Hello, Drinor here. I'm happy to publish another chapter of Slytherin's Red Prince
If you want to Read 5 More Chapters Right Now. Search 'Drinor Patreon' on Google and Click the First Patreon Link
Chapter 14, Chapter 15, Chapter 16, Chapter 17, and Chapter 18 are already available for Patrons, so go to my Patreon to gain Early Access.
Harry Potter
Sylvia wound through Harry's fingers in slow figure-eights while the grass snake, whom he had taken to calling Moss, explored the arm of the chair with the cautious tongue-flicking of a creature encountering leather for the first time. Both serpents moved in that liquid, boneless way that made most people flinch. Harry found it calming.
"Snape," Draco said with absolute conviction. "I could take Snape."
Blaise didn't look up from his Transfiguration notes. "You could not take Snape."
"I could if I had preparation time. And the element of surprise. And maybe a Bludger."
"So your plan for defeating Professor Snape," Theodore said from his chair, turning a page, "is to ambush him with sporting equipment."
"It's called strategy, Nott."
"It's called a funeral."
Goyle leaned forward, his thick forearms resting on his knees. "What about Flitwick? He's small. You could probably just step on him."
"Flitwick was a dueling champion, Greg," Harry said mildly, letting Sylvia coil around his wrist. "He'd have you airborne and spinning before your foot left the ground."
"What about Quirrell?" Crabbe offered. "He's scared of everything. I bet even I could take Quirrell."
"Quirrell faints at the sight of his own turban," Draco agreed. "That one's a freebie."
"Sprout," Blaise said. "I'd take Sprout. She's dangerous in a greenhouse, but get her into open ground and what's she going to do? Throw soil at you?"
"Sprout grew a Venomous Tentacula that ate a desk last year," Theodore pointed out.
"In a greenhouse. I said open ground."
"Fair."
"What about you, Harry?" Goyle asked. "Which professor could you take?"
Harry considered this while Moss found his collar and began the slow ascent toward his neck, where Sylvia was already established. The two snakes touched noses briefly, a negotiation of territory that resolved in Moss retreating to the opposite shoulder.
"Binns," Harry said.
"Binns is already dead," Draco protested.
"Then I've already won."
Crabbe laughed so hard he snorted pumpkin juice, and even Theodore's mouth twitched.
"Oh, come on, Potter," Draco pressed. "Properly. If you had to fight one professor, full combat, who would you pick and how would you do it?"
"Trelawney. I'd walk into her tower and tell her I foresaw her defeat. She'd be so delighted someone was taking Divination seriously that she'd faint from excitement."
"You're impossible."
"I'm practical. Why fight when you can make them faint?"
Blaise set down his quill. "Speaking of impractical victories. Harry. The troll."
Harry's hand continued its slow stroke along Sylvia's scales. He didn't look up.
"What about the troll, Blaise?"
"What are you actually going to do with it? You've got a twelve-foot corpse in cold storage somewhere in this castle. That's a lot of troll. Bones, hide, organs, blood. You could sell the parts individually and clear two hundred Galleons, easy. More if you find the right buyer for the heart. Troll hearts are used in-"
"I know what troll hearts are used in."
"So? What's the plan?"
Harry lifted his gaze. Green eyes, flat and calm. "My answer is the same no matter how many times you ask, Blaise. It's my own business."
Blaise held his stare for a beat, then smiled that knife-thin smile of his and returned to his notes. "Just making conversation."
"Make it about something else."
Draco opened his mouth, probably to circle back to his Snape assassination fantasy, when the common room entrance ground open.
Every conversation in the room stopped at once. Not because the door opening was unusual. Because the person stepping through it was.
Professor Minerva McGonagall stood in the entrance to the Slytherin common room with the posture of a woman who had walked into enemy territory and found it beneath her concern. Her emerald robes were pressed to a severity that made even Daphne Greengrass look rumpled. Her square spectacles caught the green light from the lake windows and threw it back.
She did not belong here. Everyone knew it. She knew it. She did not care.
Every Slytherin in the room stood.
First-years, second-years, third years, the cluster of fourth-years near the bookshelves, the sixth-year couple who had been sitting too close together on the far sofa. They rose like a congregation, and the common room went silent except for the crackle of the fire and the distant drip of water from somewhere deep in the stone.
Gemma Farley stepped forward. "Professor McGonagall. What can we do for you?"
McGonagall's gaze moved across the assembled students. Her eyes passed over Draco, Blaise, the older students near the fireplace.
They settled on Harry.
"Mister Potter," she said. "We need to have a private talk."
