Return From The Veil
Chapter 1 – The Second Veil

A/N: Hey guys, ooooohhhh I'm so excited about this chapter, I felt particularly clever when I came up with this concept. ENJOY R&R PLZ!

From the second Harry and Ron entered Hermione's office it was hard not to notice what she was so excited about even if they had no idea where it had come from. The space in front of her desk had been cleared of its chairs and in their place was a veil similar to the one in the deeper bowels of the ministry except this one's arch was made of wood that appeared rooted in the floor and had three distinctive knots at the top. From these knots was suspended the veil portion that was clearly Harry's cloak. All too familiar with the other veil Harry hesitated to touch that part but he did run his hand up the frame, "Is this what I think it is?"

"Yes Harry, that is the Elder wand," Hermione confirmed from behind.

"Where's the Stone?" asked Ron.

"Inside the wand, look at the top." The guys took a closer look and spotted a tiny green gem embed in each knot.

"How?" Harry turned to his friend.

"The clues were always there but I just didn't see it," Hermione closed the door behind her and walked over to her discovery. "I had to think both literally and figuratively."

"Meaning…" Ron pressed.

"Start with the symbol for the Hallows," Hermione got a piece of paper from her desk and held it up. It had a large Deathly Hallows symbol on it. "Figuratively speaking it means that the hallows are a set, together. Literally speaking, look again, the stone is in the wand with the wand supporting the cloak."

"Okay but where did this come from?" Harry waved towards the veil. "You knew about it?"

"I had my suspicions but I actually didn't know what would happen so I consulted the closest thing I had to a source," she picked up the old copy of Tales of Beedle the Bard. "I took the story and combined it with actual historical fact. I realised that everything was just one big allegory for the study of death and necromancy. The first thing that tipped me off was that the brothers were travelling at twilight and that is significant because those were times that necromancers would work because the laws prohibited it specifically during the day and night."

"That doesn't leave a lot of time for study," Ron pointed out.

"No it doesn't which is why not many people continued to practice it and why I think Beedle described it as 'a lonely winding road', the amount of dedication it would have taken… And there was the river. I didn't know what to make of it because at this point of the tale, something too deep to wade through and too hard to swim across. It sounds like a metaphor of death but they survived which didn't make sense at all because they didn't have the hallows at this time. So that's I had to switch literally to figuratively. I think something happened to the Peverell family, they were confronted with death and they didn't meet Death in person, they were only able to see it."

"I don't follow," Harry crossed his arms.

"Well this is where my theory actually has something to back it up. I examined the cloak and Elder wand and found that both had Threstral hair."

"Ohhhhh," Ron and Harry said together.

"I don't know how they made the Stone but I think they found a Threstral and used its inherent connection to the death to make the items and whatever happened afterwards must've been bad because we know that they would split up and take one piece each for themselves."

"I wonder what this veil does," Harry moved to stand in front of it, Hermione and Ron on either side.

"He who brings together all the three Hallows shall be the conqueror of Death," Hermione murmured.

"Immortality?" Ron supposed.

"Or a way out," Harry whispered. It was like the veil was entrancing them; Harry thought of his parents and Sirus, Ron imagined seeing Fred again, and Hermione had visions of reuniting little Teddy with Remus and Tonks. It wasn't so much instinctive as it was mindless; together they reached up touching their own knots. Like a sudden hurricane, the veil came alive with a gust of wind coming from the inside that was so powerful it sent them stumbling backwards on to the ground. Shielding their eyes from the flying papers and dust, they did not see when it happened next; they heard a number of thuds and the ground vibrating slightly beneath them. Winds died down and the trio was surprised and slightly terrified by the sounds of groans and heavy breathing that weren't coming from them.

"Harry? Is that you?"

Harry froze; slowly he sat up and turned his head meeting the eyes for the first time in eight years the eyes of his godfather Sirius Black only to realise something more astonishing than that – he wasn't alone.