Chapter Text
‘Behold,’ the Fairy cried,
'Palmyra’s ruined palaces!
from Queen Mab,
by P. B. SHELLEY
--
Somehow, despite their initial airborne positioning, Theo breaks his fall by landing neatly atop Harry. (Neatly in place, not neatly in limb arrangement.) Theo can’t tell if he’s trembling, or if the vibrations in his limbs are conducted from Harry.
The thrill of flight has dissipated, taking his relatively calm mindset with it. Gone is that adrenaline-slow-mo, and the terror sets in, somewhat ameliorated by the relief that follows, upon the realization that they are, indeed, safe.
Honestly, despite the near-kilometer drop to the bottom of the ravine, Theo’s fairly sure they could have landed intact even if they did fall. They’re still in the age range where strong emotions or deadly danger lead to accidental magic. (Well, Theo’s in the age range. Harry’s age is a matter for him and the gods. No—scratch that, Harry probably doesn’t even know himself.)
They would have survived. They did survive. So why is Theo so on edge? Discombobulated.
Theo notices, belatedly, that Harry’s presence has receded from his mind, slipped out like a weasel.
Harry looks… closed off. Icy. A little feral. “I regret that embarrassing lapse in concentration. It won’t happen again.”
Theo flushes hot. “That’s what you think you should apologize for? A panic attack?” Upon meeting Harry’s quite fearsome glare, Theo backtracks, “uh, or whatever.”
Harry’s pupils nearly go slitted. “And what am I supposed to be apologizing for now? You know, you’d be lucky to get one at all.”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe for chucking us off the top floor of the Divination Tower?”
Harry raises his eyebrows sky-high. Theo’s beginning to suspect he’s being purposefully obtuse.
Something hit him during that flight, hit him hard. He resents my weakness, Theo thinks. I’m supposed to protect him, but he ends up mothering me.
Harry may be halfway to eldritch being, but Theo is a Nott.
He’s had elocution lessons since he was a toddler—gods forbid he learn to speak by listening to the mangled English of the house elves who fed and bathed and clothed him. (Of course, Mother was around—she cared for him, as much as a mother could care for the sort of creature they turned him into—but she had her own obligations.) Tutoring, from age 4, in family lore, history, politics, manners.
And, of course, magic. In practice, a limited set of curses and hexes for self-defense that, though effective, require no great skill or power; in theory, a breadth of knowledge regarding the dark arts, though nothing sufficiently deep as to be mind-eating (much). And, more impactfully, experience seeing the deep arts in practice—a deeply effective caution, in its own way, though not without side effects.
Gaze into the void and it gazes into you, et cetera. Bargaining with demons, the abyssal stench of the lower planes, high ritual and low magic—well, it all leaves traces.
And Theo has traces. Even the witnessing of some things can scar you, change you.
And that’s why the greatest portion of his training regimen was spent on mental control exercises, even if he didn’t grasp their purpose or method until he witnessed his first summoning. Slipped into sword practice, into music lessons, into dance; over the years, they've made use of any and every way to trick a child into meditation.
Of course, mental control is a two-pronged approach. Punishment is certainly an effective motivator, though it mostly functioned to train him out of speaking unless spoken to. Or emoting. At all. But punishment is reactive, and not quite conducive to the introspection required to witness deep magic and stay functionally sane.
It’s not about erasing emotions—that’s impossible—but acknowledging them, accepting them, and judging their worth as leverage.
Because the lever you don’t see is the first one they’ll push. 'They' being the demons, restless spirits, servants of the Old Gods, the fae—powers one should be wary of meeting, much less bargaining with. And they do so love to push levers.
Masking outward reactions is a separate skill, in the general region of lying and politicking and manipulation. But the Notts are enforcers, not lawmakers. Advisors, not leaders. Their curse is not quite Cassandra’s—think Tiresias, maybe. Or Rasputin. In any case, trained to spot falsehoods, not spout them.
Of course, Theo’s grandfather can connive with the best of them. Then again, he broke with tradition in more ways than one.
Notts are scholar-warriors. Notts are deeply creepy. A good second stays in the shadows, and only draws attention insofar as he is required to by his liege. A good politician is charming, appealing, with a silver tongue and glittering smile. When a politician gazes into your eyes, you feel important. When a Nott does the same, you run.
Theo is the epitome of a Nott. He’s never been a good liar, and has little patience for manipulation. He can play ‘stoic’ with the best of them, but even that skill seems to have left him, now.
So Theo may be twelve, but he is a deeply scary twelve year old. Or, rather, he should be. In the corridors of his family’s dark tower, he barely has to regulate his mood at all. Irritation, boredom, apathy—grief—he cycles through and through. But ever since arriving at Hogwarts, he seems to be having more and more unsightly outbursts of high emotion.
