"Basilisk venom," offered Moody.
"
"Calm down, son, I was just checking to see if you could be trusted."
Mad-Eye Moody continued his (secretly unnecessary) slow turning, surveying the graveyard, and the Potions Master continued pouring.
"Hold on," Moody said suddenly. "How do you know
"Because it says 'Tom Riddle' on the easily moved headstone," Snape said dryly. "And I have just won ten Sickles from the Headmaster, who bet you would think of that before the fifth bottle. So much for constant vigilance."
There was a pause.
"How long did it take Albus to reali-"
"Three years after we learned of the ritual," said Snape, in a tone not quite like his usual sardonic drawl. "In retrospect, we should have consulted you earlier."
Snape uncapped the ninth bottle.
"We poisoned all the other graves as well, with long-lasting substances," remarked the former Death Eater. "It
"The true location doesn't look like a graveyard any more," Moody said flatly. "He moved all the
They continued their futile work.
The Slytherin common room could be accurately and precisely described as a remilitarized zone; the moment you stepped through the portrait hole you would see that the left half of the room was Definitely Not Talking to the right half and vice versa. It was very clear, it did not need to be explained to anyone, that you did
At a table in the exact middle of the room, Blaise Zabini sat by himself, smirking as he did his homework. He had a reputation now, and meant to keep it.
"You doing anything interesting today?" said Tracey.
"Nope," said Daphne.
If you went high enough in Hogwarts, you didn't see many other people around, just corridors and windows and staircases and the occasional portrait, and now and then some interesting sight, such as a bronze statue of a furry creature like a small child, holding a peculiar flat spear...
If you went high enough in Hogwarts, you didn't see many other people around, which suited Harry.
There were much worse places to be trapped, Harry supposed. In fact you probably couldn't think of anywhere
If Harry hadn't been told that he
How could the castle and its grounds seem so much smaller, so much more confining, how could the rest of the world become so much more interesting and important, the instant Harry had been told that he wasn't allowed to leave? He'd spent
If Harry hadn't been told that he couldn't leave, he probably would've
...but not the rest of his life.
That was sort of the problem, really.
Who knew whether there
Who knew whether He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named still existed outside of the imagination of a possibly-not-just- pretending-to-be-crazy old wizard?
Lord Voldemort's body had been found burned to a crisp, there couldn't really be such things as souls. How could Lord Voldemort still be alive? How did Dumbledore
And if there wasn't a Dark Lord, Harry couldn't defeat him, and he would be trapped in Hogwarts forever.