The word attempt looked harmless at the top of Hermione's page. Percy suggested writing it in larger letters so nobody could accidentally mistake it for a promise.
Hermione underlined it instead. Beside her, Dumbledore moved the two covered bowls farther apart and asked Flitwick for the result of his inspection.
The smaller drop was ordinary rainwater now. It accepted a warming charm, reflected the lamp correctly, and failed to produce anything sinister when Ron called it several names Professor McGonagall hadn't approved.
"That proves what it is now," Flitwick said. "It does not prove what might have accompanied it through a larger opening."
"Comforting distinction," Percy said. "I was getting dangerously cheerful."
They weren't going to repair the whole seal. The plan was to enter the lower chamber, interrupt the false claim using the moment when Voldemort's damaged clamp released its pressure, and leave before the return channels opened fully.
Hermione had written the intended limits below the heading. No complete invocation, no surrender of an entire power or memory, and no attempt to draw the stolen sample back towards Percy.
Harry read the last line twice. "And if it doesn't let go?"
"We withdraw," Dumbledore said. "An unsuccessful attempt leaves us with a problem we already possess. Continuing beyond our limits may give us another."
Snape looked as though he could provide an alphabetical list of those problems. Instead he asked Harry to describe the sensation he would use to distinguish his own magic from the foreign pressure.
Harry talked about his broom. He described the moment before he pushed off, when being afraid and wanting to fly belonged to him at the same time, and Percy watched Snape listen without interrupting.
"Not a happy thought," Harry said. "Just mine."
"Precisely."
Ron leaned towards Percy. "If he starts giving points, check whether he's been replaced."
Percy almost laughed. Then he felt the distant clamp tighten, and the sound caught in his throat before becoming something much less useful.
The adjustment lasted longer than before. Whoever was handling the sample had learned to hold it steady, at least for a few extra breaths, and Percy told Dumbledore before anybody could count on yesterday's gaps lasting forever.
There wasn't going to be a comfortable moment. They settled for a moment when everyone understood how to stop, which Percy suspected was what adults usually meant when they said a plan was ready.
----------------------
Flitwick showed Ron the new arrangement one last time. The upper slab and the return tongue could now be held separately, with two plain wooden markers showing their positions in a narrow inspection slot.
One marker meant the entrance channel was open. The other meant the way back remained clear, and Ron checked the second before touching anything connected to the first.
McGonagall stood behind him with the safety rope. Dumbledore would watch the channel itself, while Flitwick watched the markers and the wedges that prevented the old mechanism from closing both routes together.
"And you," Ron told Percy, "will actually climb when I pull. No stopping to investigate mysterious noises."
"There goes my entire personality."
Ron didn't smile until Percy nodded. Then he handed over the lamp and checked Harry's knot with enough force to make Harry complain.
Hermione carried no copy of the old language. She had left her notes upstairs, and when Percy glanced at her empty hands she explained that she didn't want something in front of her making the next line look inevitable.
They descended with the rope between them. The channel ran downhill today, obedient enough that Percy trusted it less than he had when it was visibly doing something wrong.
At the last bend, Aequor's presence settled beyond the wall. Percy felt the guardian's weight take up strain somewhere deeper than the chamber, and the brief image that followed showed a great body braced against a door.
Holding, the impression said. It made no suggestion that holding would be easy.
The chamber was dry except for the sea hollow. A shallow lens of water sat inside it, perfectly still, with a dark point at its centre that failed to reflect the lamp.
Harry stopped at the threshold. His hand moved towards his forehead, paused, and dropped to his side.
"Cold. Still separate."
Hermione stood beside the hollow marked for mind, keeping her eyes above the inscription. Percy took the sea position, and the lamp between them cast three shadows back towards the doorway.
For a moment he could see how the chamber had been used before Hogwarts existed. Three people standing where they had chosen to stand, another waiting beyond the agreement, water carrying away something borrowed instead of taking a life as payment.
Then the dark point in the hollow opened like an eye. The impression vanished, and Percy remembered that old intentions didn't make present machinery safe.
----------------------
They waited through the first adjustment. The lens of water thickened, lifting above the stone without spilling, and a pressure shaped like Percy's own command pressed against his senses.
He let it pass. His hands remained open at his sides, and he concentrated on the ordinary dampness inside his shoes instead of the water inviting him to recognise it.
Hermione made a small sound. Harry looked across at her, and she shook her head before he could ask.
"I haven't answered."
