The Heiress of Slytherin

The Raindrop that Brings the Flood

The weeks following Ivy's fight with Harry, Hermione and Ron were full of more than just training with the selkies. There were the usual things that she slipped back into her various meetings with her friends, trips to Hagrid and quidditch practice.

In addition to these, there were three other things that Ivy had introduced to her life. The first one was meeting with Griffin at least once a week, much to Draco's chagrin. They would arrange a time and place and sit for hours, talking, laughing and playing games.

Both the other things mainly involved researching in the library. The first was the chamber of secrets. Instead of trying to understand the actual chamber, Ivy decided to backtrack to the history of the mystery: starting with Salazar Slytherin.

She read every book possible on the founding member of Hogwarts, including ones about his time before school and after his departure. In one of the books she read on the latter subject she found something particularly interesting: after he departed from the school, Salazar Slytherin had married the pureblood daughter of a Duke, and she was named Katherine Highbury.

There wasn't much on her, but it gave Ivy a brilliant, slightly far-fetched idea. What if she could try and trace the family line of Salazar Slytherin down to the modern age to find his heir? It was a large task to assume and since he had lived so long ago, it was an ambitious one, but she hoped that she may rely on the Pureblood community's manic obsession with recording family trees to give her some hope of insight into who the culprit may be.

The effort was extensive and draining and more than once Ivy fell asleep in the library, resulting in her friends having to find a way to try and carry her down to the common room without waking her.

Pansy and Draco were, in the end, far more helpful than any library book. They both wrote home asking for any information that their families may have on the lineage of Salazar Slytherin. They received far more than they bargained for in the form of three owls, laden down with books until they could hardly fly.

Pansy's parents included a note on how they were pleased that she was taking such a keen interest in pureblood legacy and that she might try discussing such topics with Theo or Draco, while Narcissa simply sent them with a letter saying hello to each of Draco's friends and a very sweet note to him.

It was in these books that Ivy unlocked what she was really looking for. She lost track of the line for a little while, but on her eighteenth book, she found it: a chapter on a family named the Gaunt's.

As much as the book tried to make it seem as though this was still a very impressive family, not even the most complementary author could fully smooth over the truth: the once-great line of Salazar Slytherin had evolved into a family of depraved lunatics whose main talents were being entirely deranged and squandering away what little money that they had scraped together.

Ivy drew up a picture of the family tree as far as she could follow and quickly understood why they were so unhinged: approximately three hundred years ago the line that she could trace began to look more like a plait than a tree.

From there she turned to the next two things to understand: what happened three hundred years ago that made one of the branches vanish, and what lay at the end of the line that she knew about.

The latter was easier to solve than the former, although still tricky. Those who preached pureblood supremacy were as unwilling to talk about the end of family lines as they were eager to discuss their histories. Luckily for Ivy, everyone else was perfectly happy to discuss the messier bits of the story.

This time she found what she was looking for in newspaper clippings. One was a piece on Marvolo Gaunt. There were a few lines from what seemed like a very short and unfruitful interview, but they provided Ivy with another link in the chain: Morfin and Merope Gaunt.