Chapter 205: Tom: Dealing with Leonardo Is Just a Side Task, the Basilisk
In the Defence Against the Dark Arts office, candlelight flickered restlessly.
Lockhart tossed a pair of gleaming, gold-rimmed spectacles onto his desk, then snatched up his peacock-feather quill and began writing quickly in the old diary.
Ink bled into the yellowed page as he recorded the latest developments: Dumbledore's announcement about the basilisk, the professors being organised into a search, and the distribution of those glasses meant to obstruct the basilisk's gaze.
Before long, Tom's reply surfaced on the page:
"The glasses don't matter. We only ever planned to Petrify those little witches and wizards anyway. Now that the glasses block the gaze, it even saves us effort, doesn't it? At least we no longer have to go out of our way to find puddles, mirrors, and the like."
"And that student, Leonardo Grafton, isn't worth paying attention to. He won't affect our plan."
Inside the diary
The young Tom Riddle lounged in a high-backed chair, turning over an identical pair of gold-rimmed spectacles in his hands.
He studied them for a moment. His black eyes stayed flat and cold.
"Thestral tail hair…"
He flicked the glasses up, caught them again, and spoke with the same detached calm.
"First, he supplied Mandrakes, sped up the recovery of the Petrified, and disrupted the rhythm of spreading fear. Now he's produced this."
Tom's voice remained cool.
"Leonardo Grafton is becoming inconvenient."
But the irritation faded as quickly as it had come.
To Tom, what mattered most now was gathering enough vitality to complete his return. Once he had a body again, everything else could be settled.
The first objective was obvious. Use the basilisk to kill Harry Potter.
As for dealing with the meddlesome Leonardo, that was no more than something to do along the way.
And those so-called protective glasses?
Tom curled his fingers and squeezed.
The gold-rimmed spectacles burst apart, scattering into drifting motes of light.
"Even if they truly block the basilisk's gaze and spare someone from instant death, what of it?"
The basilisk's sheer bulk could crush a body with ease. The venom dripping from its fangs could eat through flesh and bone. Its hard scales resisted most spells.
"When the time comes, against a crowd of panicking schoolchildren, the basilisk won't even need its eyes. A single coil, a single press, a spray of venom, and the slaughter will be efficient."
Tom leaned back, unhurried, almost relaxed.
"I only hope Leonardo won't be too far from Harry Potter when it happens."
With that thought put aside, Tom Riddle stopped wasting attention on minor details.
He turned to a blank page and wrote again:
"My friend, the plan remains unchanged. How goes your gathering of the ingredients for that potion I mentioned, the one that briefly heightens magical power? It will make your spells far more dazzling, and it's essential for your 'heroic entrance'…"
Outside the diary
Lockhart saw the new words appear and immediately wrote back:
"Oh, don't worry. I'm nearly done. I'm only missing one last, utterly insignificant ingredient!"
The truth, however, was that Lockhart had already gathered everything and brewed the potion.
He had tested it on a toad used for trial brews. It was not harmful. The toad had even seemed unusually lively afterwards.
It looked exactly as Tom had promised. A simple draught to restore energy and briefly stir magical power.
Even so, Tom had been helpful at every turn, but Lockhart remained cautious about anything he was meant to swallow.
As for Leonardo, there were moments when Lockhart found that boy's gaze unpleasant, as though he could see straight through him. Most of the time, though, Leonardo seemed perfectly normal.
Lockhart suddenly felt an itch at the back of his neck. He scratched at it, then bent back over the diary, continuing to "coordinate" with Tom.
Above him, a spider hung upside down from a thin thread, its tiny eyes fixed on the diary and the drafts on Lockhart's desk.
A minute black vortex appeared, so small it was easy to miss.
The words on the page became perfectly clear in Leonardo's sight.
A magic-boosting potion, then. Let's have a look.
Rain poured in sheets. Lightning tore the sky apart again and again.
Leonardo walked the corridor at an unhurried pace. A pair of fine, silver-wire spectacles sat on the bridge of his nose, and behind the lenses, his dark green eyes moved quietly, assessing every student he passed.
With the professors enforcing strict rules and handing out protection, the students were now wearing Thestral glasses or the invisible contact lenses.
"Leonardo," Harry asked uneasily, "is something else about to happen?"
He wore the Thestral glasses too, though the style matched his usual round frames. For reasons he could not name, Harry had felt wrong-footed these past days. It was the same sick instinct he had carried last year, before Quirrell.
"Yeah," Ron added, rubbing at his eyes. He had chosen the contact lenses, still unused to the feeling. "They're tightening rules, they've stopped the Quidditch matches. Is this about the Chamber of Secrets?"
Even if Ron could be slow on ordinary days, he felt the castle changing. The air was pressing down, like the thunderstorm outside.
Hermione, who had been quiet, spoke up at last.
"Leonardo, are these spectacles connected to the monster in the Chamber? I think I read that some magical creatures can harm people just through eye contact…"
Leonardo nodded lightly. Hermione was quick, and she read more than most adults.
