+Mens mea cupit cantare formas versas in nova corpora.+
(Ovid)
CHAPTER TEN
The wind chased Harry high and fast through the sky. The air currents were unusually tricksome - or maybe it was his distraction, and his thoughts, that made the flying so difficult. He drove his wings hard against a rising draft, felt it boost him roughly upwards so that he almost flipped over. Righting himself just in time, feeling the human terror clawing at the strange animal logic - that part of his brain that told him how to fly - he forced himself to calm down.
/Calm down?/ he thought, banking to follow the line of a stream he knew led to Draco's home. /How can I calm down?/ Perversely, after their visit to Azkaban, it had been Hermione who had been the calm one, and Harry who had been in need of that influence. /How could she have been so calm?/ The stream lost itself in a tangle of thick canopy as it wound its way northward; Harry angled downward to catch sight of it through the tree limbs. It flickered and flashed in unexpected places, elusive as thought. He struggled to reconcile himself to both these things - the thought and the river.
When preparing to leave Azkaban, he had spoken briefly with Hermione - Hermione, who seemed to know what he was doing, and to approve of it. Maybe it hadn't been approval, exactly, more like resignation. Or determination. He'd found it hard to tell; her voice had taken on infinite shadings when she had come to him and told him she would help him in any way she could, because Ron could no longer do it.
"I won't let Fudge take you away too," Hermione had said. Had there been a trace of ferocity in the words? Desperation? "I *can't* let him, Harry. He's cost me enough already. Whatever you're looking for in Snape's journal - I know you'll find it."
Her words chased him, too, clung to him although he tried to shake them. /He's cost me enough./ Fudge - Harry remembered his awe of the man, but it had diluted itself over the passage of time to the normal awe of any child for an authority figure. His respect had decreased proportionately, had vanished altogether when he had heard Fudge turning a blind eye to Voldemort's return, and turned to contempt when Fudge had nearly destroyed Hogwarts in his fanaticism. /How many years of war did he cost us? How many friends died because he couldn't - wouldn't - see what needed to be seen?/
Dumbledore would have called that a futile question; there wasn't any magic in the world that could show them what might have been. The Mirror of Erised? It would have shown Harry only what he wanted so desperately to be true: the punishment of a man guilty of not preventing what he could have prevented. Certainly, though, that would be better than the other choice, that maybe Fudge had been trying to avoid a general panic in the wizarding world, that he had done so not out of selfishness, but out of good intentions.
/That's what the road to hell is paved with,/ he reminded himself. The forests were thinning now, vanishing altogether over a small, forsaken bit of open field before returning just as thick as before. He arrowed over both forest and farmland, flying at the same speed he had been all day, impelled by the fierce wind at his back, the thoughts at the back of his mind, the desperation of his last memory of Draco, the quick burning anger rising in him.
/From deep down./ Draco could have hidden it in the ocean, or in a hole in his flower garden. It could be anywhere. The manor was probably being watched by Aurors; there was no way he could sneak in. Fly through an open window? Doubtlessly, the authorities would have secured the place... Fudge would probably have taken along some select treasures.
While Ron was dying.
/Ron is *not* dying,/ he told himself, but the insidious /you need to go back and be with him/ put the lie to his assurance.
/No./ Hermione had told him to go; she, Minerva, the Weasleys, and Neville Longbottom (Neville! Of all people!) had the situation well in hand. And Ron was not wholly without friends elsewhere, she had reminded him. "And Draco," she'd said reluctantly, "has no one except you."
She'd known, of course, that Harry would have stayed if she'd asked him, and he knew it too. He would have hated it, have tried to hate her and Ron for insisting on the friendship that had bound them for so many years... but he would have stayed. That she had released him still made something in his heart, even now, twist and ache with an unexpected sharpness. Yet she had *not* let him go; that obligation to Ron and to her, no matter that she had absolved him of it, would follow him everywhere like a dragging chain.
Such heaviness, when he was light as the wind he rode on; already he could see the outline of the manor, dim even to his sight, in the far distance, embraced by the forest and hills. /You have to save something out of all this. You can't save Ron, you can't save Hermione. You probably can't even save yourself. Just... save Draco./
In turning toward the mansion, Harry ran into a headwind that nearly sent him turning end over end. He managed to correct himself and angle back toward the lake; the winds wanted to push him to the west, but he grimly resisted them. He almost missed the lake, as it swung away from him with terrible swiftness, but with a final effort he climbed above the draft and made his way above the lake. He hovered over it uncertainly a moment, turning Draco's words over in his mind.
/"The lake... There is... a tunnel. Just fall..."
The water of the lake was dark, the occasional glassine ripple making it like obsidian. Above Harry, the sky was clear, the sun warm on his back, but the light and warmth did not seem to penetrate the water at all. He couldn't even see his own reflection - the lake took the sunlight, the clarity of the day, and devoured it, and nothing but a hole of liquid blackness lay stagnant beneath him.
/"It's that easy."/
/"There is a tunnel..."/ By the lake? A secret entrance?
/"Just fall..."/ Despite the weariness in Draco's voice, the words - Harry now remembered this - had had a peculiar intensity. He recalled the shaky, dipping motion of Draco's hand, like a bird diving down into water...
He couldn't let himself think too much about that. /"Just fall..."/
/Just fall, Harry,/ he told himself. He gained a few more feet of altitude, then angled downwards. Folding his wings close to his body, he let himself drop.
Wind howled past him. He shot through it like a black arrow straight into the heart of the lake. The water's face rushed up at him with terrifying speed; everything in him, hawk and human, screamed for him to twist out of the dive - but gravity had him now, and something else that drew him down, down into the waters.
He never saw himself as he hit the surface - he *never* hit the surface, for the water parted around him. He had the impression first of gloomy light that faded out into gray, a distant rushing and a sense of weight pressing in around him. Then the gray became a strange, incandescent blue, and before he knew it the tunnel flashed to an end, spitting him out into a large, vaulted room.
There was no way to make a graceful landing of it; something in the tunnel had shed his speed, but he was so disoriented that braking in flight quite escaped him. And so he found himself toppling end-over-end, barely missing the marching rows of stone columns and finally landing in a painful, skidding lump on the floor.
