Harry Potter and the Veil of Time

Chapter Seven: The First Divergence

By Cybergades


"What are you looking so pleased about?" Hermione said, interrupting Harry's reverie.

"Nothing," Harry said. "Just patting myself on the back."

"Well cut it out," she said playfully. "We can barely concentrate on our schoolwork with all your daydreaming."

"Shhhh!" hissed Madame Pince from her desk. The sound echoed through the towering shelves of the library where the trio of students had settled down to work their way through that night's homework, or in Harry's case, to try and properly crystallize the look on Rita Skeeter's face in his memory forever.

"Say, Hermione," Ron said, looking at her sideways. "I don't mean anything by it, but er…your front teeth…"

Harry smiled as he saw Hermione blush ever so slightly.

"Well…after Harry and Draco got into that scrap in Potions and I was hit with a sidelong curse, they sent me to the hospital wing to get fixed up. Madame Pomfrey cast a spell to shrink my teeth, and told me to look in the mirror and tell her when they were back the way they were before, and I…I took the opportunity."

"There's a spell that shrinks teeth? What next?" Ron asked quizzically. Hermione only rolled her eyes.

"Well, I hope you appreciate it," Harry said, trying to maintain a stern tone of voice. "That's a detention with Snape of all people that Ron and I will be suffering through."

"I'm really sorry about that, guys," Hermione said, then narrowed her eyes slightly. "Wait, Harry…if you already know everything that's going to happen this year…"

Harry laughed and waved her off.

"Think nothing of it," he said. "Either of you would do the same for me, if…if we somehow ever found ourselves in that situation again."

"So have you thought about when you're going to tell Dumbledore?" Ron said.

"Not yet," Harry said, shaking his head, "although it should probably be soon. Dumbledore has access to allies and materials that we can't even come close to. Even if I managed to clean out my vault at Gringotts, Dumbledore's had decades to build connections we just have no access to."

"What about Sirius?" Hermione said. "I know he's lying low right now, but he'd probably have some advice on how to proceed."

"Oh my gosh, Sirius! I knew I was forgetting something!" Harry said. "The last time I was here, I wrote to him right after my name came out of the Goblet of Fire. I've got to go, guys, I'll catch up with you later." Rising, he stalked swiftly towards the library door.

"Wait, Harry, your homework!" Hermione called out.

"I already know everything I learned this year!" Harry shouted over his shoulder.

"That doesn't mean you can just flunk everything!" She cried back, a tinge of desperation in her voice, but he was already gone. "Hopeless!" she said, half to Ron and half to herself.

"Shhhh!" hissed an exasperated Madame Pince.

Back in the Gryffindor Common Room, Harry stretched the empty parchment out before him, quill in hand. He knew he wanted to get Sirius close to Hogwarts, as he did last year, as he would be a valuable ally and a trusted friend to have close by. Those were the reasons he gave himself, the rational and easily explainable reasons. But below all that rationalization and excuse-making, he knew the truth—Sirius was alive, and Harry was ecstatic at the prospect of seeing or talking to him again. His hand shaking, he touched it gently to the parchment and began to write

Sirius,

You told me to keep you posted on what was happening at Hogwarts; sorry I haven't written you sooner, only things around here are a little crazy right now. Hogwarts is hosting the Triwizard Cup this year, for the first time in centuries I think, and the Goblet of Fire spit out my name as a fourth champion, even though I'm underage and couldn't possibly have put my own name in. Somebody's trying to set a trap up for me to fall into, and I'd really like your advice on the subject. Is there any way you could contact me by fireplace on the 22nd of November? I could see to it that the common room was cleared out by 1:00 AM. I trust you and Buckbeak are doing well, wherever you are.

