Motes of dust drifted without any particular order through the golden sea of light spilling in from the windows, much like the tangled thoughts currently occupying the minds of everyone present in the room.
"You knew everything, then. All along."
Salazar repeated it slowly, his own gaze was cooling as he spoke.
"I can be sharp on occasion too, Salazar—"
Gryffindor curled his own lips at that, as if trying to show off some of his cleverness, but the smile sitting on his face, thick throughout with sorrow and evident helplessness, revealed rather more of the confusion actually sitting in his heart.
Dumbledore remained thoroughly absorbed in this particular fragment of history.
To witness a private, secret conversation between the four Founders of Hogwarts was, in itself, a first across the whole of his life—whatever Gryffindor and Slytherin were actually discussing, he found it deeply fascinating regardless.
Bryan, however, was working through something rather different.
His own heavy gaze settled steadily over the sharp facial features of Salazar Slytherin's composed face; after a long moment, he turned instead to study the details of Gryffindor's office.
Finding nothing unusual in that closer inspection, his eyes returned once more to Slytherin's face, and the faint furrow visible between his own brows showed something of the private confusion still sitting, unresolved, in his heart.
"Since you already know—do you intend to simply let Rowena—"
"Since this is Rowena's own decision, I will respect it—"
Gryffindor emphasised his position once again, firmly.
The contempt sitting on Slytherin's face went entirely obvious at that answer.
"You truly disappoint me, Godric. Your heart proves considerably more cowardly than I ever credited you for—you're scarcely fit, by that measure, to even call yourself a wizard of courage anymore."
The air tensed sharply for a moment at that; Dumbledore even thought briefly, that Gryffindor might draw his sword again.
But in the end, Gryffindor only sighed wearily instead—this same legendary wizard, revered across countless generations still to come, now carried eyes steeped in exhaustion.
"If it were you standing in my place, Salazar, what would you do?"
"I wouldn't be nearly so cowardly as you're proving yourself to be, Godric—"
Slytherin's whole bearing turned suddenly domineering; he declared it without a single shred of doubt.
"I would grant the child in whose body my own blood flows the noble title of 'Slytherin'. He will inherit the glory of my family, and of myself, and he will carry that glory onward together with the noble blood that runs through him, whatever the cost!"
"That same old song again, Salazar—"
Gryffindor sighed heavily.
"Salazar, I don't understand—why a wizard like you remains so unable to free himself from the shackles of bloodline thinking. You know there's no such actual thing as inherently noble blood and besides all that—bloodlines always come to an end eventually. It's only ever a matter of time before they do.
The noble families of the wizarding world today, ourselves very much included—our own names will one day die out completely, same as all the rest. You've already heard what Helga herself foresaw of the future. Isn't that proof enough, on its own, of how little any of this ultimately matters?"
"Wise Gryffindor."
Dumbledore murmured the private praise in awe at the observation, but a moment later, his own face clouded over with fresh confusion.
'Helga Hufflepuff had foreseen the future?'
Helga Hufflepuff was a witch who truly possessed the rare gift of real "prophecy."
Unlike Sybill's uncontrollable, unreliable prophecies, delivered without warning or apparent will, Helga Hufflepuff could reportedly foresee the future intentionally, at her own choosing though doing so, according to the old record, cost her a portion of her own life each time she attempted it.
This much was recorded in the notes passed down through successive generations of Hogwarts headmasters.
Dumbledore's eyelids trembled faintly at the confirmation.
'Gryffindor had said, quite plainly, that their family names would all eventually die out—that one seemingly careless remark carried, on reflection, more weight than it appeared to.'
"You all know full well that the future itself is a river with countless branching paths—the very moment it is foreseen by anyone, it will inevitably veer off into some new unknown, unpredictable direction—"
Slytherin remained entirely unmoved by the argument.
"That you and Rowena and Helga are all willing to let the noble names you each inherited from your own respective ancestors simply vanish into the wider river of history—that is your own private affair to decide—"
Slytherin lifted his own chin slightly at that, his eyes were burning as he stared steadily at Gryffindor, his tone utterly resolute.
"But I—I will find some way to make sure that Slytherin blood continues on!"
In the settling stillness that followed, both Dumbledore's and Bryan's expressions turned grave.
By the floor-to-ceiling window, Gryffindor's face, dimmed against the sunlight still pouring in behind him, drew its own thick brows together into a deepening frown.
"You intend to interfere—"
A trace of unmistakable severity seeped into Gryffindor's rough, weathered face as he said it.
"Don't do anything unnecessary here, Salazar. You know how dangerous that se would prove—a thousand years is a long span of time to account for. Anything could change across that distance."
'A thousand years.'
Dumbledore's own brow gave a sudden twitch at the phrase.
Gryffindor truly was exactly as he described himself—his heart wasn't nearly as rough or simple as his outward appearance suggested; on matters that mattered, he was far from foolish at all.
