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It had been a long time since the first attack, and the truth behind the second incident had been quietly suppressed — deliberately buried by the Headmaster and the professors.
Bit by bit, the legend of the "Chamber of Secrets" faded into the background, becoming little more than a topic of idle conversation among the students. Even Professor McGonagall's strict new rule — requiring everyone to wear protective goggles — had gradually turned into something students grumbled about more than obeyed.
Once the novelty wore off, it wasn't unusual to see students roaming the corridors with their goggles pushed up to their foreheads, or carelessly dangling from their collars. Only when a professor's sharp gaze swept past would they reluctantly straighten up and hurriedly slip the eyewear back into place.
At that very moment, Percy Weasley was standing in one such corridor, casting a stern, disapproving look at the second-year students just released from Potions class.
Under the weight of his ever-so-serious "point-deduction warning," every single student promptly and obediently adjusted their goggles.
The air was still heavy with the unpleasant mixture of boiled toad entrails and crushed wormwood; a lingering scent from their last lesson. Caught in the slow-moving tide of students, Harry, Ron, and Hermione clutched their thick textbooks tightly against their chests, shuffling forward with the crowd.
Then, all of a sudden, Harry froze.
It was a sound — barely audible, a faint, whispery noise like fingernails dragging along rotted wood — that somehow pierced through the chatter and footsteps all around them, weaving its way into Harry's ears.
His feet came to a sudden halt, and his expression changed at once.
That sound…
It had been so long, but he recognized it instantly.
"What's wrong, Harry?" Ron stumbled forward a step, caught off guard, and muttered in confusion. Hermione turned to him as well, her eyes filled with concern.
"Shh!" Harry raised a hand, brows furrowed deeply as he tilted his head, listening intently. "That sound... it's back again, I think…"
"What sound?" Hermione glanced around, alert and uneasy.
The hallway was packed shoulder to shoulder, with dozens of students from two different houses crammed together. The noise of conversations, footsteps, and the occasional thud of books bumping into one another filled the space in waves.
"It's too loud here. Maybe you just misheard something?" she said, peering at him uncertainly.
Harry didn't answer. Instead, he slowly bent forward, lowering his head until his ear was nearly pressed against the cold stone wall.
GRAAAHH—!
A harsh, ear-splitting shriek exploded directly above them!
All three of them jumped, startled, and instinctively looked up.
Perched high on a nearby windowsill was Sargeras's raven, Noctis. Its feathers shimmered with a cold, metallic sheen as it gazed down at them in eerie, motionless silence.
A few students who had noticed it first were already crowding around, craning their necks for a better look. Harry straightened up too, giving his head a small shake and glancing at Ron and Hermione with a sheepish smile.
"Maybe… maybe I really did imagine it. It's too noisy in here."
"I told you it was just a false alarm!" Ron let out a theatrical sigh of relief, then absentmindedly adjusted his goggles so they fit more snugly on his face.
"Well, still…" Hermione pushed her own goggles back up the bridge of her nose, her eyes thoughtful behind the lenses, "it's better to stay cautious. Professor Greengrass is still investigating this, isn't he? We should probably mention this 'possible case' to him this afternoon."
Harry paused for a moment before nodding. "Yeah, good idea. We'll tell him later today. For now, let's drop off our books at the tower. I'm starving."
As they chatted, the three of them also drifted toward the window, drawn by curiosity toward the raven that so rarely made an appearance during the week.
Someone nearby had taken out a handful of owl treats, hoping to tempt the bird with a bite. But Noctis gave the food a cold, dismissive glance before turning his head away with a haughty air, as if the very idea insulted him.
"It eats iron, remember?" Seamus reminded them enthusiastically.
"That… doesn't really look like iron," Neville murmured, sounding unsure.
"Hey! Say something! Come on — say something for us to hear!" Parvati Patil called out excitedly, her eyes sparkling as she looked up at the raven.
Noctis tilted his small, jet-black head to the side, his eyes glowing faintly with an eerie light as he stared straight back at her, unblinking.
"Silence!"
That familiar, rasping voice rang out again — still just as harsh and grating as ever, like sandpaper scraping against stone.
The students all flinched at once, instinctively stepping back a pace… only to immediately surge forward again, too curious to stay away.
"Is that all it knows how to say?" Dean Thomas asked, scratching his head in disappointment.
