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It was a side effect of the lingering connection to the Horcrux, though now severed, its remnants flickered like shards of shattered glass, slipping through his thoughts.
"The diary… Malfoy… what's he doing…" Harry's resilience, the grit that earned him the title of the Boy Who Lived, was on full display. Though the pain was enough to split his head in two, he clung desperately to the fragments he glimpsed, choking out the scattered thoughts to the older boy beside him.
"Steady on, Harry. I know about the diary, I also know Malfoy had it. But he lost it through his own carelessness."
"I think the soul trapped within it realised something was off and fled," Ian said as he examined Harry's trembling form, sensing the storm brewing in his mind.
"No!"
Harry suddenly screamed, latching onto Ian's arm with surprising force. His fingers dug in, eyes wide with a mix of fear and agony.
"I mean now! It's happening right now!" Harry's voice cracked as he cried out.
But the bond as a Horcrux was nearly extinguished, and the final fragments of memory flickered, then began to fade. Gradually, his face relaxed.
"Whew, Whew, Whew~"
He slumped onto the stone floor, gasping for air.
It was as if he'd just escaped a nightmare.
"Ian… I… I saw… that man. He's taken Malfoy's body," Harry stammered, soaked in sweat, his voice hoarse and trembling.
There was still fear in his eyes.
"It's just like what happened to me. We have to help him." Harry pushed himself upright, clearly anxious about Malfoy's fate.
"Hmm?" Ian froze for a moment.
"Where did you see him?" The young wizard quickly pressed the question.
He couldn't ignore this. It was serious. Somehow, the cursed diary might have found its way back to Malfoy. Sometimes the most dangerous place is the one that appears safest.
Ian realised, with a sinking feeling, that he'd been outplayed by the sixteen-year-old version of Tom Riddle.
"Office… Professor Flamel's office." Harry forced out the words between breaths.
And that single sentence made Ian go rigid. His pupils contracted, and an incredible, horrifying thought took root in his mind.
"Take Miss Parkinson back up top. Then head straight for the hospital wing. If you spot yourself lying there, don't go in. Find a place to hide."
"Voldemort is walking straight toward his own end. If you don't see me, then take Pansy in, get her healed, and alert a few of the Heads of House. Tell them everything."
There was no time. Ian didn't explain further; he merely blurted the cryptic warning, leaving Harry utterly confused. Then he vanished, his body twisting into a streak of silver-white mist, hurtling out of the Chamber of Secrets.
"What does he mean, 'walk toward his own end'?"
Harry blinked in confusion, Ian's words echoing in his head. But he knew there was no time to stand around puzzling them out. He looked down at Pansy, slung across the floor like a discarded rag doll, and picked her up as gently as he could.
"Can someone please tell me how to get out of here?" He muttered, glancing around at the chaotic, serpent-scarred cavern before stepping through the ruined doorway.
And the moment he turned into the dark passageway, his nerves were rattled again.
Lying just ahead was the massive corpse of the basilisk. He nearly dropped Pansy from the shock.
"Who in Merlin's name would build a place like this and leave that lying around?" Harry muttered under his breath, pressing a shaky hand to his chest.
And then, another voice answered, a calm, regretful sigh from behind.
"It's rather rude, don't you think, for a Slytherin student to criticise the founder of their House?"
Harry spun around so fast he nearly lost his balance.
Behind him stood a figure, wooden, yet humanoid. Its entire form was crafted from aged timber, carved with uncanny precision.
But its eyes… its eyes were strangely alive.
They scanned the chaos with something almost like sorrow.
"Who are you?" Harry dropped Pansy again, completely by accident this time, and reached for his wand.
The wooden figure didn't flinch. Instead, it tilted its head slightly.
"You're holding your wand the wrong way." It offered the correction gently, almost like a professor to a first-year. Realising he'd made a mistake, Harry flushed crimson and quickly corrected the angle of his wand.
