Journey into the Ages

By J.C. Vascardi

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Disclaimer: All characters and places featured in this story that relates to Harry Potter or Myst are the property of their respective authors/creators and various publishers and/or developers. I'm not profiting on this story and it is not my intent to infringe on anyone's copyright or trademark. The only things about this story that I own are the characters and storylines not featured in the books or other media.

Summary: When Hogwarts becomes completely unrecognizable and unbearable under the dominion of Dolores Umbridge, four of its students manage to escape to a new world that promises them a new life and many adventures. Question is, will they ever be able to get back to their old world and help their friends?

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Chapter One:

Arrival

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I realized the moment I fell into the fissure, that the book would not be destroyed as I had planned. It continued falling into that starry expanse, of which I had only a fleeting glimpse. I have tried to speculate where it might have landed, but I must admit, however, such conjecture is futile. Still questions about whose hands might one day hold my Myst book are unsettling to me. I know my apprehensions might never be allayed and so I close, realizing that perhaps the ending has not yet been written.

- Atrus

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Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

At one time it had been one of Harry's favorite places. The first place that he'd truly thought of as home, as he'd never thought of his mother's sister's house on Privet Drive as home.

Now, however?

It was more like a prison. Dumbledore was gone. Fled from his office with Fawkes to avoid arrest on trumped-up charges of treason and sedition.

It made no sense. Dumbledore had refused the position when it was offered to him after Millicent Bagnold retired. And so Cornelius Fudge was put in the position instead. A man so incompetent that in the first few years of his tenure he was writing to Dumbledore sometimes as many as fifteen times a day for advice.

Maybe that's why Fudge was so intent on the idea that Dumbledore wanted his job. Fudge delegated as much as he possibly could to be done by others and for those matters that he couldn't delegate, he got advice from Dumbledore and then implemented the advice received exactly as he'd received it.

So, Fudge was basically a mouthpiece who spent most of his day with his feet on his desk, relaxing and listening to Celestina Warbeck on the Wizarding Wireless while other people did the work that had traditionally been done by the Minister.

Of course, when Harry and Dumbledore began insisting that Lord Voldemort had returned, Fudge finally began distancing himself. He stopped asking for advice and began implementing his own ideas.

He refused to believe that the Dark Lord had survived and he wasn't going to allow Dumbledore to stir people to support him in taking his job. No, it was the best job he'd ever had in that he could delegate so much of it away and there was nobody who could do anything because he was at the top of the hierarchy.

Dumbledore could still cause problems, however. So he devised a plan to keep the venerable headmaster busy. It was Fudge's hope that he'd be so busy at the school, that he wouldn't have time for anything else.

That's why he installed Dolores Umbridge at Hogwarts. First as Defense Against the Dark Arts professor. Then as Hogwarts High Inquisitor. A position he created for her, as no such position had never existed previously in the school's more than thousand-year history.

And now, with Dumbledore gone, Fudge named Umbridge as the new Headmistress of Hogwarts.

It was this reason that had made Harry start to hate Hogwarts. Why it was beginning to remind him more of a prison than the home he'd come to love over the short span that he'd known of it.

He wasn't alone in his feelings. He was certain that many others agreed with him. Of course, he didn't know if his two best friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, did. From everything he knew of them, he was sure that they'd chafe under the new restrictions put in place by Umbridge after the disbandment of Dumbledore's Army.

The group that Dumbledore himself, despite taking credit for, had had absolutely nothing to do with.

One of those restrictions was that Harry was no longer allowed to see his friends. The only people that Harry had seen for the last two weeks since Dumbledore's flight were Slytherin Blaise Zabini, Ravenclaw Roger Davies, and Hufflepuff Cedric Diggory.

Of course, Harry was sure that if Umbridge had been aware of the fact that Harry and Cedric had become romantically involved or that he'd had sex with Blaise and Roger on several occasions, she would not have assigned them to his work group.

That was one of Umbridge's most recent alterations to daily life at Hogwarts. Students were separated into groups of four. One student from each house who they spent twenty-three hours a day with in different sections of the expansive castle. Set to do whatever menial tasks that Umbridge decided to set them.

