The next morning arrived, and Harry only vaguely recalled the strange events of the previous night when he groggily climbed out of bed. It wasn't until he noticed a corner of cloth protruding from beneath his bed frame—the edge of the robe he'd used to cover the packages that the memories came flooding back with clarity.
Jumping down from his mattress with urgency, Harry crouched halfway to the floor, squinting into the dim, shadowy space under the bed. The two neat rows of stacked meal boxes, still emanating a faint sweet aroma, left Harry momentarily speechless as reality crashed over him.
The sight finally convinced him beyond any doubt that everything that had happened during the night—Dobby and Winky's mysterious visit, their cryptic warnings, the emergency food supply was not some bizarre, anxiety-induced dream born from his worries.
It had all been real.
"Dobby and Winky brought you a huge pile of pies and cakes last night?!" Ron exclaimed with excitement, his voice was echoing off the walls of the corridor as they made their way from the Gryffindor common room down toward the Great Hall for breakfast.
Harry had caught up with Ron and Hermione on the stairs, and unable to contain the strange secret any longer, couldn't wait to share the night's events with his two best friends. As Harry had fully expected, Ron completely missed the deeper implication of the situation.
"I knew it wasn't just a hallucination! I did smell pies and pastries, didn't I? My nose never lies about food!" Ron said indignantly. "Why didn't they bring me some too? I gave Dobby a pair of socks last Christmas—good ones with broomsticks on them! Doesn't that count for anything?"
"The point isn't the food itself, Ron—" Harry said with suppressed exasperation, nimbly leaping past Angelina Johnson who was descending the stairs in the opposite direction with her Quidditch practice bag.
He greeted her with a quick wave and a distracted "Morning, Angelina," then turned his head urgently back toward Ron and Hermione, lowering his voice as other students passed them on the crowded staircase.
"The key issue is the crisis Winky and Dobby mentioned, the warning they came to give me. Dobby said Hogwarts is facing a crisis comparable to the Chamber of Secrets incident. What could that possibly mean? What could be that serious?"
"It means Hogwarts might face closure," Hermione said softly.
The casual statement, delivered so somberly, nearly caused Harry and Ron to slip dangerously on the stone stairs they were descending.
The two boys steadied each other with difficulty, grabbing onto the stone bannister and each other's arms for support. They looked helplessly toward Hermione, who always gave them sound, rational advice in times of crisis and could always see through complex situations to the truth of matters with her superior intellect.
Harry hoped to see some sign of joking or exaggeration on Hermione's face, perhaps that knowing smile she had when teasing them, but unfortunately, the deadly seriousness flickering in her brown eyes told Harry she wasn't joking at all.
"You're joking, Hermione. You must be," Ron said flatly, giving his blunt assessment with a forced laugh. "Hogwarts might face closure? Oh, didn't that precious book of yours—Hogwarts: A History tell you that Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry has existed for over a thousand years? Since the time of the Founders themselves! No one can shut it down, not really. What's more-"
Ron's voice grew more confident, "-we have Professor Dumbledore and Professor Watson here now, the two most powerful wizards in Britain. Even You-Know-Who wouldn't dare mess with this place, not with both of them here."
Ron's words, though delivered with typical casual dismissiveness, inadvertently revealed an essential truth—the reason why even those wizards who genuinely believed the Dark Lord had returned and was lurking somewhere among them, gathering his forces, weren't particularly panicked about their safety.
Hogwarts, with its two legendary defenders, seemed impregnable.
"Oh, actually, Hogwarts: A History told me considerably more than you'd think, Ron—" Hermione replied sharply.
The three of them started moving again, descending the remaining stairs at a faster pace, nearly running now. Hermione's bushy brown hair expanded and contracted in the cool morning breeze drifting through the open windows, like seaweed floating gracefully in ocean water.
"The Ministry of Magic—that toad-faced Senior Undersecretary Umbridge, even after getting the full support of the Board of Governors and arriving with all that authority and confidence, still couldn't successfully enter Hogwarts as a professor,"
Hermione continued. "Her wand was shattered by Neville during that demonstration duel, and she ended up spending days in St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries recovering from her injuries and humiliation. Do you really think they're going to let such a public embarrassment go, Ron?"
"But what can they actually do to us?" Ron said dismissively, still not grasping the severity of the situation. "They can't physically touch Professor Dumbledore or Professor Watson, can they? Those two are untouchable—everyone knows that."
