Parselmatch
Chapter 21: Tunnels
The gang, now consisting of Harry, Ron, Luna, Ginny, and Neville, arrived in the Egyptian Embassy. They were greeted with a rather stern looking wizard.
"Are you the dimwits who lost your friend?" They all nodded tiredly, and the old man gave a long sigh.
"Follow me then." The teenagers followed the older man in an unsettling silence.
"I haven't been to Egypt since the summer of third year." Ron mused.
"Bill took us on tours of all the pyramids in the Giza complex," Ginny reflected.
But Harry was beginning to panic. "Where is everyone? This place looks like a ghost town."
"That's because you are in the basement of the Ministry, Mr. Potter. We specialized your transportation here. This operation is a secret. Only a fool would deliberately seek out the Library of Alexandria," the Egyptian wizard tersely answered as he led them down a dark corridor. At the very end, there was a door that had an eerie green light glowing from behind it.
"This is as far as I can go. You'll need to open this door and walk down the steps. From there, you'll have to find your own way. Typically, I would tell you that I would see you soon, but the odds are that this is the one and only time you'll ever see me."
"What makes you say that?" Neville questioned with a nervous scratch in his voice.
"The Library is very particular about who it lets in, and even pickier about who it lets out. I wish you all the best of luck in finding your friend." The man walked away without another word, not even bothering to shake their hands.
"Let's start, shall we?" Harry asked Ron. His best friend nodded, and Harry pushed the door open. The stairs were made of marble and built in a narrow spiral pattern. The walls around the stairwell were shining metal. As the team crept down the stairs, the lights began to flicker and the art on the walls morphed too.
With each flight of stairs, a mirage of that century's art was displayed. Color photography of the 1970s, the black and white photography of the 1940s, the art deco of the 1920s, Cubism, Art Nouveau, Impressionism, the Romantics' art, Rococo, Baroque, the frescoes, the medieval paintings, it was all there, concealed within the walls of this stairwell. By the time they had reached the Medieval times, the lights had gone out, and they turned to their wands for guidance. Under the blue glow of their wands, they could begin to see the hieroglyphics on the wall, but they too faded. When the stairs stopped, they found nothing but a cold, moist wall.
Ron marched forward and padded down the wall. "What the bloody hell? There's no door!"
"There is a door," Luna replied, feeling for any odd bumps on the wall, "we just don't know where it is."
Ginny joined in, "We need to find it."
Harry argued with her, "No, we can't look for it. We have to ask it to let us in."
Ginny blurted out, "In the name of Godric! This is becoming ridiculous: we're asking a library to let us in."
Luna calmly replied, "It's just like the Room of Requirement. It's a living, breathing thing that needs to be respected."
So please, Harry thought to himself, please let us in. A golden door appeared within the wall and swung open. Thank you! They all trudged through the door and into an eerie corridor that felt
like it belonged in a cave, with its stalagmites and stalactites and odd puddles of goo. For Harry, it reminded him of the cave he had gone to with Dumbledore that fateful night where the elder man had died.
Neville noted, "Bit spooky in here, ain't it?" The walls of the cave rumbled in response. "In a nice way, I mean!" Neville added, trying to appease the library.
The five students soon found a river that split into two branches within the cavern. "Which do we follow?" Ron asked.
Harry studied the rocks of the riverbed before pointing to the one on the right. "This stream has smaller rocks. See? They're more crushed and look like pebbles."
Ginny started to move. "So, we follow the pebbles?"
Harry put out a hand to stop her. "Just the opposite. This seems to be the path most others took, and we already know most other don't even make it to the Library." So Harry shouldered his bag and began walking, with his four friends behind him. It wasn't long before something went wrong though. The river they had taken split once again into two separate, smaller rivers.
Harry knew to continue walking towards the left, but Neville and Ginny stopped in their tracks. In the distance, they could hear a soft lullaby. As they grew closer to the fork in the river, the song only grew more beautiful and enchanting. Suddenly, Neville and Ginny heard their names echoing through the cavern and pushed past Harry to blindly follow the song. The pair were slowly heading into the river on the right, which had become foggy and murky. Ron reached out and grabbed Ginny by the arm, pulling her back to the bank. "Ginny! You have to cover your ears!" Harry had done the same for Neville. But they still seemed incensed, yearning to follow the melodious voices they heard. It took a long time to drag them away to safety.
