Snape's hand tightened slightly on the doorframe. Advising a student to cherish friendships within Slytherin was not something he did often.

Lucas understood the message with pinpoint accuracy. He answered Snape with complete sincerity: "Yes, I've noticed. Marcus has his flaws, but he's reliable enough. I'll handle the roommate situation."

That kind of blunt translation earned him no praise from Snape.

The professor seemed to find the response a little too on-the-nose. He left quickly.

Marcus, who had been hovering in the corridor, watched Snape's retreating back with something close to reverence.

Once he was sure the man was gone, Marcus came inside with barely contained eagerness. "Did Professor Snape find my pocket watch?"

He noticed the documents scattered across the floor and asked with a flicker of suspicion: "Were you two actually using magic to find my pocket watch just now?"

It felt more like they'd had an argument.

But the quietly satisfied look on Lucas's face didn't fit that theory at all.

Marcus didn't understand. Marcus didn't want to understand.

"My pocket watch..." He delivered the line with the dedication of a broken record.

Lucas didn't bother engaging. He bent down and gathered the scattered papers, stacking them neatly. The contract was done, and the Ministry of Magic paperwork could finally be properly filed.

His Felix Felicis had been progressing slowly lately. The purification steps weren't going smoothly.

That was how research worked, a student could be sharp and clever most of the time and still hit a wall. If everything came naturally, there would be no point taking on a master at all.

But to avoid Snape getting so frustrated mid-lesson that he threw Lucas out of the workroom like any ordinary student, it was best to have every formality he could manage properly squared away first.

That settled, Lucas finally turned his attention to Marcus's anxiety. "Your pocket watch," he said, with limited patience. "Tell me — what were you thinking when you put it in the drawer?"

"What does that have to do with anything?... I was thinking I shouldn't leave it sitting out where I might lose track of it." Marcus answered, thoroughly baffled.

"So when you opened the drawer, you were thinking about putting it somewhere safe." Lucas refined the phrasing.

If a spell were reading Marcus's intent, the truest interpretation of that thought would be: storage.

A place that could store things.

He had suspected this for a while now. The dormitory was a variant of the Room of Requirement.

Under normal circumstances, the dormitory environment was configured by the headmaster. Dumbledore would have it set to unalterable, to stop students from wishing up swimming pools, beaches, lavish palaces...

For the duration of student residence, this place was simply "a dormitory capable of housing all Slytherin students, boys and girls."

Marcus's desire to "store" something should never have received any response at all.

In all likelihood... the Room of Requirement already had something inside it.

"I'm going out for a bit. If I'm not back in 3 hours, go find Professor Snape." Lucas left a note on a piece of parchment. "Bring this with you when you go."

Marcus didn't quite follow. "You're searching inside the castle? What kind of danger could there even be inside the castle?"

"What if I get lost?" Lucas left behind a remark that thoroughly puzzled Marcus.

He found an inconspicuous picture frame in the eighth-floor corridor.

The entrance to the Room of Requirement had been rearranged. The troll tapestry had been folded away, its imagery transferred into a small frame.

Lucas studied it for a moment, then rotated the picture ninety degrees and thought: a place to store things.

A moment later, an unassuming door appeared beside the entrance to the Slytherin dormitory.

He pushed it open and quickly turned to shut it behind him.

The Room of Requirement was as obliging as ever.

Lucas had come here before to scavenge furniture and run experiments. What lay before him now was something else entirely, mountains of furniture and all manner of strangely shaped objects piled in every direction.

He looked up. The Extension Charm on this room had been pushed to its absolute limit.

The ceiling soared far higher than the Great Hall, three storeys at least by his estimate, and the stacked wooden furniture and discarded objects rose like hills waiting to be climbed.

The air wasn't pleasant. Peculiar bone lamps, red lanterns, candles, and a thin wash of natural light from somewhere far above all provided illumination, and together they threw the floating dust into sharp relief.

Walking through the space felt like wading through it.

This was a fixed room.

Lucas considered that for a moment, then stepped back out with a quiet measure of reverence.

He returned to the picture frame and thought of a room that held pocket watches.

When he opened the door again, hundreds of pocket watches filled the room.

Some still ran. Others had long since stopped. More still had dials that were simply strange.