He lay there a moment, wings sprawled uncomfortably out to either side of him, just breathing.
Slowly, the cold of the stone leeched through his body heat. He struggled briefly before remembering to change back. The metamorphosis was an effort, such a one as it had never been - every tendon resisted it, he could hardly think clearly enough, past shock and exhaustion. For a terrifying moment he almost lost control of the transition, felt himself lurching between forms. Hollow wing bones wavered into fingers before shifting back, his eyesight was clear one moment, blurred the next by human imperfection. The pain in his leg echoed throughout his body.
But it was done, and he lay another moment more, gasping, eyes shut tight.
When he opened them again, it was to a high, vaulted ceiling, and pillars lit by hidden lights that vanished away into shadows. The columns marched away in neat rows to some distant end; the only interruption of their order were long stone shelves and - and, Harry realized with a sudden jolt, sarcophagi.
Carefully, he pulled himself upright. The scrabbling of his feet and short, pained breaths rasped loudly in the empty air. He paused, hand braced against a pillar, and listened to the echoes recede into nothingness. Age lay on the place, age and incredible - malignant - power. He glanced upwards, certain eyes were watching him from the shadows. That he saw nothing gave him no comfort.
Blinking, he dragged his gaze from the invisible heights and looked around. There was light, faint and strange, dreamlike and coming from nowhere that he could discern. No torches hung on the columns, no candleholders lined the crypt. But light there was, enough to make the place a maze of shadows. For all the size of the place, it now seemed incredibly confining, the empty air breathing close upon Harry's neck as he wandered through the crypt.
The air was cold, but not damp; there had to have been spells placed here, Harry thought, to keep out the damp - and that meant there were likely other spells as well. What had he set off just by coming here? He thought unhappily of the dragons guarding the underground vaults in Gringotts, and then of the Malfoy history of attraction to the Dark Arts. It took only a moment to pull his wand from the folds of his robe; the length of holly, the handle worn to fit his palm, calmed him somewhat - but by no means did it make him bold.
He wandered past tombs - Sulpicius Malfoi, dead in 1213. There was a Latin inscription beneath the head of the effigy, as sharp and clear as it had been carved the day before: *facti lumina crimen habet.* Peering closer, Harry saw that the effigy's eyes were blank, staring holes dug into the marble. Near Sulpicius was his wife, Eurodise, with a blunted knife in her hand.
Other tombs lay scattered about, seemingly at random, and Harry moved quickly through them. It seemed that those eyes, riveted as they were to the invisible ceiling, followed him. /Just find the diary,/ he told himself as he stumbled through the labyrinth, fighting against nerves. /Find it so you can get out./ He tried not to think about how he would get out - he could see no walls, only the endless rank and file of the columns.
/Where could this thing be?/ The chamber seemed endless; he could be searching the rest of his life. He had seen that most of the shelves of artifacts were clustered about the sarcophagi themselves; many of the coffins were done about with chains holding huge agrippas down with their links through strong iron locks unrusted by time. Some of the books stirred if Harry got too close. One it seemed was encased in stone, resting on the breast of a slumbering Julia Black-Malfoy, but the stone quivered dangerously when Harry stepped too close.
He moved back quickly, too quickly; all his weight fell on his injured leg. Crying out, he stumbled; there was nothing except to fall, the painful crack of falling on his tailbone. In flailing for balance, his hand struck a smooth marble surface; he had a split second to arch his shoulders against the impact and save his head from striking the coffin behind him.
"Oh, God..."
Panting, he turned his face into the coolness of the stone, which only made his sweat clammy and uncomfortable against his skin. /Draco... don't just sit there, get up!/ He twisted around, hoisted himself up by gripping the edge of the sarcophagus. Stiff muscles rebelled, and he was dimly aware that he had done something to his knee; there would be a bruise on his back in the morning, guaranteed. But he stood finally, hands braced on the elegantly carved drapery on the lid, stared down into the face of the effigy.
"Oh, *God*."
Sightlessly, Draco Malfoy's eyes stared into infinity, wide and blank.
Harry jerked away from the sarcophagus, tangling his fingers in his robe to wipe away the memory of cold marble. His heart did a strange tripe-thud against his ribs, and his breath caught in his lungs. Draco's face, so finely carved, seemed for a terrifying moment to be the real thing - that pale, that perfect, the lips parted slightly, the brow wrinkled in some unspoken thought. The body, cloaked in folds of stone, was still that lithe, swift form Harry remembered from that ages-ago afternoon - so close, hot despite the icy paleness of Draco's skin, against Harry's own body - hovering at the edge of potency, about to be transfigured into life, that it might rise and set aside the book clasped -
/And in the lifeless hands, Harry saw, hands as long-fingered and elegant in marble as in flesh, closed around the leather cover of the diary of Severus Snape./
Steeling himself, Harry drew closer. He half-expected Draco's eyes to move, to turn to meet his, and was chagrined to realize he was waiting for the effigy to do just that. Carefully he reached out, cringing a bit as his fingers brushed those of Draco's fingers.
There was a sudden warmth in the stone beneath his skin. Harry removed his hands warily, wondering if the diary or the image were bespelled in some way. Likely they were - but he could spend the next year curse-breaking both of them and never finding the solution. It took a moment to rally his courage - /don't be such a wimp, Potter!/ - before he placed his hands on the statue's once more.
Heat roared into the marble hands, unexpectedly searing against the cold. The pain was too great - Harry had no choice but to break contact, crying out in pain and frustration. Bewildered and nursing hands that felt as though they had been burned away to nothing, Harry glared at the effigy, bitterly cursing it - and Fudge for his blindness, himself for the same and for his failure, Draco for putting him in this position, Ron for dying, Hermione for not being -
The hands of the effigy moved, the fingers unlacing gracefully. Slowly the arms moved until they lay naturally down the sides, the fingers now draped over the folds of graven cloak. Harry could hear a faint cracking sound, that of molecules of stone grinding against each other, and then the statue was still, the book lying free upon Draco's chest.
