bookbashuk Chapter 12 Damon's Manor
Chapter 12 Damon's Manor
Stone steps stretched out beneath my feet, and fireflies glowed faintly on the walls on either side, illuminating the sinking darkness. The air grew increasingly dry, carrying an ancient and enclosed aura, like a tomb sealed for far too long.
Hermione held the dragon egg in one hand and gripped the back of his robe with the other, her footsteps echoing on the narrow stone steps.
"We're going down," she said softly, but her voice was amplified in the stone staircase. "This island doesn't look very big from the lake, but these stone steps—"
"It's blood magic," Viserys's voice came from the front. "Daemon used blood magic to extend space to the bottom of the lake, just like in the vaults beneath Gringotts. The space has been distorted."
“It’s different,” Hermione said, her tone suddenly becoming very certain. “Gringotts’ vault is a building, carved out of a single block of rock. Didn’t you notice? There aren’t any seams in the walls.”
The stone steps suddenly widened at the fourth corner, with the walls on either side opening outwards to form a long, narrow antechamber. Viserys stopped, and Hermione peeked out from behind him.
Before me stood a stone door. Its surface was covered in runes, densely packed, hundreds of symbols crammed together from the lintel to the threshold, from left to right, without any apparent order. The walls on either side of the door were also covered in runes, and a fluorescent light danced across these inscriptions, making them appear almost alive.
"Runes again," Hermione whispered, her gaze already moving over the symbols. "But these are different from those on the statue's pedestal."
"You can tell?"
"There are two lines of text on the statue, one in High Valyrian and one in French, both forming sentences," she said, pointing to an inscription on the upper left of the stone gate. "These aren't sentences, they're individual symbols. Each symbol is independent, but they're carved together, and there's some kind of connection between them."
Viserys reached out and pressed his hand against a stone slab in the center of the stone door, his fingers sinking into the gaps between the runes. He pushed hard, but the stone door didn't budge. He moved to a different spot and pushed again, but it still wouldn't move.
"I can't push it away," he said.
"Then it wasn't pushed." Hermione crouched down, her gaze level with the lowest rune on the facade. Her eyes swept from left to right, her lips moving silently, as if counting something.
Viserys stepped back and looked at her. The girl who had been clutching the dragon egg in the Gringotts tunnels was now crouching before a stone door engraved with unfamiliar symbols, her brow furrowed, her gaze as focused as when she was reading a history of magic textbook at the ice cream shop. He moved half a step to the side, allowing more of the glowing light to illuminate the runes in front of her.
“These runes weren’t just randomly carved.” She stood up, turned and walked to the wall on her right, her finger moving along the surface. “Look at this wall, the same symbols are repeating. Here, here, and here,” she pointed to three marks, “They’re all the same shape, like a simplified sketch of some kind of flame.”
Viserys walked over to her. The symbol she was pointing to was indeed repeating itself: a flame shape with three upward lines, the middle one being the tallest. He had seen a similar symbol in Damon's notes; it was drawn next to the chapter title of the chapter on flame absorption.
"Are there any other repeating symbols in the corridor?" he asked.
Hermione had already moved to the left wall, her fingers moving quickly across the surface, lightly tapping each instance of repetition as if marking an invisible book. "Yes, that flame shape appeared on all four walls. And another one, this one," she paused, pressing her finger on an arc resembling a crescent moon or a scimitar, "this appeared three times. And this dot, like a water droplet or a teardrop, appeared twice."
She turned away from the wall, her eyes shining brightly in the fluorescent light. "The runes on these four walls aren't decorations; they're a set of rules. Each wall has several repeating symbols, and each symbol is repeated a different number of times. What your ancestors carved in the corridor wasn't a spell; it was an instruction."
"What instructions?"
"How do you arrange the runes on the door?" she said, walking back to the stone door and looking up at the dense array of symbols. "The runes on the door and the runes in the corridor are from the same symbol system, but the ones on the door have been deliberately scrambled. The corridor tells you how many times each symbol should appear and where it should appear—you need to rearrange the symbols on the door according to the rules given in the corridor."
Viserys stared at the hundreds of symbols on the door. He knew what rearranging them meant. It required touching each rune with magic, peeling them from the stone, moving them, and re-embedding them. His experience practicing fire summoning in the library taught him that manipulating magic required absolute concentration; any distraction could interrupt the spell.
