26 Book 6

It was wednesday the next week and Lucas was currently reading in the library, waiting for Tracey to arrive. He was reading a book about elemental magic as the lost looking Slytherin girl walked in. Her eyes were unfocused and she seemed to be looking for something.

Lucas approached her and invaded her mind through the backdoor he had created the last time they had talked. It was easy to create one once he was inside.

Just like the others before her, she showed Ms Pince the permission to enter the forbidden section of the library and shortly after got the green light to enter.

But as she tried to push open the metal fence, nothing happened. The gate wouldn't budge.

Lucas who was observing the whole thing from afar was confused. He walked over to Tracey, past the librarian, who collapsed with a dull sound on her desk as he walked by her. When he arrived next to Tracey he released his domain, which unlike last time didn't bounce back, instead his magic dissipated.

'This is concerning.' Lucas thought before a person flashed before his eyes.

Snape.

'He had to have told Dumbledore about my shenanigans. The question is, what now?'

The first thing he did was sent Tracey away, the second one was wake up Ms Pince and get back to reading. There wasn't really a point in walking away or hiding. If he was correct, then the headmaster knew exactly what he had been doing and what he just tried. 'A shame, but what can you do. Not like I could go up against Dumbledore.'

----

Later that night after curfew, when the candles were already extinguished and Ms Pince had gone to bed Lucas finally sat up and put the pile of books laying on the table away. They slowly floated into the shelves were he had gotten them.

He made his way out of the library in total darkness, he didn't need a candle or a Lumos spell to see, his domain was enough. Similar to bats with their ecolocation he wandered the empty corridors to his destination.

The light breeze of his magic swept the way in front of him.

"Humm, mmh, mmmmh…" He hummed a lullaby his mom used to tell him years ago.

Still humming he approached a corner and was about to turn, but when his magic filled the corridor a cold shiver travelled down his spine.

Whatever was behind that corner was dangerous. Dangerous enough to ring all possible alarm bells within him.

Then it slowly came into his perception, an enormous and elongated creature that reeked of the severs. In that split second he recognised it, the Basilisk was here. As his magic fully bounced back, he saw it, its dragon like head with rows of razor sharp teeth dripping with the most dangerous venom known to wizardkind, as well as its glowing yellow eyes.

And he was gone.

It was so fast that he couldn't even cast a single spell.

It wasn't one of the most dangerious cratures for nothing.

----

The next day in the morning inside the Slytherin common room.

"Come on Daph, we are going to miss him if we don't hurry," Tracey said excitedly to her best friend. She had planned to introduce Lucas to Daphne, and the best or only time for that was super early in the morning, before most students even woke up.

"Don't get me wrong, I am all for diligence and hard work, but why does he have to wake up THIS early?" Daphne murmured drowsily while working hard to keep her eyes open.

"You know he is a Hufflepuff, right? Their motto is hard work," Tracey responded, already at the door and waiting for her friend to catch up.

"Yeah. *Sigh*, let's get this over with. I want to go back to sleep afterwards."

Both Slytherin girls walked through the empty corridors, but before they reached the Great Hall, they felt something attack their Occlumency shields. It was weak and easily shrugged off, however, both proceeded with utmost caution, because they did not see their attacker. Something very dangerious when it came to mind attacks.

Their wands at the ready they carefully approached the corner from which they felt the attack. With a protego ready to be deployed at any moments notice, they turned the corner.

Instantly a wave of Legilimency washed over them, so strong that their shields started to shake, but before any damage could happen, both cast their prepared shield charm. As the mind magic bounced off their protegos, they got a glimpse of what their attackers mind looked like.

It was a mess, barely holding together. Nothing they had ever seen. It was better described as ruins than an actual mind at this point.

But what they saw in the middle of all that brought a grave expression onto Daphne's face. There on the castle's stone floor lay a young boy who perfectly fit the description her friend had provided her, next to a stange blue construct.

Contrary to her Tracey rushed to the unconscious boy and checked if he was still alive, which he obviously was, otherwise he couldn't have attacked them with Legilimency, but in the heat of the moment she didn't think about that, only that one of her two friends was unwell. "We need to bring him to the hospital wing!"

"Tracey you never told me that he was a Legilimens." Daphne said, her tone a mix of concern and surprise.

"That's not what's important now, I think he got petrified." Tracey urged her friend to help her.

'But it is.' Daphne thought as she finally helped her.

They cast the levitation charm onto Lucas and made their way to the hospital wing.

*knock* *knock*

"Coming!" came back from inside.

"What brought you here this early." Madam Pomfrey said, before she opened the door and saw the two Slytherins with a floating body. "Oh, dear. Come in! Come in! Bring him over there, to that bed."

