Harry Finds Founders – EAD 2025

Title: Harry Finds Founders
Author: Claire Watson
Fandom: Harry Potter
Genre: Canon Divergence
Content Rating: Gen
Author Notes: This series involves personal worldbuilding as well as my own head-canon. For instance, in this ‘verse, Charlus Potter and Dorea Black were James’ parents. I’m stuck in the headspace I was in when I read the books, and I’m not particularly bothered by that.
Word Count: 4,742
Summary: Following Harry’s adventure in the Chamber of Secrets, he discovers that he can access another hidden room in the castle; one with such strong secrecy spells on it that he can’t even tell anyone else where it is.

Chapter one

It was the day before the end of term when Harry found the hidden room. He was on the way back to the Gryffindor common room after serving detention with Snape—for breathing obnoxiously too near the potions classroom—when he noticed what looked like a portrait of the statue from the Chamber of Secrets; the one the basilisk had come out of.
Not remembering seeing it there before, Harry stopped to examine it more closely. It did look remarkably similar, down to the long, thin beard and the enormous grey feet.
“Speak to me, Slytherin, greatest of the Hogwarts Four,” Harry said, more out of mockery than because he expected any result.
At his words, the painting retracted back into the stone, leaving a shimmering archway in its wake.
Harry blinked in surprise. He looked around, but no-one else was in the corridor with him. He looked back at the archway. There was something very tempting about it.
“I should probably come back another time with Hermione and Ron,” Harry said to himself. “Only, Hermione is stressing about the classes she missed, and Ron and his brothers are still worried about Ginny. It would be unkind to drag them away, just so I can sate my curiosity.”
The archway continued to shimmer invitingly.
“I could wait until September, I suppose,” he mused. “But what if it disappears? What if this is my only chance to see what’s inside? Hermione would want me to ask someone if it was safe, but let’s face it, it’s unlikely to be anything more dangerous than a thousand-year-old basilisk.”
Nothing continued to happen.
“Am I a Gryffindor, or what?” Harry drew his wand, took a deep breath, and stepped through.
On the other side of the shimmering veil was a series of overlapping wrought-iron gates. Intertwined with the metal like a great stone chain was a familiar-looking carved snake, emerald eyes glittering as they reflected the shimmering archway.
Harry concentrated on those eyes and hissed “Open,” heart beating faster as the snake slithered out from where it was nestled, allowing the gates to pull away and back into the walls, revealing a spiral stairway leading down.
At the bottom was a small room with a dusty, ornately carved long bench seat along one wall and another door opposite. This one was guarded by a portrait of a woman with bright green eyes and dark red hair, wearing dark blue robes with a yellow trim.
She raised her eyebrows at his approach. “Greetings, supplicant. Do you have an offering?”
“Uh…” Harry swallowed hard. “I don’t think so. I just found this room by accident; I didn’t know I had to bring an offering. Um…what kind of offering?”
The lady in blue frowned. “You found this room by accident?” Her disbelief was clear in her tone.
“Yes,” said Harry, rubbing the back of his neck nervously. “I saw a painting of something I had seen somewhere else, and then I said something jokingly and a sort of doorway appeared.”
“Which painting was it?”
“The one of the statue of Salazar Slytherin.”
Her eyes narrowed. “There are no paintings of Lord Slytherin in the main area of the school, in statue form or otherwise.”
What?
“Well, a painting of the statue down in the Chamber of Secrets.” Come to think of it, he’d assumed the statue was of Slytherin, and then Riddle had used that grandiose password to call for the basilisk, but it wasn’t like there was a sign or anything.
The lady in blue sniffed. “As if Lord Slytherin would place a statue of himself in his private chambers. That is a statue of Asclepius, Lord Slytherin’s patron.”
Harry might not be as well read as Hermione, but the library had been one of the places Dudley couldn’t attack him with impunity, and some of the librarians had been a bit sympathetic to the boy in rags, allowing him to read during lunchtime. Myths and legends had been interesting, and while Harry couldn’t recite the full Greek pantheon, he knew enough to know who Asclepius was.
