After the marathon of riddles with the MacDougall sisters, Albert didn't head for the Great Hall or the Quidditch pitch. While the rest of the school was busy cheering for Chasers and dodging Bludgers in the freezing rain, Albert made his way to the eighth floor. He walked past the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy three times, his mind focused on a single intent: a place to record and analyze.
Inside the Room of Requirement, he conjured a comfortable mahogany desk and a stack of fresh parchment. He needed to get everything down while the ink in his brain was still wet.
Memory is a fickle thing. Even for someone as sharp as Albert, a hundred distinct riddles were a lot to juggle. If he were a Ravenclaw student who had to answer these daily just to get to bed, they'd be burned into his subconscious through sheer repetition. But for a visitor? Without a record, these pearls of wisdom would fade into a general blur of "something about fire and mirrors" within a week.
"A good memory is nothing compared to a scratchy nib," Albert muttered to himself, echoing an old maxim from his previous life that felt more relevant than ever in a world where secrets were buried under centuries of dust.
He spent the next few hours meticulously cataloging the riddles. He categorized them by logic type: linguistic traps, philosophical paradoxes, and mathematical sequences. By the time he capped his ink bottle and stretched his stiff back, the clock on the wall chimed twelve.
Outside, the match was likely still raging. Quidditch games were unpredictable—unless a Seeker was particularly talented or particularly lucky, the match could stretch into the late afternoon. He knew his friends would probably be cold, wet, and hungry by the time they returned for a late lunch.
Albert tucked his notebook into his robes, rubbing his jaw to ease the tension from hours of concentration. He turned his attention to the corner of the room where he had reconstructed the old wooden board featuring the bronze eagle ring—the one he had discovered during his previous explorations of the Room's hidden corners.
He took a deep breath, centered his thoughts, and tapped the board twice with his knuckles.
The eagle's eyes glowed with a faint, ghostly blue light. Its beak opened, and a voice like rustling parchment filled the room: "You are not in the past, nor are you in the future. I see you clearly now, yet you are not where I look. Where are you?"
Albert didn't even have to pause. "In the mirror."
"Reasonable," the eagle replied.
The air in front of the board shimmered and warped, like heat rising off a summer road. A door materialized out of thin air—not a wooden door, but an opening in space that led into a chamber beyond.
"Success," Albert whispered, a surge of adrenaline washing away his fatigue. He drew his wand, cast a silent Lumos for good measure, and stepped through the threshold.
He found himself standing in a massive, circular marble chamber. It was breathtakingly silent. The walls were polished to a mirror finish, and the room was illuminated by several blue-flamed torches set into silver brackets.
"Eternal Fire?" Albert walked over to one of the torches. He could feel no heat radiating from the blue flames. It was a legendary piece of magic, a flame that consumed no fuel and could not be extinguished by wind or water. He had a sudden, nearly irresistible urge to pry one off the wall and take it back to his dormitory to see if he could reverse-engineer the spell, but he restrained himself. There were bigger prizes here.
"Where is it then? The 'Knowledge Treasury'?" Albert murmured, his voice echoing in the vast emptiness.
The room was bare. There were no bookshelves, no pedestals holding ancient artifacts, and no piles of gold. It was a windowless "Chamber of Secrets" that felt more like a tomb than a library. But as Albert's eyes adjusted to the flickering blue light, he noticed the walls weren't just blank marble. They were covered in intricate, sprawling carvings.
"Ancient Runes," he realized, stepping closer.
He ran his fingers over the grooves. The texture was cold and smooth. He realized instantly that the fragments of text Professor Brood and Professor Smith had shown him in the past were direct copies of these very walls.
Albert began to translate the text in his head. His proficiency in Ancient Runes was high, but this was a dialect from a thousand years ago. In that era, Runes weren't just a subject you took in third year; they were the primary written language of the magical elite in Britain. English, as a language, was still a messy toddler, heavily influenced by Latin and Germanic tribes.