"What was that?" Neville said, still a bit in a daze.
Harry explained, "It's 'El Naddaha'. They're Arabic sirens."
"When did you learn so much about Egypt?" Ginny asked.
"How do you know all of this?"
"The Dursleys used to give Dudley history books for car rides. He didn't like them, so they were tossed at me. I would have worn those copies ragged, but when Uncle Vern found out I liked them, he burnt them in the fireplace when I wouldn't shovel the driveway during a blizzard."
"Oh," Ginny's mouth formed a perfect oblong oval. An uneasy silence drifted between Ginny and Harry - it seemed they didn't know each other as well as they thought.
Harry continued as navigator, with Luna taking the rear. Before Harry's eyes, he was seeing a large underground maze appear, and the rivers and streams were the roads. Harry tried his best to always go left, but it was hard to do with Ginny questioning his motives. Having two alpha leaders trying to navigate, especially when they were on the verge of a breakup, was a terrible idea.
Five forked rivers later, they were fighting a serpopard, a fearsome leopard with the long, scaly neck of a snake. The creature lunged out to snap out Ron, but Luna fired a swift Sectumsempra.
"If we had just gone right at the last turn, Ron wouldn't have nearly been made a monster snack!" Ginny grilled him.
"They only reason I didn't go right is because the last time you wanted us to, we hit a dead end with collapsing walls!"
"You aren't always right Harry Potter! No one died and made you our leader!"
"I know!" Harry bellowed. "But neither are you!"
"Enough of this!" Neville interceded. "You two need to stop. We're trying to find answers on how to get Hermione back, not outwit each other on who does the best job navigating. We are all working together - there is no leader."
"I'll take over navigating," Ron suggested, and the arguing pair conceded, falling into the middle of the group.
They continued searching through the tunnels, fighting off minor monsters. It felt like hours had passed before they reached the center. After a while, Harry apologized to Ginny.
"I'm sorry Gin. I'm not always right and I can't always be the leader."
"I'm sorry too," Ginny replied. "Neither of us shouldn't have acted the way we did. It's just . . . I'm struggling to . . . I don't know if . . ."
Harry filled in the blank "You don't want to keep dating." Ginny nodded reluctantly. "I agree. I still love you, but maybe it's not as romantic as it once was?"
"Exactly!" Ginny cried. "Of thank Godric, I was worried that I was the only one who realized."
"No, it's been coming on for some time now," Harry confessed. "Still friends?"
"Of course Harry. Mum may be disappointed I'm not marrying you, but you're still a part of our family." They laughed at that, a weight having been lifted off of them.
They entered the center of the cavern maze, which looked like an older version of the Room of Requirement. In one corner, there were a series of crashed planes, pirate ships, and submarines. In another corner, there were towers of boxes filled tea, jewelry, art, weapons, and lots of other trinkets. In the middle there were three portals on rickety stone platforms that sat on an island in the center of the river. The island itself was covered in gold; gold coins, gold goblets, gold swords, gold everything. Each portal was made of brittle and jagged rock with hieroglyphic writings all around the rim. But upon closer inspection, Harry could have sworn the one on the left looked like The Veil from The Department of Mysteries.
"So, we just choose a door then?" Neville surmised
"I guess," Ron shrugged. As they waded through the waters to approach the island, Harry began to hear voices. The water was much deeper than they had expected. They weren't even a quarter of the way in yet and the water was touching Harry's ribcage. At first, he thought it was the portal on the left, but he soon realized that they were coming from the water.
"Is it just me, or is the water chattering?" Ron joked. Before Harry could even respond, something grabbed his foot and pulled him under. "Harry!" Ron screamed out. Unlike his friend, Ron had no idea what he was battling against. The Inferi, hundreds of them, were digging their nails into Harry and dragging him deeper and deeper into the river. Ron dove under and tried to grab Harry, but the Inferi shoved him aside. He swam back to the surface to take a gulp of air. But new Inferi from a different part of the river had spotted the redhead, and they raced towards him in a furious frenzy. All too soon, both friends were being drowned in the foreign waters. Nearby, Neville, Luna, and Ginny were also fending off the undead beings.