Harry's hand froze at the bottom of the page. He gazed at the blank space for several seconds, until he finally had to jerk his trembling hand to one side to avoid dripping a great black spot where his signature would go. Nodding to himself, he pressed quill to paper and wrote:

Love,

Harry

Setting the quill down, he folded the letter and tucked it inside his robes, to be delivered to the Owlery the next time he was about the campus. No sooner had his hands retreated from his robes then they quickly darted back, feeling around the spot where the letter was hidden to make sure that it was really there, that he was really about to talk to Sirius again. He felt flush with excitement; this was the first real step towards undoing everything that had been done over the past years, correcting every misfortune and every mistake. Harry felt a surge of pure hopeful elation that was quite the opposite of the crushing depth of despair he had felt in this very room, a few weeks ago and a few years ahead. Suddenly remembering Merlin's words to him before he departed, he clung to that feeling, trying to think of ways to pile more emotion into himself. Cedric was alive, Sirius was alive, Dumbledore was alive, all thanks to Merlin's knowledge of the portal in the Department of Mysteries. And that's when it struck him…

If the portal was a way to send himself back into the past, was there a way to send himself back far enough? Could he save his parents?

He sucked in a quick breath, the very thought that such a thing could be possible causing his heart to skip a beat. In that instance, he felt as though he was lifting off the floor, out of his chair, upwards and…outwards? Outwards towards…

"Merlin…" he thought hard to himself, before murmuring it out loud. "Merlin, where are you?"

"Hmmm?" came the hazy reply. Harry wasn't even sure he had heard a human voice; surely it was simply the rustling of the wind down the vast chimney of the common room, some ancient cornerstone of the castle settling slightly. But before he knew it, he could feel the edges of his vision blurring, the colors of the room half-fading, half-bleeding together, and the figure forming in front of him, wisped together from thin air in a watery and graceful manner quite unlike the sudden –pop - of Disapparation.

"What's all this, then?" queried the blurry-edged Merlin, narrowing his eyes and peering down his nose at Harry Potter.

"Mister Merlin, sir," Harry said, feeling very much like a first year again under the stern and seemingly impatient gaze of the most famous wizard who ever lived. "I…er, that is…my name is Harry Potter, and you told me…well, I suppose you will tell me, but that's not really-"

"Harry Potter, you say?" Merlin asked with a raised eyebrow. "Well this is intriguing. I didn't expect I would be able to meet you for quite some time."

"About three more years, give or take," Harry said with a grin. Merlin's eyes lit up.

"Then…you were able to pass through the gate? You are from a reality more developed than our own?"

"Um, I guess that's one way of putting it."

Merlin's face became stern again. "Well, then, Harry Potter, it is good to meet you. We have much work to do, and-"

"Not enough time, right," Harry said.

"Never enough time," Merlin said, shaking his head sadly. Harry laughed.

"It's good to meet you, sir. Again," he added. Merlin laughed, a single sniff through his nose.

"What did I tell you already? Three years from now, that's not much time at all; I must have been in quite the rush."

"Well, yeah, you were in a pretty big hurry about the whole thing. You told me I would need this time to prepare, to prepare for an evil greater than Voldemort, from…" he furrowed his brow, trying to remember exactly what the aged wizard had told him, an age away. "From very far away and very long ago. Are they going to be using the gate at the Ministry as well? Traveling forward, like from the past?"

"No, no," Merlin said with a wave of his hand, "They will be using gates, but not that gate, and not all of them. Some will- oh, it's very hard to explain." He scratched his long white beard thoughtfully. "Why don't I simply show you? Meet me tonight, in the Astronomy Tower of your school, and I will explain everything in more thorough detail. In the meantime, I believe you have a Triwizard Tournament you need to be preparing for."

Harry shrugged. "I pulled it off pretty well last time."

"Well, that's good news," Merlin said with a watery smile. "I'm rooting for you, Mr. Potter. Much depends on your success."

"Yeah, haven't you heard?" Asked Harry sarcastically, as the room around him began to shimmer again. "I'm destined for great things."

"Hear about Rita Skeeter?" Ron said around a mouthful of kidney pie that evening at dinner.

"Got herself caught in a spider-web trying to chase down a story?" Harry asked, and then looked offended when no one laughed. "Come on, guys, I explained this. Unregistered Animagus? Beetle? Nothing?" He tossed a chicken wing onto his plate. "I feel critically under appreciated."

