Chapter 5.

The Interpretation of Dreams

The remnant of our waking thoughts and deeds move and stir within the soul.

--Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.

A/N: Yes, Draco and Ginny are getting back together!! You may notice that I gave all the Malfoys angels' names-- Gabriel (Draco's great-grandfather,) Michel (his grandfather,) and of course Lucius. Snerk. Klaus and Cisselinde von Drachen are Narcissa's parents, Draco's other (and only living) grandparents.

Wow. Who would've thought I'd have so many German readers. And readers who speak German. Um, there will be mistakes. Probably even more when they get to Linz, and in several hundred pages they will... all criticism welcome... btw, the Bavaria vs. Austria thing is explained in the Tour Guide. That will be Chapter 14, posted *very* soon. Chapter 15, which gets back to the plot, will probably be posted at the same time. After that, the next several chapters will be posted a lot sooner, too.:)

Thanks to all the reviewers!

Ooh!!!! Stareyes is starting to do illustrations for JOTH... I just saw her first drawing of Draco at the clock tower and a couple more.... OMG, OMG, words fail me. Leather boots are involved. Y'all are going to love her stuff, I guarantee. Find it at:

http://www.artisticalley.org/reviews/showthread.php?s=&threadid=6045

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Ginny's steps halted. Her breath was coming very hard and fast through a painful stitch in her side. She wiped the sweaty strands of hair from her face. Had she heard her brother's voice? Had she seen the carriage retreating from her?

Or had it all been an illusion... a trick of some kind?

She glanced around. She was standing beneath a enormous oak tree, and the forest was very silent around her. It was a waiting silence. A listening silence, as if some brooding force held its breath. She glanced from side to side, uncertainly. The branches were much too dense overhead for the full moon to penetrate. Or maybe even the sun-- I don't know how long I've been here, time seems to have no meaning, really--

And an icy chill rippled down her back. She was no longer on the path. She could see no trace of it. Only the titanic sentinels of trees in all directions. No. No. Oh, no--

Ginny leaned against one of the trees, thinking, trying to retrace her steps. The feel of the bark was like touching living flesh. She stepped back with a gasp. But the tree had turned monstrous, its limbs writhing in anger at her presumption. It swelled to such enormous heights that she could no longer see the top. She clutched at the silver locket around her neck. The tree fell back. Its branches folded inwards, and it was silent.

She'd done exactly what she had been warned not to do. She'd lost the path. The thought came to her in a way that was almost calm.

Well, there was nothing to do but keep walking. Ginny moved beneath the branches of the tree that had seemed to threaten her, and it stood silent and motionless.

The trees were shifting and changing. Their trunks were actually moving. Sort of-- she squinted-- running into each other. The fabric of everything she saw stretched, the colors of green and brown and black sliding together like wet watercolors. The fabric of reality itself was going to rip any second, and something great and terrible would come through, its monstrous clawed hands reaching for her--

--or was it only the forest, seen through her swimming eyes, her terrified tears?--

Inside the locket, a soothing voice whispered in her ear. The same one she'd heard earlier. The parchment. You need it now, don't you? You need to touch it. To touch the jewels. Her hands crept up to her neck. Yes. Yes, my young one... that's right...now open it... And in the moments before the shrieking panic claimed her completely, she parted the halves of the silver locket with a fingernail and grasped the folded parchment inside. A very faint warning voice said that this might not be such a good idea. She ignored it. Ginny pressed the glowing rubies against her fingertips as if she were going under for the third time in a monstrous ocean, and they were life preservers bobbing on the waves before her.

The world steadied itself, slowly, slowly. Became understandable again. Gravity worked, and Ginny heard the beating of her heart, the frightened sound of her own breathing. She felt almost foolish for having been so afraid. There was nothing to threaten her here. Nothing to fear but fear itself. She'd follow the stream and find her way out; she could hear its chattering sound coming from somewhere to her left, surely she must be almost through the forest.

And on the other side of the Ogham wall, Draco felt the heat pulsing through the Kitap-an Düs, stroked its pages, and linked once more to Ginny Weasley. But he was not the only one who had.

