The pool moved while Percy stood at its edge. Water rose against the stone, then sank before it could spill over.
The figure above it was becoming harder to see.
Percy kept the trident close. Its warmth had reached his wrist.
"Why does this have to happen now?" he asked.
"The threshold is weakening."
"How long has it been weakening?"
The figure looked toward the arch rather than answering.
Percy noticed. He wished noticing would provide a better choice.
Hermione moved beside him.
"We should learn more before you agree."
Ron nodded.
"That is my preference too. Ideally, somewhere with an exit."
The floor shook again. A crack opened between two stones near the arch.
Percy looked at it. The crack was narrow, but he could feel the water below pressing against a boundary he had not sensed before.
He tried to steady the nearest current.
For a moment, the pressure eased. Then something pushed back from farther below.
Percy stopped.
Hermione had seen his hand move.
"Was that you?"
"I tried to hold it still."
"And?"
"It is holding something else."
The figure grew brighter.
"You can protect the connection."
"Can you?" Percy asked.
Its outline weakened before returning.
"I have kept what remains."
That was not a clear answer. Percy did not think the figure had many left to give.
He looked at the trident. In his other life, people had asked him to protect things because of who his father was.
Here, the request had found him before he understood what he had inherited.
He was tired of being told a title before being given the work it meant.
"What happens to them?" he asked, indicating Ron and Hermione.
"They are not required to carry the bridge."
"They still fell through the floor with me."
Ron stepped closer.
"We also have opinions about what you carry."
Percy almost smiled.
The next movement in the pool ended that attempt. Water rose higher, and the trident pulled against his hand as if he had lifted it into a strong current.
Images appeared before he could shut his eyes.
He saw people standing around arches. Some held the same weapon. Others waited beside channels cut into stone.
He saw water crossing open gaps, then stopping at a boundary.
The images changed too quickly for him to read them as history. They could have been memories, warnings, or things the figure wanted him to expect.
Percy lowered the trident until its base rested on the floor.
He needed to feel something ordinary beneath his hand.
"Are those things that happened?"
"Things that may be remembered."
"That is not the same answer."
The figure's light faded at the edges.
Hermione looked at Percy. She was frightened, but she was also thinking.
"It might be showing you a function," she said. "Not promising an outcome."
Percy considered that. The people in the images had not all looked victorious.
Some had looked as tired as the figure before him.
Ron looked toward the passage.
"We could still go back to the altar."
"Yes," Percy said.
He turned to check the route. The corridor remained open, but the marks along it were weakening in the same order they had lit.
He could try to carry the trident back. He could wait while the room changed around them.
Neither option would tell him whether the pressure beneath the pool would stop when he left.
The figure raised its hand again.
"You may become the bridge. Or leave it to what comes after."
Percy thought of the note telling him to stay away. Someone had wanted him frightened enough to stop.
Someone else had brought him here and made accepting a responsibility seem like the way to keep his friends alive.
He could not establish which one had been honest.
He could choose the part he would agree to.
"I will help protect it," he said. "I am not agreeing to open anything because you call it my destiny."
The figure watched him.
Hermione touched his arm.
"Percy."
He looked at her before continuing.
"If this lets me hold the boundary, I will try. If it asks for something else, we stop and find another answer."
Ron did not look satisfied. Percy appreciated that he had not pretended to be.
"Then we stop," Ron said. "Even if stopping is inconvenient."
Percy nodded.
He lifted the trident from the floor.
"I choose to protect the bridge."
The light struck all at once.
Percy gripped the shaft with both hands. He could feel the water below, the pool before him, and currents beyond the room that had no ordinary direction.
The orb brightened until he could see it through his closed eyelids.
Hermione called his name. He answered, though he could not hear his own voice over the movement around him.
Water turned inside the pool. It rose into a tall spiral without leaving its boundary.
Percy felt the force trying to pull him closer.
He remained where he stood.
The choice he had made was to hold something. He could begin by holding his own position.
His feet shifted on the wet stone. Ron caught the back of his sleeve while Hermione steadied his arm.
The pull weakened.
Percy opened his eyes.
The carvings were lit from floor to arch. The figure above the pool had become almost transparent, but its raised hand was still visible.
"Guardian."
This time, the word reached him as a description of the connection he could feel. It did not tell him what would happen next.
The spiral fell back into the pool.
The light weakened, leaving Hermione's wand as the clearest source in the room.
Percy lowered the trident. His fingers hurt from holding it so tightly.
Ron let go of his sleeve.
"Still you?"
Percy looked at him.
"Yes."
"Good. Because I would prefer not to explain replacing you on the way back."
Hermione checked his face, then the pool.
"What changed?"
Percy tried to answer without making the new sense sound better than it felt.
"I can feel where the connection is held. I could not do that before."
"Can you control it?"
"Not yet."
He would not repeat the figure's confidence as his own.
The figure's last outline disappeared. The arch remained, the pool was still, and the corridor behind them had stopped losing its light.
Percy took a slow breath.
Then Ron looked toward the far corner.
Something had laughed there.
Two points of red light appeared in the dark. Percy turned the trident toward them and wondered how much of the choice he had made someone else had been waiting to use.
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To Be Continued... next week! MUAHAHAHAHAHA!
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