//------------------------------// // 65 - Trials // Story: A Phoenix Beyond the Veil - The Philospher's Stone // by gerandakis //------------------------------// Act Four Containment Chapter Sixty-Five Trials He was ecstatic. His master was more along the lines of smugly triumphant, not that Quirius Quirrell would ever have said so to his face. His master had questioned many things about him. His abilities. His power. His resolve. But never his loyalty. As such some parts of his mind were still his and only his. One of those he buried that thought in now. His master, thankfully, was too distracted to notice. The plan had worked. He and his master alike had been sceptical when they had heard the three muggle women discussing the ancient legend of the cerberus based of the real magical creature. Could it really be so easy? Could the weakness of the mythical creature be as based in reality as the myth itself? But sure enough. A few bars of conjured music and the beast dozed off. From there it was only a matter of levitating it out of the way and the way to the trapdoor was clear. He had had a plan laid out. To coax Hagrid with a dragon egg that he had been working hard to covertly acquire. To get him drunk, get him talking. But all of that was unnecessary now. Still, he didn’t dare go further. Even at the height of his power, his master couldn’t beat Albus Dumbledore in a one-on-one duel. He was not his master, he could match neither his power nor his skill. And, here at Hogwarts, a straight duel wouldn’t happen. Not with this much hanging in the balance. McGonagall, Flitwick and Snape were all formidable duelists in their own right. With them supporting Dumbledore, he wouldn’t stand a chance. With his master’s aid or without it. He would have to wait until the old geezer was out in the next session of the Wizengamot. With him far away, the wards protecting the stone would have no one else to report to and by the time Dumbledore came back, he would be long gone. And the stone with him . Until then, he would have to continue laying low. For now, however, he would have to make his way back through the sleeping castle to his office without attracting attention. Snape had become suspicious, he could tell. His master was convinced of the man’s loyalty, but agreed that it was not a risk they could take at this juncture. If he became a greater problem, perhaps, but a little suspicion wouldn’t be a problem. Just before he was about to go to bed, a small gout of golden fire delivered a message into Albus’ bedchambers. He recognized the handwriting. He has taken the bait. He couldn’t quite hide his smirk. And, he realized, alone as he was, he didn’t need to. Everything was going to plan. Over the next week and a half, Sunset was under a constant, slight tension. She knew when Quirrell was likely to make his move. The next session of the Wizengamot was the obvious candidate. Still, she had to keep up the charade until then. After discussing the matter with Dumbledore and Princess Celestia, Sunset had let Hermione in on the secret. To account for the fact that her sister had a terrible poker face, she had left out certain details, such as the identity of Voldemort’s agent, but told her the general gist of the situation and the plan to deal with it. Dumbledore and the heads of house would be needed to defeat Quirrell, Sunset didn’t know enough offensive magic to do so herself, even when accounting for him being weakened by the trap. But what she lacked in offensive ability, she more than made up for in defensive power. She couldn’t stop him, but she could buy time. But with her being occupied, someone else would have to rally the professors. That someone was Hermione. To be able to do so at a moment’s notice, the two of them were sticking with one another as though they were glued together, but that wasn’t entirely new. The only times they separated were when Sunset had her comparative magic session with Professor Flitwick and her trainings with Crabbe. Finally, on Wednesday afternoon the next week, she felt her spells go off once more. She shared a glance with Hermione and they both got up to leave the common room and made for the roof of the tower. With the dog out of the way, he could get through the trap door and make his way to the second challenge. He tried using a gravity spell to slow his descent, but found it blocked. Fortunately, something soft broke his fall. Lighting his wand, he recognized the plant. A simple spell later, the offending weed shied back from the magical fire he had conjured, allowing him to make his way forward. Sunset was glad that the princess had come up with the idea of placing detection spells in between the challenges, allowing her to track Quirrell’s progress while she filled Hermione in on the rest of the details. After having already dealt with Hagrid’s and Sprout’s contributions to the Stone’s defence, the trial he now faced was clearly Flitwick’s work. He found the door sealed with four separate locks and reinforced by the same siege wards that had protected the Great Hall on Halloween. His summoning charm proved useless. He hadn’t expected anything different, but it was still wasting valuable time. With a sigh, he called one of the brooms to his hand and got to work. That a good portion of the keys started attacking him whenever he came close to one of the keys he suspected matched the door, didn’t make this trial any less frustrating. Sunset noted with satisfaction that it took nearly fifteen minutes for Quirrell to beat the key room. Once Hermione was filled in, she got to writing notes for the heads of house. They would need to be warned. The next trial turned out to be a gigantic chess game. He was very glad that Dumbledore was in London and would be occupied there for hours yet. If this trial and the previous one were anything to go by, this would take a while. When she felt Quirrell leave the chess room, Sunset sent a note to Dumbledore. He needed confirmation that their expectations had been correct. She couldn’t help her smirk. This was where they had added her trial. Something any muggle would call a classic, yet entirely unfamiliar to wizards. He was confused to see that the door beyond the chessboard opened up onto a spiraling staircase. The path lead him up into a square room with a pedestal in the center. In the direction he suspected the stone to be there was another door. It was locked and, once again, sealed by the siege wards, but didn’t have any actual lock he could see. