Serpentine [T.M. Riddle]

Fluency

The small church Tom was forced to attend as a child had a basement that was always flooded. On hot summer days, you could smell it from under yourself and do nothing to escape it short of standing up and walking right out of the service (which he was caught doing once). He had never been down there personally (to his recollection), but he imagines it's something like this. Something like that.

Bones cracking under his feet, snapping. Clanking and crushed. Sickening. Like when the bones of his roast chicken snap under his eager, hungry fingers. The only respite is the knowledge that these bones are not human: his lumos maxima shows that. Reptilian, avian, rodent skeletons all litter the floor of the dungeon-like caverns the way dust coats many of the books in the Restricted Section.

Tom holds out his hand to steady himself on something, anything. His hand is met with a mossy wall. If he grips his hand into a fist, it comes off in clumps and squeezes cold water down his fingers and wrist. The air is dank. Wet. Full of echos and water. A cold breeze from some faraway opening creeps into the pipes. An entirely unique environment than just meters above him.

He wonders how long it will be until this area floods.

The pipes below the girl's bathroom are absurdly large. As if they were meant to be tunnels before the installation of plumbing, for some other place in the castle. Though marred with age, the stonework on the walls is solid and well done. As if it were meant to be seen, not hidden. It only makes the state of disarray all the more dreadful: amplified by the atmosphere of abandonment.

Tom walks on.

An impassive stone door, twice as tall as he, stands at the end of this corridor. There are two snakes intertwined with each other delicately carved into the cold stone, their eyes set with emeralds glittering from his lumos. Untouched, as opposed to the emblem on the sinks above him. Every last detail on their scales and head as crisp and perfect as the day they were made.

His free hand runs up along the bodies of the serpents, long ago memories of dueling and his first year come to him. Memories of wonderful magic being displayed before him[1]. The glow from his lumos makes the emerald eyes feel alive. Gleaming down at him, expecting him.

Tom tells the door to open. Hisses at it in the language of his ancestors, and it obeys him. And he knows that he is meant to be here. That this place is meant for him. Only him.

The chamber revealed by the door is as ostentatious as the portraits of Slytherin in the castle. As the gaudiness of the commonroom and as the flamboyant as many of the snake motifs around the dungeons. It's an altar, if anything, to some unknown cavernous god. Tall pillars rising into a ceiling so tall he cannot see it, embellished with more coiling snakes. A horde of them. An army, if he wants to try and be delphic[2]. He wonders if they move at his command. If they can come alive all at once and follow his every order.

At the end of the long chamber is a statue. Tremendous and imposing. It looks nothing like any of the portraits of his ancestor, and yet he knows it must be him. A statue of Salazar Slytherin as tall as his eye can see: young and brooding. Looking every bit the dark wizard Tom's made him out to be in his head. If he tries, he can see great resemblance, despite the generations of wizards in between them. He'd go as far as to say that they look like grandfather and grandchild.

He presses his lips together. Wets them. Speaks. «Awaken.»

His heart is beating violently in his throat, and he remembers the last time it's done this, it was when he was first pushed into the bomb shelter with the other children: fearful and crying and shaking, and he is not crying though he is certainly trembling with something like fear...But it is tinted with something much sweeter, it is the taste of anticipation and—