"Oh No!!" Dobby's eyes went round with horror. "Not to kill! Never to kill! Dobby only wanted Harry Potter hurt enough to be sent away. Hurt is better than dead."
Harry stared at him, sickened. "Why?"
Dobby wrung his hands until his knuckles cracked. "B-Because history is about to repeat, sir. The Chamber of Secrets has been opened again."
Harry's breath caught. The voice he heard in the walls came back to him like a hook. "There is a Chamber of Secrets?" he whispered. "Who opened it? Who did it last time?"
Dobby made a strangled sound. "Dobby cannot say."
Footsteps sounded in the corridor.
Dobby froze, ears twitching.
"Dobby must go," he gasped, and vanished with a pop that left Harry clutching at air.
A moment later, the ward door opened. Dumbledore backed in, wearing a wool dressing gown and nightcap, holding one end of a rigid body. Professor McGonagall followed, gripping the feet.
They laid the figure on an empty bed.
"Go fetch Madam Pomfrey," Dumbledore murmured.
Harry lay still, eyes squeezed shut, listening.
Pomfrey arrived in haste, robe flung over pajamas, hair pinned in a hurry. She bent over the body and made a sound like a swallowed sob.
"Another attack?"
Dumbledore nodded quietly.
"He had grapes," McGonagall added, voice tight. "We think he was coming to see Potter."
Harry's stomach sank even as his bones continued to knit themselves into agony.
Dumbledore's hands moved to the camera trapped in Colin Creevey's stiff fingers. He pried it loose with surprising gentleness, then opened the back.
A hiss of hot air escaped. The smell reached Harry's bed, acrid and wrong.
"Melted," Pomfrey whispered. "Completely melted."
McGonagall leaned in, desperate. "Did he catch the attacker?"
Dumbledore closed the camera again, slow. His gaze lingered on Colin's wide, unblinking eyes.
"It means," he said, and the words landed with a weight that silenced the room, "that the Chamber of Secrets has indeed been opened again."
McGonagall swallowed. "Albus… you must know… who."
"The question isn't who," Dumbledore replied, voice softer now, more dangerous for it. "The question is how."
In his office later, Dumbledore sat with that question like a stone in his palm.
Ginny Weasley could not be the Heir of Slytherin. Not by blood, not by magic, not by any logic that mattered. And yet he had his informants. Portraits that listened. Ghosts that drifted.
Something moved inside the castle, wearing the shape of a first-year girl.
That alone was enough to be alarming.
Dumbledore turned the night over in his mind, not ignoring his own disquieting choice. He had looked into Ginny Weasley's eyes the night of the first incident. He had pressed, guided, drawn out what she did not mean to reveal.
He had found only one clear thought, bright as a spark: Draco Malfoy is the Heir of Slytherin.
Absurd. Draco was a boy with promise, yes, but the sort of promise that depended on being told what to do and applauded when he did it. He had no Parseltongue. He had no hunger in him large enough to open ancient doors.
But Lucius Malfoy did have objects. He had loyalties that survived their owners. He could give dangerous things into the hands of children and call it a legacy.
Dumbledore looked toward Fawkes, slumped and dull in the corner, feathers losing colour as rebirth approached.
"Hurry," Dumbledore murmured, more to himself than to the phoenix. "I may need you soon."
Fawkes only plucked a tail feather and ignored him with the calm superiority of a creature that had outlived entire eras.
...
Elsewhere, in a small bed in Gryffindor Tower, Elijah opened Ginny's eyes.
It had never been only Filch and his cat. Hogwarts had always been a network of minds trapped in frames, of painted faces that listened and whispered. Riddle had avoided them by keeping the Basilisk in pipes, by striking where portraits did not hang.
Elijah had been less careful. He had let the serpent glide through open corridor.
And Dumbledore had arrived too fast for coincidence.
So that was it.
Portraits were not decoration. They were surveillance.
"At least the Chamber itself is still hidden," Elijah thought, and the relief was thin.
