Broken Bonds

76 - Step #2

Before Ginny knew it, it was already April. She had visited the Chamber a couple of time during the school term, to keep exploring and to slowly work her way through all of Slytherin's books. If someone had of told her a year ago that she would be reading as much as she was, she would have hexed them, but these books were much more interesting than any of the school books. And her exploring of the Chamber was fun.

She had been also able to investigate the four doors that led off the staircase up to the rooftop courtyard, which she had wanted to do since she found them but been unable to find time to do so. What she had found was amazing. It seemed that the other founders had been able to access the Chamber, considering where they came out, and since none of the doors needed Parseltongue to open. The again, the doors were disguised where they appeared very well, and you wouldn't notice them if you didn't know they were there.

The first door was at the same level as the upper dungeons and led into an isolated part of the Slytherin common room. The second door had opened into the Hufflepuff common room, again in an isolated area. The third door was to access a small library in the Ravenclaw tower, which was under the common room, but had stairs leading up to the common room. The final door opened into an area above the dorms in the Gryffindor tower that she hadn't realised existed, since she thought the top dorms were at the top of the tower.

What had surprised her even more was that the common rooms were in various locations around the castle, yet all the doors were in the same vicinity. After discovering that anyone could open the doors if they found them, she had made sure to ward the draw with the blood even more, knowing that people had trusted her to keep the blood safe until she used it. She very much doubted that anyone would find the doors, since they were so well disguised and in places not often visited, but it was better to be safe than sorry. Other than the short periods of time that she had used investigating the doors, she hadn't had much time to explore.

The teachers had been giving them more and more homework in preparation for their exams at the end of the year. The amount of homework she was getting, plus Quidditch practice meant that Ginny had been forced to drop the number of lessons she had with Remus down to only one a week, alternating between Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays so that they still had lessons covering everything they had been doing, which she wasn't very happy about. But she was still managing to finish all her homework, Quidditch practice, her lesson with Remus, and attend the DA every Saturday, as well as finding time to hang out with her friends; her, Hermione, Ron, Neville, and Luna could often be found together, having grown even closer after Christmas. She was just glad that she didn't have Prefect duties on top of all of that; she probably wouldn't have been able to cope.

The Easter holidays had just finished, but it hadn't been at all relaxing, not that it ever was. Their homework had increased dramatically for the holidays, and there was almost no time to relax at all. And now that the whole school was back, Katie had upped the training sessions to four times a week, determined that they were going to win their last match. With everything that she was dealing with, Ginny was just surprised, but relieved, that she didn't lose track of the date and miss the date for the second step of the ritual.

It was set for tonight and she was just glad that she didn't have Quidditch practice that night; practice went well into the night and she would have possibly missed the time that she had to start. She had a wide window to carve the runes, having from the moment that the moon came over the horizon until it reached the middle of the sky, which would be between midnight and one in the morning, but she didn't know how long it would take her. Carving runes were much more difficult than drawing or writing them and she always worked slowly so as to not stuff up, so she wanted to have as much time as possible to carve them.

She spent the morning doing any homework that she had gotten during the first week after the holidays since it was a Saturday. She wanted to get it all done that day so she could sleep in the next day, not miss the DA meeting, which had been pushed to Sunday that week, and not have to rush any of the work. Her hand started cramping part way through her third essay and she had to stop and shake her aching hand out to try and relieve some of the tension; she understood that they had OWLs coming up, but did every teacher have to assign such long essays?