"Give it to me, Gregorovitch." The voice of the man whose perspective they were inhabiting was high, clear, and cold, His wand was held before him in a long-fingered, dead-white hand, holding Gregorovitch, a stout little white-haired man with a thick, bushy beard, suspended and immobilised.

"I have it not, I have it no more! It was, many years ago, stolen from me!"

"Do not lie to Lord Voldemort, Gregorovitch. He knows... He always knows."

The old man's pupils were wide, dilated with fear, growing "larger" and more overwhelming as the Voldemort focused in on him—

They were hurrying along a dark corridor in a much younger Gregorovitch's wake as he held a lantern aloft: He burst into a room at the end of the passage, into what looked like a wandmaker's workshop. It smelled of wood-carving, and there were delicate engraving instruments scattered across one of the benches. There was a young man perched on the ledge of the window like an enormous bird, his golden hair glinting in the lamplight.

He grinned, clearly delighted with himself, as he threw a Stunning Spell at the wandmaker and hopped backward out of the window, crowing with triumphant laughter.

Voldemort withdrew, his focus returning to the wandmaker in the present day, his face stricken with terror.

"Who was the thief, Gregorovitch?"

"I do not know, I never knew, a young man — no — please — PLEASE!"

The madman found the wandmaker's pleas to be, if anything, even more infuriating than having been frustrated yet again in the pursuit of his goal. Those frustrations he let loose on the hapless old wizard in the form of a Cruciatus, though it didn't last long — while he did want to burn the entire world to the ground a little more every day he was thwarted in his pursuit, he didn't truly want to see Gregorovitch specifically in pain. The retired wandmaker was, in fact, utterly useless to him, and it was difficult to maintain the Cruciatus when all one truly felt was contempt for the target's existence. That emotion was far better suited to the Avada he cast bare seconds into the useless wizard's torture, brilliant green light tearing his soul from his body.

Voldemort let it fall to the floor, throwing himself into the air and triggering the metamorphosis which allowed one to assume the form of a cloud of smoke, streaking out of the window, his rage at the world and its stubborn refusal to simply give him the Elder Wand unabated—

Harry startled awake, stomach turning, horrified to have just 'tortured and murdered' someone, even if he hadn't personally actually done anything, his scar burning with that same peculiar internal fire which always felt as though it would split his head in two, like there was something in there, trying to get out—

He lay for a moment, the back of his hand pressed against it, as though that would help (it never did, but he couldn't seem to stop himself doing it every time anyway) trying to catch his breath, uncomfortably clammy from tossing and turning in a cold sweat for however long the dream had lasted. After that moment, though, he hauled himself out of bed. There was no point trying to go back to sleep. He'd never manage it.

Might as well go take a bath, he thought, resentful of both the fact that he was awake and that Grimmauld didn't have showers, vaguely considering returning to the task of trawling through the books in the library for potential tracking spells. The sooner that fucker was dead, the better, because he didn't remember the last time he'd gotten a good night's sleep. Even when he didn't have nightmares, his sleep was broken and uneasy, haunted by the possibility that he might.

Mimi withdrew from his mind as he grabbed his towel and stalked toward the door, her attention returning fully to her own body, in the unoccupied room adjacent to Harry's.

Going to bed at six in the afternoon meant she'd woken around two — later than she'd expected, honestly, but dementors, ugh — fully rested and ready to get on with her plans. (Twenty days and counting...)

She'd checked Hermione's work on the anchoring amulet (which was perfectly adequate — much better than Mimi could've done) and collared ToadCat. She'd also given the transfigured witch a bowl of water and a tea-saucer of minced liver, and conjured a sandbox for her. ToadCat had not been appreciative, her still-human mind categorically rejecting the idea of shitting in a box or eating raw liver, but Mira was certain her bodily needs would eventually overcome her fastidiousness.

That had reminded her that she still hadn't eaten in...a while. One of the sort-of negative things about developing a habit of shunting aside negative physical stimuli — simply refusing to feel pain and discomfort — was not noticing that she was actually hungry until someone pointed out she was unconsciously channelling extra magic and subsuming it to sustain herself, or she just passed out. That did happen, sometimes. She could go a lot longer on a lot less food than most people, but she couldn't live on magic alone, much less on the ambient magic she unconsciously exploited. She'd made it five days, once, deliberately consuming magic rather than physical food, but when she just slipped into it unintentionally she rarely made it more than two. (Though she also rarely made it more than twelve hours without someone reminding her to actually eat something, these days.)

