Chapter 3: Shadows in Scarlet

Despite the unease and guilt that now haunted her waking hours, Hermione found herself returning toThe Hogwarts Lexicon of Secretseach night, as if drawn by an invisible tether. The dark accounts she had uncovered so far had left a deep mark on her. The idea that Hogwarts held such memories—such twisted secrets—unsettled her, yet she could not resist the allure of what remained hidden within its pages.

One evening, after the castle had fallen silent, Hermione turned the Lexicon to the next entry. She had reached "R," and a name soon materialized in a bold, angular hand:Regulus Rampart. Her heart skipped a beat—Regulus was a Gryffindor, a fact that immediately piqued her interest. A Gryffindor, marked in this forbidden tome of dark secrets? She hesitated, then began to read.

The entries began innocently enough, detailing Regulus's arrival at Hogwarts in the late 1870s, a time when courage and daring were celebrated above all. Regulus Rampart embodied those values, yet his concept of bravery was laced with a thirst for power and a knack for recklessness. His words grew darker as he described his early years at the castle, recounting tales of thrill-seeking stunts and wild schemes that often left him standing on the edge of catastrophe.

But as Hermione read further, a more disturbing side of Regulus emerged. He wrote of his fascination with dueling, a skill he honed with precision and almost predatory intensity. At first, he challenged only those willing to spar, but soon, the matches took a dangerous turn. Regulus grew impatient with friendly duels, craving something fiercer, something real. He began picking fights under the guise of "practice," escalating to curses meant to injure rather than disarm. To him, pain and danger were mere byproducts of his ambition to become, as he put it, "the most feared Gryffindor in Hogwarts' history."

Hermione felt a chill run down her spine as she read his accounts. She could see, in the twisted courage he described, a distortion of the Gryffindor values she held dear. For Regulus, courage meant superiority, strength meant dominance, and he sought glory through intimidation. The entries grew darker still as he described his descent into forbidden magic. His words revealed a growing obsession with hexes and jinxes, which he practiced in abandoned rooms under the cover of night.

In one particularly chilling entry, he recounted the thrill of casting a hex on a classmate that left them incapacitated for days. He described the rush, the sense of absolute control he felt, watching them suffer while he was left untouched, a hero on the outside but harboring a darkness within."Glory and terror are but two sides of the same blade,"he had written."A true Gryffindor does not cower from either."

Hermione's heart pounded as she continued reading, her fingers trembling on the pages. Regulus's ambition seemed limitless, his hunger for power rivaling even the darkest Slytherins she'd read about. Yet what disturbed her most was the way he manipulated his house's values to justify his actions, twisting courage into cruelty, daring into danger. Gryffindor's virtues had become tools in his hands, weapons for his own advancement.

The Lexicon recorded his story in brutal detail, describing his exploits with unflinching precision. Regulus wrote of a hidden space he had discovered within Gryffindor Tower, a room concealed in shadows and draped in secrecy. There, he would retreat to practice the darkest of his spells, honing his skills in secrecy. In one of his final entries, he hinted at an artifact he had found, an ancient blade left by one of the castle's original inhabitants. He described it as a weapon imbued with "courage wrought in steel, sharp enough to slice through lies and loyalty alike."

Hermione felt a jolt of recognition. The sword—could he have meant Godric Gryffindor's sword? She knew it to be enchanted, but Regulus's writings suggested a much darker history. He hinted that the blade's true power had been suppressed, locked away by enchantments laid upon it after Gryffindor's death. Regulus, with his unrelenting thirst for power, had apparently sought to unlock those lost abilities, to wield the sword in its raw, untamed state.

But there was a final, haunting entry. Regulus had made one last attempt to channel the sword's original power, sneaking it from its concealed location to practice with it in the dead of night. According to his writing, the sword had seemed to respond, pulsing with a life of its own, vibrating with an energy that thrilled him to the core. Yet as he attempted a forbidden spell, the blade turned cold, slipping from his grasp. In an instant, he felt a blinding pain as the sword turned against him, as though repelling him from ever touching it again.

"A true weapon of courage will only serve the worthy,"he had written, his final words shaky."It is not to be wielded by those who mistake bravery for ambition."Hermione read the last line, feeling an unexpected pang of sadness. The Lexicon fell silent on his fate, but she knew in her heart that Regulus Rampart's downfall had been one of his own making, his ambition consuming him like a flame devouring fuel.

In the early morning hours, Hermione closed the Lexicon, her hands cold and her mind haunted by what she'd read. Here was a Gryffindor who had betrayed the very values he swore by, twisting bravery into darkness. And for the first time, she felt the shadows of the past press upon her, as though the castle itself whispered reminders that not all who wore red and gold were pure-hearted.

In the days that followed, Hermione scoured the library for records of Regulus Rampart, but as with so many others, his story was nearly erased. Only a handful of vague references to his time at Hogwarts remained, each one a fragment of a larger tale hidden from the world. She felt herself spiraling, driven by a need to uncover what history had chosen to forget. And as she moved through the days, she couldn't shake the strange, addictive thrill of the Lexicon's secrets, wondering whose story she would uncover next—and how many more shadows lay hidden within the heart of Hogwarts.