"Probably…" Seamus muttered, clearly unwilling to give up just yet. He reached out cautiously, one finger extended, trying to touch the sleek, metallic-looking feathers on Noctis's wing.
But in a flash, the raven jerked its head back, expertly dodging Seamus's hand. Its beak snapped open again:
"Idiot!"
The small group of young witches and wizards instantly froze, their faces flushing red with embarrassment as awkward silence hung in the air.
"…Well," Dean said dryly, trying to recover, "at least we know it's got more than one word in its vocabulary."
Noctis's small head swiveled from side to side, its glowing eyes scanning the crowd below. A low, rumbling sound began to rise from its throat, as though it were sizing everyone up, judging them silently.
"What does it actually eat, anyway?" someone finally asked.
"Mithril," Hermione answered without hesitation. "Professor Greengrass feeds him that."
"Mithril?" Ron blinked, then muttered with a click of his tongue, "That's gotta be expensive. No way that bird's cheap to feed…"
Just then, Malfoy pushed through the crowd with Crabbe and Goyle following closely behind. With a smug look on his face, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a tiny handful of glimmering mithril shards, which shimmered faintly in the light. Without saying a word, he extended his hand toward the raven, offering the precious metal.
He didn't speak, but the self-satisfaction gleaming in his eyes was more than obvious.
Yet even so, Noctis made no move to accept the offering. He simply kept his head tilted, eyes sweeping slowly across the students below, showing no interest in Malfoy's mithril at all.
"Food… slaughter…"
Suddenly, a voice unlike anything human — raw, violent, and chilling enough to tear straight through the soul — exploded in Harry's ears without the slightest warning.
Followed by the thunderous crash of a wall being shattered by immense force!
BOOOOM!!
The ground seemed to tremble beneath their feet. Everyone's heads whipped toward the direction of the sound, their instincts kicking in before their minds could catch up.
Just beyond the corridor's bend, the stone wall had burst apart, debris shooting through the air like shards of glass in a storm. Amid the swirling dust and flying rubble, an enormous figure surged forward—a monstrous shape so large it seemed to suck the air out of the hallway, radiating an aura of pure destruction as it burst out from the shattered wall with terrifying force!
Everyone froze instantly.
The enormous serpent had only just burst into view when its molten-gold eyes locked instantly onto the back of the nearest student. In the same breath, its jaws — lined with fangs as sharp as spears — snapped open wide and lunged forward, slicing through the air with the stench of death.
CRASH!
The student's body shattered before their eyes — Only, it wasn't a student at all.
What had been bitten to pieces was the castle's mirrored wall at the corner of the hallway. The serpent's bite had struck the illusion clean through, crushing the cold reflection into glittering shards of glass.
But the moment of relief was fleeting. A tidal wave of terror erupted through the students like a spell gone wrong.
Monster!
A real, living monster… a snake, enormous, alive, and hungry.
Its body was thick and powerful, each coil wrapped in a layer of thick, impenetrable scales. Its massive, grotesque head rose high into the air, so tall that it nearly brushed the arching ceiling of the corridor.
But the most terrifying part was its eyes — two enormous, molten-gold vertical pupils that blazed with ancient magic so cold and deep, a single glance could freeze the very essence of life.
And what made it worse, what made the horror sink its claws into the stomach, was this:
Scattered along the path of the charging serpent, directly in its line of attack, were dozens of young witches and wizards, fresh from class, still laughing as they made their way back toward their common rooms.
The laughter hadn't even fully faded from their faces before it froze, locked in place by the serpent's deadly gaze.
In that instant, it felt as though time itself had been paused.
A Slytherin girl had just bent down to pick up a fallen book. Her fingertip was still an inch from the parchment when her body turned to stone; solid, cold, and unmoving.
Two Gryffindor boys had their arms slung around each other's shoulders, caught mid-laughter. Their faces, still frozen in joy and surprise, remained locked in that moment of youthful camaraderie as their bodies petrified into statues where they stood.
The students who had crowded around Noctis turned at the sound… but it was already too late. The instant their eyes met the basilisk's, they were transformed. Dozens of stone statues froze in place, each with its own posture and expression, now trapped forever in a silence too deep to break.
One Gryffindor student had fallen to the ground. In a panic, he raised his wand, the spell stuttering to life in a faint flicker of light, but the glow vanished with him, swallowed by stillness as he too turned to stone, wand and all, frozen mid-motion.
