The Placebo
The Tower of Elysium, London, Time Unknown
After Draco turned them down Daphne and Hermione agreed to find a room. This settlement was curious and both of them felt the need to know how one of the most important moments in Magical History turned out. What became of the Rebellion against pureblood supremacy?
The surge of the challenge of understanding the dynamics of this new world made Daphne put her quest to find Harry in the proverbial closet.
Hermione was the voice of camping out in the wastelands, roughing it out, and making inroads into the society of a post-apocalypse London; but Daphne shot her down. They weren't going to stay long, and it was worth exploring the comforts of the tower of Elysium.
Daphne's argument swayed Hermione and she had to admit, the magic holding the tower in place in addition to its open layout, was appealing. The higher she went, the more she noticed the subtle upward spiral of the tower with every twist being larger than the one below. The blend of magic and physics blew her mind.
Their room was on the seventeenth floor and the view of a torn down dead city that looked more ethereal than tragic at such heights made her imagine how more floors were there and what perspective would be perceived at those heights.
The corridors were white with natural light streaming through the gaps in the floors. The doors, however, were black. It was an odd choice of colours. It felt like a deliberate absence of colour and Daphne felt it held a deeper meaning more in line with the possible mind of a reformed Dark Lord.
"Tell me how are we supposed to enter again?" Daphne asked Hermione.
"The lady in the lobby tapped our palms with her wand." The receptionist had been utterly unhelpful. She had just yawned and drawled out their room number. "There's no mark on the door but I guess we just have to press our hand against it. Like a fingerprint scanner," Hermione explained and then placed her hand in the centre of the door.
"You mean like how goblins used to open vaults," Daphne realised. The tower was goblin magic finally harnessed by wizards, she realised.
The door opened with a whisper of a click.
Daphne took the first step inside and the lights came on with gradual intensity.
Hermione followed, and her eyes widened in surprise. She looked at Daphne, who was fighting a smile.
"Maybe we should rethink how long we want to stay here," Daphne said with mild glee.
"Or maybe this is just how they make us drop our guards," Hermione added suspiciously, grounding Daphne to bitter possibilities.
Daphne headed straight for the couch plush with pillows and jumped in. "Good thing we're smart then," she said with a relaxed sigh.
"I need to get better at transfiguration," she said with a groan and leaned into the pillows.
She was asleep before Hermione could even think of a proper response.
Hermione laughed softly, and her stance mellowed. Daphne was right. Psychologically, they needed this offered comfort.
Her eyes turned to the well-stocked kitchen that looked way more high-tech than the one she remembered from home.
The floor tiles were polished marble and as Hermione walked towards the kitchen, the lighting improved. Digital display units began to light-up on the perceived electronics.
Was this really the new magical world? Built upon the foundations of destruction? Could the Desert have broken the pureblood supremacy ideology? Hermione couldn't help but wonder the more she explored the apartment. And the more she thought about it, the more it became clear.
They had to meet the High Council to have their questions answered. But was it worth the risk?
"It is held true, there will come a Wizard who shall rain untold destruction on the world. His coming will herald the rebirth of Gaea who shall only bend to the will of the Chosen One."
- An Elvish Prophecy
The Research Centre of the Settlement, Time Unknown
It had been a few days into his stay at the settlement. Much longer than Harry had expected and more interesting than he had given it credit for.
After a refreshing haircut, Oliver had taken him back to the research centre and reintroduced him to Jenna.
Jenna, Harry realised, after a few hours of being with her, had a curiosity meter that was fuelled with logic. She saw the Desert as a hypothetical apocalypse scenario. And in this scenario the survival tool offered was magic. Jenna had used her newfound knowledge of runes to teach herself magic and that power had opened up an entire dimension of possibilities for her. The only way to end the simulation to her was clear. Escape the Desert.
And to do that some kind of reboot was needed with the right parameters at its core. However, she still didn't understand the code powering the desert and Harry was the only one who could help her decipher it.
