Happy 7th Birthday Fanatical Fics! I heard you like Magic Treehouse, so here's this:

Harry was too excited to sleep.

He put his glasses on. Far away, in the yard down below, he heard the big clock.

Bong!

Bong!

Bong!

Three rings.

Three o'clock in the morning.

Harry got up and looked out the window. A ghost was flickering down the hall.

Harry lit the end of his wand by whispering the spell he had learned in class: "Lumos!"

The end of his wand lit with a soft light.

He picked up the scroll he had been writing notes on. He had made a list of all the strange things that had happened.

–Found secret tunnel behind the statue of Gregory the Smarmy

–Followed tunnel to a treehouse in the forbidden forest

–Found an Even More Restricted Library inside

–Pointed wand at a picture in a book and made a wish

–Went to the time in the book

–Pointed wand to a picture of Hogwarts and made a wish

–Came back to Hogwarts

Harry pushed his glasses higher up on his nose. Who was going to believe any of this?

He tried to think of what anyone would have said in his life before coming to Hogwarts. His horrible aunt and uncle, the Dursleys, would have hated anything magical. Mrs. Figg, his babysitter, would have only talked about her cats.

Harry had talked to Dumbledore, the way he did at the end of every adventure.

But this time, even Dumbledore seemed not to believe him. And Harry hadn't been able to prove that a secret tunnel existed behind the statue.

When Harry went to show his teachers, the door was gone!

The only one who would believe him were his best friends, Ron Weasley and Hermoine Granger, who had gone with him to the time of Wendolyn the Weird, and seen her burn up.

She was fine, of course. She liked being burned up very much.

"Can't sleep?"

Harry had gone down to the Gryffindor common room, only to find Hermoine and Ron already there.

"No," said Harry, showing them his scroll.

Hermoine made a face. She did not like the list that Harry had made.

"What's wrong with it?"

"You left out the most important part," Hermoine said.

"What part is that?"

"The part about the sword."

"Oh, right."

Harry picked up his quill and wrote:

–This was there, too:

And he drew a picture of the long, thin sword they had found while they were in the past with Wendelin.

"It doesn't look very much like what we found," Ron said.

Harry thought Ron was right. It should be green.

Hermoine had some color changing ink. It was special because it changed color with the mood of the writer. She thought very hard about things that made her jealous, and then colored in the sword Harry drew with green ink.

"That's not the only thing your list is missing," said the talking fireplace in Gryffindor Common Room, who was also Harry's godfather.

"What else am I missing?"

"The magic person you saw."

"We don't even know for sure if we saw a magic person," Ron explained.

"Someone built the treehouse, and made sure to put it where Dumbledore wouldn't know. Someone put books in it. And someone lost a sword that glows green all the way back in 1689, the year when the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy was first signed.

Really seeing all the important wizards and Muggle kings sign the special treaty had been exciting. Seeing Wendelin the Weird there, even though his textbooks in school said she died centuries earlier, was even more exciting. But being chased by Muggles and other magical creatures had not been exciting at all. That had been terrifying.

The friends sat and talked about who it could be. Hermoine thought it was most likely Ronan or another one of the centaurs. The half-human, half-horses lived in the woods and some of them used some kind of magic.

Ron thought it could be Dumbledore. But then Dumbledore would have to be pretending that he didn't know anything about the tunnel and the treehouse.

Harry didn't like to think of who it might be.

"I want to go back to the tree house right now," Harry said. He really wanted to more than he knew how to say.

"It's after hours," said Hermoine. "We would get in trouble if the teachers saw us out of bed."

"Besides, it's dark and scary out in the forbidden forest," Ron said, "We could get eaten."

Those were both points Harry couldn't argue with. "I guess we should wait."

But he was worried.

Whoever had built the treehouse was going to know that someone had been inside, and maybe they would be angry.

"I think you should go," said the fireplace. "I can be a distraction for you while it's still night, and you have the magic invisibility cloak. Then you could check on the treehouse and still be back in time for class."

"Okay, I'm going," said Harry.

Outside the window, the sky was dark gray by the time all three all three had changed into their regular school robes, then hopped into the fireplace using the special flue powder that would send them near Gregory the Smarmy.

"Ouch!" said the fireplace when Ron accidentally stepped on his nose.

Then they were zooming through the fireplace.

Swoosh!

They stepped out into the dark, cold fireplace near the statue.

Harry had his invisibility cloak with him, but it seemed like they didn't need it. No one was nearby, and the secret door was there this time– right where it hadn't been when he tried to prove it to Dumbledore.

They snuck through the door and carefully closed it behind them.

The tunnel leading to the treehouse was the strangest one Harry had ever seen at Hogwarts. Every few feet, a torch hung in a wall sconce on the wall. But it was a regular, flashlight-type torch, like the kind you could find on Privet Drive where he used to live with the Dursleys.

Well, not quite.

These were classic old torches from the time of his parents. Harry realized they were all normal the kind of electric lights that you could find in the Muggle world during the time when Voldemort was here at school.

Then they reached the end of the tunnel and climbed a little ladder that led out to where the treehouse stood.

All around them the woods were dark and scary.

But there it was.

A white, gleaming tree, that shimmered like ghost hair in the gray morning light. Above them, owls flitted by catching a late meal, or gathering parcels for delivery.

And there was the house, high in the branches.

"Help!" cried Ron. But it wasn't because he was in danger. It was only because he had accidentally dropped his rat, Scabbers.

"Why did you bring him?" Harry demanded. Neither of them had brought their pets, even though Hermoine's cat, Crookshanks, was smarter than most animals. And Harry thought Hedwig, his owl, was smarter than most people.

"I couldn't just leave him behind," said Ron.

"Bet you could," said Hermoine.

Just like last time, they got close to the tree and Hermoine tapped the bark, trying to find a foothold on the smooth surface, and then Ron tried, too, just like last time.

But when Harry touched the bark of the white tree, a row of steps grew out of the bark in a spiral all around the tree.

It felt as if the tree had been waiting, just for him.