Now that she was thinking of it, she could feel it, the edges of her mind, instinctively attuned to the local ambient magic, not just relaxed, waiting for her to get close enough to another mind to infiltrate it, but pulling that energy into herself and transforming it into something she could use to keep herself going a bit longer, maybe another day or so. She should eat, though.

The number of meals she was capable of cooking for herself was relatively limited. She was reasonably competent at brewing potions, but she couldn't quite seem to get the hang of cooking anything more complicated than porridge or cheese toasties. Sev liked to point that out whenever she tried to tell him that she was a bloody adult now, thanks very much, but it wasn't like cooking was a skill she actually needed. She was very good at transfiguring porridge to change the consistency and glamouring the hell out of it to make it resemble any actual food she liked, and nutrient potions were cheap.

In any case, she hadn't seen any reason to wake Kreacher, she'd just made herself a couple of cheese toasties and glamoured a bowl of water to resemble a nice cream of tomato soup, poking at the enormous black pearl Ari and the kids had apparently evicted from an enchanted pyxis while she did so. As far as she could tell, it didn't do anything, which was...odd. She could see the magic in it, but it wasn't active, so she had no idea why it had been stored in a magic-suppressing box. It was possible it had just been in the box so it wouldn't roll off the shelf or get dusty or whatever, but she'd decided it was better to keep an eye on it, just in case, so she'd left it in an egg cup in the middle of the table.

After breakfast, she'd drafted a letter to Dru, explaining who she was and why she was here, though she hadn't sent it — it was generally a good idea to wait at least a few hours and look at it again before she sent anything really important, because when she didn't, she often realised about ten minutes after sending off the owl that she'd forgotten some very obvious key detail or other. Also, there were no owls here, and no public post-owlery would be open in the middle of the night to hire one.

Instead, she'd gone back to trying to figure out her next move. She really wanted to get on with reviving the Family Magic, but since she had no idea how long she would be dead to the world after doing so, she wanted to at the very least get Harry, Ron, and Hermione working on occlumency and some serious light battlemagic (both of which would help them resist the DAPs), and they should probably start trying some of the locator spells and rituals they'd found while she was crashed out earlier.

Though she was a bit hesitant about letting them do so without her, because again, none of them were even slightly competent at occlumency, and the enchantments on the horcrux were serious business. They would necessarily need to un-shield the locket in order to use it as a focus, and she wasn't certain she trusted the trio of locals not to do something stupid under its influence, like, oh, she didn't know. Put it on and open it, allowing it to possess one of them, or something? Or freak out when they realised it was fucking with their heads, and destroy it before they found the others, maybe.

She suspected that not-Ari would still head up to Hogwarts with her, maybe stay and impersonate a student to teach the kids some decent self-defence, or spy outside the school at Sev's direction, or something. Though Mimi might tap her to come help when they located the rest of the horcruxes. The ones Dumbledore had already found seemed like they were pretty well booby-trapped, so she imagined having a trained auror at her back would be a better idea than taking Harry along to fetch them as the old goat had done with the (fake) locket.

Considering the logistical details of actually reviving the Family Magic, trying to think if she needed to do anything to prepare ahead of time, she'd realised she'd overlooked a potentially significant problem: she couldn't make the sacrifices before the Family Magic was awake to accept them, but waking the Family Magic would likely draw heavily enough on Mimi's life force to knock her out, and would almost certainly (unintentionally) kill her if the sacrifices weren't made pretty fucking immediately.

If she somehow set them up so they were bleeding to death (but not already dead yet) when she awakened the Magic, and it didn't accidentally kill her before it figured out what she was doing, it would probably still knock her out, and then she'd be lying unconscious on the altar at the Keep for who knew how long — possibly days. Clearly, she would need an assistant.

