Disclaimer: Not mine.

The Chasm

Chapter 3

Enlisting Help

Hermione downloaded the pictures she had taken in the dungeons to her computer, then opened her e-mail and retrieved the ones she had already sent, pleased when she could see the pages clearly enough to decipher. At first, the small sparks of magic in the storage room had concerned her, but as they had remained constant and did not strengthen or change their pattern, she had been able to snap off quick shots once she had learned to time the intervals between them and before the magic had drained the battery.

Printing out each of the forty-eight runes on a separate sheet of paper, she made two stacks. One pile she sorted the twenty- four known runes into, and the second the unknown. First, she inspected the known set, carefully, noting the slight differences, the lilting ends, the small curls, seeing a more delicate hand, a more precise method of execution, a beautiful fluidity of motion. She saw the influence of later writers and knew the depiction was not what the original scribes had intended.

Turning her attention to the pile unknown to her, or to any Muggle scholar, she frowned and began to sort by number of intersecting lines, as Snape's notes had indicated he had in his first attempt to understand what he was looking at. Studying the runes that now lay on the bottom of the stack; she found that they all contained many more lines and intersecting angles then the previously known runes. Downloading the text of the book into the computer, she again hit print, and waited for the image of the scroll itself to come off the printer.

Grabbing her old Latin book, three others on ancient languages, the seventh year book on runes, and a thin barely used note book with all she could find of Snape's research, she headed for the kitchen table, and then put on a pot of tea. As she waited for the water to heat, she found her cell phone had recharged enough to use, and hit her speed dial.

"Hermione?"

"Harry, can you talk?"

"I was just getting ready to head back into the Ministry, but yeah, for a couple of minutes."

"Remember that book you had, the one Snape used to have?"

"The potions text, of course."

"I found another one that he has written all over. I don't have the original, but a good copy. I can use some help reading his handwriting. It's the abbreviations that are going to stump me…like…HMO."

"The Headmaster's office. It's really easy."

"Right, like I would know that." She rolled her eyes and grabbed the hot water kettle off the flame. "I would have guessed Her Majesty's Opposition."

"Give me another," he chuckled.

"HH, and don't tell me it's His Highness."

"Simple…Hagrid's Hut. He used to list the closest place her could get ingredients."

"Show off," she laughed. "Okay, smart arse, D."

"D? Durmstrang? That or Dumbledore…it would depend on what he was noting."

Hermione set down the hot water and turned back to the books on the table. "Harry, can you get me in there? Just to look around. I want to see it. Even if all I do is fly over it."

"Beauxbatons would be easier if you just need a school."

"Maybe that too…yeah, maybe. Beauxbatons is rather new, I mean it's what? Seven hundred years old? Would he have just used a B?"

"Yeah, I think so…or a BX more likely. What's up?"

"If you can come over as a friend, and not an Auror…can you? It's the only way I will talk about this."

"Hermione? What are you doing?" He sighed and she could almost see him frown.

"I asked you a question first."

"I …I don't know."

"Then neither do I," she said tersely.

"Hermione, come on, you can't expect me to take you…."

"I'll go myself. Piss off Potter." She flipped her phone closed and thought of who else could get her into the school with such strict security that not even known loyalists were admitted. Her phone rang, and with a sigh, she flipped it up. "Yes, Potter."

"Don't do that to me."

Grinning she pulled the phone from her ear and shut it off. Knowing that he could not rest until he found out what she wanted. Glancing at the clock, she set two cups on the table and measured out loose tea into a pot, pouring the hot water over it and looking back to the clock.

Setting the cups on the table with a pot of milk, she then went into the sitting room and quickly levitated the blankets and pillows from the sofa, not wanting to get into another conversation about how she was doing with the evidence of her lack of sleep in front of her. Waiting a few minutes for the tea to steep, she poured two cups, walked to the door and pulled it open in time to see Harry raise his hand, ready to knock.

"My, what a surprise," she intoned walking back to the kitchen.

"You did that on purpose."

