Harry stared down at the teardrop-shaped shard of black stone in his hands. Somehow, it had felt appropriate to house the fruits of the unicorn's sacrifice in the very device that had killed it. It wasn't a Nullifier anymore; that sort of enchantment was one use only. Now, it was something much worse.
A horcrux.
He supposed it was lucky that the ex-Nullifier had satisfied the requirements for a horcrux – that it be of emotional significance and capable of containing something. Calling anything about a horcrux lucky seemed intellectually disgusting, however.
Even though Master Petri spoke of horcruxes as if they were nothing special, Harry knew on a gut level that it was an awful thing, a perversion. Anything whose creation involved an unspeakable act had to be, by the definition of unspeakable. And who knew what else it had required? Harry had been unconscious for the entire process after the unicorn's death, and Master Petri remained tight-lipped about the details.
Harry did not feel any different, but his feelings had to be lying to him. He knew with all his mind that he was different now from how he had been before, but it was impossible to evaluate his memories with anything but the feelings he had now, in the present. He couldn't remember anymore what it had been like to be himself before the horcrux. One never really remembered that kind of thing, but usually the change from day to day was not so great, so the feelings that came with memories still seemed true.
Not his. They were too different, too false. He felt vaguely sick all the time, but could find no reason for it. It did not cause any physical reaction either, not like a real sickness.
Master Petri had told him that it was normal.
Suddenly, Master Petri had simultaneously become more reasonable and more detestable. Both changes were in Harry's head, he was sure of it, but that did not make them any less real.
Before the horcrux ritual, Harry had been sure that something would go wrong, even if he did manage to complete his "unspeakable act." How could he manage to accept it once it was done? How could he possibly avoid feeling remorse? It had seemed unimaginable.
Master Petri had told him, almost flippantly, not to worry about it.
And he had been right. It was getting easier, day by day, to admit to himself how right Master Petri was all the time. The things that he said, which had once seemed so foreign and impossible to Harry, had become clear and sensible.
What could possibly be the point of remorse? It was simply the weakness of indecision that haunted one even after completing a task. But the window of possible change had long closed. The things that he felt about the past were quite simply inconsequential, so it was best not to feel them if there was no reason to.
The feelings used to just come to him, Harry could vaguely recall. Even if he had thought about them, they would not get any better. It was better now. He was better now.
"What am I supposed to do with this?" Harry asked Master Petri, not even turning around. The meaning of the question was clear enough, but his disrespect was plain to see. Harry didn't care.
The searing, fiery trails of pain that scored themselves all over his back sent him to his knees, but drew no reaction other than a physical one. Harry waited for his pounding heart and heavy breathing to even out.
"Forgive my disrespect, sir," he said tonelessly, this much at least coming easily in the native tongue of Master Petri. This time facing the man properly and keeping his head down, Harry looked up through his lashes in time to see the withdrawing wand. He held out the hand with his horcrux and clasped the other one over it. Perhaps his posture was a little too submissive, to the point of mockery, but it could not be faulted.
He used to become angry over this, this asking – begging – for forgiveness for trivialities from an unforgiving teacher, but now he simply hated it. It felt liberating to properly acknowledge how much he loathed Master Petri, the man who was always right, even when he was wrong.
To feel this emotion was allowed, proper, even. But to wallow in it would be useless. He needed to do something for himself, and act on that hatred. His contract with Master Petri would end, and Harry would not be the dead body at the of it, nor the withered spirit, nor the victim.
To have such designs at all was perhaps reckless, and to carry them out impossible, but Harry had nothing if not determination.
He would take everything he could from Master Petri, and then destroy him.
"Sir, how do I protect my horcrux?" Harry asked, keeping his voice steady.
"You must hide it, so that no one will ever find it," was the answer.
What was the best hiding place? Somewhere close to him, so he could know if it was taken away? But guarding it would be difficult. He could not even use any wand magic yet. How could he possibly keep something so important safe?
He couldn't, but the protections did not all have to come from him. Master Petri wanted him to hide it where no one could find it. What was the best hiding place?
Ignorance.
If no one knew what it was, then even one who found it would not pose a danger. But there was a chance that there were magical ways to figure out its nature, ways which Harry did not know of, because truly his knowledge of magic was not very great at all. So he could not simply leave it lying about in the middle of nowhere.