Harry set Moss carefully on the arm of his chair, where the grass snake immediately curled into a tight defensive coil. Sylvia stayed where she was, draped across his shoulders, apparently unimpressed by Scottish authority figures.
"Of course, Professor."
He crossed the common room. Behind him, whispers broke out before he'd taken three steps.
"It's about the troll," Draco said, not quietly enough.
"Obviously it's about the troll," Theodore replied.
The stone door sealed behind Harry, cutting off the speculation.
McGonagall was already walking, and Harry fell into step beside her. She said nothing as they climbed the dungeon stairs, nothing as they crossed the entrance hall, nothing as she led him down a corridor he hadn't mapped yet, one that wound toward the eastern wing of the ground floor where the November light came through narrow windows and made long pale bars on the flagstones. Harry wondered why the two had to take such a long walk to have a private talk; he was sure a hundred meters from the Slytherin Common Room door would have been enough for this private talk.
She stopped beside a window alcove. Turned to face him.
"I wanted to thank you, Mister Potter," she said. "For saving Miss Granger's life last night."
Her voice was quieter than he expected. Not soft, McGonagall didn't do soft, but the hard edges had been sanded down into something that might have been sincerity.
"You're welcome, Professor." Harry paused. "Though I have to ask. Why was she alone?"
McGonagall looked displeased. "Miss Granger had an altercation with a fellow Gryffindor. She was upset. She sought privacy."
"An altercation," Harry repeated. "And no one checked on her? For six hours?" He let the silence do its work for a moment, then added, lightly: "I was under the impression that Gryffindors protected their own. Perhaps I've been reading the wrong books."
McGonagall fixed him with a look that could have bent iron.
Harry held it. He did not blink.
"I have already spoken with the student in question," she said. "The matter has been addressed. It will not happen again."
"Good."
McGonagall studied him for another moment, as though debating whether his impertinence warranted further response. She apparently decided it didn't.
She cleared her throat.
"I am also here to inform you that your troll has been moved. Professor Dumbledore has secured it in a classroom on the second floor. The door is red. You will be the only student with access."
Harry turned this over. If Dumbledore had placed the protections, Dumbledore could walk through them. That was obvious enough not to mention. The old man wanted to see what Harry did with his prize, wanted to watch and measure and draw conclusions.
Let him watch.
"Is the corpse whole?" Harry asked.
"Not a fingernail missing," McGonagall confirmed. Then, with a slight tightness around her mouth: "Though I should note that Professor Kettleburn and Professor Sprout are both quite displeased with this arrangement."
Harry said nothing to that. He had no interest in Kettleburn's feelings about troll burials or Sprout's ambitions for fertilizer.
"Is there anything else I should know, Professor?"
McGonagall looked at him for a long time. The light from the window fell across her face, showing the fine lines around her eyes, the silver threading through her dark hair. She looked tired. Not the kind of tired that sleep fixed.
"Why did you save her, Mister Potter?"
"I've explained this to Professor Snape, Professor McGonagall. Granger provided a useful distraction while I positioned myself for the kill. The troll was focused on her. I saw an opportunity. I took it."
"Yes," McGonagall said. "That is the story you told your housemates."
"It's the truth."
"Mister Potter." She removed her spectacles. Cleaned them on the edge of her robe. Put them back on. "I have been teaching at this school for thirty-nine years. I have heard every lie a student is capable of telling. I have heard lies about broken curfews, smuggled creatures, cheating on examinations, and romantic entanglements that would make a romance novelist blush." She fixed him with those sharp eyes. "And I know, with absolute certainty, that no child runs toward a twelve-foot troll for a business opportunity."
Harry's jaw tightened. He said nothing.
"Looking at you now," McGonagall said, and her voice had gone somewhere else entirely, somewhere that had nothing to do with trolls or classrooms, "it feels very much like looking at your mother."
Something moved in Harry's chest.
"What was she like?" He asked within a second, and he felt relieved. "My mother. What was she actually like?"
McGonagall smiled, and for the first time, she appeared like a soft grandma rather than a fierce teacher. Harry wondered for a moment what it would have been like if McGonagall had lived near his relatives...it doesn't matter anymore.
"Fierce," she said. "And wild. She argued with professors. She argued with the Headmaster. She argued with her own friends when she thought they were wrong, and she was usually right, which made her absolutely insufferable to be around during exam season." The smile deepened. "She had a big heart, your mother. Bigger than she knew what to do with, sometimes. She felt things deeply, and she acted on those feelings, even when acting was foolish, even when it cost her."
McGonagall looked at him, and he knew she was looking at his dark red hair and green eyes.
"You remind me of her."
"My house uniform would disagree, Professor."
