The next day, the wizarding police came around.
They interviewed Harry, Neville and Hermione (separately), asking plenty of questions about what happened. Harry was pleasantly surprised to find that they only mentioned the fact he was a dragon when it was actually relevant, such as why he'd asked everyone else to keep using spells, and why he'd put himself in so much danger.
That last question had come from a pleasant Auror called Sturgis Podmore, who was quite surprised to discover that just how unwounded Harry had been by the whole ordeal. His total injuries amounted to bruises, which it had taken Madam Pomfrey seconds to magically heal.
Harry later found out that they'd interviewed everyone involved, including Professor Snape, and that Professor Quirrell had been brought in to try and explain just how a troll had made it into the dungeons of Hogwarts. The Defence teacher had rather weakly suggested that perhaps it had become lost, or that it had stumbled upon a secret passage (though Fred and George had thought about it for a while and had said that they couldn't think of a secret passage in the school that could let a troll in like that).
It was the talk of the castle for the next few days, and just about everyone involved (except possibly the troll) was considered to be 'cool', 'awesome' or 'brave', or in Snape's case 'surprisingly helpful'. Harry clinging onto the back of a rampaging troll got particular attention, and even Neville was treated with a kind of awe by the Gryffindors because he'd actually dared to seek help from Snape – successfully.
Almost inevitably quite a few of the next lessons ended up being about trolls as well. Professor Flitwick gave Hermione three points for her creative use of a simple charm, which made her blush, and Professor Quirrell spent the whole of the defence lesson questioning Harry on what he could resist apart from certain spells and being hit with a club.
Inevitably, though – apart from the occasional article Harry saw in the news about whether Hogwarts was safe – the furore slowly died down, and the normal rhythm of the week resumed. Harry did Astronomy and practiced flying on Wednesday, spent most of an hour trying to Transfigure a curtain into a bookcase on Thursday, and made another potion on Friday. Then over the weekend he visited Portree on Skye, instead of Fort William, and ran quite unexpectedly into about half of the Pride of Portree Quidditch team in a gift shop when the young daughter of the team's Keeper pointed him out in the middle of the shop.
It had taken a lot of fast talking (and some quite bare-faced lying) to convince the shop owner that all that was involved was an over-excitable child – and after some thought the Keeper, Meaghan, got him a T-shirt with a dragon on the front of it and told him to wear it whenever he came to Skye (which was apparently surprisingly well populated with wizarding families). The dragon on it was quite nice looking, blue rather than black, but it looked like a friendly dragon to Harry and he was very much in favour of friendly dragons.
The experience did make him wonder where else in the country there were wizarding communities, though.
As November wore on, however, something occurred to Harry – or, rather, several somethings occurred to Harry.
The first thing was that it wasn't all that long until Christmas, when Ron mentioned that he and his brothers were going to be staying at Hogwarts over the Christmas break. That sounded like a good idea to Harry, but it also got him thinking about the second thing.
The second thing was that he was now – well, he wasn't sure if he was rich, exactly, because he didn't know what qualified as rich by wizard standards and the only real standard he had for what was rich by dragon standards was "a mountain full of gold". But he had quite a lot of money, more than he needed for a bed, and he'd mostly spent it on himself so far. And that meant that he was in the unusual position of being able to get his friends Christmas presents.
(He was in the unusual-for-Harry position of having friends, too, but that wasn't quite as new.)
For most of the people he sort-of knew, like Blaise and Penelope and Terry, he didn't really know enough about them to know what they'd like (except that most people liked chocolate) and he also didn't know if he knew them well enough that it was all right to get them a present. The Dursleys had never really let Harry experience Christmas, or at least the present side of Christmas (even Uncle Vernon had realized that having half a dozen of Dudley's friends over while Harry was literally locked in a cupboard was asking for trouble, and Harry and Aunt Petunia had ended up with a sort of understanding that Harry helped with cooking and in return got to join the Christmas table – and even watch television – so long as he kept his head down).