"Of course I did. When have you ever managed to keep your nose out of something?"

"Look who's talking," he snorted. "Now spill."

"You first, as I said."

"I could confiscate these books," he said as he pointed to the table, curiously tilting his head in an ill-concealed effort to read the spines.

"Do it, and I yell rape."

"They would never believe you."

"It wouldn't matter. Once I say it there will always be those who think it is true and Ginny has only talked to me once…sorry, twice in three years," she said with a smirk, watching his face dance between disbelief, horror and back to disbelief.

"You would do that?" he asked incredulously.

"Damned right I would." She sat down, grinned and sipped her tea. "Have some?"

"Fine, I'll have a bloody cup of tea with a ….friend. That's it though, so no crazy plans."

She smiled and pushed his cup across the table and then leaned forward and began to tell him what she had found. Ending with her discovery that Hogwarts was in the centre of a rune, as were the grounds by the Quidditch Pitch and the Forbidden Forest. Pushing the stack of unknown runes in front of him, she smiled smugly.

"These were in a book in Snape's library. That son of a bitch was hiding them, but since his notes are so sparse, I don't think he spent much time on them. However, the museum has just found a complete tablet with the same inscriptions, so don't dare tell me to stay out of it. They're in public as well as Muggle domain."

"Why would Snape have hidden them?"

"My guess is that once the war was over he could have made a bloody fortune and if you remember, he didn't have a lot of free time. He has all sorts of things he must have been researching, his library is huge."

"Are they all like this?" Harry looked up from the pictures, obviously confused.

"All but one." She flipped over the pile to what had been the top. "It is the only new one with no angles. Strange, but it may just be in there to throw off someone trying to break the language. Many of the ancient texts were like that, but there is…something else. I want you to look at that, really look at it, before I tell you what I think. It's like Uruz…but not. Can you see the difference?"

Harry pushed the drawing of a misshaped U back to her frowning. "So, you think the other schools are protected by runes also?"

"It would fit. Only, no, not…not exactly. By the time they built the schools, I think the runes had already been bastardized into something mystical, not the language they were. That's not what I am interested in, the markings on the ground only made everything click into place, but by themselves, they mean nothing. I think that at one time the runes were…real. Concrete, touchable, something …seen. I think what we call runes were tangible…then, used in written form…developing an alphabet. First, look at these." She turned the picture towards her and tapped it with her finger. "This one is too obvious to be a ruse. Don't you think?"

Harry looked at the inverted U that now faced her and became quiet, suddenly carried back in time and seeing a similar shape.

"Harry? Do you see it?"

"It's wrong. The lines…imagine them thicker, wider at the bottom, more…," he whispered, looking up at her face. "The arch, the one at the Ministry."

"That's what I thought." She turned the paper upside down and looked at it form the angle Harry had seen it, then watched as he took it and make the slight changes he had spoken of. "You could be …no, Harry. Imagine it in stone, roughly cut and thick.

Look at Dagaz; it could be the floor plan at Hogwarts. Put the courtyard at one end and the greenhouses at the other end…," she mused. "Harry, we could make a ton of stuff out of this. Mostly it would be romantic nonsense, meaning nothing. Only what if…some time between when the Arch was made, and the period that the founders laid out Hogwarts, things changed. Runes became a written language, not …real and tangible. We need to find out when, and then keep going back. I truly think we are going to find that even the Latin that we have always thought the runes were based on, was instead based on the…living runes."

"You are nutters," he tried to joke, looking up at her grimly.

"What if Harry? What if is possible for a rune to actually…be? I don't mean like the stuff that is already there, like Hogwarts sitting in the middle of a rune, that doesn't mean anything, not truly. I saw the original plans, and it is there, right there on the parchment. Only…Hogwarts was built later, by people that thought they understood what they were looking at, after the runes had been corrupted into what we see today. Maybe the arch is from before, part of a whole. Uruz, Sudden or unexpected changes…it looks close to that, upside down, and rounded, but… Harry, what if it did correlate to what is at the Ministry?"

