Ludo Bagman raised his silver whistle and slowly swept his gaze across the three Hogwarts champions. His voice rang out with excitement as he reminded them to stand ready.
At his signal, Harry and Cedric immediately tensed. In that same moment, both boys made an identical movement: their smiles vanished, they leaned forward, and their hands tightened around their wands.
Sherlock, by contrast, showed none of their rigidity though he too had made his preparations.
Bagman observed the scene with a satisfied nod. These were the ones he'd staked a heavy wager on, all right. Even their bearing alone put the other two schools to shame.
"Three—two—"
As he began the countdown, the crowd in the stands surged with excitement.
"One!"
At the sharp cry of the whistle, Sherlock, Harry, and Cedric stepped forward as one and crossed into the maze entrance, vanishing from sight.
The champions from Beauxbatons and Durmstrang stood rooted to the spot, watching the three figures disappear. Their eyes were full of envy and reluctant frustration.
The score advantage built up over the first two tasks had now translated into a very real head start.
On the surface, the three had simply entered the maze ten minutes early. But if luck was on their side, those ten minutes could save them far more than ten minutes' worth of ground.
There was no help for it—when you lacked the skill, this was simply the consequence. However much they resented it, all they could do was swallow their impatience and wait for their own moment to come.
The three Beauxbatons champions were in slightly better spirits, at least. They weren't in last place.
Up in the stands, the Holmeses and the Dursleys—both families invited by their respective schools to watch—wore matching expressions of bewilderment.
They had been warned in advance that they wouldn't get to see much of the competition. Even so—wasn't this a bit fast?
Three, two, one—and just like that, Sherlock and Harry had been swallowed by the maze?
"Are we just supposed to sit here the whole time?" Vernon couldn't help asking.
Mr. Holmes let out a long sigh. "It would appear so."
The magical world's approach to spectator sports, one had to say, was bafflingly incomprehensible.
Inside the maze, the tall hedgerows rose like impenetrable walls on either side of the path, casting ink-black shadows across the ground. Their density smothered nearly every trace of starlight; even the pale glow of the moon could not push through.
Whether it was the hedgerows' natural sound-dampening or some deliberate silencing charm, the three couldn't tell but the moment they stepped inside, the roar of the crowd outside vanished completely, as though someone had cut a wire.
All that remained was the sound of their own footsteps, their own breathing, and the occasional distant rustle of hedges shifting in some unseen wind. The silence was the kind that crept under your skin.
"This feels absolutely dreadful," Harry muttered to Sherlock and Cedric, a note of unease in his voice. "I feel like I'm back at the bottom of the lake."
"Same," said Cedric, who had taken the lead. "Lumos."
A soft white glow bloomed from the tip of his wand. He studied the still-dim corridor ahead and glanced uncertainly back at the other two.
"Doesn't seem bright enough, does it?"
Without a word, both Harry and Sherlock raised their wands and cast the same spell.
Three beams of white light wove together, and at last several feet of the path around them were properly lit—enough to make out the winding trail ahead and the rough silhouettes of the hedges on either side. At least they wouldn't stumble blindly into the dark.
"Thank goodness this is a team event," Cedric said, glancing around with undisguised relief. "If we were going solo, just walking through a place like this alone would be enough to make your skin crawl."
Harry nodded. He understood that completely. There was something about this particular combination of darkness and silence that amplified fear, made every nerve feel exposed.
Sherlock said nothing. His gaze moved over the hedgerows and the marks on the ground, expression unreadable, thoughts his own.
By the time Harry and Cedric turned to look, he had already stilled again. Neither had caught what he'd been doing.
As agreed beforehand, Cedric who had volunteered for the role was crossing. He moved with careful deliberateness, and it wasn't long before he came to a three-way fork.
Three paths stretched ahead of them like the tendrils of some dark creature, disappearing into the heart of the maze. Cedric stopped.
He hesitated for a moment, then held his wand flat on his open palm, drew a steady breath, and spoke clearly:
"Point Me."
The charm did exactly what its name promised: it turned a witch or wizard's wand into a compass needle.
The wand began to rotate slowly in his palm. It wobbled, steadied, and finally came to rest pointing toward the corridor on their right—the one most thoroughly blocked by dense hedgerows.
"The center of the maze is northwest," Cedric said, measuring his words carefully. "My instinct says we take the leftmost path first, then cut right as soon as we can. That's the shortest route toward the core."
He glanced over at Sherlock, uncertain. "What do you think?"
Sherlock gave a single nod.
Cedric quietly exhaled. Though the Goblet of Fire had chosen him as Hogwarts' team captain from the start, he had, in his own honest reckoning, contributed almost nothing in the first two tasks. He hadn't deserved the title.
For the first task, it had been Sherlock and Harry who'd uncovered the intelligence—that their target was a dragon.
While Cedric was still working through which spells might be useful against fire, Sherlock had already taken a completely different angle: summoning a broomstick, turning a ground battle into an aerial one, and giving them the decisive advantage of speed.
The results had been obvious.
Not only did that strategy win Hogwarts the best score, it had apparently inspired Durmstrang's Krum—one of the finest Seekers in the world to follow suit.
In the second task, Sherlock had once again been on a different level entirely. He'd cracked the golden egg's riddle in a single week, leaving the other schools far behind.
That time, Cedric had at least found his footing—he'd planned the Bubble-Head Charm strategy for the long underwater segment. But fate had other ideas. The rules had made him a hostage instead.
Technically an external circumstance. Still: on the day itself, he had done precisely nothing.
Now, standing at the entrance to the third task, whatever confidence he might have once had was nearly worn away. Sherlock's quiet nod felt like more than approval; it steadied him.
