Chapter 43: Broken Time
Aurors began appearing with the telltale popping sounds of apparition. As always, when seconds matter, police are… jeez! Twenty minutes behind? Now that's just unacceptable. Even if it was after midnight.
"Holy shit, is that a dinosaur?!" He heard Tonks' voice.
He spotted James and Sirius among the group of Aurors who accompanied the fowl mouthed woman.
The individuals in question spotted Harry and Minerva instantly. This was less to do with their perceptiveness and more to do with the two Hogwarts Professors being so recognizable. Along with the crowd of huddled Muggles behind them.
"We'll handle the evacuation." Said an Auror he didn't know. "I assume you have to go Deus Ex Machina this catastrophe with Dumbledore?"
Harry looked at the man, and for the life of him he couldn't recall ever having met him. He'd worked up a stranger reputation than he'd thought if people thought of him as a magical power house worthy of verbifying Deus Ex Machina.
The unknown man and twelve of his colleagues wend down into the subway while the present Maraudors bore down on him.
"Do we know the source?" James asked.
Harry pointed at Big Ben.
"Use your eyes. Source is exactly what it looks like. Difficulty is getting to it safely. No telling what passing through those filaments will do to a person, especially with them bunched up so close to the epicenter. Might wind up in the neolithic, or cretaceous." Harry told him.
James and his cohorts did as instructed and looked to big Ben, bathed in wavy curtains of light that reminded Harry so much of the priori incantatum in the graveyard in another world. He suspected the cause was similar in nature, a clash of identical magics and wills. Only this time engineered instead of accidental.
Harry smelled a rat, one significantly less clean but more cunning than Wormtail. The original Wormtail. His Wormtail. Whatever.
"What course of action do you recommend?" James asked him.
Harry blinked at the man. Was his own father deferring to his wisdom and experience? This felt like a right of passage with none of the buildup. He better not fumble it.
"Impedimenta and reparo wards could stop the movements of these filaments entirely." Harry sent. "These filaments are first and foremost time anomalies, a measurement of motion and entropy. So wards stopping motion and reversing entropy may hinder or destroy them."
He gave the long winded explanation in the second half only after seeing the confusion on his unexpected follower's faces. Those expressions turned to understanding as he went on. His reasoning must have made as much sense to them as it did him, even though he was partially grasping at straws.
He didn't know for certain such wards would work here, only that they were the first two worth trying when trying to contain and temporal anomalies. That was at least one thing he had learned working beside the unspeakables. Not from them, but from encounters with them.
"Okay. I think all of us are capable of doing that." Said James. "I assume you're leaving that to us while you eliminate the issue?"
Harry touched his nose with one hand and pointed at James with the other. He was clearly still in the mind frame of charades. After the hard time Draco had put him through, kicking all of their asses at the game, his brain ought to be stuck in a loop of some kind about them.
"I need to find Albus first, and maybe Voldemort because this doesn't seem like his work, let alone a turn of events he wants. The three of us madmen together would come up with a better way to deal with all of this than my dumbass alone." Harry said in an honest assesdment of both his, Albus' and Tom's natures.
Both Sirius and James glared at him in suspicion, seemingly from his guess that Voldemort might actually be an ally in all for this. Tonks went with the flow.
"Okay! We will handle the warding in this section. Can you and Auntie Bella handle one of the other sections?" She asked.
"We can." Said Bella, without hesitation. "If you see Albus or Tom, who I would remind you has declared a truce, tell them of our plan."
James, Sirus, Tonks and their many companions got right to work carving runes into map posts, which were regulated to be designed with ward stones under their bases for Auror use. Word traveled quickly between them and they all got to work erecting the wards in question. Even in the time it took for Harry and Bella to embrace Harry recognized they were setting up the wards in queation on the east and west sides of streets, respectively, and designing them to project skyward. Harry would have been impressed if he'd been given the time to do so.
But Bella wrapped her arms tightly around his neck signaling that it was time to go. He twisted in place and apparated them both to the other side of the nearest film.