That left Harry wondering who his closest friends were, and after a bit of careful thought he decided that in addition to Hermione, Dean, Neville and Ron, he should probably get something for Hagrid as well. Hermione was easy, and Harry knew straight away what to get Ron – in fact it gave him a rough idea of how much to spend on the others – but the others gave him a bit more of a problem. In fact they gave him a lot more of a problem, and it wasn't until early December that Harry's mental list of Christmas Problems was down to just Hagrid after a particularly productive trip to Fort William.
The only unusual aspect of that particular shopping trip had been that he'd discovered that the Forbidden Forest had a Hippogriff herd. Things hadn't quite escalated to a fight, though it had taken him several minutes to remember that you were supposed to keep eye contact and by then they were all very suspicious indeed.
Then, one Friday night, it snowed.
A lot.
Harry wasn't quite a newcomer to snow, but the most he'd ever actually seen was an inch or so that had blanketed Little Whingeing the previous winter. Uncle Vernon had moaned, Aunt Petunia had complained about the mess it would make of her garden when it started melting, and Dudley had thrown as much of it as possible at Harry.
But the snowfall at Hogwarts was something else entirely. On Friday there had been ominous grey clouds in the sky; on Saturday morning the snow was four feet deep.
Harry loved it.
The first thing he did after spotting how much snow there was was to dive out the window, dropping to a low altitude over where he thought one of the flat lawns was before deliberately crashing down into the soft, pillowy drifts. After that, a bit of experimentation told him that he was small enough to burrow into the snow and hide inside it, which gave him all sorts of ideas.
Since so few students had class on Saturday, practically the whole school came out to get involved in snowball fights or to make things out of snow. Professor Flitwick happily distributed Warming Charms to everyone who wanted them, Professor McGonagall went around making sure that the snowball fights weren't getting entirely out of hand and Professor Quirrell got bombarded by snowballs from Fred and Maybe Fred. (Their homing-in snowballs got six points for excellent charms work from Professor Flitwick and a deduction of eight points plus detention from Professor McGonagall.)
Harry's friends came out too, pushing their way through the thick snow towards where they'd last seen him, and Harry's ears pricked up as he listened to their approach.
Moving stealthily through the thick drifts, Harry dug underneath the top layer and waited.
"Harry?" Ron called. "Where is he?"
"Probably somewhere near the crash mark?" Dean suggested.
"Yeah, but it's all white now," Ron replied. "Except for, you know, the hundreds of fellow decent students having snowball fights… and the Slytherins."
Neville giggled. "That's kind of rude, Ron."
"What?" Ron replied, shrugging. "If Slytherins talk about us and they say there's hundreds of sensible students plus Gryffindors, I don't mind."
He paused. "Much. Okay, maybe it depends who says it?"
"I wish I'd learned a spell to let me find something," Hermione frowned.
"Would it even work on Harry?" Ron asked. "Most spells don't."
"It does depend on the spell," Hermione replied. "Healing spells seem okay, those dragon-related spells that Charlie used mostly worked as well… I don't think anyone's ever researched it."
She inspected her wand, wondering if there was some way she could use it to help. "I could use bluebell flames to melt a way through..."
"That would get rid of some of the snow, though," Dean said. "And that'd be a real shame."
Harry slowly spread one wing out, using all his strength to unfold it through the snow, then brought it up in a sharp movement. His flight muscles catapulted several cubic feet of snow into the air, and his friends yelped in surprise as he buried them.
"Snowball fight?" he suggested.
Dean shook the snow off. "You git. We were worried about you."
"Why?" Harry asked, honestly puzzled.
"We thought dragons were maybe weak to being cold," Neville supplied. "Like plants."
"Plants are also weak to being set on fire," Harry replied. "I'm not."
"I like the sound of a snowball fight," Ron volunteered. "Anyone else?"
Hermione scraped the bluebell flames back into her jar, having used some of her supply to melt the snow that had gone down the back of her neck. "I don't think it's fair if Harry's on one team."
"Well, what about if I'm on one team and all four of you are on the other team?" Harry suggested.
"That's what I mean," Hermione explained.
"It's not that bad, is it?" Neville asked, turning to look at Hermione.
Harry ducked his head back down, and Hermione pointed.
"...oh, okay," Neville realized, noticing that he couldn't see Harry at all.
