"Sleepover night!" Blaise declared, grinning widely. He gestured widely. "We've got board games, snacks, and even popping corn! And we can finally try out the hammocks!"
"I've already tried them out," Harry told Blaise. "They're not bad. Pretty okay, once you get used to the swinging."
Blaise shot Harry a scowl, while Susan looked skeptical.
"I know you want a coven sleepover for safety for the full moon," she said, "but is the coven house really the safest place for us?"
"Yes," Blaise said immediately. "The Bones estate might not have had the silver wards redone yet. Greyback probably knows it was Hermione who introduced the legislation. And this house has insanely powerful wards on it."
"We could sleep in the Ritual Room if you're worried," Luna suggested to Susan.
"No, I don't think that's necessary," Susan said hastily, immediately backing off. "I just don't know if all these measures are really needed in the first place."
"The Wizengamot was worried about it on Tuesday," Hermione said, plopping herself onto the couch. "They kept fighting about how best to protect the Ministry in the event of another attack."
Harry looked puzzled. "Couldn't the Ministry just lock up for the night?"
"There are departments that can't just lock up, but that was essentially the end result," Hermione said. She sighed. "For what it's worth, I think Era was right – Greyback's already attacked the Ministry. He's bound to have another target for tonight."
"All the more reason to hole up here!" Blaise said cheerily, bringing over butterbeers.
"I guess that makes sense," Susan said grudgingly. "And this place is set up for us to sleep. We each have our own rooms even, practically."
"No sleeping in separate rooms," Blaise declared immediately. "There's safety in numbers. We all sleep together in the hammock room."
Susan rolled her eyes while Luna giggled.
"Well, we are in the coven house," Harry said. "And it's a full moon. Are there any rituals we should be doing?"
"You don't just pick a ritual from a book at random like a recipe to try out, Harry," Susan said, amused. "We need a specific goal, careful planning—"
"We could," Hermione pointed out. "There are books of pre-made rituals. Most people don't custom-craft rituals to suit their needs."
Susan turned to shoot Hermione a dark look, while Luna spoke up.
"The Ritual Room has a lot of components already," she chimed in. "Depending what we want to do, an impromptu ritual might not be out of reach."
Harry was grinning widely, and Susan threw her arms up in despair. "Fine! Ignore me! Just do rituals willy-nilly, with no respect—"
"We're not saying we'd do them without respect, Susan," Hermione said. "Just… some of the simpler ones might not take a lot of preparation."
"It feels wrong to do ritual magic at a sleepover party," Susan grumbled.
"We don't even know what we'd want to do," Harry reassured her. "We're just talking, Susan. No harm in that."
Susan looked resigned, while Blaise was amused.
"What do we want to do, then?" he asked. "What's something we're working on?"
"The Greengrass' fertility issue," Susan said, "but Hermione thinks that's environmental."
"It doesn't make sense as a genetic issue or magic issue," Hermione argued. "I'll look into it more. I'm going with my parents to the muggle library over the weekend, and I'll find more books on pregnancy and whatnot then."
"Hermione will have to do a demonstration of Fiendfyre for her new followers," Luna suggested.
"We don't really need a ritual for that," Blaise said, raising an eyebrow. "She already used it on all the dementors – I don't think she needs more practice now."
"Oh," Luna said. "I just thought it'd be nice to be fireproof."
Harry snickered.
"Hermione wants to make those complicated pendants," Harry said. "Is there a transportation ritual to make something like a portkey?"
"Not that I'm aware of," Hermione sighed. "That would probably require customization, anyway."
"We could try and find another horcrux," Luna suggested. "Maybe we could use a tracing ritual to follow the connection from Tom Riddle's diary to another one."
They all sat in silence for a moment.
"Does that exist?" Harry asked finally.
"It might?" Blaise ventured. "People have been losing things for ages. They've probably got a small ritual for small things, and a bigger ritual for bigger things."
"It'd be hard to do," Susan said, "given we'd be following a connection that isn't ours. Tom doesn't have magic of his own, either – he's just using Hermione's – so he wouldn't be of any help."
