Harry Potter and the Veil of Time
Chapter Eight: The Truth Revealed
By Cybergades
No matter how many times he found himself alone in the Hogwarts hallways at night, Harry always found that nighttime roaming brought out the little kid in him. Invisibility Cloak wrapped tightly around him, he paced the halls, his only companion the sound of the various portraits shifting around as they prepared for slumber or gossiped quietly with one another. The ambient noises of the portraits, when there was no other noise in the hallway, could be slightly disturbing to someone unprepared for them, but Harry was always glad they were there. No one was likely to notice a wayward scuff of feet on stone when there was already that much background noise, and once he had managed to pull off a sneeze without attracting too much attention to himself.
He paused for a moment, halfway up the winding Astronomy Tower steps, and held his breath. There were voices above him. Mind racing, he tried to think of who it could be, but as the voices and footsteps drew closer, his heartbeat slowed slightly. It was only a few stragglers from the midnight Astronomy class, a handful of students who had stayed behind to talk to Professor Sinistra, either out of sincere academic commitment or for the simple thrill of a good reason to be out of bed and in the hallways this late at night. Harry ducked into a small alcove as they passed by, hiding himself behind a very dusty-looking bust of Uric the Oddball, so as not to accidentally brush against or trip up one of the passing students. When he was sure they had receded down the stairs, he resumed his ascent, reaching the top of the Tower itself at nearly three o'clock in the morning.
He stepped out onto the ramparts of Hogwarts' highest tower, breathing deeply of the night air and pulling the hood of the Invisibility Cloak back from his head. The torches on the walls had been put out, plunging the apex of Hogwarts into darkness broken only by starlight and a sliver of moon hanging in the cloudless sky. Harry rocked back and forth on his heels, looking around for some sign of Merlin's presence or hint as to his intention. Why had he called him all the way up here?
"Ah, young master Potter, good evening," intoned the disembodied voice of the ancient wizard. Harry jumped slightly, and steadied himself against the cracked stone ramparts to stop himself from accidentally plunging over the side to his death.
"Merlin?" he whispered, fearful for a second that one of the professors was mocking him from the shadows. His fears were assuaged, however, when the aurora-like light of Merlin coalesced together and the wizard stood before him, in the flesh as much as he ever was.
"I thought this would be an appropriate place to discuss things of grave importance," the wizard said. "Not to mention, of course, the obvious benefits of its solitary location."
"Yeah, my legs thank you for all those stairs," Harry said.
"Don't be impertinent," Merlin said simply, and Harry's smile dropped off his face, although Merlin didn't seem upset. "I am here to answer the questions no doubt rattling around in your mind as best as I am able, which is a sight better than most other sources of answers you could lay hands on."
"Well," Harry said, trying to decide what to ask first, "I guess the most important question is why? Why all the secrecy, and why me? Before I came through the gateway, you said something about my…my blood?"
"Yes, Harry, you are of a very interesting and unique lineage," Merlin said. "You represent a step forward in the evolutionary process of humanity hitherto unseen."
"Right, you said something like that before. But what does that mean?"
Merlin seemed to ruminate on this for several moments.
"It means," he began cautiously, "that you bear a great responsibility to your people, both those that you care about, and those that you do not. Even your greatest enemy is a potentially valuable asset to you in the coming conflict, because it represents a threat to your species as a whole, a threat that goes beyond the human squabbling for power and dominion."
"Beyond human?" Harry said, unable to disguise the skepticism in his voice. "All the giants are quiet; the goblins seem satisfied with their vaults. Is Hermione going to instigate a House Elf rebellion or something?"
"Come now, Harry," Merlin said patiently. "You know very well that it's nothing of the sort." He took a step back, wisps of color flowing off his skin and robes and dissolving into the darkness. He raised one arm and pointed skyward, his outstretched hand flickering like a candle flame. "Why do you think I brought you here to explain all this to you?"
Harry followed the ancient wizard's gesture upward, but saw only the night sky, countless stars twinkling down at them. Slowly his mouth began to gape, and he shook his head slightly.
"You're mental," he said. "You mean to tell me this great threat is going to come from up there? From space?"
Merlin looked almost apologetic. "I wish, Harry, that I could tell you a truth that would fit more easily with your current understanding of your world, and humanity's place in it, but that is simply not the case." He heaved a great sigh, holding out his hands, born down with an invisible weight. "Ah, where to begin?"
