Chapter 12
The year went by quickly after the end of winter break. I gave Bill a book on famous tombs and their associated legends. I bought Charlie a model of a Swedish Shortsnout that I painted and animated myself. Percy, I was less certain about, but eventually got him a Muggle book that was intended as a beginner's guide to politics. In return, I received a jumper of my own from the Weasleys—purple with a dark blue bird on the front—and a box of Wizarding sweets. I wished I was able to afford gifts for the rest of the Weasleys, but settles for just the ones I was at school with.
Our Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher met an unfortunately grisly end at the close of term. Determined to actually put into practice some of her research, she'd constructed a complex series of traps to demonstrate the importance of preparation. Unfortunately, she forgot how to disarm them and ended up... Well, I heard it was a closed-casket funeral.
By the end of the year, I'd begun correspondence with a number of noted experts in various fields, all recommended to me by Albus. As an aid to study they were a mixed bag, but it proved to be a very interesting experience once I got over the initial nervousness at corresponding with strangers. I was afraid that they'd be annoyed by some of my more inane questions—and some of them had indeed withdrawn from the arrangement—but had been quite surprised—and amused—by the candid replies I received, often couched in anecdotes of some of the more interesting failures and early endeavours.
The best part was that there was nothing keeping me from continuing my letter-writing over my summer break. I was already hopeful that my next year wouldn't prove quite as hard, in spite of the additional subjects—upon consideration I elected to study Arithmancy and Muggle Studies from my third year onwards. I hadn't really considered Muggle Studies as an option until I learnt from an older student that they were occasionally allowed to make use of Muggle technology such as computers. I wasn't sure if they were brought out of the castle for that or if there was some way of protecting them from the effects in Hogwarts. Either way, it was a good opportunity to try and find a way to marry magic with some of the more useful Muggle innovations.
Which reminded me that I had to turn down an offer to stay at the Burrow again that summer. Bill had been disappointed and I eventually agreed to at least visit once or twice. That, I could spare time for.
But the rest of my summer looked to be busy. In the latter term of my second year, I turned thirteen, meaning that I was just barely old enough to undertake some very limited work. In the Muggle world, of course, but sterling could be converted to galleons—albeit at a poor exchange rate. I wouldn't be earning much, but every bit of money that I could scrounge up would help. And maybe I could try and get some of my anxieties under control this time around if I could make myself seek out some people willing to pay a young teen for part-time work.
—tN—tN—tN—
Train journeys were generally enjoyable. They were relaxing.
You weren't scrunched up in your seat like on a car or a bus. Not tossed to-and-fro like on a boat. Not as stressed and confined as on a plane.
As a means of transport, there were few—to my mind—more comfortable than taking a train.
And there were few journeys more capable of contradicting that opinion than the one that carried me away from Hogwarts each year.
Hogwarts was a school, yes. There were tests and trials and assignments that bothered me and wore me down, yes.
But it was also freeing. It was a place where I could let down a few of my masks and laugh a bit more genuinely. It was a place where my magic—so familiar to me now that I could not recall my life before it—could be used as often as I liked. It was a place where I had a few acquaintances I could relate to. It had the Room of Requirement, the beautiful Library and a hundred other nooks and crannies I could hide away in when things became too much.
More than that, it felt real in a way the Muggle world I returned to each summer was not. The fantasy, the magic and the charming anachronisms were now more my world than banality and technology could ever be. After the colours and sheer liveliness of the world of magic, the world of the mundane felt dull and lifeless.
I didn't let myself dwell on it more than I could help. If I did, I fell into a funk for months on end and never accomplish anything. As wonderful as the hidden world I now called home was, it wouldn't do to become addicted to it. To fall listless whenever I was removed from Hogwarts... It was a bad habit to fall into.
That being said, I fully planned on seeking out a few more of the hidden spots of wizarding London. Aside from Diagon Alley, there were a few other enclaves hidden right under the Muggles' noses in the metropolis. I could just imagine them, little streets filled with witches and wizards—resplendent in their robes and eccentricity—completely invisible to the jams of cars just feet away. It was an amusing thought if an unlikely one.
"Are you sure you can't come to stay with us?" Percy asked for the tenth time that day. The young boy had taken to my Christmas gift with unexpected enthusiasm. He'd taken the book as a sign that I supported his nascent ambitions for power—why, oh why wasn't he placed in Slytherin?—and had deemed me one of his shining examples to follow, right alongside his Prefect eldest brother. I just hoped that I could temper his... Temper his rigidity from canon. There were some other books I thought I could get him which covered the many incidents in recent history where governments had proven themselves less than virtuous and infallible. Come to think of it, loyalty was a Hufflepuff trait, wasn't it?