"Come off it," Ron said, slapping Harry on the back of the head. "You drove her off, mate. Apparently she's withdrawn from covering the Triwizard Tournament, gave some little blurb about letting "fresh new talent" have the story. Instead she's writing some human interest column, she's gone to the Americas to study ancient wizards in the Yucatan or something like that. I mean, really brilliant, you drove her halfway around the world."

"Wish I could have driven her the other half," Harry said, then promptly wilted under Hermione's icy stare. "Er…which is a joke, of course, because I realize that this would put her right back where she was before."

"You need to start paying attention in class, Harry. Keep that brain of yours exercised. All that future knowledge is going to be no good if you turn into a drooling idiot by the end of the year."

Ron made the mistake of laughing too loudly at this, and earned himself a glare from his friend as well.

"That goes double for you, Ron. You don't even have Harry's excuse, this is the first time you've been a fourth year."

Ron promptly stopped laughing, dropping his eyes to the table and cramming his mouth full of food, muttering a muffled "Yes, ma'am," around a slice of buttered potato.

"The first task is coming up, Harry, and you still haven't told us what it is," Hermione said. "We could help you, you know."

"Not with this one," Harry said. "I don't even know if I want to tell you. Maybe it should be a surprise."

"Can't be that surprising," Ron said. "We already know you're going to pull it off, don't we?"

"Well, you never know, Ron," Hermione said, in a tone of voice that informed the two boys that they were about to be educated against their wills. "Harry hasn't followed everything he did last time to the exact letter, the recent departure of Rita Skeeter being the prime example. Anything he's done differently could end up having unforeseen consequences, things he couldn't possibly predict."

"So what, I got Rita Skeeter to run off with her antennae between her legs. It shakes her world up, certainly, but it doesn't really change anything here, she didn't do anything other than slander me in the papers. Not being made a media circus will probably make it easier to take on a dragon."

Hermione opened her mouth to continue her lecture, but let it continue to drop open as her eyes widened.

"A…a dragon?" she whispered, "Are you serious? Harry, that's dangerous, I thought the Triwizard Tournament wasn't supposed to be deadly anymore."

"Relax, Hermione, it's not like I have to kill it or anything, just keep it from killing me while I fetch something it's guarding. I'm sure the judges have some sort of safeguards in place…although, come to think of it, I don't really remember seeing any last time…" This seemed to calm Hermione not at all, and Harry could see her mind reeling through all the possible ways he could deal with a dragon.

"Relax, Hermione. I'm going to use a Summoning Charm to fetch my broom, fly a few circles around it to get it riled, and wait for an opening to swoop in."

"That's your plan?" Ron said. "Doesn't exactly seem airtight, does it?"

"Worked like a charm when I tried it," Harry said, lying through his teeth as he recalled the shallow gash the Hungarian Horntail had managed to give him.

"What works like a charm for getting the smell of pickled rat's brains out of your robes?" Ron asked. The two of them were set to serve detention with Snape that evening, a prospect that Harry was much more eager about this time around, since at least he was on speaking terms with Ron again. He realized, in retrospect, that this year had been the year that really taught him the importance, not only of having friends to rely on when things got really difficult, but also to simply have friends around that you could talk to and confide in. He grinned at Ron.

"There's nothing for it, mate," he said. "We'll just have to live with smelling like a dungeon for a few days. Or buy new robes."

The Mexican sun beat down harshly on the stone blocks of the ruins, as it had for thousands of years. Rita Skeeter lifted her hand to shield herself from the bright light, watching cross-eyed as a single drop of sweat dangled from the tip of her nose before plunging to the stones to quickly evaporate.

"Why? Why Mexico, Rita?" She asked herself aloud, sliding her glasses back up onto the bridge of her sweat-slicked nose.

"You said you'd take the first assignment they gave, ma'am," came the timid voice of her new assistant, Bernerwald Chasiter. A wraith like shadow of a man, he was always skittering around underfoot, walking awkwardly behind Skeeter from place to place, slowing himself to keep pace with her on his long gangly legs. Still, she mused, he was quick with a quill, and went unnoticed enough that he could be useful for gathering information. Not that he would be seducing secrets out of any potential interviewees anytime soon, she added with a curl of her lip, watching him slick his hair to one side carefully, managing to make it look more like a toupee than it already did, which was impressive, given that it was in fact his real hair.

