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The Serpent's Gaze, Book One: Hatching Snakes	By : DictionaryWrites Category: Harry Potter > General > General Views: 2459 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: The world of Harry Potter and the characters therein belong to JK Rowling; I'm playing in the sandbox, as it were, whilst claiming no ownership and making no money.

Chapter List
- 18
- 19
- 20
"Harry?" Hermione asks.
"It's fine!" he calls back. "I landed on something soft. Go, go tell McGonagall he's after the Stone, and I'll go on." There's a whoosh of air and a soft thump as Hermione lands next to him. "What the Hell, Hermione?"
"Oh, you idiot, I'm not letting you go alone," Hermione hisses. "Malfoy, you need to go to Professor McGonagall! Tell her that Snape is going after the Stone, and that we're going after him!"
"What stone?"
"Just go and tell her!" he yells. There's a third whoosh and another thump. For a few moments, in the darkness, there is silence. "Hi, Draco," Harry says sarcastically.
"Hi," Draco says, having the decency to at least sound embarrassed. Harry pulls his box of matches out of his robes and flicks the red head over the side of the box, holding the tiny flame aloft to look around. They're on a bed of thick, green vines, and Harry's so surprised at the shift of one of them under his leg that he throws the match away. It alights on a tiny leaf, burning through it, and then the flame goes out, leaving them in darkness again.
"It's Devil's Snare," Harry hisses.
"Yeah, I can see that!" Hermione whispers back, sounding like she wants to hit him.
"Incendio," Draco hisses, and the flames flicker greedily over the thick vine, forcing it back, but the plant is too thick to burn properly, and he swears as the flame goes out. "So, we're all going to die by Devil's Snare because Professor Snape is searching for some mystery rock?"
"It's not a mystery rock- Look, we'll explain in a minute. Lumos," Hermione's wand bursts out with light, and the Devil's Snare retracts some. "Lumos maxima."
---
It's with messy hair and a slightly dirty face that Harry stumbles into the third room, wiping his cheek with his sleeve. He'd hit the floor hard when they'd fallen from the Devil's Snare, and the ground had been grimy with soil and mould, but it's mostly off his face now. Explaining their being here to Draco had been a rushed affair, but now Draco has come this far with them, he's completely unwilling to leave.
"What's this?" Draco demands as they enter the room, and the three of them stare across the chessboard. Each of the chess pieces is the size of a grown man, and Harry steps across the room, towards the door, but when he reaches the other side the black pawns block his way. "What are we supposed to do?"
"We have to play," Harry says. "To get across."
"Can you play chess?" Hermione asks. Her eyes are flickering wildly from piece to piece, but what can Harry say?
"Well," Harry says awkwardly. "I know the rules, but- I'm not any good. Draco?" The other Slytherin shakes his head.
"Father and I played when I was younger, but I've never been as good as he is, or good at all. Granger?"
"I'm not even that certain of all the pieces' moves," Hermione admits. "So I don't think playing across is an option." Harry is about to open his mouth to ask what other option there is, and Hermione holds up her wand to the pawn closest to them and says, "Bombarda." Harry and Draco duck their heads as the pawn's head explodes in a dusty burst of black stone, and then Hermione does it again, and again, aiming at different heads.
"What's the spell?" Harry demands. "Bombarda?"
"Straight wand movement," Hermione agrees. "It's a really simple spell, but it's draining. It takes power."
"Okay," Harry says softly, nodding his head. "Bombarda!" The pieces don't move except to shatter outwards in dramatic showers of marble and rock, and they only destroy six figures before they step through the pieces and towards the door.
---
By the time Draco and Hermione figure out the riddle, the both of them look drained. Draco is even paler than usual, and Hermione's eyes keep defocusing slightly, as if she's about to faint. Harry looks between the both of them carefully as Hermione points out the tiny bottle that will get him through the flames.
"You two need to go back," Harry says. "You need to get help. I can just distract him, stop him from getting away."
"Is this worth dying over, Potter?" Draco asks, and the question hits Harry like a punch to the chest.
"What?"
"The Philosopher's Stone, the way she described it," he gestures to Hermione, "It's worth killing someone over. Professor Snape, if he wants it, it would be worth killing you over." Harry stares at the bottle as he takes it from the line-up.
"Go back, guys."
"Harry-"
"Go get McGonagall," Harry says firmly, and he swallows the potion, pushing himself forwards and through the flames.
