Morris decided it would be best if he left now, before this strange watch stretched any longer.
Dumbledore showed no sign or intention of going anywhere soon. He looked perfectly content to idle away the midnight hours right where he sat on the cold floor.
Lingering any longer in the shadows would be pointless at best, and at worst might invite unnecessary risk that Morris had thus far managed to avoid.
Besides, Morris had been crouching in the shadows for far too long now. His legs had moved from slight discomfort to real ache now.
He began his retreat, preparing to slip silently back toward the corridor.
Just then, a large bird appeared from thin air with a burst of warm light.
It emerged trailing long, sweeping tail feathers the color of living flame. The creature circled the chamber twice in a graceful spiral and then landed in front of Dumbledore on the floor.
Morris recognized it by its distinctive silhouette alone: Fawkes, Dumbledore's phoenix.
Dumbledore leaned slightly forward toward the phoenix, tilting his head with its silver beard, and moved his lips in quiet speech, murmuring something to it that Morris couldn't catch from within the shadows.
Sound reached him in the shadow form only in muffled, distorted fragments, as if traveling through deep water. He could make out the general rhythm of speech, but almost nothing of actual content or meaning.
A few seconds passed. Some communication occurred between wizard and bird that Morris couldn't intercept.
Then, the space where Dumbledore had been sitting was simply empty. The headmaster and his phoenix had vanished together from the spot in a flash of golden-red fire that lit the chamber briefly and then extinguished itself, leaving behind only the faint smell of ash.
'Finally. He's gone.'
Morris exhaled slowly releasing the tension he'd been maintaining for the past several minutes. He emerged carefully from the shadows, his body was reassembling into solid form, and crossed the chamber toward the Mirror of Erised.
As he approached and looked into its reflective surface, the image that manifested was exactly as he had seen it during his previous encounters with this artifact.
His instincts had been right from the moment he'd detected the mirror. This was indeed the Mirror of Erised, here as part of the protection sequence.
But then... where exactly was the Philosopher's Stone?
Morris turned away from the mirror and began circling the room scrutinizing every inch of wall and floor and ceiling, checking for hidden mechanisms or concealed spaces.
There was no stone, no hidden compartments, no secret passages. Nothing out of place.
The only object in the entire chamber beyond the mirror itself was a small cloth bag that Dumbledore had apparently left on the floor when he departed—lemon drops, by the look and smell of them. A small pile of the yellow sugar candies had spilled from the bag's opening onto the stone.
'Honeydukes,' Morris thought, recognizing the packaging from his visits to Hogsmeade.
'Good taste,' he thought with a faint trace of approval, examining the abandoned sweets. He liked lemon drops himself. Sour and sweet with a clean finish that didn't linger unpleasantly.
At that moment, without any warning and giving Morris no time to prepare or react, the air in front of him shimmered with sudden heat.
A flash of golden-red fire ignited from nothing, blazing brightly in the dim chamber, and Dumbledore reappeared amid the flickering phoenix flames with Fawkes spiraling down beside him.
The headmaster must have forgotten his bag of sweets on the floor.
Morris reacted instantly, his body was responding before his conscious mind had fully processed the danger. The Shadow Concealment spell activated in a fraction of a second, his reflexes were bypassing the need for thought, and he melted back into the nearest pocket of darkness.
Dumbledore noticed nothing in particular, his attention was directed downward as he stooped to retrieve his abandoned lemon drops.
But Fawkes did not land beside him or settle onto a comfortable perch as a it would usually do. The phoenix remained in the air, hovering on silent wings, and began sweeping its gaze around the chamber in a slow arc.
A sharp, instinctive sense of danger prickled through Morri
Morris edged backward with excruciating care, moving with the absolute minimal displacement of shadow that he could manage, beginning to plot his retreat path toward the chamber's exit.
Fawkes's head snapped toward him with sudden precision.
"Hmm?"
The sound wasn't quite speech and wasn't quite bird call.
Morris froze completely and immediately held his breath, converting himself into the most perfect stillness his body could achieve. If he was being detected through movement and heat signatures rather than visual means, then absolute stillness was his best defense.
The phoenix tilted its head to one side. Then, gradually, it shifted its gaze away from Morris's position and toward another part of the chamber.
Morris exhaled in the smallest possible increment, barely a breath, and tried moving again.
In an instant, Fawkes turned back. Its burning eyes were fixed with unmistakable certainty on the precise patch of shadow where Morris stood, the specific point of darkness that contained him.
Twice in quick series. Snapping away and back to the same target.
That could not possibly be coincidence.
'The bird has noticed me.'
Could a phoenix's perception truly be that acute?
Morris didn't dare move so much as a single finger. He slowed his breathing to the absolute barest of air exchange and focused every fragment of concentration he possessed on maintaining stillness and silence.
Fawkes's strange behavior quickly drew Dumbledore's attention from his recovered lemon drops. He looked up at his phoenix, then followed the direction of Fawkes's gaze with his own eyes.
Dumbledore walked toward the shadow where Morris was concealed with a thoughtful gait. His half-moon spectacles caught the dim light as he tilted his head.
He glanced around the shadows carefully and specifically. Then he gave a gentle shake of his head toward the phoenix.
Morris felt the tension in his chest begin to slowly drain away.