The house-elves provided food and each group was allowed outside for fresh air and sunlight for one hour a day. But other than that, their contact outside of their groups was non-existent. Umbridge and her Inquisitorial Squad would check on the groups occasionally, but usually only once a day when it was time for the students to be allowed outside for an hour.

There were simply too many groups scattered throughout the building for observation any closer than that.

So what task was set to Harry and his group? It was daunting and something that would no doubt take ages to complete.

One of the side effects that had resulted in Umbridge finding the Room of Requirement was the revelation that the Room of Hidden Things, as the house-elves who served them meals called it, was not actually a room manifested by the Room of Requirement. It was actually its own separate room… it was just inaccessible from the rest of the school unless the Room of Requirement provided the link.

It was in the Room of Hidden Things that Harry's group had spent the majority of the last two weeks. The house-elves provided their meals and the room did possess a full bathroom, with sink, toilet, and bathtub. Dobby still responded to Harry's calls and would often provide the boys with a few extra snacks if they asked.

And their task? Catalog the contents of the room. A truly daunting task. Just the books alone would probably take fifty years or more, considering how many thousands of them there were.

Harry was working on a pile of them along with Roger. Perhaps unsurprisingly, due to being a Ravenclaw, the books were something that interested Roger more than the others. Although due to the sheer number of them, they tended to alternate which of them would assist Roger each day in going through them. Today it happened to be Harry's day.

About five feet away, Cedric and Blaise were sorting through a mass of old trunks. Some were full of old clothes that harkened back to the early medieval era. Others were full of old hats. There were even a few that were full of jewels. A fortune that would no doubt be of great interest to the goblins.

But rather useless to Harry and the others, given their present circumstances.

Harry had just finished cataloging an extremely dry and boring treatise on the mating habits of slugs when he stretched and sighed as he picked up yet another book. He hoped this one would be mildly more interesting.

The first thing he noticed was the word 'Myst' emblazoned on the front cover. His first thought was that the word was clearly misspelled.

Of course, he knew from other books that he'd cataloged that it wasn't uncommon in some older books for the letter 'I' to be replaced with the letter 'Y'.

One of the most recent examples of this that he'd come across in his cataloging was a copy of 'The Vampyre' by John Polidori. Every dictionary and lexicon that Harry had ever seen would say that it should be spelled as vampire. The same could be said for the word mist.

There was no writing other than that one word on the front cover and flipping it over, Harry could see that the same held true for the back. Knowing that Umbridge would expect a detailed listing of each book, he sighed and opened the book to see if he could discover who it was written by and what it was about.

Of course, no sooner did he open the book was he met with something he didn't expect. Something which he hadn't seen in any of the other books that he'd cataloged thus far.

Emblazoned on the first page of the book was a small rectangular window that had a moving picture in it. As a wizard, he was accustomed to moving pictures, but this one seemed different somehow.

As he watched, the picture did a flyover of what looked like a vast ocean, before on island came into view through the mist. He could see buildings erected on it. The image finally stopped on a dock beside a sunken ship.

"Curious," Harry said, making Roger look up, even as Harry reached out and laid his fingers on the image on the page.

He knew the moment he did it that he'd done something that he probably shouldn't have done. A feeling similar to portkey travel suddenly washed over him and in an instant, he was gone from Hogwarts.

"Harry!" Roger exclaimed as he watched his lover disappear from the room.

This drew Cedric's and Blaise's attention as they both looked up to where Harry and Roger were sitting. Only now they could only see Roger. There was no sign of Harry.

"Where's Harry?" Cedric asked, as he came over, thinking at first that maybe he'd walked behind one of the huge stacks of books, some of which towered over their heads by several feet.

Shaking his head, Roger said, "I don't know. He was there a moment ago and then he touched the picture in that book and he just faded away."

As he said this, Roger got up, picked up the book and examined it more closely. He refrained from touching the picture, however, as he turned the page and looked at the writing on the next page.

His eyes widened by what he saw. He recognized the script. They'd begun learning it in Ancient Runes at the beginning of the school year. Before Umbridge decided to give up any semblance of Hogwarts still being a school, cancel all classes, and fire all of the professors.

