Crouched by the hatch, Harry stared down the mouth of a staircase, stretching far beneath the main structure of the house, darkened within a few yards. The air was damp and heavy with age, and for a moment the house seemed alive, a too-human exhale.<br/>Doubling over and craning his neck, Harry flicked his fingers to cast a<span style="font-style: italic">lumos</span>, stretching his hand into the belly of the beast to expand their field of vision.<br/>At the very bottom, a shimmer of metal.<br/>“There’s a room,” Harry replied, his voice tight. Keeping low to the ground, he inched forward, taking a tentative seat at the lip of the hatch, leaning further into the darkness. The air was humid, making the hairs on Harry’s neck stand, a primordial unease of the darkness.<br/>“Paul, repeat the scan of the terrain, we have to know the size of this - it<span style="font-style: italic">has </span>to show,” Harry ordered, though his mind was elsewhere.<br/>With a shake of his hand, the light disappeared. Instead shifting his wand to his dominant hand, he looked up at Draco, a hazy expression of focus in the face of unease. He felt tightly wound.<br/>Distractedly, Harry’s attention flickered to Connor, eyes perpetually returning to Draco. “Connor, what’s your read - is it safe to enter?”<br/>Clearly caught off guard, Connor all but jumped at the question. With a wave of her wand, she cast a standard Ministry detection spell over the area. Nothing showed, making her uneasy; her eyes, too, flickered to Buchannan and Draco. “I - uh - think so.”<br/>Despite her hesitancy, Harry gladly accepted it as sufficient. Coming to a stand, wand in hand, he was quickly down the first few steps.<br/>“Draco -” Harry called, an invitation. Draco’s input had time and time again proved far more valuable than that of Buchannan or Connor, and Harry found it impossible not to turn to him first, always and inevitably. “What do<span style="font-style: italic">you</span>see?”