"The arch is older than the runes. That's what you are saying, only you think…the arch is…or was…the real thing," Harry said aloud, making sure he understood what she was saying.

"So are these. We are off...we are off by centuries, a millennium or more, if I am right…if Snape had any idea of what he was looking at…He has it here in his notes," she pushed the copy of the notebook over to him. "I want to find out. I want to find out when runes stopped being drawn on the ground and became a language. Then I want to find out what they were before they were a language. I want to find out why. Why these images. We have always thought they were a corruption of the Latin alphabet…but what if they came first? What if it was the runes that gave the alphabet and not the other way?"

"Oh, no…I…"

"Think of it. Just give it some time." She stood up and began to pace. "Read that. Read his notes and write out the abbreviations for me. He was interested in finding the meaning of each one, but I don't think they have a meaning, not like what he was looking for, some sort of code or something, anything more than... Harry, what if they are all like the one at the Ministry? I want to find the where…the why they were dropped from the alphabet and where the rest of them are. I don't think he was successful because he didn't find out the when…Harry, we have to do this."

"Where are you going with this?"

"I don't know. Harry, listen… I think the original alphabets used the sounds of the rune's name to depict their written language. I think the Ministry doesn't even know what it has. They think it is…like what we thought, a veil…a place…a place of death."

"So…if the arch at the Ministry is really one of the original runes…" He looked up at her confused.

"It's always been there." She returned to her chair and locked her eyes on his. "This is one of the oldest cities on the British Islands, I think it is the oldest, sort of, as least in the Magical world it is, and this would be why. Harry, what if the Arch was not taken to the Ministry, but the Ministry was built there to hide it? What if there are other runes? Real runes, real living runes? Think of all the monoliths that are dotted from one end of these islands to the other. May they were based on something real."

"That still work."

"Yes, and are hidden because of it, or lost to antiquity."

"You really believe this."

"Read the book, I can print another copy, and I have more. Snape's library is chock full of stuff like this. He has a scroll that I can not even start to read…I know, I just know, there is something more."

"It's a long shot."

"No," she chuckled, leaning back in her chair and grinning. "A long shot was an old man putting his trust in a skinny eleven year kid and his two friends."

"Hermione, don't do that. We were lucky."

"We can be again."

"We had help."

"We are all grown up, Harry. We don't need it."

"We… what am I saying…there is no we…there is only you."

"Would you let me go off by my self? I will you know. I can find someone to get me in to Durmstrang. If Snape's notes mean anything, he didn't get that far…I want to fly over it…and I want to see their library. I'll need help to get in there, if I remember correctly it is an all male school."

"And all pureblood."

"So?"

"So you need a pure-blood male to … oh no, not me. Nope." He stood up pushing back his chair with his legs. "I swore to Ginny, to myself, fuck…get Ron to do it."

"Not a chance, you know better. You want to do it. Look at yourself, you know you do," Hermione said, laughing as his face became redder and more flustered.

"Of course I do, that's why you hauled me over here isn't it?"

"Yup." She kept laughing.

"I'll…" He grabbed the copies from the kitchen table and crammed them in his pockets, shrinking down what was left and took those as well. "I'll let you know."

He turned and angrily strode to the door, muttering under his breath.

Harry," she said softly, holding on to the edge of the door before closing it behind him. "You know that even if we find out that the arch is a living rune, that all of these were real and we can pass through them, it won't change anything."

"I know."

"You believe me, right? Harry? I don't want you helping if you don't understand that."

"He smiled at me, when he fell he wasn't dead…he wasn't, Hermione, he…"

"Bellatrix hit him full on, Harry. I saw it, we all did. He couldn't have survived."

"But he fell before he…I know what I saw…what I still see…what I can't get out of my mind."

She shook her head sadly and watched him walk away. "Harry, let me know. I just don't want you to think there is anything we can do, or that what happened can be undone."