"Would you like me to teach you the Killing Curse right here and now?" The wooden figure looked unnervingly eager.
"I can set you alight with Incendio! Just say what you are!" Harry barked, tense and flustered. His mind was reeling, but he still tried to maintain the upper hand.
In truth, he hadn't even learned Incendio yet.
"Come to Hogsmeade village, and I'll tell you who I am… That is, if you truly are a Slytherin student. I wouldn't extend such an offer otherwise."
With that peculiar declaration, the wooden figure turned from Harry without further explanation. It moved confidently through the chaos of the Chamber, heading toward the scorched ruins where the great stone statue had once loomed, now reduced to ash by Fiendfyre.
"Thank Merlin, he took it away,"
The wooden figure let out what seemed like a sigh of relief as it looked over the open, unguarded cavity of the ruined sanctum.
The night outside had grown thick and unrelenting, pouring down on the Hogwarts grounds like a curtain of ink.
The castle's empty corridors stretched on like ancient tunnels lost to time, muffled, shadowed, and brimming with secrets.
Dim wall sconces sputtered weakly, their enchanted flames flickering as though resisting the suffocating gloom. Each cast only a feeble pool of light, swallowed at the edges by darkness.
Then, without warning, a swirl of white mist began to rise from the second floor. Ian emerged within it, striding with a look of fierce determination. He'd pieced it together. The basilisk's death wasn't some convenient accident.
From the residual presence that had clung to Harry, Ian could tell the soul from the diary had remained in the Chamber for a time. But being a fragment of Voldemort, it had no need to slay the basilisk in order to leave.
After all, as a Parselmouth, it could control the creature with a mere word. The basilisk was bound to obey. There should've been no threat, no need for conflict.
And yet… the beast had been slain. Not only that, its blood and flesh had been deliberately drained.
There had to be a deeper reason.
The soul embedded in the diary had a peculiar trait, it could absorb life force to restore its strength. It wasn't true resurrection, not fully, but it allowed the soul to cling to a semblance of vitality.
Like possession. Like forcibly inhabiting a living body.
Just as Harry had described.
"That thing didn't escape at all," Ian murmured, voice tight with the chill of realisation. "It's been hiding inside Malfoy all along."
As the truth settled in, Ian felt a shiver crawl up his spine. Voldemort's other soul, the clumsy, half-formed one within Harry, likely hadn't grasped what its counterpart had been planning all along.
"I really hope I'm wrong. If I'm not, then this whole scheme is beyond outrageous."
Ian surged through the winding corridor, his thoughts racing as fast as his feet. He was heading straight for Nicolas Flamel's office.
He burst through the door and reformed mid-step. The room was cloaked in a faint mist, its shelves lined with intricate magical instruments and potions. Strange devices ticked and clicked with their own internal enchantments. But something was wrong.
Nicolas Flamel wasn't here.
The venerable alchemist was likely still in the hospital wing, tending to the version of Harry that may well have arrived from another point in time.
But someone else was here.
The figure Harry had glimpsed earlier, Draco Malfoy. Or rather, the soul that had taken his body. The diary's ghostly remnant of Tom Riddle, now wearing a living disguise.
And he'd been hiding right under their noses.
"So, you've arrived."
The thing wearing Malfoy's face did not appear surprised to see Ian. He smiled thinly, having likely sensed the link between himself and Harry when Harry had felt his presence. That lingering psychic connection had revealed far more than either boy realised.
"That other version of me was too pitiful to buy more time," Said Malfoy, or what was pretending to be him, standing before a towering, ancient contraption.
It was the great magical clock, an enchanted relic Ian himself had brought into this world.
A time-turning artefact powerful enough to bend the flow of time itself.
And it had already been activated.
It emitted a pale, radiant glow, the shimmer of time-magic unfurling. The thing inhabiting Malfoy had one foot already in its light, ready to vanish into history at any moment. No wonder he looked so smug.
(To Be Continued…)