On the second night of the Easter holiday, Morris paid a long-overdue visit to the Forbidden Forest.
This time, he had no particular purpose, he simply wanted to take his pet out for a stroll.
Just a few days ago, the Undead Unicorn had completed its advancement ritual, absorbing the carefully accumulated Gate Energy Crystals in a vortex of grey-black mist and ascending to a Tier Two undead creature.
Naturally, the advancement had come with a new ability.
"Faster—come on, faster—woohoo!"
Morris leaned low over the Undead Unicorn's neck, both hands gripping the saddle's pommel, his dark robes streaming behind him like a banner caught in a gale.
The ability the Undead Unicorn had gained was simple and wonderfully practical: speed.
Fitted with a comfortable saddle, it could carry Morris forward at a breathtaking pace. Without the saddle, it worked fine too, just a bit rough on the backside.
The Undead Unicorn was nothing but a framework of bones, yet it moved with uncanny lightness. The tangled roots and obstacles of the forest floor were no obstacle at all, it darted between them or vaulted over them effortlessly, as if the forest itself were parting to make way.
Truly, Morris thought as the world streaked past, the perfect mount.
"Stop."
The instant the command left his lips; the Undead Unicorn decelerated smoothly and came to a clean halt.
That precise mastery of speed satisfied Morris even further.
He swung down from the saddle, dusted off his hands, and looked around.
The surrounding forest was utterly, profoundly silent.
This was a stretch of territory he rarely ventured into as it was the primary habitat of the Acromantulas.
He had never dared go deep before. But tonight he had the Undead Unicorn at his side. The Acromantulas had far more legs, yes but nowhere near the same speed.
He gave the Undead Unicorn's cold neck bones a brief, affectionate pat and signaled it with a slight tilt of his chin to stay alert. Then he drew out the Death Compass from his inner robe pocket.
'I'm already here,' he reasoned, turning the compass over in his fingers until the needle steadied. 'Might as well bring something back.'
Following its guidance deeper into the trees, Morris arrived at an open clearing beside a lake.
He summoned a bone shovel with the Bone Summoning technique and cast Auto-Digging Spell effodio upon it. The shovel rose from his grip, oriented itself and began driving itself into the earth with force.
Morris settled himself against a nearby tree root and rested.
The Undead Unicorn took a position a few feet to his left, standing facing the lake with absolute stillness, its hollow eye sockets on the black water as though watching for something only it could perceive.
The digging went quickly. The soil here was soft and dark, loosened by years of moisture from the adjacent lake, and the shovel worked through it efficiently, throwing small falls of earth to side.
Morris sat with his knees drawn up slightly, watching Sparkles circle overhead in lazy, silent loops of a black shape moving against a slightly less black sky.
Before long, the shovel scraped against something solid that was not stone.
Morris casted a Lumos, and rose to his feet to peer into the pit the shovel had carved. There, perhaps a meter and a half down, a large white object had been partially exposed where the shovel's edge had caught it and knocked loose the surrounding earth.
'What's this?'
He summoned three more bone shovels and set them all to work in a coordinated row, widening the excavation and carefully clearing earth away from above and around the buried object rather than risking damage to it.
What emerged, inch by inch, was a massive bone.
He levitated it free of the pit with a Wingardium Leviosa, bringing it to rest on the grass beside the lake, and crouched to examine it more closely. The bone's color was a deep, aged ivory and its surface had a subtle crazing, fine hairline fractures spread across it like a cracked glaze on old pottery.
It appeared to be the femur of some large creature over a meter in length.
Morris pressed a finger against its surface and applied light pressure. A small flake crumbled away at his touch with almost no resistance, drifting down to the grass like a fragment of ancient plaster.
Whatever this was, it had been in the ground for a long time, possibly centuries. The structural integrity was poor enough that attempting any standard undead creation process would likely reduce it to powder before the ritual was half complete.
Still, he couldn't simply leave it as bones of this scale were genuinely rare. He retrieved his pack from the Undead Unicorn's saddlebag, applied a careful Reducio to shrink the femur down and tucked it inside. He would post it to Frick tomorrow with a note asking for a professional assessment.
After returning the excavated earth to the pit, Morris shouldered his pack and turned to go.
The scrubs to his right rustled.
