A/N: Mwahahahaheeheeee......yes, this would obviously be part six, coming as it does after part five. Do enjoy, and please try not to torch me with butane--I know I'm mean and nasty and all that rot, but if you kill me you'll never know how this ends. ::evil grin::

The Truth (Some of It): Silversleeves

Harry was feeling incredibly dazed. Just how the horde had fought their way through the army of zombies, he didn't know, but the flood of motley creatures pouring into the already packed Hall was making him dizzy. The guests, frightened and confused, shrank back against the far wall, but it quickly became apparent that the throng, whatever it was, wasn't harmful. The cause of the knocking, an incredibly well-dressed giantess whose head fairly scraped the ceiling, was doing her best to stay out of the way and not stomp on everyone at the back of the Hall.

Ron pulled Harry to his feet, dragging he and Hermione out of the throng's path. The three perched on one of the long tables, watching with incredulity as the entire army crowded themselves inside in less than five minutes. The shutters and doors were rattling harder than ever, but as Dumbledore still seemed confident in the school's defenses, Harry chose not to worry about that for the moment. He watched the Headmaster, whose expression had grown far less grave since the arrival of the mass, and wondered with an almost surreal calm what on earth could possibly happen now. He half felt as though he were in a dream, and would wake up at any moment to find his face stuck to his Transfiguration book and Professor McGonagall glaring at him fit to kill.

Awaken he did not, and presently he came to realize that the Hall had quieted, and Dumbledore was speaking.

"Well, I won't pretend this entire situation isn't something of a shock (to say the very least), and I'm certain I'm not alone in wondering just what exactly is going on here. I therefore propose that we sit down and work out the answer to that very question, before proceeding with any counteraction on those outside."

This seemed reasonable enough to Harry (who was by now so confused that Hermione's Arithmancy homework sounded like a walk in the park), but many of the parents let out outraged cries.

"What are you talking about, man?" thundered Pansy Parkinson's father. "That mob'll be in here any minute now, we can't be caught standing around yarking like a load of housewives." His arms were crossed and he was glaring, but any further outbursts were silenced by an extremely well-aimed Petrificus charm shot his way by Mrs. Finnigan.

Harry swore he saw a spark of amusement rise momentarily in Dumbledore's blue eyes. "Have a little more faith in your school's defenses, Conrad. This castle was built during the time of some of the most terrible wizarding wars imaginable; I would certainly hope it could withstand a half hour's worth of assault."

The parents settled back, apparently mollified, and Dumbledore continued serenely.

"Now, since I have absolutely no idea as to the nature or purpose of our unexpected guests, I shall turn the floor over to those who I feel most likely to hold that information. Lorna, Remus, Sirius, if you will." He swept a slight bow, and the Marauders, standing near the doors, exchanged nervous glances.

"Er, well," said Doors, after being rather conspicuously elbowed by Sirius, "It's sort of a long story, but I'll try and keep it short." She was looking paler than ever, Harry noticed, but her eyes were glowing even brighter and greener than usual. She sighed, ran a hand through her limp bangs, and said,

"All right. Most of you know that I was, well, dead over the summer. You've probably wondered why I'm not now, but before I go into that I have to tell you all something else that you probably didn't know, and it'll explain a lot about this whole mess in here." She swept a hand at the medley of magical creatures, all of whom rolled their eyes.

"See, there's this long-standing ritual among magical non-humans to hold a massive party every Midsummer Eve, and basically make fun of all you humans. It's held by a different person in a different place every year, and this year it was supposed to be my turn. Obviously I couldn't take that turn, seeing as I was pushing up daisies in the cemetery out back of St. Mungo's, but as soon as all this lot heard I'd come back, they started plotting a way for me to pay my debt and hold a party anyway."

Doors paused, looking as guilty as it was possible for her to look. Sirius was pointedly looking elsewhere, but Lupin gave her a nudge.

"Er...Well, that's where we sort of cooked up something mean," she went on, slight laughter in her voice despite her self-reproach. "See, I figured that since most of us love disasters and this wedding was likely to be the biggest one of the century--"

The entire Lockhart clan "humphed" in unison.

"--that it would more than pay my debt to invite them here and let them do what they would. They were waiting to crash this party long before old Moldywarts and his army of goose-stepping mummies showed up, and when he did I called them here anyway, figuring that at least they could take out a couple of those maggot-eaters on the way in."

There came a snort, and a tall, vividly dressed Gypsy woman fought her way to the front of the crowd. Oddly, her black eyes were sparkling merrily, and she laughed before she spoke.

