Love is the Most Dangerous Spell

She clutched the burning pendant against her chest, the One-Winged Bird jade oozing rainbow-colored blood threads in the darkness.

It wasn't light—it was truly warm blood, laced with contract magic, dripping through her fingers onto her school robes.

From the other end of the pendant came not the familiar resonance of warmth, but a forced, dying wail of something being torn apart.

"Backlash," Hermione murmured, her mind frantically piecing together 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.

Those weren't scars from injury at all.

They were backlash patterns from an ancient symbiotic contract, briefly recorded in the appendix of Deadly Magic:

When one party of a contract tries to violate a core oath—like "do not harm the innocent"—or when their very existence is eroded by high-level dark magic, the contract visualizes the pain.

"The Philosopher's Stone cures illness... no, maybe the real point is something else..."

She wiped the blood off the jade, tucked it back into her collar, pulled out a blank piece of parchment she carried with her, and rapidly wrote with the tip of her wand:

1. Caesar's physical condition: Precursor to magical collapse? Dark magic parasitism? Ancient contract backlash?

2. Deal with Voldemort: True cooperation? False use? Real goal?

3. After moonfall tomorrow night: Snape's shift vacancy (needs verification), Forbidden Forest defense gap (needs investigation), Mirror of Erised's "deception method" (biggest doubt).

4. My action options: ① Report to Dumbledore immediately (insufficient evidence, might alert the enemy) ② Preemptively sabotage the Stone's transfer route (needs positioning) ③... Confront Caesar directly, force him to tell the truth (most dangerous, but the contract might protect me).

When she reached the last line, Hermione stopped writing and froze.

The rational thinking that had been racing in her mind suddenly cut off.

Why did I mark Caesar as the most dangerous?

That's not a clear judgment.

Absolutely not!

A chill ran through Hermione's heart.

The next second, she forcefully crossed out the last line.

Just as Caesar had said before, love is the most dangerous curse—it can make people lose reason, can cloud clear judgment.

No one is exempt.

The parchment suddenly rolled up on its own, and Caesar's handwriting surfaced on it—a two-way encrypted message spell he had taught her many years ago, which she thought had long since expired:

"Hermione, don't get involved. This is the only distance that can protect you."

The handwriting burned away three seconds after appearing, leaving not even ash behind.

Hermione stared at the last sparks in the air, then suddenly smiled.

There was no warmth in that smile, only Gryffindor's scorching stubbornness.

"Protect me?"

She whispered to the empty compartment, her fingers stroking the withered 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, using the heavy curtains to shut out the entire world. Three open books lay on her bedside table:

Backlash Phenomena of Symbiotic Contracts

Precursors and Disguises of Magical Collapse

The Mirror of Erised: Seventeen Flaws in Desire Reflection

The One-Winged Bird pendant on her chest had stopped seeping blood.

But the rainbow-colored feather had completely dimmed to an ashen gray, cold and brittle to the touch, like the last stiff leaf of deep autumn.

Yet when Hermione closed her eyes, she could still clearly "feel" the presence at the other end.

It wasn't a concrete image, but a continuous sensation of falling—as if Caesar stood at the edge of an abyss, and she was tied to his wrist by an invisible rope.

"I need the Philosopher's Stone to cure my illness."

Caesar's voice replayed in her mind, the faint tremor beneath the calm now magnified infinitely by memory.

Those cracks under his skin, his sluggish steps, the protrusion of his shoulder blades, the fatal magical disease.

Her heart ached for Caesar.

But what ached even more was the reasoning that followed:

If all this was true—Caesar dying, needing the Stone to survive, willing to cooperate with Voldemort for it—

Then should she stop him? Was she supposed to watch him die?

If all this was false—Caesar having another goal, perhaps even betraying Hogwarts—

Then should she expose him? Push him toward Azkaban with her own hands?

"Ah..." Hermione buried her face in her knees, letting out a muffled sob. Logic had failed her at this moment.

Every path her deductions led to ended in deeper thorns.

She remembered when she was ten, Caesar holding her hand and leading her home: "I promise, after we leave the station, I'll take you home. Please trust me, little Hermione."

She remembered the year she turned eleven, when Caesar brought her to Hogwarts: "When the day comes that I have to steal Butterbeer, will you catch me?"

She remembered after losing the duel in first year, when he held her trembling hand in the bathroom stall: "Against the world, neither of us can be missing..."

She remembered countless nights when she woke from nightmares, and the necklace would always pulse with a steady, warm rhythm—his silent response from the other end of the castle.

Hermione trembled as she pulled a small mirror from under her pillow. In the faint glow of the Lumos charm, she saw her own pale face, dark shadows heavy under her eyes.

But in those brown eyes, beyond the fear and confusion, there was something that even she found startling—a stubbornness that refused to be extinguished.

She finally understood her deepest fear:

Not that Caesar would betray her, but that even knowing he had, she would still choose to stand by his side.

This realization made her stomach clench.

She was Hermione Granger, the Hermione Granger who always put "what's right" first.

But when "what's right" meant destroying the person who had carved the deepest mark into her life...

Outside the window, the moon began to sink westward.

Less than twenty hours remained until "tomorrow's moonfall."

Hermione slowly stood up and pulled open the door.

The last trace of hesitation in her eyes was burned away completely. The torches on the corridor walls reflected in her gaze, like two clusters of blue Fiendfyre that refused to die out.

Ravenclaw Tower, Caesar's office, at dusk.

Caesar sat at the oak desk, the tip of his quill hovering over the parchment, a drop of silver-blue ink poised to fall.

The setting sun outside the window dyed the Black Lake the color of blood amber. Light slipped through the gaps in the bookshelves, falling onto his left hand.

Those azure cracks pulsed with his heartbeat, like dying fluorite deep in an underground vein.

He switched pens.

Not the usual unicorn hair quill, but an old, cracked pen inlaid with scales.

It was a birthday gift Hermione had given him in third year, haphazardly glued together from a strand of her fallen hair and a Bowtruckle's shed skin. She had muttered at the time:

"Anyway, you never lack for anything."

The nib wasn't dipped in ink, but in the silver-blue blood beads oozing from his fingertips, mixed with Mithril powder. Written on paper, it would change color with the reader's emotional temperature.

The nib fell:

Hermione, By the time you read this letter, I should no longer be among the living. Do not grieve—this is the outcome I deserve.