3.
Lost Space
Hermione remained in the library for lengthy periods of time, studying, helping Harry, and, when she could, see if she could discover something about the strange man who came several weeks into school.
She had seen him. The books she read proved to be barren of fruit, no information given, nothing but a bare mentioning of his name or a poor picture of him. There was one picture, however, that caught her attention. It was in one of the older books, dusty, and smelling sweetly of age. The old tome in her hands weighed nearly half her body mass, but she was hardly troubled in placing it upon the table. She plucked it open and shifted to a page in the middle. There, as if finding her by chance, was an ink drawing of a man labeled A.K. The man stood alone, dressed in dark robes. His face was hidden in sketchy shadow and his hands moving constantly, fumbling with a wand, and his eyes glowering up at Hermione, incessantly annoyed at something just between him and her. She watched him, wondering what it may say. The next page, where penned in delicate and tight script, would have described him had not the information been executed with spells and spills and scratches. Nothing but several words such as the or is or whom was visible. All the rest was lost for good. She kept note of it and later told Harry and Ron.
"That's strange," Harry said.
"If they took the time to scratch it out something important or forbidden should have been written in there." Ron added thoughtfully.
"Come to think of it, I haven't actually seen the man fully yet." Hermione paused, looking around the hall. Students bent over their studying filled the scene, candles floating overhead, and the night tumbling down outside like spilled paint. Stars speckled the sky, peering timidly through the windows. Whispers and the scratching of quills pierced the otherwise silent room. Teachers examined the perimeter like stalking birds of prey. There was no sign of Arthur.
The students knew for certain that he was there in the castle, for they had seen him when he arrived. They sat outside by the lake, enjoying the final warmth of summer, and spotted a man entering the vicinity. He stood in the distance speaking with several professors, nodding his head full of hair the color of parched wheat and his hands deep within the folds of his robes. Next to the teachers he was short in stature and looked nothing more than a harmless man who could be a banker or accountant.
"He doesn't look like the most powerful wizard of all time," several students muttered.
"Yeah, he hasn't even got a beard!"
"He's short, too."
Harry thought of the man's arrival and noticed something there, lodged in his memory like a hard stone. When he recalled Arthur's shape, there distinctly hovered an atmosphere of power than enlisted not fear but simple awe, similar to Dumbledore but far more subtle and, in a way, more menacing.
"We were told that we'd see him in small groups. I think we are going together, all of Gryffindor, this Thursday night." Hermione reminded them, curiosity gleaming in her eyes, almost wicked.
"You look far too excited, Hermione." Ron shrunk back.
"Oh, don't you kid yourself!" Hermione rounded on him, her eyes sparkling even more and her lips parted. "We are going to be taught by the most powerful wizard! It's like getting a private lesson from Dumbledore!"
"Like when Lupin taught me the patronus spell…" Harry muttered, looking back and forth from one of them to the other, delighted to find Hermione so excited and Ron so withdrawn, for a change.
"Yes, exactly so! Can you imagine what we can learn? This is a rare opportunity, Ron, and if you think that it's just another old lesson then suite yourself, but don't bother me about it." Hermione finished with a heavy silence, returning to her work and scratching out vigorous notes, finishing the essay for Snape, and practicing a charm.
Quite some distance away, Arthur stood at the window of his room. It was more of a dungeon with a slit in the wall to show the night, ending early as the earth tilted away from the sun. A single four-poster bed stood in one corner, tables all around, bottles of ink here, quills there, a cauldron emitting a steady puff of steam in the other corner, and a dresser to hold his meager belongings decorated his room. Arthur leaned against the sill, resting his chin upon his palm, and shutting his eyes halfway, so semicircles of green and black appeared to any onlooker. He played with his wand with the other hand, creating wispy white apparitions of nymphs and naiads and pretty creatures dancing about a flame and tossing their heads back in silent laughter. Raising his wand the phantoms were snuffed out like the flame of a candle. Arthur set his wand down and created another one, to amuse himself with the archaic but little known spell. His spells were rooted in his blood like an old oak's to the earth, so deeply embedded that he need not even think of a spell and the magic springs to his wand, his oldest and dearest friend forged of an old man with a beard so long it put Dumbledore's to shame constantly trailing behind him.
He fondly remembered it. He was meandering through the forests, dense and lush, touching rocks and causing them to glow, or summoning spirits, and causing disruption in the centaurs who had no choice but to obey to the freckled, curious child playing around them as England grew to be. The old man beckoned him over, seeing his magic shoot from his fingers long before the four founders were even to open their eyes once to the world. He leaned against his shack, built of stone and thatched with straw. To the boy so young it appeared to be so big and mysterious. Smoke billowed from within and the man's eyes glowed brightly, drawing his fingers through his beard solemnly.
"Boy, come forth."
"Yes, sir." Arthur timidly ventured forwards.
"Where are you parents?"
"I haven't none to speak of."
"Why, were you born of the very dirt?"
"Mayhaps, sir."
