lxxxiv. lost to the ages
By the end of the week, Harriet was certain Madam Pince would murder all three of them before term let out.
After Hermione stopped fussing and regained her breath, Harriet brought out the tome she stole from Slytherin's office and the bushy-haired witch went right back to fussing, going into absolute raptures about the treasure Harriet managed to nick from the bowels of the earth. Hermione informed her it was written in old Anglo-Saxon, and if they wanted a chance of reading what Salazar Slytherin himself had written on those crinkled pages, they'd have to translate it themselves.
Hence why Madam Pince was one step away from committing a triple homicide.
They arrived early every morning that week and waited for the elderly librarian to open the doors, taking over their favorite table in the back during lunch and break and before dinner, badgering Pince with questions about the materials they wanted and the sources they needed. Hermione had a terrible habit of gasping aloud when she made a discovery and hoarding far too many books, which irked Madam Pince, and Elara accidentally set off a Caterwauling Charm when she wandered too close to the Restricted Section. Twice. Harriet thought herself perfectly well-behaved—but then she got ink-covered fingerprints on a monogram more than seven-hundred years old about the Norman conquest and Madam Pince threatened to boil her alive. Twice.
In Harriet's latest letter to Mr. Flamel, Harriet told him about finding a book written by the Founder and wanting to translate it, leaving out her dubious acquisition of the book in question, and the wizard wrote back that "you always have the most interesting questions and stories to tell, Harriet," enclosing a primer he hoped would assist them in their quest. Hermione devoured the primer, of course, with help from Elara, who actually understood bits and pieces of Anglo-Saxon and could read the dated, cramped lettering better than anyone else. Harriet was relegated to scribing the chunks they managed to translate.
Harriet didn't mention the other book, the journal she knew she took from the desk with Salazar Slytherin's tome. She panicked when she first discovered its absence, but Harriet found nothing when she searched, so it either fell out of her pocket somehow or never left the Chamber in the first place. After a minute of thought, she decided that might be for the best. Harriet was only a second-year, after all, and she didn't know all that much about magic; what if Professor Slytherin had a Tracking Charm on his journal? What if it was cursed? No, best the bloody thing not be in her possession when all was said and done.
"It's not anything Salazar Slytherin would have thought important," Hermione deduced on Friday, the three of them once more in the library hiding from Pince, who was determined to oust them early, being that it was the end of the week. They sat on the floor in the stacks devoted to Edwardian Wizarding history with a candle and Slytherin's obnoxiously heavy book open between them. "Parchment back then would have been more difficult to procure as well as more expensive, so even what we would consider scribbles or scratch paper were kept and bound together. The Founder kept notes here. It's not a diary, not really, but he did write down his thoughts on current events. He even mentions part of the east wing's construction—oh, this is priceless, Harriet. To have a firsthand account of the castle's creation—."
"Does he waffle on for a full chapter about the plumbing? Because Hogwarts: A History already did that."
Elara snorted.
Indignant, Hermione gave them both a stern look worthy of Professor McGonagall. "No, he doesn't mention the plumbing, because there was no plumbing in those days. It was added on later—and from your description, Harriet, it seems as if someone purposefully disguised the Chamber's entrance when the updates were started or converted old drains and drainage lines. He talks about the Chamber here in this bit, briefly." She scrunched her nose and consulted the primer again, holding it closer to the candle. "Oh."
"Oh?"
"I'm not entirely sure, but the context of the word would be odd otherwise…. You see this line here? Where he mentions the 'neoðan'? That roughly translates to 'the underneath,' and if I'm not mistaken, that's what the Founder called the Chamber. In hindsight, it makes perfect sense. Why would Slytherin himself call it the Chamber of Secrets? That's too pedantic even for a bigoted egoist."
A sudden clopping of shoes on the floor turned their heads as Madam Pince bore down upon the trio. "You three again! Out! Out of the library! It's closing for the evening!"
"But it's not even time for it to close!"
"Out, I said! Go to dinner! Go!"
Sulking, Harriet and the others allowed themselves to be ushered back into the corridor, and—leery of being isolated in an area of the castle where the Basilisk had already attacked—they rushed to the Great Hall, taking their usual spots at the House table before many of their classmates arrived. For a little while, Harriet pushed thoughts of Slytherin's book from her head and tucked into her supper, talking with the Beater Peregrine Derrick about the upcoming Quidditch match between Gryffindor and Hufflepuff and who he thought would win. Soon, however, dinner ended and the Slytherins returned to their dormitory, and Hermione asked if they could use Harriet's trunk to keep researching. Elara grimaced, but the trio descended into the extra room inside the trunk, lit the lantern, and shut the lid.
Livi peered from his terrarium, displeased with the interruption to his nap, and two smaller heads peeked over the teacup's rim.
"Harriet, is that another snake?"