It’s embarrassing. And he already has this deep need to impress Harry. How much is his father’s tutelage? How much is in his blood?
And how much is… personal.
Having had his fill of self-pity, Theo rises from the floor. Straightens his tie as he tries to mask his breathing exercises. Harry’s already gone, halfway across the half-wrecked greenhouse, absurd wings gone, shirt thrown back on unbuttoned. Theo can see the collar—torc—stark in shimmering ink around Harry’s neck again, unmasked for Theo, along with the binding circles.
It’s still unsettling.
Theo glances around the greenhouse. It’s overgrown, its planters either desiccated or spilling exotic weeds, undulating masses of vines crawling up its birdcage walls. Charming. The wrought-iron cage of wall struts, no longer backlit by the sun, are coppered with rust and chipped paint. A good number of the glass panes are cracked or punched out, and a light wind whistles through, echoing strangely in the glasshouse. The ceiling climbs into two stepped arches, double-beveled, forming sort of rectangular domes with cut corners, or a lopsided octagon.
So it’s a layercake.
Theo’s eyes track to Harry’s movement. Harry is idly wandering the structure, brushing his fingers over the planters—the plants all shy away when he approaches, even the ones that look carnivorous.
Harry has a bad track record in Herbology. The plants he works with tend to wither.
So Harry doesn’t catch it. It’s Theo who points out, “There are signs someone’s tended this garden recently. Either they don’t mind the mess or are actively cultivating the image of disrepair.”
A few of the rarer plants have seeping cuts, signs of recent pruning. The shears are encrusted with fresh dirt. Certain of the plants have rather stringently unnatural requirements, and most certainly would have been edged out if not for human intervention.
There’s one plant in particular Theo only knows from etchings in ritual spellbooks. Ritual spellbooks for phyto-mediated sacrificial anthropophagy. Eating of flesh that has eaten of flesh of…
Yeah. This foul-smelling flower eats human flesh. It can't generally swallow people whole, though, so it has to be fed regularly. Chopped up fingers and such. Artificially bred, can't survive in the wild. So someone must be feeding it.
“A sealed wing? An open window? Disguised signs of mysterious presences? How wonderful!”
Whoever this garden belongs to... well, honestly, their presence in a school would be highly questionable on a good day.
“Now all we need is a locked room and a murder weapon,” Theo grumbles.
“Theo, you’re being silly. You are a murder weapon.”
Well, not yet. The gun on the mantelpiece, more like.
But if that’s the case, then Harry’s a weapon of mass destruction, armed and ready.
“Well, shall we continue o—” Theo says, and his words echo in the empty greenhouse. Great. The greenhouse spans the length of the wing, sitting above what appears from the air to be the main hall, and thus it has two exits, one for each connecting tower. Theo heads for the open door, skirting the flesh-eating blooms. The door looks to be rusted in place, half-cracked open—but it’s not as if the shattered walls are offering any viable sort of climate control.
Theo peers through, cautious.
They’re in a tower, on a winding staircase. But in the center is an enormous chute, twice the width of the stairs, dropping straight into blackness. Strange.
“Up or down?” Harry asks.
“You’re asking? I never thought I’d see the day you’d listen to my counsel, nevermind seek it.”
“And would you like to prevaricate, or give it?”
“Up, first.”
They climb what feels like endless steps, as Theo remembers belatedly to orientate their position with the landmarks they saw outside.
This tower, though, has no windows, only arrowslits.
The torches, curiously, are lit, giving the cobwebs the eerie feeling of stage-dressing. More evidence—the wing is not so abandoned, after all.
As they reach the top, they realize what looks to be the ceiling is actually a winching platform, sized to fit the chute, making the whole tower something of a lift shaft. A service lift, if the size means anything.
There’s a trapdoor at the top of the winding staircase, which they promptly open, climbing out to reveal a massive, open-air platform, no walls, no guardrails or crenellations, even, simply five huge stalls circling the winching platform.
Over their heads rises another circular roost with no apparent foot access—perhaps the ladder has rotted away.
Any residue has long been eroded, but Theo spots what looks to be troughs and something of a hayloft.
“It’s a stable,” Theo murmurs.
“A huge, open-air stable. Elephantine, really. How dramatic!”
More like an aerie, in fact. It’s the tower they saw from the air, and Theo’s first impression rings true—”Sized for hippogryphs?”
“Perhaps, but…” Harry squints. “No. Gryphons, I do believe. Too large, otherwise, unless they didn’t much care for efficiency.”
“Gryphons?” Theo doubts that. Rarer than dragons, these days.
“You know hippogryphs are crossbreeds, right? Horse meets gryphon. I shouldn’t like to see how that’s done. Of course, now they have their own breeding lines. Anyway, they have a bit too much horse in them. Prefer to graze, dig up worms and rodents and such. Of course, they roost to lay their eggs, but otherwise, they’re happy with a patch of field.”
