As of now, there hadn't been a single memo about the hat being stolen, which made me wonder what in Merlin's beard Dumbledore was doing, I mean sure it had only been like eight hours but still...
If he had any suspicions that it had been me, he didn't show it. I hadn't been stopped once by him or any other teachers during the evening.
Thankfully.
I looked at my watch, 1:39 AM.
The castle was as silent as a tomb, except for the gossip of portraits of course. Moonlight spilled through the arched windows, casting long shadows that seemed to reach for me with ghostly fingers. This was as good a time as any to retrieve my prize.
Slowly I slipped out of my room without taking Jarvey with me. His snoring was soft and rhythmic; it seemed almost cruel to wake him.
I looked toward the Ravenclaw door, slowly closing my own dorm room, trying to make as little noise as possible before muttering.
"I Cast Misty Step."
My body dissolved into silvery vapor, disappearing and reforming instantly in front of the door. The sensation never failed to send a shiver down my spine – like being unmade and remade in the space between heartbeats.
The door creaked open, the sound unnaturally loud in the midnight silence. I winced, freezing in place for a moment to make sure no one had heard. Satisfied, I unfurled my map and whispered.
"I am one with words."
The parchment unfurled with blue light, Hogwarts revealing itself in all its glory.
I began moving through the castle, using the map to dodge Filch on his nightly patrol, Mrs. Norris stalking the third-floor corridor, and any other professor that was making rounds around the castle. The Bloody Baron drifted through the dungeons, his silver bloodstains gleaming eerily in the darkness, while Peeves bounced between the suits of armor on the second floor.
After a few minutes that seemed to stretch to hours, I made it to the fruit bowl painting guarding the entrance to the kitchens.
My fingers trembled slightly as I reached out to tickle the pear. It giggled, squirming under my touch before transforming into a doorknob. With one last glance at my map to ensure the coast was clear, I slipped inside.
The kitchen was completely dark, the fireplace solely filled with cinders and ash. I walked over to the hidden entrance of their headquarters before opening it up. I looked at my map, where Tillery was sleeping, before walking towards his bed.
"Tillery," I whispered, just loudly enough to be heard without waking the others.
His doey eyes, slowly opened, a smile appearing on his sleeping face.
"Master Felix, welcome back." His voice was hushed, respectful of his sleeping kin.
"Tillery, hi. I need you to show me the Come and Go Room, where you hid the hat."
"Of course, Tillery will take you there."
He grabbed my hand with his long, bony fingers, and I felt my body stretching and compressing all at once, the familiar but never comfortable sensation of apparition.
We appeared in front of a tapestry I recognized – a man teaching trolls how to dance, the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy. Was there a hidden room? If so it had never been in the Marauder's Map, and I hadn't been able to find it.
"Come, Master Felix," Tillery said as he held my hand, his skin cool and papery against mine.
We began walking up and down the corridor, though Tillery always looked at the wall across from the tapestry when we passed by.
Up.
Down.
Then back up again.
But when we crossed the wall the third time, Tillery stood waiting expectantly.
A door began to materialize at the other side of the tapestry, appearing first as a hairline crack in the stone, then widening, solidifying, until a polished oak door stood before us.
Tillery eagerly rushed at the door and pulled on it, opening it up. I was stupefied.
It was a room filled with cleaning products, pure white and spotless, it looked like a house elf's paradise. The scent of lemon polish and fresh laundry hit me in a wave, so powerful I could almost taste it, Jarvey would have hated it.
"Come in, Master Felix."
I did as I was told, walking into the room. The door suddenly closed behind us with a soft click that somehow sounded final, like the sealing of a tomb.
On a podium in the center of the room, illuminated by a shaft of moonlight that seemed to have no source, was the stitched-up together Sorting Hat.
"Finally! I've been in this place for way too damn long!" it exclaimed, its wrinkles forming into an expression of indignant relief.
"It's only been like eight-nine hours," I replied, distracted by the room around us.
Absentmindedly, I looked around the space even more. Shelves lined with bottles of various cleaning potions stretched from floor to ceiling. Mops and brooms stood at attention in one corner, while stacks of freshly laundered towels and linens rose in perfect columns in another.
"I didn't have any clue a place like this existed."
"Well, it does, now get me out of here!" the Sorting Hat yelled, its voice echoing strangely in the pristine room.
I however didn't pay it attention. My focus had shifted entirely to the room itself, to the magic I could feel humming beneath the surface of the walls, pulsing like a living heart.
"Tillery, what exactly is this Come and Go Room?"
Tillery looked excited, his large ears perking up, his eyes growing even wider.
"It's a room a person needs when they have a great need they need to fulfill."
"So is it just this, a pure white room?"
"Oh no, the Come and Go Room is able to change according to the need."
"That's... interesting."
I walked over to a wall, drawn by an impulse I couldn't explain. I needed to feel this magic, to understand what charms were in place for something like this to exist. Who put it here? The founders? Someone else entirely?
I put my hand on the wall, closed my eyes, and let my magic sink into the room.
