They had to split up. Since the twins had the map, Harry sent the two of them, plus Hermione and Neville, to the third floor to watch, and only watch, the door. None of them were happy at the decision, but even Fred could see the logic in the decision.
"Just don't go near Fluffy!" Harry shouted after her friends as they split up. She gave a half-hearted smile when Fred - or maybe it was George - flipped her off.
"Come on," she said to Cedric, already running towards the staircase that would take them to the fourth floor where, according to the twins, was the entrance to Dumbledore's study. Like with Oliver, she wanted Cedric nearby, just in case something went wrong, or maybe as a good-luck token. At the moment, she wasn't sure which.
When they finally got there, both of them were slightly out of breath. Harry let out a string of curses learned from the Chasers when she realized that she didn't know the password. Cedric was equally in the dark as to what the password could be.
"Just let us in, will you!" Harry screeched at the stone gargoyle. "It's an emergency!" It didn't budge, and Harry rattled off another string of curses, ending with, " - burn a hole through your head with an acid pop!" The gargoyle slid soundlessly aside, leaving both Harry and Cedric to gape at it.
Harry recovered first. "Well, hurry up," she said, stepping forward and onto the rotating staircase. "We don't have all night."
The door at the top of the spiraling staircase was much less of an obstruction - in fact, it was already partially open. Harry exchanged a glance full of trepidation with Cedric before pushing the door open the rest of the way and stepping inside.
Dumbledore's office was amazing. If she hadn't been in such a hurry, Harry would have loved a chance to investigate and inspect every single one of the Headmaster's many silver trinkets and shelf after shelf of books. As it was, she barely spared a glance for her surroundings - her brain only just registering that there was a baby phoenix no bigger than an orange croaking in an outraged tone in a pile of ashes under a crooked golden stand - on her way to the Headmaster, who was slumped over his desk, a puddle of overturned ink dripping off the side and onto the stone floor.
"Is he…?" Cedric trailed off before taking a breath and finishing the question, "Dead?"
Harry squinted at the Headmaster's beard and moustache. It took a few seconds, but then, the hairs closest to his mouth moved. "He's breathing," she said, relief flooding through her. For a moment, she'd feared that the powerful wizard was dead.
"Like Wood, then," Cedric said grimly. "But he can't have been like that for very long. It must have just happened."
Harry looked over at the third-year in surprise. "Why do think so?"
He nodded towards the phoenix. "I'd bet anything that his phoenix tried to protect him, and got incinerated for its troubles." The phoenix gave a shrill warble, as if agreeing with Cedric's statement.
"You're probably right," Harry agreed, stepping carefully around the growing puddle of ink on the floor to get closer to Dumbledore's prone body. "The ink hasn't even started to dry yet." She and Alex had learned fairly quickly how long it took ink to dry; they'd used it once to draw on Remus' face during one of his post-full-moon naps. Oddly enough, colored ink took longer to dry than plain black, although she supposed there were spells that would speed up the process.
"You ready?" Cedric asked, also coming around the desk.
"There's nowhere to sit," Harry said, her nerves - momentarily driven from her mind by the many apparatus in Dumbledore's office - coming back full force. She had no idea what she would find in his head, or if she would even be able to get in at all.
"Here." He conjured a plain wooden chair with ease, once again sparking a small amount of jealousy in her. She wished she could conjure something - anything - with that ease. She would study ahead over the summer, maybe see if she could find a way past her father's supervisory charms; the Potter wards would prevent the Ministry from tracking her usage.
"Thanks," she said as she sat, and then, forcing her hand to be steady, she pointed her wand at the Headmaster, her left hand moving, as if she was only an observer in her body, to grasp Dumbledore's lax hand where it was laying near the edge of the desk.
The feeling of his skin against hers - papery and soft and the bones easily felt beneath her fingers - sharpened her resolve a little, and the incantation came out with more confidence than she actually felt. "Legilimens."
Dumbledore's mind was thousands of times more complex than Oliver's, yet at the same time, exactly the same. The most noticeable difference was that Dumbledore still had remnants of thoughts in his foremost layers of psyche, and the further in she went, the more difficult it was to keep moving forward. His thoughts were very distracting, blending together so that there were none of the blank gaps she preferred to navigate to be found. As she struggled to move beyond a very boring memory of paperwork - was that what being Headmaster meant? - she realized that Albus Dumbledore was not known as the greatest wizard alive for nothing.
