Mernom, thereaperd: I do have a plan in place for the ending, and I think that's a large part of the problem. I had already come up with all the twists and turns before I started writing; in fact, I think this is the only story where I had the whole thing planned out start to finish before I put the first word to the page. I find that's where a lot of my enjoyment comes from, the planning, so it's become very… boring?… writing out what I already know is coming without any surprises.

My next story I've intentionally not planned out in great detail for that very reason, so there will be plenty of opportunities for my muse to spring something on me without warning. Whether that will be good or bad is anybody's guess.

I'm back! It's been a little while, I know. The good (?) news is that since we only have a few chapters left, I'm just going to hammer those out and get this thing finished rather than bouncing back and forth between this and MGET. That means there shouldn't be as long a delay between chapters as there has been recently.

Chapter 16
Trial of the Heart

Morning would always come whether anyone wanted it to do so or not.

Harry rolled over and covered his head with the pillow. After what seemed like an hour trek in the mist and dark last night, he really wanted it not to be morning just yet. There was plenty of sleep he had to catch up on, and his magic still had that stiff and aching feeling to prove he had not yet recovered all his mana after fighting through the Slytherin Tower yesterday. Sadly despite his grumblings, the sun did not reverse its course and return below the horizon, so with little else in the way of options Harry threw off the blankets and stumbled into the attached bath.

After a wash, a shave, and getting dressed, he felt significantly more human, and he padded his way into the main living area of the suite their party had claimed. "Anyone else still exhausted?" he asked as he buckled his sword belt.

"Blegh," Hermione said in reply, not opening her eyes nor sitting up from where she was lying on her back on a couch.

Her obvious disdain for being up and awake put a smile on Draco's face. The Sorcerer and Dudley sat at one of the little tables with playing cards in their hand. That must have been how they passed the time since both of them, much to Harry's disgust, were morning people. They had probably been up for hours already. "That's too bad," Draco said nonchalantly, placing a couple of cards in the pile between them and drawing another. "By now it should be the peak of breakfast. Plenty of food to go around."

One of Hermione's ears twitched at the mention of food, and the catgirl opened one eye to look over at him. "You're sure?"

"I lived here for most of my life. I think I know when breakfast is."

That earned a long sigh from her, and the Stellis rolled off the couch onto her feet. "Fine. For food, I'll get up."

"Does this mean we'll be eating with all the rest of your old pals?" asked Dudley while he tossed a card of his own onto the discard pile. Draco froze for just a moment, but it was enough for the Knight to nod to himself. "You've been doing your best to keep us away from the other wizards. I don't know why, but that you were doing it was pretty obvious."

Hermione's face fell into a thoughtful frown. Harry knew he had not noticed this, and apparently neither had she, but Dudley had a tendency to figure the strangest things out sometimes. "I'm curious why you're doing that, too."

"Maybe he's just embarrassed to be seen with us," Harry suggested.

Draco sighed and set his cards down. "It's not embarrassment," he finally said. "Part of why I've been avoiding them is that I don't want to deal with them. In their eyes, I'm a dropout who went off to live among savages. I really don't care to listen to their taunts when we know they're idiots."

"And the other part of it is that we're the savages in question?" Hermione prompted.

"More or less." His eyes moved to meet all of theirs in turn. "I don't know just what they would say to you, but I would rather not find out. Not to mention if they realize Harry is the Harry Potter. You saw how Dumbledore reacted when he heard your name," he reminded them. "Your story is famous among wizards. Before the Transition, you were considered a savior. If they find out that you're here but you did the same thing I did? It could get ugly quick."

"So by avoiding them, you get to protect us as well as yourself," Dudley said in summary.

Draco opened his mouth, closed it, and then nodded.

"I can understand that, I guess." Dudley turned to Harry and Hermione. "What do you say to raiding the kitchen of this place and heading back out to the forest? There's only one tower left, after all."

"The sooner we get that done, the sooner we can sit back and figure out what these pieces of parchment are all about. Maybe take a nap." Hermione shrugged. "I'm in."

Looking at the three of them, a soft, delicate smile curled Draco's lips. "Thanks."

With the other towers already conquered, it was simplicity itself to track down the last. Like the Trial of the Mind, this one was a single tower, round in shape and only twenty feet high. The writing on the stone slab that served as a door was the only thing that marked it as anything unusual.

