Harry and Ron were crashing through the undergrowth, the Ford Anglia weaving with sentient precision through the gaps in the trees.
It followed a route it clearly knew by heart, eventually bursting from the treeline and leaving the Forbidden Forest—and its silent, eight-legged pursuers—far behind.
Harry turned to look at Ron. The boy's mouth was still frozen in a silent scream, though his eyes had finally ceased their frantic bulging.
"Are you alright?" Harry breathed.
Ron stared blankly at the dashboard. Without a word, he threw open the car door the moment they skidded to a halt near the pumpkin patch, scrambled out, and vomited violently.
"Following spiders," Ron croaked, wiping his mouth with a muddy sleeve. "I'll never forgive Hagrid. Never. We're lucky to be alive."
He pulled out his snapped wand, brandishing it at the dark forest. "When he gets back from Azkaban, I'll kill him myself!"
"He probably thought Aragog wouldn't hurt his friends," Harry said softly, though the defense felt weak even to him.
"That's the problem with Hagrid!" Ron pounded a fist against the stone wall of the hut. "He always thinks monsters are just misunderstood. Look where it got him! Locked in a cell!" He began to tremble. "And what was the point? What did we actually find out?"
"We found out he didn't open the Chamber," Harry insisted. "He's innocent."
Ron snorted. In his current state, hatching a man-eating spider in a school cupboard was enough to forfeit the title of 'innocent' forever.
Harry ducked into the hut, retrieved the Invisibility Cloak, and draped it over them both. They sat huddled in the shadows of the eaves, staring back toward the depths of the Forest. The wait for Elijah felt eternal.
"That monster... the one the spiders fear," Harry whispered. "It sounds like Voldemort. They won't even say the name."
"Then don't you say it either," Ron hissed, shivering.
Harry sighed, looking up. The clouds had finally broken, leaving the sky clear. Moonlight spilled across the pumpkin patch like a layer of silver frost. Then, deep within the woods, the horizon suddenly ignited. A fierce, orange glow pulsed upward, illuminating the firmament.
Harry sprang to his feet. "Ron, look!"
...
"Protego Totalum."
Elijah watched the car's taillights vanish into the blackness of the trees. Some of the smaller spiders attempted to give chase, but they slammed into the invisible barrier he had erected across the hollow.
The contact was instant and terminal; the magic incinerated them into drifting ash.
The colony turned. Thousands of Acromantulas, from the carriage-sized elders to the hound-sized young, converged on the single human left in their territory.
They moved like a black, chitinous tide, driven by a frenzied, collective hunger.
The rhythmic clack-clack-clack of their pincers vibrated through the very ground, a booming percussion of death.
Even Elijah felt a prickle of revulsion. It was the sight of a nightmare made manifest—tens of thousands of writhing, hairy bodies piled atop one another, a sea of multifaceted eyes gleaming with mindless greed.
He did not flinch. He waited until the wave was nearly upon him, then drove the tip of his wand into the earth.
Boom!
A violent shockwave erupted from the point of contact.
The surge of magic sent the front line of spiders flying backward, clearing a wide, circular vacuum around him.
In the center of this dead zone, he unhurriedly produced a cauldron, its contents already simmering with a dark, expectant heat.
The spiders surged again, stepping over the broken carapaces of their kin. They piled higher, forming a living wall of shadow that loomed over the small figure in the center.
Elijah watched them with cold, analytical eyes. Then, he ignited the fire.
It was not a normal flame. It gushed forth like a pressurized spring, a torrent of magical heat that surged into every corner of the hollow.
The Acromantulas were caught in a firestorm that clung to their limbs like liquid poison.
Wails—high-pitched and alien—pierced the night as the fire jumped from one hairy body to the next.
"Wait—human—stop!" Aragog wailed, pleading from the center of his burning web.
Elijah was deaf to it. In alchemy, the value of life was measured in equivalent exchange, but to his own perspective, there was no equality between a human and a swarm of man-eaters.
The flames consumed them, but their essence did not simply vanish. As their bodies turned to ash, a thick, crimson vapor rose into the air, swirling and condensing into a river of liquid life that flowed upward, draining into the cauldron.
The hollow transformed into a desolate graveyard, a font of sacrificial power.
Tens of thousands of lives were exchanged for a single pot of blood-red plasma.
Standing in the center of the inferno, untouched by the heat, Elijah's gaze was colder than the winter he intended to escape.
...
The orange glow on the horizon eventually began to fade, turning the sky a bruised purple as dawn approached.
"He's possessing her body! I have to go back for her," Ron said suddenly, his voice resolute despite his exhaustion. He wasn't thinking about 'Mr. Riddle' anymore—he was thinking about Ginny.
"We're going together," Harry replied.
They hadn't reached the treeline before a small, slight shadow emerged from the mist.
"Ginny!" Ron rushed forward, stumbling in his haste and rolling through the mud before scrambling to Elijah's feet.
"What are you doing?" Elijah asked, looking down at the disheveled boy with genuine astonishment.
"Are you okay? Did they hurt you?"
"Not a hair harmed," Elijah said, flicking a stray strand of red hair back into place. "They were persistent, so I simply took the time to kill them all."
Harry and Ron exchanged a look of sheer horror. The casual nature of the statement made them realize, perhaps for the first time, that the spiders were the ones who should have been afraid.
"Killed them all?" Ron echoed. "Hagrid's going to be devastated."
"Better him sad than us eaten," Ron muttered, though he looked at Elijah with a new, guarded respect. "It's almost light. We have to get back."
...
Back in the Gryffindor common room, Elijah provided them with a Vitality Potion to stave off the collapse of their bodies. As the castle began to wake, Harry shared his latest theory about Moaning Myrtle being the girl who died fifty years ago.
"I'm afraid she won't have the clues you're looking for," Elijah said with practiced sympathy. "If she did, Hagrid's name would have been cleared decades ago."
"We still have to try," Harry insisted.
Elijah nodded, though his mind was elsewhere. The sacrifice in the Forest had been successful.
Two days before the Mandrakes were set to mature, the crimson liquid in his cauldron had finally solidified into a bright, irregularly prismatic stone—a ripe pomegranate seed of pure power.
The Philosopher's Stone.
He had tested it privately, turning a wooden stool into solid gold to verify its completion. More importantly, he had distilled a single drop of its elixir and consumed it. The surge of life magic that filled Ginny's body was intoxicating, mending the fraying edges of her soul and anchoring his own presence.
The time for waiting was over.
On the afternoon before the Mandrakes were to be harvested, Harry and Ron spotted an opening to sneak toward the girl's lavatory. Elijah watched them from under a Disillusionment Charm, the Marauder's Map clutched in his hand.
"Shouldn't we have brought Mr. Riddle?" Ron whispered as they crept down a side passage. "He might know how to talk to Myrtle."
"No time," Harry replied. "Ginny's in class anyway."
Elijah brushed past them, a phantom in the corridor. For a fleeting second, Harry paused, looking back at the empty air as if he had felt the weight of his own destiny passing him by.
"What is it?" Ron asked.
"Nothing. Let's go."
Elijah let them go. He detoured, creating a deliberate noise in the next corridor to draw Professor McGonagall's attention. He watched from the shadows as she intercepted the boys.
"Potter! Weasley! Where do you think you're going?"
As Harry spun a desperate, tearful lie about wanting to visit the petrified Hermione one last time, Elijah slipped away toward the second-floor lavatory.
He stood before the entrance, looking at the wall where he had painted his first warning.
It was time for the finale.
He raised his wand, and in a vivid, visceral red that looked far too much like fresh blood, he added the final line to the legend.
Her bones will remain in the Chamber forever.