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The Guardians of Magic

Harry had been part of some interesting situations since Hagrid had first told him that he was a wizard, but he was sure that he was currently in the middle of a crisis even Dumbledore couldn't have dealt with. He still wasn't entirely sure how he should feel about being dragged into this kind of situation, but on the other hand a part of him liked how everyone he was with seemed to like him for himself without any sign that his reputation had anything to do with it.

OK, all the evidence suggested that his reputation was the reason that he was here, but that actually reinforced the idea that nobody else here had to care about his personal history. As far as Harry could tell, when everyone else was here because they were some kind of hero, nobody was particularly interested in each other's legend or story back home and were able to focus on who the others were as people.

(Harry was prepared to admit that he still found himself staring at Merlin, but considering that was the actual Merlin he had a feeling he wasn't the only one who couldn't believe that young man would become a legend in his future.)

He just hoped that they would have some time to talk outside of facing the current threat of the Empirikul. Harry still couldn't entirely believe that a society could have such a hatred of magic that they would go to these kind of lengths to wipe it out on this scale, but the worst part was that it wasn't that hard to picture how it might have happened.

When he thought of the Dursleys, even if he couldn't see them actually joining the war as soldiers, he could certainly picture them supporting the idea behind this conflict. They didn't like magic even when he had no reason to believe they'd actually met a dark wizard in person, so the concept of magic itself being evil wouldn't have been hard for them to accept. If this whole society had basically been built on that kind of hatred…

How many people are we going to have to beat to get them to stop?

Harry appreciated that it was probably going to be more complicated than what Hagrid had told him about how Voldemort's reign of terror had ended just after Voldemort's apparent death, but at the same time he couldn't work out what this new group could do instead of fight. If it was as easy as killing the Empirikul's current leaders, he doubted that this many people would have been brought together for a 'simple' assassination (and Harry didn't like the idea of doing that kind of thing anyway), but from what everyone had said they were up against a very large army.

Harry was increasingly finding himself wishing that Hermione was here to offer her own advice; waging a war might not be her area of expertise, but he would at least have someone there whose opinion he knew he could always trust. However he looked at this current situation, this new group needed to be able to find out more about their enemies if they were going to actually stop them, which meant finding a way to get around. They might have some ideas about how the scanners worked, but that meant that the Vision was the most powerful member of the team who could definitely go out without being caught, and Harry didn't need to be an expert to know that relying on one person like that wasn't a good idea. It was bad enough back at Hogwarts when Dumbledore was basically the only thing stopping Voldemort from going all-out during his attempts to return to power; they couldn't declare war on an entire civilisation if more than half of them would apparently be caught the moment they left this place.

"Anything?" Emma's voice broke Harry's train of thought. He looked over at the blonde woman in the red leather jacket to see that she was talking to the Vision.

"Not entirely," the 'robot' (Harry knew there was another term for the red-faced man, but he couldn't quite remember it) said, thoughtfully studying the object he'd retrieved in the recent outing. "I can intercept the signals it is sending and disable its access to the wider network, but I cannot determine… what it is precisely scanning for."

"But… we know it's scanning for magic…" Mildred put in tentatively.

"And yet we do not know how it scans for magic," the Vision clarified. "If I cannot define what it is designed to scan for beyond 'magic', I cannot devise a means of ensuring that we can operate undetected whenever we leave this trailer."

"And if we can't figure out how it works, we can't work out how to be sure we're not being detected by it," Nick observed.

"Well… at least that makes sense, right?" Willow put in as she tentatively raised her hand. "I-I mean, if it was easy to avoid this thing, it wouldn't be much use to these guys…"

"We're still allowed to be annoyed by it," Billy put in with a frown. "I mean, maybe I can just go along with Vision and Kenzi and change when we need the firepower-"

"And I'm sure none of us want to put that kind of pressure on you," Nick cut in.

"Hey, I can handle it-!"

"I'm not saying you're not capable, but we're not going to pin our whole strategy on one teenager," Nick looked at Billy in an apologetic but reassuring manner. "Maybe none of us know why Doctor Strange brought us all here now, but we have to believe that he wouldn't have done this if we didn't at least have a chance, and that includes allowing each of us to contribute to this mess. If we can't work out what we're dealing with from this thing, what are our options?"

"Isn't there a library or something we could look up?" Willow asked.

"Would a society like this keep that kind of information where people could easily find it?" Bo pointed out. "These guys have based their whole regime on destroying magic; they're not going to have a complete breakdown on how their technology works in a public library."

"What if we could get to their place of power?" Merlin put in.

"Place of power?" Tommy repeated, looking curiously at the young Merlin (would that ever not be weird?).

"I recognise that this… technology… doesn't follow the same rules as magic, but there has to be somewhere where these people keep most of their secrets," Merlin explained. "If we could get inside there and find the information we're looking for…"

"In other words, we break into the enemy's base and try and get our hands on the details about how the scanners work from there?" Emma looked sceptically at Merlin. "Good idea in principle, but in practise we'd get caught before we could get anywhere near a place like that; we got detected just when we got close to the army barracks with one magical being who doesn't really do much, and a place like this-"

"What if you could stop being magic?"

