The Art of An Ending

Chapter Twenty-One: Baneberry and Lethality

The next day Erica told Draco and Pansy all about Slughorn's tampered memory, the task Dumbledore had set Harry with, and how they finally had a real name for the objects; a Horcrux. Draco, much like Erica, thought this was a positive thing.

"It means we can actually do some research on our own now," he said, spearing a sausage with his fork at breakfast and waving it in the air for emphasis. "I mean, we have a name, so nothing is stopping us from looking through the Hogwarts library, and even if that doesn't yield anything then I'm sure the Room of Requirement has books we can use or something."

Pansy, on the other hand, was not so optimistic.

"A name means nothing if we don't know what it is, and we know it has to be some powerful Dark magic, which means the likelihood is we're not going to find anything on them whilst here," she sighed. "We've never even heard of them before, and we all come from Dark families, so it has to be a pretty well-protected secret, at any rate."

"I like the Room of Requirement idea," Erica finally said, shaking her head slightly as she pushed away her bowl of porridge, appetite suddenly vanished. "We can check it out, and I can send a letter to Jeremy as well. He's usually better at the research aspect of things then we are anyway, and he promised he'd helped me."

"Fine," Pansy waved her hand in the air, "I just don't feel like we're going to get any answers this way."

"You've been crystal-gazing again?" Erica raised her eyebrow.

Pansy had been using crystal balls more as of late, and she would often be seen sitting in the common room after curfew by the fire gazing intently into its depths, though she never seemed very happy with whatever she found there, and refused to talk about it. When she had done a tarot reading for Erica a few days ago, she'd actually uttered a little scream when Erica picked out Major Arcana for the fifth time, the card signifying death, but had then, too, refused to explain what she had seen.

"Not crystal-gazing," Pansy shook her head. "I've been trying some other methods, but everything is coming up the same. Dark times and death are coming, and there doesn't seem to be anything we can do to stop it."

This immediately put a dampener on the rest of breakfast, and when they made their way to the dungeons for Potions later it was in relative silence, each of them lost in their own thoughts. Erica wondered, for the third time just that day, whether keeping her illness and plans for her death a secret was a good idea.

"We'll just have to get stronger," Draco said resolutely as they set up their cauldrons around the table.

Before Erica could answer, Slughorn was calling for silence from the front of the room.

"Settle down, settle down, please! Quickly, now, lots of work to get through this afternoon! Golpalott's Third Law... who can tell me-? But Miss Granger, of course!"

Hermione recited at top speed: "Golpalott's-Third-Law-states-that-the-antidote-for-a-blended-poison-will-be-equal-to-more-than-the-sum-of-the-antidotes-for-each-of-the-separate-components."

"Precisely!" beamed Slughorn. "Ten points to Gryffindor! Now, if we accept Golpalott's Third Law as true..."

Erica was only really half-paying attention by this point, her thoughts lost on Draco's desire to get stronger, as though that would help them beat death and the overwhelming odds set against them, and what she would write in her letter to Jeremy later. In fact, nobody aside from Hermione seemed to be following what Slughorn said next, either.

"... which means, of course, that assuming we have achieved correct identification of the potion's ingredients by Scarpin's Revelaspell, our primary aim is not the relatively simple one of selecting antidotes to those ingredients in and of themselves, but to find that added component which will, by an almost alchemical process, transform these disparate elements-"