"If you'd actually bothered to read Hogwarts: A History even once, you wouldn't be nearly so optimistic about this situation, Ron—" Hermione said with an increasingly gloomy expression, her face was darkening with worry.
"I guessed they might resort to using some underhanded, dirty political tricks against the school. Oh, and looks like I guessed right again."
"What do you mean? What kind of tricks?" Harry pressed her urgently, grabbing her arm to stop her from walking ahead.
But Hermione stubbornly refused to elaborate further, her lips pressing into a determined line. She said only coldly, pulling her arm free, "Just wait and see, Harry. Everyone will know soon enough."
The three of them rushed from the entrance hall through the doors into the Great Hall. Harry immediately looked anxiously toward the staff table at the front of the hall, and indeed noticed something was off, confirming his growing fears.
First and most noticeably, Professor Watson had disappeared from among the teaching staff again, absent from his usual seat. Even more concerning, Professor Dumbledore wasn't there either—his golden chair in the center sat empty.
The remaining professors at the high table had lost their usual cheerful, lively expressions. Professor McGonagall in particular looked deeply troubled—she sat firmly upright but hadn't touched a single bite of the breakfast spread before her, and was instead looking down at the students below with a distressed expression.
The Great Hall was still filled with the usual morning noise but it was quieter than usual. Many students had already finished their meager meals and left their seats early for their first classes.
"Since when did you learn to be so mysterious and cryptic, Hermione?" Ron grumbled at her with a frown, clearly frustrated by her refusal to share her theories. Then, dismissing the mystery for the moment, he neatly pulled out a wooden bench at the Gryffindor table and sat down heavily.
Muttering complaints about being "absolutely starving" and "wasting away," Ron rubbed his stomach, ready to pile his plate high with food as he did every morning. But when his blue eyes actually focused on the food offerings laid out on the table before them, his eyebrows shot up immediately in surprise.
Compared to the typically abundant, overflowing feast that usually filled the house tables each morning, today's offerings were much sparser.
A few scattered dishes held plain toast that was already going cold and hard, some fried eggs, and small portions of mashed potato pies. Meanwhile, the plates that had earlier contained the popular items like sausages, bacon, and fresh pastries had already been completely cleared by the younger students who'd arrived earlier and faster, leaving only empty serving platters and a few crumbs.
"What's going on here? Where's all the food?" Ron asked, looking thoroughly puzzled. He turned toward Neville, who sat across from them struggling to swallow a dry, tough piece of bread that seemed to be fighting back, and handed him a goblet of pumpkin juice in sympathy.
"Who ate everything?"
Neville accepted Ron's offered pumpkin juice with relief, nodding gratefully at him with watering eyes, then gulped down all the liquid in several large swallows and let out a long, satisfied sigh of relief as the juice helped wash down the stubborn bread.
"It was already like this when I came down earlier—" Neville said, not without a note of complaint in his usually good-natured voice.
"I woke up absolutely famished, with my stomach growling loud enough to wake the portraits, so I came down early specifically to get first pick of the food. But there wasn't much on any of the tables even then. I barely managed to snatch one small plate of fried sausages, and only because I was faster than two hungry second-years who were reaching for the same plate."
Harry's expression changed subtly. He turned in his seat to look at the neighboring Hufflepuff table, then craned his neck to see the more distant Ravenclaw table across the hall. His stomach sank as he found the situation was similar everywhere.
Harry's troubled gaze shifted back to Hermione, his eyes asking the question before his mouth did. "The Ministry isn't letting sellers sell food to Hogwarts anymore?"
"Oh, the situation might be even worse than just that, Harry," Hermione sighed, looking somewhat exasperated by Harry's failure to grasp the full scope of what was happening, though she couldn't entirely blame him for not knowing. "But don't press me for details right now, Harry. I'm still not entirely certain. I need to think this through more carefully."
Many small details and observations proved that something highly unusual was indeed happening at Hogwarts. But Harry couldn't yet confirm with certainty whether his growing suspicions and worst-case scenarios were actually correct.
The bland breakfast left even the usually voracious Ron without his typical hearty appetite. After quickly forcing down what little food he could stomach, they walked together with Neville and several other Gryffindors toward the dungeons for their first class of the day.
