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Chapter 604: Iced Passage
🕑 Added 2019-09-27 15:09:43 +0000 UTCIn the eyes of the goblins, the house-elves were cowardly traitors and were not worthy of forgiveness. The cruelty and miserable life they suffered was entirely their own fault.
And in the eyes of human wizards, the house-elves were only slaves and private property wizards. They had the right to dispose of their own house-elves, even to kill them, regardless of their own thoughts.
After the goblin rebellions, the house-elves lived a very miserable and dark life.
Fortunately for them, with the end of the era of pure blood glory and the prevalence of Dark magic, their status improved to some extent.
Although they were still slaves to wizards, there had been a few cases of inhuman persecution.
However, judging from the treatment Dobby received at the Malfoys, they were still abused.
The terrible thing was that both the pure-blood wizards and the house-elves took those things for granted.
Evan hoped that Hermione's Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare would be able to change this situation, although its effect might end up being negligible.
He walked fast for five minutes and came to the end of the room.
There were no heads of house-elves on the front wall. Instead, there was a stone ladder extending downward.
The end of the stone ladder was tightly closed by a heavy iron gate.
"Where does that door lead to?" Evan asked, looking around carefully, feeling a little bit wrong.
He had a panoramic view of the whole room, and this was the only way forward, but he always felt that things were not that simple.
"I don't know, Master Evan, Dobby hasn't been here before!" Dobby answered, looking fearfully at the dark corridor.
"We can go in and check it out later!" Evan paused, and there was a flash of inspiration in his mind. "Hold on, since this cold storage can keep this low temperature, there must be a magic at work, but I don’t feel it here."
On the contrary, the temperature near this ramp seemed to have risen.
Evan closed his eyes, felt the magic fluctuations in the air, and led Dobby back.
He took a few steps and stopped in front of a row of shelves full of mutilated, persecuted house-elves' heads.
The heads of these elves above the shelves were all more or less missing an organ or suffering some kind of damage, just like Moody's face.
Besides, they emitted a strange light blue, which was particularly ghastly and terrible. They all stared ruthlessly at Evan and Dobby with scary, big bulging eyes.
Evan didn't know what kind of abuse they had been subjected to, which made them look so horrible with such looks of hatred on their faces.
Arguably, this kind of expression should not appear on a submissive creature like a house-elf. Even if their owners killed them, they probably wouldn’t reveal this expression...
Dobby howled and covered his eyes again.
Evan directly ignored it. When he first passed by, he thought it was because of a problem with the formula of the anticorrosive potion that made the heads of the house-elves so weird. Now it seemed that was not the case at all. The magic around here was very strong. What should be the explanation?
Resisting nausea, he used his wand to knock one by one on the blue heads of the house-elves on the shelves
"Master Evan!" Dobby looked at him anxiously, not knowing what he was doing.
When Evan’s wand landed on the head of the third house-elf on the left with a missing nose, the elf's frozen eyes suddenly moved.
He looked at Evan fiercely as if he were going to eat him alive.
Evan subconsciously stepped back and saw three dark green fires appear in front of him.
The magic fire quickly rushed to Evan. In Dobby’s scream, Evan lowered his head and avoided the fire.
He cast Protego on himself at the fastest speed, and the remaining two flames hit the shield, making a repressed sound.
A few seconds later, Evan got up from the ground and looked at the shelf in front of him with horror.
He didn’t expect to be attacked, but fortunately he had reacted quickly...
It seemed that no matter where he was, he couldn’t take it lightly.
He cast another protective spell on himself and continued to try to crack the device.
This time he was lucky. When his wand landed on the fourth head of the house-elf, the whole shelf suddenly trembled and slid to the right to give way for a secret downward passage.
Dobby let out another scream and looked at the suddenly opening secret passage in surprise.
For Evan, who had rich experience in castle exploration, he was already familiar with this scene.
In Hogwarts, secret passages could be hidden anywhere, even bedrooms or the headmaster’s office.
"Let's go in and have a look!" said Evan.
He remained vigilant, strengthened the light of his wand, and pulled Dobby down the stairs.
The passage stretched downward, and the staircases on both sides and on the ground were paved with the distinctive black rock of Hogwarts Castle, dark, cold, and extraordinarily gloomy, as though absorbing all the light.
The further he went, the lower the temperature was. Evan noticed that when he breathed, he emitted white mist.
The ground was slippery with a thin layer of ice on it.
Under the fluorescent light of the wand, Evan could see that everything had a strange cyan luster.
That was the color of the frost, here was the world of ice.
He had a feeling, just like entering one of its own isolated ice caves.
The low temperature of the above cold storage was transmitted from here, and he didn’t know what was underneath.
"Master Evan," said Dobby trembling, "Dobby feels cold and uncomfortable..."
Evan looked down and saw that the house-elf was shivering at his feet and curled up into a ball.
He thought for a moment and gently tapped himself and Dobby's head with his wand, and a warm current flowed in from where his wand touched, as if a stream of hot water were spinning in their bodies, dispelling the cold around them and warming himself and Dobby.
With the cold being driven out together with uneasiness and fear, the dark cold storage seemed less terrible.
Dobby's face gradually calmed down, but Evan secretly raised his guard.
He could feel that the strange magic that made the surrounding cold and the temperature lower was gradually increasing.
After the heads full of hatred of those house-elves and that trap, he had to be careful in the face of this unknown environment.