"Sorry, Percy," I said, also for the tenth time that day. "I have other plans in place already. I will come and visit though. Watch out for my owl, okay?"
"Alright," the young boy said, drooping slightly.
Bill and Charlie were playing exploding snap on the other side of the carriage. Bill shot me a sympathetic look, though I knew not what for. The eldest Weasley brother, if I had my dates right, would be allowed to use magic this year. Conveniently enough, the Trace broke in time for most—I thought?—students to be able to get some extra practice in before starting their final year. NEWT students could probably do with every advantage they could get.
Until I reached that point, I would have to make do with what few moments I could steal in Diagon, keeping my own spellwork as discreet as possible.
Do what I could and hope it was enough.
—tN—tN—tN—
Trace or not, the next time I saw Bill Weasley I was going to hex him silly.
My summer holidays had been mostly uneventful. I got some study in, exchanged regular letters with the experts Dumbledore had put me in contact with, worked a few odd jobs to scrape together a bit more money and so on. All according to plan.
Also according to plan, I found time to visit the Burrow, much to Molly and Arthur's delight. I even managed to snag a few books on the history of engineering that I thought Arthur would find interesting. While I was visiting, Bill had dragged me off to show me some of the things he had worked on.
The aspiring redheaded cursebreaker had taken over a shed on the very edge of the Weasley's property. I noted with some satisfaction that some of the charms he'd placed on it to conceal it from prying eyes were ones I'd told him about. Inside the shed, he'd taken a number of ordinary objects and, well, cursed them.
Nothing too severe, he assured me. His aim was to become more familiar with the processes behind the magic so better his chances of breaking similar bewitchments in the future.
I had to admit that I was somewhat impressed by some of the things he was able to do. An old glass bottle, for example, had been enchanted to overflow with oil if it was unstoppered and to continue flowing with it until it was somehow sealed again. A small wooden horse had been inflicted with a self-duplicating curse akin to the one protecting the Lestrange vault. I kept my hands away from that one.
The problem lay with a hand mirror that Bill had gotten more creative with. He'd experimented with a few different spells with the intent of trapping anyone who looked in it. Unfortunately, he was unable to test the mirror properly as the gnomes he'd... Recruited for the task had vanished without a trace and the protections he'd built in spared him from being affected. For safety's sake, he covered the mirror with a thick piece of cloth that obscured the reflective surface entirely.
Naturally, as he picked it up to show it to me the cloth tore on something and exposed just a small section of the mirror. The glint of light caught my eye after he set it down and I turned to look more closely. Then things got a little... Fractured.
I was in the Burrow, but it was a mishmash of how it normally was. Some chunks of rooms were duplicated, others were missing entirely. There was a multitude of kitchen tables, a baffling number of cupboards and a variety of bedrooms... But no staircase. It reminded me of someone how had scanned the Burrow into a computer then gone mad with the cut, copy and paste options. It was bizarre and inconsistent.
I did find the gnomes that Bill had been looking for though. They'd made their home in the precarious and impossibly-balanced wall of cupboard doors on one side of the kitchen(s), throwing blackened utensils at me when I approached. I left them be and wandered around.
Whatever space I was in did not extend much further than the Burrow. Patches of land around the house had been subjected to the same cut, copy and paste effect, but after I went a few hundred metres, things got... Weird. As soon as I began to lose sight of the Burrow—which looked even more bizarre from the outside than normal—the world got blurred and hazy, light reflecting strangely. I decided to head back to the house rather than try my luck by wandering further.
In the far distance, farther than I dared even consider walking, the sky and horizon looked like an impressionist painting. A smear of colours and shades like every shade of sky had been mashed together. Directly above, there was no sky, only an undefined grey. There were several suns and moons hanging in various places on the sky, casting odd shadows.
And above all else, it was quiet. There was no wind to stir what few plants I could find—closer examination revealed those plants to be dead and brittle facsimiles regardless—and the only other living things were the gnomes, who occasionally clattered over something in their cupboards, but that was it. No birds singing, no redheads arguing. Just eerie silence.
I sat myself down at one of the kitchen tables and thought. Given how I got here, it seemed likely that I was put into a mirror world. It would, at the very least, explain the lack of living things—gnomes excluded, they were immigrants—and the lack of food. If this was some kind of magically-created space though, it wasn't like anything I'd read about. It was just a hypothesis, but I suspected that it was formed from the reflections in any reflective surface in the area. From all the reflections. Hence how there were large chunks of the house that were duplicated—especially the kitchen, where there were many shiny tools and surfaces—and also chunks missing—such as the staircases, which lacked any kind of mirror.
