November 8, 1992.
The festive warmth of Halloween had been scrubbed away by a week of biting winds and an atmosphere of suspicion that clung to the stone walls of Hogwarts like a persistent damp. The castle felt older than it had in September—heavier, as if the weight of the "Chamber of Secrets" was a physical pressure bearing down on the foundations.
But for Colin Creevey, the weight was nonexistent. He was a boy fueled by the frantic, buzzing energy of discovery. He wandered the corridors with his camera clutched in his hands like a holy relic, eager to document the magic that still felt impossible to his Muggle-born heart. To Colin, even the flickering candles and the grinning pumpkin lanterns were a story worth telling.
He had paused near the East Corridor, drawn by the whispers that seemed to follow the Potter twins. The thrill of being a witness to history pulsed in his chest. He spotted an ornate tapestry—a depiction of a medieval hunt—and crouched to snap a photo, his tongue poking out in concentration as he adjusted the focus of the lens.
A shadow flickered across the periphery of his vision.
Colin smiled, thinking it was a friend or perhaps a rival photographer trying to pull a prank. "Gotcha!" he called out, his voice echoing in the empty hallway.
Then, he froze.
The air didn't just turn cold; it turned still. Something moved—slithered—within the deep shadows beyond the reach of the nearest torch. He didn't look directly. He couldn't. But through the periphery of his gaze, he caught the gleam of something serpentine, massive, and impossibly deadly.
His breath hitched, turning into a plume of white frost. Instinctively, he raised the camera. He didn't think of a curse or a flight; he thought of the flash. He hoped the burst of light would reveal the intruder, or perhaps fend it off.
A bright click—the shutter snapped. But the flash didn't just reflect off the stone; it reflected off a pair of eyes that were too large, too yellow, and too ancient to belong to anything in the natural world.
Everything went still. It wasn't the darkness of death, but a terrifying, freezing suspension. As the world turned to grey, Colin's last thought, fleeting and panicked, was a silent, helpless scream: Why can't I move?
The castle was quieter than usual later that day. It wasn't the peaceful, scholarly hush of the library; it was a heavy, expectant silence. It felt like the entire building was holding its breath.
My roommates and I—the "Alliance"—were returning to Ravenclaw Tower just minutes before the evening curfew. Tobias was carrying a stack of books on "Ancient Defensive Runes" that looked wildly impractical for someone who had initially claimed he only needed to check a single footnote.
"You said you needed one reference, Tobias," Cassian noted dryly, his boots clicking rhythmically against the stone. "You are now carrying a small library. Your spine is going to collapse before we reach the third floor."
"I did need one reference!" Tobias replied defensively, struggling to keep the top book from sliding off. "But then that reference cited a commentary by Barnabas the Baffled, which referenced a treatise on gargoyle-binding, which referenced—"
"—your utter inability to stop reading once you find a thread," Adrian finished for him.
Elliot chuckled nervously, clutching a smaller book on herbology to his chest. "At least if we get trapped in a moving staircase, we'll never run out of things to study. We can build a fort out of Tobias's research."
I walked slightly ahead of them. My cloak shifted softly with each step, but my mind was elsewhere. My Thestral-sight was acting as a low-frequency radar, sensing the "Endings" that seemed to be vibrating in the walls. The corridor was long, lit by sparse, flickering torches that cast skeletal shadows across our path.
As we neared the staircase leading toward Ravenclaw Tower, Elliot suddenly slowed down. "Did you hear that?"
Cassian groaned. "Elliot, if this is another one of your 'haunted corridor' theories, I'm going to personally transfigure your shoes into lead."
"No," Elliot insisted, his voice dropping to a whisper. "Look. At the end of the hall."
He pointed. In the dim light, something was leaning against the wall. At first, it looked like a student sitting down to rest. But as we drew closer, the posture became wrong. It was too rigid.
We stopped three feet away.
Colin Creevey was standing—not sitting—beside the wall. He was perfectly upright, his body locked in a position of mid-crouch. His eyes were wide open behind his glasses, staring forward into the dark without blinking. His skin wasn't pale; it was a dull, ashen grey. His entire frame was as stiff as a marble statue.