Not two seconds after that thought flashed through her mind, something akin to a black hole opened in the middle of the memory of paperwork, and she was sucked down it, screaming and flinging her mental arms out for something to latch onto to prevent her body from being left an empty husk. It was pointless; the darkness did not let her go, and though she stopped screaming - wasn't much point in here - her breathing was erratic and adrenaline pounded through her body.
"LET ME OUT!" she yelled in anger and fear.
"Only you can do that, Mr. Potter," a gentle voice said. Even though she'd only ever heard it from half a room away, Harry knew right away who it was.
"Prof - Professor Dumbledore?" She looked around wildly, but could only see darkness. "Where are you?"
"Oh. Pardon my rudeness." He sounded surprised, almost, at the question, but not two seconds later a faint outline of warm light appeared to her right, making a tall glowing rectangle. A door.
She pushed tentatively forward, and then with more conviction as she felt what seemed to be smooth wood under her fingertips. She stepped out into a large, plain stone hall, with a high arched ceiling and many tall stained-glass windows. It looked almost like a cheaper imitation of the Great Hall, only with no charms on the ceiling to reflect the weather outside and no tables of any kind, or even any doors.
The only things in the room - besides herself - was a plain stone pillar in the very center of the hall, upon which rested a small bronze model of a building, and, standing next to it, almost expectantly, was Professor Dumbledore.
"Ah, there you are," the old wizard said with a benevolent smile. "I was wondering where you'd gotten to."
Confused, Harry looked back - to her surprise, the door was gone, leaving only bare stone wall. "What - how did you do that?" she asked.
"The mind is a tricky thing, Mr. Potter. It is best never to get too comfortable in a mindscape."
"So you know what's happening?" A great sense of relief flooded through her. Dumbledore would know what to do; after all, how could he not? She'd heard stories of his greatness from Remus as a child, and had read even more after Remus had been forced to leave.
Dumbledore chuckled. "Not at all. Do you?"
Harry quickly told Dumbledore what she and her friends had discovered over the past months, finishing with, "We're sure that someone is going to try and steal the Stone, and that they're going to do it tonight!"
"Ah." Dumbledore frowned pensively in thought and started to pace. Harry's attention was torn between watching him, and inspecting the small bronze statue, which she'd discovered was a modest-looking one-storey house complete with a garden with a little girl on a swing and two goats grazing near a birdbath. After a few minutes, Dumbledore stopped in his tracks. "Yes," he murmured, "It's the only way."
"What is?"
He turned towards her. "I take it you have some experience in Legilimency, Mr. Potter?" Harry nodded. "And as such, I would hope that you have heard of Occlumency?" Once again, she nodded, sensing that he didn't wish for any more than a mute reply. "Then you should understand most, if not all, of what I am about to say." He didn't so much as take a breath before launching into an explanation. "When first learning Occlumency, a teacher will assist their student in finding the core of their mind, and will then bring them out of their mindscape once they have gained some sense of why their mind is shaped the way it is. Are you with me still?" Harry nodded. "Excellent. The technique for drawing a person out of their own mind is simple in theory, but taxing in practice. It requires the teacher to manipulate the mind of the student in such a way that both of them can see the route out."
"But," Harry interrupted, "the door I came through is gone!"
Dumbledore gave another small chuckle. "Not at all. I merely cloaked it to make it seem as if it were. And that is not the entrance, in any case. Anyone who takes it upon themselves to visit me will be - for lack of a better word - directed to that broom cupboard, to be let out at my leisure."
"So it's a trap?"
"A precaution," he corrected hastily. "But no, that cupboard is not your exit. You make your own." Harry frowned, remembering back to how she'd left Cedric and Oliver's minds.
"Before," she said slowly, "when I was practicing, I just closed my eyes and pictured myself out."
"Crude, but in essence the same. If I were not so firmly banished to the depths of my own mind, you would be able to do the same here and I would be dragged along with you whether you wanted me to come or not." He paused. "Can you see the exit?"
Harry looked around the room, not really knowing what she was looking for. She didn't dare close her eyes - she didn't want to find herself back in Dumbledore's office and have to fight back through the many layers of the Headmaster's mind again. "I can't -," she began, but Dumbledore cut her off.
"Don't try so hard. It will come to you."
He sounded infuriatingly calm, but she did as he said, taking a few deep breaths and letting them out slowly. Feeling slightly less frantic than before, Harry looked around the room again. The walls were as impregnable as ever, and the stained glass as pristine as before, but near the far right corner behind Dumbledore, there was a small black hole opening in the floor.
