a few times more than any other texts were actually a series of far fetched adventure stories without any form of instructions in them to boot had to be a joke. The problem was that no-one could work out what the joke was, and Dumbledore wasn't saying anything because he'd locked himself away in his chambers.
Minerva didn't bother saying anything when Lockhart decided to take Dumbledore's fancy chair at the centre of the High Table (it was the most imposing chair he could find in the castle to replace his throne after all the misappropriated heirlooms and Family treasures were reclaimed) because it wasn't being used, she just hit him with an overpowered stinging hex, which apparently hurt like a Cruciatus curse if his scream was to be believed, and quietly asked with a carrying voice.
"Just what do you think you are doing Mister Lockhart?"
"I was just going to take a seat for dinner!"
"And what makes you think that you have the right to usurp the Headmaster's chair?"
"He hasn't been here for the last five meals! It's just a chair for Merlin's sake woman!"
"It is not just a chair, that chair is a symbol of the Headmaster's authority and no one but the Headmaster will sit in it! And if you ever refer to me as woman in that tone of voice again I will have you in front of the Hogwarts' Board of Governors! I am the Deputy Headmistress of Hogwarts and you will refer to me as that or Professor McGonagall, do you understand?"
He went to mouth off at her so she hit him with another stinging hex. "I asked whether you understood what you were told Mister Lockhart!"
"Yes! Yes, I understand!"
She raised an eyebrow at him, which made him feel like he was back in her Transfiguration class, being dressed down for messing up, mind you being called 'Mister Lockhart' in that tone of voice had already taken him most of the way there.
"Yes, I understand Professor McGonagall!"
She nodded. "Very good, now as you've already been told, the Junior Teachers and non teaching staff sit at the end of the table, please take your proper seat now."
Minerva turned to look at where Harry, Hermione and Luna were sitting at the other end of the Hufflepuff table and it wasn't hard to interpret her thin lipped expression so Harry called for one of the elves to bring Dumbledore to his seat at the High Table. When he appeared moments later, half of the Great Hall burst out laughing, because he was wearing a night shirt, but another whispered command had this swapped for more normal robes (nothing in Dumbledore's wardrobe really qualified as 'normal'). Minerva gave him a thin lipped smile.
"Ah, Headmaster, I glad that you have decided to join us at last, your presence has been missed."
It was obvious that Dumbledore wanted to say something to that but her expression told him that it wouldn't be worth the pain it would cause.
A couple of weeks after Dumbledore was… induced to stop hiding in his chambers, Harry had a strange visitor, because the Bloody Baron came to the Druids Tower to tell him that there was something in the Upper Dungeons that he needed to see urgently. Harry asked where, specifically, and when the Baron said "The ever flooding toilets". Harry, Hermione and Luna popped to Uncle Filius, Auntie Minnie and Auntie Mona's chambers respectively, grabbed them and popped to the Dungeon outside Moaning Myrtle's toilets.
'THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS HAS BEEN OPENED AGAIN
ENEMIES OF THE HEIR BEWARE'
Had been written in what appeared to be blood on the wall opposite the toilet door and the floor was covered in water, but that wasn't what the Baron had collected them for. No, that was the two Hufflepuff First or Second Years and five Slytherin Sixth or Seventh Year students who were all laying on the floor, in a state much like rigor mortis. It looked as if the Hufflepuffs had been on the floor, trying to crawl away from the Slytherins and they were all facing the same way, but that was about the limit that could be determined from their positions. The only good news was the fact that scans indicated that aside from one of the Slytherins they were were all alive, but pretty much in stasis. (Well, according to Dumbledore the fact that the Hufflepuffs were both Muggle-Born and the Slytherins were all from disgraced families without much power or money was good because no-one would be worried about them, but Slughorn and Lockhart were the only ones to openly agree with him.)
Dumbledore was miffed to find that Amelia was there with Alastor, Sirius and Alice and Saul was there with Lily and Pandora (hidden in their Unspeakable robes of course) by the time he arrived, but when he started to bluster about no-one having the right to call the Ministry without his permission Harry snapped at him. "Oh shut up you old fool! How many times do you need to be reminded that Lady Hogwarts follows the orders of the Founders' Heirs, which are Hermione, Luna and myself in case you've forgotten, first and I asked her to get Directors Bones and Croaker here as a matter of priority. The fact that they chose to bring trusted members of their staff with them is only sensible so, as I said…. shut up!"
They were organising to move the petrified students and the body to the infirmary and collecting the evidence when Lockhart hustled up. Unfortunately some Hufflepuffs had seen the group assembled here and he'd heard students gossiping about something going on in the Dungeons so he came down to see whether he could leach any benefit to himself out of whatever was going on.