He went still immediately, wand already rising. The Undead Unicorn's head spun toward the sound.
By rights, with Sparkles on watch above the canopy, anything of significant size approaching should have triggered a warning long before it got nearby.
A moment later, he understood why it hadn't.
What emerged from the low bushes was a juvenile Acromantula no bigger than half Morris's head, even smaller than the one he'd caught at the start of term.
Morris blinked, then cast a Binding Jinx.
A cord shot from the tip of his wand and wound itself neatly around the young spider's legs and body. The creature gave a startled shriek, its eight legs flailing helplessly in the air.
Then, Sparkles dove down from above and cried out a warning.
A large group of adult Acromantulas were heading their way.
Morris understood at once. He spared no further thought for the bound spiderling, it wasn't particularly useful to him anyway and jumped back onto the Undead Unicorn.
"Retreat."
The Undead Unicorn shot forward, becoming a pale, ghostly blur streaking through the dark trees.
As they rode, Morris urged it up to its full speed.
The forest on either side dissolved into a continuous smear of shadow and color.
In that moment, Morris finally understood those people from his previous life who used to race through the streets at midnight.
'It really does feel incredible.'
Though, of course, his Undead Unicorn was far more responsive than any car and he didn't even need to steer.
Not to mention it was considerably safer—
"BRAKE! BRAKE!"
The warning was half a second too late.
Thud.
"AUGH—!"
The Undead Unicorn skidded and still the collision happened. Something dark had been directly in their path, practically invisible between two trees, and there had been no time for the unicorn to fully arrest its momentum before impact.
Morris lurched forward in the saddle. A sound reached him, low and clearly human, like the kind that gets punched out of someone when something heavy hits them somewhere they weren't expecting.
Then silence.
He sat still for a moment, the Undead Unicorn was now completely stopped, breathing, well, not breathing, it had no lungs but motionless, its head turned toward the shape now lying in a heap on the forest floor.
'Should I just... flee the scene?'
He entertained the thought for a genuine two seconds. It was dark. He had a mask. No one had seen him.
In the end, his conscience won out.
Morris conjured a bone mask to cover his face, then guided the Undead Unicorn toward the figure now sprawled motionless on the ground.
"Lumos."
The moment the light bloomed, the figure lurched upright and spun to face him.
He was swathed in a voluminous black robe, his face concealed behind a swirling veil of dark mist that obscured his face.
But Morris had a fairly good idea who it was.
'Quirrell.'
Quirrell himself was taking longer to arrive at any conclusions.
He stared at the strange figure before him, a person seated atop a unicorn's skeleton, wearing a ghastly white mask and felt his mind go completely blank.
Was this... a kindred spirit?
Then again, today had been catastrophically unlucky from the start.
Voldemort had pressured him into the Forbidden Forest to hunt a unicorn, and he'd spent half the night wandering without so much as glimpsing a single horn. He'd finally spotted a single unicorn alone, only to be caught in the act by a group of centaurs before he could make a move, forcing him to flee in a humiliating scramble.
And now, barely a moment to catch his breath, he'd been run over by this?
Quirrell felt a deep bitterness settle on the back of his tongue.
He wanted to please Voldemort, yes but he hadn't signed up to risk his neck against every dangerous thing the Forbidden Forest had to offer.
"You there," Quirrell managed, forcing a measure of composure into his voice. "Who are you?"
Morris considered this question for approximately half a second.
The honest answer was: someone who ran you over with a dead unicorn by accident and would very much like to pretend this never happened.
Morris decided the wisest course was simply to ignore Quirrell.
He turned the Undead Unicorn around with a light shift of his weight and prepared to leave.
But at that very moment—
Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh.
Several arrows hissed through the air, aimed with lethal precision at both Morris and Quirrell.
The shafts were fast and came at vicious angles, it was clearly the work of a practiced hand.
"Bone Summoning!"
A shield of bone appeared in front of Morris, deflecting the two arrows aimed at him.
Quirrell was not so fortunate.
He had no prepared defense.
One arrow caught the top of his head as he threw himself sideways, shearing cleanly through the outer layers of his wrapped turban with a sound like tearing cloth. He hit the ground hard, arms clutched over his skull, his whole body curled in, and shrieked.
"Useless wretch."
The voice came not from Quirrell's mouth but from him.