"That I did, Bernie, that I did," she said with a sigh, hefting her crocodile skin bag and dumping it unceremoniously into Chasiter's hands, where he very nearly dropped it.

"If I may be so impertinent, ma'am," Bernerwald said, one strap of the crocodile bag looped around his crooked pointy nose, "why did you take this assignment exactly? Not often one gets a chance to cover something like the Triwizard Tournament, especially not with Harry Potter involved."

Rita plastered a false smile across her face. "I told you before, Bernie," she said with a premeditated chuckle, "I needed to get out of Britain. See how the other half lives, you know? Tell their story, the stories people aren't hearing. Lending my voice and name to these stories might draw some attention to the sections of the wizarding world we don't talk about very often, educate the populace a little more, you understand."

"Of course, ma'am," Bernie replied, wriggling his head ferociously to detach the strap of the bag from around his nose. He did not look convinced.

The pair had been dispatched by the Daily Prophet in an effort to "globalize" their readership, something that had been discussed with a great deal of head-nodding and harrumphing, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world that readerships should be globalized, immediately if possible, whenever the opportunity arose. Rita had been dispatched to write a full report of the activities of witches and wizards in this area of the world, especially those that predated the arrival of pilgrims and other white colonists from Europe. Rita Skeeter was here to study the magical activities of a relatively unknown sect of witches and wizards, something at which a real rough-and-tumble journalist would salivate at the thought of, and which a glorified gossip columnist like Rita Skeeter had ever-increasing difficulty. Bernerwald himself had covered the random comings and goings of the wizarding worlds celebrity elite prior to his reassignment, and so it seemed the Prophet could not have picked a worse pair to cover the piece.

Still, the work wasn't without its interesting perks. As part of her assignment, Rita had been assigned an Obliviator liaison to assist in the potential interviewing of Muggles regarding their folklore and mythology of magic in the area. Although the Obliviator himself was a judgmental and unpleasant man who avoided her whenever possible, the fact that Rita could pick the brains of whomever she wanted and then simply have the record of her conversation erased gave her a feeling of power that she found addicting. Many of the interviews turned up very little, but over time she had uncovered a general trend linking the pre-Mayan priesthood with various accounts of ancient and powerful magic, often couched in "godlike" or "divine" terminologies, but indistinguishably magic to the trained observer.

That research had led them here, where, it was rumored, a great priestess had sealed a goddess inside a temple using a powerful sealing spell. At the very least, Rita had justified to herself on the way here, the pictures of the ruins might give the Prophet readers something interesting to look at. Perhaps she could pose with some sort of tropical bird, to add an even greater touch of local culture to the piece…

"Senorita," one of the laborers said, approaching her. "We've broken into the tomb, come, come quickly!"

"Finally, some good news," she said with a sigh, snapping her fingers and waving to Bernerwald. "Come along, Bernie, and bring the camera."

Bernerwald looked down at the bag in his hands and then towards the bulky magical camera nearby, heaving a sigh and shifting the bag to one hand before tottering after the impeccably and unseasonably warmly dressed witch.

The interior of the temple was much cooler, and no less damp, than the outdoors, and Rita felt as though she was breathing in spider webs wherever she walked on the dusty stone floors. The temple entryway was fairly unimpressive, at least to someone looking for evidence of witchcraft; hieroglyphs and religious symbols lined the walls, some worn or chipped away, although they became more and more pristine the deeper into the shadowy stone halls the witch and wizard stepped. Finally they came to the previously-sealed stone door, which now stood ajar, the thick carpeting of masonry and dust evidence of the effort put into opening this vault to the outside world.

"Inside, inside, senorita," the man said. "It is amazing!"

"Oh, I'm sure it is," Rita said with a saccharine grin. A pity for you, she thought, that we'll have to wipe your memory if there really is anything interesting in here.