After a few hours with him and she was beyond frustrated with his lack of cooperation and enthusiasm. She had shown him the magic she had learnt. She could rustle a piece of paper now and granted it wasn't impressive, she had at the least expected an impressed reaction, she being a muggle.
All he was interested in was the innovations they had developed to survive in the desert. He was particularly fascinated by her newly developed water harvester. It worked like a borewell except it was a three-foot-long pipe that was powered by runes and sunlight to bore a metaphysical hole into the Earth to find water and funnel it to the surface. The problem was it didn't work very well and wasn't able to get to the right depths unless a witch was holding it in hand. She had modelled a solar harvester that was used to kick start the runes, but the blanket enchantment over them kept interfering and making the water harvester lose integrity and fall apart.
It was clear to Jenna that part of the enchantment of the Desert was dismantling anything that could make survival easier. And that was the code she was after, so she kept her mouth shut and entertained his questions with fake politeness.
Harry, on the other hand, wondered if he should tell her he could see her restrained anger in her colours and stonewall her further or should he just help her out with deciphering his out of control enchantment.
They were in one of the rooms deeper inside the Research facility which Jenna had for herself. It was littered with crushed balls of paper and rows of tables neatly categorised into divisions of science. They were currently in the work in progress subsection of the physics division.
Harry put down the water harvester and pointed to the table in the corner.
"Those are your notes on the enchantment?" he asked, deciding to cooperate at last.
Jenna's expression changed from sour to hopeful. "Take a look," she said and grabbed his hand to pull him towards the study corner. She ignored his irritation and pulled out a chair and gestured at him to sit.
Harry ignored her pushiness. He turned his gaze to the table and his eyes drifted towards his diary that he had been steadily ignoring ever since it was pointed out to him when they had entered the room.
It held so many memories and had been violated by unworthy wizards and witches. Yet it had finally come back to him and he didn't know how to feel about that. The boy who wrote in that was lost an eternity ago.
He sighed and began to sort through the papers presented to him. He didn't feel ready to open it.
A few glances in and he pushed away everything with an annoyed sigh. "The first thing you need to know about runes is that it's not a language with a script," he said crisply. "They are literal manifestations of thought, emotion and material. They are the translations of the communion with the source and if you want to draw the rune, you need to channel the desired manifestation."
Jenna nodded, processing his words with a thoughtful frown. "So, I meditate and draw."
Harry shook his head and smiled. "You need to connect. Here, watch," he said and picked up a pencil.
He focused on vision and drew the rune.
"Vision," Jenna recognised.
"It's manifested structure will remain the same no matter who connects with the source," Harry said.
"Amazing," Jenna whispered.
"The effectiveness of focused magic through runic structures is dependent on the power of the Will they are fed," Harry continued. "So, no matter how much you understand and how perfect your solutions are, first you need to overcome the will of the runic structure's desire to disintegrate."
"Its will to disintegrate…" Jenna muttered slowly. "So you're saying my will has an opposing force which is the source… and I need to overcome that by strengthening my will... or say my beliefs?"
"That's an interesting way of looking at it." Harry hummed thoughtfully. "I guess a placebo effect is what you really need."
Jenna laughed.
"So, focus on the depths of my willpower and keep drawing it out," she concluded. It wasn't something she hadn't thought of but hearing the words from the creator of the desert filled her with the confidence of knowing it could be achieved. The daunting task of overcoming unlimited power would not put a dampener on her ideas. All she had to do was go step by step. Her mind wandered down to her idea of harnessing the power of the solar rays.
"Ok, I'm going to try it," she said with determination. "Er, I guess you can hang around if you want to, just don't go to section X and preferably don't leave. I have so many more questions."
She hurried off to another corner of the large room leaving Harry free to finally focus on his diary.