---
Harry ducks down as soon as he begins to move into the room, making himself less visible. The room is high-ceilinged and round, and in the centre, on a raised dais, he can see a figure barely illuminated by the bare light coming fom the torches to the edges of the room. The figure is muttering, Harry can hear, and he creeps closer.
Before the Mirror of Erised, hands clasped in front of him as he mutters to himself, is Professor Quirrell, and suddenly Snape's stupid, evasive answers from a few weeks ago make sense. God, Harry hates the man right now. Harry looks around, searching for him, and he sees a crumpled figure to the edge of the room, limp and still. Snape lies on his back, and Harry stumbles towards him, trying to see if he's breathing.
There's a wound on the top of his head, and blood seeps thickly into the professor's lank, greasy hair, making it look even wetter and darker in the dim light, but before Harry can reach out and put his hand to the man's neck, see if he's breathing, he hears Quirrell move suddenly behind him.
"Potter!" Quirrell says, and Harry turns to look at him. "Stand up," Quirrell orders, every trace of his stutter, nervous shakes and anxiety completely absent.
"Don't suppose you'd believe I got lost?" Harry offers, and Quirrell raises his wand, but then another voice speaks. It's not Quirrell's - it's too deep and too raspy to be his, disembodied and imbued with a magic that makes it echo unnaturally throughout the room.
"Let him try. Put him before the mirror."
"Who's that?" Harry demands, but he steps forwards all the same, walking towards the Mirror of Erised. His heart pangs to look up at the familiar glass and its gold gilding. Quirrell doesn't answer him. Harry hadn't expected him to. He shifts on the dais, leaning forwards to look into the mirror, but his parents, his family, are nowhere to be seen. In the picture is just Harry on his own, dirt on his face, tie askew, robes dirty and scuffed and ripped in places from where keys had bitten into them as he and Draco had tried to grab the right one.
Harry stares into the glass, frowning at himself - his desires can't have changed, can't be different, can they? The mirror Harry shifts, winks at him, and holds a glittering red stone aloft. Then, he puts it in his pocket, and Harry feels the sudden new weight in his own.
God, Harry can't help but think. Magic is stupid sometimes.
"What do you see, boy?" Quirrell asks.
"My uncle calls me boy," Harry says conversationally, "I never did like it much."
"What do you see?" Harry stares into the mirror, looking at Snape in the reflection behind him, unmoving. Like this, dusty and with his robes around him, it reminds Harry of a dead bat. The comparison doesn't make him feel any better about the sitatuon.
"Well, it's a big mirror. It's quite nice, I guess. It wouldn't really go with the décor in my bedroom, but I suppose it would suit a Gryffindor." Quirrell lets out a loud noise of frustration, stamping forward, but then comes that disembodied voice again.
"He's playing with you," it says. "Don't let him." Quirrell comes forwards, holding his wand up and squeezing its handle tightly.
"Potter," he whispers, "I know spells that will flay the skin from your bones. Look into the mirror and tell me what you see." Harry turns, staring at the glass, and he lets his face slacken.
"I see-" he breathes in, slowly. "I see my parents. They're standing either side of me, my mum, and my dad. My dad, he looks like me, or, um, I look like him, I guess. He's got the same glasses, the same messy hair. And I- in the Mirror I'm, um, I'm raising my wand-" Harry glances back to Quirrell, uncertainly, but the defence professor just hurriedly nods his head and reaches into robes, pulling out his wand. "I'm- I'm raising it slowly, and I don't know the spell - I can see it on my lips, though... Bombarda!" Harry whirls, but the red pulse of light misses Quirrell by inches and flies at speed across the room, hitting the wall with a harsh boom of sound and sending stone and white dust showering from the brick.
Harry gasps, surprised by the way sensation rips down his arm. He hadn't yelled the spell back in the other room, hadn't thrown his wand forwards with such force, and he feels something like electricity wrench through his body, forcing him to crumble to the ground.
"Idiot boy," Quirrell hisses, snatching Harry's wand from him as he breathes heavily on all fours, coughing. His right arm is tingling, as if it's covered in pins and needles, and Harry's vision blurs for a second or two. In An Introduction To The Wizarding World, there'd been a passage on magic used by children. Wizards didn't have different levels of power, but there were different limits to which wizards could hold themselves to in terms of how much magic they allowed to travel through them, and the reason spellwork is taught from age eleven onwards is because too much magic in a young body can damage it, leave it stunted. Growing, using magic, lets you withstand more power at a time, use more magic and different sorts of magic.
