The exact nature of the Time Turner malfunction escaped him. It seemed to have been hit by some spell, making it shatter… and now he was here, in a dark, dank dungeon. He had his wand- managing not to lose it in the maelstrom of energies that had sent him wherever he was- and there were no restraints keeping him locked up, but that wasn't the only problem. He certainly hadn't been in a dungeon when he had been hit.

This was, presumably, not what being dead was like. He expected his parents and Sirius, he had hoped to give Lupin and Tonks… some updates about Teddy, but he thought that he was still alive. Considering the trouble Time Turners caused, he was lucky to not be wiped from existence entirely.

Back to business. Wand still worked, Point Me still worked, so he got to getting out of wherever he was. He could just break down the wall, but he had no idea what he was breaking through to. The last thing he needed was a cave-in. (Hell, did he even know he was underground? What if he was in the middle of some great stone tower? The walls were of cleanly cut stone brick, after all.)

Deciding to bet on being underground, he crept up any stairwells he found, looking out for any potential watchers. None came, but as he went up things seemed to get a bit more lively. There were casks and barrels, crates and tightly closed chests. Some were sealed physically, some were sealed with magic, and any that had writing on them were in a language Harry couldn't understand. They did use the same alphabet, thankfully, so Harry wasn't in too much trouble. Hopefully.

Of course, the moment he thought that, he heard the sound of heavy footsteps in the distance, like a whole swarm of people coming downstairs. Because the universe upped the ante.

Thankfully, his wand wasn't the only magical tool he brought with him. He pulled out his invisibility cloak and crouched under it as the people stormed by. They looked… they looked like reenactors: old-timey clothes, swords at their hips, even chainmail. Despite their silliness, they patrolled with an Auror's professionalism, discussing something in quick, rapid-fire bursts of some strange language.

(Hearing it out loud, some parts sounded almost like the quasi-Latin of spells, with some funky pronunciation and a helping of French to boot.)

They scanned the room like they were searching for someone invisible, and it took a Silencing charm and some quick maneuvering to keep from getting caught. They even used spells- some had wands, while some seemed to have cores installed in their swords. Homenum Revelio was of no real use in a crowded room, thankfully, so Harry managed to avoid their attention. While he wasn't sure, he had a hunch those blokes didn't have his best interests at heart.

He kept going up, using the stairwells and making sure to avoid the magical-looking elevators that trundled up and down towering shafts. That was another thing- they were quite magical. The soldiers who searched him, and this building more broadly. Had he ended up in some strange Ministry analog somewhere?

Up and further up, and not a window in sight. Instead, carved stone eyes sat near the top of the walls, looking this way and that for anything out of the ordinary. Harry made sure his cloak was covering up his feet and kept on going, past armories full of gleaming weapons and spartan barracks. (Light came from glowing fixtures attached to the walls.)

Finally, finally, he saw some daylight, filtering through the bars of a sort of grate overhead. The sky was blue and the air fresh, the chill air painfully crisp. Which was concerning, if not surprising, considering his Time Turner accident happened in the summer.

Well, what could you do? Harry double-checked to make sure no one would notice him before cutting himself a hole in the grate and transfiguring a ladder.

Climbing up, he seemed to be on the top of a tower or something. He balanced on steeply angled shingles and tried to get an idea of where he was. This was the tallest building in the area, no contest, so he looked down.

A city sprawled below, stuffed full of wood and stone buildings that looked about five centuries old, at least. Even worse, each household looked like its own little Burrow, a teetering thing held together by magic and hope.

This was a magical metropolis to outsize anything back home. Diagon could have fit here ten times over with room to spare. Faintly, he could spot massive walls closing the city in, but those looked like they were kilometers away…

Looking down, near the foot of the massive stone tower he had gotten to the top of, Harry could see another set of walls. A familiar set of walls, actually, ones that he had seen on television shows and in books.

Unless this was like that American who bought London Bridge, that was the actual Tower of London down there, in the middle of a city that was, presumably, London.

Well, this seemed bad.

He looked for more details and found them on top of the building, flying at the top of a flagpole. Red background with a golden cross, with each of the red areas filled with more golden crosses. Harry didn't recognize the flag at all.

Wonderful. Another question to answer, once he figured out how to get down.


This strange London seethed with magic, from the shockingly organized broom and carpet traffic to the great clouds of messenger owls. It would be remarkably easy to get lost in the mass… if he looked like them, or talked like them. He didn't know the language, and his outfit left much to be desired.

(This was what he got for not becoming an Animagus. Well, assuming it was something useful and not something that would get killed for meat.)

Thankfully, robes weren't completely out of fashion and he could do some slapdash Transfiguration, but his glasses and shoes were a bit out there. That just left him a babbling stranger, several hundred feet above the busy streets of London. Easy.

Climbing down the side of the tower with the cloak was a definite challenge, painfully slow and requiring a lot of focus if he didn't want his impromptu sticking charms to fail. Not enough focus to miss the stream of wizards on brooms springing from the roof, circling the tower like carrion birds in the sky. Meanwhile, Harry was climbing down the great stone wall of the tower like some sort of chameleon, only saved by his invisibility.

Unfortunately, the weird, medieval-looking Auror analog (because Harry couldn't imagine them being much else) seemed to know that he hadn't gotten away from the tower, and they circled the place in great clouds, always watching. They marched in columns around the base, waiting for him to get down.

Was there a way out, one that wouldn't leave him a wanted man or imprisoned?


