Bryan looked deeply, searchingly at Dumbledore. Behind his own lowered eyelids, the wariness stirring in his eyes deepened.
"Let's go. We're going in—"
Bryan said, and Dumbledore nodded once.
Pushing aside the few clustered stinging nettles blocking the half-hanging front door, Bryan stepped first into the cobweb-choked house.
The profound darkness shrouding the interior was so thick that not even the thin moonlight filtering through the trees outside could genuinely pierce it.
The moment Bryan stepped fully inside, his own silhouette was swallowed whole by that waiting dark, vanishing almost instantly from Dumbledore's view behind him.
The air within, thick with the reek of turned earth and years of slowly rotting vegetation, carried a faint, oppressive weight that pressed against the chest with every breath.
Bryan's own expression remained calm throughout. He stopped where the itself should properly have stood, taking careful stock of his immediate surroundings before proceeding further.
Several of the house's original supporting walls had collapsed entirely over the intervening decades; among the scattered ruins, weeds and coarse grasses grew now in tangled, opportunistic clumps, reclaiming the space.
A single roof beam had fallen from above at some point, one end propped now at a precarious slant against the debris-scattered floor, the other still bearing, with visible strain, a portion of the entire remaining house's weight.
The wine rack that had once, generations ago, separated the kitchen from the dining room, along with what had presumably been a long dining table, had both been reduced entirely to a scatter of broken, splintered planks across the floor.
The chandelier that had once hung, presumably rather grandly, from the parlour ceiling had also crashed down at some point, smashing a sizeable pit into the rotted, weakened floorboards beneath it.
Bryan and Dumbledore, who had entered the ruined room close behind him, both fixed their eyes simultaneously on the exact same spot: ahead and to the right, a single half-wall still standing upright against decades of neglect, its entire surface claimed now completely by dense, spreading mould.
The darkness pooling there seemed, somehow, unnaturally denser than the surrounding gloom. The steady glow cast by their two wands visibly dimmed as it touched that particular patch of shadow, as though the darkness itself were actively swallowing the light rather.
"Which Horcrux do you think we're about to find here tonight, Headmaster Dumbledore?"
Bryan turned his head, seemingly by idle chance, and asked the question in a low voice.
A brief silence followed the question. When Dumbledore finally spoke, his own voice carried a slight, uncharacteristic hoarseness.
"Based on everything we currently know, it's most likely Tom's remaining Horcrux—the one we haven't yet destroyed. The ring he took, all those years ago, from his uncle. The one we've each shown the other—"
Bryan nodded slowly at the confirmation.
That had happened, he recalled clearly, after the conclusion of the first task of the Triwizard Tournament.
Harry and the others had stumbled, through a hidden passage tucked away in the school kitchens, into the private office of Lady Helga Hufflepuff. To rescue them, Bryan led there by Freodom's mother had forced his own way in as well.
In that particular memory belonging to Lady Hufflepuff, she and Lady Ravenclaw had once shown each other the coordinates that Slytherin himself had personally discovered during his own lifetime.
Lady Ravenclaw had specifically mentioned, in that same memory, that Salazar Slytherin intended to pass this particular coordinate down through his line of descendants.
Bryan had thought immediately of the locket the moment he'd witnessed that memory. Dumbledore had later provided solid proof that this specific coordinate had indeed, at some point, fallen under Voldemort's control.
It was, by this point, all but certain between them: Voldemort would have turned this particular coordinate handed down to him from his great ancestors into a Horcrux.
"Let me handle this one, Bryan—"
Seeing Bryan step forward, already moving to approach the mould-covered wall, Dumbledore spoke up quickly.
"I taught Tom. I know his particular style, his instincts, better. This old house doesn't look like it can properly take a great deal more disturbance—"
"No problem at all, Headmaster."
Bryan's tone remained light and easy. He fell back half a step behind Dumbledore, his own eyes following closely as the Elder Wand extended forward into the empty, waiting air ahead of them.
It was, watching the motion unfold, rather like observing an elegant surgical dissection performed by a true master of the craft.
Dumbledore held his own wand as though it were some finely balanced, sharp blade, his wrist was moving through the darkness with the gentle precision of someone conducting a choir through some beloved piece.
The very tip of the wand seemed to vanish entirely into the void ahead. As Dumbledore's hand continued its slow movement, threads of shimmering gold began appearing in the dark air before them, crossing and interweaving with each other in complex patterns.
The threads seemed to writhe with a slow, almost living motion entirely their own, independent of Dumbledore's guiding hand.
Amid a faint scorched smell rising from the working magic, the golden threads gradually thickened further, and a hazy, obscuring veil of emptiness began to peel away from whatever lay hidden beneath.
What emerged slowly before Dumbledore and Bryan was a dark brown chest of drawers, standing as tall as an average person.
Protected across the decades by whatever magic had concealed it, the chest had at least survived the intervening years without being reduced to mere splinters like the surrounding furniture, but it remained, even so, terribly old in its evident condition—its lacquered surface was cracked widely and flaking away in patches across its face, like fish scales.
"Ahh—"
Dumbledore let out a long, slow breath at the sight, then stared, entirely absorbed, at the middle drawer of the chest specifically. His own wide wizard's robes stirred faintly around him, though no breeze reached this deep within the ruined house.
