16. Potions Ingredients
There was silence for a moment as the others came inside behind him. The last stall on the end burst open and the ghost came out. She stopped and stared, startled at the congregation that met her.
"Hi, Myrtle," Harry said, a bit embarrassed. "These Goblins are from Gringotts and they'll be the ones rendering the basilisk down. You can come down and watch, if you want." The Goblins were arrayed behind him, with Jawbreaker at the front.
Myrtle gave him a hesitant nod.
Colin pushed past him, held up his camera, and said, "Picture time!" Suiting action to words, the flash lit-up the room. "Myrtle," he said, "You move over here," and he pointed to beside Jawbreaker, who definitely did not look like he liked that, but didn't know what to do about it.
"I'll be sending the film to Gringotts for developing," HtB said, at Harry's prompting, out of the corner of his mouth to Jawbreaker. "You can get your own copies of everything from there, if you want." There was another flash of light as soon as Myrtle reached the position indicated.
Jawbreaker grinned at him. At least, Harry hoped that was a grin. He still wasn't sure of his interpretations of the Goblins' facial expressions. He barked something out to the others, and suddenly the Goblins were much more cooperative to Colin's requests. Colin took far longer than he had expected, as a result.
HtB moved over to the sink and crouched down until he could see the snake. §Open Sesame,§ he hissed. The sink sank into the floor as he stepped back, revealing the pipe. §Stairs,§ he hissed.
Just as last time, he sat down on the steps as they took him deeper. The Goblins remained standing. The others were behind the Goblins. Professor Sprout stayed behind to prevent any students who sneaked past the other Professors from trying to follow them down until the pipe-entrance resealed itself.
Colin took several pictures of the Goblins marching through the tunnel, beside the cast-off skin, and in front of the Chamber doors as they were opening. After the initial shock wore off of seeing the size of the basilisk — things always look bigger in real-life than they do in pictures — Flitwick, McGonagall, and Dumbledore began a slow examination of the Chamber. Professor Snape, at first, spent his time closely examining the snake. He thought no one noticed him picking up the odd snake skin-scale or two that he found on the floor, but Jawbreaker disabused him of that notion by going over to him after a short while and simple holding his hand out expectantly.
The Snape's sour expression made the Gryffindors' day.
The Goblins were efficient, but it still took hours. In the meantime, Professor Flitwick was muttering about the impervius, air-freshening, water-evacuation, and several other spells that urgently needed reinforcement.
Both Snape and Dumbledore were disappointed that Salazar Slytherin's office was barren. It had been looted clean by previous heirs wanting those items for themselves, and now were lost forever.
Colin, meanwhile was burning through his film documenting the harvesting. Harry wasn't sure if the Goblins were upset at his hovering, or pleased that they would have photographic evidence of their working on the largest basilisk in history. They didn't growl at the boy nearly as often as Harry expected them to do so.
He thought he saw a few turning their heads just enough to make sure their faces were in profile or visible whenever he actually took a picture.
In any case, they were certainly being very meticulous and precise in their work.
The boy nearly started crying when he realized he was about to load in his last canister of film. Fortunately, the Headmaster noticed his distress and happily duplicated a dozen more for him. "These will last for several months, Mr. Creevey," he said handing the batch over to the boy.
Plenty of time to duplicate the negatives using muggle techniques.
Like Colin, Hermione was fascinated by what the Goblins were doing, but she stayed a bit further away. She didn't want to take the chance that the Goblins were tolerating Colin for the pictures they would get, but would take offense at her being in their way with nothing to benefit them.
HtB and Ron were bored, for the most part. They ended up talking about Quidditch and their House team's chances of winning this year. Wood was terrified that the Slytherin's new brooms would keep them firmly in the lead.
Harry had a few ideas about that, however. With his new resources in Gringotts, and the promise of an endorsement from HtB, he was sure he could level the playing field in the spring. Getting appropriate brooms for each position should easily offset the Slytherins all using the Nimbus Two Thousand and One brooms.
After the discussion between the two started to repeat, Harry suggested, Change the command words on the doors so they don't keep asking you here every time someone wants to take a look at the Chamber.
It took several tries before they stumbled on the right combination of words to reset how the doors reacted. They chose, simply enough, "Open" and "Close" in English as the replacements.
