"Roger is still a novice wizard," Dumbledore said with a mild smile. "It is inevitable that he will make mistakes."
As he spoke, he opened Roger Williams's pouch with the calm curiosity of someone unwrapping a box of sweets. One by one, he pulled out the grenades hidden inside, and Snape's already pale face turned red, then black, then a vivid shade of purple, shifting like a dye vat in motion.
"Williams!" Snape spat the name through gritted teeth.
Roger, who had only just escaped the dungeons, felt a sudden chill race down his spine. Without the slightest hesitation, he quickened his pace and decided that the farther he got from Snape's office, the better.
"When dealing with Voldemort, it is not entirely unreasonable to use methods that do not conform to wizarding honor," Dumbledore said, turning one of the grenades over in his fingers. Before Snape could stop him, he pulled the pin.
The high-explosive grenade detonated in his hand. The blast did not spread outward, however; it slowed and folded in on itself, all its fire, force, and flying metal fragments contained within Dumbledore's palm as if trapped inside invisible glass.
"Not bad," Dumbledore said, nodding as he rubbed his slightly numb fingers. "The power is quite respectable."
Without warning, an ordinary wizard would likely have died from such a weapon. Fortunately, the plan had been adjusted in time, and Firenze had been allowed to act earlier than intended; otherwise, Quirrell might genuinely have died in the Forbidden Forest.
"Albus, this will lead to the collapse of wizarding tradition," Snape said sharply. "Even Voldemort never intended to overthrow our traditions."
"Are you saying your student is more terrifying than Voldemort?" Dumbledore asked calmly.
The question sounded gentle, but its weight settled heavily between them. Snape did not answer immediately, and the silence in the office became colder than the dungeon walls.
"I don't know," Snape said at last, shaking his head. "He is serious and frighteningly talented when something interests him. But when it does not, he refuses to touch it at all."
"Quidditch?" Dumbledore chuckled.
Madam Hooch had complained to him about Roger more than once. In her opinion, the boy treated flying lessons as if they were a scheduled execution.
"We both know he grew up in Azkaban," Snape said helplessly. "In his eyes, wizards riding broomsticks are not so different from Dementors drifting through the air. His aversion to flying lessons is practically instinctive."
Slytherin still had not found a Seeker who could compare to Harry Potter. That fact alone had irritated Snape for most of the school year.
"So you handed Sectumsempra to him," Dumbledore said. He reached into his pocket, unwrapped a lemon drop, and popped it into his mouth.
"It was better than allowing him to sneak into the Restricted Section and search for spells by himself," Snape replied.
Dumbledore nodded, his gaze resting on the unicorn's massive body. Roger's talent for spellcraft had already surpassed Snape's at the same age, and there was something almost unsettling about it.
He had created a frost-preservation charm in his first year simply because he needed one. His Patronus had already become corporeal, and his abilities in Potions, Transfiguration, and other subjects were equally remarkable.
Few students in the history of Hogwarts had been so outstanding. When combined with the information Dumbledore had heard from the merfolk, it became even more troubling.
Roger had inherited Theodore Williams's talent. That ability allowed him to amplify the power of spells almost without limit, at least in theory, and that kind of talent was never merely a gift.
It was also a danger. Dumbledore worried about him more than he wished to admit.
Roger was not like Tom Riddle. In a sense, Tom had been far inferior to him.
He was closer to Gellert Grindelwald, the friend of Dumbledore's youth. Yet even that comparison was not quite right, because Roger was more restrained, more elusive, and far more difficult to read.
Dumbledore took a deep breath and looked through the window toward the distant grounds. "That child always knows what he wants and what he does not want. His goals are always very clear."
"Albus, why not let Roger see the Mirror of Erised?" Snape asked.
"I have considered it," Dumbledore said. "Unfortunately, our Mr. Williams does not seem to possess much of an adventurous spirit."
He lifted one hand and counted casually. "Common room, classrooms, library, Great Hall. That appears to be the entire map of his student life."
Dumbledore shrugged, sighing in mild frustration. "And as you know, if I place the mirror in the Room of Requirement, it may very well disappear."
"Perhaps we should have given him the Marauder's Map instead of allowing it to fall into the hands of the Weasley twins," Snape said coldly. In his opinion, the map was being completely wasted on those two troublemakers.
