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Harry found a relieved Theo waiting for him just ten feet down the corridor. After reassuring his friend that, yes, Jim Potter was still very much alive, the two returned to the Slytherin dungeons. There, Harry and Theo stayed up talking until well after the sun came up before crashing and sleeping until noon. At lunch, Harry briefly made eye contact with his brother – non-threateningly, Harry thought, though Jim still quailed at the sight of him – and it seemed clear that the Boy-Who-Lived had taken his words to heart. Ron glanced at Harry without interest and took no notice of Theo at all, so Harry assumed for the time being that Jim would not be gossiping to anyone about the previous night's scene.
The remainder of the Christmas holidays fell back into a normal routine save for a notable reversal of circumstances. Theo, who had previously suffered from fits of insomnia for years, now slept more soundly, presumably due to the catharsis of finally talking about his mother's death with someone he trusted. He was more relaxed during the days when talking to other students and he even helped the Twins prank Percy. He'd also gotten tired of listening to Ron's bragging and challenged the Gryffindor to a chess match. He lost, of course – the Weasel was a genuine prodigy at chess, surprising for such an otherwise mediocre student – but he'd lasted longer than anyone below Fifth Year who'd played Ron since the year began. Ron had even looked worried at several points, and after the game was over, he actually shook Theo's hand and asked if they could play again sometime.
Conversely, it was now Harry who'd developed difficulty sleeping. He was no more prone to nightmares than before, but now, those nightmares were broken up by strange dreams where he and the Potters lived together in familial bliss, including a few where he was somehow a Gryffindor with awful hair of which he was inexplicably proud! Eventually, he was forced to acknowledge the truth – that there was some small, deeply buried part of him that, despite everything he'd been through, still wanted to be part of the Potter family. It was a ridiculous notion to be sure, particularly since the Git's "heart's desire" was that he'd never even been born. Harry had to admit that the Mirror would make a fiendish trap. If it could make him feel a longing for the love of the Potters, surely it could trap Voldemort in some equally absurd fantasy.
Having now added insomnia to his already lengthy list of personality quirks, Harry had taken to wandering the Slytherin dorms on those nights when sleep became impossible. He was searching mainly for snakes hidden in the artwork and architecture that he hadn't talked to yet, but he seemed to have found them all. The operative phrase being "seemed to," as there were six rooms he had not yet entered – the six prefect bedrooms. Harry didn't know how the other houses worked, but in Slytherin, all six prefects resided in private bedrooms that doubled as offices, all of which could be found in a side corridor called Prefect's Row that branched off from the common room. Harry assumed that all of these rooms would be warded against intrusion, but unless there were concealed areas (which, admittedly, there probably were), the prefects' rooms were the only rooms in the whole dungeon he hadn't entered. And so it was, just past midnight on the last Saturday morning before the holidays ended, that Harry found himself nervously entering Prefect's Row, a place no First Year Slytherin ever wanted to be without permission.
Ahead of him was a dimly lit corridor about forty feet long. There were three equidistant doors on each side, with the male prefects on the left and the females on the right. He started with the closest on his left, Fifth Year Prefect Titus Mitchell, on the entirely baseless theory that Titus (as the youngest of the three males) might be less paranoid about security than any of the other prefects. Harry crept up to Mitchell's door, looked around nervously, and cast the Alohamora. The irony that he was using the "illegal lock-picking charm" for the same illicit purpose for which he had chided Hermione months before was not lost on him. In any case, the door did not open, which meant the youngest and least pragmatic of the six Slytherin prefects had more sense than whoever put Fluffy in his room on the Third Floor. On the bright side, there was no loud alarm nor any other sign that he'd been identified as a possible intruder. Privately, Harry decided that if he ever became a prefect, he'd Charm his room so that anyone who even tried to break in would end up with purple skin for a year.
With some trepidation, he tried the Alohamora on each of the other five doors, all to no effect. Annoyed and dejected, Harry turned back down towards the common room. In retrospect, it should have been obvious that a First Year, no matter how skilled, wouldn't be able to simply break into any prefect's private rooms. They wouldn't be prefects if they weren't, at a minimum, powerful enough to defend their own property. Then, suddenly, Harry stopped.
"Powerful," he thought. "Prefects are powerful, relative to other students at least, and selected primarily for their power. Not just for academic achievement (which is, itself, one type of power, in a school at least), but for raw magical power and skill, for family reputation and financial backing, for popularity in the House and the charisma to build social alliances, and even for physical prowess. I mean, seriously, Marcus Flint is in danger of flunking half his classes but he's still the Sixth Year prefect due to family connections and Quidditch skills."
Harry turned to look back down Prefect's Row as he recalled Egbert's cryptic words from weeks before. "But the Prince of Slytherin, whoever or whatever he is, is presumably more powerful within Slytherin than a mere prefect. So in comparison, the six prefects are 'lesser powers,' and Prefect's Row would be 'the nests where the lesser powers dwelt.'"
Carefully, Harry walked all the way back down the dark corridor, past all six bedrooms, until his path was blocked by a blank wall. Except it wasn't really a blank wall at all. It looked more like an archway that had been sealed over years or even centuries before with grey bricks. At some point, a large crack must have developed in the wall which had been patched over with a chalky white mortar, leaving the impression of a jagged scar several inches thick in places that ran all of the way from the top right corner to the bottom left. Harry paused.
"Why would they repair a crack in a Hogwart's wall with mortar when they have magic?"
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