"Maybe we could get Blaise, Daphne and Tracey involved?" Dean suggested. "That might make it a bit fairer."
Harry was a bit surprised to discover that the reason Dean wanted the three Slytherins involved was so that there could be a team with Harry and some of the others on it, so that at least the humans could be hit with snowballs. But it was good fun and lasted at least an hour, with people like Lisa Turpin and both the Patils joining in on a chaotic snowball brawl.
Then Fred and George noticed, and five minutes after that won the whole thing comprehensively with two dozen of their "snow-bludgers". Four of them even homed in on Harry under the snow, and when he tried to fly out of the way they followed him before splatting across his scales – except for the one he hit with a blast of his dragonbreath, which just turned to water and splashed instead.
Fortunately, Harry could add 'water' to the list of things that people thought might work on dragons but didn't actually work on him.
Harry found it a bit hard to focus on his homework for the last week of term, as there always seemed to be a new way to play around with the snow outside. From hollowing out a hide under a particularly deep drift with his fire-breath (which he was able to experiment with, and which told him that he didn't seem to have a limit on how long he could breathe fire for as long as he kept taking breaths), to skating along the frozen lake with his wings flapping for propulsion, to covering his tail in snow like an Ankylosaur club and flicking it as a giant snowball.
Everybody else was anticipating the end of term and the beginning of the Christmas holidays as well, and Harry had already sent Hedwig out on the first of three long journeys she would be making in December. As a snowy owl she had no trouble at all getting through the blizzards (she'd seemed offended at Harry for suggesting she might), and she hadn't even needed a name to know exactly where to go – headed squarely for 'Neville's House'.
The final few days of the school year went past, with their last lesson before Christmas being a Potions class in which they made an anti-drowning potion. It was difficult and fiddly, with small mistakes changing how long the potion would work for, and Professor Snape examined the results before telling everyone how well they'd done.
Apparently, for some of them, it might actually be worth drinking them before falling over the side of a ship.
Mentally converting this through what he considered his Professor Snape Translator, Harry decided that meant "quite good" and went to lunch – which was in a now-glittering Great Hall, with twelve enormous fir trees all around the walls festooned with candles, glittering bubbles, glowing red-and-green snow and even some glass baubles full of sparks. Holly and mistletoe decorated every surface, and Harry could swear he spotted Penelope and Percy talking under some of the decorations before his attention was drawn to the food.
Even though it wasn't an official feast, the house-elves down in the kitchens had gone to a special effort. Pigs in blankets and stuffing competed for space on the table with cuts of turkey and chicken, there were jugs of gravy and sauce (mint, apple, bread, cranberry and pumpkin), and when Harry sat down a plate of glazed ham with a little sign on it appeared just for him.
"Hey, Harry, can I have some of that?" Ron asked, seeing Harry inspecting it before giving it a taste.
"I don't know..." Harry replied. "What do you think of steel shavings?"
They were pretty nice and crunchy, as far as Harry was concerned, but Ron turned pale before saying that he'd rather just have what was available on the other plates instead.
"I bet this is going to be a pretty amazing Christmas," Dean said, looking around. "It's been months since I've seen my family, so I'm glad to be back with them, but if this is what it looks like here then what's it going to be like on Wednesday?"
"Oh, yeah, that's right," Harry realized. "You're leaving tomorrow morning, right?"
Dean nodded. "I know Neville's going too, and I think Seamus is. Most of the girls too."
"Gryffindor Tower's going to be pretty empty," Ron mused. "Maybe that means we'll get the good armchairs by the fire."
"You mean you will," Dean chuckled. "Harry could probably sleep in the fire."
"I did that once," Harry told him. "It just meant I had to wash before breakfast."
"We should probably just agree to not be surprised by you," Ron said, shaking his head. "What's next, sleeping out in the snow? Underwater?"
Harry started seriously thinking about it.
"I think I still need to breathe," he said eventually. "But there's this whole bit in All the Weyrs where the dragons go into space. They can hold their breath for a really long time."
Ron and Dean exchanged a look.
"So, Christmas!" Dean said loudly. "What are you looking forward to?"
"I don't know," Harry admitted. "I'm not sure if anyone's got me anything. I decided to send my Aunt and Uncle some fudge from Fort William, though, and I did get something for each of you."