"I will consider it," Dumbledore said.
Then his eyes brightened slightly, and he stroked his beard with satisfaction. "Ah, I have it. Since the centaurs helped Roger solve a puzzle, Professor Sinistra can lend him a hand during Astronomy on Wednesday evening."
Snape looked unimpressed, but he did not object. Dumbledore then gestured toward the unicorn with a more serious expression.
"Severus, we also need you to extract the unicorn blood," he said. "I believe Professor Quirrell will try to borrow some."
"I understand," Snape said.
He nodded, though the sight of the unicorn's corpse left him briefly dazed. Aside from that person, no one in the wizarding world would dare provoke the curse attached to unicorn blood.
.....
"What would happen if Nagini drank unicorn blood?" Roger muttered.
Back in his dormitory, he took Nagini out of his pouch. The great snake coiled immediately, hissing with open hatred as if she wanted nothing more than to bite the young wizard in front of her to death.
"Do not look at me like that," Roger said. "You are a human being."
He gestured for Nagini to behave, then calmly secured her and extracted one millilitre of blood for preservation. His movements were clean and practised, entirely untouched by guilt.
"A witch, like me," Roger added.
He placed the test tube into a storage case, wrote a label, and stuck it neatly onto the glass. After Nagini finished eating, she obediently crawled back into the pouch to rest.
Under Roger's training, she had developed a basic conditioned reflex. One millilitre of blood would be drawn every day, and afterward she would be fed until full.
If she resisted, Roger would knock her unconscious. Then she would go hungry for three days, but the blood would still be taken every day.
After testing him many times, Nagini finally understood that she could not beat Roger. Since then, her life had settled into a simple pattern of eating, sleeping, and being studied.
Research into the blood malediction had reached a stalemate. For now, Roger could only collect daily blood samples and preserve them for future use.
"We cannot communicate," Roger sighed. "I do not speak Parseltongue."
He thought over the wizards he knew. Of them all, only Voldemort and Harry Potter could speak to snakes.
Harry was impossible. He would never help, and even if he did, Roger could not explain how he knew about Harry's Parseltongue in the first place.
Roger dripped the unicorn blood he had collected from the forest floor into a test tube. The blood inside trembled violently, then fell into an eerie stillness.
His expression changed. He quickly put on his monocle, prepared a smear of the blood sample, and examined it carefully.
Every cell inside had shattered.
"There is a reaction," Roger said softly. "But under the current conditions, the research cannot continue."
He sighed and wrote down the first experimental record. There was very little research on blood maledictions in the magical world, and only a small number of wizards even knew they existed.
The only confirmed information was that the blood malediction was passed from mother to daughter. Based on Muggle knowledge, Roger speculated that it might be connected to the double X chromosome.
But this was the magical world. No one could be certain the problem truly lay in chromosomes.
Perhaps it was simply a curse, just like the curse on the Defence Against the Dark Arts post. Magic did not always respect neat scientific categories.
"A curse?" Roger repeated.
He circled the word heavily in his notes. Perhaps he could use modern scientific instruments to eliminate certain possibilities, and ideally, he would need to find a family known to carry this hereditary curse.
"Sophistry," Roger murmured after thinking for a while.
The only available material he had was Nagini, which brought him back to the same problem: communication. If he could speak directly with her, his research into the blood malediction would naturally progress much more smoothly.
The difficulty was that Parseltongue was innate. Roger had never heard of anyone learning it through instruction.
"Perhaps I should shift my focus away from the Gaunt family in Britain," Roger said, flipping through a collection of wizard portraits and records. "There may be wizards on the Continent who understand Parseltongue."
His fingers stopped on the image of a Dark wizard: Herpo the Foul.
Herpo had been the first known wizard to breed a Basilisk and one of the earliest recorded Parselmouths. More importantly, he had also been the first wizard known to create a Horcrux.
"Perhaps his Horcrux still exists," Roger said. "Or perhaps his family still has descendants."
.....
After Astronomy class, Professor Sinistra called out to him before he could leave.
"Roger, please wait a moment," she said, approaching with a smile. "I heard from the centaurs that you unlocked the secret of the star map?"
"Yes, Professor Sinistra," Roger said, somewhat surprised. He had not expected her to have any connection with the centaur herd. "You know them?"