By morning the sky was clear. The lake stayed dark even where sunlight should have reached it.
Students gathered at the upper windows to look. McGonagall kept the grounds closed. Nobody had seen the squid since dawn.
Percy stood with Harry, Hermione, and Ron in an upper corridor. "It is quieter," Ron said. "Should that make me feel better?"
Harry shook his head. Percy pressed a hand against the window frame. He could feel water drawing toward the center of the lake. McGonagall approached behind them. "Back to your common room. All four of you."
"We need to study it—" Hermione began.
"You need to remain alive," McGonagall replied. "Inside. Now."
By midday, staircases moved before students had finished crossing. Water trembled in washroom basins. Percy heard that every tap in the second-floor girls' bathroom had opened at once.
A kitchen elf reported broken pitchers. Madam Pomfrey sent word about water rising from a bowl. Dumbledore dismissed classes and asked students to remain in their common rooms.
Someone in Gryffindor said the castle was sinking. Ron asked who had measured it. Nobody answered. The four friends sat near the fire.
Hermione spread her latest drawings across a table. She had stopped trying to translate the new lines alone. She marked each fresh fragment for the professors.
Harry paced. Percy sat on the floor with his eyes shut. Ron waited beside him, holding a glass that he had deliberately left empty. Percy opened his eyes.
"It's moving."
Harry froze. "What is?"
"The seal."
Hermione turned sharply. "You can feel that?"
Percy nodded. "The water keeps pulling toward one place. It stops, then pulls harder." A tremor moved through the floor. Something struck far below them.
Ron caught the ink bottle before it fell.
Hermione folded the drawings. "We need to get these downstairs."
Another tremor. Stronger. Ron grabbed the table as ink bottles rattled violently. Harry rushed to the window. The lake's surface had begun to spiral. A massive whirlpool was slowly forming at its center. Dumbledore's voice echoed through the castle moments later, magically amplified.
"All students are to remain inside their dormitories. Professors to defensive positions." Defensive positions. That was not reassuring. Percy was already on his feet.
"I need to tell him where it is pulling," Percy said.
Hermione gathered the pages. "And show him this pattern."
Ron groaned. "Brilliant. Love that."
They went down together. A shifting staircase forced them to wait on a landing. At the entrance, McGonagall stopped them. Percy described the repeated pull and Hermione held out the drawings. McGonagall sent a prefect to take Ron and Hermione back, but another tremor shook the doors before they could leave.
Dumbledore called from the grounds for the notes. McGonagall took the four students to the upper bank and told them to stay behind her. The whirlpool covered nearly half the lake.
The sky above it darkened unnaturally, though no clouds were present. Lightning flickered. Not from above, but from within the water.
Percy watched water fall toward the center. "It is pulling down," he said. Hermione raised her drawings. "That is where the lines meet." A crack sounded from below.
Water dropped away from the center. Percy saw the tops of pillars beneath it.
Ancient pillars, impossibly large, carved with the same script Hermione had been translating. They circled a central abyss, chains of light stretching across the void.
Harry stepped closer to McGonagall.
"That's been under us the whole time."
"The route is under the school," Hermione said. "I cannot tell which came first."
One bright chain flickered between the pillars. Percy felt the water pull harder. A golden eye opened beneath the chain.
Aequor endures.
The voice sounded inside Percy's head. One chain broke. McGonagall raised a shield as the bank shook. Water rose into a dome over the opening.
Hermione scrambled upright. "It's containing the fracture!"
Harry stared. "It's… protecting itself?"
"No," Percy said slowly.
"Look at the water," Percy said. "It is holding something down."
A dark patch moved beneath the dome. The water bowed upward but did not let it through. "What is underneath?" Ron asked. The eye turned toward Percy.
What was bound became binding.
Hermione compared the words with her notes. "That could mean it became part of the seal." Lightning crossed the pillars. A second chain broke. Harry moved beside Percy.
"What do we do?"
Percy felt the current strain toward him. "It needs more water on this side," he said. "I can reach that."
"Stay behind the shield," McGonagall ordered.
Percy stepped beyond it before he had decided how to explain. "I am not giving it anything. I am moving the water."
A current lifted him off the bank. Harry shouted. Percy tried to lower himself, but the dome was already beside him. He pressed his palms against it. Cold ran up his arms.
Below the eye, beyond the broken chains, he saw a space where the light ended.
An Absence.
And it was pushing upward.
The eye stayed between that darkness and the opening. Percy pushed water against the place where the dome had thinned. He could not tell how long Aequor had been holding it there.
McGonagall held her shield across the bank. Dumbledore reached the water and raised his wand toward the dome. Hermione's copied marks appeared in the air again. Harry and Ron caught her arms when she stumbled, keeping her wand directed away from them.
The third chain snapped. The dome cracked. Percy felt himself slipping. The abyss below pulsed, Hungry. Aequor's eye fixed on him one final time.
Balance, sea-born.
Percy stopped pushing all the water toward the center. He let one current return around the pillars while he held another across the gap. The pressure on his hands eased.
Blue-white light spread from the dome. Thin lines joined across its cracks. The darkness withdrew below the eye. Water covered the pillars, then rushed back into the hollow at the center of the lake.
The current dropped Percy toward the shore. Dumbledore slowed his fall. Harry and Ron caught him as he reached the bank.
Percy tried to stand and could not. Hermione lowered her wand. The lake lay flat beyond them, with no eye visible beneath it.
"Tell me that worked."
Percy coughed, exhausted beyond measure.
"For now," he said.
Dumbledore stayed facing the lake while McGonagall took them inside. Percy could no longer feel the repeated pull. He did not know what had replaced it.
He kept his hands away from the water jug in the hospital wing.
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I wrote this chapter at 2 in the morning, so I might have lost the plot a little. I'll try to foolow up with exposition in the next chapter.