Beauty and the Beast

The werewolf

Published: 09. August, 2021

The next two weeks followed some kind of pattern. Hermione would spend the morning running tests on the shield, then would explore the castle when she grew tired. But the days passed.
And she had not even gotten closer to finding a way out.

The worst part was, that now it was too late to collect the Cyan blossoms. The right moment had passed and now she would have to wait a whole year.
If she ever made it out.

Bernie wouldn't start looking for her until after two months of her departure, knowing that she would get so submersed in her research that she would forget to write. But even if people started looking for her, wouldn't they just end up in this place like her? Stuck forever?

That thought was extremely depressing, so Hermione kept herself occupied to avoid thinking about that.

Ever since of the incident with the monster in the black lake, she had steered clear of it. Sometimes she would sit at the shore and read a book, which she had brought, or scribble into her notebook.

One evening, Hermione decided to venture out into the dungeons again, feeling a sort of restlessness overtake her.
She wasn't going to return to that weird room with the jars, not that she would find it if she wanted to, but she just wanted to explore the rest of the dungeons.

Armed with her wand and a warm sweater (the dungeons were freezing) Hermione entered the dark corridors once more.
Some turns she actually started to recognize, even though that feeling of accomplishment quickly passed and she felt lost again.

Hermione sighed frustratedly and turned right.
Left, right, straight, right, left, right, right.

After an eternity, she stopped when three different corridors opened in front of her.
The left one was brightly lit with torches and so was the right. The middle one...was pitch black.

A cold draft whooshed out of it and pulled at her robes.

Hermione bit her lip.

Straight ahead it is.

Her Lumos was bright enough to show Hermione that this corridor had obviously been neglected. Pieces of stone had been knocked out of the walls and they now covered the floor, as did glass shards of smashed portraits.

She carefully tiptoed through the mess, feeling the urge to remain as quiet as possible. The weak blue light fell onto an old door at the end of the corridor, with scratch marks on it.

Hermione swallowed.
This was definitely a place where she was not supposed to be. But she knew she would find some answers if she kept going.

So she did.

To her surprise, she found a seal on the door, preventing any intruders to enter. It was not difficult to break the seal, but it astonished Hermione to discover that it had been made by a human.
So humans had been here after all.

Now she definitely had to find out what was behind that door.

The old door swung open silently when Hermione turned the doorknob, revealing a room in pitch-black darkness. The witch stepped inside and held up her wand.
The shadows slid across the walls as she stepped further into the room, making the old furniture look eery.
There was a table, cracked in half, a bed with its covers ripped to shreds, and more cabinets that had been knocked over, spilling their contents onto the floor.
Large scratch marks covered the walls, ripping through the paint.

Something crunched underneath Hermione's shoe. She looked down and found she had stepped onto a broken picture. The glass was covered in thin lines, making it hard to see what picture the frame held.
She lowered her wand to get a better look. It seemed to be a portrait of a wizard. But besides black hair and a black eye, Hermione couldn't see more.