They moved. Cedric led the way, following his plan: the leftmost path, turning right at every opportunity, always driving northwest.
They couldn't tell if their luck was good or bad but after a careful stretch of walking, they encountered nothing at all. No traps, no creatures. Only two more forks in the path.
Then, from outside the maze, a second whistle blast echoed through.
"Has it really already been ten minutes?" Cedric blinked, surprised. He felt as though they'd barely arrived.
Damn, time was moving far too fast.
Harry instinctively looked up, trying to read the stars through the gap in the hedges overhead. Nothing. The canopy was too thick.
Only Sherlock spoke, and with quiet certainty: "It has. Exactly ten minutes."
The words sent a cold spike of urgency through Cedric's chest. He also felt a private flicker of anxiety—had he led them wrong? Were they falling behind?
He cleared his throat and quickened his pace. "Then we need to move faster. We can't let them catch up."
Harry and Sherlock had no objection. All three broke into a faster stride.
The Beauxbatons champions never caught them. But a third whistle sounded in the distance—which meant Durmstrang had now entered the maze.
And at that same moment, they came face-to-face with their first obstacle.
Hagrid's pride and joy: the Blast-Ended Skrewt.
By now, nearly every Hogwarts student knew the creature's origins—not just the three champions. Over the previous summer, Hagrid had crossbred a Manticore with no fewer than sixty Fire Crabs to produce this new species.
A Manticore, it was worth noting, carried the Ministry of Magic's highest danger classification: XXXXX.
That made the breeding experiment a serious violation of the 1965 Ministry Decree on Prohibited Magical Creature Experimentation, the kind of violation that could reasonably see someone dismissed.
As for how everyone knew: Hagrid had told them himself. Despite knowing the subject was deeply sensitive, he'd managed to let the truth slip during a class discussion before he could stop himself.
Fortunately for him, Dumbledore was watching his back otherwise it might have come to considerably more than a slip.
That Hagrid would put Blast-Ended Skrewts in the maze was something Sherlock and Harry had anticipated. They knew their large friend far too well.
Even so, the creature blocking their path was worse than they'd imagined.
It had grown. Since they'd last seen it, the thing had reached a full ten feet in length, larger than a full-grown tiger. Its back was armored in thick, interlocking plates that gleamed like cast metal under the light of their three wands. A long, venom-laced stinger curled over its back, its tip glowing faintly blue.
The head was monstrous with all tusks and claws. Its low, grinding shriek was enough to make the hedgerows tremble around it.
Calling it a roadblock felt like an understatement.
"Stupefy!"
Harry reacted on instinct, firing a jet of red light the moment he saw it.
The spell struck the Skrewt's armor plating and bounced straight back, as though it had hit a wall of steel.
"Look out—!"
Harry had barely registered what was happening when Sherlock's boot connected squarely with the small of his back, shoving him sideways just in time. The reflected curse screamed past his head, close enough that he smelled the acrid tang of singed hair.
He reached up. Several strands, indeed, had been burnt clean off.
"It's just like the dragons!" Cedric cried, eyes wide. "The armor deflects spells! We have to distract it first!"
He raised his wand immediately. "Serpensortia!"
A cloud of black smoke exploded from the tip, and a black snake dropped to the ground between them and the Skrewt rearing up, tongue flickering, every inch of it a deliberate provocation.
The Skrewt, never known for a placid temperament, was not inclined to be mocked by a snake. It let out a strangled screech, spewed a jet of scorching flame from its rear end, and lunged.
"Now!" Cedric seized the opening and aimed for the soft, unprotected underbelly.
"Impedimenta!"
But the Skrewt moved too fast. His aim was slightly off; the spell glanced off the hard shell and ricocheted away. Cedric had anticipated as much—he'd calculated the angle deliberately so the deflection flew clear of all three of them.
Harry, still not fully on his feet after being shoved aside, also recovered and thrust his wand toward the exposed underbelly.
"Impedimenta!"
This time, luck cooperated.
The Skrewt was entirely focused on crushing the conjured snake underfoot, its belly fully exposed. Harry's curse hit its mark dead-on. The creature's massive body seized up mid-charge and went rigid, freezing in place only a few feet away—caught, for the moment, in the grip of the jinx.
"Move—now—that jinx won't hold something that size for long!" Cedric grabbed Harry's arm and pulled, calling back over his shoulder to Sherlock.
"Then let's extend its duration."
Sherlock drew his wand without hurry and, with the same unruffled calm he'd maintained from the start, aimed a Freezing Charm at the Skrewt's exposed underbelly.
"Glacius."
The second spell struck home. The creature locked solid in front of them.
"Oh thank—" Harry and Cedric both exhaled at the same moment, sweat beading on their foreheads, chests heaving.
That exchange had cost them both—in energy and nerves.
"Sherlock, you are impossibly calm," Cedric said, shaking his head in disbelief.
From the moment the Skrewt appeared, both he and Harry had been shouting, scrambling, just barely reacting in time. And when Harry had landed the Impedimenta and frozen the beast, Cedric's own first instinct had been to run, not press the advantage.
'Shameful, really.'
Sherlock, meanwhile, had said precisely one sentence. And that single sentence had been the decisive blow.
He glanced at Harry who was still gasping, a faint smell of burnt hair clinging to him and then at Cedric's admiring look. The corner of his mouth moved, almost imperceptibly.
"Commendable courage," he said, his tone as even as ever. "And reasonably quick action. But short on thinking."
He looked at Harry directly. "The moment you saw it, casting was not the right choice. Observe the weakness first—don't attack blindly. If I recall correctly, Hagrid covered this creature in considerable detail during class."
Harry's face went red.
He couldn't argue with a word of it. Another inch, and he would have been hit by his own curse.
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