October in the Scottish Highlands brought a bitter, biting chill that seeped through the ancient stone masonry of Hogwarts. The drafty corridors felt less like a school and more like a massive, poorly insulated mausoleum.
For Sunshine Addams, the temperature drop was a welcome comfort, reminiscent of the family crypts back in Louisiana. However, the rapidly approaching date of Halloween brought a different kind of chill—a cold, heavy anticipation that had nothing to do with the weather.
She knew the timeline. The Chamber of Secrets was going to open. The Heir of Slytherin was moving.
It was a Tuesday evening, two days before the Halloween feast. The corridors were largely empty, the student body sequestered in the Great Hall for dinner or huddled by the fires in their respective common rooms.
Sunshine was walking back from the library, taking a circuitous, secondary route through the second-floor corridors to avoid a loud cluster of Gryffindor third-years. She wore a thick, aggressively drab gray woolen sweater over her beige skirt, her dragon-hide boots silencing her footsteps entirely. She moved with the predatory, unhurried grace of a shadow.
She was alone.
Suddenly, the ambient silence of the castle was shattered by a sound that made the fine hairs on the back of Sunshine's neck stand on end.
"Come... come to me... Let me rip you... Let me tear you... Let me kill you..."
It was not a human voice. It was a low, sibilant, echoing hiss that seemed to vibrate directly from the stone walls themselves. It was cold, ancient, and saturated with an overwhelming, necrotic intent.
To an ordinary British wizard, the sound would be either entirely inaudible or indistinguishable from the hissing of a steam pipe.
To Sunshine Addams, it was perfectly, horrifyingly translated English.
In her past life, reading the books, Parseltongue was presented as a rare, genetic anomaly tied exclusively to the bloodline of Salazar Slytherin. It was the mark of a Dark Wizard.
But the Addams family did not respect British biological monopolies.
"Serpent-tongue is merely a matter of proper sibilance and atmospheric pressure, Sunbeam," Morticia had explained years ago, lounging in the conservatory with a massive King Cobra wrapped affectionately around her pale throat. "The British treat it like a genetic curse. How utterly pedestrian. In the Old World, conversing with venomous creatures is simply good manners. It requires the speaker to align their vocal cords with the frequency of lethal intent."
Sunshine had learned the language just as she had learned French, Latin, and Gobbledegook. She understood the syntax of the serpent perfectly.
She stopped in the middle of the corridor.
She did not gasp. She did not run in terror, nor did she draw her Widow's Bite bracers. The sixty-year-old survivor instantly locked her fear behind the heavy iron doors of her mental labyrinth.
She closed her eyes and pressed the side of her head against the freezing stone wall.
"Kill... time to kill..." the voice hissed again, sliding past her.
She analyzed the acoustics with clinical, terrifying precision. The voice was not coming from the corridor. It was coming from behind the stone. It was echoing through the ancient, massive iron plumbing pipes that ran parallel to the walls.
Furthermore, she felt the vibration. The stone against her cheek hummed with the physical friction of something impossibly massive dragging its scaled weight upward through the pipe network.
A basilisk, Sunshine confirmed internally, her heart maintaining a slow, steady, controlled rhythm despite the adrenaline flooding her system. Fifty feet long, at a minimum, based on the acoustic resonance of the scales against the iron. It is moving toward the third floor. It is hunting.
She pulled away from the wall.
The reality of the narrative was vastly different from the words on a page. In the books, the basilisk was a plot device for a twelve-year-old boy to conquer. Standing in the freezing corridor, listening to the creature beg for blood, Sunshine recognized it for what it truly was: an apex predator of unimaginable lethality, currently roaming free in a building filled with unarmed, incompetent children.
The golden sunflower locket against her chest suddenly burned with a fierce, agonizing heat.
The supermassive Addams core trapped within her blood-ward was reacting to the presence of the beast. It was not reacting with fear; it was reacting with territorial rage. The dark magic wanted out. It wanted to rip the goblin-silver apart, flood the corridor with necrotic energy, and tear the serpent to pieces for daring to hunt in her proximity.
Sunshine gripped the locket, her knuckles turning white, pressing it hard into her bruised sternum until the physical pain grounded her.
No, Sunshine commanded her own soul, the mental order ringing like a steel hammer in her mind. If we kill it, we expose the cover. We expose the core. Dumbledore will see us.
She looked up at the ceiling, where the hissing was slowly fading as the beast moved higher into the castle.
The moral agonizing of her past life flared for a microscopic second. If she walked away, she was allowing a monster to hunt innocent children. She was standing by while a tragedy occurred.
But the cold, pragmatic logic of the survivor ruthlessly crushed the guilt.
She could not save them without destroying herself. And she had already died once because she had prioritized the comfort and demands of others over her own survival. She had sworn on her second life that she would never, ever be a victim again.
Harry Potter would hear the voice. Harry Potter would follow the voice. The narrative demanded it.
Sunshine Addams smoothed her beige skirt. She let go of the locket. She wiped the cold, analytical gray from her bright blue eyes, replacing it with the blank, vacant stare of the harmless Hufflepuff Squib.
She turned her back on the wall and continued her walk toward the Hufflepuff basement, her dragon-hide boots entirely silent on the stone.
Two days later, on Halloween night, the school would discover Mrs. Norris hanging frozen from a torch bracket, and the blood-written warning on the wall: The Chamber of Secrets has been opened. Enemies of the Heir, beware.
When the Hufflepuff common room inevitably erupted into a frenzy of tears and panic, Sunshine would sit in her plush armchair, wrapped in a yellow blanket, projecting an aura of wide-eyed, pathetic terror. She would let Hannah Abbott comfort her. She would let Susan Bones promise her that the Ministry would handle it.
But as she descended the stairs toward the safety of her subterranean dormitory, the hissing voice still echoing in her perfect, sixty-year-old memory, Sunshine knew the truth.
The Ministry would not handle it. The Headmaster would not handle it. The castle was a death trap, and the adults were either hopelessly incompetent or maliciously complicit.
She reached her bed and pulled her bog-oak trunk out from the shadows. She bypassed the standard school supplies and unlocked the false bottom. She ran her fingers over the dark, heavy glass of her hand-mirror, a gift from Morticia, waiting to be deployed.
She had heard the whispers in the walls. She knew exactly what the monster was, and she knew exactly how to survive it.
Let the heroes run toward the hissing. The Wallflower was going to stay perfectly, beautifully still.