Judging by the current pain rebounding from the tips of his fingers to his chest, Harry had just found his limit and jumped merrily over it with a spell he'd learned twenty minutes ago. And not only that, he'd missed his target.
"Silly Potter," says the disembodied voice as Harry crawls weakly forwards, trying to ignore the sheer weight of his own body. He wants to just crumple to the floor, close his eyes and let himself sleep, but he can't let his sudden exhaustion overtake him. "You're too young to wield such power, too small." Harry thinks of how pale Draco had been, and how uncertain Hermione had looked on her feet a few minutes ago.
But they'll have gotten back just fine. He has to think that. McGonagall is probably on her way, and Draco and Hermione are probably already in the hospital wing, and Snape isn't going to die tonight, because McGonagall's going to get here in time.
Harry crawls slowly towards him, feeling his body get heavier and heavier, feeling the tingling turn to pain as he shifts forwards. He feels the weight of the stone in his pocket as he reaches Snape, touching the gaunt face of the man with one of his dirty, dusty hands. Snape's skin is cold, but it's moving a little, and Harry glances back to Quirrell. The other man is focused on the mirror, his wand out as he murmurs spells, and Harry pulls the Stone from his pocket.
Scraping it against a piece of rubble that had been thrown forwards by his botched spell, Harry catches the tiny, ruby-red shards of the Stone that shake off of it. Reaching forwards, he presses his fingers into the worst of the blood at the top of Snape's head. Snape's hair isn't quite as greasy as it looks, but the wet, gooey thickness of the congealing blood under Harry's fingers makes him want to vomit as he presses the red dust into where he hopes the wound on Snape's head is.
Harry doesn't know if it'll work. He just has to hope it does - short of shoving the entire Stone into Snape's mouth like a bezoar, he doesn't know what else to do. He doesn't know if he's imagining it when the blood stops feeling as hot against his fingers, and he doesn't know if his exhausted, aching eyes are playing tricks on him when Snape's chest seems to rise and fall a little faster.
"What is he doing?" hisses the voice. "He's got the Stone, you fool!" Harry's head whips around as Quirrell lunges towards him, and Harry waits as Quirrell gets closer to him, lets him get closer, and closer, and just as Quirrell is an inch from touching him Harry throws the Stone as hard as he can across the room. At the same time, just as the professor turns his head to watch the Stone's path, Harry brings the rock he'd used to scrape off a little of the Stone hard against the side of his head.
It barely makes a difference. There's no strength in Harry's arms, no resolve in his movement - if anything, he comes uncomfortably close to Quirrell's eye with the movement. Quirrell grabs him by the wrist, and Harry cries out loudly, dropping his makeshift weapon.
But Quirrell cries louder. Harry grabs desperately at him as he tries to pull away, needing to stop him from getting to the Stone, and he drags hard at the purple fabric of the man's turban, leaving it to fall in a long ribbon around Quirrell's head: as Harry grabs him, grasps at his head and neck and arms, Quirrell's flesh seems to blister and burn under Harry's hands, and Quirrell is screaming with pain as he falls. Harry stands over him, staring at his own hands, messy with grime and Snape's blood and brickdust, and then he looks at Quirrell.
Quirrell is writhing in pain on the floor, face pressed into the ground, but another face stares out at Harry from the back of Quirrell's head.
"Voldemort," Harry says, and he throws himself forwards as the disembodied voice screams for Quirrell to get him, kill him - Harry presses his palm hard to the cheek of the monster buried in the back of Quirrell's skull, and Quirrell is screaming, burning, crumbling under Harry's fingers.
Harry's vision begins to blur at the edges as he drops aside, and he feels like his hands should be hot, burned, but they're not, they're just fine.
"Potter," he hears someone say.
"Oh, good," Harry says, not knowing whether his mouth is moving or whether the words are only being said inside his own mind. "You're alive." He's aware of movement next to him, aware that Snape is talking, but he can't hear it, can't see anything. All he can see, all he can hear, all he can feel, is a thick, fuzzy agony that draws slowly over him and drops him, bit by bit, into unconsciousness.
- 18
- 19
- 20
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The Serpent's Gaze, Book One: Hatching Snakes