"Your house uniform is a piece of cloth, Mister Potter." McGonagall's voice was gentle and firm at once, a combination Harry hadn't known was possible. "You might wear green. You might wear red or blue or yellow. It would not change the fact that you help your fellow students. That you took the time to teach Mister Goyle when others laughed at him. That you went out of your way, at great personal risk, to save a Gryffindor girl you had no obligation to save."
She paused.
"You might wear green, Harry. But your heart is red."
Harry's throat closed. He swallowed against it, hard, and the effort of keeping his face still cost him more than the Levitation Charm had cost him the night before. He looked at the flagstones. He looked at the window. He looked at anything that wasn't McGonagall's face, because if he looked at her face he was going to feel something he wasn't ready to feel.
"Is there anything else, Professor?"
McGonagall watched him for a long quiet moment.
"Try to enjoy your childhood, Mister Potter," she said. "As much as you can. You will find, sooner than you expect, that those days pass with the blink of an eye. One morning you are eleven years old with the whole world ahead of you. The next, you will find yourself in the Hogwarts grounds waving at the Professors for the last time and wonder where all that time went."
She straightened her robes. Adjusted her spectacles. Became, once again, the severe professor who terrified seventh-years and took no prisoners in Transfiguration.
"Good afternoon, Mister Potter."
She turned. She walked away. Her footsteps echoed on the stone growing fainter with distance.
Harry stood in the alcove, alone, with the pale November light on his face and his mother's name still warm in the air between them.
Sylvia raised her head from his shoulder.
"The tall woman speaks truth, speaker," she said quietly. "You smell like kindness when you think no one is watching."
Harry didn't answer. He pressed his back against the cold stone wall, and he stayed there until his breathing was steady and his face was right again.
Then he went to find the red door.
The red door was not subtle.
It sat at the end of a corridor Harry hadn't explored yet, a stretch of castle that smelled of old dust and disuse, the kind of hallway where cobwebs grew thicker the further you walked and the torches had given up trying. The door itself was a deep arterial red, the colour of something still alive, and it had no handle. No keyhole. No visible hinges. Just smooth wood set flush into the stone, with a small brass plate at eye level that read nothing at all.
Harry pressed his palm against it.
The wood was warm. It yielded under his hand like breathing flesh, swinging inward on silent joints, and the smell hit him before the light did.
The troll.
The classroom beyond had been stripped bare. No desks, no chairs, no chalkboard. Someone had cleared everything except the stone walls and a single large carpet laid across the floor, dark green, thick-piled, the kind of thing you'd find in a wealthy wizard's study. On the carpet, arranged with a precision that suggested house-elves rather than professors, lay the troll.
Twelve feet of it, grey and warty, its ruined head turned slightly to one side so that the caved section faced the ceiling. The club lay beside it, still dark with dried blood. In the cold of the classroom the corpse hadn't begun to smell as badly as it might have, but the sweetness underneath the copper told Harry that wouldn't last. He'd need to act soon.
The door closed behind him. He felt it seal, a faint pressure change in his ears, like the room had swallowed him.
Harry drew his wand.
"Revelio."
The spell went out clean, a pulse of pale light that expanded from his wand tip in a widening ring and washed across the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the corpse. It touched every surface, probed every corner, and returned to him carrying nothing. No enchantments detected. No surveillance charms. No listening spells or observation wards or concealed portraits with open eyes.
Nothing.
Harry lowered his wand slowly.
If Dumbledore was watching, and of course Dumbledore was watching, a first-year Revelio wasn't going to find his work. The man had placed protections on this room that only Harry could pass through. That kind of magic didn't come from someone who left his surveillance vulnerable to a spell taught in second-year Defence. Whatever the old man had woven into these walls, it would be invisible to anything Harry could cast for years.
He put his wand away.
The troll lay there. Massive. Grey. Dead because of him.
Harry walked around it slowly. His shoes made no sound on the thick carpet. Sylvia lifted her head from his collar, tongue tasting the dead air, and apparently decided she didn't like it because she tucked herself deeper into his robes.
He stopped at the troll's midsection. Crouched. Looked at the skin up close, at the warts and the coarse hair and the thick grey hide that would fetch thirty Galleons a square foot if properly treated.
"Why were you here?" he asked, quietly, to the dead thing on the carpet.
Trolls didn't wander into castles. He'd read enough about them to know that. Mountain trolls were territorial, aggressive within their range, but they didn't leave it. They didn't descend from highland caves and cross miles of Scottish wilderness to walk through a school's front door. Something had brought this creature here. Someone had brought it. Put it where it needed to be, aimed it like a weapon.
At what?
