Hello, guys!
Because of the holiday season, I want to celebrate with you in two ways.
The first is that, starting today, Monday the 22nd until Sunday, January 4th, I will publish daily chapters so you have plenty to read during these holidays.
After that date, I will return to my usual schedule.
The second surprise is that, starting December 24th, I will activate a 50% discount on all tiers of my Patreon.
The promotion will be active for 2 weeks, ending on January 6th.
If you wanted to read the advanced chapters, this is your chance.
Merry Christmas!
Mike.
Patreon / iLikeeMikee
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Chapter 33: The Ancient Guardian
The darkness was absolute.
The instant Timothy jumped into the tunnel, the moonlight from the second-floor bathroom vanished, cut off with the finality of a slamming door. What followed was not a fall, but a slide. It was a stone slide, polished by centuries of... something... and it was incredibly steep. The cold, ancient air rushed past his ears, a low, dull howl.
He felt no panic. His mind, protected by the cold walls of his Occlumency, was too busy processing data.
'Interesting', he thought, as he took another sharp turn in total darkness. 'The tunnel isn't straight. It curves and winds'.
Riddle's Archive had shown him the map of the Chamber, but not the experience. This was much deeper than he had assumed. He could feel the weight of Hogwarts castle above him, floors and floors of stone and magic. He was descending hundreds of meters below the foundations, deeper even than Snape's dungeons.
The descent lasted almost a full minute before the angle leveled out abruptly, spitting him onto a damp stone floor.
He landed with an agile roll, absorbing the impact with his knees, a fluid movement that would have been impossible for the Leo of his past life. His current body was young, and his mind controlled it with absolute precision.
The silence that greeted him was heavier than the darkness. It was an oppressive, ancient silence. The air was frigid and smelled of decay, of stagnant water, and something else... a musky, reptilian smell.
"Lumos", he whispered, not out of need for the wand, but out of habit.
A light sprang from the tip of his finger, but it wasn't the bright orb of a student. It was a controlled beam, like that of a flashlight, cutting through the darkness. He was in a vast tunnel, the size of a subway mouth. The floor was covered in a thick layer of dark sludge and... bones. Hundreds, thousands of small bones and skulls. Rats, cats, perhaps even a dog. A giant predator's pantry.
'Proof of the Basilisk's diet', his mind archived automatically.
He ignored the remains and moved forward, his light illuminating the path. The architecture was what fascinated him. This was not a natural cave. The walls were perfectly carved stone blocks, slick with dampness, but without a single structural crack. The tunnels were wide, high, and followed a straight, purposeful line. This wasn't a lair. It was an aqueduct. A transit system built by a master.
'Salazar Slytherin', thought Timothy, feeling a pang of genuine respect. The arrogance of his memories of Riddle was justified; the man had been a top-tier arcane engineer.
The magic down here was different from that of Hogwarts. The magic of the upper castle was complex, woven in protective layers, comfort charms, and concealment spells. It was domesticated magic. This... this was raw. It was ancient. It was fundamental. He could feel it in the stone, a low, throbbing hum of power that hadn't faded in a thousand years. They were preservation and structural support enchantments so potent they made the enchanted ceiling of the Great Hall look like a parlor trick.
He kept walking, the only sound the soft echo of his footsteps in the damp tunnel. Riddle's mental map was flawless. He turned a corner and stopped.
In front of him was a solid wall. It looked like a dead end, but his Archive told him otherwise. Engraved in the stone were two entwined snakes, their embedded emerald eyes glowing faintly under the light from his finger.
Timothy approached. He knew this was just the beginning. The first lock. The beast was further ahead. But first, the treasure. He leaned toward the cold stone and, accessing the language that was now his, hissed the password Riddle had used for years.
~Open for the Heir~.
The hiss of Riddle's password echoed off the ancient stone. There was a low, rumbling sound, of magical gears that hadn't moved in half a century. The two stone snakes entwined on the circular door seemed to untwine, and the entire wall slid to the side with surprising smoothness, revealing another expanse of darkness.
Timothy stepped forward, the light from his finger cutting the gloom. The mental map he had extracted from the diary was flawless. He knew this next tunnel was short. It was a service passage, a connector between the main entrance and the inner sanctuary. But Riddle's Archive, focused on the power and glory of the main chamber, had skipped over the details of this place. Tom Riddle, in his arrogance, had considered it a simple hallway.
Timothy, the Architect, saw much more.
The tunnel opened into a vast, high-ceilinged cavern, as large as the Great Hall. The air here was different. Drier. And the musky reptile smell was almost overwhelming, but it wasn't fresh; it was the smell of dust and ancient leather, like a forgotten museum.
Timothy's light slid across the floor and stopped. The floor wasn't stone. It was covered by a massive carpet of pale emerald green, stretching from wall to wall in a colossal curve. It glowed faintly under his magical light, each scale the size of a dinner plate.
