Chapter 6: Last Second Salvation
The Sanguinis Siderum was colder than it looked. Hermione clutched the celestial model to her chest, its metal bands biting into her palms through her coat. The central ruby’s pulse was a tangible thing, a deep, rhythmic thrum that vibrated up her arms and synced unnervingly with her own heartbeat. It felt less like an object and more like a captured organ.
The moment her fingers had closed around it, the tomb had let out a sound—a vast, stone sigh of release.
Then the screaming started.
Not voices. Stone. The mountain itself seemed to shriek in protest. A violent tremor knocked them both off their feet. Draco caught her elbow, hauling her upright as a slab of carved ceiling the size of a dining table sheared off and exploded where they’d just stood.
“It’s rejecting the void!” he yelled over the din. “The containment field is gone—the whole structure’s unstable!”
“The exit!” Hermione shouted back, pointing the way they’d come. The archway was still visible, a rectangle of lesser darkness at the end of the shaking corridor. They ran, dodging falling rubble and jagged cracks that split the floor under their feet. Dust choked the air, thick and tasting of powdered history. The haunting piano melody warped into a discordant, crashing dirge, strings snapping in the metaphysical orchestra.
They were ten feet from the entrance when the final mechanism triggered. Not a trap. A tomb’s last, definitive act.
With a groan of millennia-old engineering, a massive stone door, unseen and seamless until that second, began sliding from a hidden slot in the ceiling. It was a foot thick, etched with binding runes, descending to seal the mountain shut forever.
“No, no, no!” Hermione sprinted, lungs burning.
They wouldn’t make it. The door was already halfway down, moving with dreadful, final certainty.
Draco skidded to a halt, shoving Hermione hard to the side, against the relative shelter of the wall. He planted himself in front of her as a rain of fist-sized stones clattered around them. His wand was already slashing through the air, not casting, but calculating. Brilliant, shimmering numerals and symbols—Arithmancy equations—flared to life in the dust-choked air around his head, a frenetic, glowing crown.
“What are you doing?!” she coughed, shielding the artifact.
“The wall! It’s weaker here—load-bearing was diverted to the door mechanism! One precise blast and we go through!”
“You’ll bring the entire mountain down on us!”
“We stay here, we’re entombed anyway! Thirty seconds!” His voice was a razor of focus. His eyes darted across his own glowing calculations, absorbing variables, compensating for the tremors, for the stone density, for the catastrophic chain reaction he was about to initiate.
The descending door was a third of the way from the floor. The light from the outside world—grey, cloudy, beautiful—narrowed to a sliver.
Hermione did the only thing she could. She clamped her hands over her ears, crouched lower, and trusted him.
Not the kidnapped trusting the kidnapper. The witch trusting the wizard whose most precious secret now lived inside her magical core. The weight of it was a lodestone, a terrible, illuminating truth. He’d rather die with you in an avalanche than live in a world where you’re safely, sensibly unhappy.
“Fifteen seconds!” Spittle flew from his lips, his face a mask of terrifying intensity. The equations orbited him faster. He adjusted the angle of his wand by a millimeter.
The door was knee-high from the floor. The world was reduced to the thunder of collapsing stone, the glittering math, and the frantic light in his eyes.
He found the solution. She saw it flash across his face—a savage, triumphant clarity.
“Now! Protect her!”
The last two words weren’t part of the spell. They were ripped from him, a raw, imperative plea to the magic itself. He whirled, throwing himself against her, pinning her to the wall with the full length of his body, his arms caging her head, his face buried in her hair.
He screamed the incantation. A single, guttural word of power she didn’t recognize.
The world turned white and silent.
The pressure was immense, a physical punch of compressed air and sound that rattled her teeth in her skull. She felt Draco’s body jerk against hers, absorbing the shockwave. Stone didn’t just break—it vaporized in a precise, conical blast that tore through the weakened wall. Sunlight, blinding and cold, flooded in.
The mountain gave one last, convulsive heave. The descending door slammed into the floor with a final, resonant boom, sealing the tomb shut a foot to their left. Dust and debris billowed out the new, ragged hole into the open air.
For a second, there was only the ringing in her ears and the crushing weight of him. He was limp, his full weight leaning into her.
“Draco.” She pushed at his shoulder. “Draco, move. We have to go.”
