In the Gryffindor common room, the members of Dawn hadn't returned to their dormitories to rest. Instead, they sat gathered around the still-burning fireplace, waiting for Eda to return.
The attack had happened far too suddenly. Although none of them liked Filch, they still felt uneasy about Mrs. Norris's fate—especially since the attack took place so close to the classroom they used for their activities.
By the time Eda returned to the common room, it was already past eleven at night.
The moment she stepped inside, she saw the others gathered by the fire. She walked over and sat down beside Fred and George.
"How did it go?" Fred asked. "Did Dumbledore find anything?"
His question echoed what everyone else was wondering. They all wanted to know the truth about the attack, who the culprit was.
Eda shook her head and said, "Mrs. Norris was petrified. Once the mandrakes mature, she'll be able to run around the castle again, glaring at students like before. But Dumbledore doesn't know how she was petrified in the first place."
"The Chamber of Secrets… has it really been opened?" George thought for a moment before continuing. "I remember Bill once told me Hogwarts does have such a chamber."
"Then does anyone know what exactly this so-called 'Chamber' is?" Angelina asked. "And who the Heir is supposed to be?"
Everyone shook their heads. No one knew what the Chamber was about—not even whether it truly existed.
Records of the Chamber of Secrets had never appeared in any official histories of magic. Only in a few odd tales and scattered legends was there the occasional mention, usually no more than a single vague line like "Hogwarts has a hidden chamber."
That was all—far too little to be of any real use in actually finding it.
The Chamber was more like a schoolyard myth, a ghost story passed from mouth to mouth. People repeated it, but no one had ever actually found it, let alone proven it to the public.
"Let's put the Chamber aside for now. If we want to keep our group going, I think we'll need a new place to meet," Eda said.
Their Dawn meetings had been held in a classroom on the second floor—dangerously close to where Mrs. Norris had been attacked. No one knew whether the culprit had any strange habits, like revisiting the scene of the crime or reliving it for pleasure.
To keep everyone safe, it was best to avoid that classroom for the time being.
"Yeah, leave that to us," Fred said. "We'll find a more hidden spot soon enough—somewhere safe from the Heir's threat and free from Filch's interruptions."
"Until then, let's put our activities on pause," George added. "It'll give everyone a chance to rest. We've all been worn out lately anyway."
The attack wasn't forgotten with the coming of dawn. Over the next few days, every student was talking about Mrs. Norris, searching for any clue about the Chamber of Secrets.
Filch constantly prowled the spot where Mrs. Norris had been attacked, determined to catch whoever dared harm her.
His temper had grown much worse, and more than a few innocent students fell victim to his "discipline."
If there was anything that struck Eda as odd, it was how strongly Ginny reacted to Mrs. Norris's fate. Eda knew Ginny had always been fond of small animals, but she had only been at school for two months and had hardly even seen Filch's cat.
How could she possibly feel such deep attachment to it?
Since August, Ginny had been acting stranger and stranger, and Eda found herself less and less able to understand her.
Recently, more students had been flocking to the library. Books like Hogwarts: A History had all been borrowed out, and the waiting list to get them was already more than two weeks long.
Eda too buried herself in the library—but she went straight to the Restricted Section.
Even there, though, there wasn't much written about the Chamber of Secrets. After several days of combing through the stacks, Eda finally managed to piece together the origins of the Chamber.
Hogwarts had been founded more than a thousand years ago by the four greatest witches and wizards of their age. The four Houses were named after them: Godric Gryffindor, Helga Hufflepuff, Rowena Ravenclaw, and Salazar Slytherin.
Together, they built the castle, far from Muggle eyes, because at that time common folk feared magic, and witches and wizards suffered much persecution.
But over time, divisions began to grow between them. The rift between Slytherin and the others grew wider and wider. Slytherin wanted Hogwarts to be far more selective in admitting students. He believed magical education should be limited to those from pure-blood families. He refused to take in children born to Muggles, believing they could not be trusted.
Eventually, the disagreement came to a head. Slytherin and Gryffindor had a fierce quarrel over the matter, and afterward, Slytherin left the school.
Before leaving the school, Slytherin secretly built a hidden chamber. When he departed, he sealed it so that no one could open it until his true heir came to Hogwarts.
Only that heir would be able to open the Chamber, unleashing the horror within to purge the school—cleansing it of all those unworthy to study magic.
That was all the information Eda managed to find. It wasn't of much use, but it was better than nothing. None of the legends about the Chamber mentioned where its entrance might be, nor did they describe the creature hidden inside.
The investigation into the Chamber seemed to have hit a dead end; Eda couldn't uncover anything more detailed.
For centuries, the school had searched for the Chamber's existence and had found nothing. A group of the greatest witches and wizards had spent hundreds of years searching without success—there was no way Eda could discover it in just a few days.
Since the "Chamber" clue had run dry and couldn't be pursued further, Eda could only shift her focus to the other lead: who the "heir" was.
Slytherin's standards for admission and his philosophy of education gave Eda a starting point. She figured the heir was most likely pure-blood.
So she began consulting books like Most Noble and Ancient: A Wizarding Genealogy, hoping to trace the wizarding bloodlines and identify the heir hiding in the shadows.
Although these genealogical books were nowhere near as detailed as the records maintained by each pure-blood family, there was still an overwhelming list of names waiting for her—so many that her head spun just from looking at them.
Eda just wanted to ask: why are there so many people with the exact same name? Why do they insist on giving descendants the names of their ancestors? Couldn't they find some other way to honor them?
Looking at all those So-and-So the First, So-and-So the Second… even So-and-So the Fourth or Fifth, Eda felt like cursing. Every time she read further, she found herself wondering: wasn't this person already dead? How is he showing up again?
On top of that, Eda discovered the tangled web of family connections among the pure-blood houses. To her surprise, the Weasley family and the Malfoys, and even the Potters and the Malfoys, were actually related.
She knew pure-blood families practiced intermarriage to preserve their so-called purity, but she had never imagined the family ties could be this complicated.
Clearly, she was still too young, too inexperienced.
Everyone knows the dangers of close-relative marriage: it greatly increases the chance of recessive genetic diseases and raises the risk of birth defects.
But even so, pure-blood families ignored these dangers (or perhaps never knew about them?), demonstrating through their actions the very consequences of such marriages.
Yet one had to admit: for this practice to continue for so many generations, the pure-blood families must have had their own ways of sustaining it.
Sure enough, persistence paid off. While her head was still spinning with thoughts of "inbreeding" and "So-and-So the Third," Eda finally stumbled upon some clues. She had found what she believed to be "Slytherin's heir."
Morpheus Gaunt, the last of the Gaunt family to appear at Hogwarts, a man who murdered a Muggle and was sent to Azkaban, the final clearly recorded descendant of Salazar Slytherin.
With Marvolo Gaunt dying in his home and Morfin Gaunt dying in Azkaban, the Gaunt family vanished, and no student bearing the name Gaunt had ever appeared at Hogwarts again.
Slytherin's bloodline was gone—so who, then, was this new heir of Slytherin?
Wait—Eda suddenly recalled a name, a name long forgotten by most—Tom Marvolo Riddle.
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