Trial of the Heart
No man is an island
No individual can succeed alone

"Less than helpful," Dudley said, slapping the door with his left hand so his Mark would open it. The door slab faded away to reveal another split staircase just as they found in the combined Trial. "Though I suppose it makes a little more sense now."

"No individual can succeed alone," Hermione repeated. Her eyes followed the stairs up to the two doors set ten feet apart. "Do you think we'll have to fight another gauntlet of monsters?"

"That wouldn't fit." The three of them turned to find Draco looking at the stairs with one hand rubbing his chin. "Gryffindor and Slytherin were always in conflict. Always in competition. This would be Hufflepuff's tower, and Hufflepuff is all about fairness and teamwork. I don't think this will be a competition. We're going to have to work together."

"We still don't know there won't be any fighting," Harry reminded them.

Hermione started climbing the stairs. "In that case, let's prepare for anything this trial can throw at us. Harry, you and I will take this right side. We have a decent mix of magic and physical attacks. Dudley, Draco, you take the left. You'll be able to cover each other's weaknesses. If this is a mental challenge rather than a physical one, Draco has the most knowledge of the castle and its history, and I should be able to figure things out quickly as well."

"And Dudley and I are chopped liver," Harry added with a faint smile that grew wider when Hermione's face flushed with the realization of what she had just implied. "I'm kidding! I'm kidding. Splitting up like that makes sense."

"Right," Hermione muttered, "so, er, let's get started?"

The first challenge revealed to be the doors themselves. Harry gave the handle of the right-sided door a twist only for it not to budge an inch. "That's going to be a problem," he muttered to himself. Glancing over showed Draco was having the same issue. "You said this would need to be a teamwork thing, right?" he called over to the other staircase.

"Yes?"

"Maybe we need to open the doors at the same time."

Dudley shrugged. "That sounds like it'd work. Okay, I'll count it down. On three."

Harry tightened his grip on the doorknob.

"One. Two… Three!"

This time the knob twisted, and he flung the door open.

What waited beyond was… just a room. The same window design as at the top of the first Tower they tackled let in sunshine and fresh air, and once more in the far side of the wall was a small bust depicting a woman with plump cheeks and an easy smile. Below that bust was a box of bright yellow wood.

"Was… that it?" He looked to the left to find another open door and Draco already walking in. "That was it?! We just had to open a pair of bloody doors!"

"Don't complain about things being easy. I'll take it," Hermione reminded him.

"I'm fine with easy, too," he argued, "but there's easy, and there's downright insulting! After that blasted upside-down puzzle and having to fight a bunch of monsters, I was expecting something! This is just… just…"

The archer could not hide her mocking half-smile. "Anticlimactic?"

"YES!"

"Something you might need to know." Harry slowly turned to stare at Draco. "Hufflepuff? Everyone knows it's the house of duffers. Maybe this is as complicated as they could manage." The Sorcerer shrugged when they all stared at him. "What? It's true."

"Right…" Harry said, though he could not help looking back at the doors. Maybe the trial was just broken? Even as he thought it, he knew it was a dumb idea. He just really and truly was disappointed that there was nothing here. Even a minor puzzle would be less of a disappointment.

"First things first, let's find out what's in the box," Dudley said, none of his enthusiasm gone. Lifting the lid, he let out a pleased noise and reached far deeper into the box that should be possible. A long handle came out, followed by a heavy hammer head. He repositioned his grip on the war hammer and gave it a few swings. "Anyone mind if I keep this?"

"Knock yourself out. I'm more interested in this." Draco reached into the box as well and pulled out yet another flickering diagram. "What do you think we have to do—?"

His question was cut off when the square of parchment in his hands started flapping in a nonexistent wind, as though it was determined to fly away. Where it would go, no one knew, and Harry was not wholly convinced it was trying to go to a place at all. Opening his pouch, he barely had time to pull out the parchment he took from the Trial of the Soul before it pulled itself out of his hands and sealed itself to the scrap in Draco's grasp, the edges vanishing as though they had never been separated.

"Pull out the others. I think we're about to get some answers."

Dudley and Hermione both pulled their own parchments out, and these too headed straight for each other. All four pieces together again, waves of white light swept over them and took away the yellowing of age. Now it looked like any other piece of paper he had ever seen. Harry took a step closer to look at the surface. When they were in pieces, they had lines that flickered in and out, never enough to make out what it was supposed to be. Now those same lines were flashing faster and faster, making a progressively more complete picture, until finally they all flashed together one last time.