“I thought Asclepius was Greek,” said Harry, trying to wrap his head around the idea that Salazar Slytherin was into healing. That certainly wasn’t what his reputation suggested. “That statue doesn’t look like any of the Greek statues I’ve ever seen.”
“Lord Slytherin wasn’t a Greek sculptor, I don’t know why you’d expect his work to look the same as theirs. Regardless, you’ve identified the portal you used.” She pursed her lips. “That entrance only opens to Slytherins, yet you are wearing red and gold.”
“The hat did want to put me in Slytherin, but I told it anywhere but there.”
Her eyebrows rose again. “May I ask why?”
Harry shrugged, feeling uncomfortable. “Partly because of what Hagrid said, but mostly cause of Malfoy. He reminded me too much of my cousin to want to go into the same house as him.”
“In what specific way did he remind you of your cousin?”
“The casual insults, mostly. I just…” Harry shrugged again. “I don’t know how to describe it. It was like there was a feeling of random cruelty about him, and I thought that if he wanted to start the magical version of Harry Hunting, it would be harder if I was in another house.”
“Malfoy, you said.”
Harry nodded, but felt the need to explain a bit. “Yeah. I was right about the bullying; he’s always saying really nasty stuff and throwing various ingredients into our cauldrons and trying to pick a fight. And his dad attacked me the other day, I don’t know what I would have done if Dobby hadn’t saved me.”
The lady’s mouth opened, then closed again. “This happened on school grounds? Another student’s father attacked you on school grounds, and the wards did nothing?”
“Not that I could see. Are there wards for that, then?” Harry hadn’t seen any evidence of anything but Dobby trying to save him, but maybe he just didn’t know what to look for. He told her as much. “Also, Draco’s dad is on the Board of Governors, so maybe that changes things.”
The lady in blue made a ‘tsking’ noise. “This is the sort of thing the Lords and Ladies will want to hear about. Since you came in through the Asclepius entrance, and your situation seems…unusual, we can forgo the offering. This time, at least.”
The portrait slid to the side, revealing an entrance to a much larger room, fitted out a bit like a common room. It was oddly shaped, with a couple of shadowy nooks as well as a huge fireplace, larger than any Harry had seen before. Over the fireplace was a large painting of a group of empty chairs set in a sumptuous room. Looming above it like it was waiting for something and just decided to rest its eyes for a moment, was an intricately carved marble lion, its mane swirling around the feline face like it had been styled.
There were paintings on the other walls; landscapes, mostly. A forest scene, a windswept hill overlooking a grey, stormy ocean, the night sky above a snowy terrain rippling with green light. One wall had several images, all of Hogwarts from different aspects, and at different times of day and year.
The centre of the room was strewn with furniture, some sofas, some chairs, some tables, a few desks, and a couple of open areas. The floors looked like black stone, maybe obsidian, polished to a high shine. There were rugs here and there in a variety of different styles. All in all, the mish-mash of colour and style should have looked cluttered and untidy. Instead, it just worked.
In for a penny…Harry went in.
As he crossed the threshold, the sound of the portrait sliding back into place made him swing around to check that there was a way out, that he wasn’t shut in.
The wall behind him showed no sign that a doorway had ever been there. Harry felt his heart speed up and sweat break out on his brow, but did his best not to show just how freaked out he was. One thing the Dursleys and Harry Hunting had taught him, was how to look like things didn’t matter when they did.
If forward was the only direction possible, then forward it would have to be. Harry grasped his wand tighter and went towards the only door that he could see.
Before he got even halfway across the room, the lion opened its eyes and stared down at him. They were red and glowing and reminded Harry of the sword he’d used on the basilisk.
He froze in place, wondering what it meant. Could the lion see him? Was it like the portraits or Peeves, was it going to get him in trouble?
“Goodness,” said a man’s voice, startling Harry badly. “Gretal wasn’t exaggerating in the slightest. Are you sure you’re in second year, young man? Perhaps you somehow started Hogwarts a year or two early?”
Harry’s gaze dropped to the portrait below the lion, which now held four figures. The one who was talking was the tallest and sitting between the other man and one of the women. They were all wearing soft-looking grey robes with coloured piping, green, yellow, blue, and red.
