June arrived with blazing sunshine and cloudless skies. The roses in the courtyard had burst into full bloom, and Hogwarts settled into exam season.
It seemed a lifetime ago that a pineapple had been tap-dancing across a desk in Professor Flitwick's classroom.
Draco's perspective on the exams had changed entirely since then.
He was no longer the anxious, performative boy he had once been—terrified of a poor mark, dreading the look on his father's face. This life had given him too much else to carry for examinations to weigh particularly heavily. In comparison to everything else that had occupied his mind over the past year, the prospect of a written Transfiguration paper felt almost quaint.
With any luck, the worst of it was behind him now. As long as the diadem was dealt with, the rest could follow.
He exhaled quietly, and with something approaching calm, he transfigured a mouse into a finely crafted snuff bottle before Professor McGonagall; produced a flawless Draught of Forgetfulness under Professor Snape's watchful eye; and set down his anti-cheating quill after writing, in a steady hand on Professor Binns's examination parchment, that the self-stirring cauldron had been invented by Gaspard Shingleton.
Exam season was over.
"You were right, Draco." Hermione walked beside him out into the sun-drenched grounds, her voice carrying a note of genuine concession. "The Werewolf Code of Conduct and the Goblin Rebellion of 1637 weren't tested."
"You actually remembered something I mentioned in passing?" Draco raised an eyebrow.
Her memory never ceased to astonish him.
"Of course," Hermione said simply.
She would never admit that she remembered virtually everything he said.
They walked at an easy pace down the slope to the Black Lake and settled beneath the large oak tree that had become, without either of them formally deciding so, their usual spot. Across the water, the Weasley twins and Lee Jordan were occupied with the tentacles of an apparently bewildered giant squid in the shallows.
They watched in comfortable silence for a while.
The dread that had clung to everything in recent months had lifted. Under this sky—brilliant and wide and utterly indifferent to Dark Lords—even the words "Forbidden Forest" had lost their sinister weight.
It was Hermione who broke the quiet.
"Harry's been very unsettled," she said. "In the Forbidden Forest that night, his scar suddenly started hurting terribly."
Draco had been turning this over in his own mind.
In his past life, he had assumed Potter's complaints about his scar were some variety of attention-seeking. Up close, over the course of this year, he had revised that opinion considerably. Potter was not a boy who performed pain for an audience.
"He came face to face with him," Draco said, after a moment's thought. "Given their history, that reaction isn't surprising."
"That's what Professor Dumbledore said, more or less. He told Harry the scar acts as a kind of warning—that it reacts when he's in the presence of danger." Hermione was quiet for a moment, her expression thoughtful and serious in a way that had nothing girlish about it.
"Harry's personal Dark-wizard detector," Draco said, with a slight tilt of his head in her direction.
"That's not funny." She gave him a look.
"I'm not laughing." He returned his gaze to the lake, where one of the Weasley twins had apparently sat down directly on the squid and was now reconsidering his life choices. "But the concern is justified. Petrificus Totalus does not equal destruction. If he isn't handled carefully, the darkness will find a way back."
"Professor Dumbledore said something similar. Harry told me that Dumbledore has placed Quirrell's body somewhere secure, and won't reverse the Full Body-Bind until he fully understands what he's dealing with." Hermione glanced around with habitual caution before leaning slightly toward him and dropping her voice.
"Good," Draco said, with real relief.
As long as the Dark Lord remained contained, everything else was manageable.
He had not anticipated what the afternoon still had in store for him.
When he rounded the corner near Ravenclaw Tower and found the Grey Lady waiting, rather than retreating—when she turned to face him with an expression of lofty, weary resignation instead of simply passing through the nearest wall—he had to stop himself from reacting with visible surprise.
Up close, as always, she was striking. The floor-length cloak could not conceal the elegance of her bearing, and her long hair fell in dark waves to her waist. Her haughty manner seemed less a character flaw than a natural consequence of looking the way she did.
"Why can't you simply leave me alone?" she asked, studying him with the expression of someone who has been mildly but persistently pestered for months.
"I need your help." Draco squared his posture and gave her a proper, respectful bow—a deliberately formal gesture. "I want to know everything about the Ravenclaw diadem."
The Grey Lady's eyes moved over him with cool appraisal. A faint, cold smile crossed her lips. "You are not the first to covet it."
She turned to go.
"I know you hid it in the forest in Albania!" Draco called after her.
She stopped.
She did not turn around immediately. She hovered in place, seemingly deliberating.
"How could you possibly know that—" She looked back at him, expressionless.
"I know it is your mother's diadem. I know your name is Helena Ravenclaw. I know you took it when you fled—and I know where it is now." He kept his voice even. "It's here at Hogwarts, isn't it?"
The composure she had maintained so carefully began to crack.
She stared at him. Then, with a flash of contempt: "You want to find it—you want to wear it? A first-year student? Hoping to perform a little better on his examinations?"
"I have no interest in wearing it," Draco said quietly.
"I know that the Dark Lord deceived you. That he took your trust and used it against you. I don't want the diadem for myself—I want to know what he did to it. You must know something about that. Please. Unless you are somehow on his side—"
"How dare you." Her voice dropped to something cold and sharp. "How dare you suggest that."
The fierceness in her expression was startling. For a moment there was nothing ghostly or ethereal about her at all—she looked simply furious.
Then, as though the fury had broken something open: "How could I possibly side with him? He desecrated the Ravenclaw diadem with his dark magic! I told him my story—trusted him with it—and he used it to track down that hollow tree in the Albanian forest and steal it!"
