lxxxviii. the heir of slytherin
From one step to the next, the cold rippled over Harriet like the first wind of winter, cutting through her robes and sweater, clinging and biting, and then—.
Nothing. Harriet gasped and gawked at a blank stone wall.
"No," she whispered, touching the wall, her fingertips scrabbling at the sharp grooves between the blocks. "No, no, no—Elara! Longbottom? Open! Open!"
The wall didn't budge.
Of course not, Harriet told herself in a stern, logical voice that sounded quite like Hermione. The Mirrors only go one way—and it's not as if I have a lot of experience with them. Merlin help me.
Gulping, she slowly—slowly—turned herself around.
The first thing Harriet noted were the books; it was impossible to not pause and take it all in, the towering cases, the gilded light falling through the mullioned windows, and the hundreds upon hundreds of volumes crowding the wood shelves. She appeared to be in an average Hogwarts corridor, except for those shelves and those books. She'd never seen anything like those out in Hogwarts' thoroughfares. Harriet took a few tentative steps forward, inspecting the corridor, peeking from one end to the other, seeing where the corners turned out of sight. The shelves crowded every available space but for where the windows were set and the occasional blank spot on the wall holding plaques of Ravenclaw's bronze eagle. There were no torches, only odd spheres of orange light suspended overhead—almost like the ones had seen in the Underneath.
Harriet peered out one of the windows, hoping for a clue as to her whereabouts, but the view was distorted, blurred and smudged, shapes in the distance oddly formed or just incomprehensible. The light coming through the fuzzy glass flickered and pooled like…candlelight. She shook her head and stepped away.
"Okay," Harriet whispered, urging Livi out from under her robes. "Can you help me find the exit? We need to get out of here!"
"Ssss…." The serpent curled and wended his way around Harriet's shoulders, lifting his head in the air. His violet tongue flitted several times and Harriet waited for his verdict, listening to the unsettling silence pervading the otherwise charming passage. "The air here isss…flat."
She agreed; every breath went down like a stale biscuit, and while Harriet didn't spot a single mote of dust on any surface and magic seemed to vibrate under her feet, a kind of static pall had come over her, prickling against her skin and her awareness. The air didn't move. The small click-clack of her footsteps didn't echo. Harriet snapped her fingers and the louder sound hung by her, fading far too soon.
Her shadow darkened and pooled as Set made his presence known, stretching toward the left turn in the passage.
"Is that where the exit is?" she asked, her trust in the shadowy creature a touch more dubious after the incident with the Underneath. He'd gotten her out and shown her Salazar Slytherin's book, but Harriet couldn't quite bring herself to forgive him for that split second of sheer and utter terror when she'd felt hands grab her ankles and yank her down into the dark.
An arm formed, and the hand with its too-long fingers pointed toward the left.
"…okay."
Harriet pulled her wand out from its brace and held it at the ready as she walked. She realized her bag hadn't made it through the Moon Mirror with her, most likely dropped when Longbottom pushed her and she lost her balance. She cursed the Prat Who Lived and prayed she didn't need Salazar's book at any point. She'd hex Longbottom bloody when she got out of there, damn the consequence.
What if I can't get out?
Harriet shook her head and refused the insidious thought purchase. No, there has to be an exit. It's a library, not a prison.
The corridor turned into another, and another. Harriet came across a flight of stone steps headed upward and took them at Set's prompting. She saw more books than she'd ever seen in her life—more than could have possibly been written in Ravenclaw's time a thousand years ago. Where did they all come from? Despite her rush, Harriet paused and eased one volume out of place, inspecting the pristine cover and odd binding. Foreign characters written with a quill filled the inside—maybe Mandarin, or Japanese, Harriet wasn't sure. The book next to it was in French, or what looked like French.
Harriet kept moving. The corridors looked similar enough to one another for her to think she'd started going in circles, so she took to checking books more and more, trying to make sense of their organization or find a clue about how to get out of there. How could this place be in Hogwarts? It was as big as the castle itself!
The layout shifted, an arch appearing between two towering shelves, and Harriet didn't pause to look at Set; she dashed through the new opening and inspected the room beyond. She stopped when she almost collided with the back of a brocaded chair, her free hand coming to rest on its scrolled edge as she looked around. More shelves resided here, as did several empty carrels and tables with the chairs kept tidy, tucked in and straightened. Harriet glanced at the domed ceiling and her breath caught, the spangled sky and its shifting constellations reflected in hues of blue and purple and bronze, tiny scrolls unwinding to show the names of various figures. An armillary sphere, a smaller version of the one in the Astronomy Tower, sat in the middle of the room, the stones of the floor radiating outward from its mount, the rings moving in slow, lazy circles.
Harriet spotted a hearth and ran to it, searching the carved mantle for a dish of forgotten Floo powder. Maybe, just maybe, she could escape that way.
A voice surprised her, and Harriet jerked back with an alarmed squeak. She'd neglected to notice the portrait hanging above the fireplace, and the woman and man inside of it looked at her.
The woman—dark-haired and arrayed in a navy blue gown, a tiara sparkling at her brow—spoke again, her language almost familiar but not quite. When Harriet failed to respond, the wizard—bearded and wearing drab robes, his gimlet eyes stern and inquisitive—barked something else. His piercing gaze landed on Livi. "Be you a Speaker then, maid?"
Gawking, Harriet nodded. "Yes, I'm—I'm a Parselmouth."
"You array yourself in the colors of mine House."
"I'm in Slytherin. Are you—?" She glanced between the pair, and for a moment almost forgot she might be in mortal peril. "Are you the Founders?"