"The ocean," Harry said, coming to a sudden epiphany. The horcrux would resist non-magical and low magical damage, as well as most basic spells, he already knew this. If he dropped it into the middle of the ocean, no one could stumble upon it. No one would know where it was, not even him or Master Petri. It needed no protections other than obscurity. It needed no magic to become lost.
"A very good idea," Master Petri said, and Harry thought he sounded genuinely impressed. Harry would have asked Master Petri what he had done with his own, but that would probably have earned him another lashing curse. One was enough for a day.
The only problem was that the ocean was rather far away. Harry could entrust his horcrux to Master Petri and ask him to make several apparition trips, but frankly, Harry did not trust Master Petri to do anything more than teach him as their contract stipulated. He most certainly did not trust the man with a piece of his soul.
Though if he thought about it, in allowing Master Petri to complete the horcrux ritual for him in the first place, Harry supposed that he had already done just that. He would not put it past Master Petri to have done something to his horcrux. It was well within possibility, since as a necromancer Master Petri dealt with souls routinely, and knew a lot about them.
With a sinking heart, Harry realised that, actually, it was overwhelmingly likely that Master Petri had done something to his horcrux. If the man had any designs about Harry's soul, he would certainly have already carried them out. What was one more gesture of trust, when trust had never existed in the first place? It was silly, but Harry was tired.
"Please drop my horcrux deep in the ocean for me, then, sir," Harry requested. His hand shook slightly as he tried to hold it out, and he had to pause for a moment to steady it.
He wasn't a gullible child. Not anymore, anyway. Harry wanted to say this all to Master Petri's face, because the expression on it right now was too pleased and he hated it, but Harry knew that now was not the time. Every advantage that he had over Master Petri, he had to keep. It was the only way he could win.
Master Petri took the chunk of iron in hand and slipped it into his robe pocket. Harry felt bare, and he wanted desperately to ask if that was really a safe place to put it for now, but he held his tongue on that front.
Instead, he asked, "That was the preparation for Malfoy's task, right, sir? Are we going to start it now?"
It felt a little strange to say "we," because every other time he had been involved in the "special business," he had played a very small, mostly educational role that Master Petri easily could have done himself. This time, however, he had gone to the extreme of splitting his soul and having part of it put in an object. Harry knew that it was a big step toward learning necromancy, really learning it instead of dabbling in low-level inferi-raising, and knew that it meant his apprenticeship was beginning to get serious.
"Yes, we are," Master Petri confirmed. "This will be simple necromancy, if we are lucky, but that is unlikely."
This was the first time Master Petri had said that word, Harry noticed. Necromancy. It was almost like he used it as a subset of the "other," however, instead of a synonym. Harry waited patiently for clarification.
"It is divination, another use of the other. It is the third kind. You made the horcrux because it is needed to understand the second kind, which is needed to use the third kind, and we have no time for full teaching now," Master Petri said.
"You mean the horcrux was part of conjuration, sir?" Harry asked, failing to see how splitting his soul and putting it in a rock was conjuring anything. He had known vaguely about the three forms of the "other," and known that everything he had tried thus far was enchantment, the first form. The way Master Petri sometimes summoned the dead apprentices was a combination of the first two forms, enchantment and conjuration.
Master Petri gave a jerky nod. "The truth of souls," he said, "the important knowledge of conjuration. The rest is technique, what one can learn from practicing."
Harry nodded, sensing that this topic would preferably be postponed for now. He could learn it after Master Petri got his five thousand galleons from Malfoy. He hoped that Master Petri would be happy for a long time after that. There were two things that could light up that man's eyes: dead people and gold, the latter surprisingly more than the former.
Harry wondered what had happened to Master Petri to make him so greedy and miserly. While it was true that Harry had always been treated like a second-class citizen at the Dursleys, he knew he still had not exactly lived like a poor person. Even Dudley's cast-offs were high-quality and practically still new, if far too big, and Harry had had a place to stay and food to eat, even if it was far less food than Dudley. Since he had hardly been envious of the miniature-whale's girth, Harry supposed he could not say it had been completely bad.
