Percy kept his hands on the back of the chair until the shaking stopped. Across the office, the black fragment on Dumbledore's desk gave off a thin silver light that had not been there a minute earlier.
Five days had sounded bad enough when Aequor first gave him the number. Now he could feel what had taken the sixth day away, and it was still pressing against the lake.
"He's using it again."
Dumbledore moved the fragment away from Helena's journal. He did it with his wand, and Percy was grateful that somebody in the room had remembered what happened when people touched interesting old objects.
"Can you distinguish the sample from the rest of the disturbance?"
Percy closed his eyes for a moment. His own power was somewhere in that pressure, but it felt stretched thin, like a familiar voice heard through a wall.
"I can tell it's mine. I can't tell where he's holding it."
Amelia had already taken out another sheet of parchment. She wrote three lines, folded it, then looked toward Kingsley rather than the fireplace.
"The injured officers need to be interviewed separately. Find out which container was opened first, and whether the attackers knew what they were taking."
Kingsley nodded and raised his wand. His silver lynx crossed the office before disappearing through the wall, leaving Percy with the unreasonable feeling that it was the only person present who knew exactly where to go.
Harry stood beside Snape's diagrams with his arms folded. He had been quiet since learning that Voldemort could use his own blood, and Percy could guess what he was thinking.
"You're still needed," Percy said. He pulled out the chair and sat before his legs could make that decision for him.
"I know. I was wondering whether he knows that too."
Snape looked up from the fragment. For once, he answered without first making Harry regret asking a question.
"Assume he does. The Dark Lord will not ignore an alternative route into something he wishes to control."
Ron stood closer to Harry. He looked at the diagrams, then turned the sheet with the smallest circle face down.
"Then we should stop discussing Harry like he's a spare key. He can hear us from here."
Dumbledore removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. When he put them back on, he looked directly at Harry.
"Your part remains your decision. Tomorrow is the earliest we might reach the chamber, not a promise that we will perform the repair regardless of what we learn."
Harry let his arms drop. The anger had not left his face, but some of the tension went out of his shoulders.
"Then tell us what we need to learn. All of it."
Dumbledore took a clean sheet and placed it between them. He wrote three questions in ordinary English, which Percy considered a considerable improvement over the original builders' approach.
They needed a route to the lower chamber and a way back from it. They needed to know whether Harry could separate the foreign signature without harming himself, and whether Hermione could release the language without losing everything connected to it.
Ron tapped the first question. His finger remained on the words about coming back.
"We find this part before anyone goes down. I'm rather attached to everyone being above the lake."
----------------------
The shore was quiet when Percy returned that afternoon. McGonagall had cleared the path, and two Aurors stood near the trees with strict instructions to keep students away.
Dumbledore came with him, while Flitwick carried a coil of rope over one shoulder. Percy looked at it as he removed his shoes, then looked at the professor's wand.
"I thought wizards hated doing things normally."
"Only when normal things are inconvenient. A rope remains a very useful object."
Flitwick placed it on a flat stone and checked the knots. There were three loops along its length, each wide enough to fit around a person's waist.
Percy stepped into the lake. He stopped when the water reached his knees, allowing the familiar weight of it to settle around him before he reached toward Aequor.
The guardian answered with an image of the broken gate. A narrow line of pale light ran across its surface, and something dark pushed against that line from the far side.
Percy made himself look beyond it. Aequor's great body curved around the old pillars, holding close to the damage.
"We need to reach the lower chamber. Show me how people used to get there."
For several seconds, the only answer was the movement of water. Then Percy saw feet on stone, a low arch, and a passage that descended beneath a row of narrow windows.
He knew the windows. He had walked past them on the way to Potions often enough to wish they looked out onto something more interesting than wet rock.
"There's an entrance inside the castle. Near the lower dungeons."
Dumbledore moved closer without entering the water. He asked Percy to describe the arch, then nodded slowly.
"There is a blocked passage beneath the western stair. The stonework is older than the surrounding corridor."