And unfortunately, none of the trio seemed likely to be willing to slit a few throats for her, even if they were throats of people they hated and believed the world would be better off without. She certainly wouldn't trust them to follow through after she passed out but before she died. And while not-Ari probably would follow through if Mimi convinced her to actually do it, she was also pregnant, and awakening blood wards which might also recognise and draw on her life-force if they were desperate enough and she was in the circle, didn't seem like a great idea if she wanted to keep the pregnancy. Kreacher...maybe. But she was reluctant to rely on the unstable elf, especially when he wasn't bound to obey her at the moment. He might not actually want to bring back the Family Magic. He seemed happy with Harry — happier than he had been in her timeline, at least — and hadn't seemed too eager about the idea when she'd spoken with him earlier.

She also wasn't entirely certain what would happen if Harry, Ron, and Hermione were at Grimmauld when the wards were revived. They might be considered intruders, since the magic wouldn't recognise them, which would not be good. Especially since, again, she might be out for days. Even if the wards just immobilised them, holding them for a member of the House to address, they could still die of dehydration or something before she hauled her arse home. So it would be ideal if they could find somewhere else for them to stay until she woke up and could introduce them to the wards properly.

She could still go kidnap the Carrow twins, of course, and had every intention of doing so, but they'd have to share lodgings with ToadCat for a while, until she figured out exactly how to make the sacrifice work. And that should probably wait until morning, at the earliest.

At the moment, her plan was to actually attend a few lessons with her fellow Hufflepuffs — probably the sixth-years. She'd look less out of place with the fifth-years, but if she had to sit through lessons for the sake of her cover, NEWT-level lessons were infinitely preferable to OWL-level. That would give her the opportunity to plant a few sleeper compulsions to trigger later in the day and force the Carrows to come out to the Forbidden Forest to meet her, or something. Funny as it might be to just stand up in the middle of one of their lectures and transfigure the 'professor' into a cat, word would probably get around and tip off the other twin that something was awry. (Or the Death Eaters directly — some of them did have kids at the school.)

It would be better if they both just left the Castle, apparently of their own will, and mysteriously disappeared. Sev could contact Voldemort a few days later (after she killed them, she wouldn't want Voldie fumating over here looking for them before the wards were properly activated — she could have her assistant tip him off, too) and pretend to be all annoyed, asking whether they'd been reassigned without telling him or what, which would deflect suspicion from him when Voldemort realised they were presumably dead. After all, Sev wouldn't draw attention to their disappearance if he were responsible, would he?

Thom wasn't constantly aware of all the soul-branded Death Eaters, and he was considerably more mentally competent than the caricature of himself which was Voldemort. If she kept the Carrows unconscious, they wouldn't be able to use the mark to attempt to communicate their distress, and he wouldn't notice anything amiss until he sent a letter demanding a progress report or tried to use the mark to summon them to a meeting or something. But he should be able to find any of them at any time if he actually wanted to, assuming they were alive.

But that meant she'd need to brew something to keep them out — probably not Living Death, that one was annoyingly finicky and took days to brew, but one of the less powerful sleeping draughts. Shalin's, or something. And that meant she'd need ingredients. Acquiring them would be significantly easier once other people were awake, like shopkeepers, and Kreacher, who would almost certainly be able to fetch any equipment they already had on hand, tucked away in storage somewhere.

And if she was going to apothecaries and alchemists' shops anyway, she might as well grab some of the shite they'd need for the locator spells they'd found so far, even if she still wasn't certain it was a good idea for the other three to be fucking about with the horcrux unsupervised. They would get around to trying them eventually. So she'd made a list of stuff they'd need, at least for the rituals the others had already bookmarked, as well as a batch of Shalin's Sleep Elixir, then checked the time again, hoping that it was at least five, so she could actually start doing things.

Five was a reasonable time to wake people. Well...reasonable-ish. Definitely more reasonable than three-fifty, which was the actual time.

(Damn it.)

She'd resisted the urge to do something loud enough to accidentally-on-purpose startle the locals into consciousness, instead returning to her to-do list, whereupon she realised she could work on figuring out what the hell was up with Harry dreamwalking into Voldemort's mind without any conscious participation on his part. She would definitely need to do so before she could teach him occlumency, much less any legilimency that might be useful to him in the coming months, and in fact, it would probably be easier if he were sleeping. He'd most likely be doing the thing, so.

