Chapter 19: The Second Message on the Ceiling

The evening meal at Hogwarts smelled, as it always did, of roasted meat and candlewax and the particular warm weight of four hundred bodies gathered under an enchanted sky. Holmes stood in the doorway of the Great Hall at seventeen minutes past six and ate nothing, because eating was a thing one did when one was not watching.

He had been watching since a quarter to.

His case-note from that morning — written at half past five in the dungeon sub-chamber before Hermione had packed her calculations away — read: *Second event imminent. The first set of glyphs was incomplete. A coordinate system with eight reference points cannot locate a chamber in three dimensions. He will need at minimum four additional markers. He will choose a moment of maximum witness. This is not vanity. This is alibi construction.*