“Yes…”
“Gryphons eat horses.”
“And that’s your point?”
“Just a fun fact. Anyway, remember who sent us here. Who do you think built this tower?”
Oh. Oh. “Godric Gryffindor, I’d guess.”
“Yes, well, it’s all in the name. This whole adventure certainly has an exciting new context, now, doesn’t it?”
“If the founders truly built this wing, quite possibly for their personal use… why lock it up? And go so far as to cast a massive illusionary protection?”
“Hopefully for reasons of danger and strife!”
Well, it seems Harry’s gotten over his little mood.
But something dangerous enough to be worth hiding away an entire wing of the castle, a wing they're about to explore, well. Just another day at Hogwarts. Or Harry's Hogwarts, rather.
*****
Theo lets himself be convinced to take the lift down. He regrets it.
Something about the space warps, like they’re spinning, or hurtling sideways instead of down, and the torches leave squiggly comet-streaks of light. Theo has no idea if they’re moving fast or slow.
(Mid-ride, Harry pulls the switchboard lever, and though it appears there’s only the one lift shaft to travel down—they don’t see any branches—it suddenly feels as if, with a jerk, they’ve changed direction completely.)
When the lift slides to a halt, they’re in a dungeon. Theo was expecting an indoor stable—why else would The Builders have constructed the gryphon-sized lift if not to move their unlikely livestock?
But though this may be a dungeon of sorts (it is clearly underground), Theo can’t picture a great big muddy beast stomping all over the fine mosaics.
There’s a strange, cool draft, and the air feels wet. The entire hall, from floor to walls to ceiling, is encrusted in delicate, shimmering mosaic work in muted earth tones, not unlike a Roman bath. In fact, a channel of water runs along both walls, occasionally cutting through the hallway, so the only way over (without getting soaked) is to step on the stepping stones.
Harry immediately looks on edge.
“What?” To Theo it feels… peaceful. Serene.
“Theo, dear. I’m sure you’re aware of the symbolism of running water.”
Oh. “Well, it’s a boundary, and… some evils can’t cross it?”
“Tch. A boundary. Some say the boundary between this world and the Otherworld. Some say the boundary between this realm and the spirit realm. ‘Evil’ is a rather quaint term, and ‘can’t’ is a rather strong word, but I’m sure you get the picture. Now, think, why would our glorious Architects feel the need to draw a boundary of their own in their stronghold?”
Oh. “So… something up ahead is dangerous and otherworldly.”
*****
They step light and slow through the hall. Theo inspects the mosaics quite thoroughly as they pass, and he’s alarmed to find that while they clearly depict legible scenes between the swimming abstract borders, his eyes appear to slide right off the figures, and he can’t identify a single one.
It’s not that the figures are unknown to him—it’s that he literally can’t see them. Or, more likely, he can see them, but he can’t read them.
It’s almost like looking at a person without a face. Highly disturbing.
He elbows Harry and gestures at the walls. Harry just shrugs, hands in pockets, and hums a ditty. Theo doesn’t recognize the tune, but it echoes off the tile.
The hallway seems interminable, or it passes in a blink. He’s not sure.
But eventually, they come to a crossing. The hall widens suddenly into a square sort of room, only about three meters across, where the channels split into a four-way intersection. There’s a barrel-arched ceiling, and a small pool in the center.
Ahead, the hall continues on as far as the eye can see. Crosswise, though, to the left and the right, are a pair of ornately carved doors, wooden and iron-studded, with a small window covered in iron grating.
“Left or right?” Harry asks.
“Left.” Always go left in a maze, after all.
They attempt to look through the grated window to see inside, but there’s some weird glamour scrambling the view. Harry shrugs. Apparently he can’t unpick this one.
There’s a thick iron padlock on the door, but rather than a keyhole, it has rotating discs set along the lower bar, strange archaic symbols etched into each disc continuing all along the circumferences.
So… some sort of medieval combination lock.
“Well. This one’s on you, Theo.”
What? Oh. Iron.
On second thought, that has rather disturbing implications for whatever is behind the door.
Harry wanders off while Theo mentally catalogues the current placement of the tumblers. It might help if he understood the language, he grumbles to himself.
It feels like he’s been staring at the symbols (or sigils) for ages, and no leap of understanding has graced him. He’s finally reaching to mess around experimentally, when he thinks of the obvious solution. He pulls, testing the padlock—
It clicks open. So, already unlocked, then. That, too, has… implications.
“Oh! That spells ‘PASSWORD’.” Harry has seemingly teleported back to lean over Theo’s shoulder.
Seriously?
"And you couldn't have told me that before you delegated? Wait, what language is that, anyway?"
Harry stays suspiciously silent.
*****
“Are you sure that wasn’t a word of binding?” Theo asks.