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There was none of the numbing shock he had felt the other times he tried to go through, none of the tremendous force barring his entry. It resisted him for a moment and then gave way, the spells parting to allow him access, snapping into a re-formed crystalline structure as soon as he'd passed through them. Draco stood on the path in the middle of the forest, blinking at the weird sourceless light, looking around him at the silent sentinels of trees. He'd only been here once before, he realized. That time in first year when he'd had detention with Potter and Longbottom and Granger, and that insane oaf Hagrid had dragged them all right into the path of Voldemort. Draco couldn't stop a sick shiver from going through him at the memory; even from all those years ago, it still had the power to frighten him, to make him remember how he'd slumped to the ground behind a tree, sobbing and shaking, praying that none of the rest would find him, thinking, I know who that is, who it's got to be; I could never follow that, I could never believe in that... I'm only eleven years old, don't make me decide, Father, don't make me swear... What a foolish child he'd been, sometimes. Strange, too, that the memory could be coming back so strongly to him now.

Sighing, he stopped and opened the Kitap-an Düs. It moved in his hand as if alive, and he almost dropped it in shock. He could feel the incredible power running through it now; he'd had enough training with magical objects to sense it, but he rather thought that any Muggle could have felt it. The only way to find Ginny was through it. Draco was suddenly sure of that. He sensed her vaguely, but he couldn't have said precisely where she was. But he was also, all at once, rather afraid to touch what he held. The book was more powerful here, much more powerful. It only made sense, he supposed, that a Book of Dreams tapped into some sort of power source in the Dreamtime. But it also made him wonder, for the first time, exactly what its powers were.Well, no time to think about that now.

He steeled his courage and opened the book. The rubies within glowed so brightly that they left little spots on the insides of his eyelids when he closed his eyes. Like a blind man, Draco reached out his hand to touch the page. He immediately fell through it.

Falling. Falling. Tumbling through dimensionless space. Tossed by a vast, indifferent power. Pieces of his memory falling through the void at wildly different speeds as he tried to clutch at them. Random dreams thrown out by this impersonal energy as if by the centripetal force of a spinning top.

--falling from a high tower, over and over again, screaming and screaming but somehow I just kept falling and never stopped, and just before I landed I'd always wake up--

--a great pair of scissors chasing me down an endless dark hall, opening and closing, opening and closing--

--drowning in deep waters and fathoms of ocean closing over my head--

--searching for someone through the endless mists, running and searching and never finding them, crying out a name I can never remember when I wake--

He was losing it, Draco thought almost calmly. Maybe this hadn't been such a good idea after all.

Desperately, he tried to clutch onto some scrap of a memory that might save him. . Thinking about Hogwarts or Malfoy Manor wasn't going to do any good; where had he ever been happy, really happy? The fields and streams of Linz. The fields of purple loosestrife, waving and whispering to each other in the soft summer wind. The von Drachen estate. The rose gardens, heavy with intoxicating scent. He'd play among the rosebushes as a very small child when his mother sat and sketched, and sometimes she'd draw intertwined scarlet symbols, hearts and flowers and half-moons in happy red intricate shapes across the parchment. Draco would reach out his chubby toddler hands to hers as she drew, and the sound of their laughter mingled in the warm air, a delicate sparkling ruby web of magic stretched between mother and son. "Hexensymbol," Narcissa would say, her face lit up with one of its rare smiles. His bedroom that looked out over the clock tower, and the comforting sound of its bells tolling in the middle of the night. Even after he could sleep nowhere else, long after he spent endless weary nights staring up at the canopy of his bed in the Slytherin dormitory like a prisoner marking time to a release that never came, he could sleep in Linz, deep, heavy, refreshing sleep, simple and pure as a spring of clear water. The library, with its dog-eared, dusty tomes. The von Drachen librarian, an Austrian ghost. Draco had called him Ziggy when he was very small and couldn't quite get his mouth around the ghosts' real name, which was Sigmund. How many happy hours he'd spent in that library. That was a happy memory. Surely it was. He' d spoken with Ziggy about some of his dreams in the summer, before he left Linz; what had they said?