"I found it," she whispered, hardly daring to take her eyes off the hole as its growth slowed, and then stopped.
"Excellent work, Mr. Potter. Now, you need to concentrate on the exit, and shape it with your mind. Make it look however you wish, but keep in mind that you must be able to focus on it and picture it clearly." Harry's thoughts went first to the grand marble staircase leading from the first storey to the rest of Hogwarts castle, but then a grinning Fred and George popped into her head, and she knew exactly what to do.
"Okay," she said, mind fixed firmly on the exit. "I'm ready."
"Are you sure?" Professor Dumbledore asked. "I do not mean to doubt you, but if this should not be perfect, then I, and most likely you as well, will not recover from this meditative state." Harry's nerves bunched up and her stomach felt like it was full of fighting doxies, but she nodded.
"I'm sure."
"Then take my hand, and lead me through." Harry nearly lost her mental picture of their route, but managed to shore up the imaging before it was completely lost. She reached out, Dumbledore finding her hand because she didn't dare look away from the hole. Shoving the feeling of skin-on-skin out of her thoughts, she led the headmaster to the hole. Like the secret passage that Fred and George had shown her before their detention in the Forbidden Forest, all that she could see was a dark tube leading down; this one, however, would spit herself's and Dumbledore's psyche's back into real life. In her mind, it led directly through the many layers of Dumbledore's mind. Without further contemplation, the path firmly fixed in her mind, she stepped forward, taking Dumbledore with her.
There was no sound in the tunnel; just silence and darkness broken only by the occasional flash of memory from outside the imagined chute. Somewhere behind and to her left, she felt more than heard Dumbledore as he slid along with her.
The way out only took a minute at most, as opposed to however long it had taken her to get into the center of Dumbledore's mind - five minutes? Ten? In any case, the journey was over before the sensation of sliding along a mostly-invisible tube became normal. She burst from the tube into brightness, and then blinked.
She was still holding Dumbledore's hand, but now they were both sitting behind his desk, Harry in a hard wooden chair and Dumbledore in his impressively-carved wing-backed one.
"Back already?" Cedric asked from one of the two cushioned chairs on the other side of the desk.
"How long?" Harry asked, pleased that, apparently, she hadn't been under for very long.
"Half an hour," he replied.
Dumbledore's hand tightened around hers as he began to wake. She quickly withdrew her hand from his and, after standing, went to join Cedric on the other side of the desk.
"Do you know how to Vanish things?" Harry asked in a whisper as Dumbledore began to straighten up, accidentally dragging his pale blue sleeve through the puddle of black ink on the desk.
Cedric shook his head. "Too dangerous to practice on my own," he whispered back. "Might Vanish something important on accident." Harry smirked, but the smile fell from her face quickly when Dumbledore sat up straight, his eyes wide open and face grave.
"Thank you, Mssrs. Potter and Diggory, for your assistance. Fifty points for each of you, I think."
Cedric made a strangled sound in his throat before recovering enough to say, "Thank you, Headmaster Dumbledore."
Harry merely nodded and muttered a small, "Sure. Any time," that Cedric didn't hear but somehow Dumbledore did. The headmaster gave her a small, amused smile that only lasted for a few seconds before it was swallowed by the gravity of the situation.
"Come with me," he said, standing and spelling the ink off his robes in the same motion. He paused before the phoenix's stand and checked on the bird before continuing on. "Are any of the other teachers awake?" he asked as he led them down the spiral staircase, the door closing softly behind Cedric.
"We don't think so," Harry answered, struggling to keep up with the two males, both of whom had longer legs than her and who were walking at a much faster pace. "We didn't see anyone awake on the map except for a few students in the library and Percy."
"Weasley? The Prefect?"
"Yeah," Harry confirmed. She made a face behind his back. "The Prefect."
"How fortuitous," Professor Dumbledore commented blithely, sending off a streak of silver light through the ceiling. Harry had seen her father do something similar a few times, and knew what it was, but Cedric didn't.
"Patronus," she whispered to him as Dumbledore lead them down a secret passage that put out in the dungeons.
Soon, they were stopping at a stretch of blank wall next to a niche with a large grandfather clock handsomely carved with twining serpents.
