Love Potion

Moving Statues and Talking Portraits

After leaving Viper's room and going down the stairs, I came to a curving corridor that was lined with doors: on the left, where I had come from, the doors were all pastel-pink, and opposite the doors were blue. The pink doors were all boys bedchamber, and blue, girls. These had to be all the Snellicary sixth year bedchambers! (Snellicary was one of the Greamelts Houses, the one Viper's in. The Snellicary quarters were all a part of the east tower - the second tallest of Greamelts - and the older you were the higher up in it your bedchambers were.) I went down it, which lead me to the small staircase to the round common room: it was the same style as the bedchambers, all dark wood and stone and purple, and empty apart from a very furry blue cat that was curled up by the fireplace. Glancing upwards, though I expected to see it, I saw that small dragons were wrapped around and snuggled up along the ceiling shafts like strange but magnificent decorations. My gasp was mad and immediate and so deep it left a strange taste in my mouth - it was probably thanks to the dense layer of differently coloured smoke that the creatures had created on the ceiling. Most students had a dragon companion, though the common and tameable ones, to send and deliver post. I knew that Viper had a black stormdart called Terror (though he called her Theresa when no one was around).

Thinking of Viper I realised that it was strange he had his own room, since in Greamelts handfuls of students all shared a bedchamber. Perhaps he got special treatment from being top of the class. He always tried to seem cool about it, but he was really a bit of a tryhard, for he was constantly trying to impress his mentally sick mother, who whenever looked at him, called him by his deceased brother's name. Oh, and if anyone ever said a single syllable about his mother, he would punch their mouth into a toothless clam. And he would get away with it, too. Being smart and rich and babyfaced and suffering with his poor mother and suddenly acting sweet as a sugarbutton in front of teachers, none of them believed he would ever do wrong - or, didn't have the heart to punish him.

Trying to banish Viper from my mind, I exited the common room swiftly. I had rather violently swung its big metal open when I heard a sad little "Ouch!". I turned around in fright, and saw that the front of the door had a holed dome in the middle where the most withered and glum-looking creature I had ever seen sat. It had a long, wrinkly, pink neck that drooped out of a black shell, and it was snuffling dolefully from its squashed black beak. I hoped it wasn't me that had squashed it.

"S-sorry!" I whisper.

"It's okay..." the creature croaked gloomily. "I'm used to it..."

Just outside the door in which the sad thing sat, I came to a long, dark, winding staircase. The stone was cold under my bare feet and I padded down it hurriedly. Its numbing stone gloom spiralled for so long that my head felt cramped and clammy by the time I reached the bottom. 

I realised in half a minute that I had absolutely no idea where I was going. Greamelts was a huge and beautiful and magical but absolutely impossible to get around castle - there're traps and and revolving walls and wonky staircases and moving corridors and ceilings so low you have to stoop and passageways that lead you back to the same place and paintings that are actually doors and doors that are actually paintings and generally the castle likes to move itself around. It's actually mounted upon a humungous stoneback dragon, of which it's hard crust back looks exactly like a massive rock pile (as you could guess by the name), never staying in the same place so it would never be found, though moving very slowly. In the books Ermis and his friends refer to it as Rocky.

It was quite hard to squeeze through my brain that I was actually in a magical castle with moving walls that was on top of a humungous dragon. It was like trying to push marbles through a sieve. 

And so, I made my mentally disorientated way through empty, moaning corridors, with my only human contact being the statue of a naked man that suddenly turned to me, and made me scream "like a banshee with bloody hives!", as he put it. I tried to ask him how to find Headmaster Hwelpum, but after my scream he firmly stuck his stone fingers in his ears and started singing a song about a farmer who lived on a rock.