HtB made his way back to the pipe, and they changed the activation word for stairs to English, as well. In the process, they discovered that the stairs responded to §up§ and §down§, which they also changed to English. Then HtB started back to the Chamber, casting the scourgify spell every few steps. He planned to tell Dumbledore when they started back up.
Flitwick, McGonagall, and Dumbledore improved the state of the Chamber's spells and the dripping stopped from the drying charms they cast on the walls and ceiling.
Neither Harry nor HtB noticed when Professor Snape left the Chamber of Secrets. He slipped out of the main Chamber and went back up on the moving stairs, which started as soon as he stepped on them, naturally.
But they did notice his return, later. He was very tired. The entrance in the toilets had automatically closed while they had all been on the stairs going down, earlier. As Harry had expected, after a period of no one else transiting the entrance, the entrance had sealed itself closed. Which it had done well before Harry and the rest reached the bottom of the pipe. No one on the stairs had been close-enough to the entrance to realize when that had happened.
Snape, naturally, didn't know Parseltongue to open the closed entrance. He had assumed there was a way to get the stairs to reverse their direction once he reached the top, but didn't know that HtB had changed the stairs' commands to English. He was stuck with walking the entire way back down to get HtB to go up with him.
HtB had a hard time not laughing out loud. Harry was sure Snape knew his kreking was the owl-equivalent of laughing, but the wizard couldn't say anything in front of the other Professors without looking the fool.
HtB told Dumbledore how he had already reset the commands for opening and closing the main doors to the Chamber to English. The password to access the entrance from the toilets he would leave unchanged for the moment. They didn't want any students sneaking down to the Chamber.
The Headmaster used a simple recording spell to store §open sesame§ and §close§ in two crystals he had one of the house-elves retrieve for him.
He and Ron accompanied Snape back up to the entrance. Ron went on out while HtB and Harry returned to the Chamber just to be sure the changes he had made to the commands had been effective.
The Goblins finished in the Chamber of Secrets just as lunch in the Great Hall started.
Before the Goblins left, Harry had HtB give them all the film that Colin had shot, with the instructions that they were to make duplicates of any photographs they wanted, for use inside Gringotts and by their employees and their families, only.
Then they went in for lunch.
Naturally, the moment they stepped into the Great Hall, everyone stared at them. HtB and Hermione were used to it by now and simply made their way to the seats they had been sitting at this year. Ron was already seated. Colin was a bit cowed by the attention he suddenly received.
Almost as soon as they sat down and started to fill their plates, their dorm-mates mobbed them with questions. Before they could answer many questions, though, the Headmaster tapped his goblet with a fork.
"Your attention, please," he said. "We've had the opportunity to examine the Chamber of Secrets. It does, indeed, exist. It is rather large, in fact being bigger than the Great Hall, itself."
Frantic whispering broke out.
"Disappointingly," he continued, "Whatever papers or other paraphernalia Salazar might have left has been removed by his descendants, so nothing of historic relevance could be recovered."
Yeah, like Tom would have left anything behind when he left the castle after his NEWTs!
There were many sounds of disappointment from the Slytherin and Ravenclaw tables.
"The basilisk has been removed. It was the largest such creature on record, coming to just over twenty-yards in length. Its head was over a yard and a half wide, and it could open its mouth almost three times that, or about four yards. It weighs in excess of a ton."
He sighed. "I've been advised that it would have taken a team of twenty wizards, at least, to take it down, and there would have been many deaths.
"The Basilisk was killed by Mr. Potter on Saturday." He was interrupted before he could continue.
"You're saying a Second-year killed it? Impossible!" Flint in Slytherin yelled.
The Headmaster looked out over the students over his glasses and shook his head, clearly disappointed in Mr. Flint. "Mr. Potter told us that he discovered the basilisk on Friday, last. It was sleeping. He took one of Hagrid's roosters and, on the following Saturday morning, had it crow at sunrise. That killed the basilisk. He and several others went into the Chamber of Secrets on Sunday to see the basilisk. Mr Creevey was one of them, and he took a number of pictures, proving that Mr. Potter had indeed found a basilisk and that it was dead. This morning, the Goblins told me that based on the condition of the carcass that it had only been dead a day or so, perhaps three, at the most."
He looked around the Hall.
"Mr. Potter and Mr. Creevey have generously given their consent to setting up a photo-gallery in the Small Hall across from the Great Hall so that you may all see what they saw when they went to the Chamber.
