(I forgot the disclaimer last chapter so here's one for the whole story: I don not own Harry Potter or anything you recognize as written by JK Rowling, Charlie is mine and if you want to borrow her you have to ask.)

Chapter 1- Ashes

Harry rolled over onto his stomach and heard a crumpling sound like paper being stepped on. He was completely lost for a minute, trying to remember where he was and why he smelled grass and dirt. He slowly sat up, his eyes still closed. The sun was still very bright and he didn't want to be temporarily blind so he opened his eyes very slowly. When he regained his senses he looked around for the source of the crumpling sound. He found it almost immediately. It was a piece of rough drawing paper, completely blank. Harry crinkled his nose and put the paper on the grass where he found it. Maybe someone left it there, or it drifted in the wind. Whatever.

Harry got up and walked into the house. Time to go scavenging for food. He hadn't eaten since breakfast and he was hungry. He found bread in the pantry and made himself a cheese sandwich with orange juice. It was only five in the afternoon and he had nothing to do.

He put his hands down flat on the table and thought hard. What else could I possibly do? He held his hands up to his face and noticed dark smudges on his fingertips. He looked down on the table and saw, where his hands where earlier, eight dark circles.

Harry tried to think where the smudges came from, maybe the dirt outside, or something in the house. No, that was impossible, the Dursley house was perfectly clean, thanks to Petunia's valiant efforts.

Harry tried to think of everything that he did that day, reliving everything in his mind. Then it came to him. The paper that he found! There must have been something written on the other side. Maybe something from the order!

He ran outside to find the paper exactly as he had left it. He picked it up and turned it over. He was right, there was something there, but it wasn't writing. It was a perfect portrait of him sleeping on the lawn with the word Raven written across the top of the page. And lower down a tombstone with 'Here lies Lily and James Potter, loved by all' written on it. Harry looked for a signature and found a tiny squiggle in the right hand corner. He took it up to his room to look at the signature more closely.

He ran up to his room, taking the stairs two at a time. He sat at the desk and turned on the lamp to see better. He remembered an old magnifying glass of Dudley's was in one of the many boxes in his room. He quickly found it and looked more closely at the signature. It looked like Charles or Charlie. He couldn't tell.

Harry put the picture down and went to his bed. It completely creeped him out that some guy was drawing him when he was sleeping, and how did this man know about his parents? What if it was a death eater? No, it couldn't be. A death eater would have killed him, not drawn him.

Harry fell into a restless sleep, tossing and turning all night. Dreaming of a strange man whose face could not be seen. He woke up in a cold sweat. This was not good. This picture was bothering him more than some of Voldemort's dreams. Maybe he should tell Dumbledore about it. Naw, it was useless bothering him about a stupid picture. Then Harry remembered that he said that anything, big or small, should be reported immediately.

So Harry sat down at his desk and found a spare piece of parchment. It had been two day's since his last letter, but oh well. This was important. After several tries of writing the letter so that the picture wouldn't be that important he finally succeeded.

He tied the letter to Hedwig, who came in sometime during the night, and sent her off. He went back to his bed and sat down. There was something bothering him but he didn't know what it was. There was the picture, of course, but something else was making him itch. He went back to the desk and looked down at the drawing.

'Here lies Lily and James Potter. Loved by all.' He whispered softly. How did the man know who his parents are? He walked back and forth between the door and the desk in the other end of the room, picture in hand.

He had always wondered what had happened to his parents. Was there a funeral? Did they get a service or a memorial? Were they cremated?

No, He was pretty sure they were not cremated, and they got a proper funeral but did he know where? Nope. Could he find out? That he could do. All he had to do was go down to the city and get their death certificates. That would tell him where his parents were buried.

He got a couple of pounds out of the money jar on top of the fridge and went to the nearest bus stop, which was down the street. He got there ten minutes later and sat down on the bench beside an old grandmother with blue hair.

The bus got there two minutes later. He put the right amount of money in the machine and a ticket popped out of the slot in the side. He took it and shoved it in his pocket without reading the time he had left. When he finally got to the city he had to ask three people how to get to the record bureau.

He walked through the glass double doors into a small waiting room. The walls were a light blue with paintings of sunsets, obviously to soothe the people in the building. There was a secretary at a desk in a corner. He went to her, noticing the nameplate that said Ms. Ronaldo on it.

'Excuse me ma'am, I'm looking for the death certificate of Lily or James Potter. I was wondering of you could help me?' Harry said in his best polite voice. 'Certainly, if you are a direct descendant of the deceased, of course.' She said in a sugary voice.

