Twilight shook her head in amazement. “And to think that a basilisk or cockatrice was wandering around inside the school!” She exchanged concerned looks with the two professors. “It still might be here! Hogwarts: A History never mentions one being captured or killed.” She shook her head. “How can he stand there and say this is the safest place in England while there might be a monster like that wandering through the school!”
The children exchanged their own looks. “Maybe we should get Fluttershy?” suggested Harry.
Twilight hummed, then said, “First, I need to confirm my suspicions.” She turned to Myrtle. “Which is why I want you to share your memory of what happened with me.”
The girl looked up at her tiredly, sighed, and shrugged. “Sure.”
Twilight sat down in a chair beside the girl. “Close your eyes and just think about what happened. Pull it into your thoughts, why you were in the toilets, what you were hearing, what you were feeling . . . .”
“Excuse me, Princess Sparkle . . . ,” Professor Flitwick said.
Twilight turned and stared at him exasperatedly.
“. . . Twilight,” he amended.
She nodded and smiled.
“I don’t think you know that it is illegal to legilimens a child.”
“Legilimens? A child?” Twilight looked at Myrtle. “Hmm.” She thought a moment. “Yes. I think some of your people might think that what I was about to do does match your definition of a legilimens.” She looked over at the professor. “However,” she turned to the witch, “you were fourteen when this happened, correct?” Myrtle nodded. “And you were a ghost for forty-eight years. So, that means you are technically sixty-two years old.” She looked back at the professor. “I think we can safely say that she is old enough to no longer be a child.”
Both professors frowned at Twilight. They exchanged glances. Technically, it was true. Myrtle had been born in 1929. And that made her sixty-two years old. Definitely not a child. Harry knew, just from what little he had learned reading the histories about the wizarding world, that it was an argument that might be over-ruled by the Wizengamot, based solely on her apparent physical age right now being only fourteen, and that her ghostly state had held her in a limbo of aging. But they were also talking about a basilisk possibly being in the castle.
Professor Flitwick turned back to Twilight. “As long as she agrees, and you restrict your searching to only the incident of her untimely death.”
Twilight looked at Myrtle and raised an eyebrow questioningly.
The witch shrugged. “I don’t mind,” she said. She closed her eyes and frowned, obviously thinking about the incident.
As she did so, Twilight leaned close and pressed her forehead to the girl’s forehead for a few seconds. Then she sat up.
“Okay, probably a basilisk. The eyes are too big for a cockatrice to fit in that room so it has to be a snake. That would make it . . . ,” She frowned, thinking, “about twelve celestials in length!” She sat back, eyes wide, “Wow! That’s huge!” At the puzzled expressions everyone had, she added, “About twenty of your yards.”
She looked over at Professor McGonagall. “Who hunted down that monster? I’ve never heard of one that large before. Usually a dragon eats it before it has a chance to get any bigger than four or five celestials.”
The transfigurations’ professor just stared at her. “Twenty yards?” she finally said. She had paled significantly. She exchanged looks with the short professor.
“About.”
Frowning, Professor Flitwick said, “To the best of our knowledge, no one ever suspected that the cause of Miss Warren’s demise was a basilisk or cockatrice.”
Twilight stared at him, aghast. “You mean there’s probably been a basilisk loose in the school and no one knew it?! For decades?”
The diminutive professor shrugged his shoulders. “Back in 1943 there had been some attacks on students by a mysterious ‘monster.’ Several attacks, but no deaths, so no one suspected that a basilisk might be at the root of it — basilisks and cockatrices kill with their stare, not just petrify. And with the proper potion, which was being prepared, all the victims were expected to make a full recovery. Plus, no one knew of a beast that would only petrify someone and not kill them. It was considered an annoyance more than anything else. The students considered it more of a challenge than a threat. They spent hours every day after classes searching for the creature, I was told.” He shook his head bemusedly.
Twilight stared at him incredulously.
“After Miss Warren’s unfortunate incident, however,” he continued, “the school board was planning to close the school and hunt the beast that killed her. Before that could happen, though, a student was caught with an illegal and very dangerous giant pet spider. The spider escaped to the Forbidden Forest and the attacks in the school stopped. He was judged to be the one controlling the monster, his wand was snapped, and he was expelled.”
Twilight stared at him sceptically. “Spiders don’t kill by turning one to stone. Neither does their bite petrify. Everyone knows that. There aren’t even any mythological spiders that do that. They always bite their prey to inject poison. Didn’t anyone examine her body for bite marks? Or even just ask her ghost what had happened?”