He groaned, staggering back. His left sleeve was torn, and a fresh, ugly burn streaked up his forearm from the spell’s backflash. He blinked at the sunlight, dazed. “Did it work?”
“You blew a hole in a mountain. Yes, it worked.” She grabbed his good arm, pulling him toward the jagged opening. “Come on, before it decides to close that, too.”
They stumbled out into the biting alpine air, tripping over the scree of newly-made rubble. Hermione turned, looking back at the mountain. The entrance was gone, seamlessly sealed. Their escape route was just a chaotic, smoking scar in the rock face. Inside, the deep rumbling slowly subsided into an eerie quiet.
They were out. They were alive.
She sank onto a cold, flat rock, the Sanguinis Siderum heavy in her lap. The adrenaline drained from her limbs, leaving them shaking and weak. Draco slumped beside her, cradling his burned arm, breathing in great, ragged gulps of clean air.
The silence between them was vast, filled only with the wind and the echo of the collapse.
He’d done it. He’d gotten the artifact. He’d nearly gotten them killed a dozen times over. He’d given her a secret that changed the axis of her world.
She looked at him—really looked. The blood, the dirt, the burn, the exhaustion etching lines beside his eyes. The careful, polished pure-blood façade was utterly annihilated. What was left was raw, capable, terrifyingly intelligent, and scarred.
“Why?” The word left her lips before she could stop it, quiet and frayed.
He didn’t pretend to misunderstand. He stared at the ground between his boots, his jaw working. “You heard the secret. You know why.”
“I know what you feel,” she said, the weight in her chest throbbing. “I don’t know why you’d do all this. The kidnapping. The risk. This… insane theatrical rescue from a life I never asked to be rescued from.”
“Because you were going to smile through your wedding, and then you were going to smile through your ministry promotions, and then you were going to smile through your perfectly adequate life with Weasley until you died of politeness!” The words burst out of him, heated and sharp. He finally met her gaze, his eyes blazing. “Because I’ve watched you for years, Granger. I watched you solve impossible problems and then act like the biggest problem in the room was your own ambition. I watched you fold yourself down to fit. It was a fucking tragedy in slow motion.”
She flinched. “You had no right.”
“I know that!” He laughed, a short, bitter sound. “Do you think I’m unaware? This was never about rights. It was about… gravity. About watching a star collapse in on itself and being the only one who seemed to see it.”
He looked away, toward the distant, snow-capped peaks. The wind ruffled his ash-blond hair, which was matted with dust and blood. “The artifact was the excuse. The reason to make you look up. To make you fight for something, not just accept it.”
Hermione’s fingers tightened around the cold metal in her lap. The truth of his secret was a living thing inside her: a years-long fixation born of envy, self-loathing, and a desperate, twisted admiration that had curdled into something else. Something he himself didn't have a name for. It was ugly and beautiful and absolutely real.
“So what now, Draco?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper. “You’ve made your point. I’m awake. I’m fighting. I’m outside the tomb. What’s the next move in this grand play of yours?”
He was silent for a long time. The practicalities were monstrous. They were fugitives. She had a wedding dress waiting in a vanished London. He had Dark Artifacts to deliver to unsavory people.
“Now,” he said, finally, his voice stripped of all its usual cunning, leaving only a hollow exhaustion. “Now you have a choice. A real one. You have the secret. You have me at a disadvantage you can’t even imagine.” He gestured weakly to the artifact. “We can portkey from here. I can take you back. Drop you at the steps of the Ministry with this in your hands and a story about a deranged kidnapping. You’d be a hero. Again.”
He turned his head back to her, his expression bleak. “Or you can come with me. See what happens next. It’ll be worse than this. It’ll be darker. And there’s no guarantee of a happy ending.”
He left the third option unspoken, hanging in the thin mountain air between them. The option where she took the artifact and left him there, wounded and empty-handed, to face whatever consequences awaited a failed thief.
The wind cut through her clothes. Below them, the world stretched out—orderly, expected, safe. Behind her was a sealed tomb. Beside her was a man who was a walking, talking ruin of her old life.
She stood up, the Sanguinis Siderum cold in her arms. She looked down at him, at the question in his exhausted eyes.
“Get up,” she said, her own voice surprising her with its steadiness. “We’re wasting daylight.”
A flicker, something raw and vulnerable, crossed his face before he could hide it. He didn’t smile. He just nodded, once, and pushed himself painfully to his feet.