The four of them made their way down toward the Great Hall together.
Everyone but Will could feel something was off.
Halloween or not, the castle sat unnaturally still around them.
Aside from the occasional flutter of wings overhead, an eerie quiet blanketed the corridors.
Will chalked it up to the castle’s remarkable soundproofing at first, before the memory clicked into place.
All four houses should already be locked safely in their common rooms by now.
Unsettled by the silence, Sylvia and the others stuck close behind Will, half-expecting something dreadful to jump out at them, until a sound echoed up from somewhere below as they reached a lower floor.
They turned toward the noise just as two figures came sprinting around the base of the spiral staircase.
“Harry, slow down, I can’t keep up!” Ron wheezed.
“Watch the stairs, they’re moving again!”
Harry stumbled to a stop, chest heaving, glasses slipping down his nose from sweat.
“We don’t have time, Hermione’s in danger!
There’s a troll loose in the dungeons, Ron, a troll!
And she’s still crying in that bathroom because of what you said!”
His stamina held up better than Ron’s, likely a side effect of years spent being chased around by Dudley and his gang.
At the top of the staircase, the group traded confused glances.
“A troll?
In the dungeons?
They’re coming to save me?” Hermione, sharp as ever, pieced it together almost instantly.
She had no idea where a troll had come from, but the logic clicked easily enough: the boys assumed she was still crying in the bathroom, and they were rushing to find her.
“Forget them.
Let’s just head straight to the feast.” Sylvia looped an arm through Hermione’s, protective as an older sister.
“Let those two idiots go celebrate Halloween with a troll if they want.”
“But…
it’s a troll!” Neville’s face went pale, some half-remembered fact clearly surfacing.
“They eat people!”
“Trolls.
Classified XXXX for danger.
Honestly, I’ve never fully understood what qualifies as ‘magical’ about them, they’re described mostly as terrifying: twelve feet tall, roughly a ton, immensely strong, none too bright, and violently unpredictable.” Hermione rattled the facts off effortlessly, living up to her reputation.
If Will remembered right, that was straight out of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
“They’re going to get flattened into Halloween pudding!” Hermione’s anxiety spiked visibly.
“We have to warn them, now.”
She wasn’t heartless, not really.
Her sharp edges usually covered for exactly this kind of worry underneath. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
“You’re right, Hermione.
I’m going after Harry.” Neville looked genuinely frightened, but determined.
Whatever else could be said, Harry had always looked out for him, even standing up to Malfoy on his behalf over that Remembrall incident.
Hermione slipped free of Sylvia’s arm and bolted down the stairs with Neville close behind.
“Hermione, wait!” Sylvia called after her, worry creeping into her voice.
Will just shrugged and tugged Sylvia forward.
“Come on, then.
Unless you’d rather watch them get turned into pudding and scrape up the leftovers yourself.”
“Ugh.” Sylvia shuddered at the image and fell into step beside him, following the other two down.
By the time they reached the dungeon corridor, Harry and Ron were already sprinting straight toward them, a full-sized troll lumbering after them with a massive club raised overhead.
Neither boy was particularly slow, but the troll’s stride still outpaced them several times over, smashing armor stands and statues to rubble along the way, leaving the corridor looking like the aftermath of someone swatting at cockroaches with a sledgehammer.
Except here, the cockroaches in question happened to be the wizarding world’s future saviors.
Over the deafening crunch of destroyed armor, Harry grabbed Ron by the collar, pulling him along faster.
“Ron, move!”
“Bit difficult, that!” Ron’s face had gone bright red, breath ragged as he struggled to keep pace.
Apparently the two of them hadn’t been foolish enough to actually engage the troll once they’d found the bathroom empty, but the troll had other plans entirely, and clearly wasn’t interested in letting them simply walk away.
“That’s Hermione!” Harry spotted her rushing down the stairs with Neville right behind.
“And Neville too!”
“Run!
Get back!” Ron’s lungs burned, and the smell rolling off the troll behind them wasn’t helping matters.
Worse, the person they’d come to save was now standing directly in the troll’s path.
“Neville!
Grab Hermione and go, now!”
That was the exact moment Sylvia and Will reached the bottom of the stairs, catching the tail end of Ron’s warning.
Spotting two more people arriving, Harry practically choked on his own panic.
“Get back upstairs!
Move!”
Will, oddly, didn’t seem to register the warning at all, walking calmly forward instead, which only ratcheted Harry’s panic higher.
Whatever house Will belonged to, Harry had never actually thought badly of him, and the rumors about Will being unpopular within Slytherin had, if anything, made Harry like him slightly more.
“Harry.
You’re forgetting something.
You’re a wizard.”
Something flickered behind Will’s silver-grey eyes right as he said it, or at least, that was what it looked like to Harry.
Will had already activated his Wizard’s Eye, watching thick, tangled cords of magic wrap around the troll’s entire body, all of it converging around one impossibly small, dense core buried somewhere inside. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
The source, it turned out, was the creature’s skin itself.
That explained the classification, Will realized.
That dense, corded magic gave trolls extraordinary resistance to spellwork, which meant conventional magic would land with far less impact than usual.
Then let’s create a physical reaction instead, he decided instantly, wand already moving.
Harry watched the motion, smooth and unhurried, and thought, for the first time, that he might finally understand what people meant by Slytherin elegance.
“Aguamenti!”
A thick jet of water, roughly the width of an arm, burst from Will’s wand and slammed straight into the troll’s chest.
The spray splashed upward, drenching its tiny head entirely, no bigger than a cocoa bean relative to its massive frame.
Blinded and disoriented, the troll staggered, unsure which direction to swing next, its speed collapsing almost instantly.
Ron, trailing slightly behind the others, caught the worst of the splash and ended up soaked to the bone.
Given it was October 31st, and given how hard he’d already been sweating moments earlier, the sudden cold hit him like a slap.
Seeing the troll falter, Harry and Ron surged forward gratefully, closing the last stretch of distance to the group, breathless with relief.
Blind and thrashing, the troll swung its club wildly, smashing through more armor and statues, the corridor rattling with each impact.
Will seized the opening and cut the water spell short.
“Glacius!”
A blast of pale blue frost shot from his wand, striking the soaked troll dead-on.
Within seconds, thick sheets of ice crept across its entire body.
Will focused the effect specifically on its head, already tiny and now sealed almost entirely in ice.
Even frozen solid, the creature stayed upright, a testament to its sheer physical mass.
Fortunately, its intelligence didn’t match its size.
Struggling to breathe through the ice, it slammed its head against the stone wall in a panic, and the force of the impact nearly crushed its skull straight down into its chest.
The troll toppled backward onto the frozen floor, the corridor around it now glazed in a thin sheet of ice from wall to wall.
“Right…
let’s move, this place isn’t safe.” Harry still felt uncomfortably warm all over, his breath practically scalding in his throat.
The cold air alone offered any real relief.
Beside him, Ron shook violently, teeth chattering hard enough to slur his words, sounding almost possessed.
“Y-yeah, way too c-cold down here, we should g-go, quickly.”
“Might be a bit longer before we can leave,” Neville said quietly, tugging at Will’s sleeve.
Will didn’t need the warning.
He could already hear footsteps pounding down the staircase above them.
He turned to find Professor McGonagall leading the charge, her face bone-white, and unmistakably, furiously angry.
*****
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