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A thousand years had passed.
At the tip of Sargeras's finger, a pale, cold flame flickered to life. He walked forward slowly, guided by its faint glow. With each step, his boots struck the damp stone steps beneath him, echoing hollowly through the silence.
A thousand years… What would he find here now, after all this time?
—Perhaps long-lost and forbidden magics, hidden away and buried by time.
—Perhaps mysterious and precious relics, untouched by any living soul.
—Perhaps even the tomb of Salazar Slytherin himself…
But reality, as always, had a way of dulling the imagination. And when it revealed itself, it was as bland and disappointing as ever.
What stood before him was no grand vault, no forgotten treasury. Just a research room… crude to the point of looking desolate. A rough-hewn stone bed. A massive alchemy table, its surface scarred and stained by time. A few decaying instruments scattered across the floor, their purpose long forgotten.
The crucible had long since rusted through. The glassware was coated in a thick layer of dust, so dense it seemed a single breath might reduce it all to powder.
Sargeras surveyed the space with a calm, expressionless gaze.
Off to the side of the research chamber, he noticed a recessed alcove where the floor still bore smooth, faint traces left behind by something vast that had coiled and lingered there for a very long time.
The lingering mark of the basilisk.
"…How utterly…"
He sighed softly, the words trailing off. With a slight turn of his body, he made to leave.
But just then, something glinted faintly in the corner of his eye.
A flicker of pale firelight bounced off a small object hidden in the most inconspicuous corner of the research table. An hourglass, buried under years of dust, now shimmered faintly as it reflected the cold flame at his fingertips.
Sargeras's pupils constricted. A subtle tremor ran through his fingers.
"Scourgify!"
With a simple incantation, the dust vanished, revealing the hourglass in full. Its surface was pristine and crystalline, like it had just been crafted yesterday.
A Time-Turner…
He had seen one just a few months ago. And yet this one… this one had waited a thousand years to meet him again.
Sargeras lifted it carefully, his movements slow and reverent. For a brief moment, he simply stared, lost in thought, as if reality had gone soft around the edges.
Salazar Slytherin was gone!
Not just him… the other three great founders had vanished as well, their lives long since returned to the dust. Everything that had once passed between them, every memory of that distant time, now felt like something dreamt and half-forgotten.
If not for that familiar creature of blood and flesh, and the perfectly preserved Time-Turner in his hand, he might have doubted whether he had truly traveled back a thousand years. Whether he had truly stood shoulder to shoulder with those ancient legends, that curious band of "antiques," trading magic and words across the divide of centuries.
He gazed intently at the hourglass resting in his palm.
And then, without warning, a soft glow began to shimmer from within.
A wisp of silvery magic rose delicately from its center, drifting upward like mist, curling gently through the air. Slowly, that magic took shape as it unfolded into a sheet of aged parchment, yellowed by time but still intact.
Sargeras frowned slightly and unfolded the parchment. On it, neat yet weathered handwriting stretched across the page, each stroke filled with quiet weight.
༺✧─────────────✧༻
To Sargeras:
I asked Rowena, and she told me with confidence that you would read this letter. I hope her foresight is, as always, precise. I also hope… she didn't lie to me.
If this parchment has truly crossed the heavy curtain of time to reach your hands, then perhaps my final hope was not in vain.
I am Salazar Slytherin. And as the ink of this final letter flows from my aging hands, I know that my end is already near.
Once, with wisdom brighter than the stars, you ignited the flame of my youth. And without even realizing it, you handed me a lantern from the future, a glimmer of light that became, for me, a window into infinite possibility.
But now… that window is closing before my eyes, and all that remains beyond it is a wall of cold, unfeeling stone.
What has carried me through these long and endless years is a single question, a riddle about magic that has never released its grip on me.
You once spoke, half in jest, of exploring the very laws of life itself. At the time, I did not fully understand the weight behind your words. But now… it has become the final obsession I can no longer let go of.
After a thousand years worn thin by time, I ask you — those who live in the future, you wizards of the age to come — have you truly reached that forbidden domain the gods once tried to seal away? Have you truly gained the power to reverse the flow of the river of death?
I yearn for an answer. No, more than that — I beg for one. A definite, resounding yes.
And it is not for my sake.
It is for a rose that has long since turned to dust.
Her name still burns on my tongue, even now, but I can no longer speak it aloud in this world.
Her disappearance drained the last light from my life, and it also opened my eyes to the cold, unbridgeable cracks beneath the very four cornerstones of Hogwarts.