What was left was a drawing of several green patches of irregular shape on a background of blue, eight in total and forming a loose circle. In the middle of that circle was a single solid black diamond surrounded by white swirls. A compass rose sat proudly in one corner, revealing exactly what they were looking at.

"It's a map," Hermione breathed. She reached into her pouch again and pulled out a more typical map for comparison. "And I think that's us," she added, pointing at the continent to the north-west of the diamond. "It's a map of the whole world."

Dudley huffed. "That's great and all, but what's with the diamond and all those red lines?"

The lines in question were something Harry had noticed at well. They crisscrossed the landmasses randomly, drawn not in normal ink but instead one that gleamed as they tilted the map in the light. For all they seemed to have no rhyme or reason when it came to the continents, they eventually led to the same place: the diamond.

"They can't be roads, not with them crossing the water. Winds, maybe?" Hermione shook her head. "I don't know. We'd need to ask a true cartographer to look at it. Maybe it's something extremely specialized that only a few people know how to read?"

"Or," Draco said with a dark scowl, "somebody who's lived long enough to see a bunch of stuff. Merlin, he's not going to let me live this down." He rolled up the map and put it away with a sigh. "I don't know that we have much other choice. Let's go talk to the old man."

It was a short hike back to the castle, and from there Draco led them once again to the gargoyle standing guard before the winding staircase that in turn was the lone entrance to Dumbledore's office. "I wonder if anyone ever got trapped in here because the staircase broke?" Harry wondered aloud as they climbed.

His random question earned him some odd looks, but after a moment Draco shook his head. "I don't know. Probably not. Since this is all part of the castle, the only way for it to fail is for the castle's magic itself to fail, and that would never happen back on Earth. Not to mention, there are other ways of travel a wizard could use. Floo, Apparation, even brooms if they were really desperate. They could just fly out the window.

"But," he continued after a beat, "with Earth magic failing as bad as it is, it could be possible. Let's just hope it doesn't happen while we're still up here." Unlike last time, where he just opened the door and walked in, this time Draco banged twice on the wood.

"Come in."

Dumbledore looked more than a little surprised when the door opened to reveal the four of them. "I know I am an old man," he said, pulling a brass pocket watch out of his robes and checking it, "and old men are forgetful, but I distinctly recall you saying I had three days to get your gold. It has only been one."

Draco visibly bit his tongue and jerked his head to signal Hermione to take the lead. They had discussed the matter on their walk back to the castle, and when there was no one else in earshot Draco had been willing to admit that if he talked to Dumbledore about the map, one of them would push the other's buttons. Since they actually wanted information to act on, they decided as a group that Hermione would be the best to ask as Dumbledore had no obvious interest in her.

"We decided to do some exploring while we were here," she began, "and when we heard about the Towers, we thought they would be a good place to start. Inside we found—"

"Inside?" Dumbledore interrupted. "You found a way inside in less than a day? The staff and I spent two weeks looking for the way in."

She held up her left hand to display her Mark. "The doors opened for us immediately. We think they only allow Adventurers inside. Regardless, we found this map." She pulled the rolled up map out of her pouch and held it out towards him. "One thing that really confused us was a number of red lines running all over it. Draco thought you might be able to explain what they are supposed to represent."

The old man's blue eyes twinkled. "It is not a sign of weakness to ask for help, my boy," he said, completely misinterpreting the reason why Draco was not speaking for himself. Taking the map from Hermione, he unrolled it and spread it over his desk. "Now, let me see…"

His eyes roamed over the map, and the smile he had worn faded. Was he as in the dark as they were? After several seconds, he asked, "Do you have a map of our continent I could see?"

It was only after examining Hermione's other map and cross-referencing it and the new map that his eyes widened. He pulled open a drawer in his desk and pulled out a third map, and after looking at it he gave his desk a definitive nod. "This is fascinating. Come here and look.

"First, see this map?" he asked, showing them the one he took from his desk. It was vaguely familiar to Harry, but considering the wizards' obsession with Earth and Earthly customs was even stronger than that possessed by the people of Whinging Village, he could take a guess. What caught his eye were all the lines covering the map, very similar to those on the map from the Towers. "This shows Earth as it once was, but more importantly, it shows Earth's ley lines. You could think of ley lines as underground rivers of magic, flowing back and forth all over the world. I believe your map shows the ley lines for this world."

"Why do all these ley lines connect to one place on Gaia? They didn't do that on Earth," Harry pointed out.