It took his logical mind exactly one and a half seconds to process the information. It wasn't a carpet. It was a shed. The shed skin of a Basilisk.
His heart, usually a quiet and controlled metronome, gave a single powerful beat against his ribs. It wasn't fear. It was the pure euphoria of a collector who has just found a priceless artifact. He approached slowly. It was... immense. The skin formed a hollow tube almost five feet in diameter, curving away into the darkness at the back of the cavern. It had to be tens of meters long. And it was perfectly intact.
'Incredible', he thought, his mind racing a mile a minute. This was a treasure. Basilisk skin was legendary for its magical resistance. It was impervious to almost all offensive spells, a natural armor that made dragon hide look like tissue paper.
He knelt, his hand outstretched. The air around him vibrated with the residual magic still clinging to the dead skin. His fingers brushed the surface. It was dry, surprisingly smooth to the touch, but beneath that smoothness, it felt like a diamond weave. Hard, cold, and impenetrable.
"Archive".
The word was a mere thought. The torrent of data that hit his mind was almost as violent as Riddle's soul fragment. It wasn't just "skin". It was a complex biological matrix. His mind was flooded with its conceptual composition: keratin scales interlaced with filaments of solidified magic. He saw why it was resistant: the scales didn't "block" spells, but their molecular structure actively detuned incoming magical frequencies, causing most charms to dissipate harmlessly.
His Archive cataloged the alchemical value. Shed skin, while less potent than that of a live beast, was an unparalleled potion stabilizer. It could triple the shelf life of any power potion. Ground up, it was the base for the world's most potent liquid shields. And most importantly: it was his.
He stood up, his mind already working on the logistics. He couldn't carry this on his back. But he wasn't a normal student. He raised his hand. He didn't need a wand for this. He concentrated, visualizing the vast expanse of the skin, and applied two simultaneous wandless spells. A Reductor Charm and a Packing Charm.
The hundred-foot-long skin shuddered. With a sound like a great sailing ship furling its sails in a sudden storm, the skin began to shrink and fold in on itself. The scales clashed against each other, a sound like a thousand glass coins falling. In less than a minute, the colossal carpet that had covered the cavern floor had been reduced to a dense green cube the size of a student's trunk.
With another gesture, he levitated the cube and guided it. He opened his own seven-compartment trunk, which he carried shrunk in his pocket and which he had now enlarged in the tunnel. He opened the fourth compartment, the one he had designated as "Raw Material Storage". The cube of basilisk skin floated inside and landed with a dull thud.
He closed the trunk, shrunk it, and put it back in his robe pocket. He had been in the Chamber less than fifteen minutes and had already harvested a fortune that would make the Malfoy family look poor. The primary mission, the acquisition of a priceless resource, was complete. But Timothy wasn't a treasure thief. He was a scholar. And the skin was just the byproduct. The Chamber itself was the real prize.
He pulled Riddle's empty diary from his robes and opened it on a rock. Young Tom's archived memories were a perfect map, but Riddle had seen the Chamber as a lair. Timothy saw it as a library of arcane engineering.
He put down the diary and backed up to the center of the cavern. This was the moment of truth for his new tool, the spell he had spent weeks secretly perfecting.
"Archive Aspectus".
There was no roar of power. There was barely a sound. A pale blue beam of light, almost invisible and completely silent, sprang from the tip of his finger. It wasn't a Lumos. It was a beam of pure intent, a conceptual probe. The beam touched the far wall and began to move, sweeping the cavern with methodical precision, like a high-tech laser scanner.
And in Timothy's mind, the universe exploded.
It wasn't the flow of a single book. It was an avalanche of pure data. His mental Archive worked frantically to catalog the torrent. Not just "stone", but "Highlands granite, magically quarried, fused at a molecular level with structural support enchantments that distribute the weight of the lake and castle above through the bedrock".
He saw the runes, invisible to the naked eye, etched into the mortar between each block. Preservation runes, preventing water erosion. Silence runes, absorbing echoes. Pest repellent runes.
His Archive Aspectus swept the ceiling, and he understood how the Chamber breathed. They weren't air ducts. They were gills. The moss dripping on the walls wasn't moss; it was a bio-alchemical filter designed by Salazar, absorbing carbon dioxide and releasing magical oxygen as a byproduct. The place was a self-sustaining ecosystem.
'Impressive', thought Timothy, his mind buzzing with the ecstasy of discovery. 'Salazar wasn't just a pureblood fanatic. He was an arcane engineer of a level Dumbledore could barely match. And everyone thinks this is just a cave with a big snake'.
The scan took almost ten minutes. When the beam of light died out, Timothy had a complete conceptual model of the tunnel architecture in his Archive. He was exhausted, not magically—his core had barely noticed—but mentally. Processing that amount of raw data was taxing.
But it was done. He had stolen Salazar Slytherin's engineering secrets.