"Maybe a clairvoyance ritual?" Hermione suggested. "Instead of 'finding' anything and pulling it through, we could see where it's kept."
"You don't think Voldemort put anti-scrying magic on his horcruxes?" Blaise drawled.
"I think he might have gotten sloppy towards the end," Hermione pointed out. "He wasn't exactly all there at that point, was he?"
Susan looked tentatively excited.
"Do we want to do this?" she asked. "A vision ritual I don't have much of a problem with. And it might help in the future."
"Why not?" Blaise said cheerily, heaving himself off the couch. "Let's see what we can do."
The moon wasn't fully risen in the sky yet, the last vestiges of sunlight still peeking over the horizon. Hermione used the fading light to dig a ritual book out of her expandable bag, and Harry led the way down into the tree to the ritual room, his wand alight as he led the way.
The solid gold door at the base was still as intimidating and impressive as it had been the first time they'd seen it, handprints, runes, and gems gleaming in the light of Harry's wand.
"This is still the coolest," Blaise said, slotting his hand into his handprint.
"Agreed," Hermione murmured.
Once their hands were all in place, there was a heavy THUNK noise, and the door began to swing open silently. They all went in, looking around at the huge stone chamber once more.
"What do we need for this sort of ritual?" Luna asked, wandering around the perimeter and looking at the stored components there.
"Not sure," Hermione said. She scanned her ritual book, her wand alight and aloft. "Most of these rituals to find things are conjuration rituals, not divinatory rituals. And the divinatory rituals have a bunch of warnings along with them."
"Really?" Harry asked, coming over to look over her shoulder. "Why's that?"
"Apparently, it borders on Time magic," Hermione explained. "Sitting in the wrong place could end up with you being thrown through time."
"Are you serious?" Blaise asked, turning to look at Hermione incredulously. "You took Divination for a year. With an idiot, to hear you tell it. And now suddenly divination is risky and dangerous?"
"The warnings say that divination rituals have to open up portals into timelines to work," Hermione said. "So… yeah, I'd say that's pretty dangerous."
Blaise groused and went back to looking at all the lines in the floor again, muttering about stupid portals making things difficult all the while.
"We could modify a conjuration ritual and combine it with an illusion ritual circle," Hermione said, thinking hard. "So it'll search for and find a horcrux, project an image but nothing else, and if we don't open the illusion circle at the end, it'll just snuff out."
Susan gave Hermione a look, but Hermione was on a roll.
"We could use this pattern, with the squares and circles in the middle…"
As she traced lines in the floor with her wand, the floor shifted, leaving only the channels she specified. She'd never done an illusion ritual before, so she referenced her book as she went around.
"Blaise, can you look up the words for 'horcrux' in ancient runes?" she asked. "Harry, can you get us some quartz? Round spheres, if we have them."
"On it," said Harry, going at once to scour the shelves.
"Do we need salt for this one?" Susan asked, resigned. "Or blood?"
"We're going to try and break possible scrying wards to see a fragment of the Dark Lord's soul," Blaise said. "Even I know this one will need blood."
"Do we need a sacrifice?" Luna asked, blinking.
"A sacrifice?" Harry repeated, alarmed.
"It'll make the ritual have more power to get through blocking magic," Luna pointed out. "We might not need it, but we'd have it if we needed."
"I'd… really rather not," Hermione said, biting her lip uneasily. "Elements, I'm fine with sacrificing. But other things… that gets dodgy fast."
"Really?" Harry asked, looking over. "Like what?"
"Like… if your mother is sick, and you do a ritual to heal her," Hermione said. "If you sacrifice your memories of your mother to bring her back to health, you'll never get them back. Your mother would be healed, but you would never remember your mother again."
"Sign me up," Blaise muttered. Hermione shot him a look.
"Usually sacrifices are just burning herbs," Susan reassured Harry. "Things like that. But… they can get more intense."
"There's a reason people are wary of celebrating Samhain now instead of Halloween," Blaise reminded them all, his tone dark. "The Dark Lord sacrificed people."