"Yeah!" she chirped, bending at the waist to pick up Kevin and her newest acquisition. "He's another Chr—Yule cracker golem. I got him at the feast." She held the skinny red snake out toward Hermione, since Elara had already seen the tiny creature when they'd pulled the cracker and Harriet tucked him into her sleeve. "His name is Rick."
"…Rick?"
"It's short for Godric—because he's red, like a Gryffindor."
"Then what's Kevin short for?"
"Kevin's short for Kevin. Are you daft?"
Hermione opened her mouth as if to argue, then thought better of it and shook her head. She removed Slytherin's book from her satchel and set it on the worktop, the spine creaking as she opened it to her marked place. "Never mind. Let's go back to the part we were reading before Madam Pince interrupted…."
And so they did, Harriet returning Kevin and Rick before retrieving her quill and parchment as Hermione and Elara scratched their heads and picked apart Slytherin's ancient lettering. Tired from dinner, Harriet's eyes glazed over, and her attention drifted, tracing the old spots on the wall where posters or placards used to hang, the faded Potter crest emblazoned on the cupboard. Sometimes she wondered if her dad had used this space, and Harriet amused herself with imagining what he could have possibly stored down here. What had he been like? She knew James Potter had been a Chaser and Head Boy, so did that mean he was brainy? Popular? Was Harriet anything like him?
"He mentions Rowena Ravenclaw quite often," Hermione muttered, squinting in the low light, bringing her face closer to the pages. "This section is almost incomprehensible. His handwriting is atrocious in places. Here he mentions something about a 'nest,' but is that the right word for it?" She flipped through Mr. Flamel's primer, growing more frustrated. "I can't decipher this nonsense!"
"It would make sense for Slytherin to talk about Ravenclaw, wouldn't it?" Harriet asked, worried she might get snapped at if she interrupted Hermione now. "All the stories say the Founders were friends before they made Hogwarts, so that means Slytherin and Ravenclaw were friends, too. Why else would he have those mirrors down in the Chamber—or the Underneath, or whatever?"
"That doesn't explain why the mirror only responded to Parseltongue," Elara pointed out. "Ravenclaw wasn't a Parselmouth."
The unspoken question in her tone went unanswered. True, the Moon Mirror in Salazar's study had only opened after Harriet had spoken to it in Parseltongue—and after Set had badgered and shadow-mimed her into inspecting the ruddy thing in the first place—but that didn't mean it was the only way to get it to cooperate. If Ravenclaw made the mirror, then she knew it better than anyone else, and it was entirely possible for the Parseltongue password to be something like a failsafe just in case Rowena herself couldn't get through or open the way. It reminded Harriet of how she'd adjusted the Charm on the trunk just enough to let Elara and Hermione open the extra room. Maybe that was the whole reason Slytherin had the Moon Mirror in the first place.
Lost in thought, Harriet made idle scratch marks on the edge of the parchment with her eagle feather quill, and when Elara and Hermione started to bicker over the exact connotation of this "nest," Harriet took the opportunity to look over the book herself. Unlike Hermione, who dissected the thing page by page, Harriet marked her place and chose a random spot to flip to. Twice more she did this, until she spied a promising section complete with stray doodles and crossed out scribbles. Something about the image of the great Salazar Slytherin huffing and scrawling over his notebook like a teenager made Harriet want to laugh.
She made a right hash of the writing in trying to puzzle out a few of the disjointed sentences. 'Fire, foe, cannot burn mine person, water cannot take mine lungs. What be I?' Harriet nibbled on the end of the quill, picking through the stray lines here and there, finding other, similarly written phrases. A few struck her as being familiar. Are these…riddles? Odd.
On the corner of the page, smudged by the fingers of someone long dead, Slytherin had drawn something feathery encircled by coils or thorns, Harriet couldn't tell which.
Above them, Harriet could hear the tired, impatient thump of feet moving into the dorm and the lavatory beyond, someone—probably Pansy—dropping their satchel with a particularly heavy bang. "C'mon, we have to be in bed before Prefect Farley comes by for her rounds."
Elara and Hermione abandoned their squabble with some reluctance and followed Harriet up the steps and out of the trunk. Never one to miss an opportunity for being an irritating berk, Pansy sat up from where she'd flounced on her own bed and glared at the trio. "What are you up to down there, Potter?" she demanded.
Harriet considered giving a snippy reply, but she was tired and not inclined to humor Parkinson. "Studying," she said as she closed the trunk. "Pince kicked us out of the library."
"Why not study in the common room like a normal witch?"