He spent the next half hour meticulously reading and copying the sections of the wall. The text spoke of the founding of Hogwarts—not the sanitized version found in A History of Magic, but a more raw, tactical account.
The four founders hadn't just built a school; they had built a fortress. The Middle Ages were a nightmare for wizards. Between the Viking raids and the superstitious fervor of Muggles who feared anything they couldn't control, the magical community was under constant siege. Hogwarts was built on a hill, protected by water and high cliffs, and enchanted to be Unplottable because the founders genuinely expected a physical army to march on them one day.
The text described the "living" defenses of the castle—the armors and statues that could be animated by a single command to form a tireless, unkillable infantry. It was a sobering reminder that the "whimsical" castle he lived in was actually a war machine designed to repel invaders.
But as interesting as the history was, Albert felt a gnawing sense of disappointment.
"This can't be it," he grunted, looking at his task panel. The quest 'Find Ravenclaw's Knowledge Treasury' remained unchecked. "If the 'knowledge' is just a history lesson I can find in the library, then Rowena Ravenclaw's reputation is a bit overstated."
Had someone been here before him? Had centuries of headmasters slowly picked the room clean of its actual books and treasures? He scanned the floor for marks or scratches that might indicate moved furniture, but the marble was pristine.
"Maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way," Albert mused. He began to walk the perimeter of the room again, looking for anything he might have missed.
Near the back of the chamber, he found it. It wasn't a hidden door, but a section of the wall where the Runes were scattered in a chaotic, nonsensical pattern. It looked like a puzzle.
He touched a rune—a symbol for 'Gebo' (Gift)—and felt it vibrate. It didn't move physically, but his magical perception told him it could be rearranged.
"Exceptional intelligence is humanity's greatest wealth," he read, piecing together the primary motto of the house.
He rearranged the surrounding Runes to complete the phrase, reading it aloud in the harsh, guttural tones of Ancient Runes. He expected a wall to slide open or a chest to rise from the floor, but nothing happened.
There was a subtle shift in the air, a hum of magic that made the hair on his arms stand up, but no physical change.
"What's missing?" he asked the empty room.
He looked back at the Eternal Fire. He took one of the torches from its bracket this time. Up close, he could see tiny, microscopic Runes etched into the silver base of the torch. They were arranged in a circular pattern that mirrored the layout of the room itself.
He realized then that the difference between these Runes and the ones he used for his protective amulets was like the difference between a candle and a sun. These weren't just symbols; they were conduits for a type of elemental magic that modern wizardry had largely forgotten.
"Is the knowledge... the magic itself?" Albert wondered. "Is the treasury not a collection of things, but the understanding of how this room was built?"
It was a frustrating thought. If the "treasure" was simply the ability to create Eternal Fire or build Unplottable fortresses, it was knowledge that required a level of mastery far beyond what a second-year student—even a genius—could grasp in an afternoon.
He felt a massive headache brewing. The layers of magic here were so dense they were almost physical. He realized why Professor Brood and Smith hadn't "found" anything. They were looking for objects. They wanted a diadem or a lost grimoire. They weren't looking at the architecture of the magic itself.
"Fine," Albert sighed, leaning against the cold marble. "I'll play your game, Rowena. If I can't take the books, I'll take the walls."
He pulled out his notebook again and began to sketch the exact alignment of the Eternal Fire brackets in relation to the Runes on the wall. If he couldn't solve the puzzle now, he would take the data with him and crunch the numbers in his dorm.
The possibility that someone had already looted the place was small—the Room of Requirement's version of this chamber was likely a static snapshot of the original. If the quest wasn't complete, the secret was still here, hiding in plain sight. It wasn't a matter of what was in the room; it was a matter of how the room was.
As the blue fire flickered, Albert Anderson sat on the floor of a thousand-year-old secret, writing furiously. He didn't know it yet, but he was looking at the source code of Hogwarts itself.