Harry straightened. His eyes moved to the ceiling, though there was nothing to see there except stone and old smoke stains.
The third-floor corridor. Dumbledore's warning on the first night: the third-floor corridor on the right-hand side is out of bounds to everyone who does not wish to die a very painful death.
Not a vague warning. A specific location. A specific corridor. A specific threat.
And now a troll in the castle. A troll that had, according to Quirrell, been in the dungeons. The Slytherin dungeons. Where every first-year in his house had been marched by their prefects during the evacuation.
Harry's mind worked.
A troll creates chaos. Every professor leaves the feast. Students are herded to their common rooms. The castle's authority scatters in six directions. And for a window of time, however brief, whoever wanted access to the third-floor corridor would have it.
Distraction, Harry thought. That troll wasn't a threat. It was a tool. Like Sylvia had been a tool for Mulciber. Something brought here to serve a purpose, and the purpose wasn't killing students.
The purpose was getting everyone to look the wrong way.
He looked down at the troll's face. The ruined skull. The dark blood dried in the creases of its skin.
You were bait, Harry thought.
Third-floor corridor. Something worth protecting badly enough to warn an entire school away from it. Something worth smuggling a troll into a castle full of children to get to.
Something Dumbledore had. Something someone else wanted.
Not today's problem. Today's problem was twelve feet of dead troll.
Harry looked down at Sylvia, who had re-emerged from his collar and was regarding the troll's massive hand.
"I hope you like goblins," Harry said, in plain English. "Because we're going to pay them a little visit."
Sylvia tilted her head. She didn't understand the words, not in English, but she understood the tone.
Harry took one last look at the troll. Then he turned, pressed his palm to the red door, and walked out into the corridor.
The door sealed behind him. Warm wood going cool. The smell cut off like a closed tap.
He had work to do.
Abandoned Classroom
The candle had burned down to a stub of tallow in a cracked saucer. Quirinus Quirrell sat on a three-legged stool in the dark, his turban unwound, his hands flat on his thighs to keep them from shaking. They shook anyway.
The face at the back of his skull breathed against the cold air.
"The troll," Voldemort said.
"Y-yes, Master."
"What happened."
"The, the distraction worked, Master, initially. Dumbledore sent the professors to deal with the creature, the students were evacuated. I had a clear path to the third floor. But S-Snape—" Quirrell swallowed. "Snape got in the way. He was already at the corridor when I arrived. He'd gone straight there from the feast, as though he knew, as though he'd been expecting—"
"Snape is not your concern. Snape is mine." The voice went flat. "The troll. You said it was neutralised. By whom?"
"It was killed, Master."
"Killed."
"Yes."
"By a professor."
"No, Master." Quirrell's hands were trembling badly enough now that his fingernails clicked against each other. "By a student."
The silence from the back of his head was worse than any sound Voldemort had ever made.
"Which student."
"Harry Potter."
Three seconds. Four. Five. Quirrell counted them in the ticking of blood through his temples.
"How," Voldemort said, "is that possible."
"I, I gathered the details from the other professors this morning, Master. From what they were saying among themselves. It seems Potter left his house group during the evacuation. Went after the troll on his own, while the other students were being led to their common rooms."
"A first-year went looking for a mountain troll."
"Yes, Master. He found it on the first floor. It was attacking a student. A mudblood. Gryffindor girl. Granger, I believe. He k-killed the troll while it was occupied with her."
Another silence. Longer.
"How did he kill it."
Quirrell closed his eyes. His voice steadied fractionally when he was relaying facts rather than facing judgment. "According to Professor Flitwick's analysis of the, the residual magic, Potter used an advanced version of the Levitation Charm. Wingardium Leviosa Interius. He cast it through the troll's hide and damaged its heart. Internal hemorrhaging. That slowed the creature. Then he used the standard Levitation Charm to raise the troll's own club and drop it on the creature's skull."
The candle guttered. In its dying light, Quirrell's shadow stretched and bent across the classroom walls, two-headed.
"A first-year student," Voldemort said slowly, "used fifth-year magic to attack a troll's internal organs, and then crushed its skull with its own weapon."
"Yes, Master."
"While the creature was attacking someone else."
"Yes."
"He used the girl as a distraction."
"That is, that is the story he told his housemates, Master. That he used her to keep the troll occupied while he p-positioned himself."
Quiet. Quirrell could feel Voldemort thinking. It was a physical sensation, a pressure behind his eyes, like something was rearranging the furniture inside his skull.
"There is more," Quirrell said, very quietly. "After he killed it."
"Tell me."
"The boy claimed the troll. By Right of Conquest."
