The thought stabbed into both of them at once, chilling to the bone. Surrender felt like the only ending.
But then—just as Snape reached the corner of the stairwell, just as Filch's footsteps closed in within striking distance—
The diary stirred again.
On its once-blank page, letters emerged, not from ink, but from countless silver motes of light. They pulsed with an eerie glow, foreign to this world, searing against the dark.
The flash was so quick it could have been an illusion.
But the words burned into Fred's vision with absolute clarity:
[At your feet. Three steps. Knock.]
An utterly illogical, even absurd instruction.
At any other time, Fred would have dismissed it as a prank. But here, at the end of this hopeless road, that inexplicable line became the only light in the dark—a single straw dangling from the edge of a cliff.
He had no time to think, no time to explain.
Survival instinct crushed all reason.
His body moved before his mind.
One step. Two steps. Three steps.
He stopped in the very center of the corridor, standing on an ordinary-looking flagstone, no different from the hundreds of others.
Fred raised his foot, aimed the heel at its center—
—and stomped down with all his might.
"BOOM!"
The sound burst out, hollow and cavernous, nothing like the crack of striking solid stone. It echoed as though he had kicked the lid of some colossal coffin buried for centuries.
Snape froze.
Filch's sneer stiffened on his face.
And then, under everyone's stunned gaze, the impossible happened.
The slab didn't shatter—it rotated downward in eerie silence, defying all physics. In the hollow that opened up, a rusted, ancient-looking iron ring gleamed dully.
"Quick!" Fred's voice cracked from the strain.
George snapped out of his daze. He flung aside the diary and lunged forward. Together, their trembling fingers clamped onto the cold, rough iron ring, knuckles whitening with effort.
"Heave—!"
"Grrrk—SCREEEEECH—"
The floor groaned like a wounded beast, stone grinding against stone. Incredibly, a slab nearly two meters square lifted free of the ground.
Beneath it wasn't a cellar, nor another floor.
It was a slide—vertical, steep, and swallowing into endless blackness. Dust, mildew, and the stench of rotting wood billowed up from the pit like a monster's breath.
"Catch them!"
Snape and Filch roared in unison, fury exploding down the corridor.
But it was too late.
Fred didn't hesitate. He leapt first, vanishing into the abyss.
George followed close, scooping up the diary at the last second and dragging it with him into the chute.
The slab slammed shut above them with a thunderous BANG.
Snape's roar, Filch's curses—all of it was sealed away.
The world collapsed into darkness and silence.
The slide was long, terrifyingly steep. They plummeted at breakneck speed, stone walls scraping their clothes, cobwebs whipping their faces, the air thick with dust and decay.
At last—light.
They shot out of the chute and crashed into a mound of thick, ancient dust, coughing and sputtering.
"Pffft—ugh!"
They scrambled up, patting themselves down, wide-eyed as they scanned their surroundings.
It was a forgotten chamber.
Time had stopped here long ago.
The room was littered with cracked crystal balls, rusted astrolabes, bundles of half-burned herbs giving off stale, pungent smells. Broken desks and chairs sagged beneath layers of dust so thick you could write words with a finger.
The air hung heavy with rot and the musty scent of extinguished incense.
"We… we made it?" George gasped, his legs trembling from the flood of relief.
Fred didn't answer.
His gaze was fixed on the diary George had retrieved, eyes dark with something beyond awe—something dangerously close to fear.
The Next Morning
The Gryffindor common room fire crackled softly.
The Weasley twins, sporting dark circles under their eyes, leaned close to Alan and recounted every pulse-pounding detail of the previous night. They carefully skipped over the diary, passing it off as pure chance.
Alan's face betrayed no surprise.
He simply listened calmly, as though hearing a story he already knew the ending to.
When they finished, Alan slowly drew a piece of parchment from his bag. It wasn't an ordinary map, but an old architectural plan of Hogwarts, drawn with painstaking detail.
His finger circled a particular spot.
"Look here."
As the twins leaned in, Alan's Mind Palace was already racing. Keywords flashed through: Divination, abandoned, trapdoor, slide, seventh-floor corridor. Cross-references flew across his mental database of castle history.
The conclusion was inevitable.
"According to Hogwarts' structure a century ago, you stumbled into the original Divination classroom."
Alan's voice was calm, steady, certain.
"Records say that over a hundred years ago, a professor attempted a dangerous time-reversal divination. The experiment went wrong, causing a minor magical disaster. No one was hurt, but the space itself became unstable.
"For safety, the headmaster at the time erased the room from all official maps and sealed it away from both perception and reality."
Alan raised his eyes, meeting the twins' shocked stares.
"What you found wasn't just a secret passage.
It was a forgotten fragment of Hogwarts' history."
Fred and George gaped, speechless.
Who would have thought that, trying to dodge a detention, they had crashed headlong into one of the castle's buried secrets?
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