The Answer

"Professor, do you know who's inside?"

McGonagall applied a little pressure, and the coffin lid slowly slid aside. A smell sealed away for many years spread out, heavy with the weight of history.

"You already have the answer yourself, don't you?"

Professor Binns raised the pocket watch that had fallen from the back of the coffin lid. The fixed mainspring, after a thousand years, finally began to turn again. This pocket watch had been made specially for him, and almost in an instant, Professor Binns understood everything.

"Hold my hand." He reached out to McGonagall. "We're about to begin a truly extraordinary journey!"

"You already have the answer in your heart, don't you?"

Herpo the Foul's final voice froze inside a bubble in the steel and failed to drift ashore.

But perhaps the question Tom had once asked him, and which Nelson had then repeated, had already left a deep mark in his heart. Now, did he still remember why he had set foot on this path in the first place?

Limbo and the present world completely overlapped. The Lost Mist spread through the world, carrying away the memories of every person who touched it in that moment.

And Herpo the Foul's mysterious soul finally emerged at that moment.

His ruined soul was like a badly burned infant, curled up in swaddling clothes condensed from black mist, incomparably fragile.

Just as Nelson had designed, he had launched the ritual for a desperate counterattack amid the anxiety of deception, only to be driven into a dead end at the end of it. The ritual was interrupted at the final instant. The candidate he had personally chosen to fight for this power had long since ceased to be an ignorant, benighted soul. In the brief few days she had spent with