Chapter 1: Through the Veil
Pale fuchsia sunlight seeped across the Australian outback, staining the red dirt in hues of rose and rust. Harry stepped out of his traveling tent, the dry morning air sharp in his lungs. He stretched, bones popping after a rare night of dreamless sleep, and squinted at the scraggly brush dotting the grasslands.
Peace. The word still seemed foreign to him. A few years ago, he'd have sooner believed in friendly Death Eaters than this quiet.
The gravel crunched under his boots as he ambled toward the excavation pit. Dawn's chill clung to his skin, but he didn't mind. The cold here held no echoes of Dementors or Dark Magic. Just wind. Just earth.
How different this was from the Hogwarts years that still haunted him - the prickling dread of Voldemort's visions ambushing him in his sleep; Cedric's dead eyes; Sirius's laugh swallowed by the Veil. Back then, even waking brought no relief, only another day of dodging curses or reporters.
Everything was different now. After the Battle of Hogwarts, Harry finally began to heal from his absolute disaster of a childhood. Going back to get his NEWTS with Hermione and Ron, helping to rebuild Hogwarts, taking care of Teddy with Andromeda, throwing himself into studying Ancient Runes and Arithmancy; the normalcy of peacetime, the comforting drive of having a goal to work towards, helped soothe his scars borne from the War.
He paused at the tent's canteen, its magically expanded interior filled with the scent of coffee. As he poured a mug, his gaze lingered on the Daily Prophet left folded on the table. No front-page photos of me for once, he noted wryly. Kingsley's stern face dominated the headlines instead, alongside Hermione's Ministry portrait. "Granger Pushes For Centaur Land Rights". He could almost hear her voice in the op-ed, brisk and unyielding.
The deal with the Ministry had been worth it, he decided, blowing steam off his coffee. Occasional public appearances in exchange for privacy - a fair trade, even if it meant shaking hands with politicians who'd once called him a liar. Better than the alternative. The press had hounded him relentlessly after the war, their headlines dissecting his grief like vultures picking at fresh bones. "Savior's Secret Struggles!" "Potter Spotted at Weasleys' Funeral - Is He Cracking?" The memory soured his tongue worse than the coffee.
But this - this - was freedom. Not the gilded cage of Britain, where every alleyway whispered his name, where every familiar scene brought back ghosts from the past. But here, with red dust under his nails, runes to decode, and a research team that treated him like a colleague rather than a monument.
As a recent Hogwarts graduate, Harry needed a Mastery in Runes or Arithmancy before getting a chance to study the Veil, something that would've taken years. The Department of Mysteries had agreed to fast-track his internship only if he traveled. "Fieldwork beats paperwork, son," His Unspeakable mentor had drawled, "And you'll be less of a PR headache abroad." Harry hadn't argued. Let the Ministry ship him to Australia. Anywhere where the ancient mysteries might hide a link to the Veil, and Sirius.
Harry drained his mug, the bitterness grounding him. Guilt still lurked, of course - Lupin, Tonks, Fred, Sirius - their ghosts lingered in every quiet moment. But here, under a foreign sky, the weight felt … diffused. Like the arid wind could carry it, if only a little.
Harry stepped out from the kitchen. Looking around the rest of the campsite, he noticed some of his fellow researchers beginning to step out of their tents. As Harry greeted a young red-haired woman from the Australian excavation team, he had to admit to himself that there was another, more shameful reason why he wanted some time away. His relationship with Ginny after the war had fallen apart in quite a dramatic fashion.
Ginny had grown up with certain expectations of her ideal Harry Potter - the hero who would save her and the world by facing evil and defeating Voldemort. Fortunately or unfortunately, Harry had fulfilled a lot of her expectations by saving her from the basilisk in 2nd year and then defeating Voldemort in a fated duel to end the War.
The problem was, Ginny's fantasies of marrying her knight in shining armor right after Hogwarts, living happily ever after, were fundamentally incompatible with reality. Instead of a golden knight, Harry was a traumatized victim. Instead of settling down in a fairytale ending, Harry wanted to make amends for the people who died for him. He needed to throw himself into researching ways to bring back Sirius, not just to honor the sacrifices others made for him, but also to mend his own guilt.
This eventually led to a rather public breakup in Diagon Alley that was the talk of Wizarding Britain for months. Thankfully, that was also when Harry got the final approval from the Unspeakables.