Percy turned back to the lake. He tried to hold the image of the passage steady, but Aequor replaced it with something else.
Three people walked down the steps. Behind them, a fourth person waited beside a shallow channel cut into the floor.
"Who stays behind?"
The answer reached him as a feeling of waiting and keeping watch. Percy translated it aloud, then asked the question Ron would ask first.
"Does the fourth person bring them back?"
Aequor showed him the channel filling with water. Three dim lights moved along it, reached the person at the top, and brightened again.
Percy could not see faces in the image. He could feel exhaustion in the three returning figures, but the fourth remained separate from the gate.
"Someone has to stay outside the working part. They keep the way back open."
Flitwick lowered the rope he had been examining. His expression became more intent, and he asked whether the channel carried water from the lake or power from the seal.
Percy repeated the question. Aequor answered by showing him rain gathering on a hillside, running beneath roots and entering the stone passage.
"Ordinary water. At least before it reaches the chamber."
Dumbledore looked toward the castle. The western side stood in shadow, and Percy could see the small windows far above the waterline.
"A separate supply. That may be why the passage survived when the lake entrance became unstable."
Percy took another step. The borrowed pressure stirred at the edge of his senses, and he felt a sudden urge to reach toward it.
His power was being used somewhere he could not see. Every part of him wanted to pull it back before Voldemort found another way to hurt someone with it.
The water around his ankles tightened. Aequor's warning struck him before he could follow the feeling any farther.
Percy stopped and clenched his hands. Dumbledore noticed at once and asked what had happened.
"It doesn't want me following the sample."
Aequor sent another image. Percy saw his hand gripping a rope, then a second hand closing around it from the other end.
He understood that one without help. If he pulled hard enough to find the vial, he might give Voldemort a direct connection to everything he still held.
"Right. No tug of war with the Dark Lord."
The pressure eased around his feet. Percy took that as agreement, although Aequor might simply have been pleased that he had understood something quickly.
Before leaving, he asked whether the passage would admit Dumbledore. Aequor showed the Headmaster standing beside the channel, then placed the three lights farther below him.
It was not a refusal. It was also not permission to bring an army into the chamber, and Percy repeated that distinction carefully.
----------------------
Harry's first lesson had ended by the time Percy returned. Snape had left him in an empty classroom with a headache, a glass of water and instructions that Ron considered unnecessarily unpleasant.
"He said you should avoid becoming excited. Naturally, I offered to read him your notes."
Hermione looked up from the table. She had arranged three clean pieces of parchment beside a small bowl, and Percy noticed that Helena's journal was firmly closed.
"Did it work?"
"He threatened to hex me. I thought that showed improvement."
Harry was sitting with his eyes shut. He opened them when Percy took the chair opposite him and waited until Ron had moved away from the water before speaking.
"I could find the edge of it for a moment. Then I tried to hold it, and it disappeared."
Percy remembered the rope in Aequor's warning. He kept that thought to himself until Harry had finished explaining.
Snape had asked Harry to identify an ordinary memory first. Harry chose breakfast, then the taste of the strengthening potion, and finally a moment from the dream in which the fear of death had briefly gone away.
That last feeling had been easier to recognize because it did not belong to him. Harry could be afraid of dying without wanting what Voldemort wanted, and for a few seconds the difference had become something he could sense.
"Then Snape told me to stop pushing it away. Apparently that was also wrong."
Hermione drew two small circles on one of her sheets. She left a gap between them and rested her quill on the table.
"If it uses your magic to stay stable, pushing against it may still be feeding it. You would be using more magic to keep it out."
Harry looked tired enough to fall asleep in the chair. Percy decided that this was a poor time to mention that the lake was also teaching lessons through unpleasant surprises.
"Did Snape say you made any progress?"
"He said I had finally identified the problem. I don't think he meant the fragment."
Ron smiled, but Hermione was still looking at the two circles. She crossed out the line she had started to draw between them and turned the parchment over.