And the camera hanging from his neck... it was a ruin. The metal was twisted and warped as if it had been held in a furnace, and the lens was shattered into a spiderweb of cracks.
For a long moment, no one spoke. The silence was absolute.
"…Is he breathing?" Elliot's voice was barely a tremor.
Adrian stepped closer, his analytical mind fighting the instinctive urge to run. He waved a hand slowly in front of Colin's staring eyes. There was no pupil dilation. No twitch of the lid.
Cassian circled the boy, examining the grey skin. "Merlin," he muttered, his pureblood composure slipping. "It's like he's been carved from stone."
I stepped forward last. The air around Colin felt wrong—it was stale, smelling faintly of sulfur and the ozone-scent of a massive magical discharge. My Nundu instincts hissed a warning.
Basilisk.
I looked at the melted camera. The boy hadn't looked at the snake directly; he had seen it through the lens. The glass and the silver-nitrate of the film had acted as a filter, a biological circuit-breaker that had turned a death-gaze into a petrification-curse.
"Is he… dead?" Tobias swallowed hard, his stack of books suddenly forgotten.
"No," I said, my voice sounding like a gavel in the quiet hall.
They all looked at me. I knelt slightly, examining the "dead" grey of Colin's eyes. "He's petrified. He's alive, but his biology has been suspended."
Elliot went even paler. "Petrified?! Like the cat?"
Cassian's expression darkened, his jaw tightening. "Then the rumors were true. The Chamber really has been opened. There is something moving through the walls of this castle."
Tobias looked down the corridor in both directions, his eyes darting toward every shadow as if expecting a sixty-foot serpent to emerge from the masonry. "Okay," he said quickly, his voice tight. "I officially vote that we do not stay here long enough to become the next set of garden statues."
Adrian nodded immediately. "Agreed. Logic dictates we find an adult. Immediately." He looked at me. "What do we do, Orion?"
I stood up, my night-black wings shifting invisibly beneath my cloak. "We alert the Headmaster."
"The Headmaster?" Elliot squeaked. "Why not Flitwick? Or McGonagall?"
"Because this is an ancient threat," I said. "We go to the one authority who won't waste time with a panic."
"Right. Running then," Tobias said.
"Running," Adrian confirmed.
We didn't look back. We sprinted. Our footsteps pounded against the stone in a frantic, synchronized rhythm. We raced through the corridors, the torches blurring past us like falling stars. Portraits shouted in protest as we nearly knocked over a suit of armor near the Charms classroom.
"Slow down, you disrespectful whelps!" an elderly wizard yelled from his frame, brandishing a painted cane.
"Not now, Sir!" Tobias shouted back over his shoulder.
We reached the moving staircases, nearly colliding with a group of Hufflepuffs who were heading toward the kitchens. We didn't stop to explain. We kept going—up one staircase, across a landing, down a corridor that smelled of old dust. Finally, we reached the stone gargoyle that guarded the entrance to the Headmaster's office.
We stopped abruptly, all five of us gasping for air.
"…Password," Tobias panted, clutching his side. "Does anyone… know the… password?"
We stared at each other. Cassian looked ready to swear. Adrian knocked sharply on the wall beside the stone bird. "Professor! Headmaster! We have an emergency!"
No answer. The gargoyle remained a silent, unmoving block of granite.
"What if he's not in there?" Elliot wrung his hands. "What if the monster finds us while we're standing here like idiots?"
I looked at the gargoyle. I remembered the stories. I remembered Dumbledore's peculiar affinity for Muggle sweets.
"Sherbet Lemon," I said.
The gargoyle didn't just move; it leaped aside with a grinding of stone, revealing the moving spiral staircase behind it. My roommates stared at me as if I'd just performed a miracle.
"…Lucky guess?" Tobias managed to gasp.
"Observation," I replied, not waiting for them as I stepped onto the rising stairs.
At the top, the door opened before I could even raise my hand to knock. Professor McGonagall was standing there, her emerald robes rustling, her eyebrows raised in a sharp, lethal arc.
