"Ready?" asked Cho, standing just outside the pentagram.
Harry sat in the middle of the glowing five-pointed star. Specially made candles burned with magical energy at the tip of each of the five corners. It had taken the better part of a week for them to get everything ready, even with the use of the time turner which, unfortunately for Harry, caused him to become violently ill, severely restricting the advantage he could get from it.
Ginny had listened to Harry's request, and then taken the book from him to study the ritual and the potion. She initially agreed with Hermione, but also accepted Harry's reasoning, especially when he related an abbreviated version of the Slughorn Occlumency training and his almost complete failure to master any form of mind protection.
Hermione had been even more buried in her studies, now that she had a solid lead to work on, and Ron was deeply involved in practicing his newfound ability to remember things, thanks to their accelerated training. The redhead often joked that it would not be long before he would know as much as Hermione, but Harry suspected that Ron was actually spending most of his time learning every Quidditch play ever invented. At the moment, Harry was glad to have been able to sneak off without either of his two friends questioning his extended absences too much.
The potion and ritual were complicated, and well beyond either his or Ginny's abilities, so they brought in other people to help complete different parts. Only Cho knew exactly what they were up to, and the price of her cooperation had been high.
"If it works for you, you have to let a few of us do it as well," she said. "I'll help you, but you can't deny me the opportunity to get the same advantage."
"It's not about advantage, Cho," Ginny had argued. "It's about Harry being unable to defend his mind from Snape or Riddle!"
"Never the less, if the potion and ritual works, it could be an enormous asset. Imagine being able to recall everything you have ever read, or to be able to see your memories as if they were happening again. That's just too good to pass up."
Harry relented, knowing the risk he was taking allowing others to have access to the knowledge and not just from Hermione when she found out what he had done.
He explained Hermione's concerns about the slippery slope of blood magic, and was surprised to find Cho agreed, to a point.
"You have to have a proper system to classify these things, otherwise you could end up labelling all magic as too dangerous," explained Cho. "The Ministry has corrupted the current system until it is virtually useless, but once upon a time there existed some pretty stringent guidelines and tests that were much better at labelling the dangerous factors involved, rather than just arbitrarily saying everything is either 'Light' or 'Dark'. Once you have a proper system, it becomes much easier to judge exactly where you are going and be able to control yourself better."
When he thought about it, it shouldn't really have surprise him that the ex-Ravenclaw student not only considered the pursuit and classification of knowledge worthy of further study, but had actively been developing her own system of measurable morals in regards to magic – it was a very Ravenclaw thing to do.
"It's all to do with the Heroes," she said, making Harry cringe. "We had to make decisions to ensure we didn't cross the line and become as bad as the Death Eaters. There are still a lot of grey areas, but everybody is confident that we are staying on the agreed track and have not started doing things for our own glorification or satisfaction."
Ginny's attitude was much more flexible, and slightly embarrassing to Harry. "I know you would never go down that path," she said. "Not after our talk, would you, Harry?"
Now everything was completed and the time had come.
"I am ready," he said, picking up the cup of potion that had been sitting on the floor in front of him. It didn't look very appetising, and smelled as foul as any potion he had ever taken before.
"Remember, don't break the pentagram until the effect of the ritual has completed," said Cho, for at least the tenth time. "You are going to be undergoing some pretty dramatic visions, but you have to try to remain aware of your body. Stay seated, otherwise it could all fall apart.
Harry knew the danger. He also knew he only had one shot at it. The potion could not be taken twice without becoming toxic. "Okay," he said, then took a deep breath.
Cho began to chant the words to the ritual. They had decided that she would invoke the magic, firstly because she was much better at this sort of thing, and secondly because the book had recommended a second person be present to make sure the recipient of the spell had help available should anything go wrong - like his legs falling off because he said a word of the spell wrong due to the effect of the potion.
He looked up and his eyes met Ginny's. She was standing directly in front of him, looking worried but trying to hide it. His feeling towards the girl had definitely taken a turn for the more serious. It was becoming more and more difficult for him to keep leaving her, or to keep her out of so much of his life, but the ease with which first Snape and then Slughorn dug up his memories of their time together terrified Harry. It was one of the main reasons he was so desperate to master Occlumency, whatever the cost. He smiled reassuringly, making her automatically smile in return, and then downed the potion in one huge gulp.
He felt his head explode, and then slumped to the floor.
The magical concoction burning in his blood as his mind shattered into a thousand pieces. For a split second he didn't know or where he was, then everything changed.
Looking up, after his bout of weakness had passed; he expected to see Cho and Ginny rushing over to find out what had gone wrong. Instead he was greeted with an unexpected sight.
He was in the main Hall of Hogwarts.