Salazar, it seemed, meant to use that person to achieve his own ends across the span of centuries. After all, this was the only place where their present lives intersected with the era a full thousand years hence.
But seeing the unmistakable resolve sitting firmly in his old friend's eyes, Godric hesitated once more.
He had never been a man skilled with words of persuasion; perhaps Rowena and Helga would have a better chance of talking him around, given time.
"By the way—"
The lingering sorrow that had been sitting in the air thinned considerably at that shift; with the crisis a thousand years distant now raised between them, Godric could no longer afford to dwell further on matters of the heart.
"I forgot to ask—did you find anything new on this particular trip of yours, Salazar?"
Godric had finally gathered himself fully, and pressed the practical question forward.
"That's precisely why I came to find you in the first place, Godric—"
Salazar said, not looking directly at his old friend by the window as he spoke; instead, his own gaze drifted toward the sword Godric had hung on the rack earlier.
"I want to borrow your sword from you, Godric."
'Slytherin—asking Gryffindor to lend him his sword?'
This particular detail, too, struck Dumbledore as an exceedingly curious thing to witness; he instinctively looked toward Bryan for some kind of explanation.
But Bryan, noticing Dumbledore's questioning gaze, only shook his head in response—he was listening intently to what came next. He knew that Gryffindor was about to ask the obvious follow-up question, and that the answer would come through their exchange.
And just as expected, Gryffindor's face took on a puzzled expression at the request, his lips were moving as though about to ask precisely that question.
But Bryan and Dumbledore both discovered, to their mutual shock, that they could no longer hear Gryffindor's voice at all.
"Bryan."
Dumbledore turned abruptly to look around, calling out in a grave, urgent tone.
The room they were both standing in was collapsing around them!
The solid walls on every side seemed to be turning suddenly to shifting sand, crumbling rapidly away as though blown apart by some sudden, violent gust of wind, and in the space left behind, everywhere they looked, lay only boundless, encroaching darkness.
The darkness surged in with terrible speed; in a single instant, it had swallowed the room's entire furnishings whole, and the figures of the two Hogwarts Founders dissolved fully into it as well, vanishing entirely from view!
'Hah.'
Bryan had grown used to this sensation by now—the moment that familiar wind-sigh, ancient as another lifetime altogether, echoed in his own ears, he opened his eyes, prepared for the transition.
The waning moon still hung in the night sky above them, though it had already begun its own slow tilt westward, marking the passage of real time.
'It was over, then?!'
Bryan's lips moved slightly, his own expression was entirely unable to hide the absurdity and lingering shock he felt at the whole experience.
This had been, by his count, the fourth time he had personally followed the preserved perspectives of the four Hogwarts Founders, peering into the years a full thousand years past.
In both Gryffindor's and Ravenclaw's respective memories, he had lived through two adventures alongside them, each one revealing something significant. In Hufflepuff's own preserved memory, too, he had glimpsed things of genuinely great, lasting value.
But Salazar Slytherin's memory—had proven to be nothing more than a single, private conversation, as though it had been left behind purely to placate him rather than to genuinely instruct.
On the surface, at least, the most valuable single thing he had actually learned from tonight's whole extraordinary experience seemed to be simply that Rowena Ravenclaw had, indeed, borne Gryffindor a child together, and that Gryffindor himself had known of it all along but out of some unspoken private understanding between himself and Rowena, had chosen to remain silent on the matter.
"The Resurrection Stone!"
A sudden, sharp cry startled Bryan out of his hazy, still-settling thoughts; his heart lurched violently in his chest, and he immediately looked down at his own hand as Dumbledore's urgent warning stimulated.
And the moment he actually saw it, the colour drained from his face.
At some point, without his own noticing, the pitch-black stone resting in his palm had begun to visibly change before him.
Ring after ring of glowing incantation, each one shimmering with a faint, green light, had surfaced steadily across the stone's surface, slowly turning around it as though it were a captured star wrapped tightly in its own private halo of binding light!
'Shackles.'
The exact same thought surfaced in the minds of both Dumbledore and Bryan at precisely the same moment, both their faces were struck through equally with rising astonishment.
Bryan raised his right arm sharply and thrust his wand toward the Resurrection Stone, testing it.
Just as he had immediately suspected, these particular ring-shaped incantations constituted a powerful seal of some kind or perhaps, more precisely, some form of protection, built into the artifact itself.
No matter how much force he applied, the very tip of Bryan's wand could not manage to touch the stone through those layered incantations at all, meeting only resistance.
Perhaps it was only a trick of the bright moonlight, but Dumbledore's aged face seemed to pale slightly at the sight, his composure was visibly shaken.
"Salazar Slytherin. Of all people."
In the swaying woods beneath the moon, Dumbledore's helpless complaint rang out into the night air.
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