In that instant, the sickening drop through the trapdoor and the heart-stopping lurch of weightlessness were nothing compared to what George glimpsed as he turned back.
Just before their bodies vanished into the darkness, the black hard-covered diary slipped from his hand. It fell like a sinister feather and landed silently on the empty, silent corridor floor.
Escape, by sheer luck.
That thought lasted no more than a heartbeat in Fred and George's minds before a colder, deeper terror took its place.
Neither of them slept that night.
At the first gray light of dawn, they made an excuse and slipped out of the Gryffindor common room, moving like ghosts back to that forbidden corridor.
It was empty.
The cold stone floor held nothing but the shifting patterns of morning light.
The diary was gone.
That realization dropped like lead into their stomachs. They didn't need to reason it out—an oily, sinister figure immediately rose in their minds.
Without a doubt, it had fallen into Snape's hands.
Monday's Potions class was less a lesson than a scheduled execution.
The dungeon air was as always—clammy, cold, and pungent with herbs and chemical fumes. Students barely breathed; even the bubbling of cauldrons seemed too loud.
Snape didn't stalk the rows with his usual cutting remarks.
He simply stood at the lectern, silent.
His cold, black eyes swept past the rows of anxious faces and locked unerringly onto Fred and George.
He wasn't looking at students.
He was looking at two rats already dead, their bodies rotting, ready to be tossed into the trash.
Time stretched unbearably in that suffocating silence. Finally, Snape spoke, his greasy voice chilling the dungeon walls.
"Because certain students, lacking all repentance, prefer to blunder about the castle at midnight like headless trolls…"
Each word trailed with a slick, venomous echo.
"Gryffindor, minus fifty points."
The dungeon rang with sharp intakes of breath, stifled into whimpers.
Fifty points.
A devastating blow. Everyone could feel the house hourglass bleeding rubies in an unstoppable torrent. Overnight, Gryffindor had plummeted from the top contender for the Cup to dead last.
Fred and George went rigid.
But that, clearly, wasn't the end.
"Furthermore, Mr. Weasleys…"
Snape's gaze never left them. His thin lips curled into a cruel, twisted smile.
"I hear you've taken an interest in a… particular project lately?" His voice sank lower, dripping with poisonous mockery.
"'How to turn Prefect Percy's badge into a hiccupping slug,' was it?"
In an instant, Fred and George's faces lost all color, paling like parchment.
Their hearts stopped.
Their minds went blank.
That idea—they had whispered it the night before, hidden under their bed curtains, voices so low they could barely hear each other.
No one else knew.
No one except Alan and Lee Jordan had overheard even a scrap.
It was impossible that a fifth person knew.
Snape savored their horrified expressions before delivering his sentence.
"Your detention will be to handle the semester's entire supply of slugs. By hand."
He stressed the last words, tasting the revenge in each syllable.
"One… by one… plucked from the slime."
The dismissal bell rang, sounding distant, unreal. The twins packed up in numb silence and drifted with the crowd out of the dungeon.
The moment the warm sunlight touched their faces again, they realized their backs were already soaked through with cold sweat.
On their way back to the common room, they caught up with Alan, stopping him with voices that trembled as they recounted every word Snape had spoken in class.
Bit by bit, the expression on Alan's face changed.
It was a look his friends had never seen before.
Gone was the usual calm confidence, the air of having every answer in hand. In its place was a grave and icy weight, born from the deepest layers of logical judgment.
He stopped walking.
Around them, the corridor buzzed with the noisy chatter of students passing by, but it was as if their small space had been cut away from the world.
"The situation is worse than we imagined."
Alan's voice carried no emotion, yet it sent a chill down the twins' spines.
"Snape didn't just get hold of the diary."
He paused, every word dropping like a lead weight on their hearts.
"He may have already read it."
"Read it?" Fred blurted out in disbelief. "But there was nothing written on it! We checked—it was blank!"
"I don't mean reading with the eyes."
Alan shook his head. His gaze seemed to pierce through the air in front of him, falling into some unknown, perilous domain.
In the depths of his Mind Palace, alarms were shrieking silently, violently.
The theoretical modules marked "Soul Magic" and "Memory Imprints" activated instantly, flashing with the highest level of warning—dazzling red lights. Fragments of forbidden knowledge, research notes, speculations, and theories swarmed together, combining and evolving at breakneck speed.
"I suspect," Alan said, his voice terrifyingly calm, "that through some advanced magic we can't yet comprehend, he directly glimpsed the imprints recorded within the diary."
"Imprints?" George's lips were dry.
"The memories you left when you interacted with it."
Alan delivered the final, most chilling conclusion.
"He saw every question you wrote. Every answer that appeared. He knows all your secrets—including the idea about Percy's badge that existed only inside your heads."
Thought invasion.
The phrase struck Alan's mind like a bolt of black lightning.
A cold, real killing intent flickered in his eyes.
"That diary is tens of thousands of times more dangerous than we thought. It's not just a passive tool of intelligence—it's an active trap. A trap that records, and may even steal, the very thoughts of its user."
Fred and George felt ice pour through their veins, as though they had fallen into a frozen abyss.
Before, they had only thought losing an amusing magical object would bring them trouble.
Now they realized what they had once held in their hands was no treasure—it was a smiling key straight into hell.
Alan, meanwhile, was wrestling with a far deeper and far more personal dread.
His Mind Palace was his greatest reliance, the fortress of all his secrets.
It housed knowledge from another world, every analysis and plan he had made about the wizarding world.
It was the very core of what made him "Alan."
If Snape—or more precisely, the diary's creator—truly had the power to bypass all physical defenses and directly peer into "memory" and "thought"…
Then was his Mind Palace also vulnerable?
In some unknown dimension, was it too at risk of invasion?
He could not—would not—ever allow that risk.
Almost the very moment the thought arose, a new directive was instantly generated within his Mind Palace, assigned absolute, overriding priority:
[Task Name: Construct Mental Defense System (Firewall Project)]
[Task Objective: Research and master magic capable of resisting any form of thought invasion. Establish an impenetrable barrier to guarantee the absolute security of the Mind Palace.]
[Theoretical Support: Presumed source material located in the Restricted Section of the Hogwarts Library.]
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