/It was bespelled,/ he thought, but not with the grim certainty of before - there was instead a strange elation in the thought, that somehow a spell had been shaped to respond specifically to him. Had Draco done it? Images of the trial, the small explosion of smoke as the dragon-heartstring evaporated when Fudge cut through it, came back to him. Not Draco, then, but another? Blinker the house-elf? He peered into the darkness; no answer came out of it.
But the diary was there, and with inward certainty he knew he was meant to take it. He reached out and removed it from its resting place on Draco's chest, not flinching this time as he laid a hand briefly upon the curve where the chest would slope down into the abdomen. Still the sightless eyes stared into the void, but looking more closely now, Harry saw no true lifelessness - some spirit of Draco, the part sucked out of him by the misery of Azkaban, had been preserved in stone, if not in flesh. He gathered the diary to him, felt the fugitive warmth of it seep into his body - so blessedly easy, all of a sudden, to imagine it as warm from Draco's touch; that Draco had freely handed it to him, asked him (asked him) to read it.
He had, of course, been the one to find them - a chance discovery, really, when a wall had accidentally given way during the expansion of Honeyduke's - he had been there to help block the secret passageway into the store's basement. And there they had been: filthy, their pages coming loose, not the slightest spell woven about them to protect them from time or the elements. Others had been found in later days, by accident, and in the same condition. But blank pages had been their protection - either that or Snape thought it not likely that they would survive the impending attack on Hogsmede. Ministry curses had been added later, "to protect classified material"; after Ron had taken it, Harry hadn't seen it again until it was put in Draco's hands... and by then the diary had belonged more to Draco than it ever had to him, if the diary could ever have belonged to him in the first place.
Not for the first time he thought of a Pensieve, a teenaged boy's most painful memory - one of glossy black hair, sarcastic eyes framed by glasses, a darting golden Snitch almost as radiant and as elusive as a red-headed girl who offered scorn and salvation at the same time. Intruding on Snape's memories now... the man was gone, true; he had died years ago, lost several years into a war that would give many people more honorable deaths, but opening this book now still had the flavor of intrusion.
He could still see the face of Severus Snape, fury and hatred blazing in those fathomless eyes, fury and hatred directed mostly at him, but some reserved for his father, and behind it something else - an old bitterness, scars never fully healed, the despair of knowing that one's most closely-guarded secret has been exposed, pulled from its hiding place.
But Draco had read to him, just sections, but enough... And, with the war now gone (or as gone as the war could ever be), Harry thought Snape wouldn't mind, if it was for a good cause.
And Draco, surely, was good enough a cause to justify his prying.
And so he sat down again, stiffly and not without a little pain, his back propped against the side of the sarcophagus, the book set up against his bent knees, as if on a lectern.
He opened the book. The first two pages had stuck together. Carefully, he slipped a finger between the pages and parted them; the parchment was reluctant, but under his gentle pressure separated. He smoothed the page back and studied thoughtfully the words written in minute, careful script in the center of the page:
/"Now, my brother Mambres, take care that you do well in this life to your children and to your friends, because in hell there is no good thing, only torment and blackness. And after you are dead, then you shall come to hell and amongst the dead you will have your dwelling, underneath the earth, and your grave shall be two cubits wide and four cubits long."/
On the facing page, again written in Snape's precise script, was his opening address. Draco had not read him this.
'Hello, Draco.
'I have buried these several books at various places in Hogsmeade, places that have, for various reasons, been important to my life at Hogwarts, and I am sure you know why. This page you are reading now is, in effect, my last will and testament, if you will, and it is the final thing I have left on record concerning my role in the cause of Albus Dumbledore and Harry Potter.
'By now, I expect that one side will have won - there was, I believe, very little time left before the end of things. At any rate, there are no great strategic secrets contained herein, for those I have decided to take to my grave, whenever I may go to it. Therefore, the value of these books is questionable at best, and rests solely with my reader to determine. As it is you, Draco, and you have decided for whatever reason to decode my books, I cherish the hope - and let it not be ill-founded, as hope usually is - that you will learn from what is written here.
'I expect that I am dead at this point; these words were written the night before I was to leave for Cornwall on a mission for Dumbledore, and they were committed to the earth that very morning, as I for a long time had expected to be. Do not, Draco, wonder after my soul or worry that my fate was unjust: whatever end I have come to, I assure you that I have earned it.
'I had begun to keep these journals toward the end of the first year of the war, at the insistence of Albus Dumbledore. At the time, I felt them a useless gesture, the fulfillment of the romantic, senile request of an old man - and yet Dumbledore has proven right about many things, in my school days as now, and I cannot help but feel that there is something here that I have written (although I cannot identify it) that may be of use to you. The use, as I said, will not be strategic - and much, I believe, is not even about the war, but rather to other, older struggles.
'You doubtless remember me without fondness, Draco, and perhaps for no better reason than youthful pride - I daresay that many times I must have rubbed your aristocratic fur the wrong way, and not apologized suitably for it. I do not apologize now. You see, I have found that war does not spare the prideful or the meek. Magic is much the same, for I have seen the most arrogant break under Cruciatus, as well as the spineless and the power-seeking. There is hardness and cruelty in these things that I finally realized I could not match... in seeking to make myself as dark as the magic I practiced, or as bitter as the war between my old master and my old teacher, I saw perhaps more clearly *through* that darkness than I had before....'
Harry swallowed past a tight throat, ignored the persistent tickle of conscience, and kept reading.
'.... If I were a Seer, I would predict the exact day on which you would look at your arm where they branded the Dark Mark, and hate yourself for receiving it. I remember the day I got it as clearly as though it were yesterday, and I cannot think on it now without disgust, for it was the day I did what I vowed I would never do, and became the slave of another man. And even that brand did not release me from slavery of another sort, and it was one that was equally distasteful to me.'
/He owed a life to your father./ Dumbledore's words, or nearly so. /A life-debt can never be easily discharged./
'But I am not a Seer; all I have is the certainty of experience. You will survive this war - you are too much a Slytherin to die in something so meaningless - and, I hope, will find these. No potion I know of allows the maker to see the future; there is only intuition and my own sense, which I trust above all other things, although they have at times led me horribly astray. You will look at your Mark and hate it for what it has done, and what it continues to do; Voldemort holds us even beyond his death, but there are ways in which we can defy him.
