Chapter 147: Another Kind of Ending

No matter how reluctant he was, Snape still left with Dumbledore.

Madam Pomfrey still would not allow Silven to leave.

At noon, Ron woke up. Harry and Hermione begged outside the door for a long time before they were finally allowed in to visit.

From them, Silven learned that they had each been awarded fifty points as well, on the grounds that they had foreseen Lockhart's plot in advance and thwarted his scheme to use the Basilisk to wreak havoc in the castle.

Only they did not receive the Special Award for Services to the School.

Even so, Harry and Ron were already very satisfied, their faces flushed with excitement.

Somehow, the Chamber, the Basilisk, and the three-headed dog had already spread throughout the whole school... the great hole in the entrance hall that had not yet been repaired, the corroded grass on the Quidditch pitch, and those enormous footprints were all the best proof.

A three-headed dog battling a Basilisk, a legendary duel of magical creatures... people had gone mad, desperate to know what had happened the night before.

Harry and Hermione had lost count of how many times they had already said the same things, but every time they ran into a new wave of people, they were asked about it all over again.

They had come to the hospital wing not only to visit Silven and Ron, but also because it was quiet enough here.

With Madam Pomfrey around, those people could not possibly chase them here to ask about last night's details.

They just had not expected that Silven was also very curious about the matter, and asked quite a few questions about the Chamber during their chat.

But since Silven was already in the know, the two of them held nothing back from him, and recounted the events of last night exactly as they had happened.

It was pretty much what Ron had said: Harry noticed something off about Lockhart, then learned the location of the Chamber from a ghost, and by a stroke of luck opened the entrance and stumbled upon Lockhart's plot.

It sounded very reasonable. Harry and the others had done exactly that last year — tailing a professor, getting past one obstacle after another, and finally succeeding in stopping Quirrell from stealing the Philosopher's Stone.

Only this time the difficulty had been raised. The Basilisk was not Quirrell; it would not turn to stone just because it touched Harry. So they could only run, and go look for a professor's help.

Only in the process, they happened to run into Silven and Hagrid, who had just come back from outside, and then everything that followed happened.

Hagrid dragged the Basilisk away, Silven rode the three-headed dog to help...

Harry shook his head hard. Honestly, every time he recalled the sight of Silven riding the three-headed dog, it still felt a little unreal to him, even now.

Perhaps their chatting had been a bit too loud; before long, Madam Pomfrey came and chased them away.

……

By the next day, Silven and Ron were finally allowed to leave the hospital wing and return to the castle.

But Ron was a little unhappy.

"If I'd only stayed one more day, I wouldn't have had to sit the exams," he said in frustration. "I should have asked Fred for a Skiving Snackbox in advance. That would have definitely kept me here until tomorrow."

Silven had his doubts about his words.

Not about the effect of the Skiving Snackbox — Fred and George's reputation was still quite solid. The fact that their Skiving Snackbox had not been discovered by the professors until now was largely because the effects were so convincing that even Madam Pomfrey had not noticed anything off.

But Ron might not be able to afford one.

Fred would not give his own brother a discount; not raising the price on a familiar customer was already considered him being in a good mood.

The moment the two of them returned to the Great Hall, they instantly became the focus of everyone's attention.

Ron was over the moon, until the owls arrived carrying today's New issue of the Daily Prophet.

"Look, look! Professor Lockhart is actually a fraud!"

Someone shouted, instantly drawing everyone's attention. People turned their eyes to the newspaper one after another. Those who had not subscribed crowded in with the others.

Hermione happened to have a subscription, so Harry and Ron leaned their heads in from either side and began reading the contents aloud.

【According to informed sources, the books written by Gilderoy Lockhart were not his own experiences, but were shamelessly stolen from other people's memories.

【Wizard Grant Fiddler has now recovered his erased memories under treatment at St. Mungo's, and has revealed to us Gilderoy Lockhart's shameless scam.】

Below was a photograph of a big-nosed old wizard gesticulating excitedly about something.

"He asked me how I drove away a werewolf, and said it was to provide material for the Daily Prophet..."

【Later we found other wizards who had lost their memories. It turns out that every single deed Gilderoy Lockhart claimed to have done was stolen from someone else's memory!】

Today's paper unusually carried photographs of seven different wizards, with their deeds listed alongside...

The big-nosed wizard had driven a werewolf out of a village.

