A gigantic sword swept down through the air, wrapped in boundless, freezing light, its accumulated force were like the very heavens themselves collapsing—leaving no room in the heart of anyone witnessing it for any thought of resistance.
The sword could not, of course, actually be the literal size of a mountain.
And yet the unstoppable, forward-charging intent that radiated from that descending blade was more than sufficient to conjure an entirely convincing illusion—as if, before their very eyes, some towering peak were genuinely crumbling to ruin in real time.
Even though this was only a memory unfolding around them, both Dumbledore and Bryan could not help but feel a jolt of alarm shoot through them, their hands rose instinctively to level their wands toward the threat.
But the Slytherin standing before them in that memory seemed to have already anticipated this move well before it arrived.
His face did not so much as ripple with reaction.
Only his pale green eyes flickered faintly with something that looked closer to weariness. No one present saw his hand actually move and yet a wand had already appeared in his palm, its handle carved hollow and inlaid with delicate golden filigree, its wood the distinctive dark grain of snakewood.
No one saw the wand so much as twitch in his grip and yet a basilisk's head, bodiless, nothing more than a snarling, disembodied serpent skull, rose up to bar the path of the descending blade.
A single, ringing clash of sound sounded through the expanded room, and two rows of jagged fangs set in that bloody, gaping maw snapped shut in an instant, clamping down hard on the gleaming edge of the falling sword.
For one breath, the massive blade trembled against that grip—then burst out into a brilliant, matchless crimson lightning, and beneath the sheer weight of that overwhelming force, the basilisk's summoned head crumbled into nothing more than drifting black smoke.
Wreathed continuously in that crimson lightning, the blade continued its descent and with ease, it tore straight through what proved to be only an illusion of Slytherin standing there.
Slytherin vanished at the contact, and with him vanished the half-formed blade that had reached out from the surrounding void to strike him.
But the duel itself was far from over.
At the very centre of the expanded room, wrapped now in dense, coiling crimson lightning, there appeared a fully sealed-off "Field" —hundreds upon hundreds of points of emerald light, pure as gemstones, encircling a discrete space that had been cut off from the ordinary rules of the surrounding world.
Within the bounds of that Field, every single strand of the attacking crimson lightning simply dissolved into nothing the instant it crossed the threshold.
Watching that particular Field take shape and hold, the corner of Bryan's own mouth twitched with private recognition.
It was plain enough now, observing this directly, that the "lesson" this founder of Slytherin House had left behind in his vault deep beneath Gringotts had been only a heavily censored version of the real thing.
The real Slytherin, standing here in the flesh within this memory, commanded a Field of vastly more perfect, complete construction than the fragment Bryan had previously studied and worked from.
Still, Bryan felt no resentment over this particular discovery.
The essential nature of a Field was fundamentally a space of governing rules that a wizard personally constructed from his own hard-won, individual understanding of the deeper nature of magic itself.
In other words, when put simply: the wizard took the ordinary, shared world as his own private canvas, and within its bounds created a small, self-contained world of his own where he himself, alone, functioned as God.
Within the bounds of that small, personally authored world, the wizard capable of sustaining it held power that was nearly divine in its authority over that bounded space.
And the actual strength any given Field could achieve depended entirely on how deeply the wizard who constructed it understood the underlying nature of magic itself.
Every single wizard capable of condensing a Field of his own had necessarily arrived at his own distinct, individually earned understanding of magic's fundamental essence, walking his own singular path to that understanding.
And so, by the very nature of the thing, no two Fields, across the whole of magical history were ever truly alike in their construction or character.
What Slytherin had chosen to leave behind in that vault had only ever been intended as a revelation of principle—something meant simply to let Bryan find his own way forward by careful analogy.
From somewhere within the surrounding void came the rolling, hearty laughter of a booming voice, full of unmistakable good humour despite the violence unfolding.
Under the command of that laughing man, the loose lightning drifting scattered through the expanded room turned as one and surged directly toward the Field that Slytherin had just revealed.
That gathered lightning carried with it a keen cutting edge—each individual bolt was shaped like a drawn sword in miniature, and thousands upon thousands of such blades struck at once toward Slytherin's Field, intent on tearing its structure apart.
The resulting clash between magic released a blinding, genuinely dazzling brilliance—one that overwhelmed even the natural sunlight still pouring in steadily through the tall casement windows of the room.
Yet both Bryan and Dumbledore kept their own gazes fixed throughout, utterly absorbed, on that mass of contending light that had, by this point, veiled everything else in the room from sight.
The duel had clearly settled into a kind of stalemate; both Slytherin and Gryffindor were holding their strength in careful balance rather than releasing it fully.
That restraint alone was the only reason this office had not already been reduced to rubble around them.
Had either of them truly unleashed himself without restraint, this room would have been the very least of the resulting devastation—even the surrounding grounds of Hogwarts itself could not have withstood the full shockwaves of their unrestrained clash.
"Hah!"
A sudden, piercing cry rang out from somewhere within the churning void, and Bryan and Dumbledore both felt a fresh chill of foreboding settle over them at once—they sensed that the duel was drawing rapidly toward its conclusion.
The countless strands of crimson lightning still assailing the Field abruptly drew back together into a single mass, and a sword wrought of that gathered lightning—one that carried within its formed shape both the aura of world-ending destruction and, simultaneously, a fierce, vital pulse of living energy—manifested fully before them, a sword of divine judgment and came crashing down!
