It did not take long for Madam Pomfrey to come hurrying from the hospital wing to Quirrell's office.
The moment she stepped through the door and saw Quirrell writhing on the floor, face twisted in agony, her voice shot up an octave.
"Professor Quirrell?"
"Which student threw a dungbomb at you this time?!"
Quirrell gasped for breath, his whole body trembling.
"A curse! This is a curse!"
"Quick—do you have any magic for treating curses?"
Madam Pomfrey let out a small sigh of relief.
"Oh, so it's a curse. Students do sometimes learn a few nasty little jinxes and then get ideas above their station."
"But don't worry. I've handled more than enough of those over the years."
She immediately raised her wand.
"All it takes is this, and this, and then this…"
"The pain caused by the curse should be gone now. Professor Quirrell, do you feel any better?"
Quirrell still looked as if he were being flayed alive.
He continued rolling across the floor, clutching at himself as if he wanted to tear the pain out with his bare hands.
"No. Not at all."
"It still hurts. It feels like I'm about to die!"
Madam Pomfrey's expression tightened.
After a brief pause, she pulled out several commonly used anti-curse potions and forced them down his throat one by one.
"Well? What about now?"
Quirrell shook his head frantically.
"Nothing. I can't feel any difference at all. These potions can't seem to reach wherever the curse is actually taking effect. They're useless!"
At once, Madam Pomfrey's face grew grave.
For the first time, she looked genuinely out of ideas.
At that moment, footsteps sounded in the corridor.
Snape strode into the office, his black robes swirling behind him, his brows already drawn into a hard frown.
"Professor Quirrell. You sent word for me?"
"You said you were suffering from a curse?"
He looked Quirrell up and down, and a strange feeling rose in his chest.
He had long suspected Quirrell of being Voldemort's pawn—someone planted at Hogwarts to steal the Philosopher's Stone.
But even so, this made no sense.
A dark wizard of that caliber, even if he were not a true specialist in curses, ought to have every sort of defense against them.
How had he ended up being tortured into such a state by a curse?
Snape turned to Madam Pomfrey.
"Have you already tried the standard anti-curse potions and the common curse-breaking spells?"
After she confirmed that she had, Snape fell silent for a moment, then reached into his robes and produced a potion of his own.
"If the usual methods are useless, then this is no ordinary curse."
"Try this. I brewed it myself. It's designed specifically to break stronger and more complicated curses."
Quirrell nearly snatched the potion out of his hand.
Snape's talent with potions was legendary. If anyone's brew could work, surely it would be his.
He gulped it down in one swallow.
For an instant, he felt a warm current sweep through his body.
But then despair flooded his face.
The warmth passed over him, but the curse remained exactly as it was. When the potion reached the place where the pain should have been centered, it was as though it sensed nothing at all. The warmth flowed by. The torment remained.
Snape's eyes narrowed.
Then he pulled out several more potions and tried them one after another.
Not only did Quirrell's curse fail to improve, hideous boils and lesions soon began erupting all over his body from the sheer quantity of conflicting brews.
Madam Pomfrey stared at Snape in disbelief.
Snape merely gave a small shrug.
"He consumed far too many potions in too short a span of time. Naturally there are side effects."
"Yes, it will be unpleasant."
"But he was already suffering anyway. A little more suffering hardly changes much."
Now even Snape's expression was beginning to turn genuinely odd as he looked at Quirrell's miserable state.
"This curse is troublesome," he muttered.
"By all rights, those potions should have covered several major branches of curse theory. How can none of them have done anything at all?"
He paused, then looked down at Quirrell.
"Professor Quirrell, it seems I have only one method left."
"Curse counteraction. I'll use additional curses to interfere with and suppress the one afflicting you."
"The process may be painful. It may also leave behind lingering curse damage."
"But at least those side effects are treatable. Better that than letting this current curse continue unchecked."
By then Quirrell had long since passed the point of dignity.
He did not care what method Snape used.
As long as the pain stopped, he would endure anything.
"Hurry up!"
"I can take it!"
Snape began muttering incantations under his breath.
His wand moved in crisp, efficient arcs, and one curse after another fell onto Quirrell.
For all that Snape's reputation rested on potions, his command of the Dark Arts was no less impressive. He had once been hailed as the Half-Blood Prince, a prodigy who understood more magic upon entering school than many seventh-years did upon leaving it.
Years later, even though potions had become his public claim to fame, his skill with curses was still formidable.
To him, layering curse after curse was as easy as breathing.
Madam Pomfrey's eyelids twitched violently as she watched.
If a student had cast even one of the spells Snape was now casually using, that student might have earned months of detention—perhaps even expulsion.
And yet here Snape was, using them all in succession on Quirrell without repeating a single one.