Normally, when legilimens slept, their consciousness relaxed (like anyone else's), allowing their aura to spread through the local ambient magic undirected. Both Thom and Sev were exceptions to this, in opposite directions: Sev was relatively private and uncomfortable with the idea of accidentally legilimising people, and had therefore achieved the degree of self-control necessary to keep up habitual occlumency to contain himself while he slept, while Thom's mind had developed in a permanent state of partial dissociation — like Mimi, he'd awakened as an empathic legilimens at an absurdly young age, but unlike Mimi, he hadn't been a sheltered child surrounded by a loving family of ghosts and elves.

The most reasonable explanation anyone had come up with for the shape of his mind was that he'd instinctively attempted to distance himself from his perception of the negativity and suffering all around him, and incidentally imposed a deep division between his conscious and unconscious mind, constantly reinforcing it as his mind developed. It wasn't a problem when he was awake, and therefore able to control himself — he did sort of have to legilimise himself in order to understand exactly what he was feeling most of the time, the physical sensations he experienced largely divorced from any emotional investment, but it allowed him to maintain a functional façade despite an affinity for the Dark which would almost certainly have rendered anyone else entirely psychotic well before he'd left school. (The division wasn't total, his unconscious need to commune with the Dark did occasionally rise to the level that he was compelled to act, but Mimi was sure he would have been caught decades ago if he didn't have some self-control.)

When he was asleep, though, his unconscious mind had free rein to express itself through his magic, actively infiltrating any mind around him without his usual restraint, torturing them with their own greatest fears and failings to elicit negative emotions; subsuming those emotions, and occasionally strongly emotional memories; or even actively corrupting their personalities and motivations to serve his own interests, basically enthralling them over the course of a few nights. (Sirius's dementor comparison was entirely legitimate.) Bella was literally the only person who could safely sleep in the same place as him, at the same time. It wasn't really even a good idea for non-legilimens to be conscious around him while he wasn't.

Since those two were the mind-mages she'd had the most contact with over the course of her life, she was somewhat less familiar than she probably should be with normal mind-mages' consciousness, but from what she'd read, her own experience, and what she knew of Blaise's (Mira Zabini's son was also a legilimens and Bella's godson; they'd spent a lot of time together when she'd first moved to New Avalon), it was far more usual for a sleeping legilimens to just sort of...sprawl out. Those who found themselves unconscious in relatively close proximity to another mind they were intimately familiar with, or who were particularly adept at matching others' mind-frequencies unconsciously (like Mimi), often found themselves infiltrating the (un-)consciousness of one or more nearby minds during the phase of sleep where most people dreamed.

Dreamwalking wasn't quite as restful as sleeping normally (behind wards to stop intrusions and keep her mind contained) and dreaming her own dreams, and it tended to make non-legilimens uncomfortable, knowing their privacy could be so easily invaded, but it didn't hurt, and was a perfectly natural experience for probably seventy per cent of all legilimens at some point in their lives. Most of them did grow out of it as their abilities matured and they gained more self-awareness, but the ten or fifteen per cent who didn't just warded their bedrooms to keep them from wandering into the dreams of anyone who didn't voluntarily choose to sleep in the same room. It wasn't really a problem, or even unusual.

Unless, of course, instead of accidentally sleep-legilimising your best mate in the next room, you somehow found yourself accidentally sleep-legilimising an insane fucking dark lord hundreds of miles away.

Slipping into Harry's mind while he slept wasn't much like watching any other legilimens she knew sleep. It reminded her more than anything of watching Dru resting, which was just really fucking weird.

Among her (many) other peculiarities, Druella didn't really sleep. She was a seer, and an obscenely powerful one at that, exhibiting a greater degree of perspective than any other remotely functional seer in Europe or North America. It was therefore sort of hilarious she hadn't actually realised she was a seer until she started working at the College in Paris, right around the time Mira was born. Thom claimed he'd had his suspicions as far back as the mid-Fifties, but by the time they'd met, she was more than capable of entirely blocking out her awareness of the vast majority of ongoing potentialities around herself if she wanted to (and normally did), so it hadn't been immediately and unmistakably obvious. He hadn't mentioned it because he wanted to see how long it would take for her to figure it out.