'I believe, then, this journal may be one of them.
'Severus Snape, June 2004.'
Harry stared at the signature at the bottom of the page, unwilling to reread the rest of the words. There was something in this as revealing as dipping into Pensieve thoughts. He had never been able to like Snape; for a very long time he had hated the man, and for a short time in the war had fostered a sort of grudging respect, but nothing more... And yet the words were as much contradiction as explanation, if they indeed *were* explanation. They had much of Snape's insufferable lecturing tone in places, yet... /I cannot think on it now without disgust, for it was the day I did what I vowed what I would never do.../
The man had been a hero. Not that it had mattered much to Snape, who never cared, and not that it would have made a difference to the body that had been found in Cornwall by a team of Aurors.
For a time, he thought of deeds done, willingly and unwillingly. He turned the page and read a bit more.
'August 13, 1998
'I have found that the hell of school is the never-ending cycle of new annoyances; once one has got rid of the last batch of overgrown ignoramuses, a troop of smaller ones comes marching in to take their places. I must guide them through their next seven years, with only the useless knowledge that three or four of them will turn out to be any good. Yet on the bright side I only have the one Weasley to deal with this year - the last brother mercifully having graduated from these halls - and the insufferable Granger jade has been given her duly-accorded honors and sent packing. I do not believe I will go into raptures about Potter's departure... there has been celebration enough already.
'McGonagall, true to form, has insisted upon regaling me with the success stories of her pet students. It seems Weasley has darkened the door of the Auror training facilities, and Granger along with him for some top-secret assignment. No one knows what Potter is doing; whatever it is, it is destructive, I am certain of it.
'There is some concern over the whereabouts of Seamus Finnegan; he has not been seen for some weeks, I am given to understand. Well, the boy will turn up eventually. They always do. McGonagall has been most... importune in demanding the use of my former associates to see if anyone has done something untoward with Finnegan; it has been difficult explaining to her that one does not simply use the fireplace to contact the Lestranges, or drop in unexpectedly at the Malfoy estates. She is threatening to go to Dumbledore with her complaints; there is some veiled reference to suspicions that I may be relapsing, and some hints dropped of blackmail. Let her go to Dumbledore and to hell with all of them, I say.
'I have not heard from Draco since our last conversation at the end of the year. Well, that is to be expected, I suppose; he and I did not part on the best of terms, and I have no doubt Malfoy is silently cursing my name. There may be hope, however; I am not dead (yet), so Draco could not have betrayed my secret to Lucius. Either that, or Voldemort is waiting for a more opportune time to exact his vengeance. It is probably the latter of the two.'
Harry paused in his reading, suddenly aware of the fact that he had stopped breathing. He quickly flipped back to the letter on the previous page, then returned to the beginning of the diary. /Something happened between the two,/ he decided after a moment. /What was it, though?/
He had not spent much time with Snape; mostly he'd been with Ron, or off on his own - or closeted with Dumbledore on something, and so he had missed much of what had gone on within the Order of the Phoenix. The fragmentation of responsibilities had been deliberate, of course; few people knew what most others were doing, or knew anything even beyond what their own small circles did. He had gone off on something for Dumbledore, who had been the only person who could have ordered Snape to do anything. Anything could have happened between August 18, 1998 and Severus burying those journals.
/Only one way to find out what it is./
But his back was sore and stiff from sitting and the cold, and he was uncomfortably aware of the rapid failing of his body. He couldn't possibly spend the night here - but it looked like he would have to, as he didn't know if he was up to another transformation, or to carrying the heavy book in his present state. And, too, there was the uncomfortable problem of how to get *out*; the place had the look of permanence, that the only trip a person ever made down to the crypt was one-way.
Unhappily, he set the book down, for his eyes were blurred with exhaustion behind his glasses. The crypt hadn't been designed for the comfort of the living, but he thought at least he could make his own. A wave of the wand - and a moment's fond remembrance - produced a squashy purple sleeping bag and pillow. Exhaustion hovered close upon him, oppressive despite the forbidding silence of the crypt and the mysteries of the diary.
Thinking on it, Harry stood awkwardly and replaced the diary on Draco's chest. A strange knot twisted in his heart as he watched the marble arms bend once more, the fingers reaching upward to lace together over the book, restoring it to the effigy's protective embrace. Harry stood there a moment, gazing at the unexpectedly serene countenance on Draco's sculpted face, realized distantly that there were no dates carved into the side of the coffin as there had been for others. A symbolic thing, then, but done when Draco had grown; the likeness between the living Draco and the marble one was too astonishing, too perfect.
He wanted to bend down - to kiss, touch the statue in some way. But that was silly, and romantic, and Harry Potter was neither of those things.
/How did you know it was me?/ he asked instead, silently.
The effigy gave back no answer, and Harry had not expected one. He stood in silence a few seconds more before sinking back down and crawling inside the sleeping bag. Sleep claimed him in the space of heartbeats, and save for quiet breathing, the crypt was silent as the grave.
TBC.
1.) The Latin inscription on Sulpicius Malfoi's tomb reads (roughly): "It is the eyes that are guilty."
2.) Agrippas are magic books, usually with pages or the binding made of human skin. They were supposed to be highly attuned to their owners, and untouchable by no one else except them. Some stories say that agrippas could sense their owners' death and would react violently by flying through the air and screaming. They take their name from the Renaissance scholar/alchemist Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, who was alleged to have dabbled in the magic arts himself, and wrote vast treatises on the subject.
3.) The quotation at the beginning of Snape's diary is an excerpt from the end of the Old English "Wonders of the East," a catalogue of rare and fantastic beings found in Africa and India. The story of Iamnes and Mambres is Biblical apocrypha. They were said to be the magicians who constested against Moses and Aaron and were killed for their presumption against the God of Israel; the extract is Iamnes' admonition to Mambres, who had according to the Old English text, opened up Iamnes' magic books to reveal "the deep secrets of his brother's idolatry."