"The answer is about to be revealed to us at last—"
Bryan gazed at that same drawer as well, a flicker of anticipation showing plainly through his own otherwise composed expression. To him, personally, this particular coordinate mattered every bit as much as it evidently did to Dumbledore.
"Allow me, Headmaster Dumbledore—"
Bryan raised his own wand, moving to step forward and take the actual opening himself.
"Oh—no, I can manage this myself, Bryan, please, allow me—"
Dumbledore's voice trembled with an unmistakable urgency and rising tension as he tapped his own wand once, decisively, against the empty air directly before the drawer.
Click—
The middle drawer of the chest finally, at last, sprang open on its own. There was no burst of dramatic magical light accompanying the motion—it simply opened as plainly and unremarkably as any ordinary old drawer being pulled loose from long-stuck tracks.
Bryan's own heart gave a sudden, violent lurch in his chest at the sight.
Fate, it seemed, had not chosen to play some cruel joke on them tonight. The drawer held exactly what they had both believed and hoped it would hold.
A large ring rested inside, its band appearing to be crafted from gold, though the workmanship itself struck Bryan immediately as crude and unrefined—utterly unlike the far more delicate, refined locket that had come down through Slytherin's line.
But that particular detail wasn't what mattered most in this moment.
Bryan's eyes fixed instead on the heavy black stone set prominently into the ring's band, cracked straight down its middle, and his own heart continued pounding on and on, refusing to settle.
This was it. This had to be it.
Bryan's own dry lips moved slightly, forming the thought. This was, unmistakably, one of the coordinates Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw had spoken of together in that ancient memory—one that marked the way toward that mysterious stone door, and whatever waited beyond it in the world past that threshold!
Bryan had already confirmed that the stone door he'd seen, on his very first descent into the hidden sanctum beneath Azkaban's own island, was currently housed somewhere within the Department of Mysteries at the Ministry of Magic.
Earlier, when the Death Eaters had first breached Azkaban during that same crisis, Amelia had let slip, without quite meaning to reveal it, that the Unspeakables working within the Department of Mysteries had held, for generations upon generations, a certain binding contract governing the Dementors' behaviour—though the Ministry itself had long since lost any trace of where that extraordinary, ancient contract had originally come from.
But Bryan knew. The contract had been left behind by Lady Rowena Ravenclaw herself, centuries earlier. It was from this very piece of assembled information that he had first deduced the stone door might be hidden somewhere within the Ministry.
And during this past summer, when he had, in practical terms, held control of the Ministry's operations, he had gone on to fully confirm that suspicion himself.
Now, one of the three coordinates that would locate it—no, in fact, two of the three—had appeared before his eyes. Only a single one remained.
A trembling aged hand slowly rose into Bryan's field of vision, cutting sharply across his rapid, cascading train of thought.
For one fleeting, suspended instant, Bryan's mind went entirely blank at the sight then, an instant later, his expression changed abruptly, sharply, from calm anticipation to sudden, sharpened alarm.
"Careful, Dumbledore!"
The hand—unmistakably Dumbledore's own hand did not stop or even slow at Bryan's sharp, urgent cry. If anything, it reached forward with even greater urgency, moving decisively to seize the ring that had lain quietly, undisturbed, in that drawer for half a century of accumulated dust.
Bryan's own gaze went hard and utterly still in that same instant. He wrenched his left arm up with desperate speed, the back of his own hand shoved Dumbledore's reaching palm sharply aside at the very last possible moment while a fierce glow of light was already surging beneath his skin as he made the contact!
Boom!
A blinding flash of raw fire came and went in a single, violent instant, and a violent shockwave surged out through the dark, enclosed air of the ruined parlour.
Both Bryan and Dumbledore staggered backward hard from the force, thrown badly off balance by the unexpected blast.
The shockwave tore through the entire room, and the decrepit old house, already unable to withstand the slightest further disturbance after decades of neglect began, after one brief, eerily still moment of silence, to shake apart.
Crack, crack, crack—BOOM!
The outer walls collapsed in a rapid, cascading sequence. Beam after beam came crashing down from above in quick series, and a surging, choking cloud of dust and debris swallowed both Bryan and Dumbledore whole within seconds.
Whoom—
Beneath that sky-filling cloud of dust, a pure white radiance suddenly flared to sudden life, spreading with remarkable speed to envelop the entire collapsing house in its glow.
Within that spreading radiance, time itself, began to run backward. Brick and stone, grass and splintered timber—all of it, everything that had just been violently shattered by the shockwave's force, went flying back through the air to its precise original position, each piece finding its exact former place.
In the span of a single, disorienting blink, the old Gaunt house stood entirely whole again, fully restored to whatever state it had held moments before the explosion, as though nothing at all had happened.
Standing now in the parlour, Bryan's face had gone cold and hard as he stared down at the black stain spreading rapidly across his own left palm, while his right hand swept his wand through the surrounding air in a continuous stream of gestures, sending winding threads of golden light sinking into the mark.
Dumbledore, after a stunned second, went pale. He closed the distance in two rapid, lunging steps, his own wand already blazing with a pure holy white light—
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