Disclaimer: I own nothing related to Harry Potter. This is an amateur, non-profit work. I write for my own enjoyment.

Chapter 10: Harry's Sanctuary

They started early next morning right after breakfast (Harry prepared his and ate alone). He holed up in his bedroom again for the day's lesson. He played with the marbles again, practicing controlling his magic tendrils and hands. He still didn't know what to call them; magical hands?

He found out that the further the marbles are, the higher amount of magic was needed to control and bring them to him. And even if he couldn't see the marbles, he could find and bring a particular marble to him using his magic as long as he was able to picture it clearly with his mind. Voldemort said with that he had perfected 'summoning' and 'levitation' charms already.

Voldemort was pleased with his progress and decided to start on the next lesson: mind magics.

{Now, this might seem a bit boring than the previous magic, but it was nevertheless very important. It is used to protect your mind and all the information that you knew. And you might find interesting applications for it later.} Voldemort snickered when he remembered what he applied them for.

{So, do you have a place for your sanctuary?}

Harry frowned, "Can I imagine one?" He was lounging on his bed, his back leaning against the wall. Voldemort said he should be relaxed and comfortable for this lesson.

{Yes, just visualize a place where you feel safe and comfortable. It can be a room, a castle, a beach, whatever suits you.}

Harry remembered his parent's house. Can that be his safe place? But Voldemort did destroy it. But he really liked the garden, so unlike Aunt Petunia's carefully maintained garden that simply looked cold to him. But his parents' garden looked inviting, where he could play and rolled around on the grass and no one will ever scold him.

He decided to imagine a garden, the grass freshly cut that he could still smell it. And there were bushes of roses and lilies (his mother's) and there was the fence surrounding the garden. There were trees that he could climb (away from Dudley and Aunt Marge's bulldogs) and he could see far away when he climbed on top of it. Yes, he could have a tree-house! He had thought of making one when he read it in a book, thinking that would be a lot better than a cupboard under the stairs. He could make the tree house the biggest in the world, built between the branches of the tallest tree so that he could climb on top of the tree and see everything. He would be like a king observing his realm. He would be safe up there, he could see from miles if anyone is coming to hurt him.

Voldemort was satisfied with Harry's creation. He asked Harry to describe the tree house more; how big was it? What is it made of? Are there any windows? How will you get up the house? How many rooms? And so on. Each detail is important, he said. Harry could see it clearly in his mind, he would have stairs, no, a ladder, that could be rolled down only for people that he trusted. He could have his own bedroom that has attached bathroom, a desk and a shelf for his books...

{How do you prevent people from climbing up the tree if they had a ladder?} Voldemort interrupted his dreaming. {What if they somehow can climb up the tree, how do you defend your house?}

He remembered his father and the wolves, fiercely fighting Voldemort.

"There are wolves guarding the tree below, so no one can come near the tree without me noticing. And there are fierce jaguars sitting on the tree branches, anyone who climbed the tree will be attacked by them... And if someone decides to fly up there, there are eagles or vultures that will attack them before they reach the tree." Harry hadn't forgotten that Halloween night memory; Voldemort could fly.

Harry began to devise more and more creative ways to prevent anyone from entering the tree house without his permission. He even made the tree house invisible so people cannot easily search for it. He put up another tree house, visible this time – a guard house, he said, so if anyone climbed that one, he will know someone had come searching for the tree house. He made the fence around the garden too high to climb, and stronger so no one can break it down and also too slippery to climb. He also put some alarm at the fence. Should he have a gatekeeper?

{No, that's good enough. But, say, if, if someone somehow managed to bypass all your protections and entered your tree house, how will you get rid of him?}

"Well, I shall have guard dogs. Huge, fierce dogs that will attack any intruders." Huge, fierce black dogs that was friendly only to him and no one else, so unlike Aunt Marge's bulldogs. Harry thought he really shouldn't let other vicious beasts inside the house. It wouldn't be a sanctuary for him anymore if he does!

"And then I'll put a trapdoor in the tree house; any intruders will fall through hundreds of feet below to the ground!" Harry added, rightly thinking that anyone who's stupid enough to enter his sanctuary without permission will be in for a nasty time.

