A/N: Thank you for reading and following. I would appreciate if you could leave a review to let me know how you are finding my story so far. If you have any fears and concerns, please share them with me so I can caution myself in the future. For now, I would like to say two thoughts I have on the story while writing it: I hope that none of my characters will be pigeonholed into a demon or an impossibly good archetype. They reflect people as they are in real life- neither wholly good nor evil, but just struggling and trying our best.

Another thing is about the chapter titles. They will follow the major arcana for a while, but it doesn't mean that Harry will be meeting each and every one of them. For a 11-year-old boy to comprehend all of the major arcana, it would be a very tall order indeed. If anything, the meanings of the arcana will be flavouring each chapter at most. It's a little challenge from myself to myself.

Please enjoy the chapter.

Chapter 2: The High Priestess

Dinner was a strained affair. If Uncle Sirius had not been there to crack jokes to ease the tenseness, Harry thought he would have keeled over from stress before dessert was served. As it was, he was already tensed and on the edge of his seat, his fingers gripping too tightly on his fork.

"Is it like this all the time, Harry? It feels like a mausoleum in here, brr! You have to lighten the place up, Prongs," Sirius complained, slapping James on the back. Harry stiffened at the mention of a mausoleum, but his father simply grimaced.

"If you must come for dinner, uninvited, then at least try to be civil," Lord Potter said bitingly. He put down his fork and motioned to the servant waiting by the door. "Dessert won't be necessary for me. Harry may take his later, after our discussion."

Harry felt his stomach twist into a knot. He was in no mood to eat any more of the delicious rack of lamb which had been neatly carved for him. The mashed potatoes slumped sadly on the side of his plate, untouched. Dessert was the last thing on his mind in this tense atmosphere.

"What? You can't cancel dessert, Prongs. It's like cancelling Christmas!" Sirius exclaimed indignantly, "Back me up here, cub. Is he like this all the time here? I can see why he's so reluctant to come back..."

"Sirius," his father hissed, "You can stay here and have your dessert. I'll keep the meeting short, Harry, since your godfather and I have an event to attend later."

Harry nodded, still unable to speak, and folded up his napkin from his lap to leave the dining table. He could still hear Sirius grumbling to himself as he followed behind his father, "If he actually succeeds in seducing her, I doubt he'd ever come back..."

His footsteps faltered, and he felt his blood pounding in his ears. His father turned and shot him a sharp look. Mechanically, he plodded up the staircase, his eyes boring into his father's back. Who was Sirius talking about?

The lamps flickered to life as soon as his father walked into his study, welcoming back its master. It was still the dark and oppressive room that Harry remembered from early in his childhood. He had not been back in this room for a long time, but he still felt as small and helpless as he had been back then.

He was startled from his reverie as his father collapsed roughly into his enormous leather office chair. His father seemed to pause as he looked away beneath his desk, but his moment of hesitation was brief as he placed a square box wrapped in a coarse black cloth on his desk. He did not address it immediately, instead choosing to look directly at Harry.

"You've grown, son. You look just like I did at your age," his father said softly, "but your eyes, they've never changed. You have your mother's eyes."

Harry felt a lump in his throat grow, but he steeled himself and swallowed his fears. "I know, dad."

His father smiled faintly, and for the first time, Harry saw the weariness in his eyes. His father looked worn-out and a lot older than he had once been. An inexplicable feeling began to well up within him.

"I was never a good husband, and god knows, I've been an awful father too. After your mother died, I..."

"It's alright, dad. I'm fine," Harry said.

"You are? Good, good," his father replied distractedly, visibly lost in his own thoughts, "You've always been independent, always looked after yourself, so I thought..."

"I'm fine," Harry repeated.

His father looked at him searchingly, then shook his head. "As long as you're taking care of yourself. Your mother, she never needed anyone as well. When she was carrying you, she was convinced that she saw her own death. She made endless preparations, but a lot of them didn't survive-" here, his voice caught, "They didn't survive what happened. This box, however, was one of the few that did."

"It's yours now. She wanted you to have it and bring it to Hogwarts with you," his father continued steadily, "so that a part of her would always be with you, while you were away from home."

Harry did not hear what his father said next. He barely remembered the touch of his father patting him on the back, telling him to stay in the office as long as he wanted to. Only the soft click of the door closing shut behind his father woke him from his stunned state.

His mother knew he would be her death, but she carried him and loved him anyway. Anguish threatened to overwhelm him, the raw pain of old wounds threatening to bleed anew. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. His father's whisky scent lingering in the air, the dusty old books that had not been touched in a decade, he breathed it all in.