It was the man with the red piping who was talking. “Of course,” he continued, “if they’re letting students in before their first maturation, then that’s another problem entirely.”
“Tatty would refuse to sort them,” the blue piping lady assured him.
The red piping man nodded. “Quite right, quite right. And we know that Tatty is still functional, at least, although she’s lasted longer than I originally thought she would.”
Blue piping lady sniffed disdainfully. “As if my calculations couldn’t be trusted.”
“That’s not what I meant,” he protested. “Sally, you know what I meant, don’t you? You didn’t think Tatty would last either.”
“Don’t bring me into this,” said the green piping man. “You can get your foot out of your mouth without dropping me in the midden, if you please.”
Harry might not be as bright as Hermione, but he was able to piece together clues when they were as blatant as the ones in front of him.
“The founders!” he gasped, wondering if he was having a delayed hallucination from the basilisk bite. “You’re the founders!”
“Technically, we’re representations of the founders,” said the yellow piping lady, who could only be Lady Helga Hufflepuff, kindly. “A very complicated combination of magic combined with quite a bit of luck, imbued us with rather more of the original’s essence than is normally considered wise.”
Lord Godric Gryffindor frowned. “I notice you’re not jumping down Huffy’s throat, saying she’s maligning your calculations.”
Lady Rowena Ravenclaw spoke through gritted teeth. “That’s because she didn’t. You know perfectly well that none of my calculations predicted this.”
“Don’t mind them,” said Lord Salazar Slytherin, winking at Harry. “They’re not really angry with each other; they just enjoy fighting.”
“We do not!” they both said at the same time.
Harry was still staring, mouth open in his shock.
‘Come now, lad,” said Lord Gryffindor bracingly. “It’s not that surprising, is it? Even if you’re a newblood, you must have been around the castle enough to see magical portraits!”
“Y-yes, of course,” Harry replied. “Is newblood another name for muggleborn, then?”
He shrank back as all four of them scowled at him. “Sorry, sorry, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”
The scowls melted into looks of worry.
“Of course you should ask, if you don’t understand something,” said Lady Hufflepuff. “That word you used…muggleborn…might be in common parlance but we have yet to be reconciled to it.” At his blink, she rephrased it. “It is in everyday use, yes? But it is an insult. You probably know this, on some level. What does muggleborn mean to you?”
Harry’s gaze darted between the four apprehensively. “A muggleborn is a witch or wizard born to muggles, that is, ordinary non-magical people. When a muggleborn and a pureblood have kids, they’re half-bloods, like me.”
Lady Ravenclaw narrowed her eyes. “And the hierarchy in place puts full-bloods at the top, yes? Tell me, have they reached the point where inbreeding has led to declining birth rates and other defects?”
“Uh…” Harry really didn’t know how to answer any of that. “I’m not really…I don’t…”
“You’re unfamiliar with the political state of magical Britannia?” suggested Lord Slytherin. “What occupation do your parents do?”
“My parents died when I was a baby,” Harry explained. It was the first time in years that he’d had to explain it to someone; even Hermione had known all about it before she met him. Come to think about it, she’d known more about it than he had. “There was an evil wizard, and…but I grew up with my mother’s mug—, that is, non-magical sister.”
“I see,” said Lord Slytherin, glancing significantly at Lady Ravenclaw. “And what about the Traditions and Politics class? What subjects were covered in that?”
“I haven’t heard about that class, sir,” said Harry. “My friend Hermione never mentioned it, either.”
Lord Gryffindor shook his head, sadly. “It does rather look like the standards we set have dropped somewhat. I had hoped that the bylaws would provide an adequate guideline, but it seems I was in error.”
“We didn’t have much choice,” said Lady Hufflepuff. “Tying everything up in magical laws wouldn’t have worked either; it would have stifled any kind of growth or advancement.”
Lady Ravenclaw scowled. “We agreed that we didn’t want to build the kind of restrictive society that we’d seen in other places.”
“Come on, we can talk about this later,” said Lord Slytherin. “What I want to know is, why this young man came in through the Slytherin entrance when he’s got red on his robes? Gretal said it made no sense to her, and that we should ask you ourselves.”