Rolling her eyes, Harriet switched the latch on the trunk and opened it again, fishing out her nightgown from the small compartment. Elara disappeared into the washroom, and Hermione sat on the edge of her bed, brown eyes distant as she stared at the rug under her feet. Runcorn asked her about the quiz they were supposed to have in Astronomy later that night, but Hermione didn't hear her, so Katherine scoffed and went to ask Daphne instead. Harriet changed, then went to brush her teeth, and when she came back, Hermione was still sitting on the bed, her brow furrowed, lips pursed.
"…Hermione?"
"Hmm?"
"Everything all right?"
"Oh. Yes, I'm fine." She stood and smoothed the front of her skirt, though her face didn't lose that speculative look that made Harriet a mite nervous. Nevertheless, Harriet went to her own bed, drew the curtains, and tucked herself in. She set her glasses on the end table—and made sure to set a timer with her wand, having forgotten to do that more times than she cared to remember. The sound of her dormmates moving about settled, and soon Prefect Farley checked they were all in bed. Really she only popped her head in, pausing her conversation with her own dormmate long enough to see all the curtains were closed. Farley shut the door again, and Pansy continued whispering with Millicent once the prefect moved on. Harriet listened to the indistinct rasp of their voices and, slowly, fell asleep.
xXx
Hours later, in the cold, unrelieved dark of the quiet dormitory, Harriet woke wide-eyed and gasping from a dreadful, slippery nightmare, the details quick to disperse and drain over the edges of her mind like spilled milk dripping off a counter's edge. It left her feeling unsettled and nervous, and so she sat up, shivering against the chill, and brought the blanket up over her head.
"It's just a dream," she reminded herself in a low whisper, her breath warming the air trapped under the cover. "It's not real."
The familiar mantra helped calm her nerves, and Harriet pushed the blanket off, peering into the dark with her myopic vision. The timer on her wand had yet to go off, and the other witches were still fast asleep, so Harriet assumed she hadn't dozed off for very long. With a grunt, she placed her glasses on her nose and nudged open the curtains, deciding it best to get up and read or study instead of trying to go back to sleep. All the other curtains remained closed—except for the ones around Hermione's bed, which was perfectly made without a single wrinkle in the counterpane.
"Hermione?" she whispered, picking up her wand. When no answer came, Harriet padded into the lavatory, finding it empty but for the steady drip-drip of a loose faucet, so she returned to the main room. She happened to glance at her trunk and saw the latch undone.
What is she up to?
Frowning, Harriet eased the lid open—and squinted against the sudden, soft glow of lantern light emanating from below. She threw a leg over the trunk's side and crept down the steps. "What are you doing?"
Hermione sat on the floor in the tiny room, Slytherin's book propped open upon her lap, Mr. Flamel's primer tucked under her knee. Livi had abandoned his terrarium, and Harriet knew Hermione was distracted because the older witch didn't so much as blink when the Horner Serpent hung his head off the shelf to inspect her bushy hair. Letting out a little huff, Harriet came to Hermione's side and tapped her on the shoulder. Hermione glanced up, her eyes filled with dreadful confusion, and again Harriet asked what she was doing down there.
"I couldn't sleep," she admitted. "I—. Slytherin made a comment I couldn't get out of my head, even when I lied down and tried to shut my eyes. He goes on these long tangents about the 'gyr-blódgeótend,' you see—these parts where it looks as if he'd tried to stab the parchment with his quill. According to him, they were quite a problem in his youth, and he—and Godric and Helga—lost several members of their families to their 'deceit of the cræft.' He hated the gyr-blódgeótend. Despised them utterly and thought they should be wiped out. Do you know what it means? It translates to 'dirty bloodshedder,' and it's the etymological origin of Mudblood."
Harriet leaned on the wall and slid down until she could sit next to Hermione, wondering where this conversation was going. "Well, everyone knows he hated Muggle-borns. That's the whole bloody legend behind the Chamber, isn't it?"
"But that's just it! In the comment I translated just before we went up for bed, Slytherin mentioned those 'from Eargian'—'Eargian' being an early term for Muggles. He wrote about the tutelage of his Muggle-born students—and he didn't hate them, Harriet, he didn't. He hated the gyr-blódgeótend, the dirty bloodshedders—those witches and wizards, pure-blood or not, who betrayed their own kind to the Muggles that hated and feared magical beings. This was far before the Statute of Secrecy; the Wizarding world was common knowledge to everybody. To Slytherin, you were either with magic, or against it, and though he remained suspicious of Muggle-borns, he didn't think them undeserving of their abilities. Mudblood doesn't mean Muggle-born. It means traitor."
They stayed silent as Hermione's words sunk in, her hands tight upon the book's weathered edges, and Harriet watched as the color leached from her small knuckles.
"I had to keep reading. I had to be sure of what I'd spotted—because this means everything we know about the Chamber and its legend is—is utter bollocks, Harriet! Rubbish! He didn't leave the Basilisk behind to kill the Muggle-born population; he left it behind as a final line of defense in a Muggle incursion! So much history, all lost to shoddy translation and misinterpretation!"