"That is all I wished to say, you may return to your repast." He smiled genially at the students and then sat down to his own lunch.
The announcement meant that most of the more urgent questions had been answered, letting the trio and Colin eat in peace.
The Slytherins still looked upset and disbelieving. The sour expression on Snape's face didn't reassure them in the slightest. Draco spent no small amount of time disparaging the Gryffindors' story about what they had done, and how big the snake really was.
He played up the line that the Headmaster had to be exaggerating, as everyone knew Dumbledore favoured those of his old house over the others.
At breakfast the next day a Gringotts owl arrived with all the photos. By dinner time they had sorted the photos into a coherent order, and had a list of the ones they wanted the Goblins to enlarge for display.
-===(o|o)===-
While HtB and his friends were working on their photo-gallery, Harry and the twins had been finishing up on his plan to reduce the acromantula problem.
Harry had had to drop his plan of fire-bombing the acromantulas. The hollow they were in was larger than a football stadium, including the stands. It would require too many bombs for them to manage to drop in any sort of really coordinated pattern, especially in the dark. Even dropping forty-five of the bags of petrol, if he had that many, would leave four and five metre gaps between the fires, until they spread. Any fewer than that and there would be too many spiders who could escape before the remainder were trapped.
His solution took quite a lot of thought, but he did hit upon an answer. In late November he had first shown Harry what he had "found" while flying one afternoon, and then had the boy look up acromantulas in the library. HtB had then shown the twins, with appropriate commentary about how dangerous the spiders were.
"Going to Dumbledore would be useless," HtB explained. "He would just ignore the colony as not a threat to the school, citing the fact that they have been in the forest for decades and haven't attacked any students. He would probably argue that trying to do anything would simply goad the spiders into leaving their nest and spreading throughout the forest." HtB shook his head in disbelief.
"Hagrid says that Aragog, the head of the nest, would never hurt the students or allow his children to do that. But Hedwig says that Aragog is very old and will probably soon die. When he does, who knows what the other spiders will do? What if they decide to ignore Aragog's promise?" He shuddered, as did a very pale Ron.
"Besides, the spiders are already attacking the Centaurs and other creatures in the forest. That's one of the reasons why the Centaurs are so anti-wizard! The wizards brought a deadly predator into the forest and refuse to help them against it. I heard they lose a child, and occasionally an adult, at least once a year."
The twins were suitably appalled.
The solution was hoses.
Harry bought a twenty-metre hose from a hardware shop in Blackpool. Then he had the twins make thirty-two duplicates during the first weeks of December, incorporating a trap-spell technique. The duplicates were timer-set to disappear exactly at midnight, local time, on the seventeenth. Each hose was then expanded, inside, and the ends sealed after filling it with one-hundred litres of petrol. The final touch was adding a time-triggered incendio on the petrol. It would go off five seconds after the hoses disappeared.
The result would be an instant ring of fire around the Acromantula nest. None would escape. Dropping the fire-bombs earlier in that day, properly impervioused and set with the same timed-spells as the hoses, would help things along nicely. The bombs, of course, were set to release fifteen minutes after the hoses disappeared. With any luck, the spiders in the centre wouldn't notice the flames around the perimeter for a few minutes. The ones closest to the flames should move away from the perimeter and, without realizing it, into the middle of the nest. That would crowd them together for the preplaced bombs to explode.
Notice-me-not spells on everything would let the twins set things up during the day, undetected.
Hopefully, as Harry remembered, in a few more days, on the evening of the seventeenth, it would start to snow after a brief sleet/rain combination. By Saturday, the blizzard would have covered the castle and grounds in a thick blanket of snow. That would help prevent the fire from spreading too far into the rest of the forest.
First, though, he wanted to warn the Centaurs. The Room of Requirement had been especially helpful in creating a map of the forest and the Acromantula nest. Nothing created in the room could be taken out of it, of course. However, copying the information from the map it created for him onto another parchment brought in from outside? That worked amazingly well.
-===(o|o)===-
Bane surveyed the clearing that was their home for the winter before setting out on his patrol with Ronan to check the Centaurs' traps. The stars foretold a blizzard, soon, and the Centaurs had prepared for it. They had tree trunks prepositioned across the clearing. As soon as the snow stopped, they would pack it down so it was no longer an impediment to movement. Their lean-tos would easily shelter them from the winds, and the fires in their brick stoves would keep them warm. Their food stockpile, safely stored in a nearby dugout, was well in hand, there would be no hungry stomachs this year.