Harry repeated what he’d told the other portrait about the sorting hat and how Malfoy, Hagrid and Ron had made Slytherin seem like a bad choice so he’d asked to go anywhere else. And how the whole school had thought he was the Heir of Slytherin and had been going around petrifying people right up until one of his best friends was attacked, despite the fact that the last time the Chamber had been opened was even before Harry’s father was born, so it couldn’t possibly have been him.
“But Hermione says that wizards don’t have any logic,” Harry finished. “It turned out that the Heir of Slytherin was actually a magic diary created by Voldemort, the evil wizard who killed my parents. It was possessing one of the students and getting her to do everything.”
“I don’t think very much of an evil wizard who makes it his business to terrorise a school,” said Lord Slytherin with a snort. “How pathetic. Also, I wonder how they managed to fool the world that they were descended from me when I had no children of my body. In fact I found that sort of thing all a bit distasteful.”
“I think it might have been because he spoke parseltongue. They only thought it was me when they found out that I could talk to snakes,” Harry explained.
“That’s even more ridiculous!” said Lord Gryffindor. “I’m a parselmouth too. Does that mean I’m descended from my friend here?”
Harry gaped. “Excuse me? Did I just hear you say…Godric Gryffindor is a parselmouth? Then why is there a snake on the Slytherin banner, and not on the Gryffindor one?”
“We wanted four distinct creatures for our banners,” Lady Ravenclaw explained. “Both Goddy and Sally wanted the reptile, but since only one could have it, they played a game of dice for it.”
“I wanted to be Drustan Dragonwing,” said Lord Gryffindor aggrievedly.
“Stop pouting; you look ridiculous,” said Lady Hufflepuff sternly. “We let you call yourself after a griffin, didn’t we?
“…Does that mean your name isn’t actually Godric?” Harry asked, confused.
Lady Hufflepuff laughed. “Of course not! It would be beyond the realms of coincidence for four alliteratively named persons to just happen to meet and decide to build a school. None of the names we used while running our school were our real names. Firstly, what we were doing was radical and bordering illegal, and we knew we would become very visible on the political landscape. Taking new names ensured that our families wouldn’t bear the brunt of our actions, should things go badly.”
“Secondly, names have power of their own,” said Lady Ravenclaw. “We wanted our school to be a new beginning, which meant new names; names that had no history of their own.”
“Thirdly, some of us didn’t like the names we already had,” said Lord Slytherin. “We made an agreement amongst ourselves to only refer to ourselves and each other by our new names, and at this point, I’m no longer sure what my friend’s original names actually were.”
“Neither do I,” said Lord Gryffindor.
“I do,” said Lady Ravenclaw.
Lady Hufflepuff nodded. “So do I.”
“Not that it matters,” said Lord Slytherin, ignoring the women. “What matters is that I didn’t have any heirs, and anyone who claims that I must have or there would be no parselmouths around clearly knows nothing about how magical gifts work.”
“The bit that I don’t understand is why everyone believes that you hate newbloods,” said Lady Hufflepuff. “It’s all very well and good to say that information gets lost and distorted over time, but that particular detail seems to have been made up out of whole cloth.”
“The story is that Slytherin and Gryffindor had a huge fight, and Slytherin left the castle never to return,” said Harry, remembering what Hermione had told him about it.
Lord Gryffindor rolled his eyes. “Sally and I argued a lot, but it was never anything serious. We’d usually go into the duelling chambers and work out our anger and come out best friends again.”
“Sometimes, one of them would pick a fight for that express purpose,” said Lady Ravenclaw, the hint of a smile on her face. “Helly and I discouraged it, of course. We thought it wasn’t a wonderful example to be setting for our students. Goddy and Sally ignored us.”
“Now, Ro, we didn’t ignore you,” said Lord Gryffindor cajolingly. “We merely added your opinion to the list of things to consider and made our decision accordingly.”
“They ignored us,” confirmed Lady Hufflepuff. “We decided to let it go, so long as they didn’t try to use their demented form of conflict resolution with anyone else.”