But it was a very different Hogwarts. Instead of the usual candles floating through the hall lighting everything, larger ones that had small, television-like images in place of the flames drifted on unfelt currents, each one a different scene of his life.
The roof was not showing the outside sky, but was playing like a movie, showing a never ending cascade of his memories.
It took a minute for him to register what was going on. He was actually inside his memory mansion, just like when he used the potion Slughorn provided, except this was a thousand times more realistic and intense. It was somehow even more real than watching a Pensieve memory.
For long minutes, Harry watched the display on the roof. Strangely, he felt no emotion. Fear, worry, and even the excitement he had been experiencing just before taking the potion were just missing. It was as if a part of him was absent, the part that caused him so much trouble and yet made him a unique individual, and that part was floating in the candles and playing on the ceiling.
When a 'candle' drifted into his view that had an image of Sirius in it, he instinctively raised his wand and summoned it. It obediently zoomed into his waiting hand.
Inside the flame, Harry could see Sirius as he was during the last Christmas of his life, laughing and joking with them all at Grimmauld Place. Watching it replay for the third time, Harry let it go and it returned to the air above him.
He knew what he had to do; he had to put each of the memories into a place in the castle, somewhere he could easily find them again. The combination of the ritual to help him focus his mind, the potion to magically access his thoughts and memories, and Slughorn's training, all came together into a super-powered whole. He might not be able to complete the building of his mansion before the potion ran out, but he would be able to make more progress than months of Slughorn's exercises could give him.
Harry reached out and summoned another candle of memory, then began preparing classrooms full of cupboards to store them in.
Seemingly hours later, he had barely made a start, and yet his virtual Hogwarts had already been expanded to larger than the real place. Hagrid's hut, the forbidden forest, the Shrieking Shack, and parts of Hogsmeade, had been pressed into service to separate his memories into easy to find places. Tirelessly he worked, unconcerned at the passage of time, as he started with the most important memories he wanted hidden and work worked his way down through the multitudes.
Sometimes he removed memories from the places he had previously stored them and put them in to another, more fitting location. This happened many times as he discovered he needed increasingly secure places for certain types of memory. The Chamber of Secrets became a massive vault, a dozen times the size of the real room. In place of the statues lining the hallway, giant representations of his memories stood guard, and Slytherin's face was replaced with a much more fitting bust.
The sheer quantity of the memories was overwhelming.
In his training with Slughorn, there had been scarcely a thousandth as many. The Hogwarts Library was also pressed into service storing masses of facts and figures Harry hadn't even known he knew, along with whole books he now remembered in their entirety.
Eventually Harry noticed fewer and fewer candles floating in the hallway. He had discovered the candle memories had strong emotions attached to them, where as the moving pictures on the roof were more general in their nature. Surprisingly, most of his time at Privet Drive was shown on the roof, with comparatively few candles holding images of his hated childhood. Harry put all of those into a miniature model of the despised house, based on the dollhouse he had bought seemingly so long ago, and then put the dollhouse into a cupboard under one of the more permanent staircases of Hogwarts.
Fitting, he thought.
Finally the Hall was cleared, and Harry felt exhausted. He had just viewed most of his life, and sorted and catalogued millions of memories, but the spell still held him in its grip.
Still completely calm, Harry walked the hallways of his virtual Hogwarts. The paintings had been replaced with scenes from those specific areas where they hung.
Here was the portrait inside of which he watched Hermione running up the stairs to the third floor corridor. Over there was where he had torn Cedric's bag in order to warn him about the dragons of the first task. With the aid of the magic, he was able to watch and hear the scenes again much more clearly than he thought possible without a Pensieve. Cedric's murder was outside; in the graveyard he had constructed near the Triwizard Tournament stadium.
Memories of his parents were hard to place, but eventually he had made a series of compartments in his trunk at the foot of his bed in the dormitory. It had been surprising to find he had so many that he wanted to keep, even the sound of his mum's voice as she was murdered found a compartment to be placed in. He spent a lot of time going through the trunk, examining everything, including some very vague and blurry things from his early childhood.
Days seem to pass as Harry roamed the corridors of his mind, and he finally started to get worried. Realising he was starting to feel strong emotions again, he became aware of an awful lethargy seeping into his limbs. He sat down heavily on the floor. His vision swam as the walls of his mansion blurred. He blinked to clear his eyes and found tears filling them. Reaching up sluggishly to wipe them away, he found his hand was too heavy to hold up. As his head slumped forward to make painful contact with the floor, heard a voice call his name, but then a familiar blackness enclosed him.
-
"Hey, sleepyhead," said a comforting voice. "Time to wake up."
Harry struggled to open his eyes, finding them glued shut with sleep. He reached up and wiped them, then managed to crack each eye open separately. A blurry shape filled his vision.
"You probably need these," said the voice. A pair of glasses was gently fitted onto his face.