As Draco had suspected.
"And how did it come to be back at Hogwarts?" he asked carefully.
Helena was quiet for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice had shifted into something more distant, as though she were reciting something from a long way away. "Years passed. Then one day he returned to Hogwarts, seeking a teaching position—Defence Against the Dark Arts. Dumbledore refused him, of course." A pause. "And so he left it here."
"I can hear that diadem wailing," she said, her voice tightening. "Day and night."
Draco looked up sharply. "Wailing?"
"Yes." She met his eyes. "He turned my mother's diadem into a Horcrux. He sealed a fragment of his own soul inside it. My mother will never forgive me." The bitterness in her voice was very old, and very deep.
The confirmation landed like cold water.
He had suspected it. He had built his entire plan around the assumption of it. But hearing it spoken aloud, from someone who had witnessed it firsthand—
The Horcrux was real. The Dark Lord had actually committed the act of soul-division. He had fragmented himself willingly, deliberately, for the sake of a half-life. Any pure-blood wizard worth the name regarded soul-magic of this kind as the lowest possible form of depravity—an irreversible corruption, a permanent wound in the fabric of what made a person human.
And yet those same pure-blood families had followed him. Blindly, proudly, without the faintest idea what they were actually serving.
The Malfoys had spent years in devoted attendance on something that had been broken beyond repair.
The cold reached Draco's bones. His face had gone quite pale.
Helena didn't notice. The questions seemed to have unplugged something that had been sealed for a long time, and the words came without stopping:
"That diadem—I thought it would make me wiser than my mother. More accomplished. I wanted to prove myself, to force her to acknowledge what I could do. I wore it, and I explored the furthest limits of magic, and I made progress—real progress—but the world never knew. And my mother died before I could come back to her."
Whether the diadem truly bestowed wisdom, Draco couldn't say.
What he could say, with certainty, was that what lived in Helena Ravenclaw's expression was not wisdom. It was regret so old and settled it had become indistinguishable from grief.
"The Bloody Baron," Draco said softly. "He found you. He killed you."
"He deserved what he got." The laugh she gave was shrill and discordant, like a badly tuned instrument. "You saw me speaking to him at the Astronomy Tower. You were both Slytherins—I noticed. I wanted nothing more to do with Slytherins. I have never been able to understand your ambition, your obsession, your relentless craving for power..." Her gaze hardened. "And yet here I am, confiding in Slytherin once again. You ruthless, charming, treacherous—you deceive and betray and call it intelligence!"
She turned away, trembling with an anger that had clearly been accumulating for centuries.
Draco felt the pieces fall into place. He had been rejected every single time he approached her—and now he understood why. Slytherin's silver and green had meant something to Helena Ravenclaw long before it meant anything to him.
If he had been wearing Gryffindor scarlet, she would probably have spoken to him months ago.
The irony was not lost on him.
"I'm sorry," he said carefully, choosing each word with precision. "For what was done to you. For your death, and for the way he used you."
"Dark Lord." She gave a hollow, contemptuous laugh. "That grandiose title. It makes me want to be sick. Fifty years ago he had no such title—he told me to call him Tom. He was just an ordinary student. Reasonably handsome. Sympathetic. A good listener." Her voice had gone flat. "I was wrong to trust him. Slytherins always wear the same face—charming enough to disarm you, clever enough to know exactly which lies you want to hear—"
She fixed him with a look of cold, direct venom. "Tell me, then. How are you any different from him? Why should I trust you at all?"
"I don't want to use it," Draco said. "If I could, I would destroy the soul fragment inside it and restore whatever dignity remains to the Ravenclaw name. But I can't do that without your help. You need to tell me how."
Helena studied him for a long, uncomfortable moment.
Then she looked away, out toward the darkened grounds below. After what felt like a very long time, she spoke.
"Destroying a Horcrux is exceptionally difficult." Her voice had changed—quieter, more measured, as though she were speaking to herself as much as to him. "The vessel must be damaged by something so destructive that magic cannot repair it afterward."
She paused.
"Godric Gryffindor's sword—it was forged by goblins, which means it takes in that which strengthens it. I don't know whether it would be enough, but it's an option worth considering. The difficulty is that it's been missing for some time." A mirthless breath. "Rather like the diadem itself."
"What else?" Draco asked.
"Fiendfyre. Cursed fire with a devouring nature—it can destroy things beyond magical repair. But it is extraordinarily dangerous. I have never heard of a wizard successfully controlling it, and I suspect the incantation has been lost or fragmented in most surviving sources. Even if an ancient family still possesses it, using it would be—" She shook her head slightly.
"And the last option?"
Helena's gaze grew distant.
"The basilisk," she said, as though the word cost her something. "Its venom is among the most destructive substances in the magical world. Nothing can repair what it destroys." She looked at him directly. "Salazar Slytherin kept a basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets beneath Hogwarts. I would assume it is still alive."
"The Chamber of Secrets," Draco said. The phrase surfaced memories from another life—the chaos of second year, the school nearly shuttered, a name that had made students whisper in corridors. He had been twelve then, too young and too self-satisfied to pay proper attention. Too occupied with bloodline politics and pointless arguments with Potter to wonder what any of it actually meant.
He had wasted so much time.
"Where is the Chamber?" he asked.
A faint sadness crossed Helena's face.
"I was away from Hogwarts for too long," she said quietly. "When I came back, they had renovated much of the castle. It no longer looked as I remembered it." She hesitated. "I'm sorry. I genuinely don't know."