Lord Slytherin sniffed. “At least Goddy and I never stayed angry for long. We never nursed our irritation with one another until it grew into an inflamed wound.”
Lady Hufflepuff’s eyes narrowed. “What are you trying to say?”
“Nothing, he’s not saying anything,” Lord Gryffindor broke in hurriedly. “Let us get back to this Heir of Slytherin business. How else is this heir identified, aside from being a parselmouth?”
“I don’t know,” Harry admitted. “Everyone was too busy labelling me as evil to do much explaining. Well, not Ron and Hermione, or Neville, or the twins. And Percy didn’t seem to care one way or another but he was too distracted to help. When we asked Professor Binns, he just told us that the Chamber of Secrets was a myth and then went back to talking about goblin rebellions.”
“Goodness gracious,” said Lord Slytherin, frowning. “There’s something very wrong about all this. I’d very much like to have a word with your Head of House; give them a bit of a prod. What can they be thinking, to leave you as ignorant as this?”
Harry bristled a bit at being called ignorant, but couldn’t really refute it. “She’s very busy,” he explained, feeling like house pride called on him to defend McGonagall, even if she hadn’t actually done much to support him that year. Or the previous year, come to think of it. “She’s the Deputy Headmaster, as well as Head of House and Transfiguration teacher.”
Lord Gryffindor turned to Lady Ravenclaw. “Do you see what I mean? Come now, I know that we decided not to meddle in school affairs, but this cannot stand.” Lady Hufflepuff and Lord Slytherin nodded their agreement.
“We have to do something,” entreated Lady Hufflepuff.
Lady Ravenclaw pursed her lips. “We swore not to meddle in the school.”
All three of her fellow founders just stared at her. Lord Slytherin reached up to clasp the pendant on his necklace, and the look of entreaty on his face was particularly pitiful.
Lady Ravenclaw sighed. “Technically, if we focus on a single student’s home life and personal situation, we won’t be breaking our oaths.”
“Marv!” said Lord Slytherin happily, reaching past the women to grip Lord Gryffindor’s forearm in a sideways motion that was immediately reciprocated. “First things first. Tell us about your life from the start. Include anything you thought was odd, or may have overheard but didn’t understand.”
“That might take me past curfew,” Harry pointed out.
“Does that matter to you so much?” asked Lady Hufflepuff with a knowing look in her eye.
Harry shrugged. “The actual rule-breaking doesn’t bother me; it’s just that the only time I was caught out, Gryffindor was docked fifty points, and the rest of the house shunned me for weeks.”
Lord Gryffindor went red in the face, and Lady Ravenclaw looked infuriated, but before either of them could say anything Lady Hufflepuff was replying.
“I can see why that might give you pause,” she said. “How about I activate a time expansion option?” Without waiting for a reply, she drew a wand and waved it in a complicated motion. “There. No matter how long you talk, no more than ten minutes will pass outside this suite. Now come; find a chair and get yourself comfortable.”
At first, Harry’s retelling was sparse on details and a bit disjointed, but Lady Hufflepuff and Lord Gryffindor were adept at asking questions that jogged his memory. When he tried to demur, not wanting to recount some moments that made him feel particularly terrible or that he felt showcased his stupidity more than he really liked, Lord Slytherin pulled him back and pushed him to give a truthful account. Lady Ravenclaw just sat and listened intently.
After a while, Harry fell into a rhythm. Rather than immersing himself in the memories as he related them, he sort of stood outside and narrated them like one of those nature documentaries they’d shown sometimes in primary school when they’d packed up at the end of term and still had time to kill until the bell rang.
There was also a feeling of release; like that moment after the first twist of the cap of a soft drink bottle. When the snap of thin plastic breaking is accompanied by a rush of escaping gas, and afterwards the bottle feels different, softer. Less like it might burst.
“Hermione is busy with her studies, hoping to make up for some of the time she missed,” he finished with. “Ron and the twins are spending all their time in the Infirmary. I didn’t really want to sit around in the common room with a bunch of people who thought I was an evil dark lord only a couple of days ago, so I decided to take my cloak and go for a wander. When I saw the painting of the statue, I decided to try the password from the Chamber on it. And here I am.”