“The Headmaster at the time, Headmaster Armando Dippet, made the decision that having caught the culprit, no further actions needed to be taken,” Professor McGonagall said. “The attacks stopped immediately, which gave some credence to the opinion that he was correct in his assessment: that the monster was hiding in the Forbidden Forest, and the one controlling its attacks in the school had been removed from the school. Without its owner it would leave the school, and the students, alone. Which, with time, appeared to be the case.”
“And Miss Warren did not show up as a ghost until several weeks later,” added Professor Flitwick.
“And no one thought to follow up, just to be sure?” Twilight said incredulously. “Are you all crazy? Doesn’t anyone have any common sense?”
Twilight just stood there and stared at the professors, completely flummoxed at their casual attitude. She could almost believe that they had been bespelled to ignore the beast and the implications of its still being alive and in the castle.
“Let me check something real quick,” she said, “you don’t mind, do you?”
They shook their heads.
She cast a quick spell on the two professors, which came up negative. “Okay,” she said, “You aren’t currently under any compulsion magic to ignore the creature. Nor any other magics, either.”
They looked mildly alarmed at that statement, then relieved at her conclusion.
Did having magic mean humans didn’t have any sort of common-sense?
But Harry did. Although he frequently abandoned it in following the Cutie Mark Crusaders on their bizarre ventures in search of their cutie marks. As she had reprimanded him for doing many times.
“And this student, the one responsible for a murder,” Twilight inquired, “was never punished beyond being expelled?”
“His wand was snapped,” said Flitwick. “He could never do magic again.” He shuddered.
“But, murder? Never punished for an out-right murder? Did he claim it was an accident, that he was remorseful, and then was given leniency by the Ministry?”
The two professors exchanged a guilty look.
“Miss Warren,” Professor McGonagall said slowly, “was a muggle-born witch, and the wizard in question was a half-blood. Headmaster Dippet felt that snapping his wand and expulsion was sufficient. And turning the culprit over to the Ministry for a trial would have cast himself and Hogwarts in a bad light. He declared it a Hogwarts matter, and the case was closed. He treated it as a prank gone horribly wrong. That the student had meant for his monster to merely petrify Miss Warren, not kill her. And, as such, expulsion and snapping his wand were justified and satisfactory punishments.”
Twilight, and the others, just stared at the two professors. Myrtle was nodding.
“And this student admitted his guilt?” Twilight asked quietly.
“No, he vociferously denied that his pet could ever have hurt a student. He said that this was all a misunderstanding. He had kept the creature, he had named it Aragog, in a box in the dungeons. He denied having anything to do with the petrifications. Not that Headmaster Dippet believed him — a highly respected student claimed to have caught the guilty student red-handed. They even gave him an award for doing so.”
She stared at them for a long time. Finally, she shook her head. “Unbelievable. Even a few minutes talking with Myrtle about how she had died would have revealed that whatever had killed her was far too big to fit into a box someone could carry. And it had two eyes, not eight.”
She pressed her lips tightly together, then said, “So this Headmaster Dippet deliberately concealed what had happened and never bothered to see if his conclusions were correct when Myrtle finally appeared as a ghost?”
The professors nodded. “Not that we know of,” Professor McGonagall said.
“And no one had the common sense to check that the Headmaster hadn’t made a mistake, and talked with Myrtle?”
The professors nodded again. “Not that we know of,” Professor McGonagall said, again, after a brief glance at Professor Flitwick.
Twilight stared down at the floor for a few moments.
“And the person who really orchestrated Myrtle’s death got away without punishment.” She faced the two professors, “And having gotten away with it once, how do you know he hasn’t done it again and again, somewhere else?”
She turned to Myrtle, “Could you please show me where you died?”
A few minutes later, the group was gathered in the second-floor girls’ toilets.
“And this is where I died!” Myrtle said dramatically, throwing open the door to her stall. She turned to Twilight, grinning.
Twilight nodded. “So, you were in the stall,” she said, stepping inside and turning to face out. “You heard a boy’s voice speaking a language you didn’t know. Then there was a grinding noise. Upset, you opened the stall door to tell off the boy.” She mimed opening the stall door. She stood staring at the mirror directly across from her. “And you immediately saw two big yellow eyes staring at you, and you died.”