They were all worried about what this might mean, and whether the living students would recover without any adverse effects, so when Dumbledore's blonde himbo started rabbiting on about what a pity it was he hadn't been there earlier because he knew just the spell to stop them becoming petrified if it was cast quickly enough, Amelia turned on him.
"Really? What spell is that?"
"Um… Ah… Well you see I'm oath bound not to teach it to anyone who may use it unethically…."
Lily waved her wand and cast nigh on unbreakable privacy wards around them. "I'm not sure how a spell to prevent someone fully succumbing to petrification could be used unethically, but no one else can see or hear us now so what's this spell?"
Lockhart made another desperate attempt to avoid answering, but it backfired on him. "You cannot understand the age old traditions of honour that the Noble Pure Blood Houses are bound to uphold or you would know better than to ask me to break an oath like that..."
It was Saul who cut him off this time, and the only time any of them had seen him this furious was when he found the Mirror of Esired. "Do not talk of things you know nothing about boy! How dare you talk about tradition or Noble Houses when your mother's family had only managed to be accepted as a Common Wizard Family fifty years ago and on top of that she was cast out for getting pregnant to a common Muggle so you, worm, are nothing but a common Muggle Raised Half Blood! Even Dumbledore can claim to be above you because he at least has received some Family Magic as the Head of a common Wizard Family that is a few centuries old and his mother was a Muggle Born Witch….." He looked at Lockhart for a few minutes, obviously fighting the urge to hex him into next week, but in the end all he did was use the same magic he'd used to force Dumbledore to talk, barking.
"Tell me the details of this spell you claim to know to prevent petrification!"
Lockhart folded immediately. "There is no spell, I just said that to make myself sound important like I always do!"
That gave rise to further questions. "Tell me how many of the spells referred to in your books are real, and which ones they are!"
"None except the common spells that everyone knows!"
Minerva, Pomona and Filius all looked at each other, furious to hear confirmation of what they had been arguing with Dumbledore about ever since Lockhart arrived.
Minerva growled at Lockhart. "You will buy back every single copy of your useless books for what the students paid for them and you will begin teaching from the texts that Quirrell was using immediately! We will loan the texts to any students who left them at home until their parents can owl the proper books to them. Do you understand Mister Lockhart?"
"Minerva, you can't..."
The stinging hex she cast at his sensitive bits was overpowered by her anger, if the way he was curled up on the floor screaming was any indication. "I asked you if you understood what I just told you!"
"Yes! Yes I understand! I'll buy back all my books and teach from Quirrell's books!"
Dumbledore was either brave or stupid, because he decided to step in at that point. "Professor McGonagall! I will not allow you to attack poor Gilderoy or exceed your authority like this. There will be no changes to Gilderoy's text books or classes and you will have to pay Gilderoy a penalty for your unprovoked attack on him!"
It was apparently stupidity, because he kept the same stern authoritative expression on his face as she turned to face him, ready to hex his bits off, but Amelia interceded to avoid bloodshed.
"It is you who are exceeding your authority Mister Dumbledore. Saul and I can attest that Professor McGonagall has the backing of Hogwarts' Board of Governors in doing what is necessary to provide the students of Hogwarts with an adequate eduction. In case you missed what everyone else here just heard, this so called teacher has admitted that the information in the new text books that the students of Hogwarts were forced to pay quite a bit of money for is false. This means that the new books are not suitable to be used as text books for Defence Against the Dark Arts and therefore Mister Lockhart will be buying back every single copy the students purchased for whatever they paid for them, or he will be facing charges for several hundred instances of theft by fraud. The fact that the students already own the previous text books assigned makes Professor McGonagall's suggestion most practical and useful, if not inspired…. So unless you wish to be facing charges alongside the teacher you hired without consulting the Board or even providing us with copies of his qualifications to teach so that we may satisfy ourselves that he is a suitable hire, I suggest that you start organising to find out which students don't have their copies of their previous text books here at Hogwarts so that they can contact their parents to send them. There is no need for you to remain here anyway, as the Department of Magical Law Enforcement and Department of Mysteries have been authorised by the Founders' Heirs to take over the investigation of what happened."
Minerva gave Lockhart and Dumbledore an evil smile. "We actually have copies of what Mister Lockhart achieved in his OWLs and NEWTs here at Hogwarts Madame Bones, the only things we don't have are his Masteries….. Mister Lockhart, what Masteries have you earned since you left Hogwarts?"
They all heard him gasp "None!" from the floor and Amelia mirrored Minerva's smile as she said.
"While I must say that his not having earned any Masteries is rather a worry, at least this means that we will be able to determine whether to sign off on Mister Lockhart's employment here at Hogwarts when the rest of the Board arrives to discuss what to do about these developments tonight…." She waved at the writing on the wall.
