Chapter 206: Architects Puzzle (1/2)
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The link is also in the synopsis.
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In the dark, dimly lit entrance hall, a figure could be seen doing a moonwalk from one end of the enormous hall to the other. The figure was, of course, Quinn, who had gotten tired of sitting in front of the Architect's Statue and had decided to think while walking, which somehow turned into him doing moonwalks on the entrance hall's marble floor.
”It's night, and I'm lonely~,” he softly sang in whispers, ”the one who defies the destiny, waoho~ yeah~, I'm fate's enemy~, uh-huh, can someone listen to me maybe~ — because right now this boy needs this problem's re-re-remedy.”
Quinn was so engrossed in his ugly singing that he didn't notice when he reached the end of the path. His back bumped into something pointy, startling himself, and he ended up jumping forward in surprise. He turned in a hurry to see what he had bumped into and saw Founder Rowena Ravenclaw cast in pure gold, standing with a diadem in one hand and a tome in the other.
He let out a sigh of relief and stepped forward with a smile. Quinn knelt in front of the statue. ”My fair lady, this student of yours asks for your guidance. This poor one's wit has reached its limit, and only your divine intellect could grant me the hope to succeed the Architect's arduous trials,” he said, exaggerating every word that came out of his mouth.
There was a widespread belief that a change in perspective could help things along and sometimes allow a breakthrough when stuck at a problem. And technically, Quinn was looking from a different perspective — he was looking at Rowena Ravenclaw's golden statue while kneeling instead of standing.. .. and in doing so, he noticed the palm on which the tome rested.
It was a tiny thing, and at any other moment, he wouldn't have noticed it, but as he looked up at the end, he noticed a ring on Rowena Ravenclaw's middle finger, but that wasn't the odd thing; the thing that popped out to Quinn was that the ring wasn't melded into the finger as it would in a sculpture or stature — the ring looked like it had been put into the finger separately.
Quinn stood up at once and looked around the entrance hall. There were, in total, six golden statues in the hall — Godric Gryffindor, Rowena Ravenclaw, Salazar Slytherin, Helga Hufflepuff, Architect Stigweard Gragg, and the unnamed one-eyed witch.
He hurriedly jogged to the nearest statue and reached Godric Gryffindor's statue — the man with the portly stood tall dressed in leather armor under his robes; his hands rested on top of a vertically standing sheathed sword with the only very tip of the blade touching the floor. With both hands laying on top of each other, the lower hand was partially hidden from sight; Quinn bent his knees and got in close to finally get a glimpse of a ring on Godric Gryffindor's ring finger.
”That's two,” he muttered quickly before excitedly running to Helga Hufflepuff's statue and the homely plump woman holding a small golden cup with two finely-wrought handles with a badger engraved on the side. Here too, the ring was placed in a hard-to-spot place on the Hufflepuff's curved index finger grasping the cup's handle.
The fourth founder, Salazar Slytherin's bald head and cold eyes were perfectly depicted in gold. The ancient and monkeyish man with a long thin beard that fell almost to the bottom of his sweeping robes had so many rings on his hands that Quinn hadn't noticed that one of Slytherin's pinky was also not melded with the finger and was a separate entity.
He looked at the founders' statues standing in different corners of the room. ”Four founders, four statues, four rings,” said Quinn in but a whisper.
His hand instantly snapped into a fist, and his magic flowed. The 'ringed' fingers of the four founders straightened out with the power of transmutation as the gold heeded the command of Quinn's magic. The four rings (one from each founder) slowly rotated around the fingers as Quinn pulled them out, and the second the rings left the fingers, they zapped through the air and arrived in front of Quinn in mere seconds.
He stared at the rings and noticed the common denominator of the rings except that they were made from gold: ”The four mascots,” he voiced. The rings had etchings of the four house animals: lion, eagle, snake, and badger.
Quinn knew what he had to do. He walked towards the Architect's statue and rested his eyes on the Architect's hand holding the model of Hogwarts with the fingers digging into the ground below the model — all of his digits were bare with not a single ring in sight. Once again, the magic worked its course — the Architect's golden fingers were pulled out from the model and straightened out so Quinn could insert the rings.
Rowena Ravenclaw's eagle inscribed ring taken from her middle finger went into the Architect's middle finger,
Godric Gryffindor's lion inscribed ring taken from his ring finger went into the Architect's ring finger,
Helga Hufflepuff's badger inscribed ring taken from her index finger went into the Architect's index finger,
Salazar Slytherin's serpent inscribed ring taken from his little finger went into the Architect's little finger.
Quinn stepped back and used transmutation once again to curve the fingers back into Hogwart's model and then waited for the show to happen.. .. but nothing happened.
”Hmm?” he stepped forward to see if the fingers weren't properly inserted or had he made a mistake in the ring placement.. .. but all the things seemed to be in order.
”Then why isn't something happening.. .. was my assumption wrong?” he muttered in contemplation, but then the bare fifth finger caught the attention — ”the thumb is still unoccupied, there must be a fifth ring for it, yes.. .. the question is, where's it?”
He wondered for a few moments, whereafter he turned to the one remaining statue in the entrance hall and stared at the ugliest statue, which for some reason was also drawn in gold. Quinn walked towards the statue of the unnamed one-eyed witch — hair haggard, unsightly bumps on the skin, heavily hunched back, ragged robes, and a crooked staff — nothing about the one-eyed witch was pleasant, yet it was stationed in the entrance hall for an entire millennium.
”It makes wonder, doesn't,” he mumbled and observed the statue of the woman blind in one eye. He first looked at her hands, but unexpectedly there were no rings on her bony fingers.
”Okay, what else?”
He looked at her staff which had big hoops on the top, but they were melded into the staff, which indicated that they weren't what he was looking for.
”Eyes.. . eye, singular.”
At first, Quinn thought it was because of the general vibe of the statue that the woman's 'good' eye was bulging and looking in an off direction, but the more he stared at it, the more he thought that the direction in which the statue was looking in was of significance.
Quinn raised a hand and rubbed his index finger and thumb — when he pulled them apart, there was a thread of red Empyrean connecting them. He took the end attached to his thumb and stuck it right in the middle of the eye.
”Alright, let's see where this goes,” said Quinn and started walking in the direction in which the statue was looking in. Soon, he reached a wall, but the statue wasn't looking near the floor level but higher above.
He looked up, then at his feet and tapped his heel against the floor twice for a platform of glowing red Empyrean develop beneath his feet which then pushed him up, and soon he was standing atop a solid pillar — he had gotten decent enough to create massive concrete structures.
The line of Empyrean was still in Quinn's hand, and he pulled it a little for it became taut, then positioned it so that the glowing red line was perfectly perpendicular to the eyeball. When he looked at his end of the line, it pointed right in the middle of a very small-framed photo (there were hundreds of magical portraits in the entrance hall).
When Quinn looked at the photo, his eyes widened in surprise — what he saw was a photo of the entrance hall — a perspective of the entrance hall as seen from the eye of the one-eyed witch.
”That's some cool planning,” he said in amusement.
The picture was too small for Quinn to discern anything valuable with the naked eye, so he conjured a magnifying glass and began observing the magnified picture inch by inch. From the viewpoint of the one-eyed witch, she could've seen all other statues, but because her field of vision was higher, she could only see the wall of photo frames.
Minutes went by as Quinn tried to spot something of value, and just as he was about to give up, his breathing hitched, and Quinn gulped — he was looking at the very same spot that the statue was looking — at the photo in the small frame.. .. he could see the frame, but.. .. the picture inside the frame was different.