"We don't have anything connected to Voldemort besides the diary anyway, and we're not sacrificing that," Hermione said, bringing the discussion around back to the topic at hand. "We're basically just going to conjure an image of a horcrux in its natural environment."
"Oh, that's not too complicated," Susan said, brightening. "I'll get the knives."
They all began setting up the ritual circle. Harry was putting crystal balls in the small circles Hermione had marked out, while Luna placed and lit candles where appropriate. Blaise marked out the runes for 'horcrux' around the center circle, Hermione put the diary in the middle of the center circle, and Susan laid out knives at each person's place on the floor.
"This is the first time we'll have a 3D circle," Harry said, looking at the channels in front of him. "Does that still make it closed? If the candles are on a different plane than the blood?"
"I would imagine so," Hermione said. "The candles' flames have always burned on a higher plane than the circles, haven't they?"
Harry paused. "I didn't think of that."
When it came time, they all sat around the ritual circle, breathing deeply to center themselves and their magic.
"Am I the only one that finds it ironic that we're doing a ritual on the full moon," Blaise said quietly, his tone dry, "in complete darkness with no moonlight involved?"
Hermione and Luna broke into giggles, quickly trying to stifle them at Susan's sharp look.
When it was time, they each took a knife to their hand, cutting them and letting blood drip out.
"Wish I could use my arm for this," Harry grumbled. "The hand bloody hurts."
"You direct your magic and will through your hands, Harry," Luna told him chidingly. "Not through your forearm veins."
"I know, but still—"
Once the circle had connected and closed, they took each other's hands. A hum of power passed through Hermione, and she could feel the magic of her covenmates' thrumming through her, through them, uniting their magic into one big ring.
"Past, present, future; three in one," Hermione chanted. "We call on you to help our will be done."
The center of the circle began to cloud with white, opaque smoke that seemed to issue from nowhere. It roiled inside, and no matter how many times Hermione had done rituals like this, the sheer power and magnitude of ritual magic never failed to somehow amaze her.
"With our magic, we bid you let us see," she finished, "where the next horcrux just might be."
Abruptly, the white smoke spiraled, turning into a giant sphere. It swirled more and more fiercely, before the candle flames flared and the sphere suddenly turned clear.
"Is that it?" Harry whispered.
A moment later, it became very apparent that that was not it; the clarity within the sphere changed, instead showing them an odd reflection of them all in the ritual chamber, before the image changed, now showing the spiraling stairs inside the giant tree.
It was like a camera going on a mad dash of a journey, Hermione thought, as the picture showed the tree house briefly before erupting into the night sky. The reflection of the moon was nice at least, and if she only looked at the top part of the sphere, she didn't feel quite as motion sick as watching the reflection of the land flash by on the bottom was making her feel as the sphere sped through the air.
Abruptly, a castle they all knew well came into view, and they gasped, exchanging looks.
"There's a horcrux inside of Hogwarts?" Susan breathed. "And Dumbledore doesn't know?"
"Apparently," Blaise murmured.
The vision wasn't done; it swooped inside the castle through the Astronomy tower, spiraling down staircases until it came to a platform.
"That's the 7th floor," Harry said. "The Gryffindor common room isn't far, just in another wing—"
The vision seemed to have no desire to go to the Gryffindor common room, though; instead, it wavered in front of the wall of the 7th floor corridor before a door mysteriously appeared, the orb sweeping in through it.
"Magically-appearing doors," Hermione noted aloud. "We'll need to ask the House Elves about that one."
The room the vision had taken them into was enormous and cluttered, filled with junk. The vision zoomed around piles of junk for a while, before stopping near a chipped bust of an ugly old warlock.
"Morgana alive," Luna breathed. "Is that…"
A discolored tiara lay forgotten on a pile, silver oxidized into a patina. Its dark blue gems had gained a dull sheen to them from oil and dust, and the piece didn't look like much. The vision stayed still now, though, displaying the tiara to them all clearly.
"I think it's done," Harry said. "So…"
"That's Ravenclaw's lost diadem," Luna said immediately, her eyes wide. "She's wearing it in her portrait, as well as her statue."