The professors were still in the building, as Umbridge didn't trust them not to try to find Dumbledore or rally support against her, Fudge, and the Ministry. They were just prevented from teaching. And were segregated the same way that the students were. Except that the professors were kept in even smaller groups of two instead of four.

"This is D'ni," Roger asked.

"Who or what is a D'ni?" Blaise asked. He was taking Ancient Runes, the same as Roger. Of the four them, the only one in the room that hadn't been taking it was Harry. Of course, Blaise was only a fifth year and Professor Babbling didn't start covering D'ni until seventh year.

"They're an ancient race," Cedric said, as he recalled his own lessons. "Believed to be magical or at least semi-magical. None of the accounts that I've ever read spoke of them being able to cast spells as we can. However, they were known for what they called The Art."

"What's that?"

"The Art is the act of writing books," Roger answered. "But not just any book. They could write books which linked to what they called ages. That is other worlds. From what I've read, they had two types of books. Descriptive books which created the initial link to an age, by describing the details of the world. There was never more than one descriptive book for an age. There could, however, be multiple linking books, which could be more widely distributed, giving more people access to the age that was created."

Cedric nodded. "The descriptive books tended to be very large and cumbersome volumes that nobody would want to have to carry around. The linking books were thinner, lighter, and far more portable." He paused here and then asked, "You think this is a linking book?"

Roger nodded. "Yes, I think it links to an age called Myst and that's where Harry is now. Unfortunately, unless he finds a linking book there that will bring him back here, he's stuck there, potentially alone, as I have no idea if this Myst is populated."

"I don't know about you two," Blaise said, "but I'd really rather not have to try to explain any of this and Harry's absence to Umbridge."

"True," Roger said. "Of course, this could be our chance to escape and finally get out from Umbridge's thumb."

"Can we take this linking book with us when we go?" Blaise asked. "I ask since it stayed here when Harry left. It won't be much of an escape if Umbridge finds it and follows us. She's already poisoned this world. It would be a shame to let her poison another."

"What about everybody else in the castle?" Cedric asked. "It's not really fair for us to escape to a new world and leave them all behind with Umbridge."

"Perhaps not, but the fact that this book is here," Roger said, "would suggest that the D'ni obviously had a way of getting here. So, maybe we can go to this Myst and find a way to help the others. It'd be better than staying here, however. And we can't do anything to help them now."

"True," Cedric said. "Well, we should take some things with us then. The food and drinks we've got, our spare clothes and our camping equipment," as he said this he motioned towards their camp.

Umbridge didn't even allow them proper beds. Instead, they were all sleeping on the floor in makeshift bedrolls.

"Okay, Blaise, start packing up the food," Roger said. "Cedric pack up our camp and I'll pack up our clothes."

Blaise and Cedric nodded as the three boys set to work.

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Meanwhile, Harry found himself standing alone on the dock he'd seen in the picture in the book. He realized that the book was clearly some kind of portkey, although unlike every other portkey he'd ever used, it didn't come with him when he'd used it.

"Oh shit," Harry said. "That means I might be trapped here… wherever here is."

Looking around, he could see that he was standing on a small dock. To his right was a sunken ship, only the crow's nest, several ropes, and a couple of the masts were above water. Looking down over the edge of the dock, Harry could see the rest of the ship under the water.

Straight ahead at the end of the dock, he could see a podium with some kind of lever on it, along with two sets of stairs leading up. The second led to the top of a small plateau surrounded by a railing. Beyond that, there was a giant gear coming out of the ground.

Turning to his left, he saw an alcove in the side of the small cliff of grass and moss-covered stone that the first set of stairs led up to. There was what looked like a sheet of bent metal in the alcove. Moving a bit closer to it he realized that it was a door, as it slid open to reveal a dark tunnel beyond.

"Well, there's nothing for it. If I'm going to figure out where I am, I'm gonna have to explore. And I'm a Gryffindor. So come on, Harry, suck it up, be brave, hope there's nothing in there that's gonna want to kill you."