June 2008

Hermione pulled on a pair of woollen trousers under a Russian style knee- length rubakha, and then layered an ankle length kaftan of simple but expensive brocade over that. Standing in front of the mirror she turned around slowly, craning her neck and studying her reflection in the mirror, looking for any sign of the dreaded 'womanly' attributes that would prohibit her entering Durmstrang. She locked her eyes with the woman in the mirror and sighed, knowing that what she was about to do, could not be taken off and hung in the cupboard when she got back, as the rest of the costume could.

She pulled off the kaftan and rubakha, leaving on just a bra and her trousers, laying them on the foot of her bed and went into kitchen. Digging through the drawers, she finally found the scissors, and without pausing to think, or using a mirror, she began to cut off her hair, using her chin as a guide. Startled when her doorbell rang she threw a towel over her head and opened the door, just enough to cautiously peek around the edge.

"Thank god." She reached out and grabbed Harry by the wrist, yanking him into her flat. "I need help."

"Umm, yeah," Harry grinned and turned his back on her. "You really need to get a girl friend, Mione. You can't keep doing this."

"Oh, sorry," she muttered, covering her bra with the towel instead of her half cut hair. "Okay, it's safe now, you can turn around."

"What the bloody hell…I mean…umm, yeah…nice hair cut."

"Shut up, you need to finish it for me." She turned and walked back into the kitchen, sitting down and waiting for him. "Harry?"

"I don't do hair," he called out to her.

"Fine," she sulked, folding her arms and throwing herself back in the chair. "I have a razor."

"Hermione, I know two spells. One for my cut and one for…someone else. Neither of which would look good on you."

"Do you like this one?" She glared at him.

"No," he said, giving her a lopsided grin. "Okay, mine or Ron's. He wears his longer."

"Yours, only…maybe shorter. I have already mucked it up too much to make it long. Just….just do it."

Harry swallowed hard and preformed the spell, trying not to snicker as her hair began to curl and appear even shorter then the cut. "Umm, you may have wanted to go with the longer one."

"No, this is fine." She ran one hand over the back of her head as she clutched the towel in front of her with the other. "Did you bring your clothes?"

"Yeah, we better get ready," he sniggered looking at curls falling down over her forehead and on the tops of her ears. "Maybe you could just wear one of those head bands like Ginny used to."

"Get dressed, Harry." She waited until he had left the room the pulled the towel around her even tighter and ran back to her room.

"Change in the kitchen," she yelled out. "I'll be a few minutes at the most."

Pouring a crème in her hand she ran it through her hair, flattening and slicking her hair back straight from her face. Satisfied with the results, she picked up a spray and further welded it in place. Then, redressing and lacing up a pair of knee- high dragon boots, she was ready.

"Harry? Is it safe?"

"I am dressed but I don't know how safe we are…wow…is that you?"

"Too much?"

"Do you mind?" Harry waved his wand in front of her, waiting for her nod before changing the brocade to a softer tone, still keeping the green, only muting it and making it duller, more masculine.

"Thanks, I wanted a brown one but this is all I could find…and this was damned hard to come by."

"Let me guess, the museum."

"I am borrowing it. They'll get it back."

"You should have said something, Ginny could have …"

"Ready?" Hermione said, sliding her wand in her waistband after lifting up the kaftan and her blouse. "How the bloody hell do they expect to get to their wands in a hurry?"

"Staffs, remember? And they don't wear the kaftans every day. Do you have one of those …pony tail things?"

"Why, Harry, are you going in drag?" She intoned, then smiled watching him redden.

"Funny," he grinned, pushing up his sleeve. "Ginny's idea, I have two on my forearm, they hold the wand really well."

"Wait here." She hurried to rig up her own wand holder and came back to the sitting room nervously chewing her lip. "Ready. Do I look…un-female enough?"

"You look…yeah, un-female, right." Harry grinned and held out his hand, pulling her next to him and handing her one end of an old teaspoon. "Maybe you should wash off the make up."

"I don't have any on." She looked at him strangely as the familiar tug of port key travel took them away.