"Come off it," Harry said, suddenly indignant. "You expect me to just lap this up?"
"And why not?" Merlin said, matching the growing hostility in Harry's tone. "Have I yet lied to you? Did you not pass safely through the gate, as I said you would? Have you not traveled to the past, unwound time itself? Is this not an opportunity of tremendous importance for you, to undo so much suffering and tragedy, both personal and otherwise? Think, Harry, before you doubt so swiftly. Imagine where you'd be if you had been so eager to disbelieve wizards and magic altogether." He stopped, his ethereal nostrils flaring as he drew heavy breaths after his digression.
Harry shuffled his feet uncomfortably, looking up at the sky for something to take his gaze away from the ghostly wizard in front of him. After a ponderous minute, he murmured, "Sorry."
"The beginning," he went on, "try starting at the beginning. Who is threatening us? How are they going to get here?"
"Well, neither of those questions is really the beginning of it, but I suppose they are important points to hit." Merlin gestured with his hands to try and better express the strange and foreign ideas to Harry. "You are…familiar with the Unforgiveable Curse, the Imperius?"
Harry nodded. "It takes over the mind, makes you do whatever the caster wants. Punishable by a life sentence."
"Indeed, it is a most heinous crime, to usurp someone else's body for your own aims. Now, the shocking truth, which you must believe," he said with a fiery urgency in his usually calm eyes, "is that there is a race of beings whose entire existence mimics the Imperius Curse. They physically occupy the bodies of their victims, controlling and subduing their consciousness and utilizing them like puppets as they see fit, for they are very physically weak themselves. Humans make the easiest hosts for these creatures, and it is for this reason that your entire species on this planet is in danger."
Harry absorbed this information without displaying emotion on his face, nodding slowly while Merlin spoke, his fingers fretting absently at the hem of the Invisibility Cloak.
"I'm willing to accept that," Harry said finally, at which Merlin nodded happily. "But what I don't understand is what you want me to do about it. Even if I believe you, nobody else will believe me if I try to tell them, and it seems like if we wait for proof to arrive it will already be too late. What could I possibly do to make a difference?"
"Ah, but there is something you can do!" Merlin said happily. "You remember, of course, the gateway that you passed through to return to the past." Harry nodded. "Well, there are other gates, superficially similar to that one, but incapable of taking the traveler to a different time except under the most special of circumstances. Instead they relay objects and persons from one place, the location of one gate," he held up his hand, closed in a fist, to illustrate the theoretical location, then held up another, a foot or more away, "to a different gate. Instantaneous travel, like Apparating, but across incredibly vast distances. Imagine Apparating to the moon!"
"Ridiculous," Harry said. "How could you possibly visualize where you were going to come out unless you had already been there?"
"Exactly the reason Apparition could never be used as a substitute for gate travel," Merlin said knowingly. "Now," he added with glee, like a parent about to explain a magic trick to an eager youngster. "Imagine Apparating there…" he pointed skywards again, his arm drawing a line to one of the twinkling stars in Orion's belt. "Or there," he swung his arm over to point to the swan's head of Cygnus.
"Wicked…" Harry whispered aloud. "So where am I supposed to find one of these gates?"
"Earth is fortunate enough to possess two such gates," Merlin mused, "although I fear that accessing either of them will be perilously difficult for you. One of them is located in the frozen wastes near the South Pole, and is essentially impossible for you to reach practically; even if you could Apparate there, you wouldn't be able to power the gate. The other gate is in the hands of the United States Muggle government, secreted away in one of their secret bases, where they are studying it intently to try and unlock its secrets, something they will no doubt eventually succeed in doing."
"So we're back where we started!" Harry said in frustration. "If I can't get to them without either getting shot by Muggles or freezing to death, what am I supposed to do?"
"I trust, Harry," Merlin said plaintively, "that you will be able to find a way. You needn't worry about what to do once you have successfully located one of the gates. I can place the necessary knowledge in your mind, just as I did with the gate at the Department of Mysteries."
"So I just need to bewitch half a country's worth of Muggles armed with guns," Harry said with an exasperated shrug. "Sure, Merlin. No big deal."
"You are a far more inventive lad than you give yourself credit for, Harry. I know you'll be able to find a way."
"Wait, that's it?" Harry said.