"We shouldn't decide what the exercise means before he checks it. I nearly did the same thing with the word for surrender."
Percy told them about the passage and the fourth person. Ron stopped smiling halfway through the explanation and sat down beside Hermione.
"So there is a job for someone who isn't one of the locks."
"There may be," Hermione said. She looked at him carefully, then added another sentence before he could object. "We need to see the passage first."
"Good. I was getting tired of holding people's coats while they tried to die."
Harry gave a small laugh and leaned back. It was the first time Percy had heard him laugh since the stolen evidence arrived in the conversation.
Hermione lifted the empty bowl. She had been practising with an ordinary memory under Flitwick's supervision, using the Pensieve in Dumbledore's office before returning to write down what she could still recall.
The memory was of a page she had read that morning. She still knew the facts on it after removing the memory, but the exact shape of the ink and the sound of her own reading became less clear.
"So you can't just take the words out," Percy said. He studied the empty bowl as though it might contain an answer that everyone else had missed.
"Not all of them. The memory and the understanding aren't the same thing."
She sounded frustrated, but she had written that distinction at the top of her notes. Percy thought it looked more useful than another translation promising that everything would probably be fine.
----------------------
They found the blocked arch before dinner. Dumbledore brought McGonagall and Flitwick, and Harry came only after Snape had checked him again and agreed that a short inspection was unlikely to worsen the connection.
Ron carried the rope. Hermione carried a lamp with an ordinary flame, because nobody wanted to introduce another spell into a passage the entity might already know.
The arch stood behind a shelf of cracked storage jars. Percy had expected something grander, but Hogwarts appeared to store most of its important secrets behind things nobody wanted to clean.
McGonagall moved the shelf aside with one controlled movement of her wand. Dust spread across the floor, exposing a pale line of stone beneath the darker blocks.
Dumbledore examined the wall without touching it. Flitwick knelt beside the lowest stone and brushed dust from a shallow groove.
"This was not filled in carelessly. The upper stones can be moved without disturbing the arch."
Percy crouched beside him. There was water beyond the wall, a slow trickle running along the right side of a descending passage.
He listened to it for several seconds before speaking. The flow felt small and ordinary, with none of the empty places that marked the entity's presence.
"The channel is still running. I can't feel anything else in there."
"That is useful," Dumbledore said. He glanced at the others before raising his wand. "It is not a guarantee."
He lifted the first block and set it on the floor. McGonagall took the next, and Flitwick checked each exposed section before they continued.
By the time the opening reached Percy's shoulders, cold air was moving into the corridor. It smelled of wet stone and old soil, with a faint saltiness that did not belong beneath a freshwater lake.
Hermione held the lamp higher. Steps descended beyond the arch, and the shallow channel ran beside them exactly where Aequor had shown it.
Ron set down the rope. He counted the first seven steps aloud, then stopped when Percy raised a hand.
A mark had appeared on the wet stone beside the channel. It was small, but Percy recognized the curve from the fragment in Dumbledore's office.
Hermione drew in a breath and leaned closer. Before she could speak, Harry caught her sleeve.
"Don't read it aloud."
She stopped with her mouth half open. Then she nodded and took out a clean sheet instead.
Percy looked from the mark to the dark passage. Water continued to move down the channel, but a second ripple travelled slowly against it.
He had not caused that ripple. Far below them, something had noticed the opening of the door.
Dumbledore lowered his wand and motioned everyone back. Percy stayed beside the arch long enough to feel the ripple reach the first step and stop.
Aequor's meaning came through the water, tired but clear. This time, the guardian gave Percy two ideas together, and neither was a number.
The way was open. They must not follow the voice.
===========================
We found the stairs! YIPPEEE GVSJKOCVIJLSGHUO
[SHAMELESS PLUG]
If you're enjoying the chaos, you can support the story and read ahead on Patreon. Every bit helps keep the chapters coming and the instant noodle supply alive.
p a t r e o n . c o m /Reader004 (remove spaces)
No pressure, though. Thanks for reading!