Disclaimer: Harry Potter and all related characters belong to J.K. Rowling. I am merely borrowing them.
:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:
MUGGLE
Chapter Six: True Visions
One faces the future with one's past.
Pearl S. Buck
:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:
Day after day Petunia returned to the stuffy, dim room in the headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix and subjected herself to hours of lectures and lessons from one or two of the four Seers. Most often it was Professor Augur, but on occasion she found herself left with Bernard and Madame Devin, who had no idea how to explain what they did, let alone teach.
On those days she left with a headache.
Far worse were the days with the Scryer. Though never did she have a lesson with only him, she always left wanting to weep. The man—Petunia was sure he was human, just altered, somehow—exuded an air of desperation and misery. She never saw his face, and alternated between terror at the thought of it and wild curiosity at what lay underneath that black hood.
On those days, she left with nightmares.
Half the summer was over and the Seers were ready to give up on her. She saw things in the crystal ball, but never controllable visions, and though as the weeks went by she acclimated to the images and no longer grew ill, she never again saw Lord Voldemort.
Sometimes they used a silver bowl filled with water to See, and Petunia would gasp at the half-formed nightmares that rose from the bowl before her. Augur would gently stir the water with a laurel branch, and words whispered from the ripples against the sides of the bowl.
Death… destruction… the Mark above!… we are lost…Once Petunia returned to her room and saw in the mirror a green grinning skull with a snake protruding from its mouth. When she screamed, bringing several members of the Order running, it disappeared. Madame Devin told her later about mirror scrying, and Petunia shivered in dismay. Would she forever be afraid to look into a mirror, for fear of what she might see?
On the first of August Petunia went to the Seers' room and sat, waiting patiently. She was always early; none of the members of the Order of the Phoenix ever spoke to her, so she had no one who might slow her up getting to lessons. All of the others were, and in any case, few of them stayed in the headquarters very long. Some she saw more than once, but usually, all she got of any of them was a glimpse and no more. Once she saw the headmaster of Lily's school (she only knew it was him because the wizard speaking to him called him "Headmaster" and asked about Hogwarts), and wondered what on earth a teacher would be doing fighting a war like this.
The Scryer emerged from the shadows, his blue eyes glowing like always. Petunia shuddered before she could stop herself, but he did not remark upon it.
"I am to give you instruction today," said the Scryer in his rumbling, distant voice.
"Just you?" said Petunia.
"I would prefer not just as much as you," he replied.
"Let's not and say we did," muttered Petunia.
He heard; she had intended him to, not forgetting his sharp hearing. "I cannot do that," he shot back. "Augur sees something in you. He thinks you can help. And for him, I will try. Not for your sake, child, for his."
"What do you owe him?" asked Petunia curiously.
The blue eyes flashed dangerously. "That is none of your concern. We meditate now."
She sat, obediently, on one of the cushions on the floor, and began the breathing exercises taught her by the Professor. The Scryer did the same, and for a long while they simply sat.
Usually Petunia dozed, as hard as she tried to empty her mind as she was supposed to. Today, she felt restless and alert, almost painfully aware of everything around her. Questions raced through her mind; with only the Scryer in front of her she could focus on nothing else. For some reason she thought of the lost crystal ball, and wondered again where it had gone.
A strange compulsion came over her, and before she realized what she was doing, she had risen and walked to the small table where another crystal ball sat shimmering in the dim light. Without thinking, her mind curiously blank, she stared into the depths of the smoky crystal and Saw.
Herself, running through the rain—face flushed, already in the grips of the fever that had sickened her for so long—and a dark figure behind her.
Voldemort! Petunia shouted in her mind, trying to warn herself, though she knew she Saw the past and not the future—but it was not he.
The lost crystal ball in her arms—the dark figure, with eyes flashing blue in the deep dark of the hood—he took it from her, and spoke a single word, and Petunia remembered it—"Obliviate!"
She came out of the trance, gasping for breath. "You took it!" she cried, whirling around to where the Scryer waited. "Why wouldn't you have told me? Why did you make me forget? Couldn't you have saved me the trouble?"
"Chance, mere chance," he said. "I did not remember, except I found it curious that a Muggle child should have what was clearly a wizarding artifact. So I took it to spare you further danger. Only days ago did I See it, and make the connection."
Petunia, angry, twisted back around. "Thank you, I suppose," she snapped. "Only I wish you had erased my memory of the vision as well, and then neither of us would be in this mess."