'Yeah, I'm their son.' Harry said. 'Alright, Can I see a proof of ID please?' She said, pulling out a piece of paper. Harry got out a random card with his name on it. 'Would this work?' He asked. She looked at the name and said 'Yes, it will. Now all you have to do is sign here and I will go get the papers.' She gave him the paper that she pulled out earlier. It had a short paragraph about liability and then a signature at the bottom. He saw the line with a red X that the secretary had made. Idiot-proof, he thought comically. He took the pen she handed him and signed his name at the bottom of the line.

'Alrighty then. That's in order. Just wait a minute; I'll go get the papers.' She said and got up to go through the light blue door beside her desk. Harry took a seat in one of the comfy chairs by the secretary's desk and took a magazine from one of the little tables. In a short while Ms. Ronaldo came back with a clipboard in hand. She took a seat and Harry put the magazine down and came up to her desk again.

"It seems that your parents were buried in a cemetery in Godric's Hollow. That's a long way from here but you can take the bus and get there before nightfall if you want.' She said to Harry. 'Thank you very much. This really helps.' He gave her his best smile and turned to go.

He turned around with a new mission: Godric's Hollow. He got on the northbound bus and took it until he saw a stretch of land with monuments and tombstones scattered about. He pulled the Stop Requested string and waited to be let off. He walked up to the small house that was beside the entry way. He went inside and was promptly shown where to go. He also bought a small bouquet of flowers for his parents' grave.

He followed the instructions given to him and easily found his parents grave. There it was, exactly as it was in the drawing, 'Here lies Lily and James Potter, loved by all.' He put the bouquet of flowers at the base of their tombstone and sat down in the tall grass, noticing the silence all around him. How did the artist know how the graves looked like? He was so involved in his thinking that he didn't even notice the strange girl that had come up to him. Harry finally looked up when the girl stood right in front of him.

She was the strangest girl Harry had ever seen, she was wearing a black shirt with 'live every life like it's your last' written on it, and a neon green ruffled skirt, and the most scuffed converse shoes he had ever seen. Her eyes were so red Harry thought she might be related to Voldemort, but then noticed the Malfoy blonde hair. It was cut shoulder length, and parts of it were braided.

She was standing right in front of his parents' grave, looking down at it sadly. She turned to him and smiled. 'There's no one there.' She said. 'What?' He said, getting up from the grass to stand a few inches taller than the girl. 'There's no one there.' She repeated herself. 'What do you mean, there's no one there?' he said. 'It's an empty grave, there's no one inside.' She stated matter of factly.

'Of course there's some one inside, they're dead, sure, but they're there.' He said. Maybe this girl was crazy, how can there no be anyone inside the grave? And how did she know that there was nobody inside the grave? 'I'm not crazy.' She said, as thought reading his mind.

'Right. OK.' Harry said cautiously. This wasn't good; he had to get out of here. The girl had done absolutely nothing to harm him but she seemed really odd. Like a pulsing aura of weirdness was coming off her. She turned to look at the grave again. 'Let me explain, there is no one in this grave. I can feel the dead but there is absolutely nothing in the ground under us. Whoever these people were, they were not laid to rest here.' She said in an amazingly calm voice, as if she had explained this a hundred times.

'Then why do the records say that they were buried here?' Harry asked. Just keep her talking, and get away, he thought.

'The records are wrong.' She simply said. She looked him straight in the eye. 'I'm not lying. There are empty coffins in the ground. That can only mean a few things. They were grave robbed, which I doubt, or they're not dead.'

'Not dead?" Harry whispered. It was impossible, preposterous, but Harry had always had that bit of hope that somehow his parents were not dead. 'No.' he said. Shaking away the thought. 'Stop it.' He said angrily.

'I'm not lying.' She whispered. She looked at the grave again. 'I have to go.' She suddenly said. 'Good bye, Raven.' She turned to leave when Harry realized what she had said. 'Wait!' He yelled, but she somehow had gotten to the other side of the long graveyard in the blink of an eye. She turned and looked at him. 'I'm not lying!' She yelled back. And then all of a sudden she was gone.

Harry stared at the place where she had stood moments ago. Raven. She had called him Raven. Like the name written on the drawing he had found yesterday afternoon. So she was the mystery artist. It wasn't some strange man. It was an even stranger girl.

Charles didn't work, that was a name for a male. Charlie was also a male name but it could have been a shortened version of Charlotte. Well, Charlie suited the girl. She was really pretty once you got over the bright colors she wore. But who was she? How did she know his parents? And was what she had said true? Was there nobody in the coffins below his feet? Where his parents truly dead? This was too confusing. Harry decided to head home and work it all out on the bus.

TBC