He had just started for the edge of the clearing when Ronan stopped and pointed. "Owl," was all he said.
It was the Snowy White owl he saw, and it was headed straight for the clearing. Based on what he had seen, and Ronan had reported to them, this owl was not a normal owl: it could cast magic. "Defence!" he shouted.
The stallions all grabbed and strung their bows. They then slotted arrows, but didn't draw them yet, not knowing the target. The foals, after one startled glance around, made their way to their dams, who quickly formed a shield around them, pulling out their own bows and arrows. The younger stallions formed up with them.
The owl, much closer by now, seemed startled at their response, especially Ronan and Bane's tracking him with drawn arrows. It landed in the branches of a tree at the edge of the clearing and just stared at them.
Bane got the impression it was bewildered at their response.
It turned its head to its back for a moment, and when it turned back it held a scroll. It bobbed its head.
It clearly wanted to give them the scroll.
"Cover me," Bane said to Ronan, and slowly crossed over to the tree the bird was in.
It very carefully leaned forward, dropped the scroll, and waited.
Bane let the scroll fall to the forest floor, maintaining his watch on the owl.
The bird stared at him a moment, then seemed to shrug. It turned around, dropped off the branch, and started flying through the trees back the way it came.
Only after the bird was no longer in sight did Bane bend down and pick up the scroll. He quickly realized it was two scrolls, and one was a map. Much as he hated it, he called out, "Firenze!"
Firenze had earned his ire last year — carrying a wizard child on his back as if he were some common beast-of-burden! And then actually defending what the wizards were doing! Saying they should interfere with what the stars had foretold!
Unfortunately, he was also the most learned of them regarding wizard-writing. Bane did not want there to be any mistakes in interpreting what the untrustworthy wizards were saying in their message.
Firenze cantered over. Bane handed him the scroll. He softly read it aloud.
.
Three nights after this one, the Acromantula nest will be fire-bombed. The intent is to eradicate the creatures from the forest — or at least severely reduce their population. A fire will appear in a circle around their nest. The encirclement of the nesting area should prevent any from escaping. The map indicates the nest in relation to your camp. It also indicates where the fire will start should you wish to have warriors present to prevent any spiders from escaping their fate, or to keep an eye on the fire, itself. The blizzard that will start earlier that same night should prevent the fire from growing out of control.
You should at least set a defensive perimeter around your camp and be more cautious when foraging in the days and weeks after the attack in case some of the Acromanutlas escape.
Hopefully, the cold will slow them down enough that any survivors can be hunted down and killed.
If necessary, this will be done again.
.
After reading it aloud, he looked over the map.
"Well?" Bane said impatiently.
"We should move camp," Firenze said. "Further away." He looked up at Bane. "Tonight, we will see the stars for the first time in days. Perhaps they will provide guidance."
Bane huffed, but he agreed. "The waning crescent-moon will be in Scorpio, but by the morning it will be in Sagittarius."
"Mars is in Cancer, and Jupiter in Libra."
"Saturn is in Aquarius and prograde."
"Mercury is retrograde."
They both sighed.
"We must be careful of misunderstandings,"
"I will take this to Magorian," Firenze said.
"Ronan and I will finish our patrol," Bane replied, "Afterwards, we will set out for our emergency camp to see what needs to be done." He signalled to the other Centaur and they cantered into the forest.
The next three days would be hellishly busy. Their emergency campsite would be uncomfortably close quarters for the winter. But if it meant the scourge of the spiders could be brought under control, if not eliminated, it would be well worth the discomfort.
Plus, the larger cooked spiders would supplement their winter food stores nicely . . . and allow the Centaurs a bit of revenge on the Acromantulas.
-===(o|o)===-
While HtB and the other three waited for the enlarged prints, they placed the smaller prints on the walls. Percy volunteered to enlarge the captions they prepared to an appropriate size and stick them and the enlarged photos to the walls when they were ready.
For the next few evenings, after classes and finishing their assignments, the group spent their time preparing the photo-gallery. First, by selecting the best photos the Goblins had developed, then arranging them with neatly labelled captions. HtB's typewriter was a big help for that last.
The pictures were taken from both when the quartet went into the Chamber, originally, and then the Goblins doing the rendering.
Draco was doing his best to put down everything the Gryffindors were said to have done.