"Hmm," the ghost said in his mind's eye, tapping his incorporeal cigar on a desk in the library. "The fall from a tower represents separation anxiety. Dreams about scissors represent castration fears, of course. The image of searching for a lost companion means that you long for greater closeness with your mother, and ocean dreams signal a desire to return to the womb. How long were you breast-fed, child?"

"That's the silliest thing I've ever heard," said Draco, and the absurdity of the memory lifted him a bit. "What does that cigar represent, then?"

The ghost shrugged, curling smoke out his ears and through his trimmed white beard.. "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

Draco could feel himself rising from the sea of dreams. He laid his cheek against the cool smooth parchment surface of the page, sighing softly.

"I can figure out for myself what the right sort of people are, thanks," the cold voice of Harry Potter said quite distinctly in his left ear, and Draco pulled his head up, startled. But it was too late, and the oceanic force smashed into his mind again from a different direction. Memory, this time. And his memories were far worse than his dreams.

--Lucius Malfoy's cold flawless face with its one drooping eyelid was advancing on him from a great height as he said, "You'll spoil the boy, Narcissa, you'll make him soft, and that is one quality no Malfoy may possess." And then his favorite house-elf, his old nurse Tibby, had given a little shriek of pain and fear, trying to crouch back into a corner. But his father was far too strong and fast for her, and house-elves were not built in such a way as to defy their masters. So she only cried as she went out the window. The sight of her great eyes liquid with tears the last thing he saw, and he knew it was his fault, all his fault, she'd tried to sneak food up to him when he was in his room being punished for something and was sick with hunger. His mother had tried, too, but she couldn't go out a window of course, people would have noticed, people would have asked, what would their friends, or at least the people in their circle, think? But what happened to her behind closed doors, he was never to know; she only because more silent than ever-

--silent, his father would be silent for days and weeks on end sometimes, ignoring Draco's very presence in a room, turning his cold grey glare across his son as if he no longer existed; Lucius would never lay a hand on him but Draco sometimes wished that he would, surely nothing could be worse than the icy disapproval, the knowledge that he'd failed again. He had been ten years old when he befriended a Muggle girl with long red hair in the village and walked through the apple orchards with her. They giggled together and played cat's cradle as they knelt in the long grasses of the Kentish fields; he whispered that he liked her, touching her fingertips as if stroking precious silk, and he gave her a chain of magical daisies that would never fade.... But somehow his father had found out about it. Not a word was ever said, there was only a dreadful rotten silence that overlay the workings of whatever happened next, but his friend's family left Kent in a large black removers' van in the middle of the night, their faces haunted and strained. He had gone out into the main street of the village crying after them, running, waving with all his might at the girl in the back seat with her face pressed up against the glass, and she had pushed the window open and spat on him. "I hate you, Dray!" she had shrieked. "My mum was right! The Malfoys are all the same! All the same!" The shredded daisies landed at his feet.

Draco had trudged back to the manor after that and, as he had fully expected, was locked in his room on rations of moldy bread and water. But the silence and the isolation were worse, much worse, and by the end of it he had not seen a human face or heard a human voice for a month and a half; even the house-elves were all too afraid to speak to him. Every book had been removed from the bookshelves, and the chess set was gone from the window seat. He found a copy of Webster's Unabridged Wizarding Dictionary forgotten in the back of a closet and read it for hours on end, pausing occasionally to pace the room and trace his fingertips across the curtains, permanently closed with charms. He knew that the fields he would have seen stretching outside were green now, but in his mind's eye they were barren and brown, as if a dark wizard had stretched out his hand and forever withered them. He counted the tiles of the ceiling and the patterns on the rug; sometimes in the middle of the night they began writhing on their own, and he'd thought quite calmly that he was going mad before he was even eleven years old. Before he ever had a chance to go to Hogwarts, to escape this house.

Six weeks he was utterly alone, day after day and night after night; every other being might as well have dropped off the face of the earth. Draco never saw his mother. Perhaps she was dead. Perhaps everyone was dead. Perhaps nothing existed anymore outside of this room. These thoughts sometimes seized his mind and wouldn't let go, and then he would have to turn his head to the wall and stuff his pillow in his mouth to keep from screaming.

