You Still Dare to Show Your Face?

The stone chamber gave no answer.

Only the water in the supply pipes kept flowing, its steady drip echoing along the walls.

Gavin waited a moment. He heard no footsteps and saw no thousand-year-old wizard emerge from the shadows to demand why he had killed the guard and emptied the storeroom.

He relaxed a little.

Slytherin could still be alive and simply not be home today. Both could be true.

The stable sample might already have been taken away, and the core records had long since been cleared out. All that remained here were seventeen failed specimens and a Basilisk in hibernation.

But Gavin had only relaxed a little. He was far from at ease.

More questions crowded into his mind—

Was the Resurrection Stone now out in the world, set into the Gaunt Ring, another discarded sample? Or was it the finished product?

If that "stable sample" was the Resurrection Stone known to later generations, one of the Deathly Hallows...

Then what about the Elder Wand and the Invisibility Cloak?

Were they two more samples from other projects? Finished products made after the Peverell brothers took over the research? Or merely three unrelated magical artifacts that people later bundled into a fairy tale?

Stranger still was where they had ended up.

The Resurrection Stone and the Invisibility Cloak had each passed down through bloodlines, while the Elder Wand had changed hands through conflict and murder.

From the very beginning, the three objects had taken entirely different paths, as though placed in three separate observation groups.

Were they discarded samples lost when the laboratory was evacuated, or had Slytherin deliberately released them?

If it was the latter, who were the test subjects?

The Peverell brothers, the generations of owners, or the entire Wizarding World?

For now, Gavin had no answers.