In the Melancholy Moonlight, Part 5: Dark Matter

Chapter 266: Saviors

LUCY:

I tucked my letter to Cedric into my pocket and returned to the tent. Harry was sitting at the table, staring at the tent opening even before I walked in, looking lost in thought. He startled when he saw me, before his face relaxed into a small smile. I erected a silencing spell as I crossed over to him.

"What was on your mind just now?" I asked.

He looked over his shoulder in Hermione's direction to make sure she was asleep and facing away from us before massaging his fingers up and down the back of my neck. "You. And then you just appeared as if I'd summoned you."

"I just wanted to ask if you'd mind switching spots with me. I felt restless doing nothing but keeping watch, I want to read."

"I don't mind keeping watch," Harry replied. "Fetch me if you learn anything interesting."

I sighed as I reached for the book of ancient runes Dumbledore had given me. "I sure hope I have reason to fetch you."

"You and me both." Harry glanced over his shoulder at Hermione again before getting to his feet and pressing a kiss to the top of my head. "Good luck."

With that, Harry ducked through the tent flap, and I lost myself in the book, the world fading to nothingness around me.

I rarely lifted my nose from the book over the course of the next couple of days, stopping only to eat and sleep. My stack of diligently-taken notes grew with each passing day as I combed through the sections about each of the Hogwarts founders. I tried to glean something, anything, useful from its pages, but I found nothing that felt at all related to Horcruxes. I did find plenty of other interesting facts about the founders, though, a couple of which I shared with Harry and Hermione over dinner the night I'd finished the section about Hogwarts.

"Did you know that Helga Hufflepuff invented a branch of dark magic designed to keep someone you love safe?" I asked as I dug a spoon into a can of corned beef hash.

Harry blinked. "Hufflepuff? Dark magic?"

"Right? I was surprised too. It makes sense, though. It was crazy. Apparently Rowena Ravenclaw had two daughters, who both fled home for unknown reasons. After that, she fell ill, and Helga Hufflepuff took it upon herself to nurse Rowena back to health. Rowena didn't want to die without seeing her daughters again, or at least her eldest daughter, so she sent someone to fetch her. Get this, though, the person she chose was a man who was in love with her daughter, but her daughter didn't reciprocate, so when he found her and she rejected him, he killed her and then himself."

Harry and Hermione's jaws both dropped.

"This isn't in Hogwarts: A History," Hermione muttered.

"It should be," I said. "Well, maybe not. I don't think eleven-year-olds should be reading about this. But there's more! The daughter is the ghost of Ravenclaw. The man who killed her is the ghost of Slytherin."

"WHAT?" they burst out in unison.

I nodded. "Crazy, isn't it?"

"Wait, Lucy, does that mean that she might know what the Ravenclaw Horcrux is?" Harry asked, eyes wide. "If we go back to school, we can ask — "

"We can't go back there!" Hermione said in a high-pitched voice.

"But Hermione, if there's even the slightest chance that the ghost knows — "

"Lucy's not done with her story yet, let's hear her out first!"

They turned expectantly back to me, and I sighed.

"There's a lost diadem. Emphasis on lost. No one knows what happened to it. Apparently Rowena claimed to have it until the day she died, but when her possessions were gathered post-mortem, the diadem was nowhere to be found. Most people assume it was taken by one of her daughters, no one knows which. Apparently a couple people suspect Helga Hufflepuff had a role in its disappearance, since she was the only one caring for Rowena Ravenclaw at the end of her life, but that seems silly to me. Hufflepuff House was founded on the idea of hard work and loyalty, and stealing your best friend's diadem that supposedly magically enhances your wisdom seems rather contradictory, don't you think?"