The puzzle took Elias two minutes.
He worked through the logic cold, no hesitation, tracing the relationships between the bottles until the correct one announced itself.
He drank.
The potion slid down his throat like chilled mercury, and he pocketed the remaining vials without ceremony.
Waste not.
The black fire parted.
He stepped through expecting grandeur — some final vault, some sanctum worthy of the gauntlet he’d just run.
Instead, he found an abandoned classroom.
Desks stacked against the walls like barricades.
Forgotten junk scattered across the floor.
Dust thick enough to write in.
And in the center of it all, a mirror.
It dominated the room.
Gold frame climbing to the ceiling, clawed feet gripping the stone floor, an inscription carved across the top: Erised.
The thing radiated presence, the kind of object that made the air around it feel heavier.
Elias approached.
His reflection materialized in the glass.
But the reflection was wrong.
The Elias in the mirror wasn’t tired.
Wasn’t dust-streaked and hollow-eyed from running a gauntlet at midnight.
Mirror-Elias smiled — easy, knowing — and reached into his robe.
He withdrew a red stone, held it up to the light, then tucked it away again.
Elias’s pocket grew heavy.
He reached inside.
His fingers closed around something smooth and warm.
The Philosopher’s Stone.
He stared at it.
Red as a wound, humming faintly against his palm.
“That’s it?”
All those challenges.
Devil’s Snare.
A locked door.
A troll.
The chessboard.
The potions.
And the reward was a rock he didn’t know how to use.
He’d have preferred books.
Advanced transfiguration, restricted alchemy, anything with knowledge he could actually apply.
Hell, he’d have taken a sack of Galleons over a mystery artifact.
[Greed +1]
The notification flickered at the edge of his vision.
He dismissed it.
Then he looked up.
Mirror-Elias was still smiling.
Elias slapped his thigh.
“Right.”
The mirror.
The mirror was the real prize.
He paused, working through the implications.
But the enchantment had shown him what he truly wanted.
Only he could have retrieved the Stone.
Which meant only he was meant to have access to the mirror.
He filed the ethics under revisit later and got to work.
The levitation charm lifted the Mirror of Erised smoothly enough.
The problem was the door.
The frame was massive, ornate, and the classroom entrance was standard Hogwarts — which meant built for students, not for furniture that reached the ceiling.
He glanced at the windows.
High.
Wide.
Plenty of clearance.
Elias understood.
This was part of the test too.
If you couldn’t figure out how to move the mirror, you got the Stone and nothing else.
The real reward required a little creativity.
He summoned his Guardian Spirit.
The silver creature materialized beside him, solid and steady.
Elias settled onto its back, and the mirror floated after them as they slipped through the window and into the night air.
He wasn’t afraid of heights anymore.
Somewhere along the way, that particular fear had burned off.
The Guardian Spirit moved beneath him like an extension of his own body, and the sense of security it provided was absolute — no broomstick could compare.
[Guardian Charm LV.5 — 237/1500 EXP]
He circled twice, scanning the castle wall, then stopped in front of the seventh-floor tapestry.
I need a luxurious, grand bedroom that only Elias can enter.
The door appeared.
He wasn’t returning to the dormitory tonight.
No pajamas, no shower — trivial concerns at this hour.
He’d figure out the logistics tomorrow.
On the fourth floor, Albus Dumbledore moved through the darkness under a Disillusionment Charm, blue wool nightgown whispering against the stone, pointed cap askew.
He stopped at the abandoned classroom door.
The security seal was intact.
Untriggered.
Which meant whoever had breached the corridor had done so without touching the door at all.
He pushed inside.
Empty.
Dumbledore stood in the doorway, letting the silence settle around him.
Already gone, then.
He took a few steps into the room, moonlight pooling on the dusty floor, and stopped.
The mirror was missing.
He crouched.
The imprint was still there — a perfect rectangular void in the dust, exactly where he’d placed it.
He touched the outline with one long finger.
Where’s my mirror?
Dumbledore rose slowly, a rare flicker of confusion crossing his features.
Quirinus Quirrell couldn’t have retrieved the Stone from the mirror.
The enchantment prevented it — only someone who wanted the Stone but didn’t want to use it could remove it.
And Quirrell, desperate and hollowed-out as he was, wanted nothing else.
Which meant someone else entirely had passed his tests.
He wasn’t worried about the Stone’s safety.
The enchantment held.
He needed more information.
And he needed it without alerting Quirrell, who was almost certainly skulking somewhere nearby, trying to minimize his presence while he hunted for the Stone.
Dumbledore reappeared in the forbidden corridor on the fourth floor.
Fluffy was asleep.
All three heads drooling, the trapdoor wide open beneath the massive paws.
Dumbledore gave the Cerberus a long, disapproving look.
He levitated the sleeping beast aside and dropped through the trapdoor.
The chamber of flying keys was undisturbed.
No broomstick — he hadn’t placed one yet.
He examined the keys.
No damage.
No spell marks.
The correct key had been caught clean.
“Luck?” he murmured.
He moved on.
The chessboard was pristine.
No shattered pieces.
No scorch marks.
He stopped in front of the Black King.
“Has someone been here?”
The stone face nodded.
“Without playing?”
Another nod.
“Did they fly?”
Nod.
“Was it a young wizard?”
Nod.
“An adult?”
The Black King didn’t answer.
The question was beyond its enchantment.
Dumbledore sighed.
“I should have asked Minerva to add intelligence to the pieces. How else are they meant to gather information?”
He continued forward.
The potions chamber.
One bottle empty on the table.
The rest — gone entirely.
Taken.
Dumbledore smiled.
At least one thing was certain.
The intruder wasn’t Quirinus Quirrell.
A man desperate for the Stone wouldn’t have bothered collecting useless poison on his way out.
The other professors wouldn’t have done this either.
Which left only one possibility.
A student.
“Hogwarts has gained another excellent young wizard.” He straightened, brushing dust from his nightgown.
“I do hope they’re from Gryffindor.”
He’d have Severus replace the potions tomorrow.
Dumbledore climbed back through the trapdoor, levitated Fluffy back into position, and made his way toward the Headmaster’s office, the question turning over in his mind.
Could this be the accident Nearly Headless Nick had predicted?