Then, one night, when he'd given up all hope, his father had come and spoken to him in a low hypnotic voice, very late, when the rest of the household was asleep. Whispering that Muggles were deceitful and untrustworthy, rotten to the core, and Mudbloods were worse, the Muggle-born who dared to ape their wizarding betters. But worst of all were the pureblood wizards who refused the fate appointed to them, who were too timid, too soft, too weak to seize the power that was theirs.

"We alone are born to rule," he'd whispered to his son.

"And that's..." Draco fumbled for words "... good... isn't it?"

"Destiny cannot be defined by petty moral questions. We are beyond good and evil."

And Draco had nodded his head and agreed, looking at Lucius Malfoy anxiously, reading his face for some sign of approval. "Is that why we hate the Weasleys, Father? The Muggle-lovers?"

"Yes."

"All of them?"

"All of them. The mother, the father, the cousins, the sons, the daughter. There can be no exceptions."

"Oh."

"Never forget that you are a Malfoy," his father had told him. "Never... never... " And Draco no longer wanted to escape. Only to please his father. There was no other fate for him, and he wanted none...

--and he never did forget; but now it was one year later and he was eleven years old, standing on a step stool at Madam Malkin's in Diagon Alley, being fitted for his first set of school robes. Looking over to see the green-eyed boy with the messy black hair standing next to him. His heart leaping, a shy smile on his face, saying, "Hello, Hogwarts too?" Longing for friendship, for acceptance. Gods, but how he wanted a friend, a real friend, not those morons Crabbe and Goyle who hung around him because their fathers fawned on Lucius Malfoy and their mothers came to garden parties at the Manor, but someone to talk with, to share secrets with, to run and fly and dream with... But he didn't know how to do it, didn't have any practice. He hated the sound of his own boasting voice, and when he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror on the far wall, what he'd thought was a smile was actually a sneering smirk. Still, he'd tried again on the Hogwarts Express, knowing what he was trying to say was coming out all wrong, but persisting anyway. Offering his hand. And the other boy had turned him down, eyes cold, voice cold, going off with that damn Ron Weasley, who pulled him into a tight little circle of best friendship, leaving no possible room for Draco. How terrible he'd felt that day, knowing that he'd failed. But a Malfoy didn't show such things...

--twelve years old, standing in front of Flourish and Blotts, watching the same green-eyed boy with the lightning-shaped scar pose for pictures with that idiot, Gilderoy Lockhart. But Draco didn't particularly care if Potter needed to feed his ego at that moment, or was angling for the front page of the Daily Prophet. No, what made his heart contract in his chest was the sight of the girl with the red-gold hair and the golden eyes. Draco had been coming out of the bookshop when he saw her in a corner, waiting, and the world had seemed to stop for an endless moment as he watched her. He couldn't have possibly said what he was looking for, or why his feet seemed rooted to the spot, but it was as if his heart had known something, on seeing her. That he had never seen her before, he knew. But he had known her for lifetimes upon lifetimes. And still he stood, and stood, and stared, and stared, thanking whatever gods might be that his father wasn't here.

The girl must be for Hogwarts, first year probably; who could she be? There was potential power in her glance, ambition too, she had the look of a Slytherin. Her face with its high cheekbones and square jaw was very grave, but there was a sort of light dancing behind it, as if her soul couldn't help but peep out through her eyes. He had to find out who she was. If she was new, she would need... friends, and a sort of rush of images went through his head, of all the things he could show her, the things he could share with her, the long talks they could have as they walked around the lake, the whispered secrets they could exchange in the long grasses of the fields behind the clock tower... She was a child and so was he, but he felt something on seeing her that he had never felt before, the mysterious beginnings of some sensation he had yet to know. And Draco watched her, trembling, as if before a long-locked door about to swing wide.