-===(o|o)===-
It was nerve-wracking watching the twins slowly fly through the trees at the edges of the nest, late Wednesday afternoon. One twin held one end of the hose steady while the other flew ahead, unreeling the hose from its carrier. Harry kreked and barked from above to keep them on track. When that hose ran out, the first twin placed his end to overlap the previous hose, then quickly caught up with the other. They switched roles, pulling the next reel of hose out of an expanded rucksack. Lee guarded them from any web-threads that might interfere or any spiders that weren't asleep in their winter burrows.
Fortunately, the spiders semi-hibernated in the winter, going comatose at temperatures only a few degrees above freezing. It wasn't that cold, yet, but it was cold enough that none of the spiders should be out, unprotected from the wind. They should all be safe and snug in their web-wrapped cocoons under leaves for the smaller ones, in small dugouts for the larger ones, and in caves for the biggest. The blizzard tomorrow night would drive the temperature down, and severely slow the spiders' attempts at escape.
Which was why Harry had them doing this today instead of earlier in the month when it had been warmer. Plus, they were doing it a day early just in case there were any problems that meant they had to delay or needed more time than they thought. They would have an extra day to finish the job and not miss the storm — he hoped.
As the twins went along, they realized that thirty-two hoses didn't quite reach all the way around the hollow the spiders had established themselves in — they had to weave the hoses around trees and obstacles.
Fortunately, most of the hard spell-casting had been done earlier in the month, so making a few more duplicates of the last hose, and casting the timed spells, wasn't too much of a hardship. Awkward and time-consuming, but not impossible.
Once that chore was done, they went up higher and dropped off all fifteen of the time-release bombs, with both silencing and notice-me-nots on them. They made sure to stick one in front of each cave they could find.
The find-me spell got quite a workout finding those locations. Then they flew around the perimeter one last time to make sure none of the spiders bigger than rat was outside the ring of hoses. They found about a dozen, but a quick incendio took care of each one before it even knew it was under attack, and without warning the others.
Harry made sure to place several tracking charms at both the centre and perimeter of the area. It would be darker than dark during the blizzard.
-===(o|o)===-
That Thursday, at breakfast, a Gringotts eagle-owl delivered the shrunken enlarged prints. With only a minor amount of rearranging they were able to open the gallery at three o'clock.
A steady stream of students kept the Small Hall quite crowded.
At dinner that evening, HtB received a lot of contemplative looks as he entered the Great Hall.
The proof displayed on the walls of the Small Hall proved that all of Draco's remarks and complaints about the four Gryffindors were just sour grapes. The twins made sure to repeatedly say that Draco was jealous of the Gryffindors doing what no Slytherin had done.
Draco was obviously envious, they said, that a Gryffindor, and Harry in particular, had managed to find the Chamber of Secrets despite the best efforts of the most learned and powerful Slytherin wizards and witches in the last thousand years to do the same.
They didn't mention that Slytherin's descendants had always known where it was and how to get to it, but had prevented anyone from discovering their secret. Slytherin's descendants had probably been having a good laugh at the futile efforts of their compatriots.
Had the Gaunts kept it under the fidelius charm, barring all but parselmouths from finding it, Harry wondered? That would have prevented anyone from even noticing it! It wasn't until the last of the Gaunts who had attended Hogwarts had died, and the fidelius dispersed over the decades, that the Chamber could have been found, and by then, no one made any serious attempts at finding it. Tom, being a parselmouth, might not even have noticed the fidelius, and thus failed to reinforce it.
That Harry had vanquished the snake, Salazar's personal revenge against the muggle-borns the Slytherins all believed — Harry was sure Malfoy said mud-blood in private — just made it worse.
Not to mention the wealth and renown he had accrued in killing it and harvesting its corpse.
Harry insisted HtB visit Luna at dinner that evening, pointing out that there was no rule that students couldn't sit at other tables. HtB hesitated as he walked into the Great Hall. Ron and Hermione stopped as soon as they saw him slow down. Luna wasn't there, yet, but Harry guided HtB to where she normally sat. When the Ravenclaws, and Ron and Hermione, wanted to know why he was sitting there, "Waiting for Luna, of course," was his answer.
While they waited, and ate, Harry explained to HtB why they were there. HtB relayed what he tapped out. "Well, Hedwig says that Luna's father owns a newsparchment called the Quibbler. Hedwig thinks we should ask her if her father might want to publish the first pictures of the Chamber of Secrets and the Basilisk. Colin will make a few galleons off it, as well as getting his name as the photographer out there."