Master Petri wasn't poor. He had Harry check the arithmetic on his account books sometimes as life-skills practice, and Harry knew that the man could be placed on the lower end of well-to-do. As an enchanter, he made enough money for a decent living, and the "other thing" brought in periodic influxes of large amounts of gold, since his clients paid a premium for discretion and a vow of quality. Yet, he never spent any of that money, keeping it locked up in a Gringotts savings account and living on the bare minimum. This practice frankly mystified Harry, but at least it made Master Petri easier to deal with whenever he got the opportunity to hoard more galleons away.
Master Petri rubbed his hands together. "To use necromancy, one must find a spirit that is close to the target," he began.
Harry took advantage of the pause to ask an important question: "Who is the target, sir? You never said."
"A man called Lord Voldemort. He was a British dark lord," Master Petri replied, adding, "perhaps the most powerful of them all."
Harry did not know exactly what a dark lord was, but he could guess that it was not anything good, maybe something like an ultra-dark wizard, which perhaps explained why Master Petri had repeatedly emphasised how dangerous this task would be. Harry wouldn't put it past a powerful dark wizard to be able to do nasty things even from the grave.
"Malfoy has said that his father would be a likely person to ask. Probably he was a follower of this dark lord. His name is Abraxas Malfoy. I will conjure him but you must do the necromancy."
"What?" Harry demanded, a belated, "Sir?" coming a moment later. Seeing that Master Petri was unimpressed, he revised his question a little, "Why me, sir? I've never, er, done something like that."
"There must be a first time, right?" Master Petri answered a little wryly. Harry waited for some kind of elaboration, and was not disappointed, for after a pause, the man continued, "You are English and Abraxas Malfoy was English, so he will naturally want more to speak to you. He probably knew your parents. There are not so many English purebloods."
Harry tried not to panic, and when he failed not to panic, he hoped that Master Petri attributed it to nervousness about a new task. Because Harry was sure that the game would be up now, when it was revealed that Harry was just another mudblood. Master Petri always complained about how mudbloods were taking over with their superior numbers, so it was just unlikely that Harry's parents had actually been wizards. Besides, would wizards get themselves killed in a car crash or have relatives as quintessentially muggle as the Dursleys? Harry got the impression that wizards like Master Petri barely even knew what cars were, let alone drove them.
But he had no choice. Refusing would be even worse than getting found out. Maybe he would not be found out, if he was lucky. Also he had some limited immortality because of his horcrux. Then Harry remembered that his horcrux was currently in Master Petri's pocket.
The horror.
"Don't look so pale. This part is not the dangerous part. If you fail, I will complete it," Master Petri reassured. Harry nodded, knowing that there was nothing to do but pray for luck.
Master Petri stepped over to his blood cabinet and Harry watched a little listlessly as he withdrew a thin, unusually ornate vial.
"This is Lucius Malfoy's blood," Master Petri said, lifting his wand and tapping the wooden stopper. It popped out neatly and he levitated it absently over to one of the worktables. "The conjuration is easy with the right things. The corpse, for example, or even a bone, but Malfoy does not wish to," he paused, though Harry was uncertain whether it was to search for a word or due to scorn, "desecrate his father's body."
Harry decided it was scorn. He wanted to credit Lucius Malfoy with some points for annoying Master Petri with "pointless principles," except that Harry found it increasingly easier to see where Master Petri was coming from. If Malfoy was paying a dark wizard to interrogate the departed spirit of his father like this, then he ought not pretend with sentimentalities like the sanctity of a corpse.
"The son shares much magic with the father, so anything of Malfoy's body is still useful. But you know the advice," Master Petri said.
"Always ask for blood," Harry replied dutifully. Knowing how much magic could be done with different sorts of wizard's blood, especially willingly given blood, Harry was always surprised by how unconcerned clients seemed to be about giving it to Master Petri. Were they really that confident about sworn oaths? It did not seem that difficult to get around most oaths, as Master Petri had demonstrated time and again.
"So, I will tell you the truth of souls now, and you will believe me, because you have experienced it." Master Petri said suddenly.
Harry looked up attentively, half in excitement, half in trepidation. What was this knowledge that he had already paid so much for, largely unwillingly?
"There is no such thing as a soul," Master Petri pronounced with gravity.
