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If you messaged me about helping with translation, THANK YOU SO MUCH. Last week I was super overloaded, so this week I am trying to get all the different language bits into different documents to share with all of you, so I will hopefully be messaging you soon!
On Saturday, Hermione decided to attempt a meeting of the Shadows without telling any of the Shadows in advance. It was an experiment, she decided, to see how well this would work out in the wild.
After breakfast, Hermione went down to the side of the lake where she was mostly out of sight, screened by a tree. Once she had settled down onto a large tree root, she took her own pendant in her hand, closed her eyes, and pushed her power into it. She felt her pendant begin to warm, the golden side slowly morphing into a glowing eclipse.
Putting a Protean Charm on all of the pendants hadn't been easy, but it hadn't been nearly as difficult as Hermione had feared. It seemed to be a NEWT-level spell because of the amount of magic it required to cast to tie things together permanently, not because of the complexity. Hermione rather specialized in channeling large amounts of magic at this point, though, and once she'd gotten the complicated wand movements down, she'd charmed each pendant after they'd been made by the goblins, tying it to her own.
Hermione waited. Blaise was the first to show up, appearing quite suddenly from midair. He looked vaguely queasy, before he shot her a grin.
"You didn't warn anyone about this, did you?" he said. He sat back next to her, stretching in the grass. "Let's see who all notices and can figure it out."
To her surprise, the next one to appear was Pansy, who looked quite pleased with herself.
"No throwing up this time," she said, taking a seat. She looked to Hermione. "What are we meeting for?"
"Next stage of one of our goals," Hermione said. "Let's wait until everyone's here."
Luna appeared, looking serene and quite pleased, then Susan. Harry, Draco, Tracey, and Millie appeared in short order, one after the other, which made Hermione suspect that they had all been together and noticed each other's pendants instead of their own, and Theo came last. Once everyone had appeared, Hermione looked to Draco, who withdrew his wand and cast the Muffliato charm.
"First Shadows meeting at school," Susan said, grinning. She looked at the others. "This is kind of exciting, isn't it?"
"It is," Hermione admitted. "But we have a serious thing we need to discuss today. We need to—"
"Decide what we're doing for Hermione's birthday," Blaise cut in smoothly. He gave Hermione a wicked grin. "Don't think I've forgotten it's in just a couple days."
"We need to get the other horcrux," Hermione said flatly, meeting Blaise's eyes, and Blaise deflated.
"Oh," he said. "Yeah, that too."
"The other horcrux?" Millie said, suspicious. "I'm sorry, we already have one?"
"We went and got one at the old Gaunt shack," Harry told the others, making it sound like it'd been a simple jaunt through the forest. "That's where Tom's mother grew up, he told us, and where he first found the ring. But there's another one hidden in Hogwarts we found through a ritual."
"And… we want both?" Tracey said skeptically. "Shouldn't we destroy one before we go after the others?"
"We could," Hermione admitted. "However, if our plan is to try and have Tom incorporate these bits of soul into himself, he might be better off starting with a smaller chunk than with a larger one, in case there's some sort of battle."
"And the one in Hogwarts has a smaller piece of soul?" Theo looked fascinated. "How do you figure?"
Hermione explained the halving of Voldemort's soul with each successive Horcrux, explaining how Tom was one half, the ring would be one quarter, and the tiara (the horcrux in the castle) was likely to be 1/32nd of a soul.
"The fact someone with 1/64th of a soul can still be a threat is kind of incredible," Susan said. "That's all it took to possess Quirrell?"
"Apparently," Harry said dryly.
"The room we're going to need to search is called the 'Come and Go room', or the Room of Requirement," Hermione explained to them all. "The House Elves told me about it. The problem is, there are piles and piles of junk in it. Small mountains, practically. And we're looking for one thing amongst it all. So it's going to take a while."
Draco groaned. "Can't we borrow the House Elves and make them do it for us?"
"The House Elves report to Dumbledore," Pansy pointed out, snide, and Draco sighed.
"Fine," he said. "When are we doing this?"
"Soon?" Hermione glanced around at the others. "I don't know what everyone has going on, but I figured if we all worked together, we'd be able to make better progress. Maybe even have a bit of fun."
Susan considered. "I'm free today, actually."
"There's no Quidditch this year," Harry said dully, "so all we've got is homework. I'm free."
"We're going to need an organizational system though, aren't we?" Tracey said, musing. "We can't just wander around piles of junk for hours."
"Let's go to the room now," Luna suggested, smiling impishly. "Maybe once we see what we're up against, we'll have an idea of what to do."
Draco looked at Harry, shooting him a smirk. "Race you."
