Chapter Text
The cart rattled violently as it descended, sparks flickering from the rails. Hermione pulled her cloak tighter about her shoulders, though it did little to stave off the chill of the deep vaults.
The campaign to rid Gringotts of cursed artefacts had been announced as one of the Ministry’s flagship programmes. After Voldemort’s defeat, no one could be certain what dark objects remained hidden in the ancient vaults. The work was slow and thankless, but necessary.
She had volunteered for the inspections, naturally.
Her companion sat stiffly beside her, gloved hands resting on a silver-topped cane. Lucius Malfoy had made his opposition public, loudly denouncing petty Ministry officials pawing through the inheritance of wizarding houses. The Wizengamot had overruled him. Rumour had it he had appealed directly to Kingsley, who had permitted him this one concession: that he might be present while his vault was examined.
The cart juddered to a halt before the heavy door. Hermione stepped out first, wand already in hand.
“I do hope,” Malfoy said mildly, as he followed, “that you will not find the older protections too perplexing, Miss Granger. Many of these wards were devised long before the Ministry existed.”
Hermione watched him turn the key and press his palm to the goblin’s seal. The door swung back with a low groan.
“I’ll manage,” she said curtly.
The vault stretched vast and echoing before them, its stone walls lined with shelves of objects: boxes chased with silver, piles of parchment, even pieces of armour dulled with centuries.
Hermione lifted her wand, its glow casting long shadows as she began a systematic sweep.
“No resonance of dark magic here,” she murmured, more to herself than to him. “Bindings of this sort… fifteenth century, perhaps?”
“Thirteenth,” Malfoy replied coolly. He had followed her in, his cane clicking softly on the flagstones. “Acquired in Byzantium. My ancestor had a discerning eye.”
She glanced back at him, about to retort, but thought better of it. His pride was a wall, and she had work to do.
She catalogued one object, then another, the minutes sliding past. At last she came to a pedestal in the back of the chamber. Upon it rested a carved stone box, veined with pale lines like bone.
Lucius Malfoy slowed as he reached her side. For the first time, his expression faltered. “That,” he said, quietly, “I do not recognise.”
Hermione raised her wand, casting the familiar diagnostic charms in quick succession. Nothing: no curse, no residue, not even the faint echo of protective wards. The object seemed curiously blank.
“That’s strange,” she said, frowning. “It feels like nothing whatsoever.”
She hesitated only a moment before reaching out, fingertips brushing the cold stone.
At the same instant, Malfoy’s gloved hand moved towards it. Whether to stop her or to examine it himself, she wasn’t sure. Their hands touched the stone together—
—and the vault dissolved.
For an instant, there was only a sensation of falling sideways, the air pulled from her lungs. Then the world reassembled: high walls, a great hearth flickering with embers, chandelier dripping wax. The air smelled of dust, old wood, and something faintly sweet, like lavender left too long in drawers.
Hermione staggered back, wand raised. They stood in a house - old, grand.
Malfoy’s eyes moved slowly over the walls, the portraits, the heavy beams. His expression was unreadable.
“This,” he said quietly, “should not exist.”
She turned sharply to him. “Where are we?”
He hesitated, then said, voice measured: “I believe it is the Malfoy Manor… as it once stood. Centuries earlier, before the reconstructions. Before the fire.”
Hermione’s grip on her wand tightened. “You mean we’re inside a memory? Some kind of illusion?”
His gaze lingered on the fading portraits. “If this is an illusion, Miss Granger, it is astonishingly elaborate. No - this place has substance. But it should have been lost to time.”
Hermione looked at him, then around.
Her first impulse was to assess. Air, walls, light - all seemed tangible, solid under her wand’s touch. She pinched the bridge of her nose, taking a deep breath. Think. There had to be a rational explanation.
A ward? Perhaps some long-forgotten Malfoy enchantment, a protective spell that had endured for centuries. But why transport them here, and not simply bar the vault?
She paced slowly, wand alight, scanning walls, hearth, floorboards. Could it be tied to the artefact? Perhaps it had absorbed latent magic over the centuries, waiting for a trigger. Or a convergence - she remembered the overlapping of protective wards she had seen in some Ministry reports. Maybe this was one of those… except on a scale she had never encountered.
She decided to conduct a controlled experiment: move an object from one side of the room to the other. If it turned out impossible, it she couldn’t grasp it, it was all just a façade and they were not truly bound.
She reached for a nearby candlestick, lifted it, and set it down a few paces away. Solid.
She began testing for residue of any familiar spells. She moved from corner to corner, muttering diagnostic charms under her breath, marking each negative result with mounting irritation. Nothing.
Across the room, Lucius was silent. He had not followed her, nor interrupted. He stood a little apart, his cane resting lightly beneath his hand, his pale gaze travelling across the chamber with the slow precision of a surveyor.
Hermione looked at him irritably, “Are you going to help?”
He barley glanced in her direction. “Haste seldom clarifies matters. One must first observe, Miss Granger. Then act.”
“I don’t see how observation alone will bring us any closer to—” she began.
He interrupted softly, but authoritatively, “And I do not see how exhausting yourself with charms you know will fail is a better use of our time.”
