Chapter Text
“Excuse me.”
Bill Weasley was so busy looking at the runic inscription on the exit to the tomb that he didn’t hear it the first time, his mind caught somewhere between tehet and asrem .
“Excuse me.” The voice was a little more insistent, and it caught his attention. “I think you’re missing something.”
Spinning around, he faced an incomprehensible sight. A young girl with wild brown hair, dressed in Hogwarts robes of all things, stood perhaps a metre away from him. Reflexively, he brought his wand up, his mind racing as he flipped through his mental catalogue of types of Egyptian ghosts, ghouls, and the like. She wasn’t transparent, which ruled out a large number of spiritual manifestations, but the fact she was opaque was slightly more worrying, considering the more powerful the nasties were, the more corporeal they became.
“Don’t say a thing,” he commanded, his wand pointed squarely between her eyes, “or I’ll have you blown back to the dust you came from faster than you can say Protego .”
Unhappily, the girl pursed her lips before speaking anyways. “You’re mistranslating the rune, that’s all.”
Poleaxed, he stared at her for a moment. “What?”
“The rune?” She looked at him as if he were crazy. “The one you were staring at. I heard you mumbling about it, and you’re missing the meaning when taken in a larger context.” She shrugged. “I just thought you should know.”
“And I should trust you why?” he wanted to know, though he was burning to turn around to take another look at the archway. If he was in fact mistranslating the xomlit rune, chances were his counter incantation to get out of the damn place was missing some elements.
The girl sighed and rolled her eyes. “Why would I lie to you? One minute, I was minding my own business in the library, and the next I was here.” Peering around the place, which consisted of leagues upon leagues of sand, a lot of ledges, some ancient, crumbling boxes, and a sarcophagus, she added, “Although here does appear very interesting, actually. However, I would appreciate being sent back to Hogwarts, as I have a Transfiguration exam tomorrow that I’m revising for.”
Suspiciously, Bill waved his wand over her as he scanned her. It didn’t detect anything dark, really, so perhaps it was just a spirit that was drawing from his memories of his times at Hogwarts? It was really quite clever, if it was.
“I appreciate the advice,” he told the spirit, “but I don’t think I’ll take it, considering you’re more likely to try and use the inscription to try and possess me to escape this place.”
She huffed, jabbing the quill clutched in her hand into the mass of hair behind her ear. “I’m not a spirit. I’m a third year Hogwarts student. Honestly. Here, touch me.”
Eyes narrowed, he reached for the hand she outstretched towards him only to snatch it back at the last moment. What had he been thinking? Even novice curse breakers knew better than to do something as idiotic as that.
“Nice try,” he snapped, glaring at her.
The bow of her mouth deepened into a frown. “No need to get shirty. Look,” she said, running out of patience, “just...examine the inscription. I’ll even walk all the way over there to that rather interesting sarcophagus to give you peace of mind.”
He watched as she did so, noting the deep footprints she left in the sand. That was another point towards her being corporeal, but it still didn’t explain how, in the name of Merlin, she had gotten in here. Ergo: a spirit. A devious spirit.
“So if you think I’m not translating correctly, what do you think it is?” Sometimes he hated his incessant curiosity. It was going to get him killed.
Her shoulders straightened and her eyes brightened. “Based on my quick glance at the inscription, I think that it’s a binding to keep all intruders in. So therefore the rune, which you’re translating strictly on its own as copper, is much better understood as the binding of an electrical—or perhaps spiritual, actually?—force when taken in conjunction with the two runes, asrem and khesbalit, surrounding it.”
Wait. He frowned. That made a lot of sense. He whipped around to look at the old, hand-etched markings, his hand coming up to finger the protective fang amulet hanging from his ear as he leaned in closer. A moment later and he could see that she had the right of it.
“That’s brilliant,” he breathed.
“Honestly, you’re as bad at Ronald.” She huffed.”Are all red-heads stubborn and prone to ignoring me?”
Ronald? As in his youngest brother, Ron? A spirit surely couldn’t know something so minute as that.
He spun back around, a slew of questions on his tongue as to how a third year Gryffindor girl had somehow gotten to the bowels of an Egyptian tomb, but when he looked where she had been only moments earlier, she was gone.