Harry stared, uncomprehending. He only barely refrained from saying something stupid, because the look on Master Petri's face said that stupidity would not be tolerated. There were the obvious protests. Souls existed, because Master Petri summoned them all the time. Souls existed, because Harry had just split his soul and had it put in an object.
Or had he? What did he know, know for certain, that he had done?
He had killed a unicorn, allegedly to give himself a second chance at life, if the first one happened to go wrong. He had been unconscious for twelve hours afterwards, and there was no telling what had gone on in that time. He had emerged, feeling noticeably different.
He thought about the very little he knew of what a horcrux actually did. It stored a "fragment of soul," but Harry realised that that meant approximately nothing, if he really tried to understand it. If Harry were to be killed in a way that did not damage his body, he would immediately be restored to life and the horcrux spent, no matter where it was – the functional second chance. If he had died from damage to his body, some other preparations, unknown to him, would be needed, but the idea was essentially the same.
If he took Master Petri's word for it, that souls did not exist, then Harry supposed that he could see how the same things could be true with no mention of souls at all. That is, he still had no idea what was going on, because he had never had any idea about what was going on in the first place.
"I don't know anything," he finally said with some frustration, forgetting Master Petri's presence for a moment. He was reminded of it by a snort.
"Why are you so afraid of dementors? Of the dementor's kiss?" Master Petri asked him in what seemed like a complete non sequitur.
Harry had the feeling that a response like "They suck out souls!" would not be acceptable. "You told me, sir, that it's a fate worse than death to be kissed, that they leave your body an empty shell and then you're trapped in darkness for years until they digest you. Why wouldn't I be afraid?" Something else occurred to him, and he felt bullheaded enough at the moment to say it aloud. "If souls don't exist, how come you can't conjure Horst? Isn't it because his soul has been eaten?"
Master Petri laughed, and Harry felt extraordinarily belittled. The man was supposed to be angry because Harry had made a point. If he laughed, it only meant that Harry was wrong to the point of ridiculousness.
"I noticed that you separated your body from your identity. So you would agree that a dementor traps you inside itself?" Master Petri said.
Harry nodded a little jerkily, not trusting himself to speak in a pertinent tone. He could already sense that he was being boxed in by a vastly superior arguer, and he hated it.
"If I obliviated you right now, would you still be you?" Master Petri pressed.
"Obliviated?" Harry asked. It sounded familiar, so it was probably a charm he had seen in a book, but he hardly remembered everything he read.
"The memory charm. It's meant to erase only pieces of memories, but it can easily be abused or miscast to erase everything. But nobody has ever claimed that the memory charm harms one's soul," explained Master Petri. Harry's eyes were wide in horror at the end of it.
He felt his face twist up awfully as he thought through all the things Master Petri had just said. He could see already where it was going. If forgetting everything was the death of identity but not the soul, and the dementor's kiss moved the soul without killing identity, then that meant, at the very best, that the soul could exist without identity, but identity could not necessarily exist without the soul.
The pieces fell into place.
"But if I have to split my soul to make a horcrux, wouldn't I lose a part of myself?" Harry blurted frantically.
Master Petri smiled patiently. "If you die, say, from the killing curse, your horcrux will revive you perfectly. But it's just a part of yourself, didn't you say?"
Harry began to see, with growing anxiety, just what Master Petri was implying. "But if every piece can do that, wouldn't it make sense to make dozens, no, hundreds of them? As many as possible?" Harry stopped as he realised that he was talking about committing hundreds of unspeakable acts. He swallowed thickly, horrified at himself.
"Did it occur to you at all that, if you are a soul, that breaking yourself into pieces could be the same as dying?" Master Petri asked, almost conversationally.
For a moment, Harry was scared by that idea, which he indeed had not at all considered, before he realised something incontrovertible.
"I'm not dead," he pointed out. It could be that he was actually dead but only didn't realise it, but then what would be the point of the concept, "dead?" He didn't feel dead, at any rate.
Master Petri smiled patronizingly at him. "No, you aren't dead," he agreed, providing no help whatsoever.
Harry stared at him for awhile, realised that it was a pointless action, and then avoided looking directly at Master Petri, casting his gaze all around the room as if the answers would lie somewhere in the furnishings.