He moved on, his mind already processing the brilliance of the support runes. The tunnel ended at another solid wall, this one much larger, more imposing. This was the entrance to the main chamber. It had no visible mechanism, not even a snake carving. It was a wall of intent. A conceptual lock. Riddle's Archive told him only Parseltongue would open it.
He approached. The air here was noticeably colder. He placed a hand on the stone. He hissed again, this time not a simple password, but a command imbued with his own will.
~"The Heir commands passage. Show me the glory of Salazar."~
There was a deep, low rumble, the sound of a thousand tons of stone grinding. The entire wall split down the middle, not with a mechanism, but dissolving and reforming, and slid sideways, revealing the final chamber.
Timothy entered and stopped. If the previous cavern had been impressive, this was breathtaking.
The chamber was vast, as large as an aircraft hangar, and stretched out in a sickly green gloom. An aisle of colossal stone pillars, carved like entwined serpents, rose to a vault so high it was lost in darkness. Stagnant black water covered the floor on both sides of the central aisle.
And at the end, dominating everything, was the statue.
It was obscene in its scale. Salazar Slytherin's face, carved into the living rock of the cavern wall, rose hundreds of feet, lost in the darkness of the vault. The stone beard alone was larger than Hagrid's hut. It was a monument to an ego so pure and vast it bordered on the divine.
'How inefficient', thought Timothy, though a part of him, the architect, couldn't help but admire the sheer audacity of the construction.
He had reached the end of Riddle's map. The physical treasure, the shed skin, was safe in his trunk compartment. The architectural treasure was being processed by his mental Archive. Now, there was only one thing left to do: meet the guardian.
According to Tom Riddle's memories, the beast slept inside the statue, waiting for the call. This wasn't an assassination mission; it was an asset verification. He needed to confirm the creature's existence, its status, and most importantly, its level of obedience to a new Speaker.
He took a deep breath, not out of fear, but to prepare his vocal cords. He accessed the Parseltongue file he had stolen from the diary, feeling the hissing, ancient language settle on his tongue. He turned toward the statue's colossal mouth and spoke.
~"Speak to me, Salazar Slytherin, greatest of the Hogwarts Four"~.
He used Riddle's old password. The sound was strange, a guttural hiss that resonated in the vast chamber, bouncing off the damp stone with an unnatural quality.
For an instant, nothing. Just the echo of his own voice fading away.
Then, a low, rumbling sound, like a mountain resettling. A sound of stone grinding against stone.
Slowly, with terrifying finality, the statue's mouth began to open. It wasn't a gear mechanism; it was pure magic, moving a thousand tons of rock as if it were a cupboard door. An abyss of perfect darkness revealed itself, a void that seemed to swallow the green light of the chamber. A new smell wafted from the darkness: the potent, ammoniacal, musky stench of a living predator, so strong it made Timothy wrinkle his nose.
Something moved. It wasn't a slide. It was a flow. A mass of deep emerald green, so dark it was almost black, began to emerge from the mouth, sliding over the stone beard. It was a head, a head as large as the Weasleys' car, covered in armored scales the size of shields.
The beast flowed onto the floor with a dull THUD that vibrated the stagnant water on the sides of the aisle. Its body uncoiled from the darkness of the statue, an endless river of muscle and power, until the entire creature was coiled in the center of the chamber, a living mountain of reptilian power.
The Basilisk. It was magnificent. And absolutely lethal.
Timothy remained perfectly motionless. His Occlumency was a wall of ice, his analytical mind in overdrive. There was no fear. Only observation. He noted, with clinical satisfaction, that the beast's massive yellow eyes were closed. Its milky, reptilian eyelids were sealed. Riddle's Archive had indicated that the beast was not immune to its own gaze; it was a weapon that knew better than to point at itself.
The creature didn't attack. It moved slowly, head low, swaying from side to side as its forked tongue tasted the air. It was confused.
~"Master?"~
The hiss was so low Timothy felt it more in his feet than in his ears.
~"You have returned. I smell you. I smell the Speaker"~.
The colossal head turned, nostrils flaring, and centered on Timothy's small figure. It glided forward, stopping about ten meters away, lowering its head until its closed eyelids were level with Timothy's eyes. The heat radiating from its scales was like that of an oven.
Timothy didn't move.
The Basilisk tilted its head, its tongue tasting the air around him. And the beast's confusion became palpable.
~"You smell... different"~, hissed the snake, its voice a low thunder. ~"You smell like him... like the memory from the diary... but you don't smell... of rage. You don't smell of death. You don't smell like the Master"~.
Of course not. Timothy's mind was a fortress of cold, controlled logic. He didn't have the narcissistic fury or murderous intent of Tom Riddle. The Basilisk, who had only known one master in fifty years, was facing an impossible contradiction: a Speaker who didn't project hatred, but an intense calm and curiosity.
The giant head moved a little closer, its breath smelling of ozone and ancient carrion.
~"Who are you?"~.