(Ovid)
CHAPTER TEN
The wind chased Harry high and fast through the sky. The air currents were unusually tricksome - or maybe it was his distraction, and his thoughts, that made the flying so difficult. He drove his wings hard against a rising draft, felt it boost him roughly upwards so that he almost flipped over. Righting himself just in time, feeling the human terror clawing at the strange animal logic - that part of his brain that told him how to fly - he forced himself to calm down.
/Calm down?/ he thought, banking to follow the line of a stream he knew led to Draco's home. /How can I calm down?/ Perversely, after their visit to Azkaban, it had been Hermione who had been the calm one, and Harry who had been in need of that influence. /How could she have been so calm?/ The stream lost itself in a tangle of thick canopy as it wound its way northward; Harry angled downward to catch sight of it through the tree limbs. It flickered and flashed in unexpected places, elusive as thought. He struggled to reconcile himself to both these things - the thought and the river.
When preparing to leave Azkaban, he had spoken briefly with Hermione - Hermione, who seemed to know what he was doing, and to approve of it. Maybe it hadn't been approval, exactly, more like resignation. Or determination. He'd found it hard to tell; her voice had taken on infinite shadings when she had come to him and told him she would help him in any way she could, because Ron could no longer do it.
"I won't let Fudge take you away too," Hermione had said. Had there been a trace of ferocity in the words? Desperation? "I *can't* let him, Harry. He's cost me enough already. Whatever you're looking for in Snape's journal - I know you'll find it."
Her words chased him, too, clung to him although he tried to shake them. /He's cost me enough./ Fudge - Harry remembered his awe of the man, but it had diluted itself over the passage of time to the normal awe of any child for an authority figure. His respect had decreased proportionately, had vanished altogether when he had heard Fudge turning a blind eye to Voldemort's return, and turned to contempt when Fudge had nearly destroyed Hogwarts in his fanaticism. /How many years of war did he cost us? How many friends died because he couldn't - wouldn't - see what needed to be seen?/
Dumbledore would have called that a futile question; there wasn't any magic in the world that could show them what might have been. The Mirror of Erised? It would have shown Harry only what he wanted so desperately to be true: the punishment of a man guilty of not preventing what he could have prevented. Certainly, though, that would be better than the other choice, that maybe Fudge had been trying to avoid a general panic in the wizarding world, that he had done so not out of selfishness, but out of good intentions.
/That's what the road to hell is paved with,/ he reminded himself. The forests were thinning now, vanishing altogether over a small, forsaken bit of open field before returning just as thick as before. He arrowed over both forest and farmland, flying at the same speed he had been all day, impelled by the fierce wind at his back, the thoughts at the back of his mind, the desperation of his last memory of Draco, the quick burning anger rising in him.
/From deep down./ Draco could have hidden it in the ocean, or in a hole in his flower garden. It could be anywhere. The manor was probably being watched by Aurors; there was no way he could sneak in. Fly through an open window? Doubtlessly, the authorities would have secured the place... Fudge would probably have taken along some select treasures.
While Ron was dying.
/Ron is *not* dying,/ he told himself, but the insidious /you need to go back and be with him/ put the lie to his assurance.
/No./ Hermione had told him to go; she, Minerva, the Weasleys, and Neville Longbottom (Neville! Of all people!) had the situation well in hand. And Ron was not wholly without friends elsewhere, she had reminded him. "And Draco," she'd said reluctantly, "has no one except you."
She'd known, of course, that Harry would have stayed if she'd asked him, and he knew it too. He would have hated it, have tried to hate her and Ron for insisting on the friendship that had bound them for so many years... but he would have stayed. That she had released him still made something in his heart, even now, twist and ache with an unexpected sharpness. Yet she had *not* let him go; that obligation to Ron and to her, no matter that she had absolved him of it, would follow him everywhere like a dragging chain.
Such heaviness, when he was light as the wind he rode on; already he could see the outline of the manor, dim even to his sight, in the far distance, embraced by the forest and hills. /You have to save something out of all this. You can't save Ron, you can't save Hermione. You probably can't even save yourself. Just... save Draco./
In turning toward the mansion, Harry ran into a headwind that nearly sent him turning end over end. He managed to correct himself and angle back toward the lake; the winds wanted to push him to the west, but he grimly resisted them. He almost missed the lake, as it swung away from him with terrible swiftness, but with a final effort he climbed above the draft and made his way above the lake. He hovered over it uncertainly a moment, turning Draco's words over in his mind.
/"The lake... There is... a tunnel. Just fall..."
The water of the lake was dark, the occasional glassine ripple making it like obsidian. Above Harry, the sky was clear, the sun warm on his back, but the light and warmth did not seem to penetrate the water at all. He couldn't even see his own reflection - the lake took the sunlight, the clarity of the day, and devoured it, and nothing but a hole of liquid blackness lay stagnant beneath him.
/"It's that easy."/
/"There is a tunnel..."/ By the lake? A secret entrance?
/"Just fall..."/ Despite the weariness in Draco's voice, the words - Harry now remembered this - had had a peculiar intensity. He recalled the shaky, dipping motion of Draco's hand, like a bird diving down into water...
He couldn't let himself think too much about that. /"Just fall..."/
/Just fall, Harry,/ he told himself. He gained a few more feet of altitude, then angled downwards. Folding his wings close to his body, he let himself drop.
Wind howled past him. He shot through it like a black arrow straight into the heart of the lake. The water's face rushed up at him with terrifying speed; everything in him, hawk and human, screamed for him to twist out of the dive - but gravity had him now, and something else that drew him down, down into the waters.
He never saw himself as he hit the surface - he *never* hit the surface, for the water parted around him. He had the impression first of gloomy light that faded out into gray, a distant rushing and a sense of weight pressing in around him. Then the gray became a strange, incandescent blue, and before he knew it the tunnel flashed to an end, spitting him out into a large, vaulted room.
There was no way to make a graceful landing of it; something in the tunnel had shed his speed, but he was so disoriented that braking in flight quite escaped him. And so he found himself toppling end-over-end, barely missing the marching rows of stone columns and finally landing in a painful, skidding lump on the floor.