"Ravenclaw's diadem?" Blaise repeated.
"It's said to enhance the wisdom of the wearer," Susan said, examining the vision with keen eyes. "'Wit beyond measure is man's greatest treasure' and all that."
"So Voldemort turned it into a horcrux?" Harry asked.
"Apparently," Hermione murmured. "Not very 'lost' if it's been in Hogwarts this whole time, is it?"
"It was lost in Albania," Luna objected. "Helena Ravenclaw hid it just before she died. Countless Ravenclaws have searched for it."
"So we're thinking Voldemort found it somehow, then?" Harry asked. "So he found it, cursed it into a horcrux, and then hid it in Hogwarts?"
"Hiding a Dark artifact right under Dumbledore's nose seems like the type of thing he would do," Susan said darkly.
"Who knows?" Blaise said. "Maybe it's anchoring the Dark curse over the DADA position."
There was a silence as they pondered this.
"Actually…" Susan said, gnawing at her cheek. "When did that curse start?"
"I think the seventies?" Hermione said, scrunching up her face. "I know that the teacher in 1973 got eaten by a Venomous Tentacula, and the one for 1974 got hit with the Midas curse while dueling in Hogsmeade."
"The Midas curse?" Blaise repeated, incredulous. "Please tell me that turns someone into solid gold."
"Of course it does," Hermione said, smirking. "Very illegal nowadays, of course. No idea what happened to the poor guy."
"From the looks of it, they might have just chucked him in there," Harry said, nodding towards the vision bubble in the middle of the ritual circle. "Looks like that room's got everything anyone ever lost somewhere in Hogwarts."
"We'll have to look for the gold statue of the dead DADA teacher when we go to get the horcrux, then," Susan said, eyes glinting in amusement behind her glasses.
"Are we done with the vision?" Hermione asked them all, glancing around. At their nods, she took a deep breath and straightened her back. "Right, then. Future, Present, Past; one in three, we thank you for guiding our magic to let us see. We've seen through this object's guise; now to Time, we close our eyes."
She closed her eyes, sure her covenmates were doing the same. There was a weird cool wind in the chamber, then nothing, and she felt the hum of magic through her hands dull. Hermione opened her eyes to see the others had broken apart and were now stretching, bodies and limbs sore from sitting on the stone floor.
"That was neat," Harry said, rubbing his healed hand. "Never knew you could spy on things like that."
"Most things are warded against scrying," Luna told him. "The only reason we could see that horcrux is because we had the magic of this horcrux guiding us, I think."
"Makes sense to me." Susan scooped up the diary and tossed it back to Hermione. "So. What are we thinking? Wait till we get back to school to get this one? Or break in over the summer and get it now?"
"Let's not overcomplicate things," Blaise said, scoffing. "We can wait a month or so. There's a few others we can still hunt for in the meantime, no?"
As they went back up to the main house, filing one by one up the stairs, Luna raised a point.
"Do we know how to destroy a horcrux without destroying the object it's in?" she asked. "I would really rather we not melt Ravenclaw's lost diadem in basilisk venom."
Hermione bit her lip.
"I know of at least one way we can get the soul shard out," she hedged. "We'll have to see if there's any other way. I don't know what our options are."
"Wizarding exorcism!" Harry declared loudly, grinning. "We'll have to find holy symbols, so for Hermione, that'll be a book—"
"It'd be a blasted broom for you, wouldn't it?"
"No, it'd be the Snitch – a golden winged ball, that's much more of an inspiring holy symbol, don't you think—"
"Blaise just gets a photo of Hermione—"
"Oh, shut up. I'd have a wand, you dolt—"
They bickered happily about what it would take to construct a hypothetical wizarding exorcism all the way up the stairs, leaving everyone in a happy and playful mood before they had to get ready for bed.
The full moonlight shone through a window as they climbed into their hammocks to go to sleep, still teasing each other as they did, the cold light illuminating why they'd decided to spend the night protected in their coven house in the first place, despite the fact it'd long since left any of their minds.