Harry was struggling to grab his wand as the Inferi pinned his arms behind him. Just as he was starting to get fog in his brain, one Inferi lost a hold of him and knocked into a few on her side, allowing Harry to move his arm. Without any hesitation, Harry sent a spell that propelled him out of the water and onto the island where Luna was waiting. Ginny was searching for Neville but couldn't find him anywhere. Ron was also lost. Since he couldn't just 'accio' his best friend, Harry was forced to use repetitive fire spells on the swarms of Inferi. After setting almost the whole river on fire, Neville an Ron's bodies emerged from the water. Ron, gasping for air, tried to tread his way over to Harry as quickly as possible while dragging an exhausted Neville away from the zombie-like creatures.
Just as Ron and Neville neared the shore, Harry and Ginny ran to their friends, pulling them out and kicking away the few remaining Inferi. The four trudged up the island of gold towards the three portals before they collapsed on the ground. Luna was now reading through the marking on the stone portals.
"Well, that was fun," Harry said in a flat voice. Ron leaned his head back and gazed up at the three portals.
"Which one do we choose?" Ronald coughed.
Luna spoke up, her voice light. "Not the one on the left; it's like the Veil in the Department of Mysteries."
"How about the one on the right?" Neville suggested.
Harry moved closer to the gate in mention. "If I'm right, that's the Sun Gate."
"Sun Gate?" Ron asked.
"The god Aker guards the Sun Gate, welcoming the dawn each morning and the evening each night," the green-eyed hero explained. "You can see his image on the steps leading up to it. He's the two lions sitting back to back."
"So, dawn on one side, night on the other?" Ginny asked.
Harry nodded, "I think so."
Neville pointed to the sun gate. "Why don't we just go in that one then?"
Ron shook his head. "Time jump. You go into the recent past or recent future."
"We can just use that to save Hermione then!"
Ron argued logically, "I physically sent her back using the oldest type of known magic. It can't be stopped, only undone."
"Plus," Harry added, "the gates are supposed to guard tombs and palaces. We'd be walking into someone's burial and intimate death."
"So it's the middle door for us-" but Luna cut Neville off.
"Shh! Do you hear that?" Ginny sat up suddenly at Luna's words, looking startled. From the other side of the island, the Boy Who Lived could hear a low rumbling and the rustling of gold. Just then, they heard the rapid fluttering of wings, and the sound of a very heavy mass lifting off of the golden ground. They only had a mere moment to glance at each other before the thing came sweeping down towards them.
"Dragon!" Harry screamed, and he ducked as the winged beast flew over his head. He scrambled over to Ron and the others while the dragon flew around the middle portal. "We have to make it to the door. It's our only way of getting out!" Ron nodded in fearful compliance.
"On the count of three." Harry counted aloud, but he could barely hear himself over the angry flapping of the dragon's wings. At three, they all launched forward and ran in a mad dash to the door.
When they were almost there, something very curious happened. Some force within the cavern sent them back to their original starting positions on the island, with the dragon swooping down on them. They diverged, each running their own path around the dragon and to the door. The dragon went after Ginny first, chasing her towards the Sun Door. Once again, upon nearing the door, Ginny was swept back to his first point on the island.
The dragon was very upset, roaring and sending out fiery flames. Harry, Luna, and Neville were almost near the middle door when Harry looked back and saw Ron, who had been badly burnt by the flames. Ginny was helping him run but they weren't going to make it at this rate. With the door mere steps away, Harry ran back to his best friends.
Harry took over and was almost carrying Ron.
Ginny shouted, "I know how the doors work now. Only one of us can go through at a time." Harry tried to go as fast as possible, but it was hard when he was dragging Ron. The dragon had disappeared for the time being, distracted by something only it could see. As they neared the barrier that would bounce them back, Harry pushed Ron forward to Ginny.
"Go. I'll take care of the dragon."
Ron stopped, "I'm not going without you mate."
"We can't all go. If only some of us can, it has to include you." Harry gave Ron another shove forward, and Neville helped grab the injured redhead. "You have to make it right Ron. Bring her back."
"I don't know how." Ron broke down.
"You'll find a way; you have to." Harry ran up and hugged up; and the whole group huddled together. In the intensity of their parting, the dragon dived down towards them, mouth open and about to extinguish a fireball big enough to burn them to a crisp. They all looked up, the dragon mere meters from them, and . . . . .