Hermione bit back her retort and returned to her scan, but she felt the prickle of annoyance beneath her ribs. He was not wrong, precisely - but she had no patience for the superiority in his tone.
Hermione had spent what felt like hours pacing the room, scanning every beam, every shadow, every seam for a clue.
At one point, she moved to the great double doors at the end of the hall. It might be that simple.
She laid a hand against the door and pushed. The heavy wood creaked open. Hermione stepped forward—
—and found herself staring once more into the hall.
She stopped dead, spun back. The doors stood open behind her, but beyond them was nothing: no corridor, no passage, only the same space she had left.
Her throat tightened, a flicker of panic she refused to indulge. “We’re trapped.”
Lucius had remained standing at the far end, eyes sweeping the room with careful scrutiny.
He inclined his head slightly. “Contained, at least.”
He moved toward a faded settee, sat down, and crossed his legs.
Hermione stopped mid-step. “Are you quite certain it’s wise to… sit? We do not know what any of these objects might do.”
He glanced at her, unruffled, the faintest lift of one eyebrow. “You did check for curses. And the furniture seems solid enough - we might as well use it.”
Hermione had no energy left for arguing.
Slowly, she lowered herself to an armchair opposite him, wand still gripped in one hand. They sat in silence.
Finally, Lucius spoke, in that infuriatingly measured tone of his. “I am fairly certain, Miss Granger, that this is a version of the Manor. But a version only. It is constantly undergoing subtle alterations.”
Hermione raised her wand slightly, looking around. “Alterations?”
He gestured toward a bookshelf across the room. “That book,” he said quietly, “note the colour of its spine.”
Hermione looked. It was a deep burgundy. She watched for a few seconds. “It remains the same,” she said.
“Observe longer,” he said. “It changes gradually. I doubt you noticed, engrossed as you were in your measurements.”
She looked again. Sure enough, the book’s spine was now midnight blue.
A slow, creeping sense of unease replaced her panic.
“So… subtle fluctuations. That would explain why my charms didn’t work - they’re for diagnosing stable objects.”
He inclined his head. “And there are other anomalies, of similar character. I would suggest, tentatively, that the construction of this space is deliberate.”
Hermione’s mind raced. “You said this is a version of the Malfoy Manor. And we were transported here from your family vault. So it is likely all a creation of the Malfoy magic.”
Lucius kept looking at her, a silent prompt to continue.
“Understanding it and finding our way back might depend on your heritage.”
He nodded slowly.
“Following this assumption, I would advise you caution, Miss Granger.”
“Why?” She raised her brow half in challenge.
“Because,” he said, his expression unreadable, “If this place was built on my heritage, it might be dangerous for people with yours.”
They agreed to explore the adjoining rooms.
Hermione turned toward a side door. It opened into a library, vast shelves rising into shadow, ladders leaning against them as though waiting for a reader. Her heart lifted despite herself. At last - something useful.
She hurried to the nearest shelf, wand tip glowing over the titles. Many were strange, but she recognised a few: arcane treatises, rare charms, records of lineage.
Lucius stepped in behind her.
She felt the shift before she saw it. The shelves wavered, narrowing, shrinking into polished cabinets. Velvet drapes unfurled across the windows, a chandelier shimmered into being overhead. A drawing room, elegant and appointed - yet half-merged with the books. A wing-backed chair stood where a pile of tomes had been. A set of decanters gleamed upon a shelf still crowded with leather-bound volumes.
Hermione stopped short, blinking. “What—”
Lucius’s cane tapped once on the new floorboards. “This is a drawing room, in the Manor,” he said softly. His tone was mild, but there was tension in it.
“But it was a library,” Hermione insisted, gesturing at the shelves that still lined one wall, though pressed oddly against the velvet curtains.
“It seems,” he observed, “to be both.”
She frowned, stepping back into the hall. Instantly, the books winked out of existence, leaving only the drawing room.
She re-entered: shelves reasserted themselves, crowding against chairs and cabinets as though the room could not decide its form.
Her stomach tightened. “It’s changing,” she said, her voice low, “in response to… us?”
Lucius regarded the space in silence, eyes narrowed, as though testing a hypothesis.
“When I entered, I recognised this as a drawing room.”
Hermione frowned. “But I wanted a library. I was hoping for one.”
Their eyes met across the strange hybrid of shelves and chairs.
“So it gives us what we expect,” Hermione said slowly.
“Or what we believe,” Lucius returned, his tone clipped but calm.
She looked back at the shifting space: books and velvet crowding one another, each waiting to dominate. “That explains the fluctuation. It’s not confused. It’s… accommodating us. Both of us.”
They stood for a moment, listening. The fire popped once in the grate, though Hermione could feel no warmth.
Then, above them, came a sound: a dull, deliberate thud, echoing through the beams.
Hermione’s hand snapped up with her wand. Another thud followed, slower, heavier, and then silence.
A book toppled from the shelf, landing open on the floor between them. Its pages fluttered by themselves before fixing on an engraving: a serpent, coiled tightly about a house uncannily like the one in which they stood. The ink gleamed, too dark, as though it had just been written.
Hermione’s throat tightened. She looked up sharply, meeting Lucius’s eyes. The room had fallen utterly still, but she knew with chilling certainty that it was watching them.