Iain's golden cauldron was not the sort of thing that simply sprouted out of the ground.
But it could be dug out of it.
Lately, the little skeleton miner Iain had sent underground every day to make use of its natural talents had indeed dug up quite a lot of perfectly legitimate gold.
And now, having just returned from another round of prospecting, it had taken one look at someone "attacking" Iain and immediately chosen the legally sound option of self-defense against a suspicious figure who, at a glance, clearly did not look trustworthy.
Of course.
Whether the Wizengamot would accept that explanation was another matter entirely.
"We're finished! Magic Skeleton, you assaulted my future professor! We're both going to Azkaban now! No jury is ever going to believe an undead creature and a necromancer!" Iain threw himself down beside Snape, crouched, and placed two fingers beneath Snape's nose.
Thank heavens, there was breathing. Steady breathing, too. Then he pressed a hand to Snape's chest. His heart was beating, calm and regular, exactly like an ordinary sleeping person's.
"Oh, ancestors bless him, Professor Snape's skull is absurdly hard. Good thing he didn't die. If he'd actually kicked the bucket instead of merely passing out, I'd be carrying a mountain of bad karma!"
Iain let out a long breath and immediately began thinking about how to salvage the situation. His super brain spun up at once, and very quickly it seemed to find a solution.
"I can say Voldemort attacked this place and tried to possess him. I fought to protect him, and in the process got hit by a terrible curse."
"That curse was unimaginably vicious. I may look fine now, but in truth I've only got a tiny sliver of my lifespan left." Iain's first instinct, naturally, was to start laying groundwork for sympathy.
At the same time, he also wanted to leverage the life-saving favor so Snape would not spend the next few years targeting him. After all, dragging the man out of the little skeleton's hands did count as saving his life.
How exactly the life-threatening situation had come about was, in Iain's view, an unnecessarily rude question.
"Luckily, once school starts, Harry Potter will be in our house. He's really my savior." Iain had read enough fanfiction to know exactly how miserable life could become if Snape decided to single you out. On the bright side, in Gryffindor there would always be at least one person Snape disliked more.
Yes, now that he had obtained the King's Sword, Iain was fully convinced he was destined for Gryffindor. With Harry Potter around, Snape's hatred would always have a higher-priority target.
Just as Iain was beginning to plan for the future, the diary floated up from the table. Its pages turned in the still air with a dry rustling sound. It drifted to Iain's shoulder, opened, and words appeared.
[Or we could simply kill him. Then no one would know.]
Iain's neck stiffened.
He turned and stared at the line on the page.
[You could use that puppet you dismantled earlier, stitch together a new Potions professor, and let me operate it and teach your classes myself.]
[Trust me. No one would ever notice he'd been swapped out.]
The thing spoke exactly like an evil dark witch trying to tempt a child onto the path of corruption.
Fortunately, Iain's will was ironclad.
"I always thought people only talked out of their backside when they were literally passing gas. I never expected you could do it while writing, too, Senior."
When Iain decided to be vicious, his mouth could rival even Snape's.
Clatter, clatter.
After insulting the senior witch, Iain had just bent down to move Snape onto the bed and search for some medicine he might have lying around when he heard the little skeleton start digging.
The thing had shamelessly repurposed its mining shovel for personal use. It was now using the very same tool meant for prospecting to dig a burial pit.
The sort of large hole an ordinary person might spend an entire day struggling to make had already begun to take shape with shocking speed.
What the skeleton intended was obvious without needing any guesswork.
It dug for a while, paused, looked back at Snape, then resumed. Its posture was that of someone confirming the target's dimensions.
And making sure the pit was the correct size.
"No! Stop that! He's not at the age where he belongs in a hole yet!" Iain lunged over, grabbed the little skeleton by the shoulder blades, and hauled it bodily out of the pit.
The little skeleton tilted its head. Its hollow eye sockets fixed on him while its jaw clacked in a rapid series of noises.
It sounded exactly like someone whose sincere attempt to help had just been rejected and who was now asking, Why are you refusing perfectly reasonable assistance?
"That's not how this works."
Iain launched into patient instruction.
The little skeleton fell silent for a moment. Its jaw clicked a few times, as if thinking. Then suddenly it moved, sprinting into the kitchen.
