Tale of Four Houses: A Tiktok Story

Part 10 - ᚱᚨᚷᚾᚨᚱᛟᚴ

"What took you so long?" Tom complained, sitting on top of the cabinet and swinging his legs.

"I had to finish the rest of school, Riddle," Cass reminded him, rolling her eyes and shutting the door behind her as she entered her room. "If I skipped, I would have gotten into trouble and people would have started to suspect something."

"Fine," he sighed, jumping down. "Where's the notebook?"

"Right here," said Cass, pulling it out of her bag and held it up. "Now let's see what's in here." She plopped herself down on the floor, her back leaning up against her bed. Riddle sat down beside her, his shoulder touching hers as he leaned in close to see it. Cass unclasped the little hook that held the leather notebook shut. When she opened it, she got a whiff of various scents - burnt paper, old book, and a mustiness. The first page read simply: This Belongs to The Half Blood Prince - Beware! ~Tom Riddle.

"Really?" Cass smirked, turning her head to look at him. "You just had to include that?"

Tom gave her an embarrassed smile. "Could we, uh, forget we saw that?" he asked, rubbing the back of his neck.

Cassandra laughed. "I suppose so," she said, turning back to the notebook and turning to the next page. Her smile slowly faded away as she tried to digest the crude drawing and scribbles. It seemed to be a diagram of the night sky - stars, more specifically - with something written in a language Cass couldn't recognize. "What is this?" she asked, looking at Riddle.

Riddle shrugged. "Like I said, my time before Voldemort is foggy. I was hoping we could decipher it together."

"Not much to go on," she muttered, looking at the opposite page and seeing a viking rune and words scribbled in an unknown language. Each time she flipped to a new page, a new language seemed to be introduced. Some seemed familiar, like old Norse runes and the such, but the others... she couldn't place them.

"How hard do you think it would be to decipher all of this?" Riddle asked, nervously.

Cass flipped through the book. "There's a lot of pages..." she said thoughtfully. "But I used to study ancient and dead languages - so this shouldn't be too hard or take too long."

Riddle stood up. "Then I'll leave you to it," he said, starting to disappear. "Don't want to distract you or anything."

"Wait!" said Cass, jumping to her feet.

Tom stopped fading away. He cocked his head curiously. "What?"

She hesitated. "Nothing," she finally said, giving him a small smile. "See you later, Riddle."

He smiled back lopsidedly. "Don't work too hard, Weasley," he said in return, and faded away.

Cass sat there alone for a while, thinking and looking down at the notebook in her hands. It was going to take a lot of research to decipher these languages. She couldn't go to the library tonight - she knew the routine of the guards like the back of her hand, and tonight they tended to hover near the library. She could use the invisibility cloak from Uncle Harry... but it was too risky. Not with all this tension going around - the guards would be on higher alert. She'd have to wait until tomorrow. But maybe she could decipher the Norse runes until she could get books to help with the other languages and codes.

She flipped open to the first page that held the runes. At the top of the page was what seemed like a title: ᚱᚨᚷᚾᚨᚱᛟᚴ. If she remembered right, the rune ᚱ stood for the letter R... and ᚨ was A. Cassandra rummaged around for a piece of paper to start writing down her translations. "Okay, so there's two R's..." Cass muttered to herself. "There's two A's...a G, an N, an O, and a K." She froze, the blood draining from her face. "Ragnarok? What does Ragnarok have to do with this?"

From mythology, Ragnarok is supposed to be the final destruction of the world by the Norse gods. But it was just legend...

...wasn't it?

Unless... that was the destruction of Hogwarts that Riddle was afraid of - like Hogwarts own Ragnarok. "This is so weird," Cass murmured, turning back to the book to translate the paragraph below the title:

"ᚹᚺᛖᚾ ᚺᛖ ᛖᛋᚲᚨᛈᛖᛋ ᚠᚱᛟᛗ ᛒᛖᛚᛟᚹ,

ᚺᛖ ᚹᛁᛚᛚ ᛋᛈᚱᛖᚨᛞ ᛞᛖᛋᛏᚱᚢᚲᛏᛁᛟᚾ

ᚹᚺᛖᚱᛖ ᛖᚡᛖᚱ ᚺᛖ ᚷᛟᛖᛋ"

"When He escapes from below, He will spread destruction where ever He goes," Cass translated slowly. She laughed nervously to herself. "This is some cliche crap right here, isn't it?" She was about to flip the page to continue going on, but something in the bottom right corner caught her eye. A very small set of runes hide near the binding of the notebook.

ᚱᚢᚾ

Cass' eyes grew wide.

Run.