“Yep,” Myrtle said cheerily, “That’s exactly what happened.”
Twilight stared at the mirror. Stared at herself staring back. “That was hissing, like a snake,” she said quietly. “Cockatrices crow, so they are definitely out. And that leaves only basilisks. So,” she turned to the professors, “We are definitely dealing with a basilisk.”
The professors exchanged dismayed looks.
“Hissing? A boy came in hissing like a snake?” Flitwick half-whispered.
“Parseltongue,” said McGonagall. “Only heirs of Slytherin are reputed to be parselmouths.”
“You don’t suppose . . . ,” Flitwick prompted.
“The Chamber of Secrets is real?” finished the other.
The students exchanged puzzled looks, not knowing the implications of what that meant.
The princess walked up to and leaned close over the sink and stared at the mirror, examining its edges. She cautiously lifted her hand and gently pressed it against the glass. Nothing happened. She stood back and started casting spells at the mirror, the sink, walls, floor, everywhere she could reach with a spell.
Professors McGonagall and Flitwick, and Myrtle and Hermione, stared, wide-eyed at the display of silent wandless magic. The others just watched. Harry tried to follow the magic she was casting, with limited success.
Finally she stopped. “It’s not a portal,” she said decisively, giving Harry a significant look. Apparently her studies of the portal to this world had taught her how to refine her spells regarding portals.
“But something is there. There is an unusual amount of magic surrounding this spot.” She took a deep breath, exhaled, and started walking forward. Everyone except Harry gasped as she walked through the sink and disappeared straight into the wall.
She had done this before, back in Equestria.
Harry sighed. Every time he had tried that spell he had walked into the wall, muzzle first. He just didn’t have the skill, or power, to do that sort of thing yet. Or maybe it was the confidence that he wouldn’t just bash his nose into the wall that he lacked. Maybe he should try closing his eyes first, then he wouldn’t tense up when he reached the wall. But that hadn’t worked, so far. He always seemed to know exactly where the wall was just before he smashed his muzzle into it.
Several places on the wall flashed brightly. Twilight was apparently casting spells inside the wall.
A moment later, she walked back through the wall and mirror beside the first sink, shaking her head. “No,” she mumbled, “the wall is too thin for a secret passage, and there isn’t a portal inside the wall, just pipes and normal plumbing.” She studied the wall and mirror again, before dropping to her knees and looking closely at the sink. “There is magic here, tethered here. It’s not like the magic in the rest of the wall.”
She stood. “Everypony get back,” she said, waving a hand at them.
Harry and the fillies quickly complied, pulling the other two witches with them, and moved all the way to the Girls’ Toilets’ door. The two professors noticed the Equestrians’ caution and followed after then, while they watched Twilight closely.
Twilight took a deep breath, then another. She gritted her teeth and grimaced. She closed her eyes and concentrated. After a moment, dark-purple smoke started leaking from her eyes and pooling around her forehead. The smoky purple clouds extended tendrils that slithered towards the mirror and dipped down to a tap on the sink.
Harry shuddered. Twilight had shown him that magic once, as a warning on what to look out for. It had creeped him out then, as it did now. The two professors were watching with alarmed expressions. What they were seeing was not something they had expected.
Everyone else watched, enthralled at seeing a magic none had ever heard of before, much less seen. The professors exchanged worried looks. Harry suspected that they could feel, as well as see, the unhealthiness of the magic in use.
“That tap never worked, even when I was alive . . . the first time, that is,” said Myrtle brightly, “Don’t know why no one ever fixed it.”
The tendril grew thicker. It wrapped around the tap and then sank into the wall immediately behind it. It grew steadily thicker.
Nothing happened for several minutes until the purple cloud and tendrils simply evaporated.
Twilight staggered a step back. Harry raced forward to grab her arm and help her keep her balance. “That’s always gives me a headache,” was all she said, at first, giving him a weak smile.
She looked at the professors. “The basilisk used the pipes in the castle walls to move around. There is a large chamber far underground, under the school and lake. I imagine that is the basilisk’s lair.” She swept her gaze across the ceiling and walls of the room. “There are many pipes in the walls it has used. The magic in the castle accommodates it.” She narrowed her eyes, thinking. “I think the beast has a reverse form of your undetectable expansion charm on it that allows it to fit in the pipes. It’s mind-boggling that some . . . one actually magicked the entire castle with pipes to allow such a dangerous beast to manoeuvre inside it undetected. And they’ve been there from when the castle was built.” She shook her head, too astonished for words.
