The silence that followed the Basilisk's death was heavier than the noise of the battle. Allen stood in the center of the magnificent ceramic hall, surrounded by the ruins of a thousand years. It was a graveyard of ambition.
Salazar Slytherin had clearly poured a fortune into this place. The magic arrays he'd etched into the walls were masterpieces of runic engineering, designed to suspend the very flow of time for the treasures kept within. But even the greatest spells are not eternal. Magic requires a source, a heartbeat, and with the magic stones powering the arrays drained to husks, the entropy of ten centuries had finally won.
If anyone had come here looking for a hoard of gold or a library of forbidden spells, they would have left in tears. To Allen, it was a bitter sight. He watched as a pile of what might have been rare phoenix-feather parchment crumbled into gray soot at the slightest draft.
"He didn't build all this just to watch it rot," Allen muttered, his boots clicking sharply against the white stone floor. "There's a purpose here. A core."
He pushed deeper into the hall. At the far end, past the crumbling display cases, he found a set of twin spiraling staircases winding upward into the gloom of the ceiling. They were architectural oddities. One side was a standard flight of stairs, wide and elegant. The other was a smooth, polished stone groove—a massive slide.
Allen realized with a chill that the slide wasn't for children. It was a highway for the Basilisk, allowing the serpent to glide between levels of the sanctum with terrifying speed.
Confirming there was nothing left to salvage on the ground floor, Allen began the long climb. Each step felt like a drumbeat in the stillness. When he reached the upper landing, he found himself in a vast, circular chamber. The air here was drier, the dust thicker. In the center of the room stood the skeleton of a giant, prehistoric ground sloth, its bones bleached white and half-buried in the silt of ages.
Scattered around the base of the skeleton were dark, charred scraps that looked like burnt cloth. Allen knelt, his gloved fingers brushing the remains. They weren't cloth. They were the leather bindings and parchment of ancient books, so decayed they had essentially turned into charcoal. The ink was a mottled mess of illegible shadows.
"What a waste," Allen whispered, feeling a genuine pang of loss for the lost knowledge.
As he brushed the debris aside, his hand hit something solid. A slab of polished obsidian served as a table, and upon it sat several stone caskets, their lids sealed tight with wax and magic.
Just as Allen reached for the nearest latch, a voice—deep, resonant, and dripping with an ancient authority—echoed through the chamber.
"A thousand years... and finally, a guest who doesn't smell of common filth."
Allen's heart didn't just leap; it tried to exit through his throat. He spun around, his wand leveled at the darkness, his breath coming in sharp hitches. "Who's there? Show yourself!"
"Look up, boy. I am not a creature that hides in the dirt," the voice replied, tinged with an amused arrogance.
High above the sloth's skeleton, suspended in mid-air by a permanent levitation charm, hung a portrait. It was unlike any wizarding portrait Allen had ever seen. Most portraits were vibrant, oil-painted recreations of the deceased, full of life and color. This one was monochromatic, rendered entirely in shades of deep, obsidian green.
The man in the painting was in the prime of his life. He was handsome in a severe, chiseled way—sharp cheekbones, a high forehead, and eyes that seemed to look through Allen's very soul. He didn't look like the twisted, monkey-faced statue in the main chamber; he looked like a king in exile.
"Belemnite ink," the man said, noticing Allen's confusion. "Derived from the fossils of creatures that died millions of years before your ancestors learned to walk upright. It is the only medium capable of holding a soul's imprint for a millennium without fading."
Allen immediately slammed his Occlumency shields into place, locking down his mind.
The man in the painting chuckled, a dry, raspy sound. "Don't bother with the mental fortresses, child. I am not peering into your mind via Legilimency. Your face is an open book. You have the look of a boy who has spent too much time thinking he's the smartest person in the room."
Allen felt a flush of irritation but kept his voice steady. "The wealth required to use belemnite ink on such a scale... and yet, you let your library turn to ash. You're Salazar Slytherin, aren't you?"