I am steel. I will not break, I can only bend. Indomitable will, grant me the strength to pursue the truth I seek.The meditative chant taught by the preparatory school to contain their magic breathed pure steel into his veins. The meditation technique that worked for outbursts of uncontrolled magic also worked very well for emotional outbursts. Pressing down on his feelings of hysteria and anguish, Harry shaped it into a needle of purpose and drove it into his heart. When he opened his eyes again, he was focused and calm. First, he would attend to the box.

It looked like a very unassuming box. There was nothing special about the black cloth it was wrapped up in. However, his father had said that it was a gift from his mother to him. A piece of her that he could carry with him always. That made the box rarer than the rarest treasure on the earth.

With steady fingers, the coarse black muslin cloth was undone and fell to the table, revealing the pale beechwood box ensconced within. There were complex blood-red runes that spiralled across every inch of the box, carved so deeply that the entire box looked like a rune. There seemed to be no opening at all, but at Harry's touch, the runes glowed a brighter red than before. There was a soft click and the lid of the box sprang open.

Harry peered curiously into the box, his heart in his throat. There were three items within. A slim deck of cards, a wand and a letter. His sharp eyes caught the first line written on the letter. He immediately slammed the box shut.

My darling boy,

"There is a limit," Harry told himself blankly, "There is a limit to how much I am expected to handle in one day. I have reached it."

His breathing was quick and shallow as he wrapped the box back up with the black coarse cloth. He ran back to his room as quickly as his legs could carry him with the box in his arms.

Harry lay solemnly curled up into a ball on his bed, his arms circled protectively around the box. He watched the minutes tick past on his clock, the slow and torturous hours slipping by. When the hour hand finally ticked to midnight, he smiled brightly.

"Happy birthday, Harry," he whispered to himself.

In the main hall, they were all seated, shuffling nervously. They were on chairs rather than the customary benches to signify their impeding step into a higher realm. They would leave their lives as academy students behind and become full-fledged acolytes of magic at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. There they would stay, emerging either as wizards and witches in the prime of their majority, or remain in the watery tombs of the lake forever.

At least, that was what the Professor had said. Professor Severus Snape, the premier potions master of wizarding Europe. He had swept in silently, a whirl of luxurious black robes and malevolent sneers. He did conduct a talk so much as attack the students with terrifying statistics of injury and death rates, the disclaimers they would have to sign and the slim chance of ever flourishing as adult wizards, if they even survived their first year in Hogwarts.

Experiments gone wrong, unfixable curses, professors who used students as test subjects. There was much to trap an unaware first-year student, and many lay forever within the lake's watery grave.

"I don't know anyone in father's year who died," Draco whispered, nudging Harry in the ribs.

"No one important, you mean," Harry countered, lost in his own thoughts. Under Lord Riddle's regime, many things had changed. History had been very clearly cut in two- the time before Lord Riddle and the time after. The difference was as stark as night and day. He had taken care to whisper at a lower voice to Draco, but he was unfortunate enough to attract the Professor's attention.

A pair of beady black eyes bored deep into him, dark and full of repressed rage. The professor's sallow face faded into the background, but the pair of devil-like pitch-black eyes only seemed to grow bigger and bigger, blotting out his entire field of vision. Harry bit back a gasp as he felt memories that had been buried deeply, so deeply, within his psyche dragged to the surface. The nights spent alone, always alone since the darkest, dimmest reaches of his memory. His father's eyes, heavy with disappointment, that passed through him as if he were a ghost. Then finally, there lay the box, the coarse black cloth unwound and laying limply on his father's desk.

"No," Harry said instinctively. No one was allowed to see that. Some feral part of him recognised the box as something that once belonged to his mother, and through their shared blood, it was now his as well. As he claimed the box through his memories, so too did the box claim him in return. The deeply carved runes glowed an ominous red, springing to the defence of its new master.

A blizzard of cards surged violently out from the box, thrusting the lid wide open and charging recklessly at the enormous pair of eyes, blacker than black, that kept watching and watching and watching. Even as black blood began to pour from the paper-thin cuts that the torrent of cards inflicted, the eyes seemed to stare straight at Harry, all the way down to his naked soul. He shivered as more memories rose to the surface, becoming almost tangible in the dark study.

Harry tore his own eyes away from those demonic black orbs as he caught the box trembling once more. A fair arm stretched its way grotesquely through the open box, its long red nails scrabbling uselessly at the floor. Another arm clawed its way out from the box, then a deformed face full of red curls, followed rather impossibly by the rest of the creature's body. Long, flowing white robes thankfully hid the rest of it from view.

"Foul fiend," it hissed, its voice like nails on a chalkboard, "there is no space here for the likes of you!"

Harry didn't think the grotesque creature was in any position to call the eyes foul. It stood in front of Harry, blocking him from the gaze of the eyes. From the back, all he could see were her white robes, where a glowing crescent-shaped burning with incandescent white light hung. It looked infinitely sharp and burned brightly, but the creature did not hesitate to reach back and grasp it with its claws, drawing it with an experienced air.