The wall was cool under my palm at first, but as my magic reached out, it began to warm, almost seeming to pulse beneath my touch. I pushed deeper, trying to sense the magical weave of the enchantments.
Without warning, I felt a crushing pain in my head. It wasn't like the migraines I'd experienced before – this was sharper, more invasive, like someone had driven an ice pick through my skull.
In my mind, the image of a brown book with golden letters and spine unfurled fully, its pages flipping rapidly as if caught in a violent wind. My head was splitting open, the pain so intense that stars burst behind my eyelids.
The room began to shake, like an earthquake had just hit us. The bottles on the shelves rattled ominously, some falling and shattering on the floor. The mops and brooms began to dance and twist like possessed things, and the stacks of linens collapsed in avalanches of white.
Over my piercing migraine, I heard Tillery's terrified scream.
"Tillery is afraid! Tillery doesn't know what's going on! Master Felix be careful!"
But his voice was quickly silenced, the slamming of a door resounding through the chaos. Through squinted eyes, I saw the house elf disappear – not with the deliberate pop of apparition, but as if he had been yanked away by an invisible force.
When I opened my eyes fully again, I was alone in the room, except for the fact that the Sorting Hat lay overturned in the corner of the room, its point bent at an unnatural angle.
Wait, the room?
It had changed.
Gone was the pristine cleaning paradise. In its place was a chamber of raw, unadorned stone, dark and solid as if it had all been carved out of the same stone. The air was filled with the smell of book and something else, metallic, like copper, like blood.
Old blood.
Tillery had said the room changed according to what was needed, but changing while we were inside? That definitely wasn't something he knew or he wouldn't have reacted so frightened by the change? and why did he get thrown out while the Sorting Hat and I didn't?
I was in a completely brown room, void of anything except for one thing that dominated the center – a pedestal of polished obsidian.
And on that pedestal was a book.
No, not a book, I corrected myself. A grimoire.
It was bound in leather the color of dried blood, its spine ridged with what looked disturbingly like vertebrae. Golden script adorned its cover, but the letters swam before my eyes, refusing to form words I could understand.
"Hey kid, let's get out of here!" the Sorting Hat yelled, its voice muffled as its face was pressed against the floor. There was real fear in its tone – the first time I'd ever heard the hat sound anything but smug or irritated.
I didn't listen to him. I couldn't. The grimoire was pulling me forward like a lodestone draws iron, my feet moving of their own accord across the cold stone floor.
I was a few steps away from it when, without warning, the book's spine cracked open with a sound like breaking bones.
The pages began to flutter, faster and faster, whipping back and forth with a papery sound that somehow reminded me of insects skittering across a ceiling. Then, as I watched in horrified fascination, lines began to emerge from between the pages.
Not lines. Threads.
They weren't like any thread I'd ever seen. Too thin to be visible, yet somehow I could see them perfectly – shifting, iridescent strands that caught the non-existent light and refracted it into colors the shade of gold.
And they were reaching for me.
"Run!" screamed the Sorting Hat. "For Merlin's sake, RUN!"
But my feet were rooted to the floor, my muscles locked in place. I couldn't even blink as the first thread touched the sole of my shoe.
The moment it made contact, it burrowed through the leather as if it were water, straight into my flesh.
"No," I whispered, a sound barely audible even to myself. "No, no, no."
The thread didn't stop. It continued upward, slicing through fabric, through skin, through muscle – not cutting, but somehow passing through me, becoming part of me. I could feel it winding around my bones, threading through my veins.
There was no blood. There was no wound. Just the threads, becoming one with me, and the terrible violation of it.
"STOP!" I tried to scream, but my voice was gone, stolen by the threads that were now crawling up my legs like parasitic vines, twisting and knotting and binding.
I tried to move, to tear them away, but my arms were lead at my sides. I could only watch in mounting horror as more threads spooled out from the grimoire, writhing through the air toward me.
They reached my waist, my chest, constricting around my ribs until each breath was a labor. I felt them curl around my heart, squeeze gently – a possessive caress that promised much worse to come.
They slithered up my neck, tickling like a soft breeze in summer winds. I could feel them wrapping around my spine, threading between vertebrae, anchoring themselves to me.
My vision blurred with tears of pain and terror as the threads reached my face. They traced the contours of my cheeks, my nose, my lips – mapping me, claiming me. One slipped into my mouth, sliding over my tongue with a taste like ancient dust and copper.
Two more threads hovered in front of my eyes, swaying hypnotically. They weren't like the others – these were golden, gleaming, almost beautiful in their terrible purpose.
Behind them, I saw the grimoire snap shut with terrible finality.
Then the threads lunged forward.
"AAAAHHHHH!" The scream tore from my throat as the golden threads pierced my eyes, drilling straight through my golden irises and into my brain. The pain was beyond anything I had ever experienced – beyond anything I could have imagined. It was the pain of being unmade and remade, of having my very essence rewritten thread by thread.
The last thing I saw was the grimoire, its cover now open once more, pages fluttering as if laughing at my suffering.
Then it all went black.
A/N: We need those powerstones, let's get up in the ranking