"Very good catch! You're right, they didn't. This arrangement, will all magic flowing to and from the same central point? That is neither normal nor natural. If these truly are ley lines, then this diamond mark is most likely the location from which the curse on this world originates."

The Adventurers looked at each other in confusion. "Curse?" Hermione finally asked.

He nodded. "Indeed. You are all old enough to remember when the world was normal, before it became what we see now. This world in which we live now is a transformation, a cursed state. Many of us have tried to determine where the curse comes from, for if we determine that, we could potentially undo it. We have hit dead ends at every turn, but now you have brought me this." He tapped the map. "This appears to hold the answers we needed. It may even be the explanation for how it happened in the first place. Some experiment or curse on one ley line spread throughout the world. That much, there is no way to know. Not now, at least.

"I would ask that you leave this in my care for now, Draco," he said, standing up and looking decades younger than he had when Harry first laid eyes on him. "I would like for Septima, our Arithmancy professor, to examine it as well. There is much arithmancy could offer us in determining where this location lies. And from there? It is high time a wizard checked on things."

"Er, o…kay?" Draco said, obviously as uncomfortable with the sudden fervor as Harry was. The quartet slowly backed out of the room and back down the stairs. Only once they were in the corridor did Draco speak. "That was… different."

"You can say that again." The scope of what Dumbledore was trying to do was absolutely staggering. Reversing the Transition? It did not sound like it should be possible! The Transition rewrote the whole world, brought five races who had never met together. Undoing something like that boggled the mind. It also brought a dark thread of worry to the forefront of Harry's mind. "When Dumbledore was talking. Did anyone else feel… I don't even know how to describe it."

"Surprised? Concerned? Disturbed?" All good suggestions, and Harry nodded at Hermione. She nodded back. "Yeah. I know plenty of Stellis who would like to go back to the way things were before the Transition. The forest cities, the feasts and festivals of fish and game. He would have plenty of support if he asked them for help."

"Everybody at Whinging Village would help him, too, even if he is a freak wizard," Dudley agreed.

"But still, it isn't like everything can just go back to how it was before," Harry pointed out. "We've been in Gaia for ten years. People who died won't come back to life. Things that have been said and done won't suddenly be undone. Everything we've experienced will still be a part of us. And for every old fart who wants to rewind the world there's someone like us who grew up here. What would happen to all the kids who were born here who have never known anything but Gaia?" Hermione's ears twitched, which brought another strange thought to his mind. "Plus there's everything we learned from other races. We're talking about undoing that. Friendships between humans and Stellis and every other race, lost forever."

"What about the halfsies?" Harry looked over at Dudley in confusion, and the Knight elaborated, "The kids born to two different races. We know for a fact humans can have kids with Stellis and Osgul, and didn't we see that one kid when we were in Cambridge for a job? He was half Eddek and half Kobold, which I don't even want to imagine the mechanics of. If Gaia got split again and all the races went back to their own worlds, where would these kids go?"

Hermione bit her lip. "Even if they went with one of their parents, they'd forever lose the other. It'd tear families apart as much as friends. And that's assuming they didn't vanish somewhere between their parents' worlds."

Harry looked over at Draco. "You're being quiet." The blond shrugged. "You know, you can feel free to disagree with us. We're not going to lash out at you or anything. I'd actually appreciate it if you could convince us we're worried about nothing."

Because otherwise, all Harry could see was the perils of trying to turn the clock back. He wasn't sure about any benefits.

"That's just it. I don't disagree." Draco shook his head and continued, "I also have a selfish reason for why I don't like the idea, though, and I know it. Here, I'm a Sorcerer. I have skills and power. If the Transition gets undone, I become just a Hogwarts dropout who's been disowned by his family. Not a lot to make Earth an attractive alternative. Even with all the danger, I have a better life here than I would back there."

That was something Harry hadn't considered, nor did it seem anyone else had either. Dudley reached out and gave Draco's shoulder a squeeze, which earned a small thankful smile from the Sorcerer.

"Maybe we don't need to worry," Hermione said with a forced smile. "Maybe they won't find a way to get to that place at all." Her smile fell. "But, just in case, let's check on things tomorrow. That should also give us time to think about… everything."

Somehow, Harry doubted that more thinking would give any of them an answer of what to do.

Originally I was going to have a teamwork puzzle inspired by the co-op mode of Portal 2 as the core of the Trial of the Heart. This just struck me as way too funny not to use.

…Sorry to any Hufflepuffs who are reading, I guess?

Silently Watches out.