"You're not wrong. The creature in the Chamber is actually…"
He did not finish.
Harry suddenly clapped both hands over his ears, face twisting with pain and fear.
"It's back," he gasped. "That voice. I can hear it again!"
Leonardo fell silent because he could hear it too.
It was not Parseltongue, not exactly, but the result of the Unicorn Blessing's Tongue of Beasts. A wet, heavy scraping slid through the stone like something enormous dragging itself along the bones of the castle.
A black vortex spun up in Leonardo's pupils.
He turned sharply towards the far end of the corridor.
Something cold and foul was moving inside the wall, more precisely within the pipes threaded through it.
Hogwarts was riddled with them, countless passages of old stone and hidden channels. The basilisk used them to travel.
It was here.
Leonardo rotated his wrist. A silver-black wand slid into his palm.
"Harry, what did you hear?" Ron demanded, grabbing Harry's shoulder. "What is it saying?"
Harry kept his hands clamped over his ears, words breaking unevenly through his breath.
"It's calling," he said. "It's calling my name!"
The moment the words left him, a thunderclap split the sky, so violent the castle seemed to shudder.
At the same instant, the stone wall at the end of the corridor cracked open in spiderweb lines. Dust and chips of stone spilled down.
Leonardo's wand moved.
A soft, powerful force wrapped around several stunned students near the wall and shoved them back.
At the same time, his left hand slapped his robe pocket.
A black-red blur shot out with a sharp, tearing sound and hurtled towards the fractured wall.
The corridor end exploded.
Stone flew. Dust boiled up like thick fog, swallowing sight.
And within that churning grey, a pair of enormous yellow "lanterns" flared into being, cold and merciless.
The scraping sound became a hiss of movement. Glimpses of brilliant green scales flashed in and out of the dust, outlining a vast, coiling shape.
Just as those lethal yellow eyes were about to push fully through the haze, a heavy detonation cracked in the heart of the dust cloud.
A violent surge of magic burst outward like an invisible удар.
It smashed into the creature mid-emergence.
The enormous body let out a muffled, pained roar, then was flung backwards, slamming through the side wall and vanishing out into the storm beyond the castle.
The dust thinned.
The black-red figure stood beside Leonardo, perfectly still.
It was a finely made alchemical automaton, its metal body gleaming dully in the lightning. Its left arm was scorched and twisted, marked by short, brutal exposure to raw power. In its chest, a Philosopher's Stone blazed with harsh red light.
That level of output had been too much for the frame.
Leonardo's eyes flicked to it. The automaton's core was powered by a Philosopher's Stone Nicolas had given him, and Leonardo had built a combat module into its design. The load limits and energy channelling still needed work.
Leonardo's wand hummed with silent instruction.
The automaton did not hesitate. It stamped once, then became a black-red streak and smashed straight through the broken wall, chasing the basilisk into the rain.
It would drive the creature out into open ground, onto the wide lawn beyond the castle.
Leonardo turned his wand hand and produced several small bottles at once. He shoved them into Harry's arms.
The three of them were still staring, minds lagging behind what they had just seen.
"A few students got caught in the shock," Leonardo said rapidly. "Go. Check on them first."
When the basilisk burst through, several unlucky students had met the creature's yellow eyes at close range.
The Thestral glasses had blocked the instant-death curse in its gaze, but the distance had been too short. The dark magic was still strong enough to petrify them.
Leonardo finished speaking and was already walking towards the gap the automaton had torn open.
A gust of wind whipped through, driving ice-cold rain into the corridor.
"Wait," Hermione cried, snapping out of her stupor first. She saw Leonardo already at the edge, and panic grabbed her chest. "Leonardo, what are you doing?"
But in the space of their shocked breaths, Leonardo stepped out.
He dropped.
"I'm off to protect the future of the wizarding world," Leonardo called up, his voice carried cleanly on the wind.
Harry, Ron, and Hermione all lunged for the opening, hands stretching instinctively as if they could catch him.
A fierce updraft roared up from below, blasting rain into their faces and forcing them to squint.
Then a brilliant golden shape tore through the storm and surged skyward.
Harry's eyes, sharper than most, caught the outline. A great bird, wreathed in crackling arcs of electricity.
And Leonardo was astride its back.
In a heartbeat, he was racing across the rain-dark sky towards the open lawn beyond the castle.
Hermione seized Harry's arm hard enough to hurt.
"Harry, that voice you heard," she said, breathless and fierce, "that was Parseltongue. The monster in the Chamber is a snake. It's a basilisk."
"We have to find a professor," Hermione said, already moving. "Now!"
Harry and Ron reacted at once, the panic turning into motion.
Harry sprinted a few steps, then remembered the bottles in his hands. He thrust one into the grasp of a nearby student whose face had gone paper-white.
"Give that to the Petrified students," Harry ordered. "Make them drink it."
The three of them broke apart and ran in different directions down the corridor.
Going together would waste time. Splitting up was faster.
They had to find the professors.
They had to get someone to help Leonardo.