She clutched the pendant against her chest, its heat searing her skin. In the darkness, the One-Winged Bird pendant began to bleed iridescent threads.
It wasn't light. It was real, warm blood, imbued with the magic of their pact, dripping through her fingers and onto her school robes.
The warmth of their bond no longer came from the other end of the pendant. Instead, she felt a dying wail, as if something were being forcibly torn apart.
"Backlash." Hermione murmured, frantically piecing together the clues. "Contract magic. When one party is on the verge of collapse, the other bears part of the burden..."
She suddenly remembered the shape of the cracks on Caesar's wrist.
They weren't the marks of an injury.
They were the backlash patterns of an ancient symbiotic pact, briefly described in an appendix to Deadly Magic:
When one party to a pact tried to break a core vow, such as "do no harm to the innocent," or when their existence was corrupted by high-level Dark Magic, the pact made their suffering visible.
"The Philosopher's Stone can cure him... no, maybe the real point is something else..."
She wiped the blood from the pendant and tucked it back inside her collar. Then she pulled out a blank piece of parchment and hurriedly wrote with her wand:
1. Caesar's physical condition: signs of magical collapse? Dark Magic parasite? Ancient pact backlash?
2. His deal with Voldemort: genuine cooperation? False pretense? Real objective?
3. After moonset tomorrow night: Snape's shift left uncovered (must verify), breach in the Forbidden Forest defenses (must investigate), the "method of deception" used by the Mirror of Erised (biggest question mark).
4. My options: ① Report to Dumbledore immediately (not enough evidence, and it could alert them) ② Disrupt the Philosopher's Stone's transfer route in advance (must locate it) ③... confront Caesar and force him to tell me the truth (most dangerous, but perhaps the pact can protect me).
As she wrote the last line, Hermione stopped, suddenly dazed.
The rational thoughts whirring nonstop in her mind abruptly came to a halt.
Why had I marked confronting Caesar as the most dangerous?
It wasn't a clear-eyed judgment.
Absolutely not!
Hermione felt a chill creep through her.
The next second, she forcefully crossed out the last line.
Just as Caesar had said before, love was the most dangerous spell. It could make people lose their reason and cloud their judgment.
No one was exempt.
The parchment suddenly rolled itself up. Caesar's handwriting appeared across its surface: the two-way encrypted messaging charm he had taught her years ago, which she'd thought had stopped working long ago.
"Hermione, don't get involved. This is the only distance that can keep you safe."
Three seconds after appearing, the writing burst into flames and vanished without leaving so much as a trace of ash.
Hermione stared at the last sparks in the air, then suddenly laughed.
There was no warmth in her smile, only the burning stubbornness of a Gryffindor.
"Keep me safe?"
She spoke softly to the empty compartment, her fingers brushing the drained pendant. "From the day you gave me this feather... we were destined to fall together, Caesar."
That night, Hermione curled up in the corner of her four-poster bed, shutting out the world behind its heavy curtains. Three open books lay on the bedside table:
The Backlash of Symbiotic Pacts
The Signs and Disguises of Magical Collapse
The Mirror of Erised: Seventeen Flaws in the Reflection of Desire
The One-Winged Bird pendant on her chest had stopped bleeding.
But its iridescent feather had faded completely to ashen white. It felt cold and brittle, like the last dead leaf of late autumn.
And yet when Hermione closed her eyes, she could still clearly "feel" the presence at the other end.
It wasn't a distinct image, but a constant sensation of weightlessness, as if Caesar stood at the edge of an abyss, with her tied to his wrist by an invisible cord.
"I need the Philosopher's Stone to cure me."
Caesar's voice played over and over in her mind. Beneath its calm, the faintest tremor—one she'd barely noticed before—was now magnified by memory.
The cracks beneath his skin, his faltering steps, the protrusion of his shoulder blades, the deadly magical illness.
Hermione's heart ached for Caesar.
But what hurt even more was the conclusion that followed:
If all of this was true, Caesar was dying and needed the Stone to keep him alive, and he'd made a deal with Voldemort to get it.
Should she stop him? Was she supposed to stand by and watch him die?
If it was all a lie, and Caesar had some other purpose, perhaps even one that would betray Hogwarts—
Should she expose him? Push him into Azkaban with her own hands?
"Ah..." Hermione buried her face in her knees and let out a muffled sob. Logic had failed her.
Every path her deductions led to ended in an even thicker tangle of thorns.
She remembered being ten, when Caesar had taken her hand and led her home. "I promise I'll take you home as soon as we leave the station. Trust me, little Hermione."
She remembered being eleven, when Caesar had brought her to Hogwarts. "If I sneak off to steal Butterbeer one day, will you catch me?"
She remembered the duel she'd lost in their first year, and how he'd held her trembling hand in a bathroom stall. "We have to face the world together. Neither of us can do it alone..."
She remembered the countless nights she'd woken from nightmares, only for the necklace to send a steady, warm pulse—the silent reply of Caesar, somewhere across the castle.
Trembling, Hermione fished a small mirror from beneath her pillow. In the faint light of Lumos, she saw her pale face and the deep shadows under her eyes.
But in her brown eyes, beneath the fear and confusion, was a stubbornness that refused to die—a look that even frightened her.
At last, she understood her deepest fear:
She wasn't afraid Caesar would betray her. She was afraid that even if she knew he had betrayed her, she would still choose to stand by him.
The realization made her stomach clench.
She was Hermione Granger, the Hermione Granger who always put what was "right" first.
But when "right" meant destroying the person who had left the deepest mark on her life...
The moon began sinking beyond the window.
There were less than twenty hours left until "moonset tomorrow night."
Hermione slowly rose to her feet and opened the door.
The last trace of hesitation in her eyes burned away completely. The torches along the corridor shone in her eyes like two blue flames that refused to die.
Ravenclaw Tower, Caesar's office, at dusk.
Caesar sat at his oak desk, his quill hovering above the parchment, a drop of silvery-blue ink on the verge of falling.
Outside the window, the sunset turned the Black Lake the color of blood and amber. Light slipped between the bookshelves and fell across his left hand.
The pale blue cracks flickered with each beat of his heart, like dying fluorite veins deep underground.
He changed quills.
It wasn't his usual Unicorn Hair quill, but an old one with a cracked shaft and scales embedded in it.
Hermione had given it to him as a birthday present in her third year. She'd slapped together some of her fallen hair and the shed skin of a Bowtruckle, muttering at the time:
"It's not like you need anything."
The quill's nib wasn't dipped in ink. Instead, he used a silvery-blue bead of blood seeping from his fingertip. Mixed with Mithril powder, it would change color on the page according to the reader's emotional temperature.
The quill touched the parchment:
Hermione,
By the time you read this letter, I should already be dead. Don't grieve. This is the outcome I deserve.
Before you continue