"I don't understand," he said at length, when it became clear that Master Petri wasn't about to offer any other information. It barely even made Harry feel stupid to admit to his confusion – he honestly felt like he had twisted his mind into a knot and got nowhere.
In response, Master Petri reached into his pocket, took out Harry's horcrux, and flung it at him. With some kind of twitch reflex Harry's hand shot out and caught it, all without his conscious direction. He glanced back and forth between the horcrux and Master Petri with trepidation.
Fortunately, Master Petri began to speak, and fortunately in English: "I'm not a master of necromancy," he said, successfully confusing Harry even further. "I am also not a master of transfiguration, though my conjuration is very good. I am just a charms master with the specialty in enchantment."
Harry thought he was beginning to understand what Master Petri was trying to say in the immediate sense, but still could not tell where it was going. Enchantment, conjuration, and necromancy; these were the fields that comprised the Other, though the name "necromancy" seemed to be the popular term to cover all three, when the first two were used in conjunction with the last. From what Harry knew about the fields of magic, they were three wildly different subjects that had somehow come together in one art. While not rare, it was also not the norm for a wizard to even master a single kind of magic in his lifetime – rather, it was more practical for most people to be average at most-everything useful, fairly skilled in the spells they regularly used in their line of work, and completely ignorant of more esoteric and arcane knowledge. The time and dedication it took to become good enough at a single thing that one could be called a "master" was just not worth it for the less academically minded.
Now that he thought about it, it would have been very strange if Master Petri had actually been master in three very disparate subjects. But why bring it up now?
"A horcrux is conjuration, you said, sir," Harry mumbled uncomfortably. The word itself, "horcrux," felt almost wrong to say, like something vile and forbidden. Well, he supposed that was exactly what it was. He tried to feel properly disgusted and only managed to intensify that funny, ill feeling that had been hounding him since the ritual, which was not quite the same, but still a bad feeling of some kind, he supposed.
"Yes, and very delicate. A perfect horcrux requires absolute mastery," Master Petri said, a very meaningful tone creeping into his voice.
Harry was struck by the near derision more than the words themselves, though their meaning quickly filtered into his understanding. He felt anger burning inside him, and was momentarily surprised at the sensation, the only "hot" emotion he had felt since the ritual. His fists clenched, and he opened his mouth to say something, but then the feeling of the cold, sharp edges of his horcrux digging into his hand distracted him. What complaint could he even make? If Master Petri, an experienced wizard who was a master at least in one field, could not manage a perfect ritual, then who else could, who would be willing to do it on Harry's behalf? The obvious solution would be to not have made a horcrux at all, but with Master Petri allowed to dictate Harry's actions in the name of education, that wasn't an option at all.
Still, he could not help the gnawing worry that suddenly consumed him, or stop the words from coming – "It worked, though, didn't it? It works?" he asked, almost desperately. Everything he'd done had to be for something.
"It works," Master Petri said, sounding a little derisive. Harry hunched inward, unsure whether to feel embarrassed or reassured, or even embarrassed at his own relief.
Master Petri seemed then to lose his remaining patience. He gave a loud sigh, set the vial of blood on the table behind him, took out his wand, and gave it a light flick, conjuring a looking glass out of thin air.
"Look at this," he ordered. Harry looked, and saw himself, small, gaunt, and pale, staring back at him with indifference.
Master Petri dropped the mirror on the ground. It clattered and bounced pathetically. Giving an irritated snort, he raised his foot and stomped on it. The glass crunched under his boot. Harry winced and flinched, his mind reflexively flashing to that stupid saying about seven years of bad luck that he had probably heard from Dudley once. It wasn't like his luck could get much worse, anyway. Then he remembered that the bad luck was for Master Petri, not him.
Then he remembered that it was a dumb superstition, and he wondered why he was even still thinking about it.
"Look at it now," Master Petri said, pulling Harry out of his strange train of thought. Harry followed Master Petri's gaze down to the shards of glass. A dozen random bits of him were arrayed on the floor, but still it didn't take much effort to piece together what the whole would look like.
Harry wondered if this was what his soul looked like now. Then he remembered what Master Petri had said – was trying to say – about souls not existing, and furthermore, figured that even if they did exist, they would certainly be impossible to see.
