Chapter 114: The Young Woman (Edited)

Tom led Hermione down the corridor ahead and into the real Chamber of Secrets, where the flames had been extinguished, but a faint scent still remained. Tom noticed that the serpentine reliefs on the pillars were glowing again, as if the grease had automatically replenished itself.

"Is it the basilisk?" Looking at the basilisk carcass, Hermione was not intimidated, but rather curious, as she knelt down and took a close look at the green scales and long, dagger-thin fangs.

"I never thought there was such a creature under Hogwarts, what does it usually eat?"

"You'll see." Tom led Hermione into the tunnel at the mouth of the Slytherin stone statue.

"Hold on tight!" Tom transformed back into a phoenix and led Hermione out of the tunnel.

"These transformations of yours are quite useful." said Hermione enviously as she released the phoenix's claws after landing on the ground. The trip would have taken her two to three hours on foot, but after turning into a phoenix, she flew there in less than ten minutes, even with a person in tow.

He looked around, twitched his nose twice, inhaled some of the cool, damp mountain air, and realized something very wrong: "Did we leave Hogwarts?"

Receiving the answer in the affirmative, Hermione panicked like a startled deer, "How are we going to get out of Hogwarts? Oh my god, this is definitely against school rules, we've probably broken a hundred of them since we entered the Chamber of Secrets, we're going back-"

"Don't worry about it, you only break school rules if you get caught." Seeing that Hermione was about to get carried away with him, Tom threw down his trump card, "If we go back now, we'll get caught when Filch and the others are on patrol. We're already here, why don't we rest outside for a while?"

Hermione calmed down a bit and, despite her reluctance, realized that this was not a good time to go back. Tom was right, even if she had to go back, it would have to be later in the evening, when Filch and the patrolling teachers had rested.

So she and Tom found a rock to sit on together.

The cool mountain breeze was a relief to Hermione: on second thought, it was a good thing, at least it had been a wonderful adventure and a new experience for her.

However, the breeze in the mountains is a bit chilly, in the Scottish Highlands in September it is already autumn and the night is still a bit cool.

Thinking she might be here for a few more hours, Hermione moved a little closer to Tom.

"What's that?" she was drawn to a small glow nearby and, as she got closer, she saw that the source of the glow was a wreath wrapped in a necklace.

She reached out, but stopped as she thought of the stories in the book with the curses associated with them.

But Tom was one step ahead of her, picking up the crown and handing it to her. The moment the necklace came in contact with both of them, a white light enveloped them, and when it did, they both disappeared.

...

When Hermione recovered from the dazzling white light, she found herself in a small cottage. The furniture around her looked a bit shabby to Hermione, and the cabin wasn't very nice.

Hermione's first thought was: could that necklace be the legendary portkey?

She had read that some of the common ways for wizards to travel included a portkey, a magical object that could travel through space. Hermione thought for a moment that it would. She thought the first priority was to find Tom.

"All users must be in the same place after the portkey teleportation." Hermione was a little confused, but she suppressed her inner turmoil and the strange, twisted feeling she felt inside, and held her wand in one hand while pushing the door with the other.

Outside was a medieval town,

Many houses were lined up, with red tiled roofs and walls of gray brick or a combination of wood and white mud.

Hermione walked down the stairs outside the house, toward the dirt road.

There are many towns like this in Europe that still have a medieval look and, of course, are much cleaner.

There were some old chickens cooing by the side of the road, plucking and eating from the grass at the edge of the fence, and they weren't afraid when they saw people coming, they were still strolling quietly around.

Hermione took a few steps and finally noticed something different: did she feel taller? After a couple of gestures, did she also feel bigger?

Hermione quickly determined that she had grown. She was now more like a girl of 17 or 18 in size. This made her nervous, and the fairy tales she had read as a child came back to her mind.

At that moment, she heard the church bells and unconsciously made her way towards it.

As she approached the church, the crowd grew larger, and Hermione passed through the people, quickly ascertaining that this was not twentieth-century Earth. The people around her were dressed in medieval style, and there was no hint of modernity in the objects they wore.

She walked slowly, observing the small marketplace, where there was a small stone prison in which two men were locking a drunkard, and a bakery at the end of the street where the baker was carrying a crate of freshly baked bread.

Hermione glanced at the loaf, and thought that even the worst bakery in England made better bread than this. And these loaves, even if they were freshly baked, didn't have the aroma of the bakery down the street, that was for sure, the aroma of the modern roadside bakery came from the abundance of milk, butter, sugar and fine flour in the ingredients, how could a small village store that made black bread have that aroma?

The ordinary bread of modern society could have been found on the tables of the marquises of the Middle Ages. Feeding that bread to pigeons in the square would have been an inhumane act centuries ago.

Hermione walked through the dirty streets, where there were several beautiful, tame horses and donkeys that kept the streets smelly.

People were coming and going picking fresh vegetables and freshly baked bread from the stalls, and there was a seafood store not far away, with flies flying over oysters, prawns and the fish.

"Good morning, Hermione." A voice came from behind Hermione.

Hermione immediately turned her head and found a dark-haired young man of about eighteen, though a bit more mature, but Hermione was sure: that young man was Tom.

Tom was wearing very simple clothes, a linen blouse and a pair of rough pants, the blouse tied with a cloth belt, a straw hat on his head and a pair of sandals on his feet.

Hermione, on the other hand, was wearing a much more respectable outfit: a white dress with what appeared to be blue stripes, a blue apron-style skirt, a storage bag around her waist, and a pair of shoes that looked more like slippers. What Hermione noticed more than the clothes was that she finally had her hair pulled back at the nape of her neck in a silky braid.

"You seem to be in a better financial position than I am." joked Tom.

"Are you still worrying about this?" Hermione chided him, "What's our situation now?"

"If I'm right, that necklace probably got us somewhere in history." Tom told Hermione his suspicions about his speculations, which in Tom's mind were more like "shadows" of a story that had actually occurred in history. These shadows were like photographs of a moving carriage. Tom and she had entered the contents of the photo, and even if they changed things, it would have no effect on the actual carriage.

"So, how do we get out?" Hermione didn't want to spend the rest of her life living in this remnant of history, where there was no good food or interesting books.

"By fulfilling something, or an obsession."

"An obsession..." Hermione chewed on the word.

The two decided to take a walk around the neighborhood first.

The village market is not large, only a few old farmers sell vegetables and fruits picked from the orchard, plus a bakery, a butcher and fish stand, and a grocery store.

At the entrance to the church, a well-dressed person was reading an official document, and a group of people gathered to watch.

Tom and Hermione listened from outside, as it turned out that the lord of the lands, a viscount, had been called to war by some great man. Tom and Hermione listened for a bit and then left: it was all nonsense.

Tom and Hermione were stopped on the outskirts of the village by a young woman in a long black dress.

"Are you on your way to the Scarborough Fair?" The woman's brown hair was braided in many locks and looked disheveled.

"Yes, that's where we're going." Tom nodded without waiting for Hermione to respond.

"Great, can you get me a helping of parsley, a helping of sage, a helping of rosemary and a helping of thyme for Benn who lives on the beach south of Scarborough?"

"No problem." Tom was quick to agree.

Just as they were about to leave, the girl hesitated for a long time and said, "If he writes again, could you bring it to me, please?"

Tom naturally agreed.

Tom and Hermione left the village.

"Did you notice the tiara on her head? That crown, it's exactly like the one we found." After they were away, Hermione couldn't wait to share her discovery with Tom.

"I've seen it. She must be the key to getting us out of this mess." Tom echoed.