"Of course you're getting something, Harry!" Ron told him. "Because – well, never mind that."
Harry looked interested, wondering what it would be like to get presents, then went back to his meal.
Halfway through his knife broke, and he shrugged before eating the broken-off piece as well.
After four days in the much lonelier castle – most of which Harry spent in the library, or in Ravenclaw Library, when he wasn't outside with Ron trying to make elaborate snow structures – Christmas Day came around.
There was a pile of presents at the foot of Harry's bed that morning, and Harry was surprised by just how nice it felt to get presents. Ron tore straight into his own, but the first thing Harry did was to carefully open a present which was wrapped in obvious Muggle paper.
The card on top announced that it was from Hermione, and inside was a brand-new book – Witches Abroad, a Pratchett book Harry hadn't realized was out yet. His tail flicked form side to side happily as he put it carefully aside, intending to read it later, and then Ron made a sound of surprise.
"Harry?" he asked. "What's this?"
Harry looked over, seeing that Ron had found his present – a small piece of folded paper on which he'd written the words 'I.O.U. One Wand'.
"I asked Professor McGonagall about it," Harry explained. "I know your wand's kind of old, and it's been used a lot, so I got permission for us to go and visit Diagon Alley today or tomorrow to get you a new one."
Ron blushed bright red so he nearly matched his hair. "Harry, this is too much – but – I don't-"
"Ron, you're my friend," Harry interrupted. "And I know your family aren't very well off. But I've never had the chance to get anyone Christmas presents before, and this is the thing I thought would help you out the most."
Ron seemed lost for words for a long moment, and while he was Harry opened the next present on the pile. This one actually turned out to be from Ron's mother, who'd somehow managed to knit a green sweater with wing holes – and which a bit of squirming revealed actually did fit Harry.
"Wonder how she managed that," Ron said eventually, as Harry tested out the wing holes. "...oh, yeah, right, she probably got to see all of Charlie's notes."
"It's really nice," Harry told him.
Part of him thought it was a bit of a pity that he couldn't be there when their other friends opened their presents, because Ron's reaction had been nice to watch as well. Neville would be opening a spider plant, Dean was the recipient of a big box of art supplies, and Hermione (in a move which Professor Dumbledore would have disapproved of but Hermione was almost certain to like) had got the abridged but still long version of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Harry thought of it sort of like The Silmarillion but about real events. And with fewer dragons, so clearly inferior, but Hermione had already mentioned giving the Silmarillion a go so getting her that as a present probably wouldn't be polite.
Neville had got him sweets, which was nice (especially the big collection of Chocolate Frogs, which Harry was sure he'd have fun with) and it turned out that Dean had been doing a painting of Harry for the last week and had finished it just before heading home. It showed him in the library, wand out to light the book he was reading, and perched atop a hoard of all sorts of things from envelopes to books to a Golden Snitch.
Underneath that was when Harry found the present from his Aunt and Uncle, and his snort of laughter made Ron look over in surprise.
"It's my aunt and uncle," Harry explained. "I got fifty p."
Showing Ron the coin, he converted the price in his head. "So that's about… a tenth of a galleon, which is a bit less than two sickles? I'm kind of wondering how they got it here at all though."
Under that was a wooden flute from Hagrid, which he seemed to have made himself and which sounded a bit like an owl, and as he was reaching for the last package there was a crash as The Two Georges came in.
"Blimey," one George said. "I didn't think Mum would go for it."
"I didn't think Mum could go for it," the other George agreed. "Are you two done opening your presents yet? We've already got Percy."
"Almost," Harry said, holding up the last package. "And Ron and I need to go and see Professor McGonagall before lunch – we won't be long."
"What's that about, Ronniekins?" George asked, and Ron mumbled something.
Then all four Weasleys stared as a fluid grey cloak slithered out of the package to the floor.
"Is that an invisibility cloak?" Other George said, as Harry picked up the note that had come with it in one hand and the cloak in the other.
"It says it used to belong to my dad," Harry supplied. "Whoever sent it doesn't know if I can use it properly, but he says I should give it a try."