"Perhaps we would be in an even bigger one," said the Scryer dryly. "Haven't you learned yet that telling the future is a risky business, and one can never say for sure what might have happened? No one may know what might have been! All we may know—is what is."
"So how do you know anything you do will prevent Voldemort attacking? What if you See the future and you think something will change it, but it turns out to make the very thing you wanted to avoid happen anyway?"
"That is the risk we take," said the Scryer. "Collect yourself and try again."
A smoldering anger settled in Petunia's chest, and stayed despite her efforts to calm herself down. She thought that she didn't really want to be calmed down; all the resentment at the Order of the Phoenix and regret that she was not having a holiday like she should be seemed to have boiled up to the top. The Scryer's presence did not help. He frightened her, and irked her curiosity no end, and she could do nothing about either feeling.
In the crystal ball the mists took shape, and she drifted into the vision trance still wondering about the Scryer. What is he? Who is he really, under that crazy hood? What sane person goes about looking like the bloody Grim Reaper?
She wanted to See the Scryer, wanted to know his secret, and suddenly, her anger swept her away into the mists, stopping abruptly in a stone room, filled with desks and funny bottles on shelves. A classroom, Petunia realized, probably very like a classroom Lily would have lessons in… some kind of Chemistry or maybe Alchemy… or was it Potions? Petunia could not remember.
A boy, maybe her age or a little older, with bright blue eyes, lay beside a shattered cauldron, a gleaming liquid seeping across the floor. He writhed, screaming in agony, as light shot out from his mouth and eyes. Petunia jerked back, but the vision was not done with her yet.
He fuzzed—there was no other word to describe it—as if he were turning into a ghost then and there, and screamed in agony.
The door swung open and in rushed a much younger Professor Augur, followed closely by the long-bearded Hogwarts headmaster Petunia had glimpsed in the hallways of the Order. His beard was auburn instead of white, and Petunia wondered how long ago this had been. The boy on the floor had turned to shadow and smoke, his blue eyes the only remaining vestige of humanity.
"What have you done, John?" cried the headmaster angrily, and set about making a great deal of complicated wiggles with his wand. Augur knelt beside the boy and shook a strange powder into his hand from a little leather pouch.
"I have pierced the veil around the world!" cried John, and Petunia recognized the thunder-rumble voice at once. "I shall See more than ever before! I shall See, Professor Augur, without the need of your funny little tools! I shall be a prophet like Nostradamus and Vablatsky, I shall See everything and know everything!"
"It's out of control! He's dying!" cried Augur. "John! Stop this madness!"
"I See…" cried John, "I See how it ends!" A note of terror rang through his words, lifting at the end of his speech.
He laughed, a crazed, high-pitched cackle at odds with his deep voice. And then, the headmaster leapt back, and Augur shouted a strange incantation, and the Scryer John solidified again with a bang and a flash of lightning.
"No…" he whispered, looking at his clouded hands.
"This is not how you die, John," said Augur.
"No," whispered John. "Though I wish that it was."
A hand on Petunia's shoulder brought her back to reality. She looked down and saw the smoke-gray skin, clouded like the crystal ball, and realized that the Scryer had taken off his hood.
"There, child," he said. "You can See what you wish, if you want it enough. Use that dangerous curiosity of yours, that talent for gossip… this is just another way to find out all the facts you want to know, be it in the future or in the present or in the past. We are Seers… we See what we wish."
"What did you do?" whispered Petunia.
John raised his eyebrows, dark slashes again the cloud gray of his skin. "I took a risk. I tried an ancient and complex ritual, and I performed it incorrectly. Sloppily. I lacked the strength, really, to do it at all, but I would not listen to those who knew better. I could not wait. I was too cocky. Augur, with the help of Albus Dumbledore, pulled me back and saved my life."
"You wanted to See without using a tool," said Petunia, curiously.
"True prophecy comes without the crystal ball. These visions we see, they are only shadows… possibilities. They are not prophecy. Prophecy is a certainty." He turned away. "I wished to make only prophecy, and surpass altogether these tawdry visions. In the end, I only made one—and it concerns me alone."
Petunia did not ask him what it was. The tone of his voice suggested that he would not tell her in any case. After a time he pointed to the crystal ball, and said, "Try again. Focus on Lord Voldemort, and try to See."
His hood shrouded his head once more, and the strange empathy that had sprung between them for a few seconds was gone. Petunia was still curious, but no longer afraid.
She sighed, and put her hands against the smooth surface of the crystal. "Yes, sir," she said, and let the mists swallow her up once more.
:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-: