Two fairly quiet weeks followed the conversation with Orion Black, both for Severus personally and throughout the country. Minor skirmishes between the three factions continued, of course, but none affected the civilian population of Magical Britain, offering them at least a small measure of breathing room.
At Hogwarts, lessons continued as usual, although Rubeus Hagrid had still not been discharged from St Mungo's. After the Parent Committee intervened, the Forbidden Forest became an even more restricted area. It was now surrounded by a very tall fence, and detentions involving him were formally removed from the list of acceptable disciplinary punishments.
The paperwork regarding Orion had been signed a week ago. By the end of November, the books would be appearing on shelves in Germany, France, and Belgium. Orion attempted to negotiate over the potions, but the effort ended the moment Severus showed him the magical contract mark. He even hinted that he could be of assistance regarding his niece by sharing certain information in exchange for future recipes. Severus declined politely. He had Regulus, and a cousin always knew far more about his cousin than an uncle ever would. It had also finally become clear from which side of the family Regulus inherited his sharpness.
As for Bellatrix herself, the atmosphere had warmed considerably since that evening. She had begun to view Severus in an entirely different light. Like her aunt, Bella preferred to handle matters personally. Instead of using a house-elf to eavesdrop, she had used an artifact hidden in a vase to hear every word exchanged between the two men. His words had struck her when she was most vulnerable.
Bella was not one for such sentiments. However, when you have spent your entire life being treated as a bargaining chip, a prize mare ready for transfer to another family in exchange for advantage, moments like that become the most precious of all.
That said, to call Bella a damsel in distress would be a gross exaggeration. With her icy demeanor, she would never have allowed just anyone to lay a hand on her. She would sooner hex a Lestrange who dared try without her permission. But for the first time in her life, someone was fighting for her, and that realization hit harder than she had expected.
Their weekly meetings had become much more enjoyable and lively. Bella had begun to relax and open up instead of retreating behind her usual walls. More than that, she had finally started genuinely accepting his feelings and reciprocating them. That alone was a significant step. Consequently, Tom's influence over her had weakened further, though it was not yet enough to fully undo the damage caused by the artifact. At this rate, a year would be sufficient.
By the following Sunday, Severus and Nagini finally reached a truce. They spent the entire day together, exploring various locations in both the Muggle and magical worlds. Nagini kept up her feigned injury for a couple more days, but the animosity between them dissolved completely after that.
Monday arrived, promising to be far more interesting than the rest of the week. After nearly six months of meticulous labor, the house-elf assigned to scour the Ravenclaw common room at night finally discovered something significant.
Inside a wardrobe in one of the dormitories, the elf found strange symbols etched in tiny script. They resembled the runes Severus had once demonstrated. After copying them completely, the elf brought the transcription to Severus. The subsequent work was anything but simple. The task proved far more complex than anticipated. It involved not just one type of rune, but ten distinct types. To complicate matters further, one category contained symbols that held multiple potential meanings.
That seemingly trivial task spanned ten full hours over two days. There were eight hundred ten symbols in total, fifty of which had no clearly discernible meaning. Even so, Severus completed the work as quickly as he did only thanks to the Grimoire. Without it, the work would likely have taken at least four days. Even upon completion, he remained uncertain about several of the symbols.
In the end, it turned out to be a message addressed to any young Ravenclaw who managed to find and translate it. Severus was only sixty percent certain Rowena herself had written it. While the handwriting matched hers, a welcome letter she had personally written to the first-years still existed. This meant the message could easily have been forged, and that was precisely why he could not accept it as genuine. His sixty percent certainty stemmed from the symbols themselves, which were clearly almost eight hundred years old, dating from around the time of Rowena's death. Yet even that could be faked, preventing him from relying on it entirely.
Aside from a good deal of praise, the message was packed with moralizing platitudes. Read more and broaden your horizons. No goal is impossible and no situation is truly hopeless. Your teachers are always there to help.
In short, Severus had wanted to strangle whoever had written all this, be it Rowena or anyone else. He had spent an enormous amount of time decoding what amounted to a heap of nonsense, only to receive a mountain of life lessons in return. But he refused to give up and kept working through the letter. Something was eluding him. It simply couldn't be that obvious.
Two days later, he finally solved the puzzle, and the answer proved almost embarrassingly simple. All he needed to do was remove every rune that carried multiple meanings and strip the corresponding words from the text. He hadn't even figured it out himself. Nagini was the one who noticed a single word repeating exactly five times.
Severus had never felt quite so foolish in his life, and the Tom within the Grimoire was in complete agreement. Both had been utterly convinced that some elaborate cipher was buried within the text. The realization that he simply had to delete a handful of words hit them like a bucket of cold water.
Only then did Severus recall a specific line from the letter. "...life can be hard and unforgiving, but think simply, and the answer will always present itself..." The answer had been sitting on the surface the entire time. They had piled assumption upon assumption onto a problem that required none.
Once those words were removed, the text took on a completely different meaning. Beyond the praise for cleverness and unconventional thinking, it now revealed the next location. The location was presented as a small riddle, considerably simpler than the last. The two words "repository of knowledge" were all Severus needed to realize it pointed to the library. He had already combed through it without finding anything, but he was not about to stop. He set every house-elf to work checking every inch of the place, and he joined the search personally.
A day later, while looking through paintings stored near the caretaker's office, Severus found something rather interesting. He had arranged the viewing with Filch in exchange for seeing to Mrs Norris. It was a portrait of Rowena Ravenclaw set against the backdrop of the library. The painting was dated 1109. The shelves holding the books stood in the exact same positions and order as they did now. He confirmed this by the numbering on them, leading him to a very particular conclusion.
He had never touched those shelves before simply because they were protected by extremely powerful charms, and deactivating them would have taken a great deal of time. But once he did, spending roughly thirty minutes on shelf number one, Severus found a rune carved beneath it and could not quite suppress a smile. Then he looked up at the ninety-odd remaining shelves scattered throughout the library, and the smile faded slowly.
Two more grinding weeks passed in exactly that fashion. "Old hag," "old crow," "old witch" were among the affectionate terms Severus used every time he referred to the Ravenclaw founder, because Rowena had not stopped at the library. There was still the Room of Requirement to get through, and then the Astronomy Tower, where Severus finally received the last answer: "...wait for the full moon at the crossing of lines..." The location turned out to be a corridor on the fifth floor.
The one thing that gave him any comfort was that the full moon was only two days away. He would not have to wait an entire month.
He tried, naturally, to work out what exactly was hidden there and why it would only reveal itself during the full moon, but to his surprise, every method available to him returned nothing. So Severus decided simply to wait and let his nerves recover. If this all turned out to be someone's idea of a joke, he was entirely prepared to cast his principles aside and deal with that person himself, even if they happened to be long dead. That was, after all, one of the reasons he had studied Necromancy at the Magistrate.
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Chapters on Patreon progress: Currently at;
1. Harry Potter: Satan? Nah, Just My Family Crest = CHAPTER 272
2.Marvel: Cosmic Forger of Infinity = CHAPTER 190
3.Harry Potter: Beyond Good and Evil in the Wizarding World = CHAPTER 273
4.Harry Potter: Reborn as Draco Black = CHAPTER 117
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