The water settled. Percy felt the stolen sample become distinct for half a heartbeat, and he gave the signal by lowering two fingers towards his knee.
Harry closed his eyes. Hermione let out a slow breath, and Percy allowed one drop of water to rise from his wet sleeve into his palm.
It was a deliberately small act. He held the drop there long enough to know it had answered him freely, then lowered his hand over the dry edge of the sea hollow without letting it touch the stolen water.
"This is what I brought," he said. "I didn't bring that."
The words were ordinary English. They weren't a spell or a claim to command the whole lake, but the distinction mattered to Percy strongly enough that the drop stopped trembling.
Hermione refused the sentence waiting behind her teeth. Harry opened his eyes and looked at Percy rather than at the dark centre of the hollow, keeping hold of the moment before flight.
The stone beneath them clicked. A hairline division appeared between Percy's single drop and the lens of water, and for one astonishing second the chamber treated them as different things.
Percy felt the stolen sample fall away from him. The relief was so sharp that he nearly followed it, almost reaching down the connection to make the separation complete.
Harry caught the movement. "Leave it."
Percy flattened his hand. The single drop slid from his palm onto the stone, and the return groove nearest him brightened with a thread of silver water.
Hermione inhaled sharply. Her shadow had turned towards the central depression while she remained perfectly still, and Percy gave the rope three hard pulls before he knew why he was frightened.
Something spoke from the floor. It didn't use the voice from his old kitchen this time, and that restraint was worse than the imitation had been.
"I can send them back."
Harry went white. Hermione's fingers closed against her robes, but her feet stayed where they were until the rope tugged them towards the door.
"The people from the shop," the voice said. "The man in the road. Every place you left empty."
Percy could not tell whether it was a lie. That was the hook, clean and deliberate, and he hated it for understanding that certainty wasn't necessary.
"We aren't agreeing to anything," Hermione said. She took another step towards the doorway.
The next line was already moving under her words. Percy couldn't understand it, but he felt the invitation in its rhythm, and Hermione clapped a hand over her mouth as though she could stop meaning by stopping sound.
Harry took her elbow. They moved together towards the doorway while Percy backed after them, watching the silver thread travel down his return groove.
The dark point stretched. For an instant it looked less like an eye than a hole with somebody standing very far behind it, and then the stolen sample tightened around Percy's senses again.
This time the clamp held. Voldemort had found a way to keep the connection steady, and the chamber answered the renewed pressure with a noise like a stone grinding through a tooth.
----------------------
Percy lost the lake. One moment it was beyond the wall, familiar as the weight of his own body, and the next there was nothing where that awareness should have been.
He stumbled. The rope caught his waist before his knee struck the floor, and the shock of needing it frightened him more than the pain.
"Percy!"
He heard Harry clearly. That helped him find the doorway in a room that had suddenly become only stone and lamplight, stripped of the larger world he'd been using without noticing.
"Can't feel it," he said. He forced his foot onto the threshold. "Keep going."
The silver thread reached the narrow tongue in the floor. It gathered against the stone's raised edge, and Percy realised the lower marker upstairs must have shifted despite the wedges.
The way back was closing. Hermione saw it at the same time and dropped to one knee beside the small gap where the tongue could be lifted from the passage.
She didn't read the marks. She put her fingers into the plain recess and pulled, achieving nothing except a scrape across her knuckles.
Harry joined her. Between them the stone moved a fraction, enough for the silver thread to slide underneath, and somewhere above Ron shouted to Flitwick that the second marker was wrong.
A violent knock travelled down the wall. The tongue dropped flat, the rope tightened, and Percy lurched through the doorway as though somebody had dragged a chair out from under a falling man.
Behind him, the dark water rose without a bowl to hold it. It pressed towards the threshold in a shape that was almost a person, with no face and too much intention.
Percy reached for it by reflex. Nothing answered, and the failure brought him back to the only useful thing he could still do.
He picked up the lamp. Harry hauled Hermione upright, and the three of them climbed while something wet struck the bottom step.
The rope moved in firm lengths. Ron wasn't trying to pull them through the stairs; he was giving them enough tension to find the next foothold, while McGonagall took the weight whenever one of them slipped.
Percy counted aloud. The numbers weren't brave or clever, but Hermione joined him at seven, and Harry answered at eight without sounding like someone else.
At the bend, the lake returned. It struck Percy's awareness so abruptly that he nearly fell again, and beneath it Aequor's vast presence held against something pushing hard enough to make the walls creak.