Her face lit up, honestly lit up, with golden radiance, and he could see how beautiful this girl was going to be. For an instant Draco almost thought that the look was for him, that she'd seen him and recognized something in him as he had in her. He started forward eagerly. Then he saw Potter tipping a stack of books into a new cauldron by her side. The girl turned towards him. The smile was for Potter, and so was the inner glow, the eagerness, and the hero worship. And the stupid prat didn't even see it. Draco's chest went cold, and he somehow found himself face to face with the other boy. "Bet you loved that, didn't you?" he asked, sneering.

And the girl spoke, finally. "Leave him alone, he didn't want all that!" Her voice was cold, and she glared at him with dislike. She knew who he was, he realized. And when Draco looked up and saw the youngest male Weasley spawn headed towards them, an angry scowl on his face, he knew who she must be. The girl didn't really look much like the rest of them, but that hair... Ginny Weasley, youngest of the brood. His natural enemy, as he was hers. He groped for the most self-punishing words he could think of.

"Potter, you've got yourself a girlfriend!" he drawled.

The girl had gone scarlet, he had said all the nastiest things he could imagine to her brother and Potter, and his father, Draco seemed to recall, had ended the day in a brawl with her father. The chance was ruined beyond repair. But a Malfoy didn't care about such things...

--the rush of sounds and images was coming faster now, more jagged, more disconnected in time and space. Pansy's voracious eyes, shining with excitement, turned towards him as they crouched in the ancient Roman hypocaust beneath Malfoy Manor, hearing what they should not have heard, learning what they should not have learned. What a laugh, Draco... what a laugh... little Ginny Weasley, in the Chamber of Secrets... . Marie-France Tessier and her red-gold hair, falling about him like a shining curtain in her rose-satin bed... Mon cheri, mon Draco, laissez-moi... je peux n'être pas plus ce quie suis je... Voices on the other side of the hedge in the rose gardens of Linz, that summer, the voices of Klaus and Cisselinde von Drachen . They are upstarts, the Malfoys, all of them, Gabriel, Michel, Lucius. And the boy? He has his father's eyes. He is his father's son. I see nothing of Narcissa in him... Pink roses in his hands, roses that should have been given to Pansy but he couldn't bring himself to do it, he was watching a thousand tiny figures circling below him on the dance floor at the Yule Ball, but all his mind on only one, one brilliantly copper-gold head glowing in the fairy lights, turned always and forever towards Harry Potter...

--and with that remembered image of Ginny, the tidal wave of memory, or dream, or whatever the hell this was, might have been made of sulfuric acid, which Longbottom was forever brewing by mistake in Potions class, and which Snape continually threatened to force the round-faced boy to drink. Draco felt as if he were swimming in a sea of the caustic substance now. Every emotion from the most painful memories he had ever experienced was attacking him from all sides. I need her, he thought irrationally. I need her now. Ginny. Ginny, I could find Ginny, I've got to find Ginny. Through this book.

With that thought, the poisonous flood of memory was stopped for a moment. Draco struggled to understand what was going on. There was a flash of lucid thought at least, as if grabbing onto a piece of flotsam in a shipwreck. He'd tapped into the extraordinary power of the Book of Dreams somehow, but it was too much for him. It was overwhelming his mind. If he had understood the analogy, he would have thought instantly of an electrical outlet with far too many plugs in it, sparking, threatening to blow its circuit.

His mind was lined with a bottomless pit of dream and imagination, mostly dark, some terrible, but his memories were far worse. Ginny. If he could only hold onto the image of Ginny, the smell of her hair, the remembered feel of her skin--

Draco staggered forward, still holding the book. He was walking on the forest path again. He was reasonably certain that he was in the real world. But when he blinked, and then looked round again, he saw that he had somehow come to a crossroads. Four paths led in opposing directions, and at the center stood a tall white stone pointing to the sky. Oh Gods, what now? He looked from side to side in desperation.

And in the space between one heartbeat and the next, there was a tall dark man standing before him, an invisible wind whipping at his cloak. His blue-black hair was moving, too, in patterns that no real wind could ever create. His eyes were fathomless, and his skin was white as death. Draco actually felt his mouth go dry. He was in his sixth year at Hogwarts; he'd taken Unearthly Beings-- How to Recognize and Hopefully Avoid Them, and as a Malfoy he'd gone much further into the study of unclean spirits and dark entities than was healthy for any sixteen-year-old boy to do. But this-- person? thing?-- before him was utterly outside his experience. Or was it?