It was obvious that Dumbledore wanted to argue about all of that, but he held his tongue and scurried out before he could get himself into any more trouble.
Harry read what was on the wall again. "What's the chamber of secrets, and who's heir are they talking about?"
They all looked at Bathilda, as the resident history expert, for an explanation, and she sighed.
"Legend has it that Salazar Slytherin had a secret chamber constructed somewhere near, but not part of Hogwarts, because he wanted to keep it separate from Hogwarts. Even before Slytherin reportedly had a falling out with the other three founders, he was a secretive and stubborn man, and he was determined that some things had to be done that the others didn't agree with. One of them was the need for witches and wizards, as they were coming to be called, to be protected from the Muggle fanatics and foreign wizards who were the reason they created Hogwarts as a safe haven for witches and wizards, and a safe place for ther young to be taught to use their magic…. Of course the story goes far beyond that, but we need to cover the history of the magical world to tell it…."
Harry, Hermione and Luna looked intrigued at that and Harry voiced their thoughts. "We'd love to hear the full story, I don't know about the girls but so far I've only heard about what applied to what I was learning."
Bathilda nodded with a smile. "Never let it be said that I turned away seekers of knowledge, remembering and passing on the knowledge is my primary duty as the High Priestess, but not here in the corridor though, we can cover that back in the Tower. Anyway, Slytherin's chamber was, as you can guess, called the Chamber of Secrets and the stories were changed to talk about a monster that was meant to cleanse Hogwarts of all who were unworthy instead of being its protector. I can't say which version is true, but if the stories about Slytherin going mad and dying from his grief soon after his wife died were correct, it's possible that both are, in that he originally created a protector, but after he went mad with grief it became a monster that was tasked with destroying the unworthy. He supposedly didn't believe that Muggle Born witches and wizards deserved to have magic at the end, if true the changed role of the 'Monster' would fit in with those beliefs."
"No one really knows what Slytherin's supposed monster was, there's been a lot of speculation over the years but given the fact that he was famous for being a Parselmouth and his heraldic animal was a snake, it would most likely be a serpent of some kind in my opinion…. If it was indeed responsible for what happened tonight, it's either lived for a thousand years or has been awakened from stasis…. Again. That message on the wall could be confirmation of the rumours of the chamber being opened back in Nineteen Forty Three, when a Muggle Born student was killed in the castle but no one knew how. I don't know who started the stories but word going around was that someone had opened the Chamber of Secrets and it was Slytherin's Monster that killed the girl….. And as far as the reference to the heir goes, if we're talking about the Chamber of Secrets, the only one that makes any sense at all is the Heir of Slytherin, and the enemies of the Heir would I expect be Muggle Borns like the girl who was killed in Forty Three if that was the case."
They all nodded solemnly at that, as it made a depressing kind of sense.
With that, they left the investigation to the Auror Investigators and Unspeakables who had arrived and retired to the Druids Tower for the history lesson Bathilda had referred to. Once they'd all gotten themselves settled and Bathilda had a glass of elvan wine in her hand, she started.
"I probably should start with what set Saul off when that idiot started spouting off about age old Pure Blood traditions because that's the easy part…. The fact is that the vast majority of the so called Traditional Pure Blood Families can't trace their heritages back past the creation of the Wizengamot around Fifteen Hundred, actually most of them have been established since the Ministry of Magic was created around Seventeen Hundred so their age old traditions don't mean shite! William the Bastard bribed scores of wizards with promises of English Baronies to get them to support him in the Norman Invasion in Ten Sixty Six. Only a few dozen of them managed to last out the hundred plus years they needed to become Noble and Ancient Houses because many of them had lost their titles and magic by then to the Heads of Druid Houses and Families they challenged in their attempts to claim their Family Magic by right of conquest, and of those only a handful remain today. Other British Kings have used Noble titles to bribe wizards into serving them since then, but the number hasn't really increased that much…."
"So most of the ones who are making such a big thing of tradition can't trace their history back more than a few hundred years, and when the magical world as we know it goes back over three thousand years, that's nothing. Our magical world was basically started by the early Druids around Eleven or Twelve Hundred BC. There were other magical cultures which pre dated that but most of them have died out, and the Druids were generally more powerful because their bloodlines were seeded by the Fae..."
