The three-headed dog narrowed all six of its bloodshot eyes at the three little intruders who had disturbed its sleep. A low growl rolled from deep in its throats, thick enough to vibrate through the stone floor, and then its middle head slowly opened a mouth full of yellowed fangs and hot, rotten breath.
Harry, Ron, and Hermione instantly understood that this was not the moment to wonder why something like that was locked inside Hogwarts. Their brains reached the same conclusion at once: run, or be eaten.
Survival worked faster than thought. The three of them bolted backward, robes whipping around their legs, and threw themselves through the doorway with the kind of desperate speed no Defence Against the Dark Arts lesson could ever teach.
The door slammed shut behind them with a thunderous bang. Harry and Ron shoved against it with all their strength while Hermione fumbled for the latch, and only when the lock finally clicked did the three of them collapse against the corridor wall, gasping as if they had just escaped death twice over.
"Good thing Ron noticed it when he did," Harry said, his face still pale beneath the torchlight. He swallowed hard and stared at the door as though expecting the monster to smash through it any second. "But what is something like that doing here?"
Hermione pressed a hand to her racing heart and forced herself to breathe. "It's a three-headed dog," she said, still shaken despite the sharpness returning to her voice. "I read about them in the library, though I never expected to see one at Hogwarts."
There was another thought she did not say aloud. The dog had not merely been sleeping in an empty room; it had been positioned like a guard, and guards usually protected something.
Ron, however, gave a weak scoff, as if mocking the situation might stop his knees from trembling. "Honestly, what's strange about that? This is Hogwarts. It's an ancient castle, and I doubt even the professors know every hidden passage and sealed-up room in the place." He jabbed a thumb toward the door and added, "Maybe we were just unlucky enough to stumble into the one with a giant Cerberus in it."
His casual dismissal made Hermione's mouth tighten. She had been about to mention her suspicion, but the words died before they formed, because she could already imagine Ron rolling his eyes and Harry trying to look polite while not believing her either.
Even if she told them, they would probably think she was being paranoid. They would call it imagination, nerves, or some clever theory from a book, and Hermione was far too tired to argue about it in a deserted corridor after nearly being torn apart.
"Well," she said irritably, drawing herself up and smoothing her rumpled robes, "right now, unless either of you has another brilliant plan involving locked doors and man-eating monsters, I'm going back to bed. I suggest you two do the same, quietly, before we end up in even more trouble."
Harry and Ron had no objection. The three of them parted ways after retracing their steps through the darkened corridors, taking twice as long as before because every shadow now looked like Filch, Mrs Norris, or something worse.
By the time they finally reached their dormitories, the castle had sunk back into its midnight silence. The adventure that had begun with sneaking around after curfew ended with three exhausted first-years slipping into bed, each pretending they were much calmer than they really were.
.....
Logan sat at his desk in the boys' dormitory, still bent over a stack of spellbooks while the rest of Gryffindor slept. Wisdom, he had long since discovered, could be a lonely thing, but power remained the one force that kept him moving forward.
Harry and Ron crept back into the dormitory with ghost-white faces and the stiff, guilty movements of boys who had narrowly avoided disaster. Logan looked up from his book, saw the state of them, and raised an eyebrow.
"What happened to you two?" he asked quietly, keeping his voice low so he would not wake the others. His tone was calm, but the curiosity in his eyes was hard to miss.
The moment Harry and Ron saw him, both seemed to find their footing again. Logan, whether he meant to or not, had become the sort of person who made dangerous situations feel slightly less impossible, and the two of them quickly spilled everything that had happened that night.
A three-headed dog. A locked room. A creature large enough to swallow them whole.
Logan listened without interrupting, though his thoughts were already moving faster than their explanation. If his memory of the original story was right, that beast was an early thread leading toward Voldemort, Quirrell, and the object hidden inside Hogwarts.
He had no desire to pull on that thread. This was part of Harry's path, and Logan suspected that old fox Dumbledore had already begun arranging a little trial route for the so-called saviour of the wizarding world.
There was no need for him to throw himself into that mess. According to the original events, Harry, Ron, and Hermione would get through it in one piece anyway, and Gryffindor would eventually profit handsomely from the whole ordeal in the form of house points and heroic applause.
Logan had something more important to do. He needed to find a certain magical room, one that might be far more useful to him than whatever Dumbledore had hidden behind a three-headed guard dog.
The Room of Requirement. One of the strangest and most useful places in all of Hogwarts.
It was supposed to be on the eighth floor of the castle, opposite the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy trying to teach trolls ballet. When someone truly needed it, all they had to do was concentrate on what they required and walk past that stretch of wall three times.
After that, a door would appear. Behind it would be exactly the place they needed most.