Ron frowned. "The Quibbler is a bit odd, I'll give you that." He shook his head. "Her father is just as weird as she is."
Harry glared at Ron from his perch on HtB's shoulder.
Ron didn't notice, but Hermione did.
"Hedwig says," HtB continued, "that the Quibbler is actually a savage critique of wizarding society hiding under the umbrella of a quirky newsparchment about mythical creatures." He frowned a moment. "Sort of like Gulliver's Travels, which criticized the sins and corruption of the then-current British ruling class and their cruel exploitation towards others."
HtB cast a brief curious eye on Hedwig. HtB had never had the chance to read that book.
Hermione looked impressed and nodded her head in understanding.
Ron looked puzzled.
HtB shook his head. "Plus, you and I, Hermione," he said to the girl, "thought all the mythical creatures mentioned in the muggle books were not real. Then we found out different when we discovered we were a witch and a wizard, and that dragons, unicorns, Centaurs, and other fabled creatures were real. Perhaps the creatures mentioned in The Quibbler are just as real, but merely not yet discovered by magicals."
Hermione frowned, started to say something, then frowned again.
HtB frowned darkly. "Also, he says she is being picked on by her dorm-mates for being unusual. They call her looney and even take and hide her things."
Both Ron and Hermione looked upset at that revelation.
Luna was quite surprised to see the four of them waiting for her, and even moreso to hear HtB offering her father photos of the Chamber of Secrets. "I suppose he might, I'll definitely ask him," she said after thinking about it for a few moments.
"Good," HtB said, handing over duplicates of all the photos they had displayed in the Small Hall, with the proper captions stuck to the back of each. "You can just send these along, they're same ones in the Small Hall." He nodded, indicating the door to the Great Hall. "I trust your father will decide on a fair payment for Colin Creevey and attribute them accordingly."
He also handed her a parchment repeating basically what he had said in the Headmaster's office of how the snakes in the various portraits had told him about the Chamber of Secrets and the Great King that resided inside it. It also reiterated that there were many parselmouths in India, and that he would be teaching selected Aurors how to speak it.
Tom Riddle was not mentioned, of course. That story he would make sure to send to Rita, later. For the moment, discretion was the watchword about Tom.
She nodded eagerly, slowly shuffling through the pictures. She looked up. "I'll send them with an owl this evening." She started eating her dinner. Or, rather, building a castle out of the mashed potatoes, with carrot- and cheese-sticks for buttresses.
Their sitting with the First-year witch did not go unnoticed among her classmates.
Before the dessert was served, Dumbledore announced that there would be a sign-up sheet for tours of the Chamber of Secrets. The first tour would be on Monday evening, January fourth.
His mission accomplished, HtB finished his pudding and headed back to the dorm. Ron wanted a chess game, and Hermione wanted to rewrite her Potions assignment.
-===(o|o)===-
The pictures and story published in The Quibbler and then in The Daily Prophet about the Chamber of Secrets created quite the scandal. First over the discovery of the famed Chamber of Secrets, then over the death of the basilisk. The sheer size of both stunned most readers.
The Slytherin graduates were most distraught at seeing a non-Slytherin had found what no Slytherin had managed in a thousand years of looking — barring his descendants, of course. What they said among themselves about Harry was not suitable for printing in a public newsparchment.
Naturally, having two dozen of their leading pure-blooded "fine, upstanding citizens" arrested, trialled, and sentenced to Azkaban in September for being amoral sadistic monsters who shouldn't be allowed into any society wasn't helping the pure-bloods in the slightest.
Many of the neutrals in the Wizengamot who had voted with the pure-bloods in the past were looking askance at the remaining conservative pure-bloods and wondering if they, too, were monsters. Maybe the remaining pure-blood conservatives were simply just better at covering their anti-social traits? The rants the neutrals overheard against Harry Potter over discovering the Chamber of Secrets and killing Slytherin's monster weren't helping the conservatives at all — especially considering how dangerous a basilisk was. Never mind how dangerous one of the reported-size that this one was!
Plus, the Conservative pure-bloods still railed at the muggle-borns for failing to respect Wizarding traditions, and not understanding how things worked in the magical society. Refusing to acknowledge that they were actively preventing those muggles from learning of those traditions did them more harm than good as it made them look like hypocrites.