"Wait here," Professor Dumbledore instructed. "I do not believe Severus would ever forgive me for letting students into his private rooms." He tapped his wand against the blank stone wall, muttered a phrase in what sounded like Latin, and stepped through the doorway that appeared. The stones melded back together as soon as the hem of his robes passed through.
Harry and Cedric waited silently for nearly five minutes, Harry gripping her wand a little tighter than she normally would have as the general creepy gloom of the dungeons started to get to her. She managed not to jump or shriek when the stone once again melted away to allow Dumbledore and a very irritated Snape through, but couldn't disguise her flinch.
Snape curled his lip at her, but didn't say anything as he swept after Professor Dumbledore. Harry and Cedric joined the procession, Harry doing her best to eavesdrop on what Dumbledore and Snape were saying.
"…months!" Snape finished in a poisonous hiss. "Not to mention the sheer luck that your brains weren't reduced to mush!"
"Be that as it may, we have more pressing concerns. Mr. Potter has indicated that he and Miss Granger were able to start reverse-brewing an antidote. If you would take a look at it, I am sure the process would be sped up exponentially."
"What did you say was in the draught?"
"Autumn Misery, Everbright's Stomach Soother, Sense Repressing Draught, Jobberknoll feathers, and Lethe water," Harry answered Snape's question before remembering that she shouldn't have been listening in the first place.
"Precisely, Mr. Potter," Professor Dumbledore said, cutting off what likely would have been a scathing remark from Snape. "And how far have you gotten?"
"Er. Well, not very far," she admitted. "Hermione would know better how much further we've got. I mainly just help with the brewing and let her try and work out what we've done wrong." Snape smirked but held his tongue.
When they arrived at the third-floor corridor, Harry automatically looked around for her friends.
"Hermione? Neville?" she called out, squinting around the dark corridor. Ahead of her, Professor Dumbledore lit the tip of his wand, throwing light across the floor and onto five oddly-shaped statues that had fallen from storage, five oddly-shaped statues that were - "Hermione!" Harry gasped as the light fell on her friend's unmistakable hair. She made to rush past the two teachers, but Snape caught her arm in an iron grip.
"Don't be stupid, Potter," he snarled, pulling his wand out and holding it at the ready.
"But they could be hurt!" she protested, although she didn't try and free herself from his grip. He did have a point - it would be incredibly stupid to rush in without assessing the situation. She watched along with Cedric and Snape as Professor Dumbledore approached the five bodies and crouched down.
She held her breath until he stood up. "The three Mssr's Weasley, Mr. Longbottom, and Miss Granger are quite well," he announced. "They are merely under a very advanced sleeping curse, which I am sure Professor Snape has a cure for in his stocks."
"Which curse is it?" Snape asked, finally letting go of her arm.
"Odin's," was Professor Dumbledore's concise answer.
"I only have two of the appropriate reviver."
"Send a message to St. Mungo's, or perhaps Horace will have a few." Snape gave a scoff of disbelief. "In the meantime," Professor Dumbledore continued, unbothered by Snape's interruption, "administer the reviving draught to Miss Granger and..." he trailed off, peering at Harry.
"Fred," she supplied. "But only if you swear not to take his, er, accoutrements of the trade," she finished. Snape scowled but at Professor Dumbledore's prompting nodded his agreement.
"Splendid," Professor Dumbledore announced. "Very well then. Severus, good luck. Mr. Potter, Mr. Diggory, with me."
"Headmaster!" Snape burst out, partway to the door. "You can't be serious! They're school children!"
"School children with enough sense to know when something is quite blatantly wrong," Professor Dumbledore corrected, a cold tone in his voice, almost reprimanding. Snape looked taken aback, but nodded reluctantly. "If anyone deserves to see this through, it is them, and I have a feeling that I will be glad of their assistance by the end." Snape still looked like he wanted to argue, but Dumbledore didn't let him. "When you finish the antidote to wake the rest of the castle, give the first draughts to Poppy, Minerva, Filius, and Pomona. Have Minerva contact the Ministry." Snape nodded and swept around the corner, robes snapping dramatically behind him.
"Do exactly as I say," Professor Dumbledore said sternly to Harry and Cedric. "Mr. Potter, do you know a Shield Charm?"
"I've read about them, but I've never tried one before," she said.
"Very well. Mr. Diggory, can you perform a Shield Charm?"
Cedric nodded. "Just the basic Protego."