"Who's up there?" came the crackling screeching voice of Argus Filch from the stairs. Merlin raised his hand in farewell and swiftly melted away into shadow and empty air. Panicking for a moment, Harry drew the hood of his Invisibility Cloak over his head and vanished from sight, just as the glowing orange eyes of Mrs. Norris peered over the top step of the stairs.
Despite himself, Harry couldn't muster the willpower necessary to tell Ron and Hermione what Merlin had told him. It all seemed too absurd, too ridiculous to fully contemplate, much less to try and vocalize. He found himself paying more attention to his schoolwork, as a way to take his thoughts away from the weight that had been placed upon him. And, of course, there was the looming deadline of the first task of the Triwizard Tournament, and Harry could feel his confidence waning as the day drew closer and closer. These feelings he did share with Ron and Hermione, but they were quick to offer words of encouragement.
"It's like you said, Harry," Ron said one morning over breakfast. "Nothing you've done has caused any real changes so far, right? So there's no reason this won't go off without a hitch."
Harry could only nod at his own words being thrown back to him, although they offered him no real comfort.
To take his mind off his troubles, he also focused on the fact that without Rita Skeeter pouring poisonous trash all over the presses, the mood at Hogwarts regarding Harry Potter wasn't nearly as hostile as it had been previously. There was, of course, a large portion of Slytherin House that continued to despise him, and he couldn't walk between classes without seeing at least one of them flashing their "POTTER STINKS" badge like it was the most hilarious joke ever conceived. The Hufflepuffs, too, were fairly frigid towards Harry Potter, remaining fiercely loyal to Cedric Diggory, the champion chosen from their own house; Harry understood and expected these reactions. The Gryffindors, however, were much more supportive of him, where previously they had only been supportive insofar as they avoided actively harassing him. The Ravenclaw students seemed by and large to be detached from the Potter-Diggory dichotomy, offering both of the boys encouragement whenever they saw them. Their approach, which seemed to Harry to be the most pragmatic of all, was that Hogwarts had been gifted with two different champions, and therefore a double shot at winning the Triwizard Cup, and it was therefore foolish to spoil such good fortune with bickering and favoritism.
Mad-Eye Moody, the disguised Death Eater, was still a point of difficulty for Harry Potter. It was difficult for him to sit through Defense Against the Dark Arts class, allowing himself to have the Imperius Charm placed on him by someone he knew to be a Death Eater so heinous he had been administered the Dementor's Kiss essentially without trial. Even more troublesome was the knowledge that the real Mad-Eye was moldering away in the seventh lock of his own magical chest, starving and suffering. Harry had resolved several times to bring him food or water, or even to free him outright in one particularly altruistic fit, but each time Hermione had counseled against it, pointing out that even if Mad-Eye only knew that someone was aware of his plight on the outside, it could create a marked change in his demeanor that Barty Crouch Jr. might pick up on, and that would mean the end of their element of surprise.
On the morning of the 22nd of November, Harry fidgeted uncomfortably at breakfast, half-anticipating and half-dreading the fireplace chat he was scheduled to have with Sirius that evening. He was nervous about having changed the flow of events slightly, and that rather than a long letter Sirius had sent him only a simple note that read "I'll be there." What if Sirius acted differently because the idea had now been Harry's instead of his own? What if he put himself in greater danger than before and was recaptured? Harry glumly imagined his godfather, saved from death only to be condemned to the life sentence he had originally escaped, withering into nothing under the icy breath of the Dementor guards.
He decided that he would visit Hogsmeade undisguised this time, seeing as there was no general sense that he was an attention-whoring git, and no Rita Skeeter lurking about the village to make his life miserable. The trio of friends soon found themselves nursing butterbeers in the Three Broomsticks while Hermione pored over the extremely short list of SPEW members she had accumulated.
"Not giving that up yet, eh?" Ron said, raising his eyebrows as he read the list of names. "Wow, we'll have to build a clubhouse soon."
"Oh, shut it, Ron," Hermione said angrily, then looked hopefully at Harry. "Harry, about the future…SPEW works out, doesn't it? I mean, the house-elves, they're granted fair working conditions? Clothing? Wages?"
Harry thought about whether to tell her the truth or not, before deciding to err on the side of honesty. He was already being cagey with his friends about his experiences with the future. There was little sense in adding to the pile of lies and half-truths over something as inconsequential as the fate of SPEW. He shook his head with pursed lips.