Another Slytherin, quicker to react, had started to turn and run. But his reflex betrayed him. In the moment he glanced back in fear, that very look — the wide eyes, the open mouth — was sealed onto his face, preserved forever in an unfinished escape.
The basilisk's gaze swept through the hallway in eerie silence.
And just like that, the once-lively corridor was filled with stone. Statues of students caught mid-sentence, mid-step, mid-thought, each one a silent monument to that moment of terror.
Where there had been noise, chatter, and motion only seconds before, now there was only stillness.
A graveyard of stone, cold and haunting!
Only the sound of the serpent's heavy, hissing breath remained, carrying with it the faint stench of death, along with the quiet crumble of broken masonry rolling across the floor.
Harry had lowered his head the instant the basilisk appeared. And then, wasting not a second more, he shouted to the handful of students who had managed to look away in time:
"Don't look up! Run!!!"
Without waiting for a response, he grabbed Ron and Hermione by the arms and took off at a dead sprint in the opposite direction.
Their feet pounded wildly across the stone floor, echoing through the now-silent corridor in a chaotic rhythm of fear.
In the rush, Hermione's protective goggles slipped from her face and clattered against the floor with a sharp, brittle crack — but she didn't even glance back.
She didn't have time to.
What terrified her most… what made the blood drain from her face… was the sound behind them.
That horrible scraping noise. A dry, rasping hiss. The sound of thick, scaly skin dragging across cold stone.
It was right behind them… so close it felt like death was breathing down their necks.
It was the sound of a countdown.
And in that moment of panic, driven by pure instinct and overwhelming fear, Hermione turned her head just a little, unable to stop herself.
SHLUK!
A dark shape flashed across her vision. Noctis shot past in a blur, its wings slicing through the air, and in a single, vicious sweep, its talons slashed across her eyes.
Blood burst forth immediately.
"Ah—!!"
Hermione let out a scream that echoed down the corridor as she stumbled, her hands flying up to clutch at her bleeding face.
"Hermione!"
Harry's heart nearly stopped. He turned back without thinking, panic tightening his throat, but before he could take a single step, Ron shoved him hard.
"Go get a professor!" Ron roared, voice fierce and unshakable. There wasn't even a trace of hesitation in it.
And then he stopped running. In one fluid motion, he spun around and launched himself back toward Hermione, who was still on the ground, groaning in pain as blood seeped through her fingers.
Harry felt like something had been torn open inside him.
His heart throbbed painfully, like someone had reached in and carved straight through it with a blade. But even through the agony, he forced himself to turn away and keep running. He sprinted down the corridor with everything he had left, the walls blurring around him.
But when he reached the next bend, what he saw nearly made him stop cold.
Up ahead, right around the corner, a group of young students were walking toward him. They were laughing, chatting, completely unaware of the nightmare waiting just behind him.
They hadn't seen it yet!
"Don't come this way! Get out of here!!"
Harry shouted, waving his arms frantically, desperation pouring out of him. He tried to push them back with nothing but his voice, tried to make them turn around before it was too late.
But his warning only sealed their fate…
Several students looked up, startled by the sudden noise. Their eyes rose. Their heads turned. And in that tiny sliver of a second, their confused gazes slipped past Harry and landed on something far more terrifying.
Deep within the corridor's gloom, rising like a nightmare made real, the shadow of the basilisk loomed.
A darkness far too large to belong in the waking world. A nightmare given flesh. And staring out from that monstrous face was a single, unblinking eye… vertical and massive, gleaming like molten gold.
Time seemed to freeze.
Not even a flicker of fear had fully surfaced on their faces before the color drained from their skin. The icy gray of stone spread across them without mercy. One by one, their footsteps halted mid-motion. Their expressions remained unfinished. Their bodies stiffened and locked in place, each one transformed into a cold, lifeless statue.
Wrong!
Terribly, horribly wrong!
Harry felt his heart plummet into a pit of ice.
He realized, with crushing despair, that in the face of such overwhelming fear, even the smallest sound — any sudden cry, any mysterious presence, any hint of the unknown — would ignite something buried deep within every human being: the primal urge to look.
Just one glance.
That was all it took.
And the creature that lay coiled in that hallway — the basilisk, that vast, inescapable shadow — needed nothing more. A single glimpse of its eye… and life simply ended.
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[Chapter End's]
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