It was kind of fascinating. Almost fascinating enough to stop me from freaking out. I kept my face calm and kept thinking.
After a while, I started drumming my fingers, my hands, my feet. Random rhythms, occasionally trying to sing or hum a tune—those stopped quickly, swallowed by the lifeless quiet—almost anything to keep myself busy and not panicking. I fell still, another thought occurring to me.
If I was stuck in here, with no way out, then it probably counted as life-threatening danger, right? Definitely an excuse to use magic. Even discounting the fact that I was probably outside of the Ministry's ability to detect magic, and was close enough to the Burrow not to attract notice regardless... The point was that I was legally in the clear for trying to make my own way out. I drew my wand and began looking around again.
The alder, cloaking the heartstring of a blazing dragon, was a warm comfort in my hand. It was something solid, something dependable.
"Specialis Revelio."
Scarpin's Revelaspell offered few insights. Intended to reveal hidden or magical properties, it confirmed that the world I was surrounded by was a product of magic, but nothing usable. Undaunted, I continued to work my way around the house, pulling myself onto the higher floors with magic in order to explore them too.
There were no active spells in place on anything as far as I could tell, merely the signs of having been subject to a spell. As Bill had said, he'd been experimenting and the end result was far too complex for me to make head nor tail of. I took notes on what I could observe regardless, glad I still had my notebook from talking with Arthur.
My understanding of more complex kinds of magic was extremely limited and theoretical. As it stood, I doubted that a simple 'Finite Incantetum' would suffice to release me. I dared not even try, in case it undid the space I was trapped in and took me with it. If I was to have any hope of finding my own way out, I'd have to try and exploit the nature of the spells used. One of the few things I could remember from Bill's semi-random lectures about curse-breaking was that many of the more exotic curses often had flaws that could be used to protect yourself from them or undo them completely. Stuff like cursed plants shying from fire or magic fire being extinguished by the right kind of sand.
Things associated with mirrors... Light, images, reflections, truth... Maybe a few others. While I thought of it, though...
I stood again and moved into the middle of one of the kitchen areas. I suspected that one of the mirrors that had formed kitchens was the face of the Weasley's family clock. It was as good a place as any to start with if I were to go looking for sources. The place I stood in was formed from the 'sights' of many different mirrors stitched together. In other words, each one had a mirror missing, the one that created it.
It took a quarter of an hour, but I found an iteration of the Weasley kitchen that seemed to have been created from the view of the clock. Pointing at the general patch of air that corresponded with the clock face's location—Mrs Weasley rarely moved it. The later books, where it was carried around the house, were the exception rather than the rule—and cast Scarpin's Revelaspell again.
I guessed correctly. According to the spell, there was something there, in place of the clock. I studied it for a moment but released the spell. It wasn't anything intelligible to me. I could tell there was something special about it, but not what. More importantly, there was no flashing magic keyhole indicating what to do to get out. It was most vexing.
I kept experimenting. Various light, fire, and revealment spells produced no discernable change in my situation. If nothing else, it was giving me an excellent opportunity to practice my spellwork. According to my watch, I was trapped in the mirrors for several hours by this point, so I sat down and began working through spells from memory. Random bits of furniture proved viable targets.
My first-year spells were easy enough. My second-year spells were recalled without difficulty. I struggled a bit with the third-year spells, some of them not working and the details of others eluding my memory. Not that it bothered me that much, I would be covering them in a few months time. Then I started into my defensive spells, casting as fast and furiously as I could. Once I had turned most of the furniture to ruins, I sat down again. I was a bit tired but somewhat satisfied. Catharsis was good.
It wasn't all that bad, once I was used to the quiet. I could use magic freely and—unless someone had found a way to look in—privately. I was getting a bit hungry and thirsty, but I would survive for a while before I was at major risk of dying. In the meantime, Bill would have gone to his parents and if they were unable to get me out they'd have contacted the Ministry or Dumbledore. They'd get me out eventually.
I did hope that Bill wouldn't get in too much trouble. I was still going to hex him for not being more careful, but he'd created a most interesting result. Even if it was by accident.
I smiled, remembering the previous winter and our wars fought between frozen forts. That'd been fun. Exciting, thrilling, and enjoyable above all else. With a sigh, I tried one more spell out of habit. I hadn't gotten the hang of it yet, but I was hopeful that I could figure it out eventually.
"Expecto Patronum."
A glimmer of silvery light spurted from the tip of my wand, floating in the air like a mirage for a few moments before fading.