The witch—Rowena Ravenclaw, it had to be!—spoke again, her words fast and urgent, her fair hands pressed tight together. Slytherin held his own hand up, stalling her words. "It is not safe here," he told Harriet. "Mine guardian has been released upon these halls, despoiled and wretched! Thou cannot linger, child!"
"I can't find the way out!" Harriet replied, panic creeping in. Oh, God—Merlin! He means the Basilisk. The Basilisk is here! Harriet had guessed as much, but having it confirmed only worsened her worry. "How do I get out?!"
"Dost thou know of the glass of silver?"
"The wh—? Yes, yes I know about the Moon Mirrors. I can't find one!"
Ravenclaw told Slytherin something, words tumbling in a rush, and then she looked at Harriet. She lifted her hand and pressed it to the fancy tiara on her head.
"Touch not the diadem," Slytherin ordered. "For it has been despoiled by craeft most malicious. Keep thine eyes averted, maid, and make for the higher solar! Rowena's own glass hangs therein. Go! Be off, now!"
He yelled and threw an arm toward an arch at the opposing end of the lounge, and though Harriet did as she was told and ran for it, she couldn't stop herself from looking back. Slytherin shouted, "Go!"
Harriet entered another corridor, wand out still, one hand on Livi to keep him steady. "If we see the Basilisk, whatever you do, Livi, don't look into its eyes!"
"I will bitesss—!"
"No, Livi! Don't look it in the eyes!"
Another corridor, another flight of stairs—another thousand books, all sitting silent upon their shelves, golden light in those strange windows illuminating their abandoned titles. Harriet searched for a door, an archway, anything that might lead to what Slytherin referred to as the "higher solar." What had the portrait meant by that? Why couldn't anyone put up any bloody signs?!
Harriet sprinted around a final turn in the corridor she journeyed through and came to a sudden, terrified stop. Her eyes closed—but no, no movement disturbed the eerie, pressing silence, nothing aside from her own breathing and thumping heart, sweat gathering on her cold skin, dripping along her spine. Hesitant, Harriet peeked at the floor toward her toes, and a single glimpse of the papery white material under her scuffed shoe sent her stomach swooping and flopping about like a pigeon crashing into a building.
The snake's shed skin unraveled like a rough, translucent ribbon splayed out on the otherwise immaculate floor. In a few places, it bunched upon itself and curled up the wall, stretching on and on and on, every visible foot of it increasing Harriet's fear until her vision blackened at the edges. She bent at the waist and picked up a loose piece; the scales had left impressions larger than Harriet's hand. At the head of the trail, where the corridor came to an end, waited a mirror. A Moon Mirror.
"Of course," Harriet breathed. "That's how it's been getting about." Professor Dumbledore had told them the Moon Mirrors could be found all over the castle, stating more than a dozen existed—but exactly how many more, he never specified. Harriet had firsthand experience with the exceptional intelligence of magical snakes; given time, she didn't doubt the Basilisk could figure out how the Mirrors were connected, and which took it from one place to the next.
But where did this particular Moon Mirror lead? To the exit, or to certain doom?
Harriet navigated over the skin, wincing whenever it crackled under her feet. Her hand left a damp smudge on the glass when she pressed it to the mirror and said, "Open."
Again, the brisk, needling sensation passed over her as Harriet shut her eyes and stepped forward. Once on the other side, she blinked and looked around, wand at the ready. Nothing stirred in the museum Harriet had entered; the bones of ancient creatures stood on raised platforms or hung from the rounded ceiling, little plaques set out to tell what was what. Harriet wandered through the hulking, prehistoric monsters, hardly daring to raise her head for fear of meeting the Basilisk's sudden gaze. A glimmer caught her attention, and Harriet hurried to yet another Moon Mirror, this one set in gold and lifted a good foot or so from the base of the wall. When Harriet told it to open, it remained stubbornly shut.
An exit, then, not an entrance. Harriet turned and hurried back the way she'd come, taking a right past what could have only been a Thunderbird's massive ancestor, running by an empty tank where nothing but desiccated sand remained, pausing by a towering quadruped with a long neck—a brontosaurus, she thought it was called. Another mirror waited beyond its platform, and she dodged around the fossil until she reached the glass, whispered in Parseltongue, and managed to slip through.
Again, Harriet stood in one of the book-crowded corridors, but something had changed. She knew it by the taste in the air, an inexplicable bitterness on her tongue that made Harriet think of old dirt left too long in the sun, and how it smelled when the rain finally returned. The farther she journey, the wider the corridor grew, until the outer wall curled away, a colonnade taking its place, each pillar carved to resemble a tree, the stone branches sprawling out over the enchanted ceiling. The area beyond the colonnade expanded, two or three shallow steps leading up to what Harriet decided must have been a vast atrium in its glory days, a thousand perches of various sizes reaching high toward the vaulted roof, the curved wall dominated with a dozen soaring windows looking out upon the strange, distorted view.
Pages fluttered. Someone turned the page of a book.
Harriet climbed the steps, weak knees knocking together, and as she edged out from behind a carved pillar to see the heart of the atrium itself, she spotted yet another Moon Mirror, this one freestanding in an iron frame, gleaming bright in the orange firelight from beyond the false windows. A familiar face waited there.
"…Luna?"
A book snapped shut. A figure stepped from behind the mirror.
"Not quite."
Livius began to chime.
A/N: Okay, so something that always bugged me in canon (there's a lot, but, y'know, w/e) was that the Basilisk moved around through the pipes. Okay, awesome, makes sense given where the Chamber is…but how did it get out to attack people? It's not like there are open drains big enough for that bad boy to come slithering out of.