Seers' perspective was an artefact of a degree of deviation between their souls and their plane of existence, meaning the greater their perspective the more of their soul existed outside of the mundane realm, and therefore outside of time as most mortals understood it. The greater their degree of deviation, the more miserable it tended to be for seers to exist in the mundane realm — experiencing temporal potentialities resulting from different decisions made by various actors in a given circumstance in parallel with the present, projecting up to several minutes into the future; picking up echoes of the past of any person or object they came into contact with, including historical associations; occasionally picking up on life-changing events a person was likely to experience if they continued on their current trajectory; projected thoughts or emotions (though usually not memories or well-contained thoughts); and a good deal of information about what a thing or a person was, how it (or they) came to be and how it (or they) related to the rest of the universe.

Not all of them exhibited the same effects to the same degree, but practically anyone who could see more than a few seconds into the future, or whose awareness of the relationships between people and/or objects rose above the occasional intuition, tended to struggle to maintain their sanity existing in this plane. The amount of raw data they were bombarded with constantly, every single second of their lives, was simply overwhelming. Most of them didn't have the capacity to process even a fraction of it and still maintain an awareness of the physical world around themselves without occlumency and potions to help keep them grounded. They were sort of notorious for avoiding contact with other people and new people or environments, being obscenely picky about food and clothing and so on, and developing personalised aspects of magic (imaginary friends, basically) to help mediate their contact with the greater Beyond — all coping mechanisms to help them avoid catastrophic over-stimulation and psychic collapse.

The largest part of the reason Dru hadn't realised she was a seer until she was in her fifties, despite nearly all of her "quirks" and "peculiarities" about food and clothing and her discomfort with indecisiveness and physical existence in general being explained by that fact, was that she was simply too functional on a daily basis. Yes, she was undeniably particular about certain things, but seers with a degree of deviation great enough to exhibit similar "quirks" weren't expected to be able to care for themselves independently, much less regularly interact with the world outside their homes, especially without a grounding potion. They certainly couldn't handle a political career or a demanding university position. Well, also, all of the Rosiers tended to be a bit weird, but mostly she was just too good at coping for the thought to occur that she was actually one of the seers people generally thought of as being hermits off in the woods somewhere at best, and starving themselves to death before the age of six at worst.

And one of the biggest reasons she was able to cope so well was that she didn't really sleep. The biggest was probably that she was a fucking genius, and could therefore actually keep up with the deluge of magically-acquired information flooding her psyche at any given moment. She'd actually told Mimi once that she'd thought running through the most likely outcomes of any given potential action or combination of actions on the parts of different actors was something everyone did when making decisions, "like playing chess, you know, looking several moves ahead." And it still annoyed her whenever anyone implied that her academic success as an arithmancer was actually predicated on her being a Seer — everything she published could be backed up by logic and mundane observations. (Or indirect infernal observations, in some cases, but still, observations other people could make without being Seers.)

Projecting her consciousness out of the mortal plane, into the Beyond, instead of sleeping, though, was definitely a close second — seers, like legilimens (who were in many ways just more specialised seers) had less control over their abilities when they were unconscious. In their case, it made them far more receptive, and normally resulted in chronic night terrors from a young age, sleep deprivation compounding all the other stressors they were subject to. Spirit walking — allowing her consciousness to escape into the Void through the part of her soul which existed outside of the mortal realm, rather than relaxing her focus on this plane and subjecting herself to an overwhelming mental assault every time she tried to sleep — let her body recuperate like it was supposed to in sleep, while giving her mind a respite from the physical world.

Following Harry's consciousness into Voldemort's mind felt more like that than legilimising a dreamwalker, or someone who was deliberately legilimising a third party. It didn't feel intentional, exactly, but then, neither did Dru's spirit walking. It did feel more focused than she would expect from a dreamwalker (other than Thom) — as though he was...unconsciously projecting his awareness (like dreamwalking) through a defined extension of his soul which existed outside of what would conventionally be considered his mind-space (like legilimising someone)...but without actually making any effort to maintain that connection and from a position of trancelike, marginal lucidity, rather than actual unconscious dreaming (like spirit walking).

So, she wondered, making her way down to the kitchen to wait for Harry to finish washing up and come down to find something to eat, how the hell did Harry end up soul-bonded to Voldemort?

