The Room of Requirement gave him a workbench. Stone surface, good lighting, a single chair. Rowan hadn't asked for anything beyond space and quiet, and the Room had understood. He set the box on the workbench and sat down.
He'd been thinking about this all day. Classes had blurred together. He couldn't have said what Professor Shah taught during Astronomy or what notes he'd taken in History of Magic. His mind kept circling back to the box, to the keystone, to Revelio Complexum.
Now he was here, ready to find out if it worked.
Rowan raised his wand and cast.
"Revelio Complexum."
The air above the box shimmered. Layers of light materialized. Thin, translucent threads weaving through each other in patterns that made his eyes water if he stared too long. Deep blues, violets, threads of pale gold, all intersecting and branching across the box's surface like veins of light.
He pulled his journal close and began sketching.
The outermost layer was the anti-Alohomora ward he'd already identified. Beneath it, a series of detection charms. Proximity wards, intent-reading spells, things designed to alert someone if the box was tampered with. Beneath those, older layers. Preservation enchantments keeping the wood from rotting, the contents from degrading. Time wards of impressive complexity.
And at the very center, one thread brighter than all the others. Gold, pulsing with a slow, steady rhythm.
The keystone.
Rowan traced its connections carefully. Every other enchantment in the structure fed back to it. The anti-Alohomora wards drew their strength from it. The detection charms were anchored to it. Even the preservation spells cycled through it.
A Durability Anchor. He recognized the pulse pattern from the curse-breaking texts. A charm that made other enchantments permanent, resistant to natural magical decay. Without it, spells this old would have faded to nothing centuries ago.
Which meant the Headmistress who'd sealed this box had built it to last. She'd intended it to stay locked for a very long time.
Rowan studied the anchor's structure for another twenty minutes, committing its shape and connections to memory. Then he set down his journal and picked up his wand again.
Finitus Permanens. The counter-charm for Durability Anchors. He'd read about it last night in the restricted section, practiced it once on a ward he'd conjured himself. It had worked cleanly. The anchor dissolved, the remaining spells faded within seconds.
That had been a ward he'd created five minutes earlier. This was one a Headmistress had crafted three centuries ago.
He aimed carefully at the golden thread. At the center of the pulse, where the anchor drew its power.
"Finitus Permanens."
The golden thread flickered.
For a moment, nothing else happened. Then a ripple spread outward from the center, racing through the web of light. The detection charms flickered and died, the anti-Alohomora wards sputtered and collapsed, the preservation spells dimmed as their sustaining power drained away.
Layer after layer fell away, like peeling skin from old fruit.
The box's surface went still. The ancient carvings stopped their restless shifting, and the weight Rowan had felt pressing against his magical senses, the weight of centuries of protective magic, simply vanished.
The lid was free.
Rowan sat for a full minute, staring at it. Then he reached forward and lifted the lid.
Inside, wrapped in oilcloth that had preserved its contents perfectly, were scrolls. Old ones. Parchment yellowed with age, the ink faded but still legible. Five of them, each sealed with wax bearing a sigil Rowan didn't recognize.
Beneath the scrolls, nestled in a small clay pot with a tight-fitting lid, was a living specimen. Rowan lifted the pot carefully. Through a crack in the lid, he could see a faint bioluminescent glow, pale blue-white, pulsing gently in a rhythm that reminded him, oddly, of a heartbeat.
A fungus. Unusual, clearly magical, and somehow still alive after three hundred years in a sealed box.