“I don’t recognize these symbols,” Hermione said, her voice calm and factual, without any hint of discouragement. “So you’ll have to figure out what they mean. But I can tell you which symbols are in the same group and should be grouped together. I’ve memorized the pattern in the hallway.”
She turned to look at the four walls of the corridor and began to repeat herself. Her voice was slow, and each word was clear: "On the first wall, the flame symbol appeared five times, the crescent moon twice, and the dot once. On the second wall, the flame appeared three times, the crescent moon three times, and the dot once. On the third wall, the flame appeared once, the crescent moon five times, and the dot once. On the fourth wall, the flame appeared four times, the crescent moon once, and the dot four times."
She paused after speaking. "They are gradual changes. The flame decreases from five times to one, the crescent moon increases from two times to five, and the dot increases from one time to four. If you arrange them in the order of these gradual changes—"
"And so a new arrangement is formed," Viserys continued. He looked again at the runes on the stone door; now the dense symbols were no longer a jumbled mess. Hermione had taught him the pattern; now it was his turn.
He extended his right hand, placing his palm on a rune in the center of the stone door. The rune glowed faintly from the warmth of his palm. He tried to touch it with the same feeling he had when practicing fire summoning, drawing it inward, not pushing it outward. Fire summoning involves pushing magic outward, while this involved drawing the magic from the stone surface into his palm, moving it along with the rune.
The first rune moved. It peeled off the surface of the stone gate, hovering half an inch above his palm, emitting a faint golden-red glow. Viserys' breathing became heavy, more labored than he had anticipated, and his mana was being depleted rapidly.
"Place the flames in the top row," Hermione's voice came from behind him, steady and clear. "Five flames, arranged in their natural orientation, with the center pointing upwards and the two sides pointing outwards, starting from the center and moving outwards."
Viserys twitched his fingers slightly, and the rune was embedded in a new position.
"The next one is also flames, slightly to the left, facing a different direction than the first one—"
One by one, Hermione conveyed the arrangement of the runes, deciphering their pattern from the corridor, to him through her voice. His magic slowly unfolded through the changing runes. He recognized some of the symbols: flames represented "fire," dots represented "blood," and crescent moons represented "blade" or "sword." As the arrangement progressed, he gradually understood one thing: the fire was dwindling, and the blood was increasing. The fire was dying down, and the blood was surging. He didn't know what this meant, but it was the first message Damon left for those who came after him.
The stone door made a dull thud, all the runes lit up, and golden-red light flowed along the strokes of the symbols. Then, a crack appeared in the very center and the door opened.
She stood up, brushed the dust off her dress, and smiled slightly. "We've opened a door to a thousand years of history."
The magic within the secret chamber sensed the intruder and began to illuminate. A circular altar stood in the center, its stone surface covered in runes.
Hermione's dragon egg suddenly became hot. She looked down and saw a very fine golden-red line spreading across the grayish-white eggshell, crawling from the blunt end to the pointed end, echoing the rune markings on the altar.
"It's moving," Hermione said in a low voice, as if afraid of startling it.
Viserys walked over, raised his hand half an inch above the eggshell, the runes on his palm slightly warm. "It's calling."
"What does it want?"
Viserys looked up at the indentation in the very center of the altar. "Put it on."
Hermione walked to the altar, held the dragon egg in both hands, and placed it into the groove.
The moment the eggshell touched the black stone, all the altar runes lit up. Golden-red light ignited from the edge of the grooves, spreading outwards along the engravings, filling the entire altar and illuminating the entire secret chamber.
Flames rose from the altar, enveloping the dragon egg. The grayish-white, fossil-like textures on the eggshell were peeled away layer by layer by the flames, revealing the true color beneath—dark gray, almost black, with a metallic sheen.
The egg trembled slightly in the groove, and through the increasingly clear eggshell, one could hear a very faint sound coming from inside, a rhythm similar to a heartbeat.
Hermione took a half step back, instinctively grabbing Viserys' sleeve. "It's alive."
Viserys looked down at the egg. It was no longer the cold stone in Gringotts vault. It was burning, breathing, waiting.
"It wasn't dead to begin with," he said.
The firelight from the altar spread to the walls, and the magical lights in the chamber began to illuminate. Hermione's hand was still clutching his sleeve, but her gaze had been drawn away by something on the wall.
The murals begin on the left side of the altar and circle the entire chamber. From left to right, clockwise, there are four complete murals, followed by a fifth blank black stone mural.