Pulling out his wand, momentarily wondering if his magic would even work here, he muttered, "Lumos."

He was pleased to see when his wand tip lit up and provided him with some extra light.

"Well, at least I still have my magic. Would suck to lose that."

Entering the tunnel he found stairs moving down underground. When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he found himself in a large circular room with a large round basin full of shimmering water.

Seeing what looked like a button on the side of the pool, Harry knelt down slightly and pushed it. He jumped slightly when he heard some sort of sound that he couldn't identify. Looking at the pool, however, he realized that the water had disappeared.

Under where the water had been there was a grid with knobs. He wasn't sure what it was. Pushing the button again, the grid disappeared and the water came back.

"Huh, its some sort of holographic imager. Cool."

Moving around the room, he spotted a second, identical button to the first on the opposite side of the pool, although pressing it did nothing. He did, however, spy what looked like a note affixed to the wall next to the stairs.

"Let's see here. Settings – Dimensional Imager. Topographical Extrusion Test… 40. Marker Switch Diagram… 47. And Water Turbulent Pool… 67. It must currently be set to that last one."

Spotting a blinking green button near the top left corner of the note, Harry reached up and pressed it. A mechanical whirring noise sounded, as the entire panel that the note was on rolled up to reveal a panel with two screens that said 6 and 7. Beneath the screens were two pairs of up and down arrows. There was also another red button in the bottom right corner.

Switching the numbers to 40 and pressing the red button, he turned around and pressing the button again, a topographical map of the island he'd seen on the flyover on the book appeared. Only without any of the buildings he'd seen on it. Which made sense, since this was just a projection of topography.

Going back over to the control panel, Harry switched it to 47. This time it projected an image of the pedestal with the lever on top that he'd seen at the end of the dock.

"Well, I guess that must be a marker switch. Whatever that is."

Since it didn't seem as though there was anything else he could do in the room, he moved over to the stairs and headed back up to the dock, extinguishing his wand as he moved back out into the sunlight.

He couldn't help but spend a few moments leaning against the edge of the alcove containing the door to the underground chamber just enjoying the sun and the fresh sea air. Spending twenty-three hours a day locked inside the Room of Hidden Things was not fun.

Sure, he had his boyfriend and two lovers to talk to. And they had sex every other night or so. But it was still not the same as being out in the open. Even for that one hour a day that they were allowed out, Umbridge or the Inquisitorial Squad—which now included a group of corrupt Aurors from the Ministry—only led them to the nearest exit from the castle.

For Harry's group, this had been a large balcony on the side of one of the towers on the seventh floor of the castle. Running from their guards wasn't really an option as the only way to escape was to run through the halls of Hogwarts, where they'd surely be caught, or to jump from the balcony, where the fall would most likely kill them.

They were all allowed to keep their wands while actually in the Room of Hidden Things, as depriving them of their magic for twenty-three hours a day was a step too far even for Umbridge apparently.

Their wands were confiscated before they left the room, however, so they couldn't use magic to aid their escape. Their wrists were also kept tightly bound together by iron manacles, while heavy iron chains were placed around their waists and ankles, binding the four of them together.

Harry sighed. "Well, I'm free from Umbridge, although now it seems that I'm all alone here on this strange island. Away from Cedric, Blaise, Roger, all my friends… I'm not sure which is worse."

Feeling tears threatening to fall, he wiped his eyes, pushed away from the edge of the alcove and moved further down the dock. He wasn't sure what they did yet, but he flipped up the lever on the marker switch as he passed.

Going up the second set of stairs towards the giant gear, he found another marker switch, which he flipped up, before heading back down to the stone walkway above the docks. Seeing another short staircase that led up to the path that ran in front of the two buildings that he could see, he headed that way.

It was as he came to the top of the stairs that he noticed a note lying on the grass next to the path. Bending down to pick it up, he read it.

Catherine,

I've left for you a message of utmost importance in our fore-chamber beside the dock. Enter the number of Marker Switches on this island into the imager to retrieve this message.

