“The Chamber of Secrets,” they all breathed in unison, The Chamber of Secrets was not what any of them had expected.
It was not a cave. It was not a dungeon. It was not the dank, dripping underbelly of a castle built on secrets and paranoia.
It was a cathedral.
The ceiling vaulted upward into darkness so deep that even their combined wandlight could not find it, supported by pillars carved into serpents so massive that each one was wider than the Whomping Willow's trunk. They rose from the stone floor in pairs, six on each side, their coiled bodies forming columns that disappeared into the black above, and between them, water—silent, dark channels running the length of the chamber like veins in a body, reflecting their wand-light back at them in shattered fragments.
The floor was polished stone, seamless as the tunnel behind them, and it gleamed with a faint green luminescence that came from nowhere and everywhere at once—not torchlight, not magic that Neville could identify, but something that lived in the stone itself, as though the chamber had its own heartbeat and its own breath.
At the far end, perhaps a hundred metres away, a face emerged from the wall. Not carved into it—from it. An enormous stone visage, bearded, ancient, with a mouth wide enough for a man to walk through and eyes that stared down the length of the chamber with the calm, absolute authority of someone who needed no introduction.
Salazar Slytherin, rendered in stone by his own hand, watching over the room he had shaped a thousand years ago.
"There," Persephone whispered, and Neville's eyes snapped from the statue to where she was pointing.
At the base of the statue, where the stone floor met the beginning of a raised platform, two figures lay motionless. Even from this distance, Neville recognised the red hair, the shock of ginger that could belong to no one else, and beside Ron, smaller, darker—Daphne, her blonde hair fanned across the stone like spilled water.