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Hermione stepped through the portal from her silent, perfect workshop in the Room of Requirement and back into the loud, chaotic Gryffindor common room. She had been gone for days, lost in a blissful fugue of alchemy and spell-crafting.
The moment she appeared, Harry and Ron were on her.
"Hermione! Where have you been?" Harry's voice was a frantic rush of panic and relief. He grabbed her arm, his eyes wide with fear. "We couldn't find you anywhere! We thought… we thought you'd been…"
"Petrified," Ron finished, his face pale. "Another student, Justin Finch-Fletchley, and Nearly Headless Nick… they were found this morning. Stiff as boards. We were terrified you were next."
Hermione gently pushed Harry's hand away. "I was handling some… private matters," she said, her tone cool and dismissive.
"Private matters?" Harry's voice rose, cracking with a mixture of fear and frustration. "Hermione, the school is in a panic! People are being attacked! And you were just… gone?"
"I know," she said simply.
"You know? You know and you're still just running around?" he demanded. "We were worried about you!"
Before she could respond to his outburst, a new, more urgent memory seemed to surface. "And that's not all," Harry said, his voice dropping. "They took Hagrid. The Ministry. They dragged him off to Azkaban. And Dumbledore… Lucius Malfoy got the school governors to suspend him. He's gone, Hermione."
"They think Hagrid opened the Chamber of Secrets," Ron added, his voice trembling. "They're blaming him for it all." He then pulled a small, black, leather-bound book from his pocket. "And we found this. Tom Riddle's diary. It… it showed me something, Harry. A memory. It showed Tom Riddle catching Hagrid with the monster fifty years ago."
"But before they took him," Harry said, his eyes wild with a desperate hope, "Hagrid left us a clue. He said… he said to follow the spiders."
Hermione listened to their breathless, terrified report with a familiar, weary patience. She knew all of this. The diary, Hagrid's arrest, Dumbledore's removal… it was all part of the script, the predictable beats of a story she had read a dozen times.
"Then what are you waiting for?" she asked, her tone all business.
"We were waiting for you!" Ron said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
The Forbidden Forest at night was a different entity entirely. By day, it was a place of mystery. By night, it was a place of pure, primal dread. The ancient trees formed a dense, suffocating canopy that blotted out the moon and stars, plunging them into an almost absolute darkness. The air was cold, damp, and thick with the smell of rot and wet earth. Every snap of a twig, every rustle of leaves in the undergrowth, sounded like the footsteps of some unseen, hungry thing.
Hermione walked in front, her wand emitting a cool, white light, her expression one of bored indifference. She was on a field mission. Harry and Ron, however, were a different story. They huddled close behind her, their own wands held aloft with trembling hands, their faces pale with terror. Ron, whose arachnophobia was a deep and profound part of his being, was practically vibrating with fear.
They followed the eerie, unnatural trail of small spiders marching in a straight, determined line into the deepest, darkest part of the woods. The rustling sounds around them grew louder, more numerous. It was a strange, dry, skittering sound.
Suddenly, the ground began to slope downwards, and they found themselves in a vast, misty hollow. And they were no longer alone. From the shadows, from the trees, from burrows in the earth, they emerged. Spiders. Hundreds of them. The size of dinner plates, then the size of small dogs. They skittered and clicked, their multiple, gleaming black eyes fixed on the three small children, their fangs dripping with a hungry venom.
Harry and Ron stood back-to-back, their wands raised, their breath coming in ragged, panicked gasps.
Then, a new sound, a slow, heavy, clicking sound, came from the darkest part of the hollow. A shape, a monstrous, hairy shape the size of a small elephant, descended from a thick, web-shrouded tree. It was a spider of impossible size, its milky, blind eyes staring sightlessly in their direction, its massive, hairy pincers clicking with a sound like snapping bones.
"Aragog," Harry breathed, recognizing the name from Hagrid's past.
"Is that you, Hagrid?" a deep, rumbling, and utterly inhuman voice echoed from the creature.
"We are friends of Hagrid," Harry shouted, his own voice trembling. "He's in trouble. He's been taken to Azkaban. They think he opened the Chamber of Secrets."
"Hagrid never opened the Chamber of Secrets," the giant spider rumbled.
"Then you know who it was?" Harry pressed, a desperate hope in his voice. "Who was the girl that was killed fifty years ago?"
"We do not speak of it," Aragog said, a new, cold menace in his voice. "The monster that lives in the castle is a creature that we spiders fear above all others." He refused to say more. He had answered their questions. And now, his hospitality was at an end.
"Hagrid is my friend," the ancient creature declared. "But you… are not. My children are hungry."
With a final, terrible hiss, the entire colony of giant spiders began to close in.
"This," Hermione said, her voice a low, contemptuous murmur, "is why you do not make pets out of dark creatures. Their instincts will always win out over sentiment."
Harry and Ron began to back away, their wands raised, shouting weak, panicked spells that did little to deter the advancing horde.
"Aragog, no!" Harry yelled, still clinging to his faith in Hagrid's friend.
Hermione just shook her head. She had seen enough. She raised her new, silver-black wand, its icy core seeming to drink the darkness around them.
"Avada Kedavra!"
The incantation was not a shout. It was a quiet, cold, and simple statement of fact. A bolt of pure, sickly green light, a color that seemed to suck the very life from the air, shot from her wand. It struck Aragog square in his massive, hairy head.
The giant spider shuddered once, a terrible, convulsive spasm, and then its legs curled in on themselves, and its immense body crashed to the forest floor with a final, definitive, and very silent thud.
The chittering of the spider army ceased. A new, profound, and deeply shocked silence fell over the hollow.
Harry and Ron just stared, their faces a mask of pure, uncomprehending horror.
"You… you killed him," Harry stammered. "He was Hagrid's friend. How… how are we going to explain this to Hagrid?"
Hermione turned to look at him, and her eyes were as cold and hard as chips of obsidian. "Explain what?" she asked, her voice devoid of all emotion. "That I stopped his 'friend' from eating you alive? I think Hagrid is the one who will have some explaining to do."
Her words were cut short as the spiders' shock turned into a new, unified, and utterly ferocious rage. With a collective, deafening hiss, the entire colony swarmed towards them.
"What do we do now?" Ron shrieked.
"What do you think?" Hermione asked, a cold, almost joyful smile on her face. "Pest control."
She raised her wand.
"Glacius Tria!"
It was not a spell. It was an event. A wave of absolute, world-ending cold erupted from her. The air itself seemed to crystallize. A brilliant, pale-blue light washed over the entire hollow, and the advancing horde of spiders was stopped dead in its tracks. The ground, the trees, the webs—everything was instantly encased in a thick, shimmering layer of magical ice. The spiders were frozen solid, a silent, crystalline army of grotesque, multi-limbed statues, their fangs bared, their legs poised to strike, trapped for all eternity in their final, aggressive moment.
Harry and Ron just stood there, shivering in the sudden, profound cold, their breath pluming in the air, staring at the girl who had just committed an act of mass, magical extermination with the casual, bored air of someone swatting a fly.