He relaxed back in the chair.
At some point during his story, one of the founders had transfigured their straight-backed chairs into soft, cushiony ones more like the one Harry was sitting in. They’d also got hold of a bottle and some glasses, and were sipping at a sparkling blue liquid.
“I don’t know about the rest of you, but that is the greatest load of nundu dung I’ve ever heard,” said Lord Slytherin. “Not that I think you’re lying to us, dear fellow; no, that’s not what I meant at all. It just seems to me that your life is so full of misery—and after such a promising beginning—that it can’t be anything but orchestrated.”
“Not necessarily,” disagreed Lady Ravenclaw. “Don’t get me wrong, I do believe someone is behind your dreadful home situation, Harry dear, I just don’t think it’s impossible that it could happen without intervention.”
“You’re so concerned with semantics, it’s annoying,” said Lord Slytherin. “Fine. So, it’s highly unlikely to be anything but orchestrated.”
“How can you tell?” asked Harry.
Lady Hufflepuff blew her nose nosily. “Firstly, the fact that you were placed with your non-magical family rather than your magical one.”
“It’s a rather odd thing to do,” Lord Gryffindor agreed. “Especially when it’s clear that your parents were well known. It’s also highly suspect that you haven’t mentioned what was in their wills. As their inheritor, you should have been made familiar with your parents’ estate, you shouldn’t just be led to and from a single Gringotts vault and told that’s all there is! I also refuse to believe they didn’t bother to make a Will; you’ve already said it was wartime! They had a young son! Only idiots wouldn’t have prepared for you!”
“You said that Hagrid gave you a photo album,” Lady Ravenclaw pointed out. “The people those photos came from, where are they? Why weren’t they considered as possible guardians for you? It was unlikely that your Aunt’s despicable nature wasn’t already known to your mother; no loving parent would leave their only child, their baby, to endure such treatment.”
“I’m not convinced by this folderol your Headmaster told you about blood wards, either,” said Lord Slytherin. “There are several things wrong with what he said. Now, if we take the approach that he is an honest man who only wishes for your health and happiness, we can maybe argue that he just didn’t feel you were old enough to understand the details. I’m inclined to dismiss that thought; you’re clearly a bright lad, for all you’re not a dedicated scholar—”
“Remember that he needs his eyes checked,” interrupted Lady Ravenclaw. “If I don’t mention it now I might forget.”
“—and even if his explanation is simplified beyond recognition, I’m concerned about some of what he did say. He seems to be mixing up two very different things that aren’t compatible with each other. He’s either dangerously ignorant, lying, or actively working towards something that is not to your benefit at all.”
“I don’t know why the headmaster of a school is so involved in a child’s home life either,” muttered Lord Gryffindor. “If he’s your actual guardian, then where has he been all your life? He’s clearly not suffering from a lack of funds or access to transport; why have you been left in such a deplorable situation? And if he’s not your guardian, then who is? Don’t try to tell me it’s your non-magical relatives! Until I see it written and testified properly, I refuse to believe it.”
“It all comes back to that Will,” mused Lady Ravenclaw. “We need to somehow get our hands on it.”
The founders fell silent.
Harry shifted in his chair, wondering if it was okay to ask questions.
Lord Slytherin noticed. “Was there something you wanted to know?”
“It was what you said about the blood wards,” said Harry. “You said that it was wrong, and I wondered how that was?”
Lord Slytherin glanced at his fellows. “Why don’t the three of you go somewhere else and work on the Will matter while I walk young Harry here through the basics of warding?”
“Good plan,” said Lady Hufflepuff getting gracefully to her feet. “Come on, Goddy, Ro. Let’s leave Sally and Harry to it.”
“I don’t know why I should,” Lord Gryffindor grumbled, getting up. “He’s wearing red and gold, he pulled the sword from the hat. He should be mine to mentor.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Lady Ravenclaw. “You don’t know anything about blood magic. Let Sally enjoy a nice long coze and help us come up with a way to get hold of a hidden will.”
“I know some!” Lord Gryffindor objected. “Fine, fine, I’m coming.”