She nodded to Harry. "From what Harry's Grandmother Dorea told us, his Family Magic can be traced back to the original Druids, while the family may only go back about Twenty Five Hundred years here in Magical Britain, some older ancestral bloodlines came from Europe…. Anyway, in the early days of the magical world, women provided nearly all the magical education and direction because it was accepted that the greater bond between a mother and her child made it easier for them to teach the children to control the magic inside them and how to use it. It was traditionally accepted that the first seven years of a child's life was for growing and learning to control their bodies, then around seven they generally began to display their magic so they learned to control and use it for the next seven years until they got a magical boost when they hit puberty around fourteen and tried to gain mastery of their adult magic for the next seven years or so, after which they were supposed to be able to use their magic as masters. This was why many of the Druidic tantric rituals were created. Many of them were for the purpose of improving young witches' and wizards' awareness and control of their magic when they reached puberty and channelling their bursts of magic through puberty into expanding their magic and strengthening their bonds with their true mates, though the rituals for expanding magic and strengthening bonds were continued past puberty. Of course there were never more than a handful of Protectors in any generation, most generations only had one and many had none at all here in Britain, our witches' growth was hampered by that. The men usually handled the children's education in fighting and the non magical parts of their world from when they began learning how to control their magic until they reached puberty and they were expected to know that side of things after that. The women taught their daughters female specific tasks but back in those days the girls learned to fight as well."
"Having the Druidesses providing the magical education and direction worked well enough until about two thousand years ago when the Roman Empire began expanding and forcing the countries within its borders to follow its cultural mores and rules. The councils had been leading and directing the Druidic magical communities for several hundred years by then, but they had previously been comprised of a mix of Druids and Druidesses, and the Druidesses' importance and role was recognised. After the Romans took over the non magical world across Europe and the near east though, cultural pressure was making the councils become predominantly, if not all male, which meant that while the Druids were getting leadership from them, they were getting less education and direction. This caused problems for the Druidic magical communities, which led to covens being expanded to provide magical knowledge repositories and magical education facilities. The covens were predominantly female, while the councils were predominantly male."
"I'll concentrate more on what happened in Britain from here on in, because that's predominantly what I've studied. Back then, there were councils and covens spread around Britain to lead the communities and retain and teach magical knowledge, but there was a Druids Council and Druidesses Coven made up of the preeminent members of the other councils and covens which were leading and directing Magical Britain. The Druids Council and Druidesses Coven members tended to come from the oldest and most powerful families like Harry's."
"Witches and magical children especially were vulnerable living out among the non magical people and our magical communities were losing too many of them to the purges that the Christian priests were instigating against us by the end of the Tenth Century, so Hogwarts was built here on the intersection of a number of ley lines to become a safe haven for the witches and wizards of Magical Britain, and especially a place for our children to learn to use their magic in safety. The Druids Council and Druidesses Coven, along with many of the other covens, moved here once it was established."
"As you know, around this time they began enacting the formal Druid Laws, the structure of the Most Ancient Druid Houses and Families and Wizard Families was formalised and the Druids Council and Druidesses Coven became the Wizards Council and the Witches Coven. Some of the Druid Families were over Fifteen Hundred Years old at this point and the Family Magic associated with them was formidable. They'd found that the magic of heirs especially of these families was growing stronger and maturing faster, so their children were coming into their magic and needed to be trained to control it earlier, coming into puberty and their adult magic earlier too, so they had to throw out some of the rules they were trying to make around magical education. They also had to revise their thinking about rules of succession for the Druid Families, eventually settling on a general rule of eleven being the age of maturity where they could assume control of the Most Ancient families, fourteen for the Ancient families, but if they were the last magical member of their family's bloodline they could assume control as soon as the Family Magic judged them ready to do so."
"About seventy years after that, William the Bastard assembled scores of mercenary wizards to support his invasion of England by promising them Baronies in England, and after they settled here, many of them tried to claim the Family Magic of the Most Ancient and Ancient Houses and Families by right of conquest to gain the power they needed to take over others' lands and fortunes, but they were generally defeated and lost their own titles and family magic, which actually strengthened the druids' magical and political power. Rules had already been established which said that unless they were accepted to have done something significantly notable to advance Magical Britain, a magical family had to have been active in Magical Britain for at least a hundred years before they would be recognised as a British Wizard Family. Over half of those would be Magical Lords had lost their titles and magic to Druid Houses and Families by the end of the Twelfth Century when they could meet this requirement but the ones who survived became the core of the group that plotted to take control of Magical Britain off the Druids so that they could rule over everyone else like the non magical nobles did. Towards the end of the Fifteenth Century, these ones had managed to exert enough pressure on the non magical Kings of the Three Kingdoms through their noble relatives to force the Wizards Council to be replaced with the larger Wizengamot, but the Kings did what they could to increase the Druids' political power enough to prevent them taking over at that point."
"And that's where these so called Traditional Pure Bloods come in, over the next couple of hundred years they wormed their way far enough into Hogwarts to remove many of the Druidic teachings from the curriculum or corrupt them, came up with ways to get rid of many of the old families, though not permanently thank the gods, and gained control of the Wizengamot and the new Ministry of Magic…. And as a result of purposely stamping out the Druid teachings, they've convinced most of the idiots in Magical Britain to go along with their shite about the superiority of families that don't contaminate their bloodlines with anything but the Norman wizards' bloodlines. There are only a handful of covens left in Magical Britain to remember and pass on the Druidic teachings and most of Magical Britain is ignorant of its true heritage…. Which is why we're in the mess we are now."