They fell almost right on top of Albus and is posse. Lily, Remus, Arthur, Moody, Deadelus, and a good seven more people Harry didn't recognize swarmed around him.
They all, as one, turned on Harry and Bellatrix with their wands, but lowered them when they realized who it was.
"Impedimenta and Reparo wards?" Harry asked, noting the runes carved onto the nearby lamp posts.
"Right indeed." Said Albus. "Have you come up with a plan on where to go from there?"
"I was hoping you had." Harry said, concerned.
The groans of Dumbledore's gathered followers told him they had been hoping he'd have the answer readily wrapped for them to use.
"What is your analysis of the situation then?" Albus asked. "Perhaps you have caught something I hadn't and together we might find a solution."
That was exactly what harry was hoping actually.
"My analysis is that somebody tried to create a localized time paradox, or else amplify one, in order to put themselves or somebody else into a variable state. Existing at all of their personal times." Harry said. "The only reason to do something like this would be to undo a curse, a ritual, an oath or a disease they have by reorienting their personal time signature to a time when they were not subject to it. The trick is to not also revert their minds and rest of their bodies to such a state."
Albus nodded along.
"I had thought it was an actual hole in spacetime created by somebody trying, and failing, to travel into the past." Albus said. "But your analysis makes more sense. And it seems whoever was trying to do it hadn't expected it to effect all of London so dramatically, and most of the isles to an extent as well."
"Voldemort?" Remus, Arthur and a couple others asked.
"Voldemort." Harry, Albus, Bellatrix and Moody all confirmed.
Lily was strangely silent, gawking at thin air. Harry recognized that look, Hermione always adopted in when she was having a braingasm of ideas. And when her eyes lit back up he knew she had a dangerous idea.
She grasped Remus by the arm.
"I have to get to James!" She said. "Now!"
He looked at her confusedly for a moment, before he seemed to have the same realization.
"You're right! This is it. Go, go get him and go… do the thing." Remus told her, stopping himself halfway through as he recalled where he was and who he was surrounded by.
"Whatever you're planning is likely very dangerous, and I am certain I cannot convince you to abandon such a course of action." Albus said. "But can I convince you that your help here is more important?"
"No." Said Lily, stonily.
"And is it worth James' job?" Harry asked, not knowing what she was planning but that it may require James to abandon his post.
"Yes." Lily said, with equal conviction to before.
"Then go. It'll be a lot of extra work for us, but we'll pull through." Harry told her. "He's one turn clockwise."
Everyone looked at him queerly.
"Twelve films, each emanating from a clock tower and aligned to the numbers of a clock. We are currently at seven o clock. He is at eight." Harry explained. "We just came from there."
She nodded and reached out for Harry's hand. He blinked at her in confusion.
"It will be faster if you apparate me right to him then come back here." She said.
He shrugged and, reluctantly, let go of Bellatrix. He instead took hold of his mother and apparated back to where he had left James. When they arrived it was to see the teams of Aurors still hard at work setting up those wards.
"James!" Lily yelled.
He leapt in fright at the sound of his wife yelling his name, a normal reaction for any man in Harry's mind, and rushed over.
"James, we have to leave right now!" Lily told her husband.
"But, I'm on an emergency call. If I go awol I'll lose my job." James said.
"We only have a few minutes, and this will be our only chance. We've been trying to undo it for years, and now we can, but you know it takes both of us." Lily said.
Were they talking about getting pregnant? Huh, had they done something that caused their infertility. Harry blanched at the possibilities, the most horrific being they aborted him with a potion and had the rare, but not that rare, side effect of being made permanently infertile. With the prophecy looming over them it wasn't an unreasonable thing to do, but damn. That was heartbreaking.
James seemed to understand and nodded, a bit of fear evident on his face.
He turned to Harry, as if asking him for permission or his advice. He wanted to tell them the truth,. That he had no idea what they were talking about and what he thought they were talking about, running off to go make boom boom and give him a little brother, was absolutely insane. But he was possessed in that moment of a feeling, one he had only felt a few times before. Like when he saw Mr Marchbank's future in that crystal ball. The words he was meant to say came out of him.
