LIGHTNOVELWORLD Chapter 18: Chapter:18
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Harry fled the library. The rest of the morning was spent fleeing from room to room as Alex followed him around, throwing things at him, making him fall, or in one particularly awful moment, making the stairs drop out from under him.
Eventually, Alex grew bored and disappeared into the back garden. Bruised, singed, and bleeding slightly, Harry made his way back to the library. It would be the first place Alex would look if he came back for round two. The potions lab, while fascinating, was a bust. For one thing, the layer of dust on everything made him sneeze. Secondly, and more importantly, neither of the two doors locked. Not to mention, the one nearest the stairs didn't even close properly. He did nick a few of the beginners potions books off the shelves though.
Beyond the potions lab was a long, dim corridor James said led to storage rooms. There were four plain doors down the side across from the potions lab, and another two on the same side. One didn't have any sort of knob, and two wouldn't budge. Of the three he could open, only one didn't choke him with dust.
What he'd been expecting to find was a linen closet of some sort, or something like the loft at the Dursleys. Instead, he found a spacious room, only slightly smaller than his room, with stone floors and dingy plaster walls. It was filled almost to bursting with old furniture and trunks. A fireplace burst to life when he stepped into the room, warming the cool space considerably. His trainers left footprints in the dust.
There was more than enough space to move around, surprisingly., and after an hour of dragging heavy trunks out of the way, coughing and sneezing as plumes of dust danced in the air, he was able to create a cosy space near the fireplace. An old green velvet sofa in intricately carved legs went beneath the window. He found a cracked but functional table to go in front of it. A chair with brocaded fabric, which was ripped and showing the stuffing beneath, was moved across from the sofa, right next to the fire.
Satisfied with the arrangement, Harry rushed out of the room. He gathered the books and other things James had given him and stuffed them into his bag. Alex had shredded the duvet on the bed, and smeared something on the pillows. He left them.
In the Library, he gathered the snakes, his notebook, quill, and ink. It took three trips to transport his stacks of books to the storage room. He made a fourth trip, just to grab another towering stack of books.
The snakes loved the room.
The rest of his day was spent in blissful silence behind a locked door. He read through a couple of books, cross referenced his notes, and hunted down answers in a dozen more, trying to learn as much as he could. The only times he ventured out was to get dinner from the elves well after he guessed Alex would have gone to bed.
When he finally decided to call it quits for the night, he realised the room was too chilly to sleep without a blanket, despite the warm fire burning. With his blanket destroyed, he wasn't sure what to do. Then his eye caught on the trunks and the old wardrobes.
He went through three trunks full of books, found a set of golden animal figurines than trotted around the floor when he pulled them out. They were promptly placed on the mantle, where they quickly arranged themselves, biting and scratching at one another until they were satisfied, then promptly stopped moving. As he could only recognize the dragon, he vowed to find a book in the morning to see what kind of animals they were.
In another trunk, there was a cool dagger in a fine leather sheath. It had a trio of jewels on the hilt, an emerald with two white stones he couldn't identify on either side of it. Silver, and still sharp, it went underneath one of the sofa cushions.
He never found a blanket, but in the next trunk, he found a heavy black cloak made out of a silky material and lined with fur on the inside. It was the softest thing he'd ever felt, and warm.
It made a good blanket, and Harry slept soundly beneath it.
He woke before the sun rose the next day, and made his way up to the kitchens for an early breakfast. Mippy agreed to deliver a pot of tea to the storage room, and bring lunch, but only after he made her promise not to tell anyone, not James or Alex, or the other elves, where he was hiding.
Once he returned to the storage room, he read until his eyes went cross and he could no longer think coherently. As promised, a pot of tea was delivered only an hour after breakfast. And the kind elf snapped her fingers, making all the dust vanish from the room.
After lunch, Harry turned his attention to the trunks and broken down wardrobes. Trapped in the room until Alex went to bed, he began going through them to see what else he could find. They were filled with a myriad of things. Odd objects by the dozens, some broken, but most he didn't know what to do with, let alone what they were. Most of the clothes were moth-eaten. He did find a nice blanket buried at the bottom of one of the wardrobes, which he tossed onto the sofa. He found a nice pair of black boots made out of some type of reptile skin, which shimmered with a green hue in the sunlight that filtered through the dirty window, in the same trunk as the cloak.
They fit perfectly when he put them on. He gleefully tossed battered trainers into the fireplace.
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If you want to read ahead by 10 chapters from her you can visit my Patre-on.
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