"Lorna, they really didn't tell you, did they?" she asked, shooting a glare at a small gaggle of nearby leprechauns. Doors looked at her curiously.

"Lorna, we knew someone other than your friends had been dabbling in the sorcery of the one you call Silversleeves, and we knew at once when he succeeded in resurrecting your Dark Lord. Those dili over there were supposed to tell you what we'd seen, but obviously that never happened."

Doors stared at the woman. "You people know about this?" she said, rounding furiously on the leprechauns, who backed away. "Why didn't you tell us?" she demanded, disbelief etched across her face.

The leprechauns exchanged glances. "Well, we don't take after you for nothing," the one Harry knew as Conn said sheepishly.

Doors smacked her forehead and groaned. "Impaled on my own sword," she muttered. "You little idiots, you of all people ought to know how serious something like that is!" She was looking at the small creatures with an unusual gravity in her gaze, and Harry felt his stomach drop as his early dreadful suspicions were confirmed. "Don't you know how the Silversleeves potion works? That may look like Voldemort out there, but if it really is I'll eat my corsage."

The leprechauns (and everyone else) were looking extremely nervous by now, as Doors unconsciously infused her own worry into her voice and spread it like a blanket over the Hall. She glanced at Lupin, who sighed.

"The Silversleeves potion does two things," he said wearily, his voice echoing in the sudden silence. "Done correctly, it will work as it did on Lorna, and return the subject as they were just prior to their death."

Harry saw Snape stiffen out of the corner of his eye. Lupin swallowed and continued.

"The other way it may be used--the far easier way--is to reanimate the corpse with whatever spirit is handy. Seeing as Sirius and I were the first people to use the spells correctly in over two thousand years, I'm assuming that Gilderoy did not. Which means we have no idea what's really out there."

Silence fell, as the press mulled this over in their minds. Several of them--mostly the parents of Slytherins--clearly knew a thing or two about this Silversleeves business, and the color drained from all their faces as the full implications of Lupin's words dawned on them.

"The tachiben chachni," whispered Lucius Malfoy. He had been looking wickedly happy up to this point, but at Lupin's explanation he went whither than Nearly Headless Nick. Narcissa looked as though she were about to faint.

"The what?" demanded McGonagall. She'd somehow managed to change back into her natural habiliments, and was far more able to snap at people now that she no longer looked like an overgrown powderpuff.

Lupin sighed, and the crowd flinched as a specially hard thump sounded on the great front doors. The giantess gave out a growl and flexed her massive fingers.

"It's rather complicated," he said, smiling somewhat twistedly. "As Lucius said, it's the law of tachiben chachni--you'd have to ask Lorna what it meant; it's some sort of Romani phrase. You see, reanimating a corpse doesn't just create an evil spirit free-for-all--deciding which spirit gets the body is by no means a first-come, first-served process. Some spirits are far more powerful than others, and should you join a strong one with a formerly powerful body.....well, you'll have a serious problem on your hands."

"Well, then...wouldn't that mean Voldemort would just get his old body back?" Ginny asked timidly, wringing her expensive purple robes in her hands. "I mean...he was the most powerful Dark wizard and everything...." She trailed off.

"Ginny," Doors said softly. "We're talking spirits here, spirits of every discontented witch or wizard who, for whatever reason, couldn't make it as ghosts. And if Voldemort's body were open to the most powerful of these, it would likely be someone a bit....older..."

Realization dawned on Ginny's face, and she let out a faint squeak before tottering backward and being caught by her mother. The rest of the Hall, not far behind her, gave a universal shudder. Nobody wanted to say it, as though speaking the name aloud would make it so, but after several moments of extremely uncomfortable silence Sirius ventured a whisper.

"Salazar Slytherin," he murmured, his voice quiet and yet almost deafening. The silence closed around it once more like a shroud, the roaring and pounding outside somehow muted. Harry thought dimly that Voldemort--or whoever he was--had to be off planning something really horrible for them all, or he'd surely have been in there by now.

"Not just Slytherin, either," said Doors. "From the looks of things he's been playing Silversleeves as well, which means it's likely that Voldemort and Grindelwald and maybe Ashren de an Dachaidh himself are out there somewhere, planning ways to eat us all."

And with that, the full, horrible magnitude of their plight descended on Harry like a ton of lead.

"So what do we do about it?" he asked.

The entire crowd turned to stare at him. "What do you mean, 'What do we do about it'?" snarled Lucius Malfoy after a moment, his arm around his wife's shoulders. "We're all going to die, that's what! Do you have any idea what Slytherin did to those who opposed him?"

