Snape returned after midnight with mud on one sleeve and a small burn across the back of his hand. Percy noticed both because he had been staring at the office door for the last twenty minutes, pretending that counted as resting.
Dumbledore rose without asking why the man was late. He moved the nearest chair away from the fire, and Snape sat in it with enough care to make Percy stop preparing a joke.
"He knows the first route is closed," Snape said. "He has decided that makes it an inconvenience rather than a defeat."
Harry looked up from the cup cooling between his hands. Hermione put down her quill, and Ron stopped turning his instruction card over beneath the table.
Snape's gaze passed over all four of them. "I see the recommendation to sleep was received with your usual respect."
"We lay down," Ron said. "It didn't take."
Dumbledore gave Snape water. The headmaster waited until he had drunk before asking whether Voldemort still possessed the stolen sample.
He did, though the original cradle had been taken apart. Two metal bands now held the vial inside a wooden frame, and a Death Eater had spent most of the meeting adjusting them while Voldemort examined a map.
Percy kept his hands beneath his knees. "Map of Scotland?"
"Several maps of Scotland. One of a coastline that no longer exists."
Hermione leaned forward. Snape looked at her until she leaned back far enough to suggest that she remembered being tired.
The older map showed the land before the lake had become a lake. Snape had not been close enough to read its labels, but he had seen a branching mark repeated along a line beneath the present hills, and Voldemort had referred to one location as a place where water had once been admitted.
"An inlet," Hermione said. She glanced towards the lake beyond the window.
"Possibly. He did not invite questions."
Percy pictured the pressure Aequor had shown him after their return. They had shut a narrow crack near the chamber, but the larger boundary reached farther than the walls of Hogwarts, and Voldemort was looking for a piece that nobody had built a castle over.
Harry stared into his cup. "Did it speak to him while you were there?"
Snape's expression tightened. "He addressed the vial once. Nobody in the room appeared eager to mention that it did not answer aloud."
"What did he ask?"
"Whether a promise survived a change of entrance."
The fire shifted in its grate. Percy had spent the evening trying not to think about the voice offering to return people, and now the offer seemed to have acquired a map and somebody willing to follow it.
Dumbledore asked about the burn. Snape looked down as though the injury belonged to someone he found irritating.
"The apparatus discharged when its handler loosened both bands. I was standing nearer than was convenient."
"Accidentally?" Harry asked.
Snape met his eyes. "I recommend that you learn the value of leaving an incomplete report incomplete."
Harry looked away first. Percy decided that was as close as either of them was likely to come to thanking the other for anything tonight.
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Dorridge's reply arrived before Dumbledore could send them to bed again. Her Patronus came through the office wall, stopped beside the desk, and announced that the missing officer had been seen on the Yorkshire road where the evidence convoy was attacked.
Seen was the word that mattered. The message repeated it when Dumbledore asked whether the officer had been recovered, and Hermione's hand closed around her quill without writing anything.
A local constable had found a man beside a broken roadside marker. By the time magical assistance arrived, both the man and the short stretch of lane where he'd been standing had disappeared into heavy mist.
There had been no explosion and no spell residue from Apparition. The constable remembered walking towards the man, but his notebook recorded the same time twice, eleven minutes apart.
"The road returned," the Patronus said in Dorridge's voice. "The officer did not. We have closed the area and stopped attempts to enter."
Harry set his cup down too hard. Nobody commented on the tea that spilled over his fingers.
"The man in the road," he said. His voice was barely above a whisper.
Dumbledore sent instructions for the constable to be checked and the witnesses kept apart until their accounts were written down. He requested copies of both times and a description of the marker, then dismissed the messenger with a promise to come himself if the mist reappeared.
"It could have shown them an image," Hermione said. Her voice sounded like she was arguing against something she wanted. "It knew we were thinking about him."
"Or it was telling the truth about where he is," Harry said. He wiped the spilled tea from his hand.
"Those aren't the same as telling the truth about giving him back," Percy said. He wished the distinction felt less like an excuse to sit in a warm room.
Ron watched the empty space where the Patronus had stood. "Did the constable say the officer called him in?"
Dumbledore looked at the first message again. He read it more slowly this time, then shook his head.
The man had raised one hand. The constable had interpreted the movement as a request for help, but the description mentioned an open palm facing outwards and a repeated shake of the head.
Ron put his card on the desk. "That sounds more like stop."
Percy saw the difference reach Harry's face. Somebody trapped on the wrong side of the mist might have spent the only moment he had warning the next person away, and the thought made him feel worse in a way he respected.
Dumbledore sent one further question to Dorridge. Had the man been standing on the road itself, or beside the water running under it?
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They were allowed six hours of sleep after that. McGonagall escorted them to the tower personally, which prevented Hermione from arguing about the definition of allowed and Ron from taking a wrong turn towards the kitchens.
Percy lay awake long enough to hear Harry turn over twice. Then he shut his eyes and found himself remembering an ordinary kitchen without anything inside the memory asking him to follow it.
That distinction let him sleep. He woke with his face against a fold in the pillow and the uncomfortable knowledge that a clean memory could still hurt without being an attack.
By the time they returned to Dumbledore's office, the room contained three maps, two professors, and Dorridge herself. Kingsley stood beside the window holding a small packet of photographs, while Snape was conspicuously absent.
Dorridge looked as though she had slept less than Percy. She introduced the missing officer as Elias Venn, thirty-four, married, experienced in evidence transport, and apparently sensible enough to warn a stranger away while trapped inside something nobody could name.
"We have informed his wife that a sighting is being investigated," she said. "We have not told her he is safe. I would appreciate it if nobody in this room confused hope with a report."