Most of them were shaking their head by the end of Bathilda's lesson, because it wasn't just the kids who hadn't heard most of this before. (Lily and Pandora were smiling at each other because they'd caught the blushes that Harry, Hermione and Luna shared when Bathilda was talking about the tantric rituals, but Luna especially hadn't been shy about telling her mother what they were doing.)
But as interesting as that was, the issue at hand was working out how to deal with the Chamber of Secrets and Slytherin's Monster if that was what had caused four students to be petrified and one to be killed. By the time Bathilda had finished her story, Poppy had finished her examinations of the students and the body, so she was able to report that there was no sign of any fang, sting or bite marks on any of them, which ruled out the majority of creatures, especially serpent related ones.
The lack of marks seemed to reduce the options to poisoned breath, like a Nundu, or a deadly gaze like a Gorgon, but neither of them really fit with serpents anyway…. Potions were also considered but that was quickly thrown out because Poppy confirmed that there was nothing in the dead boy's blood. The fact that most of the students weren't dead also seemed to rule out the Nundu, because there were no references to them petrifying but not killing the victims… Well the same could be said for the Gorgons as the victims had appeared to be dead until they were scanned and found to be alive.
They were poring through everything they could find on Magical Creatures for over a week before anyone thought to ask the goblins what type of creature might match the clues they had for Slytherin's Monster, so they felt incredibly stupid when the immediate answer was. "A basilisk!"
Gringotts London's Head Beast Master was remarkably diplomatic when he conceded that the Wizarding world knew little about basilisks because breeding them had been banned there in the Fifteenth Century and they hadn't been sighted there since the Sixteenth Century. The Goblin Nations, however, weren't bound by the laws of the Wizarding world and the fact that there was quite a bit of money to be made from them in potion ingredients and skins (which had more magic resistance than dragonhide) meant that the people had never stopped breeding them.
He did have a laugh about how the references to basilisks in Wizarding books were a mixture of fact and fantasy, with fantasy predominating. For example the stories referred to the average basilisk being several hundred years old and over fifty feet long when there hadn't been any recorded instances of basilisks that size or age in over a thousand years. The Wizarding books also included such quaint ideas as the crowing of a rooster or the smell of a weasel being fatal to basilisks (While these being fatal to hatchlings may be conceivable, fifty odd foot long beasts that were several hundred years old? Ridiculous!) and the gaze of all basilisks being fatal, when the basilisks' gaze didn't generally become lethal until they were around a hundred and fifty years old and had grown to over twenty five feet long. Basilisk breeders were quite happy about that actually, and they tried to make sure that the ones they bred were killed and harvested when they were around twenty odd feet long and a hundred years old so they were big enough to be valuable but still relatively safe to handle. He also couldn't understand how it had never occurred to the Wizarding world to ask why the Goblin Nations had developed a potion specifically to cure petrifications (even if its preparation was sometimes delayed while they waited for some of the ingredients to become ready) or where they'd gotten all the basilisk potion ingredients and skins they sold from when there supposedly hadn't been any basilisks for nearly five hundred years, and he regarded the inability to think of such pertinent questions as a mark of the stupidity of the Wizarding world.
Aside from being laughed at by a wizened old goblin who had almost as many parts missing as Alastor Moody, it had been quite a fruitful visit as it was almost certain they knew what they were up against now, and the goblin people had proven ways to deal with them. Amelia was shocked to hear what the Monster was, but Dumbledore was suspiciously nonchalant when they told him. They challenged him about it but he denied knowing what they were talking about until Harry looked him in the eye as he calmly said. "Auntie Ami, can you get Uncle Saul here as soon as possible please? We can't afford to waste any time looking for this basilisk and this old bastard is still playing games that could get more people killed. If he won't tell us willingly, we need to get Uncle Saul to pull the answers we need out of his head."
Dumbledore was outraged about being called an old bastard to his face by Potter but he remembered the headache he hadn't been able to get rid of for days after the last time Croaker smashed down his barriers to force him to give an answer. He didn't want to have to live through that again, or be forced to give up more detail than he was ready to share at this point so he cried out. "No! Stop. Wait. I'll tell you!"
They stopped and waited for him to do so, but when he showed no indication of speaking Harry muttered "Arsehole!" viciously and started to turn back to Amelia. Dumbledore saw that if he didn't speak immediately he'd have Croaker ripping into his head again so he blurted out. "The portraits reported that night that they'd seen a very large snake heading down the corridor from the entrance to the Hufflepuff Common room!"