"Perceptive," Salazar replied, his expression hardening. "And yes, the decay was a choice. To maintain the integrity of this portrait—to keep my consciousness sharp enough to speak to you now—I had to cannibalize the magic of the entire sanctum. The books, the herbs, the treasures... they were the fuel for my immortality."
Allen stared at him, genuinely stunned. "You let a thousand years of magical history rot just so you could stay awake in a frame? You have to be the most narcissistic man to ever live."
"And you have the audacity of a brat," Salazar countered, his voice dripping with disdain. "I didn't stay awake to watch the dust settle. I stayed awake to ensure my legacy didn't fall into the hands of someone... unworthy."
The portrait's eyes narrowed, scanning Allen with a predatory intensity. "You are not a Slytherin. I can feel the lack of the blood-bond. You don't have the serpent's tongue, do you?"
"I am a student of Hogwarts," Allen replied, standing tall, refusing to be intimidated by a piece of canvas. "And as far as I'm concerned, that makes this my heritage as much as anyone's."
Salazar went quiet, his gaze lingering on Allen's wand, his posture, and the calm mask he wore. "Back in my day, we parted ways over such sentiments. Godric and his foolish 'all-comers' policy... Rowena and her obsession with pure logic... Helga and her boundless, tiresome patience. But time has a way of eroding even the strongest grudges."
Salazar sighed, a sound that seemed to carry the weight of centuries. "I am fading. The ink is drying, and the magic stones are empty. I need to provide a path for the one who finally broke through my guardian."
To Allen's utter shock, the figure of Salazar Slytherin stepped out of the frame. He didn't become solid; he was a faint, shimmering phantom, a ghost of a ghost, draped in emerald robes that seemed to smoke at the edges.
"Are you sure sending a child in here to fight a Basilisk was the best way to find a successor?" Allen asked, his voice dripping with sarcasm. "Most 'young wizards' would be a pile of bones by now."
Salazar glanced at him sideways, his lips curling into a thin smirk. "And yet, here you are, breathing and complaining. Unless I've misjudged and you're a particularly chatty poltergeist?"
Allen opened his mouth to retort, but found himself silenced by the sheer weight of the man's presence.
"Open the casket," Salazar commanded, pointing a translucent finger at the obsidian table. "The answers you seek aren't in my words, but in what I've guarded."
Allen hesitated for a fraction of a second, then reached out and pulled the lid of the stone casket.
A pillar of brilliant, verdant light erupted from within, flooding the dusty chamber with a divine glow. It was so intense Allen had to shield his eyes. When the radiance finally dimmed, he saw it.
Resting on a bed of rotted silk was a gem. It was raw, unpolished, and pulsed with a rhythmic, emerald light. Allen's hand instinctively went to the pocket of his robes, where the blue Merlin's Gem sat. He didn't need to take it out to know they were sisters. The shape, the vibration, the way they seemed to pull at the very fabric of the air around them—they were identical in everything but color.
"What is this?" Allen whispered, his voice trembling for the first time. "How do you have a stone like Merlin's?"
Salazar walked to the edge of the table, his phantom eyes reflecting the green glow. "Once, a descendant of mine found his way here. A boy with a twisted heart and a commoner's soul. He spoke the tongue of snakes, yes, but he lacked the vision. He saw the Basilisk as a weapon, not a guardian. I denied him. He could only open the outer doors, the 'Chamber of Secrets' that the school legends whisper about. He never saw this."
The phantom turned to Allen, and for a moment, the disdain was gone, replaced by a terrifyingly sharp clarity.
"In you, I see the fusion of what we four built. You have the wit of Ravenclaw, the nerve of Gryffindor, the stubbornness of Hufflepuff, and the cold ambition that I prize above all. They would be satisfied with you."
Salazar leaned in, his voice dropping to a whisper that felt like ice in Allen's ear.
"But more importantly, boy... you have the blood. You are a pure-blood of the old stock, whether you know your lineage or not. Only a true scion of the founding families could have survived that room."