"Well, honestly," said Harry, affronted, and also highly uncomfortable being stared at by so many people. "We've got to do something, haven't we? I mean, we're not going to just sit around here and wait for the zombies to come eat us."

"Oh?" Lucius's expression was so frighteningly like his son's used to be that Harry shivered. "And just what are you planning to do, Potter?" he asked, his lip curling in typical Malfoy fashion. "You've saved the world more often than anyone else in this room, and I'm sure we'd all like to hear your brilliant plan for outwitting that lot outside."

If the crowd had been staring hard at Harry before, it was nothing to the gaze they lavished on him now--one could tell that Lucius's words rang truer than most would like to admit, and deep inside every witch and wizard present felt that if Harry Potter, their symbolic talisman against the forces of Darkness, failed, no one would ever succeed.

"Bugger," Harry said with feeling, wishing desperately for something, anything to distract the crowd's attention. We shall now take this time to remind the audience of the old adage 'Be careful what you wish for, because you might just get it.' For no sooner had he thought this than a shout cut through the silence, effectively shattering the throng's reverie and much else besides.

"Father, you leave him alone!"

Draco Malfoy was struggling through the sea of people, his pale face flushed, grey eyes alight with an almost manic gleam. Harry groaned inwardly, knowing nothing Malfoy could say was going to improve his position, but even he had to wince at what issued next from the Slytherin's mouth.

"Potter's friends with my true love, and that makes him...well...not my enemy!" He glanced at Hermione, who paled to the hue of old oatmeal, and tottered so violently it looked as though she were about to faint.

"Oh, GAWD," muttered Harry.

Let us draw a curtain of charity over the rest of the scene. Please.

****

In the midst of the chaos that followed, Harry somehow found himself sitting concealed behind a long table with the Marauders and, for some strange reason, Crookshanks. All three of them looked very torn between anxiety and amusement, though Sirius was obviously leaning far more toward the latter. Harry regarded them all in a daze.

"Harry, I realize you've got to be incredibly confused," said Doors, looking unusually grave and still rather pale.

"Right on, Agatha Christie," he muttered, wiping his forehead.

It was a mark of just how worried Doors was that she didn't smack him one, and this fact boded not at all well with Harry. The only time he'd ever seen his aunt worried was right before she'd gone and gotten herself killed, and this situation was immeasurably worse than that had been. He looked at her steadily, feeling that meeting her eyes was like trying to stare down a hippogriff.

Doors glanced at Lupin. "You think we'd better tell him?" she asked, an odd tone in her voice.

"What, you mean all of it?" said Lupin, who was looking very grave indeed. Doors nodded. She and Lupin looked at one another for a long moment, as though reaching some silent agreement.

Doors crossed her legs, resting her elbows on her knees and picking absently at her hem. "Harry, you know how I said when the time was right you'd know why it was I was allowed to come back?" she said, not looking at him.

Harry nodded, a strange fluttering in the pit of his stomach, as though he were standing on the edge of some great precipice and in grave danger of falling over.

His aunt raised her eyes to his, first glancing at Lupin, who shot a look at Sirius. She sighed.

"I guess you've figured out by now that I'm not totally human--I mean, look at me, I've got pointed ears, for God's sake. But what I am.....well...."

She pointed at his pocket, where the Neverstone now glowed brightly through the fabric. Startled, Harry pulled it out and set it on the floor in front of him.

"You asked me once how I got hold of that thing," Doors said, the light reflecting off her slanted eyes. "It's true that on this earth Neverstones are extremely rare, and I seriously doubt even I could lay hold of one if I went looking. Which is why I got this one directly from the manufacturers."

Harry dragged his eyes from the light-swirled orb and stared at her. "W-What?" he demanded, not sure he had heard her right. "Are you telling me that how you got hold of this thing has something to do with why you could come back?" It made sense--as much as anything could make sense right now--but Harry wasn't taking anything for granted.

"It does indeed," said Doors, her eyes flashing momentarily with something like their normal glee. "I didn't go into much detail with you about just what sort of creatures inhabit Naevaerland, and there's no time now, but suffice it to say that the Guardians of the Gate of Heaven are--er--different. They're called Sidhe, and they're immortal child-spirits whose sole function is to watch over Naevaerland and control what goes in or out. It's a damn good thing they're not charged with more, for they live to have fun, and are so irresponsible it's a wonder they manage to do what little they're appointed." There was a definite laughter in her voice now, and Harry got the feeling Doors was far more fond of these creatures than she wanted to let on.

