He prepared the Room on Monday evening of the second week.
Not the hidden things mode — a different configuration, one the Room had not produced for him before. He stood in the corridor outside and held the requirement clearly in his mind: somewhere contained, with no ambient magic that would interfere with what he was doing, stone walls, no windows, and a surface that could tolerate venom. The Room considered this and produced a space that was approximately the size of a large classroom, stripped of furniture except for a stone worktable in the center and two chairs against the wall.
He set the warding first. Four layers, worked with the specific care of someone who had been studying ward construction since July and who understood that the quality of the containment mattered as much as the quality of the action inside it. The wards sealed the room against external magical interference, against accidental penetration, against any ambient detection of what was happening within. He checked each one.
Then he set out his materials.
The Goblin knife, its point prepared the previous evening with the careful application of basilisk venom to the first inch of blade. The process had taken forty minutes and had required the glass implement and the steady hand and the very specific concentration of someone who was aware that a mistake would be both painful and permanent. He had not made a mistake.
The diadem, wrapped in a cloth that he had treated with a basic isolation enchantment. He set it on the stone table without unwrapping it.
The locket was not here yet. Kreacher would come when called.
He called Kreacher.
The elf appeared with the silent crack of house elf Apparition, without the hostile assessment he had worn at Christmas. He was carrying the locket in both hands, held slightly away from his body, with the specific careful quality of someone transporting something they understood to be dangerous.
Ron looked at the locket. Even through the cloth Kreacher had wrapped it in, the wrongness of it was present — more acute than the diadem, more insistent, the quality of something that had been waiting a long time and had developed opinions about the waiting.
'Kreacher,' Ron said. 'Thank you for bringing it.'
Kreacher looked at the room. At the worktable. At the diadem wrapped in its cloth. At Ron.
'You found another one,' Kreacher said.
'Yes,' Ron said.
A silence. Kreacher looked at the locket. His expression had the quality Ron had seen at Christmas — the layered grief of a being who had been carrying something for a very long time and was now arriving at the moment where the carrying would end.
'Regulus found a way,' Kreacher said. It was not a question.
'There is a way,' Ron said carefully. 'A material that can destroy them. I have it.' He paused. 'The locket is yours to end. If you want it. Regulus asked you to destroy it. That task belongs to you.'
Kreacher looked at the locket for a long moment.
'Show Kreacher,' he said.
Ron unwrapped the diadem first and demonstrated — a precise strike with the venom-treated point, the specific angle and depth that he had worked out from theory and that proved, in practice, to be exactly correct. The diadem reacted in the way the diary had reacted: a kind of internal collapse, the wrongness he had felt dispersing like smoke, the object left behind suddenly simply itself — silver and sapphires and an inscription, no longer a vessel, no longer wrong.
The room felt cleaner afterward. He had not expected to notice this as clearly as he did.
He set the knife on the table. Looked at Kreacher.
Kreacher looked at the knife. Then at the locket. He picked up the knife with both hands — the care of someone handling something significant — and stood in front of the locket where it sat on the stone table.
'It needs to be opened first,' Ron said. 'The catch. It responds to Parseltongue.'
Kreacher looked at him. 'You speak it?'
'No,' Ron said. 'But I know the sound.'
He had practised this. Not the language — his mouth could not produce the magic in it — but the memory of Harry demonstrating it in the common room, the specific shape and pitch of the word for open, held in his mind with the precision his eidetic memory allowed. He produced what he could: an approximation, the phonological skeleton of the word without the magical element.
Nothing happened.
He had expected this. He had a contingency.
He took the folded piece of parchment from his pocket — the one he had prepared on Thursday, Harry's handwriting, the word for open in Parseltongue transcribed as closely as Ron had been able to guide him, with the instruction to read it aloud as though speaking to a snake. He had told Harry it was for a theoretical experiment on magical linguistic resonance. Harry had given him the look and written it out anyway.
Ron read it the way Harry had taught him to read it, with the specific muscular quality of the sounds, and the locket's catch released with a small precise click.
He set the parchment aside.
Kreacher looked at the open locket. His expression had the quality Ron had seen at Christmas — the layered grief of a being who had been carrying something for a very long time and was now arriving at the moment where the carrying would end.
'The locket is yours to end,' Ron said quietly. 'Regulus asked you to destroy it. That task belongs to you.'
Kreacher picked up the knife.
Ron stepped back to the wall. This was not his moment.
Kreacher spoke to the locket.
Then Kreacher struck.
The locket's reaction was more violent than the diadem's had been — a sound that was not quite a scream, a rush of cold that the wards contained, a darkness that lasted approximately two seconds before the room's light reasserted itself. Kreacher stood over the locket — destroyed, inert, no longer wrong — and was very still.
Ron waited.
After a long moment, Kreacher set the knife down. He looked at what the locket had become. His expression had moved through something Ron could not name and had arrived at something that was not grief and was not relief but occupied the space between them where an old task met its end.
'It is done,' Kreacher said.
'It is done,' Ron agreed.
Kreacher looked at him. 'The young Weasley knew about these objects. Has been planning for them.'
'Yes,' Ron said.
'There are others,' Kreacher said. It was not a question either.
Ron considered this. Kreacher was not a fool. Kreacher had known what the locket was, had understood what it meant, had been Regulus's confidant in the matter. He had arrived at the correct inference through his own reasoning and deserved a straight answer.
'Yes,' Ron said. 'I know where some of them are. I'm working on it.'
Kreacher looked at him for a long moment with the ancient, assessing eyes.
'Regulus would have approved,' Kreacher said, which was the highest thing Kreacher had to offer and which Ron received accordingly.
'Thank you, Kreacher,' Ron said. 'For all of it.'
Kreacher departed with his crack of Apparition. Ron stood in the warded room with two destroyed Horcruxes and the knife and with the quiet of someone who had just done something that mattered and was taking a moment to let it be what it was before moving on to what came next.
He photographed the room. The worktable. The destroyed objects. The knife.
He would not show these photographs to anyone. But he wanted the record.
He dismantled the wards methodically, checking each layer as he took it down — not because he suspected a problem but because the habit of checking was the habit that caught problems before they became one. The room, as the wards came down, lost the slightly pressurized quality that warded spaces had and became simply a stone room with a worktable in it. Ordinary. The kind of room that could have contained anything.
He wrapped the destroyed objects separately — the diadem in its cloth, the locket in the cloth Kreacher had brought it in — and placed them in the fifth compartment of his trunk. He was not sure what to do with them yet. They were no longer Horcruxes. They were objects: a beautiful diadem that had belonged to Rowena Ravenclaw and a locket that had been Slytherin's and then Voldemort's and then Regulus's and was now neither. Historical artefacts of a very specific and terrible history.
He would decide later. For now, the compartment was the right place — secured, contained, present but not intrusive.
He locked the trunk and went to dinner.