“I never said that.”
They’re in the mysterious room behind the mysterious door, the latter which has been painstakingly propped open and secured into position—for if something’s out there, and it manages to trap them in, well, they might never get out again. There's no mechanism to open the padlock from the inside, after all.
Like a prison cell. Or a cage.
But it has the feel of a grotto, or a shrine, or a bathhouse, with vaulted ceilings arching down into columns, mosaics giving way to rough-hewn stone, and water channels flowing into a milky green central pool.
(Theo carefully doesn’t think ‘flooded crypt’.)
It could be an old cistern in the Roman style, but, well, that’d be too easy.
They search the room, high and low, with every technique they can muster, but—
“It’s empty.”
“Do you think we let it out?”
“Maybe,” Harry says, thoughtful. “But it was set to unlock when we found it.”
Rather than continue down the endless hall, they silently head towards the other door in unison.
The other door, Theo is relieved to see, has no lock, and leads not to another crypt, but another near-identical hallway. It seems running water isn’t the only protection installed by the Builders.
It’s a labyrinth.
This hall, though, unmistakably slopes upwards.
There seems to be something wrong with the whole picture, though Theo can’t quite put his finger on it, until it hits him. The water’s flowing up.
*****
Finally, past one last iron-studded door, the heaviest yet, they exit squinting back into light again. It’s a jarring contrast.
On a whim, Theo turns back towards the door they came from and cracks it open again. As he suspected, the crypt-hall-labyrinth (or whatever) is gone, and in its place, a normal spiraling staircase up a tower. He shuts the door, opens it once more.
The same staircase. This time.
Theo turns to face the room they’ve just entered. It’s not unlike a Victorian conservatory, or a sunroom, perhaps. The floors are tile, checkered black and white. There are tea settings, desks, ferns, bookcases, ferns, an alchemy bench, ferns, hothouse blooms, and, well, more ferns.
Theo closes in on the alchemy bench. Notices, immediately, signs of recent use. The crucible still glows hot, the alembic full, embers in the athanor.
“Our mysterious resident has been here, too,” Theo says, to empty air, as it turns out.
Not again.
Theo jogs after Harry, whose back he catches a glimpse of slipping through the stained-glass door at the end of the conservatory.
The next hall has a series of doors. One is cracked open.
“Hello, Mister," Harry begins, tone light and childish. "May I have your name?”
No response.
“I don’t mean to interrupt your work. I’m sure it’s quite important, if you’ve been here working for so long.”
A grunt.
“What is this place? I don’t mean your lab, of course. It is a fine lab. This wing, though—it’s rather odd.”
Theo imagines the man is raising an eyebrow, or two.
“And we’ve only seen but a small piece of it! Really quite a mystery. A fascinoma, one might say. I believe those must be your ingredients growing in the upper greenhouse?”
A huff.
“And the aerie! Fit for Godric Gryffindor himself, I should think.”
The man radiates scorn.
“We just came from the water-vaults below. Have you any idea what used to reside there?”
That gets a reaction. The man glances over his shoulder at Harry, looks him over, through narrowed eyes. “You opened the cage, then, did you? Idiot child. You should know better than to prod at things that want to eat you.”
The man—or creature, Theo can’t quite tell—is thin, like his skin is too loose (or too tight?) for his face, with protruding cheekbones, dark hair, a patrician nose. Theo has the impression that if the… being ever smiled, he’d look not unlike a grinning skull.
His robes are ancient, Elizabethan in origin, perhaps. A black doublet with lattice cutouts, a white shirt with blackwork on the cuffs and ruff.
Harry positively assaults the man with his best shot at wide-eyed naivete. “A cage? It looked like a swimming pool, to me!”
“I’d stop trying that trick on things that know what you are, if I were you. It’s quite irritating to have ‘prey’ dangled in front of your face when you know quite well the pretty packaging hides a rotten taste. Particularly when that prey should know better.”
“Rotten! How absolutely rude. I’ll have you know I taste perfectly fine.”
Theo makes the executive decision that blunt will have to do, or they’ll get absolutely nowhere. “Do you know why they closed this wing, sir?”
The man—or whatever—has already turned back around to his work.
Useless.
Theo studies the alchemical equipment. He’s no expert, but it looks more specialized than the tools in the conservatory. There are runes and sigils engraved in bands along the rims that occasionally glow, lambent with unearthly light.
There’s a rickety installation of bookshelves above the alchemy bench, but Theo can’t read any of the titles. Strange, because he can recognize most of the ancient scripts on sight, if not read the odd line or two. Though he does note a few books that are most certainly made of human skin (he’s seen enough examples in the Nott libraries to know.)
The man lets out an atonal hum. “If you're set on disturbing my work... how would you like to make yourselves useful?”
Harry grins. “What will you give me in return?”