Published at 27th of May 2024 12:14 am

Chapter 207: Daedalus' Delights

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1 May 1994, Hogwarts, Scotland

Neville Longbottom felt the maze's hedges close behind him, feeling a mix of trepidation, excitement and desperation. This was it, Neville's last chance at making anything for himself, and had to grasp it with everything he had.

It was flabbergasting that in the span of a single year, Neville had lost everything. He had lost his reputation with what he said about the Chamber of Secrets. He should have known that it was an illusion. What second-year student would be able to kill a bloody Basilisk with a sword? Even Merlin himself wouldn't have been able to do something like this. He was such an idiot for bragging about it and telling everyone in school about his accomplishments. Looking back, he wouldn't have believed if one of his classmates had done it, even Harry.

But then, came Hermione's condition. Neville had to admit that this was what hurt the most back then. Compared to Ron spitting on their friendship, and most of magical Britain thinking that he was insane, losing Hermione was what really messed him up. It didn't take long for Neville to realize that for all his closeness to Ron, Hermione was his only true friend. Without her motivating him to get better, to grow and learn, the world felt colourless.

And so, he went to another year in Hogwarts without friends, clinging to Potter, who had thankfully forgiven him for the way Neville treated him since coming to Hogwarts. Looking back, it was hard to call their relationship a friendship. They were cordial enough and spoke to each other every week during their project sessions. Harry didn't mind giving him a helping hand, but that was it.

Now that he hadn't spoken to the Slytherin for months, everything just looked clearer. Neville asked Professor Babbling to test their assignment early, around two weeks after the duelling tournament. Bones looked furious at that but eventually agreed when Harry didn't protest.

After months without any contact, Neville could see that Harry didn't dislike him, just never actively chose to spend time with him. Looking back, he never really did. Not even when they weren't on good terms, Harry never sought him out, never tried to actively get back at him. He remembered that fact being especially frustrating.

And he had been doing the same in this past year as well, only on more friendly terms.

Maybe it was just Neville feeling bitter for what Harry told his grandmother, for causing him to be disinherited, and his family crest to be deactivated. Oh, right, if the past year wasn't bad enough, he was a Longbottom in name only. He didn't have the Longbottom crest anymore and wouldn't sit on the Wizengamot as his grandmother's heir. No, that honour would come to his uncle Algie's grandchildren, who wouldn't even go to Hogwarts for a few years.

Neville would even lose the name should he ever get married and his wife's last name instead. His former crest wouldn't even be passed out to his children. The only consolation was that his grandmother didn't treat him any differently and had set aside a small fortune in a separate vault for him to make sure that he would never have any financial difficulty.

The process of removing the crest was agonizing and he felt like he lost something afterwards. His family definitely thought so. Outside his grandmother, the rest of the family just looked at him like he was an outsider, a ward of the family at best. Neville couldn't help but wonder if his parents would have done the same, renounced him as their son.

The only positive thing that happened was that his mind became a lot clearer since the crest was removed. He felt more controlled, and less brash, but also less prone to anger and rage. Oh, they were always there in the back of his mind, ready to be unleashed, but he held it, gripped it tightly and never let it control him.

It was why he didn't try to confront Harry. It was why he realized, with clarity, that for all his attachment to Harry, the other boy likely did not feel the same, Neville was forgiven but what he had done was definitely not forgotten.

His drastic improvement with his magic slowed down. It was still far better than before the crest was activated. Maybe it was because Neville was now more motivated when it came to his studies? Or maybe it was because he felt more pressured to succeed and find his own path forward? Before, Neville knew the path his life would take. He would have finished his studies in Hogwarts, became an Auror, before retiring and taking the Longbottom seat in the Wizengamot. His family was influential enough to make people ignore the few inadequacies he might have, and his status as a celebrity would have made the event a public relations goldmine for the ministry.

But he had lost all of that and had to rely on his own efforts. Hence the need to win the third task. While before, he thought of the tournament as a way to regain the public's favour, now it was an opportunity of a lifetime to display his skills to make up for what he had lost when he stopped becoming a Longbottom.

As he progressed into the maze, the towering hedges cast black shadows across the path. It had to be an enchantment of some sort. It was far too dark for the middle of the day. Neville also noticed that there had to be some kind of silencing charm, considering the sudden absence of noise from the crowd. It was almost like he was underwater.

