Death and Domain - Chapter 7

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Snape's footsteps echoed loudly as we crossed the dungeons toward the Slytherin common area. I followed behind him, trying not to snicker to myself. In my mind, he looked like a child stomping their feet after someone took them away from their toys.

When Snape walked, His long black robes billowed behind him like a pirate's flag. You didn't have to be a stylist to tell the thing was too bulky for him. The man didn't eat right, I could tell. By the robes and the gauntness of his face and how twitchy his hands were.

Reviving Lily wasn't a passion for him; it had become an obsession. It's like his life had been put on pause and only the bare minimum went into the less important duty of survival. And yet, given how he hadn't stopped glancing back at me with a sneer on his face, you would think I hadn't just given him a crumb of hope in fulfilling his decade's long dream.

Not that I could blame him much. Octavian' track record didn't necessarily inspire confidence.

We arrived at the entrance to the common room a minute later, a stretch of bare stone that wouldn't look amiss among the countless others if you didn't know what to look for.

"Summa cogitatio," Snape announced, and the passage opened with a low rumble of stone. He shot me another annoyed look over his shoulder and marched forward.

All in all, Slytherin's common room was an elegant mixture of torture chamber and medieval opulence. Elaborate green lamps hung from the low ceiling on metal chains. Plush, button-tufted sofas and high-backed chairs in black and dark green tones spread around the carpeted floor in small circles as if to encourage mini cliques and groups to form.

On one side of the room, a rough stone wall accommodated a crackling hearth with an ebony mantelpiece elaborately carved with snakes and dueling wizards, while the other had great panes of green-tinted glass showing the depths of the Great lake. Another semicircle of chairs and sofas sat beneath that glass, these ones even more imposing and regal.

I stared at the chairs. Octavian had never sat there in all the years he'd been a Slytherin.

"Looking to be the Prime now, are you?" A bit ahead, Snape was looking back at me with a sardonic smile stretching across his face.

Ah yes, the Prime. The title given to the current 'ruler' of Slytherin.

It was nothing I had ever heard of in my previous life, and Octavian' own self-imposed ignorance did not help in filling me in on the house politics of this world. Beyond knowing where not to sit and who to avoid pissing off, the boy had kept his head down and his ears shut.

Not a bad policy for someone as down on the ladder of power as Octavian was. Of course, that would have to change. From Slytherin came the majority of the future leaders of the Wizarding World, seeing as purebloods formed the political and financial elite of society. If I wanted to extend my Domains, it seemed wise to start forming my own faction while still in school.

I eyed the Prime's seat curiously. "Perhaps," I said, which got a snort from Snape. "Though I can't say I'm too familiar with the political affairs of the house."

"Of course you are not." Snape rolled his eyes.

"I've avoided it as much as I could," I said easily.

He snorted again, then turned back around and kept walking away toward a gap on the wall near the glass windows. "Given you can only be of use to me alive, I will recommend you keep avoiding it too. Victra Rosier would splatter you against a wall before you had your wand halfway out of your pocket if you tried anything."

It pricked, but I couldn't disagree. "Having my wand out wouldn't help me either at this point."

"No, I don't suppose it would." Snape stopped by the alcove on the wall, which hid a sturdy wooden door, and pulled a large brass key from within his robes.

"The dueling strip?" I asked, surprised. Octavian knew that much, though he never attended any of the matches fought there, few though they were.

Snape gave me a sharp nod, then inserted the key into the hole and turned it three times to one side, then two more to the other and back again. "Only the Head of House and the Prime can sanction a match, so only the two of us have a key to the arena." After a moment's wait, the locking mechanism made a strange sound, and the key was swallowed up like it was made of liquid into the door. "And only the one who inserted the key can retrieve it."

There were a few other passages in the Slytherin common room that didn't lead to the dormitories and the rooms for the prefects, though Octavian had never even dared look inside them either. "Are you and the Prime the only ones who can open the other doors too?"

"Only the Prime," he said, surprising me.

From Octavian's memories, I already knew how influential the Prime was, even if the details escaped me. But the fact there was a system in place for a student to bypass even the authority of the Head of House was news to me.

"Seems very… hierarchical," I offered. The door clanked open and swung inside by itself. "For a student to have so much power, that is."

"And you only noticed it now?" Shaking his head at me, Snape ducked inside first and I followed after. We entered into a long, barely lit tunnel, but I could see green lights gleaming faintly in the end. "Why do you think your room is always the smallest and always at the end of the dormitory for your year?"

I frowned in the darkness. "I didn't know that. I thought—" I stopped myself. I had just realized Octavian had never been in anyone else's room, so he wouldn't have ever known there would be a difference.

"Everything is a hierarchy here," he said as if he was speaking to a toddler. "The higher your position, the more privileges you get. Top students in their year get better rooms, either through popularity or influence or force. Prefects get their own too, then the Prime. One of those doors back in the common room lead to the Prime's private apartments, the other for a chamber to confer with his or her deputies."

"That's a lot of privileges." Privileges I wouldn't mind having.

Now that I thought of it, even the Prefect system worked differently in the house. They were selected through popular vote here, with campaigns and secret ballots and everything. Octavius had done it every year, but always for a candidate someone else made him vote for.

However, there had been two votes this year, since Victra Rosier had called for another election after she unseated the last Prime. It was only now that I realized what had happened. Voted in or not, Prefects depended on the Prime's favor to keep their position.

The amount of power the ruler of Slytherin had was concerning.

I only noticed we stepped out into the Slytherin arena when the lights made me blink. Torches burning with green fire hung from walls of gray stone. Two rings of stone grandstands with padded seats would allow students to bear witness to two underaged children flinging spells at each other. And, in the center, a long raised platform cut the room like a sword.

Opposite the tunnel, so it was the first thing students saw when entering the arena, three words were set in relief on the wall, a giant carved snake curled around the letters.

Pauci Sunt Principes.

Slytherin's hidden motto. Few are the rulers.

"It's all a model, then," I said out loud. "Of the real world. A way to train future leaders and politicians. And, of course, a way to condition those without power to accept their place in society from a young age. Clever."

"Yes," he drawled. "The whole system was supposed to encourage cunning and foster leadership." His tone suggested he didn't think much of the whole idea. "Now it houses dim-witted children with ideas of grandeur."

We reached the bottom of the arena after taking the stairs. Up front, another led up the platform. Snape marched up without pause.

"Do any other houses have something similar?" I asked, almost wondering to myself.

"Do you discuss Slytherin business with outsiders?" Snape paused at the top of the stairs, turning to me with a frown. "No? Then do not expect the other houses to do the same."

He was trying to get a rise out of me, I knew, with the way he'd spoken. It's easier to understand a man who's quick to anger, you see. You become a known quantity. So when I reached my place on the end of the platform, I turned to him with a bright smile.

"Should we start, then?" There was still a couple of hours before the feast ended, so we wouldn't need to worry about being interrupted. "The tour and the lecture were riveting, I will say, but it is not the only tutoring I need. My spells do not seem to work properly, no matter what I do. Correct my form or pronunciation or whatever it is, and I will consider this a winning day for our partnership."