"What?" Emma looked at Kenzi as the young Goth woman paused from where she had just been flicking through the Book of Shadows.

"Well, if we want to try and find out more information about these guys, we don't want to set off their scanners, so until we can work that out, I got to thinking and I… well, I found this bit," Kenzi explained, turning the Book to show the current page to the others.

"To Disempower a Sister?" Dave read the spell's title before turning to Paige. "What was this for?"

"One of our… odder days," Paige said. "Long story short, we thought my sister Phoebe was being brainwashed by her ex, and 'she' convinced us to remove her powers to stop her being corrupted by him,"

"Was she all right?" Bo asked.

"Turned out she had never been in trouble anyway; she'd been captured and we were dealing with a shapeshifter."

"I see," Nick nodded in acknowledgement (and what did it say about this group where everyone took that statement so casually?). "So… I take it the shapeshifter's plan was to trick you into taking away your sister's powers so she could be killed while she was powerless?"

"Yeah, until we restored Phoebe's powers and she kicked the shapeshifter's butt," Paige nodded, before she smiled at the group. "But the point is that this spell is simple to cast and simple to reverse for just one of my sisters, so if I can cast it on some of you…"

"You remove our powers so we can do research and then restore them if we need to fight?" Dave asked. "Seems a bit risky; if we're caught while we're powerless…"

"But it could work," Nick nodded. "Vision would be there anyway, and if we run into trouble… I take it you know this spell works at a distance?"

"We removed and restored Phoebe's powers when she was several blocks away from the rest of us; I don't see why I shouldn't- oh," Paige stopped herself.

"Problem?" Billy asked.

"Well… I know this works to take away the magic of my kind of witch, but what about the rest of you?" Paige clarified as she looked around the room with a more subdued expression. "I mean, if it does nothing, I've just wasted our time with a dead end, but what if it can take away your powers and I… can't restore them?"

"…Yeah, that could be a problem," Dave nodded.

"Use me."

"Ginny?" Harry looked at Ron's sister in shock, the young girl staring anxiously around the room.

"Well… I mean, I'm only here because I was with Harry when he got pulled along… I shouldn't even be here after everything… so why not test this?" Ginny shrugged, an apprehensive expression on her face even as she looked at Paige. "Even if it doesn't work… it's not like I don't deserve to lose-"

"That wasn't your fault," Harry cut Ginny off, walking over to place a hand on her shoulder before he even realised what he was doing. "That diary could have been given to anybody-"

"But I'm the one who started writing in it."

"Diary?" Angel asked.

"…Before we came here, I'd just saved Ginny from having her soul stolen by an aspect of Voldemort," Harry said, fingers crossed as he hoped that Ginny wouldn't mind too much about sharing this with relevant strangers.

"Voldemort?" Emma asked.

"The dark wizard who killed my parents."

"…Wasn't he dead?" Dave asked, before he paused and snapped his fingers. "No, wait; you said he was nearly dead after he attacked you…"

"I encountered him as some kind of wraith basically possessing one of our teachers last year," Harry explained.

"Your teacher was possessed?" Willow smiled at Harry. "That's… kind of new; we had a ghost of one of our old teachers possessing people a while back, and there was an incident with a new substitute being a kind of giant praying mantis thing…"

"Giant praying mantis?" Nick looked at Willow in surprise.

"We can talk about that later," Tommy cut in as he turned back to Harry and Ginny. "So if that was your last year, what happened to you this year?"

"Someone managed to give Ginny a diary he wrote when he was at Hogwarts years ago, and it contained some kind of… memory of Voldemort from when he was at school."

"And I spent all year writing in that diary and he was writing back and he- and he- he made me-" Ginny began, before her self-control seemed to break as she fell to her knees, sobbing into her hands.

"Oh," Emma said, moving over to crouch down beside the small redhead and wrap her arms around her. "It's OK, Ginny… it's… it's OK…"

"H-h-how?" Ginny said, her voice low as she continued to sob into Emma's shoulder. "I could have killed someone… he made me send out that monster…"

"Monster?" Wanda asked. "There was a monster involved in this?"

"The diary made Ginny open this room known as the Chamber of Secrets," Harry explained, once again hoping Ginny wouldn't mind him telling her story to the rest of the group. "It was created by one of the four founders of our school who was concerned that letting in students from non-magical families would put the rest of the students in danger."

"Let me guess, he left something in that chamber to enforce his views?" Paige said with a resigned edge to her voice.

"It was a basilisk," Harry nodded.

"That does not sound good," Merlin said in a low tone.

"It's basically a giant snake at least fifty feet long."

"…Yeah, that sounds terrifying," Kenzi observed, looking at Ginny with new sympathy, the girl still wrapped in Emma's comforting hug.

"I take it we're… talking about a venomous snake?" Willow asked cautiously.