He lay there a moment, wings sprawled uncomfortably out to either side of him, just breathing.
Slowly, the cold of the stone leeched through his body heat. He struggled briefly before remembering to change back. The metamorphosis was an effort, such a one as it had never been - every tendon resisted it, he could hardly think clearly enough, past shock and exhaustion. For a terrifying moment he almost lost control of the transition, felt himself lurching between forms. Hollow wing bones wavered into fingers before shifting back, his eyesight was clear one moment, blurred the next by human imperfection. The pain in his leg echoed throughout his body.
But it was done, and he lay another moment more, gasping, eyes shut tight.
When he opened them again, it was to a high, vaulted ceiling, and pillars lit by hidden lights that vanished away into shadows. The columns marched away in neat rows to some distant end; the only interruption of their order were long stone shelves and - and, Harry realized with a sudden jolt, sarcophagi.
Carefully, he pulled himself upright. The scrabbling of his feet and short, pained breaths rasped loudly in the empty air. He paused, hand braced against a pillar, and listened to the echoes recede into nothingness. Age lay on the place, age and incredible - malignant - power. He glanced upwards, certain eyes were watching him from the shadows. That he saw nothing gave him no comfort.
Blinking, he dragged his gaze from the invisible heights and looked around. There was light, faint and strange, dreamlike and coming from nowhere that he could discern. No torches hung on the columns, no candleholders lined the crypt. But light there was, enough to make the place a maze of shadows. For all the size of the place, it now seemed incredibly confining, the empty air breathing close upon Harry's neck as he wandered through the crypt.
The air was cold, but not damp; there had to have been spells placed here, Harry thought, to keep out the damp - and that meant there were likely other spells as well. What had he set off just by coming here? He thought unhappily of the dragons guarding the underground vaults in Gringotts, and then of the Malfoy history of attraction to the Dark Arts. It took only a moment to pull his wand from the folds of his robe; the length of holly, the handle worn to fit his palm, calmed him somewhat - but by no means did it make him bold.
He wandered past tombs - Sulpicius Malfoi, dead in 1213. There was a Latin inscription beneath the head of the effigy, as sharp and clear as it had been carved the day before: *facti lumina crimen habet.* Peering closer, Harry saw that the effigy's eyes were blank, staring holes dug into the marble. Near Sulpicius was his wife, Eurodise, with a blunted knife in her hand.
Other tombs lay scattered about, seemingly at random, and Harry moved quickly through them. It seemed that those eyes, riveted as they were to the invisible ceiling, followed him. /Just find the diary,/ he told himself as he stumbled through the labyrinth, fighting against nerves. /Find it so you can get out./ He tried not to think about how he would get out - he could see no walls, only the endless rank and file of the columns.
/Where could this thing be?/ The chamber seemed endless; he could be searching the rest of his life. He had seen that most of the shelves of artifacts were clustered about the sarcophagi themselves; many of the coffins were done about with chains holding huge agrippas down with their links through strong iron locks unrusted by time. Some of the books stirred if Harry got too close. One it seemed was encased in stone, resting on the breast of a slumbering Julia Black-Malfoy, but the stone quivered dangerously when Harry stepped too close.
He moved back quickly, too quickly; all his weight fell on his injured leg. Crying out, he stumbled; there was nothing except to fall, the painful crack of falling on his tailbone. In flailing for balance, his hand struck a smooth marble surface; he had a split second to arch his shoulders against the impact and save his head from striking the coffin behind him.
"Oh, God..."
Panting, he turned his face into the coolness of the stone, which only made his sweat clammy and uncomfortable against his skin. /Draco... don't just sit there, get up!/ He twisted around, hoisted himself up by gripping the edge of the sarcophagus. Stiff muscles rebelled, and he was dimly aware that he had done something to his knee; there would be a bruise on his back in the morning, guaranteed. But he stood finally, hands braced on the elegantly carved drapery on the lid, stared down into the face of the effigy.
"Oh, *God*."
Sightlessly, Draco Malfoy's eyes stared into infinity, wide and blank.
Harry jerked away from the sarcophagus, tangling his fingers in his robe to wipe away the memory of cold marble. His heart did a strange tripe-thud against his ribs, and his breath caught in his lungs. Draco's face, so finely carved, seemed for a terrifying moment to be the real thing - that pale, that perfect, the lips parted slightly, the brow wrinkled in some unspoken thought. The body, cloaked in folds of stone, was still that lithe, swift form Harry remembered from that ages-ago afternoon - so close, hot despite the icy paleness of Draco's skin, against Harry's own body - hovering at the edge of potency, about to be transfigured into life, that it might rise and set aside the book clasped -
/And in the lifeless hands, Harry saw, hands as long-fingered and elegant in marble as in flesh, closed around the leather cover of the diary of Severus Snape./
Steeling himself, Harry drew closer. He half-expected Draco's eyes to move, to turn to meet his, and was chagrined to realize he was waiting for the effigy to do just that. Carefully he reached out, cringing a bit as his fingers brushed those of Draco's fingers.
There was a sudden warmth in the stone beneath his skin. Harry removed his hands warily, wondering if the diary or the image were bespelled in some way. Likely they were - but he could spend the next year curse-breaking both of them and never finding the solution. It took a moment to rally his courage - /don't be such a wimp, Potter!/ - before he placed his hands on the statue's once more.
Heat roared into the marble hands, unexpectedly searing against the cold. The pain was too great - Harry had no choice but to break contact, crying out in pain and frustration. Bewildered and nursing hands that felt as though they had been burned away to nothing, Harry glared at the effigy, bitterly cursing it - and Fudge for his blindness, himself for the same and for his failure, Draco for putting him in this position, Ron for dying, Hermione for not being -
The hands of the effigy moved, the fingers unlacing gracefully. Slowly the arms moved until they lay naturally down the sides, the fingers now draped over the folds of graven cloak. Harry could hear a faint cracking sound, that of molecules of stone grinding against each other, and then the statue was still, the book lying free upon Draco's chest.