A vague memory stirred in his mind, just a little. A dusty book in the Malfoy library that only opened to the hair from the head of a Drow elf, a feather from the wing of the great Roc that carried Aladdin and the Forty Thieves in its talons, and fur from the pelt of a manticore, all woven together into a lanyard and laid across its pages. The crabbed red script that only appeared to a Revealing spell whispered on the night of a blood moon at Beltane...

For many gods there are, and many devils also. Some that do good, and some that work evil. Yet above them all are the Seven Immortals, those that walked before aught else lived, or breathed, or suffered. But of them it is forbidden to speak. It is not given to mortals, to love the Endless...

And Draco knew who the man must be. He remained oddly unafraid, and was surprised at this a little, but only a little. It was as in a dream, when all things are possible. "Lord Morpheus," he said.

"Draco Lukas Malfoy." The dark man inclined his head.

"Where-- where am I?"

"You have entered my country now." Lord Morpheus began to walk down the path, and Draco followed. He noticed that the Lord of Dreams wore black boots of some curious material that left no imprint on the earth.

"I used to have this recurring dream where I was falling off a tower," said Draco, thinking that it seemed a perfectly natural thing to say. "But I'd always wake up just before I hit the ground. I'd be in the worst sort of cold sweat, too. Terrified that if I'd fallen before waking up, I would've died. Tell me, is that true?"

"I cannot say." Lord Morpheus shrugged. "You never fell."

"Oh." Draco was oddly disappointed. "I suppose I'll never figure it out."

They walked a little further, and Draco wondered detachedly if they'd just keep walking and walking, walking off the edge of the earth into the mists that curled around the edges of the flat earth, falling where the wild wind whirled and the ships of unwary mariners awaited them, and Ginny was waiting there too in the form of a mermaid with poisonous green scales, combing her long fiery hair and singing songs to lure sailors to their doom...

"Ouch!" The edges of the Kitap-an Düs were glowing so hot that they burned his fingers. He sucked on their tips, jolted back to himself for the moment. What insane rubbish he'd been thinking. He had to hold to reality, to count the steps of his feet and the beats of his heart, not to sink into the madness and illusion of the Dream Country...

"What do you here, little dragon, little dreamer?" Lord Morpheus was asking.

"I'm looking for Ginny Weasley," Draco replied.

"And how will you find her?"

"Through the Book of Dreams." It glowed now like the heart of witchfire itself.

"Give me the book." The Immortal held out his hand, and it seethed with the dead white light of a moon rising over bottomless seas.

"Why?"

"That is a thing that mortals were never meant to touch."

"I'm touching it," said Draco.

"You will pay a price that mortals were never meant to pay."

"Can I find her without it?" Immortals tell only truth, Draco remembered reading in that book in the Malfoy library. Although they do not always know how truth looks, to a man...

Lord Morpheus shook his head. His eyes were like the dark matter that lies at the center of galaxies.

"Then you can't have it." A calm peace passed through him. Draco laid his hand flat on one of the pages of the open book, feeling the power that hummed through it. And inside his ears, he heard a gravelly voice, whispering words he had almost feared he would never hear again. My young apprentice. The time has come. The time to strike, and to seize. It was, unmistakably, the voice of Lord Grindelwald.

He turned and ran down the path, leaving the dark Lord of Dreams, who continued to look after him, motionless.

Everything in this land seemed to have the quality of a dream, both more and less real than waking life. So, too, it was with Lord Grindelwald. Draco saw him, or thought he saw him, yet he couldn't say if the dark lord was sitting or standing, solid or insubstantial, in the mortal plane or out of it. Yet he knew, unmistakably, that he was there. In the stones of the path, the darkness under the limbs of the trees; the space between one breath and the next, Grindelwald had taken shape. Draco felt the dark lord's presence again, and the relief that swept through him was overwhelming.