"Sorry, Hermione, but it's sort of like everybody's been saying. The house-elves really do enjoy their work. If you keep up this SPEW business they're only going to get angry with you. They even stopped cleaning the Common Room for awhile, it was just Dobby in there."
"I told you!" Ron said triumphantly, while Hermione looked somewhere between violence and tears. When his victory proved to be hollow, he took a swig of butterbeer before muttering "I told you…" again.
"Hermione," Harry said, thinking fast. "The thing is, I've only lived up to the end of our Hogwarts schooling. The house elves, they have a deeply ingrained culture of servitude, it's a point of pride for them. But who knows what you'll be able to accomplish in the years after we leave Hogwarts? Even if you can't help the house-elves, you could work at the Ministry, you could campaign for the rights of magical creatures."
"S'not the end of the world, is what he's saying," Ron said, most unhelpfully, before ducking an attempted slap by Hermione.
"Thanks, Harry," Hermione said, glaring pointedly at Ron. "That really means a lot."
It wasn't until the trio were on their way out of the Three Broomsticks that the massive frame of Hagrid approached them, and Harry felt the half-giant's great sausagelike fingers grip his shoulder.
"Er, Harry," Hagrid said in what Harry assumed was supposed to be a low murmur, but was more of a dull rumble. "Meet me by the cabin tonight. Midnight. Wear the cloak." He winked most conspicuously before waving them off and saying loudly, "So, er, I'll talk to you later about that extra credit, eh, Hermione?"
Harry showed up early to the cabin, swathed in the Invisibility Cloak. He paced back and forth impatiently, conscious of the burning fire back in the Gryffindor Common Room, once again regretting how much he was coming to rely on his foreknowledge of events, and how lost he felt in the face of potential discrepancies. What if Sirius was early, and he didn't make it back in time? What if Sirius was early, and someone else saw him and reported it to the staff?
"You there, 'arry?" Hagrid grumbled, poking his enormous head out of the cabin door.
"Here, Hagrid," he said in a whisper, waving his invisible hand for a moment before feeling foolish.
"Righ', righ', follow along then. Got somethin' to show yer," Hagrid said before stalking away towards the giant Beauxbatons carriage. Harry began pacing after him, but slowed when he saw a pair of unfamiliar figures in the distance, standing on the lake shore. He looked back to Hagrid, who was now knocking awkwardly on the carriage door, then back to the two near the lake. One of them he was almost certain was Dumbledore, but he didn't recognize the other, at least not in the dark like this. Had they been there before, and he had simply not realized? Harry wasn't convinced, and with only a moment's hesitation, left Hagrid behind to take Maxine into the Forbidden Forest, and set off towards the lake, being careful not to make too much noise in the grass, or to catch any conspicuous burrs on the bottom edge of the Cloak. As he drew nearer to the two figures, he confirmed that one was indeed Dumbledore; the Headmaster was engaged in quiet but earnest conversation with a tall man in black robes.
"…assure you that nothing impertinent has been going on at Hogwarts, especially not anything that would warrant the attention of your department," Dumbledore was explaining calmly as Harry drew near enough to hear them.
"Headmaster, I assure you that I and the wizards in my department are very good at our work, and I can similarly assure you that the energies released by the event in question point very clearly to Hogwarts." The voice sounded familiar somehow to Harry, high and stern with a twinge of cruelty.
"I could be more helpful to you, I'm sure," Dumbledore said in an even tone, "If I knew anything about the event to which you are referring. You're being quite cagey about it, considering you're asking me for help in the matter."
"Don't be a fool!" said the man, obviously incensed. "You know full well that I can't possibly discuss that with you." Harry had to stop himself from drawing in a sharp gasp; he recognized the voice now, with a sinking feeling of dread, like cold water pouring down his legs and filling his shoes.
"Of course, Artemius, of course," Dumbledore said. "But I still don't see how one of my students could possibly be involved in such powerful magic without my knowing, especially given the wards placed upon the school to seclude it from the outside world."
"If not one of your students," Artemius said with a threatening edge, "then perhaps one of your staff. Perhaps even you, Headmaster. The crux of the matter is that I've been given authority by the Ministry to stay here, on campus, until I've gotten to the bottom of this problem, or exhausted my options." The Unspeakable from the Death Chamber narrowed his predatory eyes, while Dumbledore seemed unmoved by the veiled threats.
Well, Harry thought to himself, his mouth suddenly dry. This was certainly something different.