"You're on," Harry said immediately. "You don't even know where it is."
"Left corridor on the seventh floor," Hermione said, amused. "Across from the tapestry with the trolls learning ballet."
Harry and Draco took off for the castle at a dead run. Hermione looked at Luna.
"Do you know where Dumbledore is right now, by any chance?"
Luna considered, then looked at Tracey. "Do you have your cards?"
Tracey looked surprised but withdrew a deck of tarot cards from her pocket, handing them to Luna. Luna shuffled them quickly, then flipped one over without looking.
"Five of wands," Tracey said, looking at it. "Bunch of people going in different directions with diverse opinions, divided attention, conflicted interests, that sort of thing. There's one person trying to call the group to order."
"He's at a staff meeting," Luna said, turning to Hermione. There was a mischievous spark in her eye. "Why do you ask?"
Hermione smirked. "So we can win the race."
Harry arrived at the seventh-floor corridor first, with Draco only a few steps behind. He goggled at them.
"How did you get here first?" Harry demanded, out of breath. "We had a solid head start!"
"Oh, you cheated," Draco wheezed. He gestured at Tracey, chest heaving. "She's about to puke. They popped through the ley line."
Harry gave them all a betrayed look, making Hermione giggle.
"We did make sure no teachers would be around first," Susan conceded, amused.
Draco scoffed. "Someone still could have seen."
"Oh, be quiet," Millie said. "We have cool new magic powers, Malfoy. Lighten up a little and let us use them."
Draco rolled his eyes but smirked. Theo turned to Hermione.
"So what's next?" he asked. "You have to trigger the room to appear?"
"Yes," Hermione said, biting her lip. "Hang on, let me try..."
She began walking back and forth in front of the wall, focusing very hard on what she needed.
I need the room where Voldemort hid the diadem… I need the room we saw in the vision… I need the room where Voldemort stashed his horcrux…
A door materialized on the wall, provoking murmurs, and Blaise grabbed the handle.
"Well?" he said, grinning. "Let's go."
He pulled open the door, and they all filed into the room, lurking near the front as they all took in what they were up against. The room was enormous and cavernous, and absolutely cluttered and filled with junk heaped in large piles. There were thousands of books in tottering piles or damaged bookcases, broken furniture haphazardly stacked, chipped bottles of congealed potions, and even what looked like a large, bloodstained axe.
"…where do we even start?" Susan said, paling. "We could get lost in here."
"Then we need to make sure we don't get lost," Theo said, though he sounded uncertain too.
Tracey stepped up to the first pile, examining it, before lugging a damaged trunk off the side of the pile.
"If we're going to do this, we might as well make it productive," she said. "Any money you find, come put in this. It can be the start of the Shadows' coffer."
Blaise and Draco both snorted, and Hermione shot them a venomous look.
"We can put books in this one," Pansy said, tugging over another trunk.
"Maybe put weapons in that one?" Millie suggested, frowning. "There's a ton of books here – there's no way they'd all fit. Maybe if we lug some of the bookcases over here…"
A plan began to shape up as a few of them began setting up a system of organization to use to search the room, while the others began wandering around.
"Keep your eyes open while you search through the piles," Blaise called out, grinning. "Whoever finds the best birthday gift for Hermione wins a prize!"
"That is not the point—" Hermione said exasperatedly, but Blaise, Harry, and Draco had already run off into the piles of junk, and Luna and Susan giggled.
"Maybe they'll get lucky?" Luna suggested.
Theo rolled his eyes. "And when they don't, at least the sensible ones of us will have gotten a solid start."
Three hours later found the Shadows with no tiara, but with growing piles of other interesting things they'd found in their search.
It was clear that this room had functioned since the beginning of Hogwarts, judging from some of the items they had found. They now had several rusting swords, a large axe, a mace, a flail, and maybe a dozen jeweled daggers. Pansy had separated out obsidian athames she kept finding at the bottoms of piles, distinguishing between weapons and ritual knives, finding several to keep for larger group rituals. There were ancient gold shillings and silver pennies as well, inscribed with runes and faces of people nobody knew, and those went into an overturned top hat they'd found, kept separate from the rest of the gold. Hermione fully intended on taking them to rare coin collectors instead of the goblins – muggles were far more likely to treasure ancient Anglo-Saxon coinage.
