Deep in the night, a silent shape moved through the castle's dark corridors. It stopped in front of a painting of fruit. A hand rose, setting a transparent dome over both the shadow and the painting, and then the pear was tickled. It dissolved into laughter and turned into a green handle.
The figure did not go straight in. He aimed his palm at the handle, murmured something, and a dark blue aura spread into the kitchen beyond. Exactly a minute later, he stepped inside.
Silence sat heavily over the room, and several house-elves lay on the floor, snoring peacefully.
"You are like that ninja from the film!" came an excited hiss from under his robe. A head appeared, and Nagini looked over the sleeping workers with open interest.
"Do not hiss. We should not attract the attention of the other elves, and their shift starts in an hour. We need to check the whole room before then." Severus moved quietly, sharpening all five senses. "It is extremely inconvenient to search for anything in a place where magic bleeds from every surface."
This shadow was, of course, Severus. After several days watching Hufflepuff's common room, he had shifted his attention to the kitchens, but only after three days of observation beforehand. He had started with Helga Hufflepuff for a straightforward reason: there were only two places her things could logically be hidden, the house common room or the kitchens. According to Salazar, she had spent a great deal of time here because she loved to cook and personally oversaw students' meals. Beyond that, Helga had been heavyset, and Severus doubted she would have hidden anything far from where she spent her time.
He moved through the room methodically, checking every brick and corner, shifting cabinets, working his way across the ceiling. After thirty minutes he had found nothing.
Have I miscalculated? He looked around the room again, grimly. She loved to cook. His gaze moved from the long wooden table, across the cupboards full of ingredients, and settled on the large oven. Too bare, he murmured, touching his chin as he watched the flames inside.
"Why is there a fire burning in the oven at this hour anyway?" Nagini asked, looking at it with idle curiosity.
"It does not consume much magic. It gives light, and it keeps the room warm."
"There are torches over there." She pointed with her tail. "And is the castle not warm enough already?"
"How would I know? Perhaps they simply like having the oven burning. House-elves are peculiar creatures." He glanced at it again and stopped. "Flame."
"Mm?"
He moved quickly, pushed the fire aside with no apparent effort, and found himself staring at the soot-blackened back wall. He touched it, and the soot began to peel away and vanish.
"What an idiot I have been." He laughed, genuinely this time, and could not stop it. Smiling, he reached up and scratched Nagini's head. "You helped me again without even trying." He ran his palm over the smooth bricks now exposed and felt a small indentation in one of them.
He lit the wall and found seven more marks just like it. Above those, three more.
"Runes, and two different types. So the entrance is here, but the sequence has to be correct." He grinned. The Grimoire appeared in his hand, he opened it, pulled out a pen he had picked up in the Muggle world, and copied the runes down carefully. Make a word from these, and cut anything unrelated to cooking or Hufflepuff. Three words appeared on the blank page: Marzipan. Honesty. Loyalty. Hm. The last two are house qualities. Marzipan does not belong with them, which means. He began pressing the bricks one by one, spelling out the word.
The moment his finger found the final rune, every brick lit up at once and slid apart, opening into a dark room beyond.
"Hm." He snapped his fingers. A bright flame appeared, illuminating a small portion of the space, then split into dozens of smaller flames that scattered outward in every direction, filling the room with warm light.
"Now this deserves to be called a kitchen."
It was large and dusty and nearly as big as the room outside. A long steel table ran down the centre, laid with pots, pans, knives, and various other tools. Cabinets lined both side walls, but these were nothing like the simple wooden ones in the main kitchen. They were built from magical wood, carved and fitted with glass doors, reinforced with charms and set to regulate temperature. Three ovens stood at the far end, each as large as the one outside, and near the entrance were two refrigerators with extension charms, still running.
"This I would not hesitate to call a kitchen. Activate the charms and runes and it would be fully functional again." Severus raised his eyes to the ceiling and nodded. "Not bad."
But the equipment was not what he had come for. There was a plain door to one side, and when he opened it he found a warm-toned office: bookcases, a writing desk, and a great many paintings. One showed the four founders of Hogwarts together. The others depicted various dishes, fruits, and vegetables.
"Quite cosy."