Harry sensed he was holding something back. "Did they report seeing anything else?"
"That is all they told me."
He was obviously lying so Harry turned to the Sorting Hat. "Myrddin, as you would have heard, the Headmaster has told us that the portraits reported seeing a very large snake heading away from the entrance of the Hufflepuff Common Room on the night of the attack in the Dungeons, but when I asked him if they reported seeing anything else that night he said that they had not. I believe that he is lying, can you ask Lady Hogwarts for me whether the portraits have reported seeing anything else in regard to this snake please?"
Myrddin nodded, saying "Most certainly My Lord." It wasn't long before he nodded again. "Apparently the snake was being accompanied by a student, a small blonde girl, My Lord."
Harry bowed to him. "I thank you for your assistance Myrddin, and please convey my thanks to Lady Hogwarts as well."
Myrddin nodded to him (as he couldn't bow), responding with. "We are your servants My Lord."
Harry's respectful demeanour disappeared as he turned on Dumbledore. "Why were you withholding that information Dumbledore?….. Oh of course! You were planning on finding the girl and using her to track the basilisk down before anyone else could so that everyone would be grateful to the great and wise Albus Fucking Dumbledore for being responsible for stopping the Monster of Hogwarts! You bastard! Who knows how many more would have died or been petrified while you were playing your games! You wouldn't have cared if this girl, who's probably been compelled to do this because most girls I know wouldn't be leading a giant ancient serpent around the castle by choice, died in the process either, would you?"
Dumbledore's frustration at being found out so easily flashed across his face. "No, I didn't think so!"
Harry turned his back on Dumbledore in disgust. "I know it isn't much to go on Auntie Ami, but hopefully this girl will be easier to track down than the Monster which apparently has only been found once in the last thousand years. I presume that the most logical place to start would be questioning the blonde girls, or perhaps all the girls, in Hufflepuff and Slytherin?"
Amelia nodded in frustration. "Yes…. If I can get enough female Aurors and patrol Officers in to do all four houses at once I will, but failing that I'll get them started on Hufflepuff and Slytherin tomorrow…. But we should have gotten started on this as soon as it was reported! If the girl was compelled to do this, and you're right, she most probably was, there probably would have been signs of it which should have been easy to pick up at the time, but they're quite likely to be gone now because that was over a week ago….."
She glared at Dumbledore. "Rest assured that I'll be making sure that everyone knows what you have done to hamper this investigation Dumbledore!"
He tried to give her a 'give it your best shot' look, but he was obviously panicking about how badly his plan had backfired. The old bastard really raised Amelia's ire a few days later when she found out that it had been his warnings to his supporters' children to hide anything that might incriminate them before the Aurors arrived that triggered the next event in this mess.
A couple of hours after the discussion in Dumbledore's office, those of the family who were at Hogwarts were called back to the corridor outside Myrtle's toilets again, because there was a new message in blood on the wall. 'HER SKELETON WILL RESIDE IN THE CHAMBER FOREVER'
They all had a sense of foreboding when they read that, but none of them were expecting the type of language that was coming from Harry when he suddenly started swearing. Lily grabbed his shoulders and shook him, shouting to get through to him. "Harry! What are you swearing about?"
He turned around and said "I'm a bloody idiot, and no one else worked it out either!" before crossing the corridor and walking into the girls' toilets. They all followed him, of course, and he waited until everyone was in the toilets and the door was closed behind them before he called out. "Myrtle?"
She started berating him as soon as she floated out of one of the cubicles. "You're not supposed to be in here! These are the girls' toilets and you're a boy!"
Harry bowed to her as he cut her off (because there wasn't much point in waiting for a ghost to draw a breath). "I realise that it is inappropriate for me to be here Myrtle, but I need to ask some very important questions and I believe that you are the only one who can answer me…. I'm so sorry, I should have introduced myself first, I am Harry Potter, and I apologise in advance if the questions I need to ask are upsetting for you but I promise you that they are very important, is that alright?"
Myrtle nodded, smiling at him now because many of the girls who came into her toilets had raved about Harry Potter.
"Thank you. The questions I need to ask are… What is your full name, and when, where and how did you die?"
Myrtle frowned, these were strange questions but it was the most attention anyone had given her in over forty five years so she was happy to go along with it to talk to the boy that all the girls had been gushing over, and he was quite handsome….
"My name is Myrtle Elizabeth Warren, I died right here in these toilets on the Thirteenth of June Nineteen Forty Three….. but I'm not exactly sure how I died. That cow Olive Hornby had been teasing me about my glasses so I ran in here and locked myself in one of the cubicles to have a good cry but then I heard scraping noises and a boy's voice, then some funny hissing sounds. I came out to tell him that he shouldn't be here because they were the girls' toilets…. like I told you Harry… but all I saw when I came out was a pair of big, yellow eyes, and I just…. died…."