The hundreds of emerald stars set within the void blazed up with their own full, answering brilliance, meeting that overwhelming strike with everything they collectively had to offer!
But the earth-shattering explosion and thunderous roar that everyone braced instinctively for never actually came.
The blade of gathered crimson lightning cut through Slytherin's Field the way a heated knife cuts through soft butter—slow in progress, but entirely smooth and unbroken throughout and within the boundaries of that Field, the emerald stars set into the void dimmed, one by one, steadily into darkness.
From within the void came Godric Gryffindor's own smug, thoroughly satisfied chuckle at the apparent victory but then—
As the emerald radiance at the centre of the room finally faded away, under Bryan's solemn, watching gaze, a fresh wisp of grey smoke began to seep out from the same void.
That grey and genuinely ominous magic wound itself around the sword of crimson lightning still suspended in the void and like a green leaf swept helplessly away by some sudden autumn wind, the sword Gryffindor had gathered withered rapidly away, right before Bryan's own solemn eyes.
"Salazar—"
A few seconds of settling silence passed, and then a man with fiery red hair and a broad, square jawed face stepped out from the dissolving void.
"Godric Gryffindor."
Dumbledore murmured the name softly, his gaze was fixed unwaveringly on the man whose entire body seemed to radiate warmth and fire even in stillness.
Bryan, too, felt a faint stirring somewhere in his heart at the sight.
This was already the third time he had laid eyes on Godric Gryffindor in the flesh.
Judging purely by his outward appearance, this particular Gryffindor looked to be somewhere past forty years of age though as for his actual age, Bryan was unable to say for certain with any confidence.
Magic could, after all, slow the body's natural aging process, particularly for wizards whose own command of it had reached a certain considerable height of mastery.
It was entirely possible that Gryffindor and Slytherin, as they stood here before him now, were actually closer to sixty years of age beneath their outward appearance.
Watching the grey mist that had just entirely consumed his magic dissolve away into nothing, Gryffindor did not look especially pleased by the outcome.
"You shouldn't have drawn on the power from that coordinate, Salazar. That power is dangerous—no wizard alive, however skilled, can truly master it—"
"Power is only ever power, Godric. There's no such fundamental thing as dangerous or safe, in the abstract, about power itself. And besides—"
Salazar Slytherin, too, stepped out from the same dissolving void—the grey mist that had hung ominously through the room having come from the Resurrection Stone ring he wore on his own hand.
Slytherin's own expression remained calm throughout. He raised the hand that bore the ring, and the grey mist, like some weary bird finally returning to its familiar roost, gathered itself back smoothly into the Resurrection Stone.
"You were the one provoking me in the first place, Godric. As you well know."
"If you had seen what became of that island, in the end, once death had finished eating away thoroughly at it, you would not say that so lightly, Salazar—"
With a single wave of his own hand, the entire expanded space within the office instantly returned to its ordinary, original size.
Gryffindor sheathed the massive sword he'd been holding and Salazar, along with Bryan and Dumbledore watching from their unique vantage, all found their eyes drawn to that particular blade in his firm grip as it settled home.
After hanging the famous Sword of Gryffindor carefully back upon its place on the wall, he pulled a towel down from a nearby rack over his own white shirt and began wiping himself down thoroughly as he went and walked casually toward Salazar, who had already settled himself into an armchair.
Seeing the faint, lingering trace of displeasure still sitting between his old friend's dark forehead, Gryffindor laughed and said,
"Don't be so miserly about it, Salazar. You know well how things stand—Rowena and Helga have both gone off from the school, and no one knows where. And you're off chasing down whatever remains of Merlin's legacy across the world.
I've had to hold down Hogwarts alone for two whole months running now, without any company. That kind of life is far too dull for my taste, Salazar—I was only looking for a little amusement to break the monotony—"
'Salazar Slytherin, chasing down Merlin's legacy?'
Dumbledore's silver-white brows and beard stirred faintly at that particular detail, his own expression was shading rapidly into confusion.
'Lady Rowena Ravenclaw and Lady Helga Hufflepuff had both left Hogwarts entirely, without even sending word to Gryffindor of where they'd gone?'
Bryan narrowed his eyes at the revelation.
That particular detail, too, sounded far from ordinary circumstances.
"Rowena still hasn't written to you at all, then?"
Salazar lifted a cup of black tea from a nearby side table, his own gaze was cutting steadily through the curling rising steam to study Gryffindor's expression for any tell.
"Oh? Prying into a lady's private secrets now, Salazar—that hardly seems the gentlemanly thing to do, does it?"
Gryffindor dragged over a chair of his own and sat down heavily, his sprawling, entirely careless posture was a sharp contrast to Slytherin's own military straight seating beside him.
He shrugged. "You heard everything they said before they left, Salazar. Rowena said she'd run into a little trouble of some kind and needed to be away for a while, without specifying what. Helga simply went along with her to help."
Gryffindor said all of this with an air of not much caring either way about the specifics.
But both Dumbledore and Bryan, watching from their unique third-party vantage point, caught the subtle flicker that appeared briefly across Slytherin's face, half-hidden behind the curling white steam rising from his tea.
'Could it be—'
A fresh thought stirred in Bryan's heart.
'Could Rowena Ravenclaw be about to give birth?'
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