" You've returned," he whispered.

Yule dawns soon, a few days only, Grindelwald said without words. The time of my greatest power is near. It is the hour to strike. It is now that we may take the girl into our circle, and for our own.

The only sign of the feelings rushing through Draco at that moment was the faint smirk on his face. He knew how to hide his emotions well; it had become second nature in the past year.

This pleases you?

"Yes." If the dark lord knew just how pleased he was at the thought of getting Ginny Weasley at his mercy... But then, Draco supposed that he did.

She's close, so close, oh, I can feel her. A hot excitement ran through him. But Draco didn't dare to allow his thoughts about her to run riot for even an instant, or he'd lose control. And that must not happen; he sensed that the hour of trial and testing was coming, and he would need all his strength. "But why now? Why Yule, my lord?".

Have they taught you nothing about the days of power at that school of yours? Grindelwald's voice in his head was gently chiding.

"We learned a bit," said Draco. "The great feasts are Beltane, Midsummer, Samhain, Lughnasa, Mabon, Yule, and Imbeholc. We'd generally have some sort of ceremonial dinner at school, except Midsummer, of course. And often we had a ball or something as well. I suppose that's about all."

A pity, for you must understand this. But it is enough for you to know that the power of the oldest magic ebbs and flows with the cycle of the year. On those six days, the veils between the worlds grow thin. The immortal may walk among the mortal. The girl moves now at the borderlands between the worlds of gods and men, beneath the world-tree... I see her.. yes... but only you may lead me to her.

The smile on Draco's face was sinister, and his eyes glittered like the shadow of moonlight on snow. "How?" he asked.

You must allow me further into you than I have been hitherto, my little dragon. In a sort of nightmare vision, his spidery white fingers of unnatural length reached out towards Draco's head.

Draco didn't know why, but he flinched slightly; it seemed a reaction so instinctive that he had absolutely no control over it. That damn little voice was screaming. Perhaps after they returned he could have it surgically removed.

Will you allow this? It is a thing that cannot be done unwilling.

"Yes," Draco whispered back fiercely. "Yes!"

When we are joined-- Grindelwald paused, in his voice, or his thoughts, or whatever this communication was--Then you will find her, my young apprentice. You will see what she sees. You will know what she knows. You will walk through her very mind.

And if Draco had still harbored any doubts, they were gone in an instant. He bent his fair head to one side, permitting the dark lord easier access to him, willing his mind to be open. He felt a touch cold as death. The skeletal hands on his skull.

The sound of his feet walking the forest path grew louder and louder. Then it vanished, and he felt the sudden jolt of connection, a bit like a portkey, a bit like time travel through the wormhole; this sensation that a hook that had been attached in his head and given a sharp, profound pull.

The world vanished. Transmuted into a fog of flickering shadows and dark shapes. Draco looked at the dark lord walking at his side and saw without much surprise that he glowed silver, a mist of profound power streaming away from the pulsing outlines of him. Rivulets of power ran down from his hands, and a circlet of poisonous light shone from his brow; he was taller than the tallest trees, great and terrible beyond human imaginings. And one of his immortal hands was still on Draco's head. The power was shooting into him, more than any mortal should have been able to endure; and yet, somehow, he was enduring it. It thrummed through his veins and he knew that he now held more magic than any wand in the world could ever have given him; it was filling him, spilling over, he couldn't begin to contain it.

Yet he knew that he could use it... use it to find Ginny. She walked at the edge of his powers of perception.

Now open the Book of Dreams, and take the pen in your right hand.

Draco did so. The rubies were glowing so brightly now that he knew he couldn't have looked at them with the naked eye, without the power of Grindelwald running through him.

The knowledge of what to do next was transmitted directly to him, without any need for the intermediary of words. Or perhaps it rose from within his own mind and had nothing to do with Grindelwald at all. There was no way to tell anymore. And he knew, suddenly knew, what this might mean. If he had Ginny Weasley, and Lord Grindelwald was at his side... what the hell did anybody need Lucius Malfoy for?

He set the pen to the parchment and began to write.

Come to me, Ginny Weasley. Come to us.

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