What happened? Surely it couldn't be that some magical plant crisis suddenly erupted while he was in the Forbidden Forest and swallowed Hogwarts whole?
Impossible. With Dumbledore around, there was no way something like that could happen.
Leonard let his imagination run wild as he broke into a run toward Hogwarts.
Whatever it was—magical plant crisis or something else—he had to see for himself first.
He hurried back to the castle, looping around the outer corridor until he reached the Great Hall.
Outside, a few students were chatting and laughing as they passed. Nothing about the scene suggested any kind of emergency.
Leonard stepped inside. Some students had turned the Great Hall into a study hall, quietly bent over their books, while others treated it like a lounge, playing chess or other games.
Everything looked perfectly normal.
Yet Leonard scanned the hall in confusion. On his map, his position overlapped exactly with the cluster of green dots representing magical plants, but he couldn't see anything unusual at all.
Strange.
He frowned slightly, ignoring even Draco Malfoy's glare from the Slytherin table. After confirming that the Great Hall itself held no trace of what he was searching for, Leonard left and made a circuit around the area. He checked rooftops, corners, even the cracks between bricks.
"Nowhere," he muttered, leaning casually against a pillar by the door as though gazing into the distance, when in reality he was studying the flat map intently.
His thoughts wandered to the ancient magical ruins hidden beneath Hogwarts.
"If it's not above or in front of me... then maybe it's underground?" Leonard murmured, glancing around. But where would the entrance be?
The Great Hall didn't seem to hide any secret chambers. If something really was buried beneath it, the entrance certainly wouldn't be inside the hall itself.
His gaze shifted south, toward the docks. That was the path all first-years took when they first arrived, a winding trail climbing directly up to the Great Hall.
Beyond the trail wasn't a sheer cliff, but jagged, sloping rock faces.
The terrain there was rough and rarely traveled. The uneven stones could easily hide something from view. If there was a hidden entrance, that would be the perfect spot.
And sure enough, on the map, a long stretch of green dots extended in precisely that direction.
He had overlooked them earlier because they weren't nearly as densely clustered as the ones near the Great Hall.
It was a reasonable deduction. Of course, if the entrance was magical—like the one to the Chamber of Secrets—then his reasoning wouldn't help at all.
Still, Hogwarts's underground was riddled with secret chambers and hidden passages. Sometimes Leonard wondered if the castle wasn't actually floating. Otherwise, with so many hollow spaces beneath it, how hadn't the weight of the castle already collapsed the ground?
...
"What do you think he's looking for?" Draco Malfoy whispered from behind the Great Hall doors, glancing at his two hulking followers.
"No idea," Goyle replied bluntly. He glanced longingly back into the hall. "I was hoping to grab a snack."
"Me too," Crabbe added.
"All you think about is eating! Are you pigs?" Malfoy spun around, glaring at them with utter disdain.
Another day regretting he'd chosen these two idiots as his lackeys.
"Don't you realize this is an opportunity? We could find out what he's after!" Malfoy hissed.
"But... I don't think it matters what he's after. And... and..." Crabbe hesitated, remembering the last time they had cornered Leonard. "He was really scary when he hit someone."
Goyle and Malfoy hadn't seen it clearly—one had been knocked unconscious, the other too busy clutching his bleeding lip.
But Crabbe had seen it all. Marcus had been sent flying with a single punch, one of his buck teeth knocked clean out.
Crabbe wasn't eager to share that fate.
"Pathetic. Letting a filthy Mudblood scare you like this," Malfoy sneered. "Goyle, you're coming with me."
"I... I don't dare either," Goyle muttered under his breath.
"Useless trash!" Malfoy exploded, lashing out and smacking them both around until his temper cooled. By then, Leonard had already disappeared down the path.
At the crossroads, Malfoy caught sight of Leonard's retreating figure. He clenched his teeth.
"If you won't go, I will."
He ran after Leonard, but halfway there, he suddenly doubled back.
"If I don't come back, tell my father it was that Mudblood who killed me," he said grimly.
Before his stunned followers could even react, Malfoy turned again and sprinted out of the Great Hall.
...
Leonard followed the path down to the dock, gazing up at the cliff face beneath the Great Hall.
From here, there was no sign of caves or any sort of opening.
Carefully stepping across the jagged rocks jutting from the slope, he moved toward the cluster of green dots.
Far behind him, at least a hundred meters away, Draco Malfoy cautiously poked his head out.
He had already managed to scare himself half to death. In his mind, Leonard had become some kind of demon, far too terrifying to approach directly. All he could do was stalk him from a distance.
At that range, Leonard couldn't possibly notice that someone was watching him.
...
With a distant tail trailing after him, Leonard scoured the cliffside.
Before long, he came across a cave hidden deep between two rocky outcroppings.
The way the stone protrusions framed the entrance—whether by magic or natural formation—concealed it almost perfectly. Without knowing to look here, it would have been impossible to find.
The cave stretched far into the rock, the sunlight outside unable to reach even the threshold.
Leonard paused at the mouth of the cavern, weighing the risks and rewards in his mind. Finally, he decided to go in.
A cave like this would almost certainly harbor magical plants. As long as there weren't any species that constantly emitted poison, he shouldn't face much trouble.
And if there really were plants like that, surely they would have been discovered by now.
By his reckoning, there shouldn't be much danger.
So Leonard raised his wand, the tip glowing with a Wand-Lighting Charm, and stepped boldly inside.
"Hopefully, I'll get something worthwhile this time," he muttered as his figure disappeared into the depths.
Not long after Leonard vanished into the dark, Malfoy crept up to the entrance, his face pale with nerves.
The cavern yawned before him like the open jaws of some monster, and his courage faltered. But the image of Leonard striding in without a second thought stung his pride.
Grinding his teeth, Malfoy swallowed his fear and stepped into the darkness after him.
...
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