"Sufficient, I think. I will do my best to make sure the two of you remain unharmed, but do be ready with your wands, just in case. Now, along we go." He turned and led the way to the door at the end of the hall. It wasn't locked, and when they went in, they were greeted with the sound of a small harp playing a soothing song, and the sonorous snores of the Cerberus.
"I see that we are not the first to come this way tonight," Professor Dumbledore commented lightly. He waved his wand at the harp. "So that it does not stop playing at an inopportune time," he explained at Harry's curious glance. "Now then, do either of you wish to turn back?"
"No!" Harry nearly shouted, and Cedric replied with a much more subdued, "No, sir."
"I did not expect you to. I will go first; the landing is quite soft." With a flick of his wand, the Cerberus's enormous paw was shifted aside off the trapdoor, and the wooden cover swung open, landing on the floor with a gentle clink of metal. "Jump when I call," Professor Dumbledore said, and without further ado, stepped calmly into the gaping hole in the floor, very similar to the one that Harry had, less than half an hour ago, led him through in his own mind.
"Me or you first?" Harry asked Cedric as they waited. She peered over the edge. Somewhere far below, a small pinprick of light marked where Dumbledore was.
Cedric paused before answering. "You. Just in case the dog wakes up." Harry rolled her eyes but didn't comment.
"Jump when you are ready!" Dumbledore's faint shout surfaced from below.
"See you, then," Harry said, and tucking her wand into her robes pocket, jumped into the hole. As she fell, she restrained the urge to scream from the sheer thrill of being able to fall like this, knowing that someone was there at the end to make sure she didn't die. With a massive whump, she landed. "All clear!" she yelled up to Cedric, already moving off the soft landing zone. She had to struggle, as her feet kept on getting mired down in whatever it was, but she made it to Dumbledore's side before Cedric landed.
"Devil's Snare!" Cedric exclaimed not three seconds later.
"Very astute, Mr. Diggory," Professor Dumbledore praised, sending bright yellow flames at what Harry now knew to be Devil's Snare. "Professor Sprout has always praised your keen intellect, and I can see why." Cedric joined Harry and Professor Dumbledore, and she could see in the light provided by Dumbledore's wand and the conjured flames that Cedric's ears were much pinker than normal. "On we march! The next room is much more fun, not to worry."
And it was. Harry hadn't known what she had expected, but flying keys certainly were not it. "Why can't you just unlock the door with a charm?" Harry asked as she and Cedric approached the three brooms hovering helpfully in the middle of the large chamber.
"Doubtlessly I could," Professor Dumbledore said cheerfully, stowing his wand and joining them at the brooms, "But Professor Flitwick is quite knowledgeable on all manner of wards, and I daresay breaking them would take longer than finding a key, especially with two such excellent Seekers in company. And I do not particularly care to spend the rest of my days with my skin inside out if I should fail to break them correctly."
Harry gulped and glanced nervously at the door. "Right," she said, a little shakily. "So what's the key look like?" She stared up at the mass of flying keys above them. They all looked the same from here.
"Big, silver, and a bit old-fashioned," Cedric said slowly, also looking at the door.
"And quite probably a bit well worn, if it has indeed been caught once already," Dumbledore added. "Filius is quite the trickster when it comes to it. The last time I was down here the correct key had orange wings - now I can't spot a single key with orange!"
Harry had been listening to Dumbledore's little speech at the same time as she searched through the cloud of keys above her. "There!" she exclaimed, pointing up and following a single key with blue wings the best she could. "It's just like you described, Cedric, with blue wings, and its left one is a little bent!"
"I see it too!"
Harry was on the broom and shooting towards the ceiling within seconds, Cedric hard on her heels. "I'll just stay down here, shall I?" Dumbledore called after them, but even in her concentration, Harry could hear the amusement in his voice.
Chasing the key was almost better than chasing a Snitch. For one thing, it was a lot more difficult. There were so many keys around them that it was more like finding a needling in a hay stack than anything else, and many of the other keys were also silver with blue wings. After a minute of pointless flying, Harry pulled up short.
"Let's try and pin it to the wall," she said to Cedric, who nodded his agreement, eyes still tracking the key. "I'll go right and down, you go left and above. Herd it towards the corner closest to the door we need. Go!" They dodged and dove, twirled and made turns so tight that even Oliver couldn't have found anything wrong with them. Twice Harry nearly had the key, and Cedric go so close on one attempt that he managed to pull a feather from its wing. Finally, though, after ten minutes of exhilarating flying, Harry trapped the key between her palm and the wall.