Stepping through the doorway into the interior chamber, Rita looked around expectantly, but found nothing particularly shocking. There were more hieroglyphics on the walls, animals and eyes and dogs, and in the center of the chamber was a long golden box, inscribed with more of the symbols. Rita heaved a sigh of disappointment; she had been hoping for some sort of repository of ancient magical knowledge, perhaps an account of the spells and rituals of the pre-Mayan wizards, the ways in which they hid themselves in Muggle society, or ruled over it. Instead there was only more Muggle scribbling and a coffin.

"Maybe inside the box…" she said halfheartedly.

"Senorita, is this not amazing?" the man said. "Outside, all Mayan, pre-Mayan, Inca, like the others in the area, but inside…" he held the word in his mouth for a moment to make it easier for him to believe when he said it. "…Egyptian."

"Fascinating," Rita said drily, trying to think of why that was important. Mayan, Incan…all the dusty old Muggle cultures she had tried to teach herself about, mostly on boring Mexican nights accompanied by copious amounts of charming Muggle liquor (the only aspect of culture in which Rita gave them any respect).

"Wait, Egyptian?" she said out loud. "As in, Egypt? Across the ocean?"

"Si, Senorita, it is amazing," the man said, wiping the sweat from his brow. "I never think to find something like this here. I think maybe we find a burial chamber, some mummies, but this," he laughed. "This will make us all very rich, Senorita." At the r-word Rita's ears twitched like a bug's antennae.

"You hear that, Bernie?" she said. "I told you we were right to come here all along.

"Of course you did, ma'am," Bernie replied tiredly. Like Rita, he was having trouble understanding the gravity of their discovery in a Muggle context.

"Now, what do you say we crack this coffin open and get a glimpse of its insides?" Rita said, excited for the first time since she had left Hogwarts. She traced a hand along the side of the box, trying to gauge how heavy it was. "Bernie, be a dear and get a picture of me with the, uh…" she strained her mind, trying to remember the proper term for the box.

"Sarcophagus," the laborer piped up cheerfully.

"Yes, thank you dear," Skeeter said with a dismissive hand-wave. At that moment, however, her hand traced across a large red gem on the top of the box, and it gave a shudder, as thousands of years of dust was shaken from it. Skeeter gave a great shriek just as the camera flash went off with a great plume of purple smoke, capturing her cowering in startled terror before the sarcophagus, which was just beginning to crack open.

Within the golden box lay a human woman, perfectly preserved as though in slumber. A few more of the laborers, attracted by the commotion, poked their heads into the chamber as the sarcophagus lid slowly slid open, split down the middle and opening outwards like a pair of wings. The collected audience gave a great gasp when the woman's eyes, closed in repose for at least two thousand years, snapped open.

"The witches here must have discovered the secret to immortality," Rita hissed in Bernie's ear. "Perhaps a variant recipe for a Sorcerer's Stone." Bernie could only nod, his eyes fixed on the strange woman's.

She was strikingly beautiful, golden jewelry draped across her body as she sat up in the sarcophagus and looked into the faces of the people who had awakened her. A sort of half-smile played across her lips as she rose fully to her feet, clothed in silk and gold and gemstones of the finest quality. On her hand there was a golden glove-like device with a circular gemstone set in the center. She flexed her fingers experimentally, then addressed the speechless audience.

"Where is Ra?" she said in a haughty, royal tone, her voice sounding with the presence of multiple speakers.

"There's no one here by that name," Rita said, smiling helpfully. "Is he a friend of yours, perhaps?"

"We have no use for friends," the regal woman replied, turning to Rita and looking her up and down.

"Yes, well, um," Rita stammered, trying to figure out how to turn this situation into an exclusive interview, "friends, right? Who needs 'em? Ha!" She tossed her hand dismissively, to prove to her newly awakened exclusive story that she was in fact as friendless and free-spirited as she claimed.

"Yes, friends are without value," the woman continued, raising her hand. The jewel in the center of her glove began emitting a stream of light onto Rita's face, and she sank slowly to her knees, a look of surprise and confusion on her face.

"Servants, however, are always welcome," the woman said with a cruel, many-voiced laugh, and her eyes shone with a terrible radiance.