"Ginny," he said, as the figure became distinct.
For a moment he didn't feel anything; It was like staring at a picture of a stranger whose name he knew, but nothing else, then he somehow reached into his mind and opened to door to his emotions about the beautiful young witch.
"Ginny!" he repeated, this time putting some feeling into his words as he felt love well up inside. He reached up and grabbed her, drawing her into a deep kiss.
"Wow," she said, pulling away and smiling. "If that is the good morning I can expect everyday, I am very much looking forward to waking you up more often, Mr Potter."
"Me too," he answered, grinning, then pulled her back down for another kiss which she eagerly returned.
"Take it easy there, Tiger," said George, standing at the end of the bed. "That's my sister there you are molesting."
"More like being molested by," said Fred, standing next to his brother. "It's an unfortunate fact of life that we may have to get used to seeing this repeated."
"At every opportunity," said Ginny, standing up.
"What happened?" asked Harry, getting his wits back.
"You partook of a slightly illegal ceremony, you may recall," said Fred.
"Indeed, I hope that you can recall, since this ceremony was specifically aimed at helping in that regards, and also involved the highly dubious use of some of our beloved little sister's blood," added George.
"Although the fact she could contribute said blood did come as a bit of a relief to us both-" said Fred.
"Especially since we have noted the amount of time the two of you appear to be spending together-" said George.
"Quit it!" snarled Ginny. "I am not going to have this conversation with you again, okay? Just remember what happened to Charlie."
Harry felt himself blush, in spite of the twins' immediate obedience and matching grins. He made a note to ask about the Charlie incident some other time, though.
"Harry, do you remember the ritual?" she asked.
For a second he had to concentrate, then it all came back from inside of the places he had stored things. The retrieval required no effort on his part, but it was definitely different to how he was used to remembering things; smoother somehow, and in much greater detail.
"Yes, I do," he answered. "How long was I under?"
Ginny looked relieved and more worried at the same time.
"About two hours," she said. "But you have been asleep for a whole day since then."
Harry was shocked. It had felt like months, but had only been two hours?
"Cho says that the book didn't say how long would take, but that seemed quite fast according to the research she had done before making it for you," said Ginny, apparently seeing his confusion.
"I must say, Harry," said George. "When we stopped in to say hello, we didn't expect to find the boy-who-lived sobbing uncontrollable in the arms of not one, but two lovely ladies."
"Especially not when one of those ladies is our sister!" added Fred.
Harry was confused, but Ginny growled. "Right, that's it. I agreed to let you in to make sure he wasn't dangerous to anyone, now get out."
"And leave you alone with a semi dressed boy in his bed-"
"Out!" she shouted, grabbing her wand out of a pocket, and incidentally causing Harry to painfully realise he once again had a headache. "Now!"
The twins ran for the door, eyeing the wand warily, but no sooner had they left than Cho entered, carrying a tray of food that made Harry's stomach grumble.
"What did they mean?" he asked, after stuffing down some bacon and eggs. "The twins, what were they talking about, about me sobbing?"
Ginny sat on one side of him while Cho lay partway across the bottom of the bed, nibbling on a bit of toast.
It still came as a bit of surprise to Harry that the two girls had become friends at all, let alone appear to be quite close. Harry knew Ginny had the knack of being able to befriend almost anybody with her outgoing manner and easy charm, but he couldn't help notice that Cho had become much more relaxed and mature since he had last spoken to her at school. Any embarrassment he felt about their former relationship disappeared when she talked to him, although he had not yet been brave enough asked where her friend, Marietta Edgecombe, was.
The girls had been quite competitive at school, especially when it came to the final Quidditch match where Ginny had triumphantly taken Harry's place as seeker against Cho and won the cup. He hadn't been told the whole story, but apparently they had come to some sort of an agreement, and it had quickly deepened into friendship as both got over their old feelings to pursue the shared goal of building the D.A..
"Don't worry about it," said Cho, who had caught the tail end of the comment made by the twins. "It was just a side effect of the spell."
"Please?" he asked Ginny.
She sighed and shot Cho an unreadable glance. "You were going through a lot of emotions after the spell finished," she explained. "It was as if you were feeling everything you have ever felt in one hit. One second you were laughing so hard your face went blue from lack of air, the next you nearly threw Cho through a wall in anger. We were trying to get you into a bed, but you were crying so much we couldn't hold you down. Luckily the twins arrived and managed to get you under control without paralysing you, which could have had side effects because of the potion."
Harry felt bad, even though he knew there was no way he could have stopped it.
"Sorry," he offered lamely to the girls.
Cho laughed and waved him off. "My fault. I realised there would be a bit of a backlash, but had no idea just how much emotion you carry around inside of you."
"Thanks," he said. "And thank you too, Ginny."