"And that wasn't even its worst weapon," Harry confirmed, fighting the urge to rub at the hole in his sleeve where he'd been stabbed by the basilisk's fang just a few hours ago. "It could also kill people if it just looked them directly in the eye."

"Seriously?" Dave looked at Harry in shock. "How did that not kill everyone in school?"

"Well… Ginny wasn't exactly under the diary's control all the time, so it wasn't released that often, and even when she let the basilisk out it wasn't able to kill its targets that easily," Harry explained. "We worked out later that the basilisk's gaze just petrified people rather than killing them outright so long as they didn't look at it directly; one victim saw the basilisk's reflection in a pool of water, another student saw it through his camera, a friend of mine looked at it in a mirror, and someone else even saw it through one of the Hogwarts ghosts-"

"Your school has ghosts?" Bo looked at Harry with a surprised smile.

"Quite a few," Harry nodded with a grin. "The ghost in question was Nearly Headless Nick-"

"Nearly Headless?" Mildred looked at Harry curiously. "How did that happen?"

"From what he told me, he was hit in the neck over forty times with a blunt axe."

"Ouch," Billy said, rubbing at his own neck.

"He's still got about half an inch of skin and sinew holding his head to the rest of his body, and obviously there's no way to cut it now that he's a ghost, so…" Harry shrugged, before he turned back to Ginny as Emma still held the girl in her arms. "But Ginny, you don't need to do this; nobody will-"

"I blame me!" Ginny yelled, pushing Emma aside as she stood up to look tearfully at Harry. "I don't want- I have to try and help if I'm here!"

"You can do-"

"I can't do anything you can't do better!" Ginny cut him off (Harry wished that his first proper conversation with Ginny wasn't about such an emotionally fraught topic). "I'm only here because that spell made a mistake; I have to do something, and this is the best thing I can give anyone! Who cares if I lose my magic for good; do I even deserve it any more?"

"I… OK, granted that I don't have experience of anyone being possessed by an evil book, but I've seen a thing or two about people being manipulated," Nick said, walking over to crouch down so that he could address Ginny more directly. "Whatever happened to you because of the diary, it sounds to me like it was the diary that was responsible for all of it. I've had to deal with a few cases where people- as far as I know, just ordinary people- have gotten their kicks by manipulating children into committing crimes or just doing things they shouldn't be doing, so you can't blame yourself for what you did because of a man who sounds like he's been at this kind of thing for a long time."

"But I should have- I could have-"

"Maybe you did," Emma said, moving around to join Nick as she looked encouragingly at the young redhead. "Harry just told us how the basilisk never actually killed anyone; if you were totally under this guy's control, couldn't it just have bitten them or squeezed them after they were petrified?"

"I don't remember doing it-!"

"So you can't know how much you fought him," Angel said with a brief shrug. "The first time I was cursed I took a few minutes to remember what I'd done without my soul, but I was always aware of the difference in how I felt about it."

"You can't just blame yourself for not being perfect," Bo said, a grim expression on her face. "I mean, I spent ages with no real idea how to control my abilities, and I know I killed some people, but you… if you had an evil wizard in your head for most of a school year and nobody's dead, I think we can call that a win for you."

"Hey, I got possessed by demonic powers and tried to kill my sisters, and they observed that it's basically expected we'll end up in that kind of position at least twice," Paige shrugged.

"Possessed by demonic powers?" Mildred looked at Paige uncertainly.

"Long story," Paige gave the younger witch a reassuring grin. "But yeah, they've had to deal with stuff like Piper becoming a wendigo, Phoebe being possessed by this evil spirit under our house, Prue being corrupted by a warlock… we all live complicated lives."

"The point," Emma cut in, giving Ginny another reassuring look as she kept her hands on the girl's shoulders, "is that nobody here would blame you for what you did while you were possessed by that diary. Given the lives we live, we're probably all going to have a moment at some point where our enemies try to get at us through that kind of method, and even if it's a terrible thing to endure… well, making that kind of mistake just proves we're human."

It was an awkward way to show support, but as Harry looked around the room, he was pleased to see that everyone was giving Ginny every sense of sympathy for what she had endured. He might regret that he hadn't realised what she was going through before the final confrontation in the Chamber, but it was good to see that their new allies weren't going to blame her for that.

"…Thank you," Ginny said at last, smiling cautiously at them before she turned back to Paige. "I… I still want to do this."

"The spell?"

"I get that… but it's like I said," Ginny said, her tone still cautious as though she wanted to make sure she was expressing herself appropriately. "We need to test this spell if we're going to do anything… and I'm the only one here who doesn't contribute something unique. If you can't give my magic back… well, we'll worry about that if it happens, but at least the team won't have lost anything."

"If you're sure…" Paige looked cautiously at her.

"And if you're sure that you want to risk it?" Emma put in.

"I am."

"OK," Paige said with a final cautious nod. "Just… give me a few minutes to get this spell sorted out, and I'll get right on it."