"That was brilliant!" she exclaimed as she and Cedric landed, handing the key to Dumbledore, who thanked her and unlocked the door. "I wish Oliver could do something like that for practice!"
"As long as it's not with Bludgers," Cedric muttered.
"That's more Flint's style," Harry joked. "But if we're lucky the Bludgers will take out the entire team and we won't have to worry about playing them."
"I'm sure Mr. Wood would be glad to discuss Quidditch with the both of you at a later time," Dumbledore interrupted. "But for now, we have another type of game to play. Through the door, if you don't mind."
Harry and Cedric obliged, and, leaving the brooms behind, joined Dumbledore in the next chamber. Unlike the one they'd just been in, this chamber's ceiling was so low that the tip of Dumbledore's hat was less than a foot from the ceiling. The low ceiling made sense when she saw what awaited them.
"Is this a chess board?" Cedric asked as Harry stared in awe at the king's piece that had only a few inches to spare between its black crown and the stone ceiling.
"Correct once again, Mr. Diggory. We must play our way across. I will be a knight, Mr. Potter shall take the place of the king-side castle, and Mr. Diggory, you will take the Queen-side bishop." The pieces in question slid their way off the checked marble that made up the board. Harry took her spot nervously, and watched as the game unfolded.
Dumbledore was even better at chess than Lee. While his moves sometimes didn't make sense to Harry, and once she herself was nearly taken by the remaining white castle, the other side was slowly dwindling. At long last, though, Dumbledore paused, a frown on his face.
"Do you see it, Mr. Diggory?" he called out. During the course of the game, he had asked for their opinions several times, and the two wizards had quickly learned that Harry was horrible at the game.
Cedric nodded. "Yes, Professor…but isn't there another way?" His voice was subdued enough that Harry scrutinized the board, trying to figure out if they were going to lose.
"Excellent. And you understand why?"
"Sacrifices must be made in chess."
"Wait - what?!"
"Not to worry, Mr. Potter," Dumbledore assured her. "I will merely be knocked out for half an hour or so, and will likely have a sizable headache for the next day. And when you get past the next room, the smallest bottle is your friend."
With that, he made his move. In quick succession, the white queen raised a pale marble arm and brought it down on his head. Harry stared wide-eyed at the headmaster's crumpled figure where it had fallen near the middle of the board, and couldn't bring herself to move until Cedric had check-mated the white king. Then, she ran over to Dumbledore.
"He'll be all right," Cedric said, kneeling next to her. "Up and about in no time." His voice didn't sound like he believed what he was saying.
"He wouldn't have had to do that if we hadn't been here," Harry said quietly as they passed through the now deactivated chess pieces to the other door.
"Maybe or maybe not," Cedric replied, just as quietly. They paused before the doors. "He most likely would have used our pieces differently. No two chess games are the same."
Harry nodded slowly, and then pushed open the door. She and Cedric both gagged at the stench that hit their noses. "Eurgh," she said, voice muffled through her robes, which she had pulled up to cover her nose. The two of them skirted around the massive mountain troll that was dead in a pool of its own pale-pink blood. From the green tinge on what little of Cedric's face she could see, he agreed.
It was with visible relief that Harry pushed open the next door and stepped through. As soon as Cedric was completely in the room, fire sprang up in both of the doorways: purple behind them and black ahead. On a nondescript table in the middle of the room were seven oddly-shaped bottles, lined up in a single row, with a scroll of parchment laying before them.
Harry didn't even bother with the parchment, and simply picked the smallest bottle out of the lineup.
"You sure?" Cedric asked, hand sneaking towards the parchment.
"It's Dumbledore," Harry said as explanation, taking the top off the bottle. "He's been through here before; I expect he would know. Plus, there's already about half the bottle missing."
Cedric forgot about the parchment. "Is there enough for both of us?"
"I'm pretty small," she said with a shrug. "And you're not fully grown yet. So I reckon there's enough here for the two of us." She eyed the fire carefully. "I'll try not to drink too much. I won't have any decent competition for Quidditch if you burn up."
Cedric gave a smile that was more grimace than grin. "Right. After you, then."
Harry took a small sip of the potion, and, shuddering, handed the bottle to Cedric. "It's like ice," she said, stepping towards the black flames. Just before she passed through, she looked back. Cedric raised the bottle towards her and drank the rest in a single gulp. Then the flames swallowed him from view, and she was on the other side.