This castle once carried our shared dreams, but in the end, it failed to grant me the key to reclaim what I had lost.
Therefore I've made my choice. When the great fog has fully lifted, I will walk away. One final time, I will leave this fortress that we built with our own hands.
As for you, my friend… the traveler who once gazed upon ancient days with the eyes of the future. I still hold onto one last, fragile echo in my heart.
Will you return?
Will you ever come back to this land, where the first stones of the castle were set? Will you return to this troubled, barren age, even if only to bring me an answer?
I know well how treacherous the river of time can be. But if your journey allows the slightest detour… then please, come back before I bury that rose.
Let me look once more into your eyes, where I might see the starlight of a future I cannot comprehend.
Of course… if you cannot, that is all right too.
It is simply strange to think that I, Salazar Slytherin, once so proud and so unshakable throughout the whole of my life, should find myself, at the very end of my journey… looking up toward the time and space where you now stand.
Today, I will step into a deeper darkness, in search of an answer that may exist only on the edge of legend, brushing against the borders of the taboo.
And if your time has already found that truth, then let that knowledge cross the boundaries of time, and become the final light at the end of my long, long road!
May time be merciful to you. And may magic, in the end, remain the servant of the wizard, not his cage.
—Salazar Slytherin
The letter would be sealed away, hidden deep within the Chamber of Secrets. My servant will keep it safe for me.
༺✧─────────────✧༻
Sargeras stared down at the parchment in his hands, and an aching silence fell over him; a silence that stretched on, unbroken, for a very long time.
To the outside world, Salazar Slytherin had always been a figure of cold calculation; a man governed by ruthless logic, revered and feared for his brilliant mind and his unflinching devotion to the pursuit of magical knowledge. To most, he was little more than a dark legend: the one who dabbled freely in forbidden bloodline experiments and unholy arts with neither fear nor regret.
But now, in this moment, the brittle yellow parchment he held so gently revealed a truth long buried by the tides of time. Beneath that hard, impenetrable shell, beneath the man who had kept the world at arm's length, there had once beat a heart that was painfully, achingly soft.
And every word in that letter pointed to one quietly heartbreaking truth: the woman he had loved — perhaps once a fellow professor within Hogwarts itself — was gone.
Vanished from this world.
It was for her, for that vanished rose whose name he could no longer bear to speak aloud, that he had thrown himself into the study of terrifying magic. He had given his life to mastering the secrets of flesh and soul magic, crafting spells that others dared not even name. His descent into madness, his unshakable obsession… it had all come from a single, desperate wish: to wrest her back from Death's cold, merciless grasp.
Sargeras lowered his gaze to the hourglass once more, running his fingers gently along its curve as he mentally traced the instructions Rowena Ravenclaw had entrusted to him. Slowly, methodically, he began matching those teachings to the structure of the object in his hands.
And the answer came to him, as clear and irrefutable as any spell cast with perfect intent: the Time-Turner had already been preset. Its destination was certain: it pointed back to an era a thousand years in the past.
But along with that revelation came another, far colder truth.
He was a transmigrator from another time. A man without a "destined fate" in this world.
According to everything Rowena Ravenclaw had taught him about the nature of time, every soul in the world was linked to its own thread of fate… each thread intertwined with the river of time itself. That thread was what allowed the Time-Turner to work: guiding the traveler back to their corresponding place in the flow.
But for him, that link did not exist.
For someone like him, every journey into time would be nothing more than a blind leap into the unknowns.
There would be no way back, or…
Or rather, if he ever did return, it would never be to the same point again. Even with a precisely configured Time-Turner, the very act of using it would send him spiraling off into another place in time, separate and disconnected.
It would be like reaching out into endless darkness, trying to grasp a single star among billions, relying only on the faintest stroke of luck or else facing a hundred hopeless and soul-crushing attempts.
And worse still, beyond the vast uncertainty, one question haunted him more deeply than any other:
Even if he could go back… what then?
What was he supposed to do?
He also had no answer.
A bitter thought crept in, quiet but cutting: a thousand years had passed, yet the magical world had changed so little. So heartbreakingly little.
And that wasn't just his failure alone.
But if he truly intended to return, if he truly wished to step back into that distant age, then how could he go back empty-handed?
No…
If he was going to return, then he would bring the answer to that ancient question with him.
Only then would he be ready.
Only then would it be time to go back.
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[Chapter End's]
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