Percy liked her more immediately. It was a terrible reason to like someone, but he was running short of better ones.
Kingsley placed a photograph on the desk. It showed the roadside marker, a shallow ditch, and an old stone mouth where water passed beneath the lane.
A shape had been cut into the stone above the culvert. Three short lines branched from one stem, worn nearly flat by weather and partly hidden under moss.
Hermione reached for it, then stopped before touching the photograph. "That isn't a word."
"Good," Ron said. "We could use more of those."
It was the same arrangement as the return channels beneath Hogwarts, simplified into a mark somebody could recognise without understanding the agreement. Dumbledore turned the photograph towards the oldest map, and Percy watched the two shapes line up.
The Yorkshire marker was nowhere near the lake. The resemblance wasn't a route on the surface; it marked an older practice of admitting water, letting it pass, and keeping a way for people to leave.
"Related construction," Hermione said. "That doesn't prove they're connected now."
Percy looked at the ditch. The photograph couldn't carry the water's presence, but he remembered the stolen sample becoming distinct each time the clamp slipped, and wondered what else had been allowed through during those gaps.
Dorridge placed a second photograph beside the first. This one had been taken by an Auror after the mist cleared, and the marker appeared several feet farther down the road.
"We measured the distance from a field gate," she said. "The gate hasn't moved."
Ron bent over both pictures. "The drain's on the wrong side."
He was right. The lane curved in the same direction, but the stone mouth had shifted from the near bank to the far one, as though a short piece of road had been turned around before being put back.
Percy rubbed his eyes. "I miss when roads just had potholes."
----------------------
Dumbledore went to Yorkshire with Kingsley and Dorridge. Percy stayed at Hogwarts, which he objected to until McGonagall asked whether arriving at an unknown entrance with the sea lock sounded like a useful first investigation.
Harry took the decision better than Percy expected. He asked Dumbledore to bring back facts rather than promises, then went with Snape when the man appeared in the doorway to collect him.
Hermione spent the wait comparing drawings of the lower chamber with the photographs. She used tracing paper to keep the old language hidden, and Ron checked every sheet before she laid it on the table.
Percy went to the lake with McGonagall. The professor stood on the bank where she could see him, her robes moving in the wind, while he knelt at the edge and let ordinary water run between his fingers.
Aequor answered slowly. Percy felt the guardian holding a strain too constant to abandon, and kept his question narrow instead of demanding a tour of every ancient mistake beneath Britain.
The image that came was of several channels feeding a larger body of water. Most ended blindly in earth; one carried a faint borrowed light, and at its far end a small figure stood beside a line it couldn't cross.
Percy waited. The image changed before he could decide the figure was definitely a man.
A hand pressed against the water from inside. Beyond it was the suggestion of a stone roof, a broken lamp, and something long and dark lying across the floor.
Alive was the impression that followed. A second pressure corrected Percy before he could mistake it for safe.
"Of course," he muttered. "Wouldn't want a simple answer ruining the atmosphere."
McGonagall asked him to repeat everything. He did, including the uncertainty, and she listened without telling him that a vision counted as proof.
When they rose to leave, the lake tugged once at his fingers. Aequor showed him the small figure again, this time with another shape near its feet: a vessel, empty enough that its outline was clearer than anything around it.
Percy thought of the convoy's evidence containers. The missing officer might not have been taken because he was standing near the attack; he might have carried something across the threshold that still belonged on this side.
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Dumbledore returned at dusk with wet shoes and an empty evidence case. It was smaller than Percy expected, lined with broken velvet and fitted with a brass clasp that had snapped through its hinge.
"It was found inside the culvert," Dumbledore said. "The recovery team used a hook from the bank. Nobody entered the water."
Dorridge had confirmed that Venn carried the outer case when the Death Eaters attacked. The stolen vial had been removed from it, but one corner still held a torn strip of cloth bearing his initials in laundry ink.
Hermione examined the hinge without touching it. "The case crossed back."
"Part of it may have remained here," Dumbledore said. "We cannot yet distinguish a return from an incomplete departure."
Harry had come back from his lesson quieter than usual. When Percy asked, he said Snape had made him stop after the first successful separation instead of demanding that he repeat it until it failed.
"He's probably ill," Ron said. Harry almost smiled.
"He said you'd say that."
Dumbledore set the case beside the photographs. A small amount of water had gathered in its broken corner, and Percy could feel it now: ordinary ditch water around something deeper, moving at an angle the room didn't possess.
He drew his hand back before approaching it. The sample had taught him enough about familiar things to make caution feel less humiliating.
A sound came from the brass clasp. It was faint, irregular, and unmistakably made by something striking metal from the other side.
Kingsley counted the knocks. Dorridge took out a notebook, waited through the pause, and wrote down the next group without letting anyone speak over it.
Her expression changed on the third repetition. She tapped the sequence back against the clasp with the end of her quill, using no magic at all.
The reply came immediately. Dorridge shut her eyes for a moment, then opened them and turned the notebook so Dumbledore could read it.
"Transport distress code," she said. "He's asking whether the road is clear."
Percy looked at the empty case. For the first time since the voice in the chamber had offered to return people, somebody on the other side had asked a question that didn't require them to give something away.
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WEEEEE
I have so many more chapters to write :(
GIVE ME ALL YOUR STONES!!!
[SHAMELESS PLUG]
The roads are misbehaving, the luggage is knocking, and Hogwarts still expects everyone to get some sleep. If you are enjoying the story, support Reader004 on Patreon for more chapters and help keep the author supplied with instant noodles. Thank you for reading!