But if it had worked, that would have been one thing.
The problem was that the theoretical effect of curse counteraction never appeared.
Instead, every new curse Snape cast actually took hold.
Quirrell's condition became so pitiful that it was difficult to look at directly. His screams rose sharper and sharper until they sounded downright inhuman.
"Snape—?"
Madam Pomfrey looked at him.
Snape shifted his gaze away with the faintest trace of guilt.
"It seems… curse counteraction isn't working either."
Quirrell's eyes bulged.
He was already on the verge of exploding in fury.
But at almost the same moment, far away from the office, Ron—who had been helping Theodore perform the Nail-Head Seven Arrows ritual—had nearly decided to stop.
Then his stubbornness got the better of him.
"That was just bad form," Ron muttered. "Maybe I'm not suited for a bow. There's Quidditch blood in my family. I should be using something round."
As he spoke, he grabbed a stone from the ground and hurled it at the straw effigy.
The rock hit dead center in the chest.
"Ha!"
"I hit it!"
"Again!"
One stone after another slammed into the effigy.
And each impact felt to Quirrell as if a heavy carriage—or worse, a Muggle lorry—had rolled over him in full.
His scream rose to an even more horrifying pitch, cutting off whatever insult he had been about to hurl at Snape.
Snape and Madam Pomfrey looked at each other.
After a long beat, Snape said flatly, "Should we move him to St Mungo's?"
…
A long while later, Ron had finally proven to his own satisfaction that his issue truly was "just hand feel" and graciously stopped tormenting the poor effigy.
By the time Quirrell regained consciousness, he was lying in a bed at St Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries.
The moment he opened his eyes, he nearly jumped out of his skin.
A crowd of witches and wizards in healer's robes had gathered around his bed, all staring at him with faces full of intense scholarly interest.
"This is St Mungo's?"
"Who are all of you?"
One of the wizards in healer's robes stepped forward and introduced himself.
"I'm a healer from the Janus Thickey Ward's curse recovery division."
"As for the others—they're former colleagues from my medical training, my old teachers, and in a few cases, my teachers' teachers."
"Your condition is extraordinarily complicated. My own knowledge was not enough to handle it, so I called in every curse specialist I knew."
Only then did Quirrell feel a little hope return.
So all the relevant scholars in Britain's magical world had gathered here?
"That's wonderful," he said weakly.
"No wonder I woke up. You've cured it, haven't you?"
"Thank you. Truly—thank you!"
The thought that the nightmare curse had finally been removed almost brought tears to his eyes.
Yet what unsettled him at once was the fact that the gathered healers all seemed to avoid looking him in the eye.
At last, the St Mungo's healer coughed awkwardly and forced himself to speak.
"Professor Quirrell… there is good news and bad news."
"Which would you prefer to hear first?"
Quirrell's heart immediately began to sink.
He inhaled slowly. Somehow, he did not think he could withstand the bad news right away.
"The good news first."
At once, the gathered healers lit up with excitement.
"The good news," one of them said, positively radiant, "is that this is unquestionably a historic moment in the study of curses."
"This is an entirely unprecedented curse state. A convergence of multiple curse effects has created an exceptionally rare syndrome unlike anything seen before."
"We would wager that magical history has never recorded a case quite like yours."
Another healer eagerly took over.
"Your condition is of extraordinary value to curse research."
"In fact, we have already agreed to jointly publish a paper discussing this phenomenon."
"And after careful consideration, we have unanimously decided that this new curse and its associated symptoms should be named after you."
He lifted his hands grandly.
"Quirrell Curse Syndrome!"
Quirrell stared at them blankly.
His mind, still foggy from pain and potion residue, took a moment to catch up.
This…
Was that supposed to be good?
Was he about to become famous?
The high point of his academic life?
Then, with a strange numbness settling over him, he asked the obvious question.
"And the bad news?"
The lead healer was silent for a moment.
Then, in a tone far too cheerful for the subject at hand, he carefully arranged his words.
"To be honest, I believe the bad news can, in a certain sense, also be interpreted as an even better kind of good news."
Quirrell's eyelid twitched.
"That is to say…"
"You are about to develop a much deeper appreciation for the value of life."
"From now on, every day you live will feel precious beyond compare, Professor Quirrell."
"Sunlight. Rain. Breeze. Clouds. All the small and beautiful things you once overlooked—you will certainly come to treasure them much more."
"In this way, even if your remaining time is limited, the breadth and depth of your life may become immeasurably greater."
"And with your cooperation in our research and the publication of our paper, though the body may perish, your name shall endure in magical history."
He placed a hand over his chest and declared solemnly:
"If I had to sum it up in one phrase…"
"Glorious even in death!"
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