With a minuscule, almost lazy twitch of his wand, Master Petri levitated one of the pieces so that it hovered at Harry's eye-level. He saw half his face there, cut off by the jagged edge of the shard.
"Is this a good mirror?" Master Petri asked.
Harry wondered if it was a trick question. A quick glance at the impatient glare on the master's face made him decide to just answer it, anyway. "I think it is," he said, sounding more confident than he felt. He could see himself clearly, and if he stepped back far enough he could see more of himself too.
A dismissive circular movement of the wand, and all the shards floated up and fitted together, though they did not join back up into once piece, as they would have if a reparo spell had been cast.
"Is this a good mirror?" Master Petri asked again.
"Uh, sort of," Harry mumbled, really not certain. At his teacher's unimpressed look, he finally decided, "No, not really. I mean, I can see myself, but it's not really a great reflection with lines in it and ... things." He decided to stop talking.
The pieces welded themselves together seamlessly.
"And this?" Master Petri questioned, obviously rhetorically.
"Yes," Harry said anyway.
"This is your 'soul,'" Master Petri, his entire posture screaming disdain. "I can't break this with my bare hands just by bending," he said, not bothering to demonstrate an attempt.
He dropped the mirror again, throwing it with some force. It cracked against the ground.
"An unspeakable act," he said, and bent down to pick it up. A piece fell off. He took that instead. Then, to Harry's surprise, he cast a duplication charm, and an exact copy of the broken piece appeared, floating at his wand tip.
"Your horcrux," he declared, sending the original piece – or was it the duplicate? – back to its place on the cracked mirror.
Taking a step forward, he stamped his foot on the mirror again, the crunching sound eliciting a reflexive shudder from Harry.
"Your death."
But the somehow gruesome analogy did not end there, or proceed with any predictability. Master Petri held out the shard of mirror, the "horcrux," and tapped it with his wand. It grew large, until it was about the same size as the destroyed mirror had been before.
"Your resurrection," he pronounced with some irony, and then, almost as an afterthought, vanished the pile of shattered glass on the ground with a flick of his wand.
Slowly, Harry felt the horrible realization begin to sink in. He looked at the place the shards had been, up to the big, jagged piece of mirror, and then down to the real horcrux in his hand.
"It's not me, it's a copy of me, a bad copy," he mumbled, still staring at the thing in his hand.
"Not bad," Master Petri corrected, affecting an offended tone. Harry realised a little belatedly that he was cracking a joke, sort of.
Harry tried to think how that meant that there were no souls, and was still, frustratingly, coming up short. "But what about dementors, what happens when …" he trailed off when he saw that Master Petri was fully prepared to show what happened.
He conjured another mirror, and then, moving his wand in a violent, zigzag motion, split it apart vertically so that a thin, round sheet of glass came off. "The dementor eats this," he said, gesturing at the glass. "And here's this part."
He angled it toward Harry so that it was clear that the other part was still a mirror.
"Also, obliviate," said Master Petri, and for a moment Harry was petrified that a spell was going to come at him or something, but then he realised that Master Petri was only saying the incantation without casting – there was a noticeable difference of tone – and was now doing a silent spell again, so that the piece of glass vanished.
Harry, engrossed in the analogy, felt a visceral shudder as he realised that the thing that was left was the same in the case of both the dementor and that spell, "obliviate."
Finally, Master Petri vanished everything and conjured something new. It was a bowl. He set it on the ground, and a flick of his wand sent water spouting neatly from the end, splashing in the bowl and filling it quickly.
"If you want to call it a soul, you can. It is only a word. But it's like that." He made some stirring motions with his wand, and the water swirled, as if there were an invisible spoon disturbing it.
Harry stared wordlessly at his churning, twisted reflection.
A/N: Thanks to everybody who's read, reviewed, favourited or followed. Inspiration on all of my writing stagnated a bit with the huge influx of work that has been real life, but it seems to be making something of a comeback, and this is definitely the story of mine that is easiest to write, having no plot outline whatsoever to follow, and is getting the first benefit. Yay. Unfortunately I can make no promises about the future.
Also, if this is way too much philosophy, I apologise. The epistemological critereon of personal identity is one of my soapboxes, and horcruxes and dementors have always really annoyed the part of me that is concerned with such things.