"I agree. Better than Salazar's or Dumbledore's," Severus said. He scanned the shelves and shook his head with a faint disappointment. "Most of these are only about cooking." Then his gaze moved to the desk. A pot sat there with a small green sprout in it, and beside it lay a thick book. "Judging by the dust, no one has been here in a very long time. How did any of it survive?" He came closer, puzzled and thoughtful at once. "If I remember correctly, there are plants that need only ambient magic to live. But if it has grown this little over so many centuries, the magic in the air here is barely enough to sustain it. That explains why there is so little of it in this room." He picked up the book, blew a centimetre-thick layer of dust from the cover, copied it into the Grimoire almost immediately, and slipped it away. Then his eyes returned to the pot. "Take it, or leave it?"
"What do you need it for?"
"A plant that has been sitting here for hundreds of years and has grown this little: there is a reasonable chance it will become something valuable once it has a proper magical source. Hogwarts has an exceptionally rich magical background. The fact that it has not grown already is strange."
"What makes you think it will be something useful? What if it is something horrible, some man-eating flower?" Nagini stared at the sprout with clear suspicion.
"Even that would not be the worst result. Another line of defence for the house could be very useful," he said calmly. "But since Helga planted it, it is almost certainly an ingredient of some kind. She loved cooking, and I doubt she would grow something dangerous, though perhaps she did not know herself what it would become." He looked at the pot for a few more seconds, then picked it up. "All right. Now I am genuinely curious." He tucked it into the necklace.
Nagini said nothing, though she still thought keeping the sprout was a risk. She simply understood that arguing with Severus on this point would take days of sustained effort and might still not work.
He did not stop at the office. He gathered the books that were not about cooking, along with a few other things that caught his eye. Finally he went to the large painting and slid it aside. Behind it was a smooth wall, blank except for an illusion concealing a hollow shaped precisely like Hufflepuff's Cup.
He did not overthink it. He felt no danger from the mechanism, so he simply took the Cup out and set it in.
For a few seconds nothing happened. Then runes flared across the Cup's surface. A moment later the wall shuddered, screeched, and began to pull back, splitting into two sections that slid apart from the centre. At the same instant, the smell hit him. Severus's face twisted, and he quickly formed a thin film around himself. Nagini pressed her mouth shut very tightly. Snakes, especially magical ones, had an extraordinary sense of smell, and they tasted the air with their tongue.
"You can relax. I put a barrier up." He tapped a finger against the transparent dome around them.
"Dreadful. Like something rotted in a sealed room for two years."
"That is more or less exactly our situation." He pointed into the small greenhouse beyond the wall. Dried plants lay scattered inside, along with a few vegetables that were nearly indistinguishable from the rest of the dead mass. "It is almost a shame. What idiots the founders were. They died, told no one anything, and look at the result. Are they not idiots?"
"Perhaps they did not die naturally and expected to live another century or two," Nagini offered, looking over the dark, dusty, reeking space.
"Possibly. But they are still imbeciles for never telling anyone about these rooms: not their students, not their descendants. That is one thing. But how did it not occur to any of them to set up automatic irrigation and a harvesting system, or at the very minimum leave someone trusted to look after all of this?"
Beyond the greenhouse, there was a pen containing the skeletons of some unidentifiable creatures, a writing desk, a cabinet beside it, and another door that opened into a small chamber. Inside: jewellery, gold, artefacts whose enchantments had long since failed, and perhaps a dozen books that were probably several thousand years old. In general, nothing especially interesting, except for the books.
He left the treasury feeling mildly let down. He had not expected mountains of gold or walls of ancient texts, but he had not expected this little either. After this, his appetite for hunting the other founders' hiding places had dimmed somewhat. If there had once been a proper garden of rare herbs, most of it had withered completely by now.
He left the passages open on his way out. They would be found the next morning. Times were hard, and nearly every available Galleon was going toward containing the uprising, which meant the school was underfunded: you could see it simply by comparing the overflowing tables of his first year to the present, where the food was still there but simpler, and the brooms told the same story. They had been due for replacement five years ago, and a basic Reparo could not always fully restore them.
He did not touch the treasures. He took only the books. He did not have any particular attachment to Hogwarts, but seventy thousand Galleons would not meaningfully change the life of someone whose accounts already held over a million and a half. It could help the school.
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