He finally reached out and took it into his hands. He held it for a moment, feeling the binding and then he ruffled through the papers as a touch of nostalgia hit him. He remembered his single-minded psycho self and couldn't help but grin. He wanted to tell that young boy that the world was more complicated than black and white and that he shouldn't ignore the other metaphorical colours.
Harry leaned back in the chair and put his legs up on the table, his boots making a loud thud as they landed on the wooden top.
He then began to page through his diary, connecting his writings with his past perspectives to measure if they matched with his current state of mind.
The pages automatically turned as his thoughts churned. The Diary was linked to his magic after all.
As he leafed through the pages, he found that everything he had written was either childish or just formed the basics of what he knew today. He didn't need the Diary anymore, but he couldn't let go of it for it formed the foundations of his childhood.
He laughed as he found the notes he had made about survival and towards the end of the section on the origin of runes he found a subsection on the lost city of Atlantis.
His notes triggered in him a memory of his Ancient Runes class that had once seemed immaterial.
"Runes were first discovered in Atlantis," Professor Babbling had said in the first lesson. "Atlantis: The Lost City." His thoughts got drawn into an interesting pool of ideas.
How did humans discover how to harness the source in the first place? Was it the humans who found the source or the source that found us? What was the result of the first conscious contact with magic and what rune manifested as a result of it? Could it help him overcome the apocalyptic enchantment?
This was the end game. It had to be. Could it be the final piece that was missing from the puzzle in his mind?
His pulse quickened with excitement and he wondered if Jenna or Hermione had referenced it in their notes. He drew his legs back to the ground and pulled the chair closer in to the table to organise their notes and as he read through them, sure enough, he found references to its myth and lore.
He had never given myths much thought, but his journey into the Badlands had turned everything he believed in upside down and given him a whole new world of perspectives to explore.
With single-minded focus, as he scrolled through parchment and notebooks, looking for more references, and with time out of the way, he finally found a crumpled world map in one of the stacked folders labelled 'dump' beside the table and zeroed in on the red circle in the middle of the map around the Sahara. Beside the circle was scribbled 'Richat Structure' with a large question mark.
He leaned back with a frown and groaned when his spine cracked due to being hunched over.
"The Richat Structure," he murmured. It was a well-known hypothesized location of Atlantis based on Granger's notes but there wasn't any evidence to support the claim. Only theories and speculations existed. Hence the many myths.
To Harry, what drew him further in wasn't the titillation of finding Atlantis. His path was leading him to one of the oldest deserts in the world and a location deemed mostly inaccessible due to the terrain and odd electromagnetic activity.
The gatekeeper's voice resounded in his memories. Her words before he walked into the den of the black dragon.
'It will take you where you need to go.'
He suddenly stood up with purpose and the chair screeched against the floor and clattered to the ground.
There was no time to waste.
He closed his eyes and reached into the Void, pulling on power and the will to bend space around him.
His destination: The Sahara.
He felt magic bend around him but quite unexpectedly, a force pushed back, and his will was punched back; causing him to lose his hold of the void. The force manifested physically, and he was sent crashing into the tables behind.
Jenna came running when she heard the crash and gasped in alarm. "What the fuck happened!" she shouted furiously. Her models in the water harvesting section were shattered.
Harry was too winded to reply. His head was reeling, and everything was spinning.
The catacomb had stopped him from teleporting.
"Hey?" Jenna asked, calming down as she realised, he probably had a concussion. "Are you okay?"
Harry took deep breaths and nodded. He slowly pulled himself to his feet and looked a Jenna, a grin forming on his lips.
"What?" she asked. "What happened?"
"I think," Harry said slowly. "I have some plans to make." Harry abruptly turned his back on her and swaggered to find his back to the pantry. He needed water and to be outside.
Jenna frowned but didn't stop him. Instead, she turned towards the table that was spilling parchments. He had obviously found something significant.
She decided to put her newfound skill to the test and relaxed her mind, her focus on summoning the notes that made an impact on Harry.
A few seconds later, the papers began to ruffle with purpose.