/It was bespelled,/ he thought, but not with the grim certainty of before - there was instead a strange elation in the thought, that somehow a spell had been shaped to respond specifically to him. Had Draco done it? Images of the trial, the small explosion of smoke as the dragon-heartstring evaporated when Fudge cut through it, came back to him. Not Draco, then, but another? Blinker the house-elf? He peered into the darkness; no answer came out of it.
But the diary was there, and with inward certainty he knew he was meant to take it. He reached out and removed it from its resting place on Draco's chest, not flinching this time as he laid a hand briefly upon the curve where the chest would slope down into the abdomen. Still the sightless eyes stared into the void, but looking more closely now, Harry saw no true lifelessness - some spirit of Draco, the part sucked out of him by the misery of Azkaban, had been preserved in stone, if not in flesh. He gathered the diary to him, felt the fugitive warmth of it seep into his body - so blessedly easy, all of a sudden, to imagine it as warm from Draco's touch; that Draco had freely handed it to him, asked him (asked him) to read it.
He had, of course, been the one to find them - a chance discovery, really, when a wall had accidentally given way during the expansion of Honeyduke's - he had been there to help block the secret passageway into the store's basement. And there they had been: filthy, their pages coming loose, not the slightest spell woven about them to protect them from time or the elements. Others had been found in later days, by accident, and in the same condition. But blank pages had been their protection - either that or Snape thought it not likely that they would survive the impending attack on Hogsmede. Ministry curses had been added later, "to protect classified material"; after Ron had taken it, Harry hadn't seen it again until it was put in Draco's hands... and by then the diary had belonged more to Draco than it ever had to him, if the diary could ever have belonged to him in the first place.
Not for the first time he thought of a Pensieve, a teenaged boy's most painful memory - one of glossy black hair, sarcastic eyes framed by glasses, a darting golden Snitch almost as radiant and as elusive as a red-headed girl who offered scorn and salvation at the same time. Intruding on Snape's memories now... the man was gone, true; he had died years ago, lost several years into a war that would give many people more honorable deaths, but opening this book now still had the flavor of intrusion.
He could still see the face of Severus Snape, fury and hatred blazing in those fathomless eyes, fury and hatred directed mostly at him, but some reserved for his father, and behind it something else - an old bitterness, scars never fully healed, the despair of knowing that one's most closely-guarded secret has been exposed, pulled from its hiding place.
But Draco had read to him, just sections, but enough... And, with the war now gone (or as gone as the war could ever be), Harry thought Snape wouldn't mind, if it was for a good cause.
And Draco, surely, was good enough a cause to justify his prying.
And so he sat down again, stiffly and not without a little pain, his back propped against the side of the sarcophagus, the book set up against his bent knees, as if on a lectern.
He opened the book. The first two pages had stuck together. Carefully, he slipped a finger between the pages and parted them; the parchment was reluctant, but under his gentle pressure separated. He smoothed the page back and studied thoughtfully the words written in minute, careful script in the center of the page:
/"Now, my brother Mambres, take care that you do well in this life to your children and to your friends, because in hell there is no good thing, only torment and blackness. And after you are dead, then you shall come to hell and amongst the dead you will have your dwelling, underneath the earth, and your grave shall be two cubits wide and four cubits long."/
On the facing page, again written in Snape's precise script, was his opening address. Draco had not read him this.
'Hello, Draco.
'I have buried these several books at various places in Hogsmeade, places that have, for various reasons, been important to my life at Hogwarts, and I am sure you know why. This page you are reading now is, in effect, my last will and testament, if you will, and it is the final thing I have left on record concerning my role in the cause of Albus Dumbledore and Harry Potter.
'By now, I expect that one side will have won - there was, I believe, very little time left before the end of things. At any rate, there are no great strategic secrets contained herein, for those I have decided to take to my grave, whenever I may go to it. Therefore, the value of these books is questionable at best, and rests solely with my reader to determine. As it is you, Draco, and you have decided for whatever reason to decode my books, I cherish the hope - and let it not be ill-founded, as hope usually is - that you will learn from what is written here.
'I expect that I am dead at this point; these words were written the night before I was to leave for Cornwall on a mission for Dumbledore, and they were committed to the earth that very morning, as I for a long time had expected to be. Do not, Draco, wonder after my soul or worry that my fate was unjust: whatever end I have come to, I assure you that I have earned it.
'I had begun to keep these journals toward the end of the first year of the war, at the insistence of Albus Dumbledore. At the time, I felt them a useless gesture, the fulfillment of the romantic, senile request of an old man - and yet Dumbledore has proven right about many things, in my school days as now, and I cannot help but feel that there is something here that I have written (although I cannot identify it) that may be of use to you. The use, as I said, will not be strategic - and much, I believe, is not even about the war, but rather to other, older struggles.
'You doubtless remember me without fondness, Draco, and perhaps for no better reason than youthful pride - I daresay that many times I must have rubbed your aristocratic fur the wrong way, and not apologized suitably for it. I do not apologize now. You see, I have found that war does not spare the prideful or the meek. Magic is much the same, for I have seen the most arrogant break under Cruciatus, as well as the spineless and the power-seeking. There is hardness and cruelty in these things that I finally realized I could not match... in seeking to make myself as dark as the magic I practiced, or as bitter as the war between my old master and my old teacher, I saw perhaps more clearly *through* that darkness than I had before....'
Harry swallowed past a tight throat, ignored the persistent tickle of conscience, and kept reading.
'.... If I were a Seer, I would predict the exact day on which you would look at your arm where they branded the Dark Mark, and hate yourself for receiving it. I remember the day I got it as clearly as though it were yesterday, and I cannot think on it now without disgust, for it was the day I did what I vowed I would never do, and became the slave of another man. And even that brand did not release me from slavery of another sort, and it was one that was equally distasteful to me.'
/He owed a life to your father./ Dumbledore's words, or nearly so. /A life-debt can never be easily discharged./
'But I am not a Seer; all I have is the certainty of experience. You will survive this war - you are too much a Slytherin to die in something so meaningless - and, I hope, will find these. No potion I know of allows the maker to see the future; there is only intuition and my own sense, which I trust above all other things, although they have at times led me horribly astray. You will look at your Mark and hate it for what it has done, and what it continues to do; Voldemort holds us even beyond his death, but there are ways in which we can defy him.