It seemed he hadn't been fully discovered after all. Even Dumbledore could not reliably see through a Shadow Concealment spell cast properly.
Who, after all, Morris thought with a flicker of satisfaction, would rationally think to look for a living person inside a shadow?
Then, everything changed with explosive, zero-warning suddenness.
Fawkes beat both enormous wings simultaneously in a single powerful stroke. A layer of golden-red fire erupted from its body like a controlled detonation, blazing out in every direction from the bird.
The flames spread through the chamber, pouring blazing light into every corner simultaneously.
Within a single second, those flames had poured into and through every shadow in the room, leaving not a single patch of darkness untouched.
Morris didn't wait to see whether the light would burn him or simply expose him. He ran or tried to. The light moved faster than he could, and the shadow that had been his refuge vanished around him in an instant.
He was driven out of the darkness and tumbled involuntarily through the air as his shadow form collapsed into solid flesh with violent suddenness, his body was appearing in mid-stride in empty air about three feet off the ground.
His reflexes responded before his conscious mind could panic.
A clean, controlled backflip from nothing, and he landed steadily on the floor.
Dumbledore, clearly not expecting anyone to appear, let a flicker of surprise cross his face then broke into quiet, appreciative applause.
"Excellent, Morris," he said, his tone was warm as if commenting on a student's successful performance in class. "If I were scoring that landing, I'd give it a nine out of ten."
Morris took a breath and gave his headmaster a perfect bow from the waist.
"Thank you for the compliment, Headmaster."
Right. His brain was already running through consequences. Perhaps I should begin thinking about where to live after expulsion.
To be undone by a bird. Of all the possible detection methods Morris had anticipated for, a phoenix's supernatural perception. He genuinely hadn't seen that coming.
"Now then," Dumbledore said pleasantly, "why are you here in this chamber at midnight? And before you answer—" he held up one long finger in a gesture of gentle warning,
"—I would advise quite sincerely against lying. It really isn't a particularly good habit to cultivate, and I've had considerable practice at detecting it over the decades."
"To see the Philosopher's Stone," Morris answered without a moment's hesitation.
The absolute bluntness of the admission gave even Dumbledore a brief, visible pause.
Then he smiled slowly. "I find myself genuinely glad that at least some of my students are so refreshingly honest. I'd guess you heard about the Stone from Harry and his friends?"
He tilted his head with curiosity. "Did you actually find the Stone while you were searching?"
Morris shook his head. "No. I searched the room thoroughly. I found lemon drops on the floor—those, I found—but no Stone."
"Come here, then. Let me show you something."
Dumbledore beckoned with a slight gesture and led Morris to stand directly before the Mirror of Erised.
"The Stone is concealed within the mirror itself," Dumbledore explained.
"Only someone who desires the Stone but has no intention of using it an retrieve it from within the glass."
Morris reached out and pressed his palm flat against the glass surface of the mirror.
He said, with a trace of regret: "Then I have no hope of taking it."
Wanting it but having no intention of using it were mutually exclusive states for Morris, who had come here with clear purpose.
The mirror would know the difference.
It was only now, with his hand pressed against the surface and his attention properly focused, that he noticed the enchantments Dumbledore had had into the mirror.
"A pity," Dumbledore said and then asked, "If you had somehow managed to obtain the Philosopher's Stone, what would you have done with it? I assume you understand what it's capable of?"
Morris considered the question honestly. He was nowhere near the age where he needed to worry about life expectancy. So he answered straightforwardly, "Turn as much as possible into gold, naturally."
Dumbledore inclined his head, looking unsurprised.
"That's not so simple as it might seem," he said thoughtfully.
"Even with the Stone physically in your possession, it wouldn't function immediately or automatically. You'd need considerable expertise in alchemical theory and practice."
Morris gave a slight shrug. "That doesn't matter very much to me. The outcome isn't really the point of my interest."
"The outcome isn't the point?" Dumbledore repeated, his eyebrows lifting with what appeared to be interest.
"No," Morris said, and his voice took on a rare quality of genuine openness.
"If I'm being completely honest, what I'm far more interested by is understanding what gives the Stone its power in the first place. The Stone itself as a subject of study is more interesting to me than anything it could produce."
Dumbledore stared at him for a long moment.
"You are a true Ravenclaw, Mr. Black," he said, with something that sounded like admiration.
"Thank you," Morris said, allowing himself a small smile. "In that case, Headmaster, any chance we can pretend I was never here tonight?"
"Oh, I'm afraid not," Dumbledore said lightly, as though declining the last biscuit on a plate.
Morris felt a quiet, resigned frustration settle over him.
Expulsion, at least, seemed to be off the table given Dumbledore's remarkably calm demeanor throughout this entire conversation.
Given his apparent mood, the worst Morris would likely face was house point deductions in numbers that would make other Ravenclaws deeply furious with him for weeks, and probably detention of some duration.
He could survive both of those.
"Then what will my punishment be?" he asked, deciding that knowing in advance was preferable to wondering.
"All in good time, we'll come to that," Dumbledore said with an easy wave of his hand that dismissed the question without dismissing its eventual importance.
"First, I'm more curious how you got here. If I'm not mistaken, none of the wards outside were triggered."
There was no interrogation in Dumbledore's tone, only the bright curiosity of someone genuinely intrigued by an interesting puzzle.
Morris hesitated.
How was he supposed to answer this?