When he pulled it on, draping the main part of the cloak over his body and pulling his tail in, only his head was visible – and, though it was a bit uncomfortable, he managed to get his head under the hood as well.
"That's not possible, though, is it?" Percy asked. "It's got to be at least a decade old even if your father got it new. Invisibility cloaks don't last that long without fading, and this one is absolutely transparent."
He frowned, clearly thinking about it, and Harry shrugged the cloak off again. "Maybe it's magic?"
"...that shouldn't be an explanation," Ron grumbled. "But somehow, I know it's the best one we're going to get."
Harry put the cloak away, thinking about how it was the only thing he owned which he knew had belonged to his dad, then followed his friends downstairs to the common room.
"Good," Professor McGonagall said, when Harry and Ron turned up at her door at a quarter to eleven. "I see you have managed to avoid being caught up in Christmas Day celebrations for the whole morning."
"It was pretty close," Harry told her. "But I said Ron didn't have his present yet, and the twins told us to get going."
"It would be nice if they were normally so reasonable," the Professor said, with a thin smile. "We will be travelling to Diagon Alley by Floo. Have you used the Floo before, Mr. Potter?"
Harry shook his head. "It's happened in some of the books I read, but they never bother to explain it."
Professor McGonagall explained it.
Apparently you threw some magical powder into a fire, and it made the fire turn green, and then you said where you wanted to go and jumped into the fire. But the fires had to both be connected to the Floo network, so Harry sort of wondered why you needed the connection and the powder.
Shrugging it off, he watched as Ron used it with confidence – throwing a handful of the powder, saying "Diagon Alley!" and walking into the green flames.
Harry did the same, though a bit of the powder trickled out between his talons. Then he went whizzing off through the Floo network, which turned out to involve spinning around and around while snatches of other fireplaces went past and flames like a warm breeze surrounded him.
Then he came out the other side, landing facefirst on the stone in the Leaky Cauldron, and someone yelped in surprise.
"You all right, Harry?" Ron asked. "Sorry, I forgot to mention, landing is kind of difficult..."
"I'm okay," Harry replied, checking his glasses weren't broken, and Professor McGonagall came through a moment later.
"Is something wrong?" she asked.
Harry shook his head. "I'm fine, Professor."
"I wasn't talking to you, Mr. Potter," the Transfiguration professor said, and everyone in the Leaky Cauldron was suddenly very interested in their drinks.
After thinking it over for a bit as they went to Ollivanders' and got Ron his wand, Harry decided that Floo was sort of like if you had to use a waterslide to get somewhere, except that there was fire instead of water and you didn't land in a swimming pool.
He wasn't certain about that, because he'd never actually been on a waterslide, but it seemed like a good comparison.
Mr. Ollivander had taken one look at Ron's old wand and described it as "a fine wand but far too tired, might be serviceable if it was a good match but not a good match at all" and begun measuring, and because it was a new experience for Ron that meant Harry could sit down on his haunches and enjoy it. It didn't take nearly as long as it had for Harry, which was fortunate, and after about six minutes and twenty wands the elderly wandmaker found a match.
It was longer than Ron's old wand, and willow instead of ash, but it had the same type of core. Harry felt almost certain that that meant… something… and Ron was almost in tears when he tried a spell he'd had trouble with for weeks and it worked just fine the very first time.
Then Professor McGonagall smiled, and told him that she'd be expecting great things from him in class now, and Harry did his best not to chuckle as Ron took on a distinctly hunted look.
The journey back confirmed Harry's belief that so far there was no form of quick magical transportation he thought was nearly as good as just flying everywhere. Apparition might be an exception, and he was looking forward to finding out, but that wasn't going to be for about five years.
(Maybe if he could connect his own flame to the Floo? That might not be possible but it would at least let him send other people somewhere.)
Then it was time for the Christmas dinner. There weren't nearly as many people as there had been at the previous feasts, but the meal was even more amazing – and there were crackers everywhere.
"Ever pulled a cracker before, Harry?" Fred asked, holding one out to his twin (who was wearing the jumper with the F on it, so Harry assumed he was George).
"I've seen my aunt and uncle pull them," he said. "There's a bit of a pop, and a paper hat."
