Proliferated Petrification

6- Horcruxed

The wizard stared in awe at an ornate mirror. It looked centuries old, like most of the junk in this room, but this was fancier than most of it and gave off an aura of powerful magic.

"Bode, you found something?" a voice called.

"Oh God! I can see forever!" he said in awe.

"Bode?"

"Croaker, you have to see this! I can see it! I understand everything!"

"Bode, what in Merlin's name are you talking about?" Croaker rushed over to his fellow Unspeakable.

"Come look! Everything we ever wanted is right here in the mirror."

"What?" What the hell kind of mirror was Bode looking at, Croaker wondered. He stepped into view of it slowly, not going far enough to see his own reflection, and examined the frame. "Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi," he muttered. "I show not your face, but your heart's desire. Merlin, it's the Mirror of Erised!" What was this doing here? He'd heard rumours about it, but it was supposed to be in Flamel's private collection…but then, Flamel had died a few months ago. Had he left it to Dumbledore—? Never mind. "Bode, come away from there! It's not real!"

"Croaker, I can see it! All the secrets of magic are right there!"

"I side come away from there!" Croaker grabbed his friend's arm and pulled him out of view of the reflection. Suddenly, Bode raised his fist to strike, but he hesitated when he saw Croaker's face.

"Oh, God, I just got whammied, didn't I?" he said.

"Yeah. You're lucky I was here." Croaker conjured a sheet to cover the Mirror and wrote a label detailing what it was and instructing it to be sent back to the Department of Mysteries. He also made a note on his parchment pad in case Dumbledore wanted it back later. "One of Flamel's toys," he said. "I swear, we're gonna be mopping up after him for the next decade, and that was before we found this place."

"Yikes. This is gonna be a long day, isn't it."

"Definitely." He called out to the rest of his team, "Look alive, people! We've got Flamel-level artifacts in here, and we're just getting started. Don't trust anything you see. It wouldn't surprise me if we managed to find Ravenclaw's Lost Diadem in here, and even I don't know what that thing does." He looked around for a minute. "And does anyone know a good way to get those pixies out of the rafters? It makes me nervous enough when everything in a place like this is non-living."

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"Croaker's talking about at least a week just to sort everything in that room," Amelia told Albus. "And that's just to move everything out of there and into a few categorised storage spaces. He says three weeks if we want to avoid taking dangerous shortcuts, and he wouldn't even give me an estimate for how long it'll take to catalogue everything."

"Tell him there is no hurry as long as the school can reopen in the autumn," Albus replied. "I spoke to the Hogwarts elves. It seems they did know of the room and used it for storage regularly. It can take different forms depending on the needs of the user. I will place them at Mr. Croaker's disposal if he wants them."

"He might. Moody reports the search of the school is proceeding on schedule. That acromantula colony in the Forest worries me, but other than that, they haven't found anything significant. If that really was the only basilisk, we shouldn't have to waste more than a few more days on it."

"That is good to hear."

"Harry told me about Quirrell," she said, and with her keen eye, she saw Dumbledore's face twitch. "Under the circumstances, though, I'll provisionally forget to record the fishy-sounding bits of his story and accept that didn't realise you actually had You-Know-Who in the school. After all, he's officially dead, and Quirrell couldn't possibly have been possessed by a dead man—so if we make sure he stays that dead, I'm willing to call it no harm, no foul."