The Potions classroom was a dark, damp room located deep underground in the dungeons, where sunlight never penetrated and the air always carried a chill and the lingering smell of various potion ingredients.
When Harry pushed open the door and entered with Ron and Hermione, he immediately noticed that most of the Slytherin students had already arrived and claimed the best seats near the ingredient cupboards.
Some of the Slytherins were gathered in a tight cluster around Draco Malfoy near the back of the classroom, whispering about something in voices too low to overhear clearly—but based on their troubled expressions and furtive glances, mostly about serious school matters rather than typical gossip.
These students looked genuinely troubled and uneasy, their usual arrogant confidence was absent. Malfoy himself at the center of the concerned group like always, looked particularly unhappy and tense.
Harry's footsteps unconsciously paused just inside the doorway. He had a strong feeling they were discussing something related to the current predicament Hogwarts was facing, perhaps information their parents had shared.
Draco quickly noticed Harry watching them. He coughed heavily twice in warning, then impatiently shooed away those gathered around him with sharp hand gestures. He sat up straight in his seat and lowered his blonde head to stare intently at his Potions textbook, clearly pretending to be absorbed in study.
Harry also withdrew his suspicious gaze with dislike.
The last time Malfoy had caused trouble at Hogwarts was back when Hermione had been unexpectedly selected as the Triwizard champion. Since then, the two hadn't had any major direct conflicts or confrontations, maintaining an uneasy cold war.
But after witnessing Voldemort's resurrection in that graveyard, Harry's deep-rooted animosity and suspicion toward Malfoy and his entire family had been rising steadily, growing stronger each day.
Lucius Malfoy was undoubtedly one of the Death Eaters, one of Voldemort's inner circle. At Voldemort's resurrection ceremony in that graveyard, he had even been personally called out by name by Voldemort himself.
It wasn't just the Malfoy family either—including Crabbe, Goyle, Zabini, Nott, and several others, their respective parents were all confirmed to be Voldemort's "hardliners," his most loyal followers. Which meant Slytherin House was basically functioning as a den of future dark wizards, a breeding ground for the next generation of Death Eaters.
So the crucial question that suddenly occurred to Harry was: would Draco and the others eventually follow in their parents' dark footsteps and join the evil forces following Voldemort?
Would they take the Dark Mark when they came of age?
It seemed almost inevitable given their upbringing and family pressure.
Harry, who had silently walked to his usual seat near the middle of the classroom in a daze, was genuinely shocked and disturbed that he'd only just now thought seriously about this dangerous question. It seemed so obvious in retrospect.
The Ministry of Magic had gone to such lengths trying to force that toad-like woman Umbridge into Hogwarts to monitor and control Professor Dumbledore and Professor Watson, treating them like dangerous criminals.
But the far more genuinely evil Voldemort naturally would have a whole network of spies and future servants already embedded right here at Hogwarts, wouldn't he?
A sudden sense of urgency welled up in Harry's chest, making his heart race. He needed to remind Professor Dumbledore and Professor Watson about this as soon as possible, needed to warn them to be constantly on guard against these Slytherin students.
But then Harry thought again, his racing thoughts slowing as logic came back itself—he had personally witnessed and seen everything at Voldemort's resurrection ceremony in that graveyard. And Professor Watson had been right there too, had seen it all with his own eyes and had even killed Barty Crouch Jr. on the spot.
So why hadn't Watson taken action and expelled these students from school yet? Letting them stay at Hogwarts, letting them learn and grow stronger, was essentially equal to training and producing future enemies for the school, for the entire wizarding world!
It made no sense.
Harry was deeply absorbed in these dark, troubling thoughts that had suddenly sprouted and taken root in his mind. He was so lost in his internal debate about Slytherin loyalties and the wisdom of keeping potential Death Eaters at school that he didn't notice the change in atmosphere around him.
A sudden sharp pain in his ribs abruptly woke him from his troubled reverie. He looked up with a startled gasp of pain, bewildered and disoriented, blinking rapidly behind his glasses.
Harry discovered that at some point during his distraction; Snape had silently appeared on the platform at the front of the classroom like a large, menacing bat. His eyes were cold as chips of ice, and a lazy sneer hung at the corner of his mouth as he observed Harry's obvious inattention.
"Ah, it seems Mr. Potter has finally deigned to awaken from his beautiful daydream of saving the world single-handedly?" Snape drawled in his silky, voice that resounded through the now-silent classroom.
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