"I sometimes think wizarding talent is wasted," Tyler said as he looked around the Potions room created by the Room of Requirement. "Wizards are born with power, so they ought to be able to devote themselves to studying magic, but plenty of them spend their whole lives scrambling just to survive."
He shook his head with a quiet sigh. "If a person cannot even guarantee food, shelter, and basic security, how are they supposed to focus on magic? No wonder the wizarding world has stagnated so badly."
The thought was not difficult to understand. If witches and wizards had their lives properly secured, more of them might be able to study, experiment, and create, and the entire magical world might have advanced much faster than it had.
Muggle scientists were a clear example. The best of them had laboratories, funding, institutions, and enough stability to let them focus on research instead of worrying about whether they would eat the next day.
A scientist who could not afford food would hardly have the energy to push human knowledge forward. The same logic applied to wizards, yet the magical world acted as though individual talent alone could solve everything.
The gap between rich and poor in the wizarding world was enormous. Some old families could throw money around without blinking, while other witches and wizards who had clearly graduated from Hogwarts still had to fight for every bit of comfort.
Some gifted witches even ended up disappearing into domestic life, not because they lacked ability, but because society gave them no better path. It was a waste, like a brilliant girl graduating from a world-famous university only to have all her knowledge buried under housework until no one remembered what she could have become.
"You are thinking too far ahead," Jamie said, leaning against one of the worktables. "Changing the entire wizarding world is not easy. At the very least, you would need authority strong enough that everyone had no choice but to listen."
Tyler gave him a sidelong look. "So, a small first goal would be taking control of the wizarding world?"
"Something like that," Jamie said, completely serious. "One step at a time."
"It is too early for that," Tyler admitted. He was only a first-year at Hogwarts, and even if his strength was not ordinary, that kind of ambition still belonged somewhere far in the future.
Jamie pushed away from the table and glanced toward the door. "Then let's go. We still need to look at Ravenclaw's diadem."
Tyler nodded. "I remember it was hidden in the room where people put things they wanted to hide."
They left the Potions room and returned once more to the corridor outside the Room of Requirement. The previous doorway vanished behind them, leaving only the blank wall opposite the tapestry as if nothing unusual had happened there at all.
Jamie stood before the wall and began walking. I need a place to hide something, he thought. I need a place to hide something. I need a place to hide something.
On the third pass, the door appeared again. Its shape changed from the one that had led to the Potions classroom, proving that the room behind it had shifted into something else entirely.
"Let's go," Tyler said. He and Jamie pushed open the door and stepped inside.
The room beyond was enormous, but at first it was so dim that only three vast, black mounds could be seen rising in the darkness. The air smelled old and shut away, thick with dust, metal, cracked wood, and the strange dryness of forgotten magic.
"Lumos Maxima," Tyler murmured.
A bright sphere of light burst from his wand and floated upward, spreading brilliance through the chamber. Only then did the two of them see what the hidden room truly was.
"It's a rubbish dump," Jamie said, his face twisting with disgust.
That was not entirely wrong. The space was filled with abandoned objects piled into hills, towers, and crooked walls of clutter: broken broomsticks, cracked desks, worn chairs, chipped statues, bent brass scales, torn robes, battered books, wingless Golden Snitches, warped cauldrons, and countless other things that students and professors had probably hidden here over hundreds of years.
"It is more than rubbish," Tyler said, looking across the sea of objects. "This is everything people wanted to lose, hide, forget, or keep away from others."
That made the place far more dangerous than it looked. In Hogwarts, even a broken object might have a curse clinging to it, and a forgotten trinket could easily be more valuable than gold.
"We should split up," Tyler said. "I remember Ravenclaw's diadem was near a cabinet, but we need to find a stuffed troll first."
"A stuffed troll," Jamie repeated. "Of course. Why would a priceless relic not be hidden near something disgusting?"
"This is Hogwarts," Tyler said. "That almost counts as logic."
Jamie pointed his wand toward a narrow path between two leaning towers of junk. "Fine. I'll search that way."
Tyler took the path to the right. The stacks of abandoned objects loomed over him on both sides, and several looked unstable enough that one careless touch might bury him under a century of lost property.
"Troll specimen," he muttered as he walked. "A huge, ugly, impossible-to-miss troll specimen."
The size should have made it easy to find, but the Room of Hidden Things was absurdly large. Every few steps, Tyler passed something strange enough to steal his attention: a cracked mirror that reflected the wrong angle, a tarnished helmet twitching by itself, a wardrobe that breathed faintly through its keyhole, and a pile of old shoes that tried to shuffle away when his light touched them.
He ignored them all. Curiosity was useful, but greed and carelessness had killed many wizards far stronger than careless first-years.
After crossing a mound of damaged furniture and squeezing between two cabinets, Tyler finally saw it. A huge stuffed troll leaned against a pile of broken objects, its grey hide stretched and preserved, its club resting awkwardly beside it.
Tyler stared at it for a moment. "Who in their right mind preserved a troll and hid it in here?"
It was hard to imagine a student managing such a thing. More likely, some professor had subdued it, turned it into a specimen, and then decided there was no better storage solution than the castle's most mysterious secret room.
The troll meant the diadem should be nearby. Tyler moved past it and continued deeper, turning through several tight gaps until his wandlight fell across a cabinet half-hidden beneath dust and shadows.
The cabinet looked as though it had been badly corroded. Its surface was blistered and scarred, almost as if strong acid had eaten into the wood and left it bubbling in places.
"This should be it," Tyler said quietly.
He stepped forward and pulled open the cabinet door. Inside sat an old chest, and on top of the chest rested the ugly bust of a long-dead witch.
A battered, tarnished diadem lay upon the statue's head. It was dull, blackened, and rust-stained, so far removed from its former beauty that anyone who did not know what to look for might have dismissed it as worthless junk.
"Jamie," Tyler called. "Over here."
A short while later, Jamie followed the light through the maze of clutter and arrived beside him. The two of them stood before the ugly bust and looked up at the ruined diadem together.
"This is Ravenclaw's diadem?" Jamie said. "It certainly does not look like one of the greatest relics in Hogwarts."
"Voldemort's soul contaminated it," Tyler said. "The Horcrux magic must have blackened it badly."
"What a waste," Jamie said, his tone turning genuinely regretful. "They say Ravenclaw's diadem can enhance wisdom. Among the relics of the four founders, everything except the Sword of Gryffindor was turned into a Horcrux by Voldemort."
Tyler thought of Hufflepuff's Cup, which they already had. It too had been polluted by dark magic, its original power buried beneath the filth Voldemort had forced into it.
"Voldemort was too greedy," Tyler said. "He made seven Horcruxes and split his soul again and again. No wonder he became so unstable."
Tom Riddle had been brilliant in his youth: clever, charming, patient, and dangerous in the way only a truly gifted Dark wizard could be. But the later Voldemort was more like a manic tyrant than a strategist, obsessed with death and power while relying again and again on Avada Kedavra as if no other spell existed.
Splitting the soul had clearly damaged him. Doing it seven times was not immortality so much as self-destruction performed slowly and proudly.
"We should put the diadem away for now," Tyler said. "If there is any way to avoid destroying such a precious magical artefact, I would rather preserve it."
Jamie nodded, though his eyes remained fixed on the tarnished relic. It was hard not to feel some anger at seeing one of Ravenclaw's greatest treasures reduced to a hiding place for a shard of Voldemort's soul.
Tyler said nothing more. He simply pulled on a pair of dragon-hide gloves...