The pressure behind Quirrell's eyes spiked. He winced.
"He invoked the Right of Conquest," Voldemort repeated.
"Yes, Master. In front of his entire house. In front of Professor Snape. He cited the law by chapter and section. The, the Pillars of Wizarding Community, chapter seven, section-"
"I know the text."
Quirrell fell silent.
For a long time, neither of them spoke. The candle flame shrank to a blue nub and went out, leaving the classroom in absolute darkness. Quirrell sat in the black and listened to his master breathe through dead nostrils.
"I did the same thing," Voldemort said.
His voice had changed. The flat command tone had softened into something Quirrell had never heard from him before. Something almost distant, turned inward, as if the words were not meant for Quirrell at all.
"When I was a student here. A creature in the forest. A giant worm. Smaller than a troll, but venomous, and I killed it alone." A pause. "I claimed it by Right of Conquest. Slughorn looked at me as though I'd grown a second head. No student had invoked that law in fifty years. I sold the venom for forty Galleons and bought my first set of proper robes."
Quirrell said nothing. He knew better than to respond when Voldemort was remembering. The memories made him unpredictable.
Minutes passed. Quirrell's legs went numb on the stool. The darkness pressed against his open eyes.
"Master?" he ventured.
"I need to drink again," Voldemort said, and his voice was back to its usual coldness. "Unicorn blood. Tonight, if possible. This body of yours is failing faster than I anticipated."
Quirrell suppressed a shudder. The taste of unicorn blood was something he would carry in his mouth for the rest of his life, however long or short that proved to be.
"Yes, Master. I can go to the forest after midnight, the centaurs don't patrol the northern-"
"And the trap door." Voldemort cut across him. "We try again. But not while Dumbledore is in the castle. We wait for an absence. He leaves occasionally. Ministry business, Wizengamot sessions. When he goes, we move."
"Yes, Master."
"One more thing."
Quirrell waited.
"Learn more about Potter."
"I, yes, of course, Master. I can observe him in class, note his-"
"Not just observe. I want to know what he reads. Who he speaks to." Voldemort paused. "You mentioned something earlier. About the boy."
"Master?"
"His snake."
Quirrell blinked in the darkness. "Oh. Yes. The, the pet snake. A milk snake. Black and red scales. It was Mulciber's originally, a fourth-year, but Potter acquired it somehow. Nobody seems entirely sure how. He keeps it draped across his shoulders constantly. I believe the staff allow it because-"
"How did he acquire it."
"Nobody knows for certain, Master. The most common theory is that he simply fed the animal and it, it bonded to him. Snakes will sometimes-"
"Snakes," Voldemort said, he sounded offended by Quirrell's words, "do not bond to eleven-year-old boys because they were fed a rat."
"Well, Master, perhaps the boy has a natural affinity for animals. Some wizards do. Newt Scamander, for instance, was known to-"
"You are an idiot, Quirrell."
A burst of pain across his head made him let out a sob.
Quirrell's mouth closed.
"I want to confirm something," Voldemort said, and his voice had gone quiet. "You will not approach the boy directly. You will not draw attention to yourself. But you will ensure, through whatever indirect means are available to you, that Harry Potter gets the idea to purchase a book about Parseltongue."
Quirrell's brow furrowed. "Parseltongue, Master? You think the boy is a-"
"I think nothing. I want to confirm. There are ways to test for the gift without revealing that a test is being administered. A book is one of them. If the boy reads about Parseltongue and recognises descriptions of his own experience, he will react. If he does not have the gift, the book is merely a curiosity and no harm is done."
"But how would he have acquired it, Master? It's a hereditary gift. The Potter line has never-"
"The Potter line," Voldemort said, very softly, "is not the only lineage that marked that boy."
Quirrell went still.
"Do as I say, Quirrell. Place the idea. Make it seem natural. A recommendation from a classmate, a mention in another text, a book left visible in a shop window. I do not care how. But he must come to it himself, or the test is useless."
"Yes, Master. I understand."
"Do you."
"Yes."
"Then go. The forest. The northern path. And Quirrell?"
"Yes, Master?"
"Do not vomit this time. The centaurs can smell it, and I tire of running."
Quirrell stood from the stool on legs that barely held him. He wound the turban back around his head with hands that would not stop shaking, loop after careful loop, until the face was hidden again beneath purple silk.
He left the classroom without a candle, navigating by memory and the faint grey light from a window at the corridor's end. Behind him, beneath the turban, Voldemort was quiet.
But Quirrell could feel him thinking.
That was always worse.
If you want to Read 5 More Chapters Right Now. Search 'Drinor Patreon' on Google and Click the First Patreon Link