"Where did you see those eyes Myrtle?"
She pointed to the sinks at the far end. "They were somewhere over there near the sinks Harry."
"Have you seen anyone else doing anything unusual over there?"
"I haven't really seen anything, but there was a blonde girl who's been in here a few times lately. I go and hide in my cubicle whenever I see her or hear scraping and hissing noises like I did the night I was killed though because I don't want to see the thing that killed me again. She came in again half an hour ago and I hid when she started hissing, I heard a lot of scraping noises after that but I didn't come out again until you called."
He nodded, saying "Thank you Myrtle, you've been a big help." before he headed to the sinks to see whether there was anything out of the ordinary about them. It didn't take long for Harry to find the snake scratched into one of the taps on the end sink, but when he twisted the tap and nothing happened, Myrtle brightly offered. "Oh that tap's never worked Harry!"
When he stopped to think about it, that made sense, because otherwise any random girl trying to wash her hands could have activated whatever was here…. There had to be some way to make this work… Of course! He concentrated on the snake scratched into the tap and said "Open" in parseltongue.
There was a scraping sound as the end sink and the wall behind it began to grind their way down into the floor. Myrtle squeaked and disappeared into her cubicle when the wall started sliding down, which pretty much confirmed that this was the same scraping sound as she'd heard previously. This was further confirmed by the seven or eight foot diameter opening that was revealed as the wall moved down.
Casting light into the opening, they could see that there was a big pipe that headed down at a steep angle, and the wall didn't seem to seal off the end of the pipe very well when it rose because there was a thin layer of rank mud and slime spread over the bottom of the pipe. Minerva frowned at the idea of trying to walk down that pipe, because that slime in the pipe looked slippery and the idea of losing her footing and ending up sliding down on her bum was far too undignified for her liking so she spoke up. "Salazar Slytherin would never have willingly done anything so undignified as to slide down a pipe like that Harry, and I seriously doubt that Tom Riddle would either. There must be some way to call for stairs or something."
Harry sighed. "I expect there is Auntie Minnie, but I have the awful feeling that that girl down there won't have the time to wait for us to trudge down what appears to be well over a thousand feet of stairs. I don't particularly like the idea of getting covered in that muck either but we need to get down there quickly, we need something like….." He broke off as he remembered something and grinned, conjuring a set of long wooden pattens with wedge shaped hardwood soles about four inches high which curved up at the front and would work as skates, he quickly made enough copies to supply everyone there and they were lacing them onto the bottom of their shoes and boots when Dumbledore stormed into the toilets.
The opening in the wall was obviously the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets, which he'd been looking for for over forty five years, and he wasn't about to let them get at Salazar Slytherin's treasures before him, so he stood in front of the entrance and puffed himself up like the peacock he was. "Stop! I cannot allow you to desecrate such an important part of Hogwarts' history before I've had a chance to secure it for future generations!"
Harry had had it with this old bastard. He must have been notified when they were about the new message on the wall and he'd almost certainly waited outside until he heard that they'd gotten the entrance open before storming in to try and snatch the glory, but this wasn't about glory. "Get out of the way Dumbledore! There's a girl down there, one of your students, and I seriously doubt that she's got enough time left for you to waste any of it!"
"No! Of course it would be unfortunate if the girl did not survive, but for the greater good I must secure what's in Slytherin's chamber before anyone else enters it!"
Harry's only response to that was to say "Very well" and cast a wandless, non-verbal banishing charm at him to throw him into the pipe opening, giving a grim smile as he said "Oops!".
Listening to Dumbledore's terrified screaming growing quieter as he slid down the pipe he smirked at Minerva. "You were certainly right about sliding down the pipe like that being undignified Auntie Minnie!"
She tried to frown at him for making a joke of what he'd done but her unladylike snort of amusement belied her disapproval. Harry gave her a totally unrepentant grin as he gathered himself up and leapt into the pipe, crouching down with one foot forward and leaning forward as he headed down the pipe to give himself more stability and control. Luckily they all had ice skating experience, so they were comfortable with the idea of skating down the pipe, and settled into a similar stance to Harry's as they got going.
Harry used his animagus ability to enhance his senses as he headed down into the darkness, so he caught Dumbledore's sudden shriek and the solid 'thud' and then silence that closely followed it, so he was either unconscious or dead, either worked for Harry. He sensed what had made the old fool shriek just before he reached it, as the pipe suddenly levelled off. Given how soon after that the 'thud' had been, he started madly casting cushioning charms as soon as he hit the bend in the pipe and turned out to avoid Dumbledore and stop when the pipe entered a bigger tunnel, between the two he stopped against the wall of the tunnel without hurting himself.
