It is one thing to kill for power; it is quite another to design a place where the world itself will have to fight for the right to touch what you have given it. The Sword of Gryffindor was not an ornament. It was my Horcrux — the anchor of my survival — and I treated its safety as if every second of my existence depended upon it. In truth, it did.
I chose the old Blackwater Cave for reasons that would satisfy a strategist and a sentimentalist at once. The place had history: blasted stone, a shallow inlet that drank the sea at high tide, and a smell of iron that never quite left the air. The original Riddle had used such remote, rotting places — appropriate, if one wants the world to forget. I wanted more than forgetting. I wanted the cave to be a crucible.
What I built there was not a vault so much as a gauntlet — a layered argument that any would‑be intruder had to answer and, more importantly, fail. I wrote runes across stone and sea, and I let the old magics taste my blood and my cunning. It is not a simple thing to explain, and I will not exhaust you with arcane schematics. The point is this: anyone who seeks that sword will have to pay for the attempt in ways that make heroes think twice.
The outer ring is a test of will and loss. I bound the entrance with a sacrifice‑ward — a lattice that does not bar plodding feet but demands a cost: magic or blood drained and transmuted into a toll. Those who arrive wondering whether they can simply force a door find instead that the cave takes a measure of them the moment they cross the threshold. It is a polite theft; it is the sort of asking that punishes arrogance.
Beyond that, the cave refuses ordinary means of travel. Anti‑apparition runes bite at the edges of the aether; spectral currents fold back like a net. I layered dragon‑proof wards so deeply that even creatures that breathe fire would find their claws stung and their wings slowed. If Dumbledore came in blazing with his reputation, he would discover not an empty corridor to cut through, but a grammar he must obey — an architecture that redirects the greatest spells into moot gestures. I wrote the wards to be not merely defensive but prescriptive: cross them and you will do so on my terms.
The next challenge is a narrow, ceremonial entry — a room whose air tastes of old herbs and salt. There is a cup upon a stone, and it will not be for the faint of heart. I will not describe the potion; those who read these words ought not be given a recipe for despair. I will say only this: it is a memory‑mirror. It will not abridge or invent; it will return a person to the truest and most private corners of themselves. For those who are brittle — who build their lives on performance and bluster — it is a truth that fractures. Some leave that chamber steadied, having faced what they concealed. Others do not leave at all. The chamber is merciless because the world can be merciless; my system tolerates no half‑prepared intruder.
If curiosity or courage survives that test, the cave's lake waits. The Blackwater is shallow enough to wade and deep enough to drown a plan. It is populated not by mindless things but by not‑quite‑dead forms I bound as sentinels — obedient and patient. I will not claim sainthood for the origins of their service; I will simply note that they serve with a tireless precision more useful than most living troops. The lake is a trap for haste. Those who sprint will find their steps slowed, their resolve eaten away by the cold and the uncanny.
Beyond the water, a chamber sealed by contract and blood demands a surrender of another kind. You cannot brandish wands there. The air itself takes them from your hands and keeps them. The room is a test of muscle, guile, and endurance: no magic, just force, cunning, and the proximity of beasts. I set chimaeras in that space — scaled, horned things bred for the moment when magic fails a hand. I layered the floor with an old gravity charm I refined to increase weight and dull speed. In that chamber, the body becomes the instrument of survival.
Finally, at the heart, there is a door written in a language of blood. I borrowed and reshaped an old family rite — a lock keyed not to a name but to a lineage. Only those bearing that precise current of blood, or those who can expend a ruinous torrent of magic outside the vault's boundaries, may hope to crack it. The trick is simple: the door is the only place in the cave that will respond directly to me. It will open for me with the courtesy of an old friend. For anyone else, it will ask everything a mortal has and then ask for more.
Yes, perhaps it is overkill. I am perfectly aware of that. Overkill is, in many ways, a form of thrift: invest enough in the right place and you do not have to spend the rest of your life watching your back. If someone faces those defenses and survives, then perhaps they deserve to touch the sword. But I designed the gauntlet to be a deterrent: to make a theft so costly in time, soul, and strength that only desperation or madness would drive a thief to risk it.
And if Dumbledore himself ever stood before that final lock — as he might, with his appetite for riddles and the impossible — he would find the cave insisting on my logic. Wards can be answered, bargains struck. But the cave was made to behave as I decreed. Even a man with the Elder Wand will discover in those stones the stubbornness of my intent; he could break walls if he wished, but the cost would be calibrated into consequences that his conscience and his law would have to weigh. I designed the place so that any attempt to wrest the sword becomes not merely a physical act but a moral and metaphysical negotiation — and those are games I prefer to play with the rules in my hands.
I left the cave with the sword wrapped and nested in wards that had names known only to me. I walked out across the black mud and let the sea claim its sound again; the tide closed behind me like a curtain. My Horcrux slept beneath its layers, humming in a silence I had engineered to be sacred and cruel in equal measure.