Over the next few weeks, the dunes of Dahshur gained two of their most dedicated visitors.
The scorching Egyptian sun became a permanent fixture of their daily commute. Douglas and Bill shuttled back and forth between their Cairo apartment and the Whispering Dunes so often it started to feel routine. They weren't explorers anymore. They were contractors.
"Doug, are you absolutely sure it won't start reciting the Book of the Dead in my head while I'm in the shower?"
Bill stood before the wind-eroded rock at the tomb entrance, shaking his ringed index finger. Inside the black obsidian face of the ring, the small dark shadow hurled itself against the golden imprisonment rune at a frantic, sustained rhythm. A torrent of consciousness, thick with rage, humiliation, and ancient Egyptian profanity, kept crashing against Bill's mental barriers.
"Relax, would you," Douglas said, not looking up.
He was crouched on the ground, wand tip moving in precise circles as he recalibrated the magical nodes along the entrance rock.
"I set up keyword filtering. Anything related to Anubis, Osiris, or mummification procedures gets automatically rerouted into a live reading of Hogwarts: A History."
Bill pictured that clearly. He shuddered.
"That's worse than the Book of the Dead."
"Consider it a little taste of home. You've been abroad so long."
Douglas grinned.
Under Douglas's friendly encouragement, the Shadow of Ankh-Ka, an ancient consciousness that had spent several millennia sealed in stone, was compelled to accept a new position.
Chief Terrain Surveying Consultant, Hogwarts Egypt Campus (Preparatory).
Douglas's reasoning had been simple and completely unanswerable.
"You can stay here, or I take you back to Hogwarts and spend a semester researching how Felix Felicis interacts with a two-dimensional soul form. Your call."
The shadow had folded immediately.
Felix Felicis, with its uncontrollable and absolute luck, was for a consciousness built on curses and shadow an existential threat. Worse than direct sunlight. The shadow wanted no part of it.
With Ankh-Ka's reluctant expertise at their disposal, every inch of the tomb opened up before them. Hidden chambers, concealed magical circuits, load-bearing enchantments going back three thousand years. The full blueprint, spread out and readable.
Douglas got to work.
He stood before the wind-eroded rock carved with the closed eye of Horus and traced a long, intricate pattern of silver light through the air. The original lock needed replacing. The astrological positioning system Ankh-Ka had used was atmospheric enough, but it wasn't precise, and it could be brute-forced by anyone patient and powerful enough.
"We need something more," Douglas said to himself, "personalized."
He wove a Confundus Charm directly into the symbolic core of the Eye of Horus. From that point forward, any intruder who tried to force or dispel the entrance would be instantly transported to a random location somewhere in the Sahara. The center of a cactus thicket, for instance.
"Now the password."
He tapped his chin. His Hufflepuff practicality and his considerably less practical sense of humor both surfaced at the same moment.
"Ancient Egyptian hymns are too obvious."
He needed something secretive. Something with character. Something no one would ever guess in a thousand years.
Douglas pressed his wand to the stone and bound a single phrase to the opening mechanism.
"Dumbledore is a loyal customer of Honeydukes."
Bill stared at him.
"Doug. You made the Headmaster's sweet tooth the key to a thousand-year-old tomb."
"It's psychological encryption," Douglas said, perfectly serious. "No dark wizard or tomb raider, guessing until the end of time, would ever land on that. The defense system of an ancient Egyptian burial site and a man who eats sherbet lemons by the fistful. No one connects those dots." He tilted his head. "Try it."
Bill cleared his throat. He delivered the phrase with the gravity it apparently deserved.
"Dumbledore is a loyal customer of Honeydukes."
The Eye of Horus twitched.
It was a single sharp twitch of the carved stone eyelid, as though the ancient symbol had just heard a particularly baffling punchline. Then transparent ripples spread across the surface of the rock, the Confundus Charm recognizing the password and standing down. The mechanism yielded with a low, resonant click.
Three thousand years of arcane engineering, undone by a piece of absurd gossip about a man's candy preference.
They went in.
The tomb passage stretched ahead of them, its walls covered in murals of faceless figures. The same figures that had threatened them on their first visit, pale human silhouettes with blank ovals where faces should have been, radiating the same quiet, oppressive menace. Last time, Douglas had neutralized them with an illusion charm. But that had been improvised. It wasn't a permanent solution.
"The attack mechanism on these murals is genuinely dangerous," he said, studying the nearest wall. "Life force drainage. That's not going to clear any kind of educational facility safety review."
He needed to replace the threat entirely. Horror mode off. Something more instructional. Engaging, even.
He raised his wand and began layering new enchantments directly over the pigment.
First: a standard Muggle-Repelling Charm. If a wandering archaeologist ever stumbled close, they'd feel an inexplicable urge to go study a different pyramid.
Then came the more intricate work. Douglas reached into his memory and retrieved two very specific things: the particular pitch and cadence of Peeves the Poltergeist's most grating laugh, and the footwork pattern of the can-can dance the poltergeist had once performed across the Great Hall ceiling during a fifth-year exam.
"Shapes shift, illusions rise."
Magic poured across the ancient murals like a slow tide of color, settling into the painted lines and resting there.
Douglas stepped back.
"Done. Any intruder who triggers the mechanism from here on out won't see soul-draining faceless spirits."
"What will they see?" Bill asked.
"One thousand Peeves. Tutus. Can-can. All singing 'Weasley Is Our King' in classical ancient Egyptian."
Douglas smiled. It was a perfectly innocent smile.
Bill's face went through several stages.
He stood there for a moment, working through the full image, and arrived at the conclusion that this was actually more psychologically damaging than having your life force drained. There was something about a thousand shrieking Peeveses in ballet skirts that reached places that mere soul extraction couldn't.
He even found himself feeling a flicker of sympathy for any future tomb robbers.
Especially because Douglas's version of "Weasley Is Our King" was the original. He'd written it himself, the night Bill's team won their first Quidditch Cup. Every word of it was burned permanently into Bill's memory.
He pressed a hand to his forehead and walked past at speed, eyes fixed on the middle distance. He would not look at the walls. He would not give it an opportunity.
Because he knew, with absolute certainty, that one look would be enough to guarantee a specific recurring nightmare for the rest of his natural life. Peeves. Tutus. Hogwarts corridors. Running.
They pushed through into the heart of the tomb.
The burial chamber at the center held the seven clay urns exactly as they'd left them, arranged in the same quiet formation. This was the control core of the entire structure. The most sophisticated thing Ankh-Ka had built: a lock keyed to emotional resonance.
Douglas circled the urns slowly, hands clasped behind his back, like a professor turning an interesting problem over in his head.
"Emotion-based combination lock. The concept is genuinely good," he said. "But a fixed password is a fixed password. You leave it long enough, someone brute-forces it. Ankh-Ka's life story is moving, but as cryptography, it's not aging well."
What this room needed was something that couldn't be pre-memorized. Something that shifted on its own.
"A dynamic password system."
His eyes drifted to the copy of the Daily Prophet Bill had brought in. The front page was devoted to some fresh piece of Ministry incompetence, the headline font sized for maximum outrage.
Douglas looked at the paper for a long moment.
Dynamic. Randomized. Time-sensitive. A new answer every day, drawn from a source that updated itself without anyone having to think about it.
His eyes lit up.
He'd found the perfect password generator.
➤ Next: Douglas's Quirky Taste: Want to Enter? Subscribe to the Daily Prophet First!
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