He pulled out his wand and muttered, "Lumos Maxima!"

A giant ball of light appeared at the tip of his wand and floated in front of him.

Seeing no observable danger, Neville cast a spell that he learned specifically to navigate into the maze. A few days before, he had put four random items, that he added a tracking charm to, just outside each corner of the maze. The spell he found connects to the four items to act as a relative locator to his position in the maze. His crest might be gone, but what he had learned, the skills he had used, still remained. Nevertheless, the young Gryffindor discovered that he was in the northwest of the maze, and he needed to walk to the Southeast to get to the middle.

Hermione would have been proud of him for coming up for that one. Neville's mood turned melancholic at the memory of his friend, before he shook his head, and walked towards the east.

As Neville advanced, the maze seemed to pulse with a life of its own, the hedges twisting and reshaping, as if they were part of a living, breathing entity. The air was thick with a sense of foreboding, and Neville felt a chill that wasn't entirely due to the unnatural darkness surrounding him.

He felt watched, and not just by those fancy observers Dumbledore created.

With each step, Neville felt like something was testing him, probing him for weaknesses. He tried to ignore it as much as possible. Detection spells revealed nothing, and he kept doing his best to move towards the centre.

Slowly but surely, pieces of cobblestone started to appear in the ground and near the hedges. It didn't take long for the hedges to turn into walls and the grass into a cobbled road. The former Longbottom scion just kept pressing forward until he found himself in a large room, and the entrance behind him closed immediately.

He tried to walk forward, only for one of the stones to glow and disappear. He almost fell forward, unbalanced by the sudden disappearance of the stone but caught himself at the last moment. Neville slowly looked down the hole where the stone used to be, only to see a large pit leading to the darkness. As he peered into the void, the depth seemed immeasurable, a bottomless pit that threatened to swallow not just his body, but his very essence.

Symbols on the remaining stones glowed for a second before disappearing, but Neville immediately recognized what they were. Runes.

The room, now clearly a rune puzzle chamber of sorts, was filled with stones, each potentially a trap leading to the abyss below.

Neville extended his wand, casting a series of detection spells. The magic seemed to warm most of them off, except for one that Harry had taught him in their sessions. It wasn't anything fancy, it just gave images of all carved runes in an area.

A series of glowing symbols appeared in front of him, an elaborate rune matrix. Thankfully, those were Norse Runes and not in some obscure language that he'd never seen before. Neville analyzed the pattern for a second, only to realize what it was.

A knot.

No matter how complicated it looked, it was just a fancy knot with runes instead of ropes. Neville only had to decipher it to get to the other side, activate each stone at the right time, and in the right order to disable the trap. Funnily enough, other than his knowledge of Norse Runes, it was Herbology that helped him the most. Magical plants that were capable of movement tended to easily get knotted up in a very horrible manner. More than once, Neville had to spend hours fixing it, to avoid the destruction of thousands of Galleons worth of plants.

And so, he approached the rune matrix with the same methodical patience he would a rare, dangerous plant, tracing the lines and connections of the runes with the tip of his wand, careful not to touch anything directly.

Neville didn't know how long it took to solve the puzzle, but when he finally had a working solution, he connected each stone with the platform in front of him to activate them remotely and started to solve the puzzle.

With every move of the pattern, the walls of the chamber started to shift, the stones grinding against each other with a sound like whispers in the dark, until, when he removed the final knot, the stones glowed with magic and a door opened on the other side of the room.

Neville tried to use the rune detection charm once more, but it revealed nothing.

He must have solved the puzzle then.

The young Gryffindor took a tentative step forward and saw that the stone remained inert. Just like that, he slowly walked towards the door and went to the other side.

As Neville stepped through the doorway, the environment shifted dramatically. The rough-hewn cobblestone and imposing walls gave way to a surreal, white expanse that stretched infinitely in all directions. The starkness of the room was unsettling, its eerie silence a stark contrast to the subtle whispers and creaks of the previous chamber. It felt like stepping into a void where the very concept of reality was thin, almost translucent as if everything around him was a facade, ready to crumble at the slightest touch.

The transition was so abrupt that Neville momentarily doubted his senses. Was this another layer of the maze, or had he somehow been transported elsewhere? The air was thick with a sense of anticipation as if the room itself was waiting for something to unfold.