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that the pedestal in the center of the room had something to do with opening the door. He had no clue who’s test this could be, but turned to one of the other doors instead. Those weren’t sealed. He pushed open the first door and his eyes widened. Beyond it there was nothing but a corridor, maybe sixty feet in total, with another pedestal at the end. Hovering atop it was a fine metal ring. When a summoning charm failed to retrieve the item, he made his way down the corridor waiting for the inevitable trap. He almost missed the fine beam of magic and managed to catch himself just in time before he hit it. An aura-sight charm to analyze the spells confirmed what he had feared. The little beam was tied directly into the wards. Disrupting it in any way would alert Dumbledore. And, at this point, he would likely have enough time to come back and swoop in before he could reach the stone. More worrying, however, was the fact that there were many more such beams, some stationary, some moving, and not all of them tied into the wards. Some of them were instead far more powerful and loaded with a powerful cutting charm. Touching those wouldn’t trip the wards but run the risk of seriously injuring him. He was about to move on and try making his way through the mess of beams when something he could just barely see caused him to pause. “Revelio!” He stopped once again when his spell revealed a third again as many beams as before. Like with the others, three quarters of them were tied into the wards, the rest were meant to cut directly. Only these beams were also invisible. This trial, he decided, was terrible. Not only did it waste valuable time, it also required near perfect concentration to avoid either an alarm through the wards or a dangerous injury that would only make the trial harder for him and cost more valuable time to heal. He would have to remember this design. It was a tricky bit of work to get past the trial. A few adhesive spells stopped his robes from tripping any of the beams, but that was about all he could really do to make the matter easier for him. He had to weave between the beams, occasionally mimicking poses from a muggle sport he had observed called ‘limbo’. A few times he had to jump through a gap in the grid. The exhausting part was doing that six times. One each to get to through each corridor and one more to get back with the parts found at their end. Finally, after nearly twenty minutes, he returned to the central room with the final piece. When he placed it on the pedestal, it came together with the other two parts, each ring fitting neatly into the next larger one. They began spinning above the pedestal, but he couldn’t be bothered to care. He only had eyes for one fact. The door was finally open. Sunset and Hermione were now chatting merrily atop Gryffindor tower. Sunset used her monitoring charms to give her sister a running commentary of Quirrell’s progress. All preparations were complete. All the trials and defenses, they realized, had the unintended side effect of exhausting Quirrell both physically and mentally. That could only help them. All her messages were prepared. The only thing left to do was to wait. The next room was a surprise. This was where his trial was supposed to be located. Instead, he found a gigantic room designed to look like space. Filled with floating rocks. Now that he thought about it, Dumbledore had mentioned something about the danger a troll in the castle represented. He had likely removed it and replaced it with another defense. Probably with the help of one of the other professors. Sinistra if he had to take a guess. This test was decidedly more fun, but still time consuming to get through. At this rate, Dumbledore might actually finish up at the Wizengamot before he managed to reach the stone. It was fortunate that the old man was known to hobknob for a while after each meeting. Finding the right door was a slog, but he managed it. Hermione was still marveling at Sunset’s description of the star chamber, as she had dubbed Professor Sinistra’s trial, when Quirrell made his way to the last trial. The potion chamber. Finally! A sensible trial. No ridiculous displays of magic. No tests of dexterity. Just a simple riddle. Now if only he wasn’t so terrible at logic. After a good ten minutes, his master grew impatient and solved the riddle for him. Taking the smallest bottle he gulped down the potion and made his way first through the fire, then through the door. “Alright. He’s reached the room with the stone. Time to get ready.” Sunset handed Hermione the five rolled-up scrolls before letting Philomena hop onto her sister’s shoulder, a wing on her back, ready to bring her in on her command. The mirror surprised him. He had not expected this as the final defense. Then again, it was Dumbledore’s trial. Perhaps he should have expected something like this. He walked around the mirror, his wand drawn, but couldn’t find any indication where the stone might be located. Finally, he looked into the mirror itself. He saw himself. Using the stone to produce the elixir of life and restore his master. But where was it? Inside the mirror? Beyond it? Was it perhaps- A pulse of magic surged through the room, breaking his concentration. One moment his wand was raised, posed to fend off any attack that might come, the next it clattered uselessly to the floor. A golden light filled the room and he was lifted off his feet. Suddenly, his world erupted into infernal pain. A force unlike any he had ever known tore at his very essence. The pain wasn’t physical. It was simultaneously far less direct and far more real. But he was in no state to think about such matters. He only dimly noticed when he fell to the ground. The pain let up. Then, his world faded to black.