She slammed the book shut, and Harriet saved it before it could suffer more mistreatment in the hands of the bushy-haired witch. Harriet had never seen Hermione so frustrated and upset before. "I don't understand," she said, hesitant.
"Neither do I," Hermione retorted with a sniffle. "Professor Slytherin knows about this book. He's read it! You know he has! And so he must know the truth, for years even! But he's never said a thing! And people like him, and Professor Selwyn, and—and Voldemort, keep using Salazar Slytherin's ideology as an excuse to harm and belittle Muggle-borns when that was never the Founder's intention. I never understood why I came to Slytherin House. I argued with the Hat, but it insisted, and for almost two years I've questioned its decision every single day, every single time I had to put on the crest of an old, crusty bigot." Hermione wrapped her arms around her legs and balanced her chin on her knee, scowling. "But he wasn't a bigot. Merlin knows the man couldn't have been perfect—honestly, who leaves a Basilisk in a school and thinks that's a good idea? But he wouldn't have spat on me because of my bloodline. He wouldn't have denied me my place here. People like the Dark Lord appropriate everything the Founder stood for and just—twist it until we can't recognize any of it anymore. Pride becomes fanaticism, ambition turns to greed, cunning an excuse for cold-blooded ruthlessness. This is what people think when they see us—just look at how the others behave around Slytherins after this Chamber nonsense! Like we're a pack of murderers just waiting to happen. It's not right."
Harriet struggled to think of something to say, but there was nothing at all that would make any of this any better.
Hermione shook her head. "No one will ever believe us. We could shout it from the top of the Astronomy Tower, and no one would ever listen. It changes everything, and yet it changes nothing, and that frustrates me so much."
She unfolded one arm, and Harriet took her hand in her own, giving it a squeeze. She had a point; they couldn't reveal their possession of Salazar Slytherin's notes, not without dire consequences, and if they told a bunch of stuffy pure-bloods their idol wasn't the gleaming pillar of staunch magical lineage, they'd be called liars. Snape always harped on Harriet about perception, and was this not yet another example of perception being tweaked to suit a particular frame of mind? Like when Dudley told stories about Harriet and all the neighbors thought her a nasty little hooligan without ever meeting her. Reality wouldn't change their views.
"Some people don't want to hear the truth, Hermione. Especially if it proves them wrong."
"I know."
"Slytherin's been dead for hundreds of years, so it doesn't matter what he thought anymore. Even if he was a bigot, it's not his House anymore; it's ours. You're just as much of a Slytherin as Malfoy or Parkinson or any of those gits, and we're not going to sit about and let those dodgy pure-bloods and near-sighted numpties give us a bad name, are we?"
Tension eased in Hermione's expression, and she smiled, the fevered brightness dimming in her eyes. "Yes, you're right." Her fingers tightened once more before she let go and began to search her pockets for a handkerchief. "Thank you, Harriet."
"You're welcome."
She found her sought handkerchief and though she managed to dry her tears, Hermione's face stayed blotchy and rather miserable looking. "There's more to that book than I think any of us expected," she said, changing the subject with a brisk sigh. "Such as his apparent connection with Rowena Ravenclaw. I can't put my finger on it, but something about that connection begs a more thorough inspection. I think it's important."
"As long as it doesn't end with me brewing an illegal potion and wearing Professor Sinistra's face," Harriet joked, and the mood lightened at last.
"No, I don't believe it will come to that."
"Oh, bloody hell."
"What is it?"
"I thought I'd suppressed all that. Now I remember and we've got Astronomy soon. How am I supposed to look her in the eye?" Harriet groaned.
Hermione laughed as she tucked away her handkerchief, and together they set Slytherin's book and Mr. Flame's primer on the shelf. "Just look at the top rim of your glasses."
"Because being cross-eyed is so much better. Ugh. Drinking that had to be the worse idea you've ever had, Hermione."
"Perhaps." She smiled again, the motion sharper now, almost mischievous. They ascended the steps into their silent dormitory, and as Hermione walked away, she whispered. "But also very informative."
A/N: I dabble a bit in trying to flesh-out the Founders' characters. It's always bothered me that Salazar (like most Slytherins) is just a two-dimensional villain in canon. The world during Hogwarts' founding was a much, much different place, and it seems ridiculous to me that in a time of war, invasions, plagues, and population discrepancies, that Salazar would honestly give a shite about where magic users came from, so long as they were loyal. I'm inclined to believe he would have hated pure-bloods like the Malfoys more, who came over with William the Conquerer, and xenophobia was huggge. But, y'know, head-canon. /shrug.
Hermione: "Is that another snake?"
Harriet: "Yeah, isn't he cute?"
Hermione: *mentally organizing an intervention* "…Mhm."