As many letters to the editor of The Daily Prophet over the last couple of months had pointed out, it was the pure-bloods' fault that the muggle-borns were ignorant. They needed a class at Hogwarts that taught new magicals Wizarding traditions and customs. If no one told them what the traditions were, how were the muggle-born supposed to learn them?
The Hogwarts Board of Governors at Hogwarts, all pure-bloods, had consistently refused having such a class for decades. They also complained the loudest about the muggle-borns disrespecting the pure-blood traditions.
It would be like the French taking offense at an Englishman moving to France and not learning to speak French because no one would teach him! The French would be causing the problem, not the Englishman!
One anonymous letter writer even postulated that the pure-bloods needed an opponent to make themselves feel important! So, they made one out of the muggle-borns. Never mind the muggle-borns might be an asset to them.
After all, the OWL and NEWT grades at Hogwarts proved that pure-bloods weren't exclusively at the top with half-bloods and muggle-borns below them. The grades showed them well-mixed with the half-bloods and muggle-born. At least once every ten years or so it was a muggle-born who took the top spot, overall. The other times usually involved a half-blood.
As the letter pointed out, Headmaster Dumbledore, one of the most powerful wizards of the century was a half-blood, not a pure-blood. The same was true for the famous Dark Wizard Grindlewald. Also, Nymphadora Tonks was a Metamorphmagus, a trait not seen for a century. She was a half-blood, her mother from the infamous pure-blood Black family. A family which used to have that trait show up regularly.
If blood made all that big of a difference, shouldn't that be impossible?
This had all settled down to a simmer when the news of the Chamber of Secrets came out and re-ignited it.
Especially when someone pointed out that Harry was a half-blood, and yet he could speak Parseltongue. Which the pure-bloods had been insisting for centuries was a talent only pure-bloods descended from Slytherin could do. The Potters, while pure-bloods, had never shown any signs of that talent, and Lily Potter, nee Evans had been a muggle-born!
The pure-bloods were livid.
The neutrals were starting to distance themselves from the conservatives in both society and the Wizengamot.
-===(o|o)===-
Thursday dawned bright and cold, a big contrast to how it would end. Harry busied himself with sleeping late. He needed to be fully awake tonight to supervise the fire and prevent it from getting out of control. The twins had made over a hundred expanded bags over the last month, finishing off the box of bags he had purchased from Blackpool much earlier in the year. They had then filled each of them with five hundred gallons, two thousand litres, of water using the aguamenti spell. The shrinking spell let the bags fit nicely in his chest-pouch and the impervius spell kept the bags safe.
His plan was for him to remove each bag from the chest-pouch with his beak, as needed, then finite the impervius with his claw-held wand. A second finite would restore the bag to full size and he would drop it. The bag would burst on hitting the ground or tree branch, releasing the water in big explosive wave that would easily extinguish any fire within several yards of the impact, if not more.
Casting the aguamenti charm while flying would also work, but he would have to get really close to the flames. Plus, it would quickly tire him out. It would be better to save that as a last resort.
Especially as it would probably be a long night.
The twins would be on alert, as well, in case he needed help.
Snowy White owls are naturally resistant to below-zero temperatures. As insurance to keep from freezing in the bitterly cold storm, he also had the twins charm his mail-harness to be warm. It should last most of the night.
The storm was still in the start-up phase, slowly moving into position, so it wasn't too terribly windy, yet. That made the flight to the first tracking charm easy. Finding a tree to land in? Not so much. It was as dark as the Hogwarts Dungeons when the torches were out.
Owls have exceptional night-sight, it is true, but even they need some glimmer of light to see. Plus, while they could hear a mouse squeaking under the snow half-a-mile away, they weren't bats that navigated by sound alone!
He had to light his wand with a lumos modified to act as a torch. While the wind wasn't terrible, yet, it was a wind, and he flew around the perimeter of the nest, above the hose, until he was upwind. He landed on a branch at the top of a tree at what he hoped was a safe distance from the charmed hose.
The Death Eater houses he had set on fire gave him a good idea of the distance he would need. Too close and burning-embers thrown by the petrol exploding into flame might land on him and burn his feathers. There was also the consideration that he had been dropping bombs, before, and this was a line of far more petrol than he had worked with previously.
He wasn't going to be taking any chances.
It wasn't a long wait.
-===(o|o)===-