Tonight, Logan had planned to confirm the location mentioned in the original story. Once he knew where it was, he could return after his dormmates fell asleep and use it as a private training ground, practising spells and grinding experience without anyone watching.
The rest of the night passed without sleep. Or at least, without much of it.
A loud snore from Neville's bed dragged Logan fully awake before dawn, though in truth he had been hovering near consciousness for ages. His body was tired, but his mind remained sharp, impatient, and restless.
He dressed quietly in the dark, then raised his wand and cast the Disillusionment Charm over himself. Magic shimmered across his skin like cold water, bending the dim moonlight around him until his outline thinned, blurred, and vanished into the shadows.
Logan's magical reserves were already far beyond what a normal first-year should possess. With help from the grimoire system and the focused learning state of Sage Mode, he had mastered the charm far faster than any student his age had a right to.
Tonight marked the first day he truly became an invisible person. He looked around at his sleeping dormmates, confirmed that none of them had stirred, and opened the door with careful silence before slipping out toward the eighth floor.
.....
In the Gryffindor girls' dormitory, Hermione tossed beneath her blankets and glared into the darkness. She had tried counting backwards, tried reviewing tomorrow's timetable, and even tried mentally reciting passages from her textbooks, but sleep refused to come.
Only one question kept circling in her mind. Where had Logan gone tonight?
The thought annoyed her more each time it returned. She had classes in the morning, proper classes that required attention and preparation, and if she did not fall asleep soon, she would end up dragging herself to lessons with dark circles under her eyes like some poorly disciplined fool.
It was all Logan's fault. Yes, definitely his fault.
The more Hermione thought about it, the more reasonable that conclusion seemed. Since he was the cause of her sleeplessness, he naturally ought to bear responsibility for it, which meant she had every right to give him a proper scolding tomorrow.
Satisfied with this decision, Hermione finally felt the knot in her chest loosen. Her thoughts quieted, her breathing softened, and before long she slipped into a deep sleep.
Meanwhile, inside the Room of Requirement, Logan was anything but asleep.
"Expelliarmus!"
A red flash burst from his wand and struck the target dummy across the room. It snapped backward, its wooden arm jerking as though a wand had just been ripped from its hand.
"Protego!"
A translucent shield flared before him, catching the rebound of a practice charm and scattering it into harmless sparks. Logan barely paused before turning his wand toward another corner of the bright, spacious room.
"Lumos!"
Light burst from the tip of his wand, clean and steady, illuminating the training space the room had created for him. Smooth stone floors, durable target dummies, open space, and no witnesses—it was almost perfect.
Sage Mode active.
Through repeated, deliberate practice of spellcasting, experience is gained.
The prompt appeared again and again as Logan drilled his spells with relentless focus. His magic surged through his body, draining and recovering in constant rhythm, and every cast pushed his control a little further.
If an ordinary first-year tried to practise at this intensity, they would probably collapse in minutes. Logan, however, had the magical power to sustain it, and the more he practised, the more obvious his progress became.
"The Room of Requirement really is a good place," Logan murmured at last.
He lay flat on the cold floor, breathing hard, sweat cooling along his temples. The room had adjusted itself perfectly to his needs, offering enough space, targets, and privacy for training that no professor would ever approve for a student his age.
Then another memory surfaced.
If Logan remembered the original books correctly, Voldemort had split his soul into several pieces, and one of them had been placed inside Ravenclaw's diadem. Coincidentally, Voldemort had hidden that priceless relic here, inside the Room of Requirement.
The most ridiculous part was that Voldemort had apparently believed he was the only person in Hogwarts to discover the place. Even the Marauder's Map could not show the room's existence, so he had arrogantly left the diadem here without placing any serious protective magic on it.
Logan was not especially interested in the legendary diadem itself, even though the stories claimed that wearing it granted the bearer unmatched wisdom. Whether that rumour was true or false, the thing was still a magical artefact, perhaps similar to a wand in the way it carried power and history.
That was exactly what made him cautious. Holding a cursed, historically important object that contained a piece of Voldemort's soul sounded like the sort of decision that could kill a person very suddenly.
"A boost to wisdom?" Logan muttered, frowning as he stared at the ceiling. "Can it really compare to the Sage Mode from my own grimoire system?"
But if the two could somehow be combined, would that not mean twice the benefit?
The thought made Logan sit up despite his exhaustion. He closed his eyes, steadied his breathing, and silently focused on what he wanted the room to reveal.
There was another important reason for his sudden change of heart. The system quest, Explore the Secrets of Hogwarts, had given him a clue pointing toward Ravenclaw, and the diadem was the most obvious Ravenclaw-related secret hidden within the castle.
Perhaps the diadem could give him the clue he needed.
.....
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