"I think you should trust your wife, mister Potter." Harry told him. "Whatever happens here is meant to be, with or without you. I think we have enough capable individuals to handle things."
He nodded and held his wife close to him. With a spin and a crack they were gone. With a spin and a crack, he was too.
He reappeared back where he had left Dumbledore's team, only to find them in a firefight. He didn't see Albus anywhere, but he saw at least five Death Eaters on the rooftops flinging blasting curses to try and remove the hastily the hastily conjured defenses that Remus must have created, and was still maintaining as Moody, Daedelus and the others returned fire.
Bellatrix was also notably missing from the fight.
Harry raised his want to his throat and cast a sonorus charm.
"Hey! Hey! I thought we had a truce!" He yelled with his enhanced voice.
The rapport he had built with everyone once again paid off, as the firefight came to an abrupt pause. His voice was pretty recognizable.
"So did we, but they just attacked us as soon as we arrived!" He heard a muffled voice from the rooftops call back.
Even through the mask and voice disguising charm that cadence was clearly Crabbe.
"Is it unreasonable to believe they're behind all of this?" Moody asked Harry, quiet enough to not be heard.
"Of course they're not behind this!" Harry hissed back, forgetting about the sonorus charm for a moment. He realized his folly but kept at it anyways. "They don't want the city of London being turned into a hyper-entropy and time split wasteland any more than we do!"
"It's true!" Another Death Eater yelled. "We still have no idea what's going on here, we just got the alert of a nuclear level disaster and came running."
Nuclear level disaster. Harry looked around. Yeah, this had the potential to be as devastating as a nuclear bomb if it wasn't contained.
"Okay then, I'm coming out. The truce is back in effect." Harry said with the sonorus, giving Dumbledore's men an evil eye.
He canceled the Sonorus.
"Albus took Bellatrix and a few others to six-o-clock." Daedelus answered the question Harry was going to ask next pre-emptively.
He nodded and continued out to the street.
One of the Death Eaters, definitely Goyle Senior – Hildebrand's son, obviously – came down to meet him. Between his easily recognizable form, even when covered, and his rather poor voice masking effect his disguise left a lot to be desired.
He was flanked by two others.
"What are your instructions and how can I help?" Harry asked.
Gregory stood back a little in what Harry guessed was surprise at Harry's willingness to just jump in and help, but he shook it off.
"We don't know, we only get vague instructions and messages through the dark mark. Color and sensation codes. When our marks turned red with a squeezing sensation we came as quick as we could." He explained.
"Sorry, I'm not abreast of your codes. What defcon is that?" Harry asked.
Another Death Eater, Lucius he suspected, came up from behind him.
"Red is the highest, reserved for threat levels like all out nuclear war." Lucius explained.
Harry agreed with that assessment.
"And squeezing means 'containment procedures.' So, we are trying to figure out how to contain this situation." Lucius finished.
"Impedimenta and reparo wards." Harry said. "That will slow down the spread. But to stop this I have to get to where Voldemort is. I understand the Dark Mark allows you to apparate directly to him?"
"It does, and he did summon us, but whatever is surrounding Big Ben bounced us out here like an anti-apparition ward. We can't get to him." Goyle said.
Damn. Well, there goes that idea… or maybe not.
"You can't get to him with it, but I think I might." Harry said. "But it won't be pleasant."
They all shared a glance. The one who had yet to speak shrugged at the others and motioned at Harry. He got the impression that gesture meant "Come on. It's Morrigan."
"What do you have in mind?" Lucius asked.
Before Harry could answer them, a nearby film made a loud metalic sound, like ice on a lake cracking. They all looked up to see parts of it collapsing inward in a pattern resembling oil being poured into water. Cracks erupted out of this section like spiderwebs, and out of it poured small, grey masses.
Harry groaned as they plummeted to the earth. Hundreds of them, emaciated and cracking htemselves, like golemns made of ash and oil and bleeding silver. They picked themselves up and stumbled to their malformed feet.
"Oh god… are those… inferi?" Lucius asked.
"I wish." Harry said. "Those are the biggest reason time magic is verboten. Those are the Unmade."