A bloodthirsty and murderous aura hung heavily in the air. Harry instinctively sensed that this creature was neither good nor evil, but it was incredibly powerful.

Swift as lightning, the creature slashed its weapon down with almighty force directly across the black eyes. For one second, time seemed to stand still. The next second, inky black ichor exploded from the eyes, spraying like a fountain all over the dark study. The eyes shattered completely, falling delicately to the ground like powdered glass.

"This is a dream," Harry heard himself saying. His voice sounded a long way away, "This can't be real."

The figure in white turned to face him fully, its crescent moon weapon fully sheathed once again. Where there had once been a distorted, grotesque face, now there was only the inhumanly beautiful visage of an aristocratic woman. Her eyes glittered with intelligence and her lips curved into a knowing smile.

"And can't dreams be real, my dearest boy?" she asked.

"Who are you?" Harry trembled. My dearest boy. The first line of that letter that he could not read, not yet.

The woman's knowing smile only deepened. "I am not the one that you seek," she said gently, "but once, we all trembled under her will. First as a Queen, then as the Empress. She meant for us to serve at your side, so I wonder, what manner of monster did she hope for you to become?"

Harry did not flinch at the word monster, as he had many times before. Here in this dream world of his father's dark study, he was for the first time unafraid.

"What were those eyes?" he asked, the image of those deflated eyeballs drowning in their own black blood still fresh in his mind.

"A spy," the woman replied, her delicate and beautiful features twisting into a malevolent sneer. For a second, her face seemed to flicker back and forth between the grotesque figure that Harry had first seen crawling out of the box and her fairer form. "He dug a little too deep and fell here into your subconscious, which is my domain. I couldn't follow his eyes back to the rest of his mind, so I destroyed them. He will never see again," she said with an air of self-satisfaction.

Harry did not even know how to begin understanding that sentence. It seemed as if his unlikely protector was as determined as possible to give him convoluted answers to led to more questions. He gingerly sat down on the carpeted floor of the study in a meditative pose, massaging his temples.

"Are you confused, my dear? Do you feel as if you have lost your way?" The woman's eyes glittered with avarice.

"Just a little, yes," Harry said, rather tersely, "How do I get out of here?"

"I do not have the answers, but I know that as of this moment- you cannot leave," the woman replied, her smile deepening once again, "Your mind was most grievously injured in the vicious attack you suffered from the spy. Look up above you."

Harry turned his head up. His mouth pressed into a thin, hard line. An enormous jagged tunnel stretched up above him into endless darkness. Chunks of debris slowly fell down from its edges from time to time.

"It doesn't look good," Harry said in a small voice.

"You should be thankful that you did not immediately die," she said lightly, "As it is, the damage is irrevocable. Every second we speak here, your psyche is splintering into infinite fragments. When you wake up, if you ever do, you may find yourself irredeemably mad."

The woman said this delicately, her expression never changing even as she imparted this terrible news. Harry looked at her beautiful face, serene and majestic. She was not afraid of death, but he was. He had to grow up quickly, make it through Hogwarts and take over the duties that burdened his father so terribly. He had to go back and make sure Draco and the new boy Finch-Fletchley didn't get themselves killed in the first week of Hogwarts. There was a letter that he had left unread.

When he got back to the real world, Harry promised himself that he would read it.

If he didn't do something now, he would die. This was the only thing that he could be certain of right now, in this mutable world that made no sense to him. Harry turned to the woman and looked directly at her, past her immensely attractive mask to the monstrous face that lay beneath. One day, he thought to himself, he would not find himself so weak as he was now, having to depend on the kindness of a stranger to save his life.

"You said that you don't have the answers," he said steadily, ploughing on when she nodded courteously at him, "then could you tell me who does? How do I get back safely?"

The woman smiled beatifically, her mutilated mouth stretching from ear to ear. He could see her bleached bone-white skull shifting beneath her translucent skin. "Follow."

She glowed brightly, the light brightest at the very core of her body and radiating outwards. Her figure seemed to compress, shrinking smaller and smaller until it was reduced to a single card. It was a deep red, with gold embossing covering almost all of the foreground, save for a small open eye at its centre. Harry focused all his attention on the card until slowly, the card revolved. The card held the image of the beautiful woman seated in her white robes, a tall pillar on either side of her and her crescent moon weapon at her feet, free of the black blood it had been stained in. Underneath her image were the words, written thus: 'THE HIGH PRIESTESS'. The woman, though Harry supposed he should call her the priestess now, was smiling in the card. Slowly, her arm raised upwards, pointing at something. A little confused, Harry looked up.

He found himself in a dense forest of trees, bleached bone-white as if they had been blasted by lightning.