One morning, three weeks before Christmas, every student at Hogwarts was shaken.
Almost every student who got up that morning and went to the Great Hall for breakfast was stunned senseless.
In the Entrance Hall outside the Great Hall stood an enormous piece of "amber," drawing who knew how many hundreds of gasps and exclamations of admiration from the entire school.
It was a huge cylinder of amber, eight meters tall and ten meters across at its base. Amber was nothing unusual. What was unusual was what lay inside it.
It was an enormous, dark green python.
Unlike an ordinary python, however, this giant serpent had a mouth full of sharp fangs. The two longest were over two feet long, comparable to short swords.
The great snake was covered in extremely fine, dark green scales. Intricate, dazzling patterns in lighter colors adorned them, eerie yet beautiful.
The giant serpent was posed in a downward spiral, its jaws wide open, looking extraordinarily ferocious.
Only, where its eyes should have been, there were now two yellow, cut crystal balls.
At the bottom, two eyeballs, each a little larger than an adult's head, had been specially placed in balanced positions.
Beside the amber stood a bronze plaque that was clearly newly made and still gleaming. It recorded detailed information about the great serpent-the basilisk.
Besides that information, a separate description of the basilisk inside the amber appeared at the bottom of the plaque:
"This creature was a legacy left a thousand years ago by Salazar Slytherin, one of the four Founders of Hogwarts.
This was a genuine thousand-year-old basilisk,
the true culprit behind the attacks on Hogwarts students in 1992!
Through meticulous observation, cautious reasoning, and verification, four current students-Hermione Granger, Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, and Neville Longbottom-ultimately identified the true culprit and