Once they were there and Lucas was laying in the bed the matron ran a few diagnostic spells on him, but just like the other victims in the room he was petrified and she couldn't do anything about that. Afterwards she reassured Tracey and Daphne that apart from the obvious he is fine and that they should go get breakfast, she will take care of him.

As the two were about to leave they they heard a *pop* coming from the room, reminding them of the sound an apparition causes. They turned around just to see Dumbledore speaking with Madam Pomfrey, but what was strange was that the headmaster was frowning, something they had never seen before.

Before they could ask anything Dumbledore kindly asked them to leave in his normal tone and with his usual grandfatherly smile present on his face. Daphne knew it was better to not ask too many questions, especially when it concerned Dumbledore, and she already had plenty to ask Tracey.

When the Slytherin girls were gone Dumbledore wordlessly and wandlessly cast a spell on Madam Pomfrey, which made her freeze in the middle of walking away. He then turned back to Lucas and observed him carefully.

He had easily shrugged off the Legilimency wave, which made him even more curious than he already was. He swiftly invaded his mind without first consulting with his right hand man.

Arriving at what he would describe as a sorry excuse of a mindscape, he explored every nook and cranny of it, which wasn't that big to begin with. It was about 10 m², filled with what he thought used to be a stone house, but now the only thing that remained were cracked stones and ripped single pages. The only structure that survived all this was a glowing hexagonal block, which couldn't hide its content from his eyes, as much as it tried to do. Apart from the state of his mind, the other surprise was that there were two Lucas' present, one inside that prison and one outside. Both were unconscious.

"Interesting." Dumbledore said to himself as he approached the one outside. Without hesitation he invaded that one's mind. The first thing he noticed was that he met no resistance and the second thing was that there was nothing, no thoughts or feelings. It felt more like a decoy to him, like a trap that was supposed to lead you further into some kind of prison from which escape would be exponentially harder than Lucas' normal mind. That was his best guess, and a very good strategy at that.

'Maybe I should expand my own defences.' he thought picturing a separate realm in his own mind, in which he had full control over everything, akin to an omnipotent god.

Moving on from that he turned to the glowing blue hexagon, the only thing that survived the basilisk's attack, which was strange to begin with, because the other petrified students did not experience any of that.

Anyway, he approached it and studied it for some time. He had never seen anything like this. It seemed simple enough to be just a box, but then it wouldn't have survived the attack. Dumbledore cuncluded that it was magical in nature, but he had no clue to what extent exactly.

He hadn't found anything of interest, but he wasn't the most knowledgable when it came to Legilimency after all. He eventually reached out with his hand intending to touch it, confident that he could deal with anything that might come his way.

Even before he made contact with it he got a bad feeling, but he pressed on thinking that Lucas' mind was too damaged to defend itself against him.

How wrong he was.

The moment he made contact he felt like a spike ran straight through his head. He immediatly let go and retreated a few steps, a nasty headache already settling in. He only felt this kind of power once, a long time ago and it brought back unsettling memories.

There was nothing else here, so he left his mind. Outside again he unfroze Madam Pomfrey and with a *pop* disappeared the same way he came.

He had a hat and a potionmaster to talk to.

----

Lucas woke up, lying on a cold stone floor and as he opened his eyes he saw nothing but darkness. Even though he tried to remember how he got here and where "here" even was, he felt stangely at home. He pushed himself up, his heart's steady beat calming his racing mind. Now sitting there he could make out his surroundings.

They were filled by debris, fallen cracked stone, splintered wooden shelves and the remnants of stone walls littered the ground. If he had to guess he would estimate the area to be around 100 m². He stood up and started to walk around, taking in his surroundings fully.

Lucas's confusion only deepened as he surveyed the scene around him. The feeling of familiarity clashed with the utter destruction around him. He felt an odd sense of detachment, as if he were an observer in his own body, navigating a world that was both recognizable and foreign. Wherever he went he was greeted by devastation. It looked like someone blew up a bomb.

Bending down to pick up a partially intact book, pieces of memories began to flicker in his mind, like fragments of a shattered mirror reflecting disjointed images. He saw flashes of faces, moments of laughter, and snippets of conversations. But they were fleeting, slipping through his grasp like sand. He tried to hold onto them, to make sense of the chaos within his mind.

Eventually he found himself back where he had woken up, where he saw in the corner a mostly intact stairway down into the underground. Walking down those stairs, past the now destroyed traps sticking out of the wall, he found himself in a room filled with stone statues, of all kinds of people, frozen in time.

His jumbled mind slowly recognised what he was seeing. It all felt strangely familiar to him until he remembered. He had constructed this room and had filled it with all kinds of peoples' lives. He also remembered that this was the reason he existed in the first place and that he should talk with the original Lucas. So he made his way back up and into the hidden room, which was now easier to find thanks to the abnormal amounts of cracks on those stones.

There he saw his mirror image inside the blue glowing hexagon, the problem was he was still unconscious.