'I believe, then, this journal may be one of them.
'Severus Snape, June 2004.'
Harry stared at the signature at the bottom of the page, unwilling to reread the rest of the words. There was something in this as revealing as dipping into Pensieve thoughts. He had never been able to like Snape; for a very long time he had hated the man, and for a short time in the war had fostered a sort of grudging respect, but nothing more... And yet the words were as much contradiction as explanation, if they indeed *were* explanation. They had much of Snape's insufferable lecturing tone in places, yet... /I cannot think on it now without disgust, for it was the day I did what I vowed what I would never do.../
The man had been a hero. Not that it had mattered much to Snape, who never cared, and not that it would have made a difference to the body that had been found in Cornwall by a team of Aurors.
For a time, he thought of deeds done, willingly and unwillingly. He turned the page and read a bit more.
'August 13, 1998
'I have found that the hell of school is the never-ending cycle of new annoyances; once one has got rid of the last batch of overgrown ignoramuses, a troop of smaller ones comes marching in to take their places. I must guide them through their next seven years, with only the useless knowledge that three or four of them will turn out to be any good. Yet on the bright side I only have the one Weasley to deal with this year - the last brother mercifully having graduated from these halls - and the insufferable Granger jade has been given her duly-accorded honors and sent packing. I do not believe I will go into raptures about Potter's departure... there has been celebration enough already.
'McGonagall, true to form, has insisted upon regaling me with the success stories of her pet students. It seems Weasley has darkened the door of the Auror training facilities, and Granger along with him for some top-secret assignment. No one knows what Potter is doing; whatever it is, it is destructive, I am certain of it.
'There is some concern over the whereabouts of Seamus Finnegan; he has not been seen for some weeks, I am given to understand. Well, the boy will turn up eventually. They always do. McGonagall has been most... importune in demanding the use of my former associates to see if anyone has done something untoward with Finnegan; it has been difficult explaining to her that one does not simply use the fireplace to contact the Lestranges, or drop in unexpectedly at the Malfoy estates. She is threatening to go to Dumbledore with her complaints; there is some veiled reference to suspicions that I may be relapsing, and some hints dropped of blackmail. Let her go to Dumbledore and to hell with all of them, I say.
'I have not heard from Draco since our last conversation at the end of the year. Well, that is to be expected, I suppose; he and I did not part on the best of terms, and I have no doubt Malfoy is silently cursing my name. There may be hope, however; I am not dead (yet), so Draco could not have betrayed my secret to Lucius. Either that, or Voldemort is waiting for a more opportune time to exact his vengeance. It is probably the latter of the two.'
Harry paused in his reading, suddenly aware of the fact that he had stopped breathing. He quickly flipped back to the letter on the previous page, then returned to the beginning of the diary. /Something happened between the two,/ he decided after a moment. /What was it, though?/
He had not spent much time with Snape; mostly he'd been with Ron, or off on his own - or closeted with Dumbledore on something, and so he had missed much of what had gone on within the Order of the Phoenix. The fragmentation of responsibilities had been deliberate, of course; few people knew what most others were doing, or knew anything even beyond what their own small circles did. He had gone off on something for Dumbledore, who had been the only person who could have ordered Snape to do anything. Anything could have happened between August 18, 1998 and Severus burying those journals.
/Only one way to find out what it is./
But his back was sore and stiff from sitting and the cold, and he was uncomfortably aware of the rapid failing of his body. He couldn't possibly spend the night here - but it looked like he would have to, as he didn't know if he was up to another transformation, or to carrying the heavy book in his present state. And, too, there was the uncomfortable problem of how to get *out*; the place had the look of permanence, that the only trip a person ever made down to the crypt was one-way.
Unhappily, he set the book down, for his eyes were blurred with exhaustion behind his glasses. The crypt hadn't been designed for the comfort of the living, but he thought at least he could make his own. A wave of the wand - and a moment's fond remembrance - produced a squashy purple sleeping bag and pillow. Exhaustion hovered close upon him, oppressive despite the forbidding silence of the crypt and the mysteries of the diary.
Thinking on it, Harry stood awkwardly and replaced the diary on Draco's chest. A strange knot twisted in his heart as he watched the marble arms bend once more, the fingers reaching upward to lace together over the book, restoring it to the effigy's protective embrace. Harry stood there a moment, gazing at the unexpectedly serene countenance on Draco's sculpted face, realized distantly that there were no dates carved into the side of the coffin as there had been for others. A symbolic thing, then, but done when Draco had grown; the likeness between the living Draco and the marble one was too astonishing, too perfect.
He wanted to bend down - to kiss, touch the statue in some way. But that was silly, and romantic, and Harry Potter was neither of those things.
/How did you know it was me?/ he asked instead, silently.
The effigy gave back no answer, and Harry had not expected one. He stood in silence a few seconds more before sinking back down and crawling inside the sleeping bag. Sleep claimed him in the space of heartbeats, and save for quiet breathing, the crypt was silent as the grave.
TBC.
1.) The Latin inscription on Sulpicius Malfoi's tomb reads (roughly): "It is the eyes that are guilty."
2.) Agrippas are magic books, usually with pages or the binding made of human skin. They were supposed to be highly attuned to their owners, and untouchable by no one else except them. Some stories say that agrippas could sense their owners' death and would react violently by flying through the air and screaming. They take their name from the Renaissance scholar/alchemist Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, who was alleged to have dabbled in the magic arts himself, and wrote vast treatises on the subject.
3.) The quotation at the beginning of Snape's diary is an excerpt from the end of the Old English "Wonders of the East," a catalogue of rare and fantastic beings found in Africa and India. The story of Iamnes and Mambres is Biblical apocrypha. They were said to be the magicians who constested against Moses and Aaron and were killed for their presumption against the God of Israel; the extract is Iamnes' admonition to Mambres, who had according to the Old English text, opened up Iamnes' magic books to reveal "the deep secrets of his brother's idolatry."