He did not mind, not entirely, that Dumbledore knew something. A controlled enemy could be useful. If Dumbledore believed the culprit was Tom Riddle's shade, then he would play a familiar game. He would position Harry Potter as the blade meant to cut the knot. He would wait for the story to repeat itself.
Only the story had already changed.
The soul in the diary was not Tom Riddle.
Elijah almost smiled at the irony. If Dumbledore tried to shepherd Harry toward a confrontation with a phantom that no longer existed, he would be guarding the wrong door.
...
Morning brought pale light and routine.
Hermione sat in the common room with a book on her knees, eyes sharp behind tiredness. Powerful Potions, borrowed at last.
Ginny, moving on Elijah's will, crossed the room and spoke, "You're up early."
"It's rare I can borrow it," Hermione said. "Ron isn't up yet."
As if summoned, Ron stumbled out, hair wild, still half asleep. "Sorry," he said quickly. "Late."
Hermione snapped the book shut. "Come on."
They were halfway to the portrait hole when Percy materialised like a conscience made flesh. His gaze took in Ron, then Hermione, then Ginny, narrowing.
"Where are you going?"
"Out," Ron said too sharply. "For a walk."
"I hope you're not sneaking into the girls' lavatory," Percy said, voice rising, "and taking Ginny with you."
Ron coloured. "What's it got to do with you?"
Percy's mouth tightened. "Everything you do becomes everyone's business. I'd rather not explain to Mum why you're dragging our sister into trouble."
Ron opened his mouth, then closed it, because there wasn't a clean answer that didn't expose too much.
Elijah watched Percy's suspicion with quiet interest. A good prefect. Not brilliant, but vigilant. Vigilance was often enough to be dangerous in the right place.
They slipped away before Percy could press further and reached Myrtle's bathroom.
The air was cold and damp, the mirrors cracked, the sinks stained with years of indifference. A cauldron simmered in a cubicle, thick green potion bubbling like swamp muck.
Polyjuice.
It looked worse than any description.
"It isn't ready," Hermione said, stirring carefully. "We still need boomslang skin and bicorn horn. Those have to come from Snape's office." She spoke like a general reciting supply problems. "We also need hair or nails from a Slytherin. That part's easy."
"Hermione," Ron muttered under his breath, as if Ginny were not standing there, "we should really not have included Ginny.."
Ginny's expression didn't change. Inside, Elijah took note. Ron was afraid of Ginny's mouth, not her presence.
Harry appeared a little later, looking as if he'd been run through a grinder and reassembled. His bones had grown back overnight. His face was grey with exhaustion, but his eyes were bright with urgency.
"Colin was petrified," he blurted the moment he saw them. Guilt sat on him like a second robe. "He was coming to see me."
"We know," Hermione said quietly. "McGonagall talked with Flitwick."
Ron's fists clenched. "We need Malfoy to confess. He's been sulking since the match and now he's taking it out on Colin."
Harry swallowed, then launched into the rest, words tumbling. Dobby. The warnings. The barrier at King's Cross. The cursed Bludger. The claim that the Chamber of Secrets had indeed opened again.
Hermione's face tightened as she listened. Every new detail became another brick in the wall she was building around her theory.
"Lucius Malfoy must have done it when he was here," Ron said grimly, "and now he's teaching Draco."
"I just wish the elf told me what the monster is," Harry said, frustrated. "How can something move through the school without anyone seeing it?"
"Maybe it can make itself invisible," Hermione said, returning to her potion as if it were safer than talking about monsters. "Or disguise itself. Some creatures can change colour. I read about…"
Elijah sprinkled dead lacewing flies into the brew with measured care, listening without comment.
They were chasing a shadow and congratulating themselves for recognising its outline. It was almost comforting, in a way, to watch how easily children could be guided by what they wanted to believe.
Ron shook his head, a rough, helpless motion. "If that house-elf keeps trying to save you, Harry, you will die."
"First Lockhart," Elijah said mildly, "then Dobby. You really are having a run of bad luck."
Harry gave a weak, humourless laugh.