Unfortunately, the swarms of determined wizard soldiers were a bit beyond his ability to handle, even with Auror training. Did Harry like his odds in a hypothetical one-on-one with one of them? Yeah. Was he ever going to get a fair one-on-one? Hell no.

For what it was worth he got to keep his wand while he waited, but that didn't change the fact that he was waiting in a room for someone; if he had to guess, a higher-up of this strange society. They would probably be protected by the sort of wooden screen that split the room in half- despite the holes and slats that filled it, it was so intensely enchanted that it practically glowed. Even with his limited curse-breaking skill, he could tell it was marvelous.

After some more waiting- and keen analysis of the delicate stone carvings creeping up the walls, much better than the uncompromising flatness of the grand tower- a door on the other side of the room opened, revealing a young-ish man dressed in finery. He cast some sort of complex spell on himself before he looked at Harry and started rattling off a spiel (in English!):

"Presenting his imperial majesty, forever August, by the grace of God Emperor of Romania, Protector of the Pentarchy, Righteous Lord of the Diverted Timeline, Appointed Viceroy and Steward of all God's Earth, Philip XV."

What.

What.

Another man marched through the door, the presumably the so-called Emperor of Romania. Harry was pretty sure that Romania had been a republic, the last time he checked (and before that, they were some of the communists that Uncle Vernon loved to complain about) and he was definitely sure that Romania had, at no point, come to rule over England.

He had a long sort of face, gaunt and thin yet with intense brown eyes. A brilliant cloak of red silk and cloth of gold shimmered in the light, not quite hiding scale armor around his chest. The aide cast the same translation spell on him.

"Peace." He greeted. "Would you be so kind as to tell us the current year?"

Almost immediately, Harry thought that just giving information away was a bad idea, especially if someone this important had come all the way here to find him. He stayed silent.

"Time flows differently here. The last visitor we had came from the year 1989, but that was… my grandfather's time."

Oh shit. Modifying the flow of time was right up there with time travel as the sort of stuff the Ministry (and common sense) didn't want you doing.

"How… how long have you been here?" Harry asked, dressing the answer.

"By our reckoning, it has been some fifty-nine hundred years since the Old Constantinople was lost to the Greeks. It is the seven thousand one hundred and eighty-fifth year of our most gracious Lord, Jesus Christ."

"The Old Constantinople?" Harry decided to grasp onto that instead of… instead of the horrifying implications of the latter bit.

"I believe your modern name for it was the Latin Empire." Seeing Harry's complete lack of recognition, the Emperor sighed. "I had hoped my forebears would be remembered better… regardless. I am Emperor Philip de Courtenay, successor of Baldwin, elected Emperor of Constantinople and the Romans."

They were… Romans? Perhaps that explained, in part, the weird Latin, but Harry's head was starting to ache. Why were the Greeks getting involved, precisely?

(He almost wished he had some normal, muggle history classes that could have explained this, but nothing came to mind. He knew Rome was a thing, he knew that they came to Britain and built a wall, so maybe that was it?)

"Uh, congratulations?" Harry said, not sure quite sure how to respond.

"Thank you, although it would mean more if I knew your name."

Harry thought for a moment, considering if a fake name might be worthwhile. There was a chance that the person from 1989 knew about him, after all, and that would mean some unfortunate baggage… but he also couldn't be sure if they didn't have some sort of magical lie detector sitting around. That would sour their relationship immediately.

"Harry Potter."

"A pleasure." The man smiles. "I hope that you might be willing to share more with us in the future. We can make it worth your while; my Viceroy can explain more thoroughly. I must return to Rome."

The Emperor stood up and left, and almost immediately after another man came in. He was old-looking, with a brilliantly white beard, and he introduced himself as the Viceroy of Britannia. (Hibernia and Caledonia were other people's jobs, apparently. That would be interesting if Harry knew what those places were, exactly.)

The Romans were worryingly concerned with the political situation in the world Harry left behind, especially when it came to the collapse of the Soviet Union and how things had evolved in the meantime.

They were rather opinionated in that regard: the Viceroy thought the collapse of the USSR was a "fitting end for godless Communists," and apparently democracy was a "passing fancy" as well. That got Harry to shut up about anything relevant be could remember. It didn't exactly take a genius to figure out why they wanted all this information… but he was also obligated to learn as much about them as he could.

"What portion of the population are wizards?" Harry asked, overlooking the crowded streets of this other London. The New London, by Latin (or Romanian? Roman?) reckoning.

"As far as we know, there are no natural borne muggles left."

Harry froze. "What?"

"Carefully arranged marriages have given everyone the blessing of magic."

"What about squibs?"

"Squi- oh, those borne without magic?" The Viceroy smiled. "Most of the ones in Britannia work at the Great Library."

"The Great Library?"

"The Britannian branch of the grandest collection of books in the world. Some tomes are… too tempting for the average magician. Spells too powerful. A squib does not fall for such things."

"They're not… oppressed?"

"Well, there are certain jobs they cannot take, but that does not detract from their dignity. It only shows that God saw that they did not need magic to fulfill his goodness."

That was another thing. Dozens of churches and cathedrals sprinkled the city, their architecture magical but still graceful, spires and buttresses soaring far beyond the heights of the biggest churches back home.

This was a country led by- if not composed of- zealots, with a clear martial tradition and an unfathomably large force of wizards they could draw upon in a conflict. Considering their interest in politics, it wasn't hard to imagine what they were planning, and Harry thought there was a non-zero chance that if they tried, they could succeed. They had more time, they had more magicians…

It was only the divergence of the timelines that kept the world Harry Potter knew from being invaded by this Empire of the Latins.