He noticed one engraved with causes of death: "hanged upside down," "drowning," "plague"...

Another displayed a countdown spanning several centuries. No one could say what would happen when those backward-ticking hands finally reached the end.

Tucked among the watches, Lucas also found a half-finished Time-Turner.

He stepped back and kept his distance. Half-finished work cobbled together by amateurs was always the most troublesome kind.

He examined every single watch in the room with care. Found nothing.

The clever shortcut wasn't working.

Lucas retreated again.

He returned to the dormitory. Marcus had been waiting anxiously and jumped to his feet the moment Lucas walked in. "Did you find it?"

"I remember you saying the pocket watch would only turn for someone of your bloodline — is that right?" Lucas repeated something Marcus had mentioned once before.

The principle was simple enough. Blood had been worked into the watch during its creation, binding it to open only by bloodline.

Lucas had no interest in combing through a room crammed with stored objects. He needed a shortcut.

"I need to draw a vial of your blood." His tone left no room for debate.

Marcus didn't answer immediately. Blood was a serious matter in the wizarding world. A full vial, in the hands of a Dark wizard, was more than enough to accomplish a great many things.

"I... could I come with you to look for it?" Marcus said, voice carefully nervous. "A whole vial is too much..."

"Then give me a drop." Lucas retrieved a sewing kit from the cabinet.

A drop sounded considerably more acceptable, and the dangerous applications of a single drop were considerably fewer. Marcus agreed at once.

Lucas finished collecting the blood. Marcus called after him and asked with meticulous precision: "That note you left — does the three-hour countdown start over now?"

Lucas paused.

He had left the note as a precaution against the Room of Requirement's spatial instability. That was exactly the state the room had been in since the war.

Most of the time, opening the eighth-floor door revealed nothing but charcoal and ash left behind by fire. But occasionally the space would slip, and behind the door would appear a room that had once been needed by some other young witch or wizard.

It was said that some D.A. students had returned to school after the war, and while catching up on coursework they had revisited old haunts, only to find the empty room where they had once secretly trained in Defence Against the Dark Arts, all to stand against Dolores Jane Umbridge.

It proved that learning Defence Against the Dark Arts had been at least somewhat useful after all.

At the time, the student had been sensible enough not to step inside. They had gone straight to a professor instead.

➤ Next: Milk and Honey

Chapter 209 - Milk and Honey

Professor McGonagall threw a stone into the room as a test.

The caution was entirely warranted. The stone — transfigured from a rat — went in and never came back out.

The moment it crossed the threshold, the room that had once existed there simply vanished.

That was spatial chaos.

That was also why maintaining the castle was not merely a matter of stacking bricks. It required a deeply learned master of alchemy.

For now, Lucas had provisionally ruled out the problem of spatial chaos. The Room of Requirement was functioning normally, which meant the note no longer needed to be kept.

With one possibility eliminated, the rest carried little danger.

Lucas snapped his fingers. The parchment caught and burned to ash in seconds. "It's fine. The greatest danger's already been ruled out."

Marcus couldn't understand what dangerous place the missing pocket watch had ended up in.

Professor Snape had said he would help search for it, he'd come in, spent a short while with Lucas, and then left.

Now Lucas was once again Marcus's only hope.

Marcus said a great deal of pleading words, then watched Lucas leave the way a golden tabby watches its human head out to go hunting.

Lucas returned to the room where objects were piled like mountains.

He took out a drop of Marcus's blood and placed it on a compass. The instant the blood touched the needle, the needle flushed red. After a spell of chaotic spinning, it settled, pointing south.

Lucas followed it. Mice and cockroaches scattered from his feet, but the stacked objects were reasonably stable. Tables and chairs formed a passageway he had to stoop to pass through, tattered bedsheets hanging as door curtains.

He threaded through the winding paths carved out of construction debris.

The needle shifted. Now it pointed west.

Lucas stopped.

He listened. Dark artifacts murmured in fragmented whispers. A rocking horse creaked somewhere nearby. Inside an empty glass tank, fish bones knocked together in a sound like wind chimes.

This room was starting to give him an uneasy feeling.