Because that was her leading theory, at the moment. It was kind of hard to tell just legilimising him, and especially when he was unconscious, but it was really the only thing that made sense — the only way he could possibly be projecting his consciousness like that. She'd have to take a closer look to be sure, maybe even— Oh, that's an idea...

She detoured to the library to find a book on soul-analytic charms instead. By the time she wandered into the kitchen — flipping between two spells, trying to decide which was the more likely to reveal what she was looking for in Harry's mind — he was already there, making breakfast for himself.

"How long until the waffles are done?" she asked, plopping into a chair without looking up from the book.

She still felt him startle rather badly. "Oh! Mira. ...Morning. Ah...a few minutes. Did you want one?" he asked, clearly thinking her a bit rude for simply assuming that he would make one for her. Not that he wouldn't, just, there were much politer ways to ask him to.

Which was sort of hilarious, actually, since the real reason she was asking was much more intrusive and presumptuous. "No, I already ate." She probably could manage a waffle too, and might steal a couple rashers of bacon, but she wasn't starving. "I need to do a few soul analytics on you and legilimise you to figure out how the soul bond between you and Voldie works, find a way to break it. But it will probably be distracting, I wouldn't want you to burn your breakfast."

Harry dropped his plate. It shattered with a loud crash which probably woke Kreacher as well as not-Ari, Ron, and Hermione, ruining the bacon and eggs he'd already scooped onto it more thoroughly than burning them.

"Smooth."

"Soul bond?! What soul bond?!"

"The one you've been using to go spirit walking into that madman's mind. Obviously. I mean, I know you don't know shite about legilimency, but you don't accidentally sleep-legilimise someone from five-hundred miles away without some kind of pre-established connection. I feel like that should be sort of obvious..."

"What?!"

Before she could explain, they were interrupted by not-Ari, clearly only partially conscious, apparating into the kitchen with a messy crack (sort of impressive she hadn't splinched herself, given how confused and half-asleep she still was), wand at the ready; Kreacher popping in to chide "Master Harry" for trying to cook (that was Kreacher's job) and making a mess of things; and the others thundering down the stairs the same as they'd done almost exactly forty-eight hours ago. Kreacher ignored Harry's half-hearted protests that he was perfectly capable of making himself breakfast in the face of the elf's very pointed staring at the shattered plate, and Ronald only seemed to notice that there was food to be had, thoroughly derailing Mimi's plan to talk to Harry.

She returned to the book while the others went about procuring food, until she was interrupted by Hermione: "Er...Mira? Aren't you going to eat anything?"

She tried not to sound too defensive saying, "I had cheese toasties a couple of hours ago," but stole a piece of bacon off the other girl's plate anyway.

The muggleborn scowled at her, but when Mimi continued to read, ignoring her annoyance, she tried again. "What are you reading?"

"Agrippa's Modelling of the Soul. Healing divination charms," she added, to allay the immediate suspicion which followed that admission.

"Oh. Er. Why, exactly?"

Mira sighed, finally setting the book aside. "Because, Hermione, Harry is clearly somehow soul-bound to Voldemort. Since this timeline's Sev is stuck at Hogwarts still, I'm not exactly surprised he wasn't familiar enough with esoteric soul-magic phenomena to recognise it in passing and obviously he wouldn't want to fuck with it and risk making it worse, but tagging along this morning, I honestly can't think of any other explanation for Harry's repeated invasions of Voldie's mind."

"Tagging along?" Harry echoed.

("The fuck is she talking about?" not-Ari asked the other two.)

"What else was I supposed to do in the middle of the night?"

"Um, not read my mind while I'm sleeping?" he suggested, seriously creeped out.

"Sorry, I was under the impression you didn't want to keep reading Voldemort's mind while you're sleeping. You know nothing about mind-magic, and if you were conscious enough of the process to explain exactly what's happening without me legilimising you and watching you do it, you'd be able to stop doing it. Which you obviously aren't, and can't, so legilimising you was necessary."

"You could've at least asked!" he grumbled.