{Now, Harry, imagine that tree house is where your mind is. It has everything; it stored your precious memories, everything that you've learned, all your deepest, darkest secrets... Your mind is the most important part of you; it is what makes you, you. That's why you had to protect it well. There are wizards who can read your mind, knowing your secret and then blackmail you for it. He can alter your memories, made you forget you were and made you think you were someone else. They can tell you to do something that you would never do, even made you kill yourself.}

Harry swallowed hard. He had no idea that there exist those kinds of magic.

{So you see, that was why you need to learn how to defend your mind from such attacks. This art of defending your mind is called occlumency. And the reading of other people's mind is called legilimency.}

{What you have described so far is the outer defence. It was good; you had the alarm, the fence, and guards. You even have a decoy; that guard house that you described. I suggested you can put misleading memories, or things that you wanted other people to know at the guard house. But your mind inner defence, the tree house itself is weak.}

{You need to remember that in a mindscape, you were in control. It is where imagination is and anything's possible. When people attack your mind, they tried taking control of it as fast as possible. They either enter through the front door and attacking directly with brute force, or stealthily through your weak holes in your defence. They would have to manifest themselves though, since our mind can recognize a foreign presence. But we'd have to go more into the inner mind defence later... Right now, I need your mind to be more organized, so we can keep and search for information easier. And we need to store your secrets somewhere safer.}

Harry then made his tree house have multiple rooms for storing the memories and for better organization. He kept the memories in something like photo albums – easier to search, he told Voldemort. He made a room for his memories in school and all that he'd learned – math, science, history, arts, and all the rest, kept in albums and arranged on shelves... He made another room for all the magic that Voldemort had thought him, and that was his favourite room: his magic room. Another room was set up like a shrine for his parents; though for now it was only filled with what he got from Voldemort's memories. Another room was for his life with the Dursleys; he really hated that room and wanted to seal it.

{You know, Harry, other wizards sometimes have dungeons, or safe boxes that can store all their deepest secrets, or memories that hated or they wanted to forget}, Voldemort suggested.

'Tree houses don't have dungeons,' thought Harry. Then he grinned, that would be what people expected, right? So he imagined that the tree trunk was hollow. He could have stairs, or better yet, a lift, inside the trunk where he could go down from the house right into the ground underneath the tree. There he'd have rooms to store his hated memories and deepest secrets. Like the beatings from Uncle Vernon and Dudley and his gang, the insults and the starving, his cupboard under the stairs, his daily servant-like routine at the Dursleys.

Unfortunately, he also had the memories that he had tortured Uncle Vernon and hurt the Dursleys. Now that particular memory needed to be kept in a safe box, locked with a code that only he knew, placed inside a locked room down in the dungeons. But he'd never forget the expression on Aunt Petunia's face, when she begged him to spare her son. He caught her expression and kept it like a photo, and hidden it in the shrine room upstairs to serve as a painful remainder for him: never, ever, give in to his rage. The consequences would be terrible.

Another thing that needed its own room in the dungeon was his deepest secret: the fact that Voldemort was bound to him.

{Yes, I imagine that people would not be too happy that the one that had destroyed the Dark Lord now harbours his soul, now would they?}

Oh yes, the wizarding world was paranoid. They would easily kill the boy if they thought that would ensure the Dark Lord is destroyed. Who cares if an innocent life is lost? That would be considered a noble sacrifice, for the greater good of the wizarding world.

The rest of the day was spent with Harry in his mindscape organizing the rest of his memories, testing and fortifying the defence. Or so he said. If it meant him playing with the wolves and the huge black dogs (he thought they were strangely familiar), or climbing the rolled-down ladder and swinging from the tree branches, well, Voldemort had nothing to say. Harry however did manage to make the windows have impenetrable barriers, and made the tree vines wrapped around any intruders and bound and strangle them. All in all he felt his mind sanctuary was pretty well protected.

A/N:

I may have gone overboard with the description. But well, I'd love to have a sanctuary of my own too, if only.

Another fic recommendation: 'Battered Hearts' by PerfesserN –it's a mystery fic, but it has an interesting view on effects of occlumency, and quite an illuminating look on Dumbledore's actions as well.

Next, Revealing Ritual.