"Why are five Ravenclaws running through the castle at this hour?" she demanded. Then, she saw our faces—the sweat, the wide eyes, the raw, unadulterated dread. Her expression hardened instantly. "Speak."
"Professor," Adrian said, stepping forward. "There's been an attack. In the East Corridor."
"Explain," she said, her voice turning to ice.
"Colin Creevey," Elliot blurted out. "The first-year. He's... he's standing near the stairs, and he's turned to stone! His camera is melted!"
The silence in the office was absolute. McGonagall's face went very still, a mask of grim realization. Behind her, a calm, resonant voice spoke.
"Ah."
Albus Dumbledore rose from behind his desk. His blue eyes were suddenly sharp, the "benevolent grandfather" facade replaced by the calculating intensity of a Grand Sorcerer. "You found him just now?"
"Yes, Headmaster," I said, meeting his gaze.
Dumbledore studied us carefully, his eyes lingering on me for a fraction of a second longer than the others. "You did well to come here immediately. Many would have frozen in fear or fled without reporting." He turned to McGonagall. "Minerva."
She didn't need further instruction. "Come."
We hurried back through the corridors, this time following two professors who moved with a terrifying, silent speed. When we reached the East Corridor, Colin was exactly where we had left him—a grey, silent sentinel in the flickering torchlight.
Dumbledore approached slowly. He didn't look at Colin first; he looked at the floor, at the walls, and then at the ruined camera. He lifted the melted device with surprising gentleness, his long fingers tracing the warped metal.
"A remarkable piece of luck," he murmured.
"Luck, Albus?" McGonagall whispered, her hand over her heart. "The boy is a statue."
"Yes," Dumbledore said, tilting the ruined lens to catch the light. "The boy saw the creature through the camera. The glass and the silver within the film provided a layer of protection. Had he looked directly..."
"The reflection," McGonagall whispered, the horror dawning on her face.
Dumbledore turned to us. "You were correct. Mr. Creevey is not dead. Professor Sprout's Mandrakes will be able to restore him once they reach maturity."
Elliot let out a long, shaky breath of relief, literally deflating against the wall.
"But he is petrified," Dumbledore continued, his voice dropping an octave. "And this confirms a fear I had hoped was not true. The Chamber has indeed been opened. The monster is hunting."
No one spoke. The weight of the words hung in the air like a death sentence. McGonagall straightened her back, her face a mask of iron. "I will alert the staff. We must begin patrols immediately." She turned to the five of us. "You will say nothing of what you saw tonight. No rumors. No whispers. Do you understand?"
"Yes, Professor," we said in unison.
"Good." Dumbledore waved his wand, a silent, elegant movement. Colin's rigid body lifted gently into the air, floating beside the Headmaster like a hollow statue. "Come, Minerva. To the hospital wing."
As they passed, Dumbledore paused beside me. Just for a heartbeat. His blue eyes searched mine, seeing the "Deers of Death" within.
"You recognized petrification quickly, Mr. Blackheart," he said quietly.
"Yes, Headmaster."
"Curiosity and observation are powerful tools," he whispered, a small, knowing smile touching his lips. "But they are heavy burdens in times like these."
Then, he continued down the corridor.
We stood in silence as the professors vanished around the corner with the floating body of Colin Creevey. Tobias finally exhaled, his books still lying in a pile on the floor. "Well," he muttered. "That happened."
Cassian crossed his arms, his eyes fixed on the empty space where the statue had been. "The monster is real. It's in the walls."
Adrian looked at me, his glasses reflecting the dying light of the torches. "You knew, didn't you? That's why you wanted to leave the corridor on Halloween."
I didn't answer immediately. I looked at the dark spot on the wall where Colin's camera had reflected the yellow eyes of the King of Serpents. I felt the Golden Egg in my tower dormitory pulsing—a rhythmic, golden "I told you so."
"We should get back," I said, my voice cold. "Before curfew becomes detention."
They followed me, but none of them missed the way my expression had grown darker. The hunt was no longer theoretical. The monster had struck, and the year had only just begun. The threads of fate were fraying, and I realized that soon, I would have to decide if I was going to be the one to sew them back together—or let them snap.