Yours,

Atrus

Pocketing the note and musing on the fact that it somehow had not been blown away by the breeze coming off the ocean, Harry said, "Hmm. There were clearly at least two people on this island at some point. I guess I should make note of the number of these marker switches. I know there's at least two."

Looking up and spotting another one next to a nearby building, he added, "Well, make that three."

Before he could progress any further, he was startled, but not at all upset, when a very familiar voice called out, "Harry? Harry, where are you?!"

Turning around, Harry smiled brightly as he saw Cedric standing on the dock. Moving quickly down the stairs, Harry jumped down from the stone walkway above the dock and grabbed Cedric in a bear hug, before sealing their lips together in a kiss.

For his part, Cedric just wrapped his arms around his boyfriend and returned the kiss, very happy to see that Harry was okay.

As their kiss finally ended, Cedric said, "Oh Harry am I glad to see you. I was so worried when you disappeared."

"I'm glad to see you, Ric. Not sure where we are, but I guess anywhere is better than Hogwarts right now."

Cedric grinned. "Very true. As for where we're in another world."

At Harry's confused look, Cedric laughed and said, "I'll explain more fully, but Roger and I think this world is called Myst, as you remember from the cover of the book that you found. It's an artifact of the D'ni… an ancient race that you'd learn about in seventh year if you'd taken Ancient Runes."

"Ah, okay. Well, I look forward to hearing what you know then."

"It's not much. Beyond a few basics which are thought by some to be nothing more than a fairy tale, about the only thing I do know is the D'ni alphabet and numerals. Still, I guess that's better than nothing."

Harry simply nodded, as he and Cedric walked over to the stairs off the dock. Harry's hand was in the right rear pocket of Cedric's trousers—the one furthest away from where Harry was standing to Cedric's left—while Cedric rested his left forearm on Harry's left shoulder.

"So what's that thing?" Cedric asked as they walked past the dock's marker switch.

"Apparently it's called a marker switch. I don't know what it does yet, but I've seen three of them on the island so far. And I found this note."

Pulling the note from his pocket he showed it to Cedric as they sat down on the steps.

"Huh, well, I guess we'll have to keep an eye out for these switches and how many of them there are. I know this message that Atrus is talking about isn't really meant for us, but it might give us some useful clues about this place."

Harry nodded. "Yeah, that's what I was thinking." After a moment's pause, he asked, "So are the others coming?"

Before Cedric could answer, Blaise appeared out of thin air further down the docks where first Harry and then Cedric had appeared. Seeing them, Blaise smiled and moved closer, as Roger appeared a moment later, his hand inside the messenger bag he had slung over his shoulder.

As Roger joined the others, Blaise asked, "So, was our hypothesis correct?"

Roger nodded. "Yup," as he pulled the book that had brought them all to Myst out of the bag at his side. "Apparently as long as it was in the messenger bag that I was wearing, it came with me when I used it."

"Cool," Blaise said. "Well, as long as there isn't another copy of that book in the Room of Hidden Things, at least we know we don't have to worry about Umbitch and her Insquisijerks showing up."

"Thank Merlin," all four of them said in unison.

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To be continued…

And there's Ch1 of 'Journey into the Ages'. Yeah, I wasn't really expecting to write another new story, but the idea for this came to me because due to a graphics card issue, most of my computer games won't run. Well, at least the more recent ones. I did manage to get my old copy of the original 1993 version of Myst to work, so between that and watching a few Let's Plays on YouTube, I got the idea for this story.

This will be an alternate universe, as there will very likely be a few places on Myst Island that do not appear in the game.

Such as one of the things that's no doubt confused fans for years... as in where exactly are the living quarters that Atrus and his family lived in for the roughly thirty-odd years they lived on Myst? Surely there are bedrooms, at least one bathroom, and a kitchen somewhere on the island, even if they never actually appeared in the game.

Also, I'm changing the game's official timeline a bit. According to it, Atrus was born in the year 9411 by the D'ni calendar, which is apparently the year 1755 by the human calendar. Which means he should be long dead by 1996 when this story is set. So I'm bringing the D'ni calendar forward by 200 years, so Atrus was born in 1955, meaning he's only 41 years old, instead of 241.