"So, what about them?" he prompted, glancing nervously at the boiling ceiling.

Doors sighed, obviously searching for the right words. "Harry, you know how magic is sort of a tricky, unplottable thing--nobody knows just what makes a wizard a wizard instead of a Muggle, or why a line of Muggles will suddenly produce a magical child."

Harry nodded.

"Well, what hardly anybody knows is that there is a sort of sub-species within the magical community, who, for some strange reason, have inherited something that makes them.....not human. I told you about it once, when you asked what chooses a person to fight the Phantoms, and now I'll tell you exactly why."

She stopped, surveying Harry keenly, and Harry got the distinct impression she was sizing him up to see how he was taking all this. Apparently she was satisfied, for she continued quietly.

"Sidhe never grow up, but that doesn't mean they don't find the means to multiply--they scatter a bit of themselves into every generation of magical babies born, completely at random, leaving some of them....well....like me. Genetically we ought to be fully human, but because of some small alteration to our souls, we're not. And as the Sidhe are guardians of their world, so we must be to this one. Which is why we fight the Phantoms."

Harry exhaled noisily, not sure how to handle this. Finding out his aunt wasn't exactly a human being would be a bit to deal with under normal circumstances, and in the middle of this.....well.....But he had to try.

"And this has what to do with why you're not dead?" he asked, somehow managing to keep his voice steady. He could feel his eyes were round as dinner plates, and he knew that most of the color had to have leeched out of his face.

Doors and Lupin exchanged brief glances. "That's a bit more complicated, and I'll try to keep it brief," said Doors. "You see, when most people--like your parents--die, they go to either Heaven, hell, purgatory, or limbo. It's only natural; they came from Heaven originally, and so they're going to go back to it or one of its...offices. But for people like me, people who have the souls of Sidhe--we've never been to Heaven, and we can never go there, not for long. When we die we return to the world we came from, the world of Naevaerland, and while passage through the Gate is final, passage onto it isn't. You understand what I'm saying?"

Harry's face said quite clearly that he was woefully lost, but he knew he'd better take a stab at it. "So....you're saying that death for humans is pretty final, but death for...people like you...isn't?" he ventured timidly.

Doors grinned, clearly relieved. "Got it in one," she said. "Remus here knew--at least somewhat--what I was, and that bringing me back, while hard, could be done. And I'm right glad he did it, too," she added, elbowing Lupin in the ribs. "I wouldn't want to miss this for anything."

Harry snorted, feeling some of the numbness leave him. "Which brings us back to the whole point," he said, ducking as a chair went flying over the table and smashed on the wall beyond. He could hear Malfoy and his father having a terrific row somewhere in the Hall, punctuated by furious grunts from Dudley, and certainly not being helped any by Uncle Vernon's furious bellows. Harry reflected that poor Hermione was going to need a lifetime of therapy after this one. "What do we do about that mob out there?"

To his great surprise, Doors grinned even wider. "Oh, we'll manage," she said, her voice so wickedly merry Harry thought it ought to be outlawed. "With a little help from some little friends." She reached behind her and set something on the floor beside the still-glowing Neverstone--a very small creature, with shocking green hair and bright green eyes, of the sort that Harry had seen riding the enormous chickens through the tangle of their new....reinforcements. The creature looked up at him, grinned, took a swig off a small bottle, and let out an astonishingly loud belch.

"What the hell is that thing?" he asked incredulously, as the thing sat down with a cheerful flop and proceeded to down the rest of its drink.

Doors snickered. "This, my dear nephew, is a Failte," she said, her eyes glowing with unholy glee. "And he and all his kind are going to teach that load of swots out there just why you don't take on the forces of Naevaerland.

"Somehow I knew that was coming," said Harry. He had no chance to say anything more, however, for at that moment about five things happened--Hermione, paler than death and blindly swinging a candlestick, came sailing over the table and landed with a crunch, Malfoy and Dudley (who were pummeling the living tar out of one another) at her heels, the giantess let out a shriek, and, with an almighty crash that shook Hogwarts from dungeon to tower, the great front doors burst inward in a rain of splinters that blasted even into the Great Hall.

Hogwarts had company.

Muahahahaha........::evil author laughter:: I know, I'm just being awful about these cliffhangers, but they're so much fun for me. I promise, you will see more of Dudley and Malfoy (and a very ill Hermione) in the next part, as well as a load of Failte in action. ::looks wickedly delighted at the thought of writing one of her much-loved but little-used battle scenes:: I also caution you that the next portion of this opus is going to take the meaning of the word 'chaos' to new and--er--glorious heights. ^_^