"You're welcome," she answered. "Now tell us everything from the moment you took the potion."
He explained everything that had happened to him, his words getting Cho so excited that, by the end of his story, she was almost sitting on his lap, and kept him going over details of his experience.
"The training with professor Slughorn definitely helped," Harry said, feeling very tired. "Don't try the ritual without something like that, otherwise I don't know what would happen."
Ginny made him go back to sleep, chasing Cho out of the room by insisting Harry needed to recuperate before he would be able to help her anymore. Just before the redhead left the room, she kissed Harry again.
He found himself automatically locking the memory away in its designated area of his memory mansion, ready to be pulled out and examined in greater detail at any time. It still felt strange, but was becoming more natural by the second. It also let him quickly and easily suppress the rush of emotion the gentle touch of her lips had evoked.
As the door closed, and his eyes drooped heavily, Harry wondered if it would make him a different person.
-
When Ron and Hermione joined Harry at the D.A. headquarters, neither showed any indication they knew or even suspected Harry's actions.
Hermione had managed to find an extremely old copy of 'Hogwarts, A History'. It had a whole section relating to the myth, along with several other stories that no longer appeared in the modern versions, including the legend of the Chamber of Secrets.
"It says the graveyard was also referred to as the 'Hallowed Ground of Hogwarts', and that it could only be found on 'All Hallows Eve' when the barrier between worlds is the thinnest," Hermione explained.
"That's a lot of Hallows," said Ron, jokingly. "How do you get in, stand at the entry and shout 'Hallow there!'?"
"But the Staff is not there," said Harry, deep in thought. "Riddle must have found out about the whole Hogwarts Hallows thing. That's where he got the idea of using something from each of the four founders as Horcruxes and why he took the job at Borgin and Burkes, so that he could track down the families who had the heirlooms. I bet that was also the reason he wanted the Defence against the Dark Arts job - so that he could keep looking for the graveyard, to get Gryffindor's sword, or maybe find the other things through the children of the descendants."
"So we are back to square one, we know it was probably Ravenclaw's Staff, but we don't have a clue where it is anymore," said Ron despondently.
"No, now we have something specific to search for, and that narrows the field immensely. We can even get the D.A. involved looking for this," said Hermione, holding up a picture of a heavily engraved staff.
Harry agreed, but made sure Ginny and the others knew that there was something very important about the Staff that meant their enquiries needed to be subtle. They arranged a meeting with everybody except Fred and George, who were off on an Order Mission, and Cho, who was 'otherwise occupied', according to Ginny. Harry suspected she was on a mission for the D.A., but the secrecy they employed meant nobody was ever told anything that they did not need to know about current activities.
"But everybody knows where it is," said Luna at the meeting, after hearing about the Staff. "It is in the Ministry of Magic. Fudge had every powerful magical object he could find locked up in the Department of Mysteries so that nobody could use them against him. That's why all of the time turners where there."
Nobody was game to contradict the girl, her imaginative and usually unsupported theories having been heard often enough to no longer annoy anybody, not even Hermione.
"There was even an article on it a few years back. I remember reading it in an old paper that lined my dresser drawers," the blonde girl added.
"You use the Quibbler to line your dresser drawers?" asked Ron. "Are you scared of getting splinters in your knickers or something?"
Hermione gave Ron a withering glare and Ginny slapped him on the back of the head.
"Don't be silly, Ronald," said Luna. "I don't use the Quibbler to line my drawers, I use the Daily Prophet. The mind altering poison they coat it with keeps the Flying Dingbats out. You look like you could use some in your dresser too."
"See, Ron. That was obvious," said Ginny.
Harry, Ron and Neville laughed, but Hermione suddenly looked serious.
"Excuse me, Luna? Did you say there was an article about Rowena Ravenclaw's Staff in the Daily Prophet?"
"Yes. It was a terribly old copy, and not very accurate either, since it clearly mislead people by telling them-"
"You wouldn't happen to still have this article, would you?" interrupted Hermione. Harry stopped laughing and started thinking. If Hermione thought something was worth looking into, the chances were there was something to it.
"Oh goodness no. The poison only lasts about seven years, so I changed it ages ago," Luna answered, her gaze flitting over them all randomly.
Harry felt his hopes plummet, but Hermione was already thinking ahead, as usual. "Do you happen to remember what the date of the paper was?" she asked.
"Yes, of course. I remember it very clearly, since it was from the day after Harry became famous," said the blonde witch, staring off into space. "It was the day after he first defeated You-Know-Who."
"What are you thinking, Hermione?" Harry asked.
"I think we need to get a copy of that paper," she said, looking very serious.
"Well, Neville," said Luna innocently, but appeared unusually focussed on the young man. "Care to help me check my underwear draw, just in case I missed a copy?"
Neville's blush was so bright it practically made his face glow.