I bolted upright, eyes wide and trained on the spot where the proto-Patronus had been. Then I jammed my eyes shut and tried to remember what had just happened. Remembered the feel of the spell, what my focus was, what I was saying, how I was moving my wand, everything.
I brought up the memories of the snow and tried again. Another slight shimmer. I smiled.
I had it. I was a long way from mastering the spell, but I had a hold of the first rung on the ladder. Climbing was just a matter of practice. I located a more comfortable—intact—chair to sit on and began casting over and over. Nought but vapour came forth each time, but I fancied that it became a little stronger, lasting a little longer every time I tried.
Lost in silver lights and cold days, I didn't bother to track the time.
—tN—tN—tN—
In the end, the Weasleys were able to undo the spell themselves. It involved repairing the shattered mirror, then working through the spells on it one at a time and testing their interactions with each other. Once they'd figured it out—which took most of the rest of the day—it was apparently a relatively simple matter to undo the effect.
Inside the spell, it was a tad more dramatic. The world began to shimmer and separate. Different areas conjured from different mirrors came apart from one another, fading away until I was sitting in just a single kitchen surrounded by grey. I was in that state for about ten minutes before it too shattered and I found myself in the actual Weasley kitchen.
They had, I gathered, gone through every mirror in the area and repeated the spell until they found me again. Judging by the swearing of the younger siblings outside, they found the gnomes first.
Mrs Weasley was frantic, forcing me into a seat at the table, wrapping me in a blanker and all-but-imperiusing me into drinking a bowl of soup. Not that I was complaining about the latter part, I hadn't eaten since breakfast that morning. Arthur was worried but quiet, spending his time hovering nearby and watching me closely. And Bill... Bill did not look good at all.
"Sorry, Poe, so sorry, dammit, I should have been more careful," he said, for the umpteenth time.
"It's alright, Bill," I said, in between mouthfuls of soup. The eldest Weasley sibling was seated across from me, his hands clenched together tight enough to pale his knuckles. His face was drawn and sweaty like he'd just run a marathon. I knew it was just an effect of being out of his mind with guilt and worry for hours on end, but it really didn't suit him. "I know you didn't mean that to happen and I know you'll be careful in future. Except that I will hex you once it won't trigger the Trace."
Bill choked out a laugh.
"That would be more of a threat if you were actually interested in the kinds of spells that hurt. You've told us over and over that you don't see the point of spells that just make people suffer."
"Well, I'm sure I'll figure something out. I have a while until we get back to Hogwarts, after all," I said, making sure to smile at him. I wasn't sure how convincing it was but it reassured him a bit. "And you have your own research to do in the meantime."
Bill frowned and tilted his head quizzically, his mouth beginning to frame a query before I continued.
"That spell you used. Or combination of spells, whatever. I want you to figure out how it works, how it can be cast, how it can be used safely. Then I need you to teach me it. Then we'll be even, deal?"
Bill looked at me like I'd lost my mind. In his defence, I was half-starved and parched. Possibly a bit battier than normal from being stuck in a pocket dimension all day. His parents seemed equally uncertain, swapping worried looks where they thought I couldn't see them. I ploughed on before they could interject.
"Think about it! You created a spell that would drop anyone into an enclosed space in an instant! Think of the applications it could have. And when it ended, I wasn't where I was before I vanished, I'd moved. It's some other kind of effect, like nothing I've heard about before. I've got to know how it works."
Bill snorted and immediately wiped the smirk of amusement that crossed his face.
"That's so like you, Poe. Just like last Christmas. You just got through the toughest obstacle course we could come up with, and were on the verge of frostbite and hypothermia and all you wanted to know was how we did it. I swear you'd call a time-out in the middle of a duel to the death, just to find out how an unusual curse works."
"That can wait, however," Molly said, cutting in and shooting a sharp glare at her eldest. "It took us all day to even find out if it could be undone. If we hadn't been able to then you would have been stuck there, Poe. So there'll be no more tinkering with that mirrors where anyone else might get caught in them, understand? I've half a mind to confiscate your wand until you go back to Hogwarts, William, so don't test my patience."
I let the Weasley matriarch intimidate Bill thoroughly and drank the last of the soup. I really had been hungry. Putting the bowl and spoon back on the table, I noticed my hands were shaking.
Now that I thought about it, that had been my first brush with actual danger, wasn't it? The Weasleys had been able to free me, but if they hadn't I would have been stuck. If Bill had done his cursework differently, there was even a risk I could have died.
Boneless, I sank back into my chair. I'd distracted myself at the time with spellwork and conjecture, but... Now, after the fact, I was terrified.
I made my trembling hands form fists.
I'd improve. Somehow.
I had to.