He rummaged through his pack and pulled out a flying carpet. It levitated to waist height, one corner curling upward to let him climb on. Lucas settled onto it with practiced ease. The carpet rose steadily, clearing the surrounding furniture. The path below became visible, but the sheer number of objects at varying heights blocked his line of sight.

He checked the compass. West.

Someone was carrying Marcus's pocket watch on their person.

Lucas frowned. He recited the complex Revealing Charm from earlier, trying to determine whether what was playing hide-and-seek with him in here was a person or a magical creature.

The incantation hit something and died.

Lucas saw only a stream of disordered smoke.

He flew toward the needle again. This time the carpet picked up speed, he wasn't giving the moving target any chance to slip away.

Through several rapid changes in bearing, the carpet rose and dipped around obstacles as he willed it. Lucas drew out a telescope enchanted with a Magnification Charm. The specially crafted lenses would help him lock on faster.

Through the eyepiece he spotted a figure ducking into a labyrinth of wardrobes.

The wardrobe doors had been converted into rolling shutters. From above, he could tell it was an older student. They had clearly already spotted the carpet overhead and were skillfully using the wardrobes as cover, shaking off his pursuit with practiced ease.

Lucas urged the carpet faster. At this distance he could already put the telescope away. He sent a testing spell in the student's direction.

The spell hit a wardrobe.

A gap blasted open in its side.

The surroundings shifted without warning. An endless flood of white mist poured through the space around him. Lucas found himself standing on a pure white platform, something translucent, smoke-like, fluid as water, rising past the level of his carpet, eating into the reality of the space around him.

"Reducto. Riddikulus."

The carpet didn't slow. Lucas flung both spells out in quick succession, one in each direction.

A sharp crack, and the Boggart that had been hiding inside that wardrobe for who knew how many years exploded apart.

From the other direction came the sound of fabric tearing.

Lucas felt it: the spell he'd thrown had been deflected at the last moment. Blocked just enough to miss.

When he looked again, the needle was pointing toward a particular wardrobe.

Hanging from a rusted metal handle was a gleaming golden pocket watch.

------

"Your pocket watch." Lucas tidied everything up and made it back to the dormitory. He'd missed breakfast, but he'd make lunch.

When Marcus saw it, a brilliant smile broke across his face.

Lucas went to wash his hands. Even through the bathroom wall he could hear Marcus cycling through compliments that never once repeated.

He had already checked the watch before returning it — no Dark curses attached.

Lucas pulled a scrap of torn fabric from his pocket. Student robes. The older student had been wearing a hood the whole time, so he couldn't make out their gender.

That person was likely trouble. They hadn't even looked up to confirm who Lucas was, and there had been zero communication throughout the entire chase.

On top of that, they knew that room in the Room of Requirement well. Very well.

Drawing out a Boggart like that was thoroughly malicious.

Lucas was fairly certain that if he hadn't dealt with the Boggart fast enough, there would've been a curse coming his way from the shadows right after.

He could have pretended to get caught by the Boggart.

But... Lucas turned the tap back on, letting the water run. He washed his face.

Never mind. There'd be another chance to catch them.

------

After lunch, Alice pulled Lucas aside.

It was the first time he'd seen her since term started.

He'd been going to the library as usual this past week, but he hadn't run into her once.

Alice looked preoccupied. She was wearing her hair in a ponytail today, but a loose strand near the nape of her neck hadn't made it in.

Lucas knew this look. He'd worn it himself, it was what a Ravenclaw looked like when stuck on a hard problem.

He greeted her.

"Lucas." Alice managed a faint smile.

She stepped closer, and Lucas caught a trace of milk and honey from her.

He noticed a damp stain on her sleeve cuff.

That was odd. There'd been no honey or milk at lunch, and if she'd gotten it on herself in the morning, it should have dried by now.

Besides, how would someone have to eat to end up with that on their sleeve?

"Good afternoon, Alice." He greeted her the same way he always did.

Alice seemed to want to say something but held back. She hesitated, and Lucas waited beside her without rushing.

"I'd like to ask you something. Your Transfiguration and Potions marks have always been strong..." She paused. "And you're friends with Rubeus Hagrid." Alice kept circling around the point, listing his qualities one by one, as though measuring whether he met some condition she had in mind.

➤ Next: Three Sets of Ingredients