"I could have, but then you probably wouldn't have been able to sleep at all, and also, I didn't think of it until I was bored at half-past-three. So," she continued, despite Harry remaining unconvinced that her tagging along without asking had been a perfectly valid thing to do. Honestly, if she hadn't said anything, he wouldn't even have known... "I'm looking for a spell that can tell me exactly how the soul-bond in question is facilitated," she continued, ignoring all three of them staring at her, completely aghast, both because of her complete disregard for Harry's personal space, and because the poor kid was soul-bonded to fucking Voldemort. It was even less surprising they hadn't spotted it. Dumbledore had probably had some inkling, but of course he wouldn't have told anyone. "I sincerely doubt that Voldemort did it intentionally, since he seems to be unaware of it, but this sort of thing doesn't happen spontaneously, and it seems to be linked to that scar, suggesting it's something that was established in their initial contact with each other. You did supposedly get the scar in the attack on Samhain of Eighty-One, right?" she asked, despite already knowing the answer. (It was a good idea to keep one's audience engaged when attempting to explain complicated shite that was way over their heads. Per Thom.)

"Er. Yeah. But—"

"Right. So it's almost certainly something Lily did."

Ronald objected immediately. "Lily Potter was a light witch, Mira! She would never have done some evil soul magic on Harry!"

"Er..." Not-Ari hesitated, her eyes flicking over to Mira's, clearly uncertain exactly how to explain that Lily Evans was a light witch, sure. But she was also a dark witch, in the sense that she did black magic as well as white, and also in the sense that she practised magics which were illegal and therefore 'dark'. Sure, people said she was a front-line healer, but everyone knew she was a battlefield ritualist. Obviously not-Ari hadn't been around during the war, but Moody had been her Senior Auror, so she'd heard more than enough stories to have a good idea of who Lily had actually been.

Mimi just stared at Ronald for a full three seconds, trying to parse the whitewashed propaganda version of Lily he clearly believed was the truth, and the memories which came to Harry's mind of everything he'd been told about how he'd survived that Samhain. Had she not mentioned that Lily was a bloody necromancer at any point in their conversation on Monday?

...Apparently not. Or if she had, none of them had registered it in the midst of their shock over everything else she'd told them.

"Everything you think you know about Lily Potter is a lie concocted by the Light to posthumously canonise her for saving them from Voldemort," she informed the redhead, deadly serious. It was almost impressive, really, if she was honest. It was one thing to completely re-write Helga's personality and legacy, literally centuries after the fact. Lily had only been gone for sixteen years. "If she hadn't died saving Harry and destroying Voldemort's body, she would have been executed for practising necromancy — she was in my timeline, at least—"

"I thought you said she's alive in your world!" Harry objected, unaccountably hurt to hear that she wasn't, while Ron and Hermione were stuck on the for practising necromancy part of that statement. (Not-Ari was not surprised.)

"She is. They threw her through the Veil. She came back." That hit him like a bucket of ice-water to the face. "It took a while, but yeah. We're talking about a woman who introduced her three-month-old baby to Death and asked Kore to be our god-mother." Not-Ari let out a startled little puff of laughter. Point to Mimi! "Sirius still considers that to be the single best pun ever made in the history of the universe," she noted, with a small shrug. "She invoked gods on the fucking battlefield more than once, in your timeline and mine. Bellatrix considers her a fucking madwoman, okay.

"I mean, she doesn't think that's a bad thing, obviously, Lily's pretty much the daughter she never had—" All three of the kids found that idea horrible and offensive, which Mimi suspected Lily would find offensive and Bella would find hilarious. "—but sane people don't go around casually talking to gods. Or getting annoyed with them and not talking to them. My Lily still hasn't entirely forgiven Persephone for making her miss my entire childhood, even though flitting through different universes being a problem-solver for Death and Fate sounds like an awesome way to spend a decatriad to me.

"Knowing that there's some sort of weird lingering soul-magic affecting Harry, it would be more surprising if she weren't somehow responsible for it. Granted, I'm sure she'd never have intentionally done anything to hurt him, but when ritualists work at cross-purposes, weird shite tends to happen. And Lily in particular is kind of pants at anticipating the potential consequences of her actions in the moment. Like, I'm sure she didn't intend to warp Thom's ritual at Moel Tŷ Uchaf into a tynged that ended up turning him into a caricature of himself and ultimately making him a lot more violent and destructive in this timeline than he was in mine—"

Is that what happened? Hermione thought clearly. It seemed she'd wondered before how the hell Voldemort had ever managed to amass followers in the first place. Yes, she knew wizards had no common sense, but who would voluntarily take the Dark Mark knowing their Lord tortured them for failing and not being sycophantic enough?

