Chapter 4 – Destiny's Divergence

Summer 1994

Department of Mysteries, Archive of Unlikely Prophecies, a few hours since the Arrival of Sora at Hogwarts

Elena Merryweather was bored.

The young woman currently worked in the Archive of Unlikely Prophecies, a subdivision of the Department of Mysteries that stored an untold amount of prophecies that either were too old to still be viable, or never activated for some reason or another. Here and there a prophecy activated partially and got pulled up for examinations, but the most exciting thing to happen in here was the occasional shattering of a prophecy orb telling of the death of the prophecy's subject. That's why the Archive had a single desk with a worker tasked with recording those instances and disposing of the glass shards afterwards.

Nowadays the desk posted here served a far more mundane purpose though; it was here the Department of Mysteries sent their Novices. Handling the more unsensitive paperwork, filling out quizzes designed to test the mind of the alumni (because school was good and all, but grades don't tell much about the students were) and sometimes helping out with various magical calculations.

It was one such calculation Elena worked on at the moment. It was the arithmantic formula of a spell that had been covered sometimes in 4th year level of Arithmancy, but a few parts were….off. Figuring out the differences was enough to keep Elena interested, though she still had to fight against her sleepiness. Yawning, she stretched her arms above her head and leaned back in her chair, thinking of how boring her day up to now had been.

Only to almost topple her chair backwards because all of a sudden an alarm had begun to wail. Hastily grabbing her wand Elena tapped the ancient crystal ball on her desk, making words appear inside it.

"Ancient Prophecy activated. Row 118 Shelf 10625. Stick to protocol #212145."

Inwardly cursing, Elena sent off a short missive for her superior, because she figured something like an Ancient Prophecy was way above her paygrade. Not once in the short training programme for the new recruits had anything been mentioned about something like this, meaning it was probably a code for projects on need-to-know basis, and restricted to the higher-ups. Elena had no wish to be dragged into something that complicated. Sometimes she got a feeling of troublesome situations waiting in her future, and had heeded the warning whenever it came. That very same feeling was blaring now. So, after she had sent off the missive Elena settled down at the desk and put the matter out of her mind.

At least till the door on the far end of the room banged open. An irate looking Saul Croaker, current Head of the Department of Mysteries, stormed in. Without any of the usual pleasantries he cut straight to the point.

"Miss….Merryweather was it? Are you sure you didn't misread the warning?"

Looking strangely at her rather shaken boss Elena nodded and tapped her wand at the glass orb. Again the letters glowed.

Croaker paled even further. Raising a shaking hand up to his forehead to wipe away the sudenly cold sweat on his brows, he suddenly knew that the Wizarding World was in for a dark time, if for completely different reasons than he´d expected.

Some miles away, in Little Whinging, Surrey County

Harry woke up with a start.

He'd been having a rather strange dream. At first it was one of his more frequent nightmares of the giant swarm of Dementors coming at him and Sirius over the frozen lake.

Then suddenly the dream changed and everything went dark. Harry found himself floating in complete darkness, a lot of tiny little lights in the size of fireflies around him. He heard different voices whispering around him, like:

"That's the hero...look, he carries so much darkness...is it to soon to let him choose?...will he even want to traverse the stars?"

On and on the whispers went, till the dream finally ended and Harry woke up with a certain amount of disquiet. Harry didn't know what was scarier, the dream about his most recent near-death experience or this new dream, which filled him with a lot of apprehension without knowing why. Despite that, Harry decided to go back to sleep.

...only to wake up not even an hour later from the dream of a great big skull made of some kind of smoke with a snake making it's course through the eyes and mouth.

Letting out a tired sigh, Harry gave up on sleep for the time. Looking outside at the pre-dawn sky, Harry decided to something he nearly always did when he'd had a nightmare or couldn't sleep: taking a short walk with his invisibility cloak.

And so, half an hour later, Harry was on his way through the quiet streets to the playground. Here and there a dog barked, but because Harry walked over the grassy strips next to the roadside ditch, no sounds were heard so his walk was undisturbed. Because the last thing Harry needed now was someone seeing him loitering around and complaining to his Uncle Vernon about it.

After finally reaching his destination at the swings, Harry sat down on one with a weary sigh. Rubbing at his tired eyes with one hand, Harry's Heart was suddenly up in his throat because a few steps in front of him stood a big black dog. Hesitantly, he asked: "Sirius?"

Even further away in Albania

The shade of Voldemort shivered in it´s sleep. There was a change in the winds, foretelling a shift in the tapestry of fate. Hours later though the shade would ignore it, assuming the strangely cold wind to a normal weather change, all the while cursing about his reptilian host's sensivity to cold.

Back at Hogwarts, Heart Room

Deep under the ancient castle, Sora's heart was soothed by ancient magic. Finally letting go of it's awareness, it slowly fell into a deep, healing sleep, with only the murmuring of the magic river making any sounds.

AN.: Whew, finally done...you would've gotten this chapter a lot sooner if I hadn't cottoned on to the fact that this story needs to be in a somewhat chronological order, and not spending a lot of time with either character only to restart from the same point of time in the next chapter...ah well. Chapter 5 is already roughly planned out because of this though, since parts of it just got shifted to a later chapter. :D

To answer the question of the year this story plays in, it starts in the summer before 4th for plot reasons. Which were unclear for bit, since 5th would have worked just as well.

P.S.: The first to figure out the Easter egg I've hidden here gets to name a room I'm designing for the plot :D