"What, really?" Ron asked. "That's all?"
"Try this!" George said, pulling, and the cracker went off with a boom that knocked both twins flat. Half-a-dozen canaries flew out, orbiting briefly over the heads of the two cracker-pullers before flying up towards the ceiling, and a high-topped shako fell to the floor between them.
Harry tried one next, with Ron, and got a giant Chinese straw hat and a tiny grey statue of a griffin. A slip of parchment fell out as well, and Ron read it before giving the griffin a careful tap with his new wand.
Colour washed over the griffin, outlining it in red and gold, and it took off to hover just over his head. Then Ron pulled another cracker with Percy, engulfing them both in blue smoke, and won a fez which he put on and which the griffin landed on top of.
Fred and George had managed to get hold of two matching sombreros, one of them swapped for the shako, and Harry did his best to make sure the hat in question would stay put on his head before getting started on the food.
There were occasional pauses during the meal in which more crackers got pulled, the blasts echoing through the hall in clumps, and Harry managed to get hold of a thing that looked a lot like a gyroscope, several coloured marbles which orbited in the air like planets, a packet of luminous balloons and something called a 'dungbomb' which he wasn't sure he liked the sound of very much.
He was also patiently talked out of seeing what a wizarding cracker tasted like by Percy, despite the best efforts of the Twins.
The rest of the day involved another snowball fight (with the slight difference that, this time, the Twins' snow-bludgers were countered by Percy calmly Banishing so much snow at them that it knocked them both flat on the ground) and then long hours just relaxing together in the common room. Harry read Witches Abroad lying on his back by the fire, Ron routed all his brothers one by one at Wizarding Chess, Ron's griffin-statue chirped at Scabbers and the odd gyroscope-thing kept buzzing and whistling intermittently.
As he finally went to sleep that night, Harry could really see why people liked Christmas so much.
The next day, Harry explored the castle.
Mr. Filch, the caretaker, seemed to be quite suspicious about Harry going up and down stairs and looking in doors, but Harry had asked Percy the rules about it and the Prefect had told him that all the doors he wasn't supposed to go into were either password-locked or just plain locked. And Harry hadn't really had the time to do a really good explore of the castle yet, so he decided that was going to be how he spent the whole of Boxing Day.
His first conclusion was that there really was a quite amazing number of classrooms in Hogwarts, most of them not being used. One of them had something that rattled in a wardrobe, which he decided not to open, and another was full of piles and piles of old school papers stacked to the ceiling and forming corridors through most of the room. It seemed like there was always a surprise to be found, though usually the surprise was "really surprisingly thick dust".
By the middle of the afternoon, as the Scottish sun was setting and a couple of hours before dinner, Harry had done all the towers and most of the upper floors. He'd met a very surprised woman who told him he was a bad omen (which just seemed rude to Harry), along with plenty of portraits, and Lord Ridley had only ineffectually stabbed him twice before the Grey Lady had silently pulled him away.
He'd also found a secret passage, though unfortunately it was collapsed so it didn't really go anywhere.
As he opened the door to one particular classroom, however – another of the ones which smelled like they hadn't been used in years – he noticed that this one had a mirror in it, as well as the usual desks and chairs.
A big ceiling-high mirror with a gold frame wasn't exactly normal, even by what Harry had seen of Hogwarts, so he stepped forwards to have a look. Ron had told him about mirrors where you looked in them and they told you what you could do to look better, but this was so much bigger… maybe it did something else?
If it was a mirror where you could step through it and end up somewhere else, that would be nice. Maybe it would be a better way of getting around quickly than the Floo… but then Harry would need to know how to use it, and there was something written above the mirror but 'Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi' wasn't any language Harry knew.
Maybe it was Gobbledegook.
Or maybe it was a mirror like the one that Lily Weatherwax used in Witches Abroad? Harry looked behind him, just in case there was a second one to form a tunnel of mirrors, but there was just the one.
Then he actually looked into the mirror itself, and had to stare.
Instead of a reflection of Harry looking the same as he actually did, like a Muggle mirror would give – or even a reflection of Harry waving – what he saw was himself curled up on top of a pile of books and gold and other things.
Then another dragon appeared, one with bright emerald-green scales, and shook the reflection-Harry awake. There was no sound, so Harry couldn't hear what he or the other dragon said, but the reflection-Harry's tail flicked eagerly from side to side.
A man came into the reflection as well, one with black hair and obvious Wizard's robes, then changed in a blur into a big black dragon about the same size as the green one. They both hugged reflection-Harry, and the male dragon told him something as well, then all three of them jumped into the air and vanished as the mirror went black.
Harry swallowed, a lump in his throat, and looked again at the inscription. It looked a lot like the kind of puzzle he'd read about, but he couldn't quite work it out.
When Harry looked at the glass, this time, he and the other two dragons were flying high over an unfamiliar landscape. The mirror-Harry was playing around the other two, sliding back and forth through their wakes, and after a long minute of watching Harry noticed that far down below looked an awful lot like Minas Tirith from The Lord Of The Rings.
Another jump, another long ten seconds of the blackness between, and he appeared next to the two older dragons again. This time they were flying over a volcanic crater, with hundreds of other dragons visible lounging on ledges in the sun, and Harry was sure it had to be Benden Weyr.
He closed his eyes for a long moment, rubbing at them with his paw, and decided it was probably a bad idea to watch alone.
Maybe if he got Ron to have a look? Or Neville, Dean and Hermione, when they got back? It was worth a try… and he thought it looked like a pretty good show, too. Almost like a film, though without any sound.
Ron was busy in a Chess match with a second-year Ravenclaw called Cho, so Harry decided not to interrupt him, and then it was dinner – then, after that, Ron mentioned how Harry had chased after Chocolate Frogs on the train. The other Weasleys (and most of Gryffindor) were interested in watching, so they pushed the armchairs to the side to make a clear space and spent the next hour or so cheering Harry on.
When Harry actually told Ron what he'd found, it was too late to actually go and see it without being out after Curfew. Ron was interested in trying anyway, wanting to try out the Invisibility Cloak, but Harry pointed out quite sensibly that they could just go tomorrow.
When Ron came to see it, it turned out that he saw something totally different in the mirror even if Harry was the one standing in front of it and Ron was off to the side. Instead of seeing Harry and the other two dragons (or a witch and a wizard), Ron saw himself – older, smiling, wearing a bulky Muggle spacesuit and being clapped heartily on the shoulder by his oldest brother Bill.
Confused, Harry looked back at the mirror – which this time showed the black dragon giving him the silvery-grey invisibility cloak – then up at the inscription. He'd been thinking about it overnight, but still couldn't-
-then, all at once, it hit him.
'ishow no tyo urfac ebu tyo urhe arts desirE'
I show not your face but your hearts desire.
He quickly passed that on to Ron, who blushed hard.
"That sounds, um… kind of creepy, actually," Harry's friend added. "It's like… how does it know? Is it getting into our minds?"
"I don't know," Harry replied. "For me, when the dragons are humans I don't recognize them… I think they're my mum and dad, which is something I'd really like, but how would I know? I haven't been human in years, and if that is mum she doesn't look much like Aunt Petunia."
"Maybe if you could see a photo of them you'd know?" Ron suggested. "But yeah, I think this thing is kind of dangerous. Dad says you have to be careful of anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain."
"Really?" Harry asked, distracted. "What about the Sorting Hat? Or the Fat Lady, or any of the portraits?"
Ron blinked. "I guess the Sorting Hat keeps its brain in the hat?"
"But that means it doesn't make any sense," Harry replied. "Then you could just say that the mirror keeps its brain in the mirror."
Ron raised a finger, about to reply, then lowered it again. "Ummm..."
"And You-Know-Who was really evil, and you could see where he kept his brain," Harry went on. "And what about that little griffin statue of yours?"
"Okay, maybe it's a bit of a silly rule," Ron admitted. "I think you're just meant to think twice, and here that's what we're doing."
"You're right," Harry agreed. "I'm glad I've seen it, but I won't come down here and stare at it or anything…"
AN:
And that's Christmas.
Dean's picture actually exists. It's drawn by Amalgamzaku (who can be found on Deviantart under that name) and is the cover art picture of the fic.