Alan had solved Snape's malicious paradox-potion with nothing more than a tiny, perfectly placed "concept-lock" rune. What among the students became a story embroidered into legend was a pebble cast into a still lake; its ripples reached, inevitably, into Hogwarts' very center of power.
That evening, when an elegant owl delivered the familiar, lemon-scented parchment inviting him to tea with the Headmaster, a murmur of mingled envy and awe rose through the Gryffindor common room. Another of Dumbledore's tea calls.
But when Alan spoke the door-word and the enormous stone eagle rolled aside to reveal the spiral stairs, his senses detected a silence different from the ordinary calm.
He entered the Headmaster's office.
The easy atmosphere that usually greeted visitors was gone. The silver instruments that normally whirred and breathed faint puffs of smoke now lay hushed, as if silenced by a charm; the fire in the hearth licked the logs without its familiar comforting crackle. Even Fawkes, the noble phoenix, stood on his perch with his gold-and-crimson plumage dimmed in the low light.
Albus Dumbledore sat behind his great desk. The impish, penetrating smile that usually softened his face had been replaced by a seriousness Alan had never seen. It was the weight of many seasons and much wisdom, a cold, ancient gravity as if centuries of thought had settled in the lines about his eyes.
When Alan approached, Dumbledore looked up behind his half-moon spectacles. The blue of his eyes was not the warm sky-blue it usually was; it was deep and fathomless as a winter pool.
He did not begin with the usual light chatter about German spellmasters or the latest oddities around the school. Silence grew, almost as meaningful as speech. The hush itself said that what followed would be on an altogether different level.
At last Dumbledore moved. Without preamble, he tapped his plain-looking wand once. From the other side of the office, a cabinet ordinarily locked and carved with protective runes grated and opened with a leaden, metallic noise.
A black object floated from the shadow of that cabinet. It moved slowly, but with an oppressive gravity, as if every inch it crossed devoured the light and the heat around it.
Alan's pupils pinched to slits. His Thinking Palace sounded a top-tier alarm in less than a blink. Muscles tightened reflexively; a cold climbed from his tailbone to the crown of his head.
The object was unmistakable: Tom Riddle's diary, black, insidious, steeped in bad omen. It drifted to the polished surface of Dumbledore's desk and lay there, unmoving.
"Alan," Dumbledore said finally. His voice had lost some of its usual clarity; each syllable struck like the toll of an ancient bell, full of history and weight. "Since I retrieved this diary from you last time, I have tried every way I know to utterly destroy it."
He paused, as if recalling failed experiments. "I tried Fiendfyre."
Alan's heart stuttered. Fiendfyre, the fire so terrible it could consume a Horcrux, was the sort of destructive magic one spoke of in whispers.
"I tried Basilisk fangs, replicas, of course, but their magical quality is indistinguishable from the original." Dumbledore's fingers tapped the desk.
"I even searched the Restricted Section through and through; I tried every lost, ancient annihilating charm I could find." His tone was steady, but it carried a strain of a rare frustration, the weariness of a master meeting a limit.
"But all failed." He slid the black book across the desk so it crossed the midpoint and entered Alan's territory. A faint, very pure cold malice crept along the wood toward him.
"Each time I attempted to destroy it," Dumbledore continued, "an extremely powerful and ancient magic arose from within the diary itself, protecting it. I have analyzed it many times. Its defense's core is not about power of energy, rather, it is a kind of…self-referential, cyclic protective system."
"Paradox logic."
The words struck the core of Alan's thought like a key in a lock. Dumbledore's blue eyes were grave and intent; he regarded Alan not merely as a second-year but as someone whose mind, of program and code rather than of this age, might converse on the diary's level.
"It tells me," Dumbledore said slowly, "that 'only a nonexistence can be destroyed by you.'"
He spoke each phrase carefully, repeating the diary's defensive concept. Alan's internal alarm ceased; in its place a thousand data streams whirred, dissecting and modeling.
This was not magic in the ordinary sense. This defense was an unsolvable conceptual mechanism: a perfect, self-referential logical closure. Any act to "destroy" it would, by definition, presuppose its existence; hence every such destructive act would fail to meet the paradoxical precondition required to effect destruction. It was not a problem of strength but of domain, an issue in logic, not in force. Like a top physicist unable to prove a pure mathematical conjecture, Dumbledore, powerful as he was, found the barrier impenetrable.
For the first time, the world's greatest living white wizard admitted, to a second-year student, a kind of impotence, not from lack of power but from mismatch of fields.
"So, Alan." Dumbledore leaned forward; the small forward motion carried the seriousness of an equal entrusting a vital task. "I need your help. I need you, with your distinct, time-displaced mind of logic and program, to design for us, and for this diary, a new kind of logical trap."
He chose the word very carefully: not a spell, not merely a magic, but a logic trap.
"Or," Dumbledore added with something almost like eagerness lighting his eyes, the glint of one who has discovered a new instrument, "a firewall that can imprison Tom Riddle's paradox-riddled, malicious thought-world forever, keeping it locked inside its own logic."
The word firewall detonated in Alan's mind like thunder.
"This," Dumbledore continued, "would be your contribution to Hogwarts and to the defenses of the entire magical world."
Silence fell over the office again, but this time it was not stifling. It was charged with the tension of a challenge and the gravity of a forthcoming epochal undertaking. This, in truth, was the highest-level technical trial that the greatest living white wizard could lay before a young mind, a test borne of necessity against one of the darkness's most notorious artifices.
--------------------------------------
[email protected] / Dreamer20
Christmas Special Discount Code: HNY2026
(Valid till 31st December )