He quickly summoned Dumbledore out of the way of the pipe opening and strengthened the cushioning charms because he could tell the girls were almost there. They knew what to expect as he told them over their links and he heard them calling back to do a skate stop right after the pipe levelled off, which was repeated by the ones behind them. It worked for the girls, as they stopped without hitting the wall and he summoned them out of the way. It worked for Lily, Pandora, Sirius and Amelia too but Minerva, Pomona, Filius, Alastor and Augusta didn't stop as well as they hadn't had much practice in recent decades, luckily all that was hurt was their pride.
They were tempted to leave Dumbledore as he was, but grudgingly agreed that they'd probably feel guilty if the basilisk or something else got him or he drowned while he was incapacitated so they revived him and fixed the few broken bones he got from hitting the wall. He was still insisting that he must go first so Harry gave him an evil smile and said "After you!" as he waved down the tunnel in the direction the basilisk had obviously come from, because mud and bones were piled up along the sides of the tunnel, while the floor in the other direction looked as though it hadn't been disturbed in centuries, probably because it hadn't.
Dumbledore started to dither when he was reminded about the basilisk and Harry's amusement disappeared in a flash. "There's a girl down here who's time is almost certainly running out. Either get going now or get out of our way and stay here! The only way you're coming with us is if you're in front of us where we can see you because there's no way I'm giving you a chance to curse us in the back!"
The old bastard's dreams of getting his hands on Slytherin's treasure made him give in and start off down the tunnel in front of them, constantly bitching about the fact that he was ankle deep in mud and slush and god knows what because water had been seeping into the tunnels for the last forty five years at least so there were four or five inches of foul smelling watery mud covering the floor. He'd been going on like that for a while before it occurred to him to wonder why the rest of them didn't seem to be bothered by it and he looked back to see that they were still wearing the pattens Harry had conjured for them to use to come down the pipe so their shoes were mostly high and dry. When he stopped to complain about that Harry fixed him with a look that loosened his bowels as he said. "Keep moving or we'll stun you and leave you here!"
Soon after that they saw something up ahead of them, but the life form detection charms they kept casting didn't show any sign of life from it. Dumbledore was almost the last one to see it and Harry shook his head in disgust when he did, because he shrieked. If that had been the basilisk, he might have gotten the lot of them killed. It was actually a cast off basilisk skin that was about twenty five or so feet long, which according to what Gringotts' Beast Master had told them should mean that it had been between a hundred and fifty and two hundred years old at the time, which would probably place the time of shedding as just before Salazar Slytherin died and sealed the basilisk into the Chamber of Secrets. They cast life form detection charms up the tunnel it was sitting in the mouth of but found no sign of life up there, just like the other side tunnels they'd passed.
The main tunnel finished in a chamber soon after that, with massive silver doors which were secured by silver snake locking bars. They all kicked off their pattens as Harry said "Open" again in Parseltongue, and no-one disagreed with Hermione's comment that the snakes were disturbingly lifelike as they slithered out of the way to allow the doors to open. As they ground open, it was revealed that the doors were over a foot thick and Filius went to examine them more closely. He made it look as though he was trying to determine what the enchantments on them were but he caught Harry's eye and mouthed "They're made from solid Myddril!" to him in Goblin when Dumbledore was looking the other way. Harry just nodded, trying to cover up his reaction, but he was shocked because that much Myddril would be worth an absolute fortune, more than the entire fortunes of any but the very richest families in Magical Britain!
They cast more life form detection charms into the Chamber as the doors were opening, but the only reading they were getting was from the far end of the chamber, in front of the thirty foot high bust of Salazar Slytherin that went from the floor to the ceiling. That made them feel a little more secure, but the fact that wards over the chamber entrance prevented anyone but the one who spoke the password to open the chamber from entering certainly didn't. The looks Hermione, Luna and Lily were giving him as the chamber doors closed just confirmed what Hermione and Luna were telling him over their links, that if he got himself killed in there they'd be making his afterlife Hell!
AN: I always thought that all the absolutes in the basilisk descriptions were ridiculous, and the idea that there was a market for basilisk parts when they supposedly hadn't existed for at least 500 years even more so. Then there was the petrification angle, as demi-gods, the Gorgons turning people to stone as punishment is one thing, but there's no sense in a beast, or even a dark creature, turning its prey to stone, because that's just a recipe for starvation, how are they supposed to get nourishment from stones, and what would trying to swallow large pointy stone objects do to their insides? IMHO the conventional usage of 'petrified' makes much more sense, as it's logical to be done by meeting its gaze and immobilises their prey and allows them to swallow them easily. FWIW