Harry Potter And The Descent Into Darkness

Chapter 14

The ritual was not that weekend. Nor was it the next Wednesday. On Thursday afternoon, Harry tried to catch 'Moody's' eye several times, but the professor basically ignored him.

The week had felt like it was dragging on, and Harry's patience was wearing thin. He had tried to keep himself preoccupied by spending a half hour each afternoon practicing various magics – mostly dark – down in the chamber, and then spending an hour or two copying more pages of the old elven book. He still spent his late evenings in the common room with Ron and Hermione to get his classwork finished, but even they could tell he was distracted.

By Friday, Harry had twenty pages of the book copied into a bound parchment notebook and gave a copy to Hermione so she could start translating it. She had been extremely eager to start working on the translation of it. She had been devouring her copy of the Old Aldric book all week long, and had spent many of their meals raving to Harry about how fascinating the language was.

Harry had been regularly checking the charmed parchment that was linked to a counterpart in 'Moody's' possession. Nothing had appeared. To say that Harry was getting frustrated, was an understatement.

Harry was sitting in Potions, Friday afternoon, lazily stirring the Wit-Sharpening potion in his cauldron. It was currently a milky white color with inconsistent little lumps floating about, but it was supposed to turn into a translucent yellow by the time it was done. He really wasn't paying it much attention. It was a stupid-weak potion, as far as Harry was concerned. It's effects would only last for about an hour and a half hour, and you couldn't take another dose for twenty-four hours after that. How useless is that?

Harry had found several potions, spells, and rituals that had far more beneficial effects on one's wit and cleverness than the potion they were practicing that day. The thing was that most said potions, spells, and rituals were either dark, illegal, or required illegal ingredients to brew. Sooo... the potion they were brewing that day was the best anyone trying to stay on the proper side of the law, could rely on. Harry was under the impression that there were some post NEWTs level potions that temporarily aided in one's intelligence that were not illegal, but they were so difficult to brew that few could pull it off.

In any case, Harry felt he had very little interest in the potion he was currently brewing, and was only doing it as a part of the class, and not because he would ever want to use it at some point and be grateful of the knowledge.

What was even worse was that the damned potion was in it's incredibly boring stage of the brewing. He had to just sit there and stir, once, counter-clockwise every 3 minutes, and then wait thirty seconds and do five quick clockwise stirs, before waiting 3 minutes to do the counter-clockwise stirs again. Rinse and Repeat. He was very very bored.

He had just hit the three minute wait and leaned back on his stool to stretch his back a bit. He sighed heavily and glanced around at his fellow students around them. From what he could tell, Hermione was the only other Gryffindor who has at the 'stir and be bored' stage. Her potion was the same color and consistency as Harry's was. A quick glance to the other side of the room showed that at least, Malfoy, Zabini, and Greengrass were also at that stage, although he couldn't see into their cauldrons to see what color they were.

Snape swept through the center aisle and paused to glare disdainfully down at Harry. Harry rose a single eyebrow up at the man with a questioning, yet also disinterested look to him.

Snape's eyes narrowed and his lips curled, but just before he was able to open his mouth to spout something that would undoubtedly result in Gryffindor house loosing some points, a knock came at the dungeon door.

Snape's head spun around glared, curiously at the door.

"Enter," he drawled with a sneer.

At this point, just about everyone had turned on their stools to look back at the entrance to the classroom, looking at the door with notable curiosity. When the door opened, and the person responsible for the interruption was revealed, to say that everyone was rather shocked, would be an understatement.