She stared at the sink and mirror intently. “And there is something about the magic right here that is different. It’s not bad magic — no hate or fear — just . . . convoluted. Almost like it’s in a different language. I can feel it, but I can’t quite get a grip on it.”
She shook her head and started for the door. “Now that we know where it is, we can deal with it.” She looked both ways as she exited the toilets, then asked, “So, which way is the Headmaster’s office?”
“This way,” Professor Flitwick proclaimed from behind her, and started off.
Twilight had to stop to examine a moving portrait as soon as she noticed the witch in it curtseying as they passed. That took several minutes as the professors explained the magic used in creating the painting, and how the people in them could travel between different frames. Which the painting-witch was happy to demonstrate.
The students, especially Hermione, listened attentively. The answers to their questions about the portraits hadn’t been nearly as detailed.
Twilight was delighted. “Oh, I wonder if this can be done to the Canterlot stained glass tapestries! It would make them so much more interesting!”
Just when Harry thought he might have to say something, she sighed. “But that is for later.” She turned away and they resumed their trip to see the Headmaster.
The next unplanned stop was a suit of armour which bowed as they passed. Then the Central Staircases were the next impediment as the only stairs on their floor slowly moved away and back as they watched, as if showing off.
Finally, they made it to the gargoyle in front of Dumbledore’s office, three-quarters of an hour after starting for it. The gargoyle moved to the side as they approached, and bowed.
The antics of the castle’s magical inhabitants left Professors McGonagall and Flitwick puzzled. It was almost as if the castle itself were showing off for this mysterious Princess Sparkle.
After her explanation of what they had discovered, the Headmaster leaned back in his chair and sagely said, “Ah, yes. That makes sense.” He stared over their heads for a moment. “Salazar Slytherin was one of the four founders, a thousand years ago, you know,” he said in a conversational tone. “It has always been rumoured that he had a secret chamber somewhere in the castle — the Chamber of Secrets, people have called it. Supposedly, he had secreted a monster of some type in the chamber as a protection for the school against those who would bring harm to the students in residence. A last-ditch protector, you might say.”
He looked over at Twilight. “Even back then there was some hostility against wizards and witches. It happened more than once, during those early days, that a muggle-born student would attend the school. After their first term she or he would then betray its location to their religious leaders in a vain attempt to seek favour for their family. They hoped that in revealing a hidden nest of ‘vile sinners and devil worshipers,’ as wizards and witches were termed by the Christians, that they would be rewarded.” He shook his head sadly. “Usually, they were killed, instead, and then the leaders would assemble a small army and march here. There were some nasty attacks in the centuries before we developed the muggle-repelling charms that made it impossible for them to find us.”
He looked around the room. “That’s why Hogwarts was built as a castle, to resist those attacks and to provide temporary quarters for wizard families needing sanctuary during especially difficult and troubled times.
“As a result of those experiences, Salazar was deeply mistrustful of muggle-born, declaring them unfit to attend the school. He wanted to restrict access to only pure-blood and half-blood children. He reasoned that if the muggle-born survived to marry, that their children would be unlikely to turn against the school if they knew their father or mother, or both, would be punished for not previously confessing their ‘sin’ of possessing magic. And they would face the very real possibility that their entire family would be executed by the muggles — if the officials didn’t believe their faithfulness, and they couldn’t escape.” He thought a moment.
“He is rumoured to have built a secret chamber somewhere in the castle. A chamber which was his office and also contained a dread monster that would come out to defend Hogwarts when it was needed the most.”
He sighed. “I spent many a year searching for the chamber myself, as did almost every Headmaster and Slytherin student since the Founders’ days.” He shook his head sorrowfully. “No one ever found it and so it was considered merely a legend, a myth. No wonder we never found it — it was never in the castle, but beneath it!”
He smiled ruefully at Twilight. “Alas, even knowing where it is, now, however, does us no good. We cannot get to it. There are no passages we can find directly with magic, nor any we can scry — for scrying has been used in the past to search for it.” He shook his head sadly. “Salazar did a marvellous job of hiding his Chamber from detection.”
Twilight stared at him, then she said, half under her breath as she looked out the window, “I know I’m going to regret saying this.” She shook her head and turned to face the old wizard. She put her hands on her hips and half-yelled, “ARE YOU SERIOUS?”
Everyone except the Headmaster jumped in response.