Percy didn't try to help by throwing power at it. He climbed, carrying the lamp like an ordinary person, and trusted the guardian to know which side of the door needed holding.
----------------------
Ron waited until Hermione's shoes cleared the top step. Then he checked the second marker, shouted that the return was clear, and dropped the upper slab with Dumbledore's hand braced beside his on the lever.
The sound cut off in the middle of a splash. Flitwick drove a fresh wedge into place, McGonagall pulled the rope's slack away from the channel, and nobody spoke until the stone stopped vibrating.
Ron counted them. Percy watched his lips move through the numbers before he seemed satisfied enough to breathe.
"Three," Ron said. "Three came back."
Hermione sat against the wall, pressing a clean handkerchief over her scraped fingers. Harry crouched beside her, his glasses crooked and his face still too pale, while Percy put the lamp on the floor before he could drop it.
Water dripped from his sleeve. He lifted one drop with a thought, let it fall immediately, and laughed once with absolutely no amusement.
Snape arrived from the upper corridor carrying his bag. Dumbledore gave him the facts while McGonagall checked Hermione's hand, and Percy was too tired to resent being told to sit still.
Harry's scar had quieted after the channel closed. The foreign pressure remained, but he could distinguish it without forcing himself empty, and Snape ended the examination before exhaustion could turn that success into another experiment.
Hermione remembered the entire descent. She could still understand the language, but the next line no longer crowded her mouth when she thought about the sea hollow.
"Only that part," she said quickly. "I can still feel the rest waiting. We haven't ended the agreement."
Dumbledore nodded. He looked towards Percy, who was listening carefully to a sensation that had become conspicuous by its absence.
The stolen sample was still out there. Percy could sense it faintly when he concentrated, but it no longer pulled at him with every adjustment of the clamp.
"He can't use that route the same way," Percy said. "I don't know how long that lasts."
From beneath the lake, Aequor sent an image of one narrow crack closing beside a much larger seam. The great door remained under strain, and something pressed against it from the side Percy couldn't see.
He described the image without improving it. Ron rubbed both hands down his face and said that one fewer crack was still one fewer crack, which nobody had the energy to dispute.
Then Hermione asked about the voice. The question settled over the passage more heavily than the report of anything they'd managed to close.
"It named the missing officer without a name," she said. "The man in the road. Could it have taken him when the sample was stolen?"
"Could," Dumbledore said. "We have no evidence that its offer was truthful, or that a return would mean what we understand by it. We will give Dorridge the description and compare it with what her people know."
Percy looked at the closed slab. He could still hear the promise in his memory, arranged so neatly around things they wanted that accepting it might have felt like kindness.
That was what it had offered Voldemort too. Different grief, different fear, the same door held open from the wrong side.
----------------------
Snape left them before dinner. He paused in the corridor with one hand pressed against his sleeve, then changed direction without explaining, and Harry watched him go until Dumbledore quietly called his name.
They returned to the office for food and a report short enough that Hermione couldn't turn it into another night of work. Ron kept his new instruction card, though he crossed out nothing this time and added the word check twice at the bottom.
Percy stood by the window after eating. The lake reflected the evening sky, and his awareness of it felt ordinary again in a way he no longer expected to take for granted.
Aequor did not offer another image of victory. The guardian sent the shape of the stolen water's route, severed near the chamber, followed by a pressure moving elsewhere along the old boundary.
Percy straightened. Behind him, Harry put down his cup as though the movement had reached him through the room.
"What is it?"
Percy waited until he was certain of the distinction. The sample was no longer pulling at him, but somewhere beyond the repaired crack, something was searching for another way to knock.
"We stopped him using our entrance," he said. "I think he's looking for his own."
Dumbledore moved to the window. Under the darkening water, Aequor held the gate, and for the first time that evening Percy understood why the guardian's attention had never turned towards the shore.
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HOLY SHIT 50 CHAPTERS OF MY BS!!! I think I deserve a few power stones, right? Anyways, I have another 5 chaps to write :p
BAII GAIS!!!
Edit: Here's the rumoured extra chapter!!! Yayyy!
[SHAMELESS PLUG]
Fifty chapters, three survivors of extremely questionable plumbing, and one author still powered by instant noodles. Thank you for reading! If you want more chapters and would like to support the story, visit Reader004 on Patreon. Your support helps keep Percy arguing with ancient problems instead of leaving them on a cliffhanger forever!