He stiffened when he saw movements far away. Everything just looked foggy for some reason. Neville swallowed when he recognized the red hair, "Ron! What's going on? What is the puzzle here?"

Neville walked towards his former friend and noticed that he had an ugly expression on his face, "Ah, it's you."

"Yes, it's me, Ron. Now, what's going on?"

"You know, being friends with you was the biggest mistake I ever made. I thought it would have been an easy way for fame and fortune, but it was just tedious, in the end."

Neville stiffened, "What in Merlin's name is wrong with you, Ron?"

"You don't get it, do you? How much I had to go through to pretend I gave a shit about you. I thought you were special. In the end, you were just a pathetic arrogant boy who was lucky enough to have his parents die for him. Do you feel special now, Neville?"

"You son of a bitch," Neville bellowed while trying to punch the redhead in the face, only for his fist to go through the boy's face. He looked around and saw that Ron had disappeared, only mist remained.

He didn't have to recollect what happened before he was grabbed from the back, "He's right, you know?"

The former Longbottom scion nearly teared up at the sight, "Hermione!"

His friend looked exactly as she was a year ago. Her hair was still just as bushy, her eyes just as hazel, but she had a cold and calculating expression that looked wrong on her face, "You only bring misery to everyone around you, Neville. Do you remember what happened to me, Neville? If you were the hero, you thought you were, why didn't you save me?"

"This isn't real," the young boy protested.

"Silly boy, just because this isn't real, doesn't mean that it isn't true," Harry's voice replied from behind him, "You were barely more than a project to me, an annoyance that I pitied… She's right, you know. You could have saved her. All you had to do was ask her. She was being possessed; she must have noticed something was wrong, that she was losing time. You only had to ask her. You should have noticed something was wrong too. But you didn't care, and now you 'mourn' her. What a fucking joke. No wonder your grandmother jumped at the idea of disinheriting you."

His grandmother's apparition was next, her words like a venomous arrow. "I regret ever taking you in, Neville. You were always a disappointment. Your parents' sacrifice was wasted on you." The cruelty in her voice was unlike the stern but caring woman he knew, yet in this place, the line between truth and falsehood seemed perilously thin.

The most heartbreaking illusion was that of his parents, appearing as ethereal figures, their faces etched with sorrow and regret. "We sacrificed everything for you, Neville, and for what? You were never the son we hoped for. You're not even a Longbottom anymore. What use are you now?"

The young Gryffindor knelt down, refusing to look any of the apparitions in the eyes. They were right, weren't they? It was all his fault.

"Ah, so you've finally accepted it then…" a smooth and cultured voice spoke up.

Neville turned and saw him. Voldemort. The dark lord's mere presence seemed to chill the entire chamber, "You were a mistake, Neville. A nobody meant to be crushed. But now, I see why fate chose you. Perhaps you were not meant to defeat me as a warrior of light but as a warrior of darkness. You've felt it, haven't you, the monster hiding inside you. You felt it when you almost killed that Slytherin boy, that instinct, the need to burn everything in sight…"

"No!"

"Stop denying it, boy. It's your destiny."

Neville refused and bellowed, "NO!"

A giant pulse of magic originated from him, dispelling all apparitions around him. Neville gasped in exertion. This really took a lot out of him. When he looked around some more, he stiffened.

Bodies and blood. There were corpses everywhere and Voldemort came up from behind him and said, "There you go… Look at what you are."

"This isn't real."

"Maybe, but your actions are real, aren't they? All of this could have been real. You know it could have. You're just one hair away from becoming me."

Neville shook his head, "I refuse."

Voldemort grabbed the boy's throat with unnatural strength, lifting him into the air, "Your denial is adorable, child."

Neville kept grasping at the hand trying to stop him, but it was like the thing was made of steel. Everything was becoming hazy until it turned into mist for some reason. Neville looked around and saw the entire room fracture as if it were glass, leaving a stone chamber in its stead. He turned and tried to look at his rescuer, only to freeze when he recognized him, "Warrington?"

AN: That took a lot out of me, I'll be honest. Like I said, I was pretty ambitious when I designed this. As usual, please let me know what you think or if you have any suggestions regarding it.

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