Harry had found a damaged flying carpet, and he'd dragged it over toward the entrance and started a pile of broomsticks on top of it. Susan was making piles of all the clothing and textiles they found, sorting it in some way that was comprehensible only to her. Theo was setting up a line of cauldrons along the edge of the room, and each time someone found an old potion of some sort, he sorted it into the appropriate cauldron. Hermione was convinced they should just dispose of all the old, moldering ones, but Theo insisted that trying to figure out what each potion was could be a valuable exercise for O.W.L. review. From the gleam in his eye, he didn't actually care about O.W.L. review, but Hermione had rolled her eyes and given in with a sigh. It would be a good way to study and review, regardless of his true motivation.
Hermione, meanwhile, had taken up cataloguing the books. She and Luna had levitated over several broken bookcases, repairing them the best they could with Reparo and a few rough transfiguration spells. From there, people just threw books at Hermione, and she sorted them into appropriate place.
Hermione had hoped that she'd find ancient knowledge, that there'd be old grimoires and lost magics to read and learn, but they mostly found spellbooks that had been assigned and lost over the years. Two entire cases were soon filled with various grades of The Standard Book of Spells, and another held dozens of copies of One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi and Magical Drafts and Potions. Soon, each core subject had at least an entire bookshelf dedicated to it, if not an entire bookcase.
If nothing else, Hermione thought, all these lost books could be given to students who struggled to afford their class materials. Though... that meant they would have to turn over the books to Hogwarts, and trust that the books would somehow find their way to the correct students in need of assistance. That would undoubtedly provoke questions of 'where did you get all these?', which would provoke questions of 'why were you trawling through a room of junk?' and 'why are you bunch spending so much time together?'. These were all questions that Hermione did not want asked, even if they revealed no secrets. Having the staff be aware that there was a group beyond her coven at all would not be a great way to start off what was supposed to be a secret organization.
Maybe she could donate them somewhere else, she mused. Give them to Tracey's old magical daycare place, or she could give them to the hedgewitches – she knew Clover would covet a copy of each of these tomes.
That brought to mind something else, actually.
"Has anyone found any staffs or wands?" she called out.
As it happened, there were – but not nearly as many as she expected. They'd only found three wands amongst the junk.
"People aren't going to lose or want to hide their wand," Theo pointed out. "That's the one thing I make sure to never lose track of."
Hermione sighed. "It was worth a try."
They broke for lunch. Hermione tried to mind her manners, but she was ravenous, and Draco and Theo were eating with unusual speed as well.
"Talk about a workout," Tracey sighed. "This is exhausting."
They resumed after lunch, sorting through the piles of things for lost treasure. Their coffer gradually grew as more gold was found, as did their collections of books and old potions. Loose gems and jewelry went into a small trunk of their own, and a new stack of toys emerged as well, with a set of dominoes, several sets of Gobstones, Fanged Frisbees, and an Exploding Snap deck.
Even though they were searching in an organized manner, there was something incredibly surreal to Hermione as she wandered between piles and piles of lost things, towering over her. The room seemed practically endless, and it would have been easy to get lost if not for the sound of the others talking and bickering near the door.
Blaise came up behind her as she wandered, standing at her side while she examined what looked like a medieval torture rack. "Making plans for your enemies?"
She smirked. "More like wondering if Filch wasn't lying about detentions after all."
They exchanged a grin.
"The vision we saw had it on an old stone bust," Blaise offered. "We could fly around and look for statues."
Hermione opened her mouth to reply, but there was a sudden, terrible scream from across the room, followed by yells and flashes of spell fire. Hermione exchanged a horrified look with Blaise as they both bolted back to the center of the room.
In the middle of the cleared-out space was Millie, wearing a patinaed tiara. Her face was twisted up in a demonic rage, and she was casting spell after spell at Harry and Tracey, who were hiding behind a turned-over table. To Hermione's astonishment, the spells seemed to be doing nothing, which infuriated Millie even more.
"What kind of useless body is this?" Millie raged. She hurled what looked like cursed purple fire at Harry, only for it to dissipate against an invisible barrier in front of him. "What kind of muggle can cast magic but not have it—"
"Stupefy!"
Millie hadn't been expecting an attack from behind, and she slumped to the ground. Hermione crept closer, her eyes on the diadem Millie wore. It reeked of Dark magic, and it was undeniably the horcrux.
"Millie!" Tracey cried out, running to her. "Oh, why did she put it on?"
"It's cursed with Dark magic," Harry told her, grim. "It was probably a compulsion spell. Tom was compelled to put the ring on when he found it, too."
"Do we take it off of her?" Susan worried. "Or will that make things worse?"
"I'm not touching it," Blaise said flatly. "Remember what happened to Tom?"
"Then what do we do?" Tracey wanted to know, wringing her hands.
"Well, we can't just take her to Madame Pomfrey," Hermione said unhappily. "We're going to need to come up with a plan."