Deep within Alan's Thinking Palace, every clue concerning the first guardian, the three-headed dog, its weakness to music, and its link to Hagrid, had now converged into a single, luminous coordinate.
But for Alan, the end of one answer is always the birth of many new questions.
To simply pass the guardian no longer held any challenge.
What he truly wanted was to understand it.
To do so, he needed an opportunity, a moment where he could observe the creature's defenses up close, in real time, and without interference.
He found Hagrid again.
"This is for a paper I'm writing," Alan explained with the academic composure of a young scholar. "On the psychology of magical creatures. I want to observe how large beasts behave when separated from their native habitat, how stress alters their instinctive responses. It could be crucial to understanding their emotional resilience."
Hagrid, soft-hearted and unable to refuse anything that sounded "good for the creatures," agreed at once.
He led Alan to the edge of the Forbidden Forest, where a wide patch of trampled earth lay open beneath the trees. The air was thick with the smell of damp soil, wild musk, and a faint vibration of magic.
And there was Fluffy.
The creature was not so much an animal as a mountain, black, massive, breathing. Its three heads drooped lazily; one yawned, ropes of saliva hissing on the ground as they burned tiny steaming pits into the mud.
"Fluffy!"
Hagrid's booming voice carried pure affection as he strode forward and reached up to pat the central head.
In an instant, the other two reacted, each in its own way.
The left head snapped up, lips peeled back to expose a forest of knife-like teeth, a low growl rolling from its chest like distant thunder. Pure warning.
The right head, by contrast, merely flicked an eyelid, disinterested and heavy with boredom.
The center head leaned forward docilely toward Hagrid's hand.
Alan didn't move.
He stood several yards back, relaxed in posture, utterly alert within.
His Thinking Palace activated.
The world did not fade; rather, it restructured itself into data. The enormous body of Fluffy fragmented into discrete systems, each emitting its own faint pulse of color and energy, a visualization of emotion and logic.
Three cores, joined by a single spinal conduit.
Three processors, linked but not synchronized.
Streams of data raced through his mind, comparison, analysis, model construction. And there it was: a pattern, clear and elegant in its imperfection.
A logical flaw.
The three heads' emotional outputs lacked synchronization, each responding to the world according to its own logic tree.
Processor A , the central head: warm colors in Alan's mind's eye, the tone of attachment and gentleness. It recognized Hagrid, responded with trust and faint dependence.
Processor B , the left head: deep crimson, the hue of hostility. It had locked onto Alan as a threat; every muscle in its quadrant of the body coiled with readiness to strike.
Processor C , the right head: dull grey, the color of inertia and sleep. Response to stimuli: almost nil.
"So that's it," Alan murmured under his breath, a faint curve touching his lips.
Fluffy's ferocity did not arise from a unified will, but from conflict between sub-processes, a constant internal argument, three consciousnesses struggling for control of one body.
A perfect exploit.
The vulnerability was not physical but logical, an architecture of disharmony.
And once a flaw is mapped, it must be tested.
"Hagrid," Alan said softly, his calm voice cutting cleanly through the growl that rumbled in the clearing. "Would you play your harp, please?"
Hagrid blinked, puzzled but obliging. He drew a small enchanted harp from the pocket of his massive coat.
A slow, lilting lullaby began to flow across the clearing, its sound carrying an ancient tenderness. The air itself seemed to soften.
And, exactly as Alan predicted, Processor C, the rightmost head, reacted instantly. Its eyes fluttered closed, its breathing slowed, and its neck sagged toward the ground, surrendering to sleep.
Moments later, the central head followed, Processor A, its eyelids drooping, its body sinking under the melody's spell.
But just then,
Alan raised his wand.
The motion was minute, shielded by his own body, his voice barely a breath.
A single, tightly compressed Confundus Charm whispered from his wandtip, nearly invisible.
Its target was not the creature's body, nor its mind as a whole.
Only Processor B, the left head's left ear.
The spell did no harm. It simply inserted a grain of static into the head's auditory feed, scrambling its input so that the soothing melody reached it as incoherent noise.
The effect was immediate, and absurd.
The colossal guard-dog entered a state of perfect internal contradiction.
One head was completely "shut down."
One was "idling" in half-conscious drowsiness.
And the third, deprived of the lullaby's calming signal, became frantic, its aggression spiking to full capacity.
Its massive body lurched, the neurological mismatch visible in every motion. The left head roared and tried to rise, but the half-slumbering heads refused the command; the body stumbled, its front limbs flexing weakly before collapsing again.
The creature's entire form shuddered, confused, locked between impulses.
Alan watched, eyes reflecting data streams.
He had not destroyed the guardian.
He had not even subdued it.
He had done something far more elegant: triggered a system lag.
By exploiting the internal inconsistency of its multi-processor mind, he had induced a perfect, temporary freeze, a moment of suspended logic.
And that moment, in a fortress built on centuries of magic, was priceless.
A window of access.
A chance to observe, record, and study,
perhaps even rewrite, the defensive code of a living magical system.
--------------------------------------
[email protected] / Dreamer20
NY Special Discount Code: HNY2026