The sounds of pots striking iron rang out from inside, followed by the rush of running water and the unmistakable noise of something being thrown into a pot.
"What terrifying new plan are you cooking up now?"
Iain rushed to the kitchen doorway and found the little skeleton standing at the stove, clutching the lid of a double boiler. The water inside was already hot enough to roll.
It was boiling.
Next to the stove, on the chopping board, there was nothing at all. But in the skeleton's hand was a small jar.
Pepper.
It was sprinkling pepper into the pot.
It was making soup.
Using Snape.
Iain inhaled sharply. Seeing that the little skeleton was once again trying to invent ingredients whenever none were available, he immediately rushed in, scooped it up, carried it back to the sitting room, and stuffed it down into the mine shaft.
He had no intention of becoming Hogwarts' answer to Hannibal Lecter. Aristocratic European traditions were not for him.
"I knew it. Every last one of you is an obstacle on my path to becoming a universally respected Grand Sage of Light."
He could not help grumbling.
He really did feel that with this wicked diary and his wicked magic skeleton by his side, he was drifting further and further away from the noble White Wizard path he wanted.
[Killing someone is no great matter. It isn't as if they can't still enter the Dreamrealm. In old myths, didn't the people of Asgard dream of entering Valhalla?]
[Depending on how you look at it, you may be doing them a favor.]
The dark witch's logic had clearly moved far beyond ordinary human standards.
The older a wizard became, the stranger that logic seemed to get.
"I'm a good person at heart. You, on the other hand, are different. If you go a full day without killing somebody, your whole body probably starts to itch. Professor Dumbledore all but told me so. He said you kill more people in a day than Voldemort saw in his entire life."
By now, Iain felt he had developed a fair understanding of this mysterious senior witch. He had even begun to suspect that the reason there were so few wizards left in the world had something to do with her.
The diary's pages turned once, and new handwriting appeared, very slowly.
[I merely cast a green Lumos. They all happened to go to the Dreamrealm on their own.]
[Who knows what the cause was? Perhaps they suffered from some unknown disease, like those old tribal people who would simply drop dead while running.]
[And if you ask why my Lumos branches into something else, the answer is talent, darling. Surely you understand that.]
Reading the information the diary offered, Iain chose silence. He could not spot a flaw in the logic. At least on that front, it was flawless.
"Either way, stop undermining my moral foundation. Hm? My wizard's heart? My magic conscience?" Iain liked to think of himself as a reasonable person, but when someone's logic beat his own, all he could really do was grab the diary and shove it into the makeshift magical storage space he had lately been using.
His trousers.
"This skull of his really went down easier than mine?" Iain's attention returned to the unconscious professor. Then his super brain kicked into gear.
He had a solution.
...
Cold.
No shivering.
Snape's consciousness was beginning, ever so slightly, to return through a haze. The back of his head throbbed viciously. He wanted to open his eyes, but could not, as though the blow had left him a proper vegetable.
Fortunately, he could still hear what was happening around him.
"Magic Skeleton! I told you to fetch Aunt Lily so she could put in a good word for me! I did not tell you to bring back only Aunt Lily's head! This has gotten way too dark!"
"All right, yes, technically to put in a good word all she'd need is the head. And yes, Aunt Lily did not refuse you. Damn this airtight logic. You really have picked up bad habits from that old witch!"
That voice, Snape recognized.
The voice of that humanoid troll.
Only two sentences in, and Snape's fingers had already started twitching.
Love, perhaps, truly was a magnificent force.
"Look! Magic Skeleton, he moved! I really am a miracle doctor! Wait, what are you doing! You quack, stop! Aunt Lily's skull cannot handle herbal treatment!"
"Let go of it, you evil skeleton! The power of love magic does not diffuse into water that way! The osmotic pressure is completely wrong! Clearly you never studied physics when you were alive!"
"Seriously, stop messing around. If Harry Potter sees this in a few days, and he comes back from the Warcraft universe version, he'll kill every one of us!"
With the boy's horrified shouting ringing around him, there came a pause.
Then, suddenly,
Snape's eyes flew open.
Like a gravely ill man sitting bolt upright from his deathbed, he jolted awake.