Yes, that's what happened, she thought back, causing the muggleborn to startle somewhat adorably. I told you this version of Thom is insane...

"—she was almost certainly just trying to fuck it up, not really caring how — but actions have consequences. That's why Kore wouldn't just let her come home immediately after she was executed in my timeline. Shockingly enough, twenty-year-olds sometimes still have a lot of growing to do as people, and letting them think they can just come back every time they get themselves executed really just encourages them to be even more reckless and flippant about their own mortality.

"So, finish your breakfast," she advised Harry, "and then I'll try a few of these analytics, see if I can get an idea of what I should be looking for. If we're lucky, it will be something I can break relatively easily using legilimency."

"Er..." Harry hesitated, not entirely comfortable with her legilimising him while he was conscious, either.

"What, you want to keep wandering into Voldemort's mind?"

What? No! Of course I don't!

I didn't think so. "I know Dumbledore told you he can't get into your mind because of the Power of Love or some shite — which is utter rubbish, I can legilimise you just fine, so if Bizarro-Thom can't, it's almost certainly due to some specific soul-magic interference from whatever's causing this problem in the first place. That doesn't mean he can't hurt you in his mind, if he realises you're there."

Wait, what? How?

I'll show you later, when we finally get around to teaching you some proper occlumency. "And I can't realistically teach you any mind arts until the connection between you is broken."

Harry pushed his plate away, almost entirely untouched. "I'm not hungry anymore. We can do it now."

Mimi grinned. Excellent. "Great. While we're working on that, you two can work on procuring the shite on this list—" She passed the list to Hermione, who immediately passed it to Ronald. "And finish those amulets and look for a scheme for a two-way mind-magic containment ward." Enchanting was not her strong suit, and she'd never had to carve one for herself, so she didn't actually know one, even though she slept under one when she was in New Avalon or the Valley. There'd been no reason to bother here or at Hogwarts because there were no other humans around for her to intrude on, but she didn't like sleeping in the attic, and Harry would probably need one too, when he started practising legilimency in earnest. "Ar— Tonks, if you don't have plans, you can—"

"No," Hermione said firmly. "If you're going to be doing soul magic on Harry, I want to stay. Just in case," she added, eyes flicking briefly to Harry in a way which would have betrayed her concern for him even if her blatant projection of her emotions hadn't.

In case of what? If Mimi were doing something malicious, it wasn't like Hermione would recognise it in time to stop her... "I'm just going to be doing divining charms and legilimency, both of which are pretty fucking boring to watch." Legilimency was, admittedly, only half a step away from soul-magic, especially the more subsumption-based aspects, but it still wasn't exactly flashy or interesting to watch — especially if you weren't a legilimens yourself, or didn't at the very least have some degree of magesight, which Hermione didn't.

"You won't be able to see anything she's doing or stop her if she decides to do something malicious," not-Ari helpfully informed her.

"I did promise not to use mind-magic to harm you, if you recall," Mira reminded her somewhat more pointedly.

"Still. Harry...?" The muggleborn looked to Harry, expecting him to agree that, yes, someone should keep an eye on Mimi while she was messing around with his head. Futilely, given that Harry didn't want to be as exposed and vulnerable as he imagined this process would make him feel, in front of even more people...even if they were people he loved and trusted, and they wouldn't be able to perceive any of it, anyway.

"It's fine, Hermione," he assured her. "I don't think Mira will hurt me, and if this might help me stop having nightmares, I want to do it."

He really didn't want to, he sort of expected that having her legilimise him deeply, trying to get at the root of this soul-magic thing, would be more like Sev violating his memories time and again, trying to goad him into a response, than whatever mind-magic she'd done on him so far (most of which he hadn't even noticed until she'd said anything, because she was right, he really was bad at occlumency). He expected it to be psychologically uncomfortable, and maybe even hurt. But he really, really didn't want to be involved in any sort of soul bond with fucking Voldemort.

"Great," she repeated, before he could lose his nerve. "Let's go up to the ritual room. The wards there should stop any external interference, and I think you'll like it."