“I assure you, Princess, there really is no way to get to Slytherin’s Chamber without expending a great deal of time and effort,” he said to her in mild reprimand. “And we still might not find it. After all, wizards and witches, some of them quite powerful indeed, have been trying to find it for almost a thousand years. Even knowing its general location doesn’t make it any easier to breach the charms that hide and protect it.”
He sighed. “The beast hasn’t been seen or heard in forty-eight years, it is either asleep or held in stasis. In either case, it is not an immediate threat to us.”
Twilight shook her head in disbelief, and turned to look up at the two phoenixes currently sharing a perch in a corner of the office. They were listening intently.
“Philomena, if you please?”
The two phoenixes turned to each other and a short “conversation” erupted. When it stopped, Fawkes shook his head and flew up into the air and then glided down towards Dumbledore. Dumbledore raised his arm, after a questioning look at Twilight.
The moment the bird landed on his arm, there was bright burst of light and the two disappeared.
She stared at the empty chair. “If he doesn’t know that phoenixes can go almost anywhere that isn’t specifically shielded against them, then he’s an idiot, or lying to us. Or senile.”
Twilight turned to the two surprised professors. “Is everyone in the wizarding world here like him? Ignoring the facts in front of them for some nebulous ‘ideal’ of what things should be like? Regardless of what is really in front of them?” She frowned darkly. “Or does he simply lack any sort of common sense?” She studied the two professors for a moment. “Or is it that all wizards lack common sense?”
She glanced at the six students.
“Three times today he’s assured me something was true when it clearly wasn’t.” She looked back at the empty chair behind the desk. “He assured me Hogwarts was safe, yet he has a cerberus in a room easily accessible by children, a room he even told them about. He assured me that the children would obey his vague warning, yet dozens of them have already been to see the cerberus in the last week, with more planning to see for themselves.”
She started pacing. “He should know better, he’s spent decades running this school. Anyone with common sense would know that children will always investigate what you tell them to avoid. And just now he assured me that there was no way to access this supposed Chamber of Secrets when it was clearly, demonstrably, easy for a phoenix to find.”
Harry and the girls listened avidly.
She glanced at the two professors, still pacing. “Based on what I’ve read in your history books, he isn’t stupid. And he successfully led a group of wizards opposing those seeking to overthrow the Ministry ten years ago, so he can’t be incompetent. So why didn’t he question Myrtle? Did he just blindly accept what the previous Headmaster had told him?”
She shook her head, again. “And to say it is not worth the expense or time to search out its lair when it could, in a matter of minutes, wipe out an entire generation of children?” She looked back at the professors. “Is an entire generation of children not worth the expense or effort? If Princess Celestia were here, she’d tear apart the castle looking for the Basilisk. She’d sift through the entire valley with a sieve if she had to.
“Not to mention why he has something stored in a school that requires a cerberus as a guard.”
The two professors exchanged a guilty look.
She narrowed her eyes. “In every case, he has been shown to be incompetent or wilfully neglectful to his duties as Headmaster. Based on what I’ve seen, he needs to be replaced. But that is something I cannot do.”
“Well,” Professor McGonagall said, still looking a bit guilty. “In his defence, I have to say none of us, the professors, I mean, ever thought to suggest that he ask Fawkes to find the Chamber.” She glanced at Professor Flitwick. “And it’s not like we didn’t know about Miss Warren’s unfortunate incident forty-eight years ago. That was the only time the school had ever been scheduled to close prematurely.”
“And when Minerva and I were hired,” put in Flitwick, “we were assured by Headmaster Dippet that the creature responsible had escaped into the Forbidden Forest, never to be seen again, and the student responsible for it expelled. We were not provided the details. And I, for one, never suspected that Myrtle’s death was anything but accidental. I certainly never suspected that a basilisk, or even a cockatrice was responsible for her death. Not with the petrifications. And no one has ever heard of a basilisk merely petrifying its prey.”
Twilight gave him a puzzled look. “That’s what they do where I come from. You are only killed if the creature itself is killed, or someone breaks the statue you become.”
Myrtle shrugged. Now that she was alive, the “incident” didn’t seem nearly as terrible as it had been for the last forty-eight years, two months, and twenty-five days.
Twilight sighed and looked around the room. “I believe it is time for a competent pony to examine this castle, top to bottom.” She transformed into her alicorn self. And started casting powerful spells as the professors and students watched.
۸- ̰ -۸