The old man nodded pensively, continuing to drag his fingers through the snowy white beard, drawing behind it hollows, pockets big enough from his thick and calloused fingers. "You are a special boy."
"Am I, sir?"
"Yes."
Arthur did not know how to reply. He placed his small fists in his tangled mess of hair and dug his fingers in, waiting for the sir to continue speaking.
"Do you have a wand?"
"A what?"
"A wand that can channel your energies."
"No, sir."
The man bent over, the buttons of his spine rippling beneath the coarse fabric, and his picked up a staff longer than he and reminiscent of a blade. He placed it on the ground, tapped twice, and from it sprang a flower quite lovely and large.
"I want one of those," Arthur gawked.
"You certainly will receive one, then."
As Arthur of the Round table followed Merlin devoutly, Arthur was then subject to the old man's teachings, toning his powers that were already so strong, strong as the revenge that soiled Hamlet's heart or darkness in Macbeth's, Arthur became better and better. And once the old man died much afterwards after Arthur had been acquainted with Hamlet and after the crusades had long set sail. Arthur set him to rest, letting his old bones become fantastical memories.
Arthur thought of all this in the room in Hogwarts, many years later, and seemed to sag with the weight of his years piling to his back.
A light tapping sounded from the door.
"Come in."
The door opened and Arthur turned to greet the visitor. Dumbledore smiled sagely at him his spectacles glimmering in the candle light.
"Tomorrow you start your first lessons. Are you prepared?"
"Yes," Arthur nodded.
"What will you be teaching them, if I may ask?" Dumbledore placed the tips of his slender fingers together.
"Nothing spectacular, I'm afraid. I can't give away all my secrets. I couldn't give them away during the war. All I could do then was leave my wand secured and sling a gun on my back. But, I will teach them some skills that most of the world has forgotten. Then I could teach some parlor tricks, to have a showy event."
Dumbledore nodded, his robes swishing as he moved closer.
Arthur regarded him closely, feeling quite find of the man who had, at an early age, become a dear friend. Arthur had even taken the liberty of insinuating a few secrets.
"Will you, by chance, be taking Harry Potter out and giving him some particular advice?" Dumbledore asked quietly.
Arthur gazed at him for a long time.
Finally, he spoke.
"No."
"I understand, I know you don't want to mess with fate and the future—"
"But his friend, that Granger girl, I think I will teach something. She's sharp. I like intelligent people like her."
"Yes, she's the best in her class," Dumbledore agreed proudly.
"But what you said of the future. I don't believe I have revealed to you my true identity, have you?"
"Not a word has been spoken, unless you count your inability to age. And I do believe you'll keep it hidden forever."
Arthur shook his head. "I may at one point. I know what will happen in the future like you may remember a dream upon waking up. It's unclear, hazy. It comes in fragments and slowly slips away. I can remember the past very well, of course, but when I set my mind forth into the metaphysical, the what has not happened yet, then I begin to lose myself and I feel quite sick because I can sense my death is awaiting me. It's inevitable that it will happen. Eventually I, too, will fall. I doubt a blade shall meet my neck, but I would not be surprised if it were to occur. Furthermore, the near future becomes more strikingly clear as we step into it. I know what will become of Harry and his friends, and of who will perish along the way and who will shed a thousand tears and who will be unable to move on and will shatter before they can reach the final step, bowing before death as he casts his blade upon them. I can hear Harry's yells echoing in my mind and I can feel the anguish rippling through his veins. What I cannot say is that if I interfere with him that it can help. In times of distress what is a few words of a haggard old man? You rely on what you know, and not what a master has taught you unless you dig deep enough to hit the well. I'll be nothing but a lost memory to him. But his friend will recall me and when the time comes, maybe not in a battle and maybe not in the climax of her life, but in some distant future she'll recall my words and use them. It will not be wasted and will not be tampering with time."
Dumbledore chose silence.
Arthur turned back over his shoulder and looked one last time at the night before going forth and pulling his sleeve up to show Dumbledore. A scar went from his elbow to his wrist, gnarled and hairless.
"That was in the past, Arthur," Dumbledore said kindly.
"You forgive me?" words so quietly spoken, as if they may break the budding hope which had hardly been born.
"You know me well enough."
"I had no choice. It stings and burns every once in a while, but sometimes I forget. It's like when I succumbed before. I am the clashing of the antithesis and the thesis, but I do not become the synthesis but the deformed child of both that is disregarded for I am as imperfect as humans."
"You're very poetic this night, Arthur." Dumbledore mused, and turned away. He had not batted an eye at the Dark Mark on Arthur's arm.
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Several notes: Merlin and Arthur are the story of days yonder about the wizard who helps a boy take the throne, a very familiar story I'm sure. Hamlet and Macbeth are two of Shakespeare's plays, tragedies to be sure, and they deal with a mortal flaw. If you are familiar with them then you should be able to see the foreshadowing. And finally "thesis", "antithesis", and "synthesis" are some of Hegel's philosophies on history; that it acts in those three phrases accordingly: the idea of the majority, the idea against it, and the clashing of the two. And now you know some trivia!