A hunchbacked witch had banished the Wan Lun ghost.

A half-blood goblin had defeated a ferocious vampire...

……

Everything in those books could be traced, but none of it had anything to do with Gilderoy Lockhart.

For a moment the Great Hall buzzed with discussion, the hum never letting up.

"I told you ages ago he was a fraud, but you wouldn't believe me," Ron said smugly, looking at Hermione.

Hermione said nothing. She had indeed not believed it before, but during her investigation of Lockhart she had actually already uncovered the truth.

So the article did not surprise her all that much; she only felt that Lockhart was even more outrageous than she had imagined.

All those books, and every single one of them was stolen.

The news about Lockhart instantly eclipsed people's curiosity about the Basilisk and the three-headed dog.

The hole in the entrance hall was repaired very quickly, and the professors took the opportunity to rework the pipes as well, to prevent anything similar from happening again.

The corroded grass on the Quidditch pitch was replaced with new turf, the pits gouged out by Fluffy were filled in, and everything looked as if nothing had ever happened.

On top of that, with the exams approaching, people soon stopped paying attention to that Basilisk that only existed in word-of-mouth.

The matter had been resolved perfectly... or perhaps not.

Silven still had many doubts, such as why Harry had been able to hear Lockhart talking inside his office.

Moreover, ghosts had always disliked chatting in front of the living, and would never have leaked information like "the entrance to the Chamber," which needed to be kept strictly secret.

What were the odds that Nearly Headless Nick and the Fat Friar would, out of character, discuss exactly that — and that Harry just happened to overhear them?

And then there was the protective charm Dumbledore had supposedly left on the entrance's water tap, as Ron had mentioned... four ordinary animals? What kind of protective charm was that? And among those four animals there just happened to be a snake, causing Harry to accidentally speak Parseltongue.

And then there was Dumbledore himself — how could he have rushed out of the castle on the strength of a single letter? The Headmaster of Hogwarts, the Head Mage of the International Confederation of Wizards, the greatest white wizard of our age — had he really fallen for it that easily?

When Riddle broke the charm he had left on the door, did he not feel a thing?

Last was the phoenix Fawkes...

Silven cut himself a piece of roasted potato and glanced up at Harry beside him, who was guessing exam questions with Ron.

A thought suddenly struck him.

If he hadn't gone to find Hagrid at the time, and the two of them hadn't appeared in the castle at that moment, what would the outcome have been?

Harry and Hermione were cornered by the basilisk in the Entrance Hall, then the two kept fleeing, the basilisk in hot pursuit... possibly inside the castle, possibly outside.

Once they reached a certain spot, the two would split up—one luring the basilisk away, the other going to find a professor for help.

Harry was most likely the one to draw the basilisk, and of course he definitely couldn't outrun it—he'd be caught eventually.

Perhaps at that moment, Fawkes would have appeared with the Sorting Hat and helped deal with the basilisk's greatest threat... a phoenix isn't fazed by the basilisk's gaze either.

Thinking of this, all those mysteries from before seemed to unravel at once.

Dumbledore probably wanted to use this chance to let Harry gain some experience—after all, the Harry of now was impulsive, reckless, and really didn't look like someone who could face Voldemort head-on.

Of course, this was only Silven's guess.

As for what the truth actually was, that didn't matter... Silven chose to trust Headmaster Dumbledore unconditionally—he was probably just too old, which was why he'd been deceived by a bad person... just like how he suddenly forgot he still had a Shrunken Lizard Hide Pouch on him.

Of course, Snape knew too—he just hadn't thought of it for the moment.

But Dumbledore definitely remembered. Silven noticed that when he was in the hospital wing, he had glanced at his own cuff.

That was where the Shrunken Lizard Hide Pouch was tucked.

Yet Dumbledore said nothing, and didn't remind Snape either.

Silven ran his hand across his cuff, and two eight-inch-long, slightly curved, dagger-like fangs appeared in his palm.

The basilisk's fangs—the two largest ones from the upper jaw. The one slightly smaller from the lower jaw had been snapped off, and he wasn't sure if that mattered.

Another one had been broken off by Hagrid and pinned into a painting in the Entrance Hall. When Silven later returned to the Entrance Hall, there was only a hole left there—probably collected by some professor.

Besides that, he'd also picked up something good, just not easy to take out.

(End of chapter)