As part of an international team of Unspeakables and scholars, Harry was here to study a newly discovered stone gateway that bore striking similarities to the Veil in the United Kingdom. The excavation was located around 200 kilometers west of the magical village Wagga Wagga in New South Wales, Australia, buried in the red dirt and dry shrubbery of the Australian grasslands.
Wagga Wagga. Harry chuckled at the name. It reminded him of the Wagga Wagga Werewolf Lockhart had made him imitate back in 2nd year. He wondered whether Lockhart had ever actually been to the town in question.
Shaking his head at the ironies of his life, Harry stared down into the stone chamber unearthed by the Australian excavators who had discovered the room a few months back. The room was roughly the size of a Hogwarts classroom, with a rock pedestal in the center holding a gateway almost identical to the Veil back in London.
Smooth and cold to the touch, the dark stone making up the walls and pedestal was clearly not native to Australia. The archway itself was grey and weathered, with complex, sprawling symbols carved on every available surface that glowed white in the dim lighting of the exposed pit. A slowly drifting sheen hovered in the middle of the gateway, the slightly opaque surface appearing almost like a tattered piece of silk.
A tall, dark-skinned man wearing a heavy dirt-stained overcoat stood in front of the arch, admiring the runes. A rune carving chisel sat behind his left ear, his dark hair cropped short underneath his top hat. As Harry approached, the man turned his piercing yellow eyes onto him and tilted his head slightly.
"Tell me Potter, what do you make of this?" The man's name was Trevor Lapis. A famous Rune Master and leading researcher of ancient artifacts, he was Harry's mentor for his Mastery in Runes.
"Of course Sir!" Harry nodded, then turned his attention to the stone archway. After a brief pause to consult his notes, he tentatively gave his first impressions.
"The runic language remains untranslatable - no known human correlate. Notably, the carvings lack inherent enchantment. They are more of a … conduit, siphoning magic directly from subterranean leylines. Five millennia old, according to both Muggle carbon dating and lunar phase alignment." Harry stood in place and furrowed his brow, listening closely. "And the whispers … gibberish, as always." Harry crossed his arms. "So it's the Department's Veil all over again. Ancient, cryptic, and impenetrable. At least the London one didn't give me sunburn."
Lapis' mouth twitched. He continued with a bit of challenge in his tone. "Adequate summation, Mr. Potter - if one ignores a prominent anomaly …" He taps the keystone with deliberate slowness. "Observe. The central sigil diverges from its British counterpart."
Harry turned his eyes to where his mentor had pointed. At the very center of the keystone, carved in white, he saw a triangle with a circle within it, and a line splitting the triangle down the middle. Leaning in, Harry stiffened as a chill ran down his spine.
"... Deathly Hallows. That wasn't on the London arch." His fingers twitched towards his wand holster, an old reflex. Bloody hell. Even here?
"Astute. For once." Lapis withdrew a quill from his coat, its nib already dripping ink. "This discrepancy necessitates a full comparative analysis. Manual transcription, no shortcuts. We can't risk activating an unknown gate with careless spellwork." He thrusts the parchment into Harry's chest, smirk razor-thin. "Your penmanship is marginally legible these days. Time to put it to use."
Harry gazed with a mixture of dread and despair at the thousands of tiny runes scrawled on the archway. He was long used to the menial tasks given to him by Master Lapis - it was practically tradition for Master to make things difficult for the Apprentice. If he wanted to learn enough to have a chance at finding out what happened to Sirius, he would probably have to memorize all of these symbols anyways.
Thus, with a long-suffering sigh, Harry got to work. Dragging over a wooden desk down into the pit from one of the tents outside (no conjuring near the Veil!), Harry sat down and began to painstakingly copy every rune down onto his stack of parchments, making sure to take notes on the locations of each rune relative to their positions on the arch.
As dawn turned to noon, the sun began to shine down directly into the stone room. It was June, winter in Australia, so the temperature was quite mild. Harry's eyes squinted in the bright white sunlight as he continued his detailed inspections and transcriptions of the stone symbols. Members of the research team occasionally came over to the gateway and cast careful detection spells at various points around the pedestal, careful not to interfere with the natural leyline magic that powered the Veil from underground.
Harry's back began to ache from spending the entire morning hunched over. Deciding that it was time for a break, Harry stood up and stretched out his stiff shoulders, then groaned as he realized he had only finished a third of the symbols covering the gateway. He walked back to the canteen and ate a quick lunch, pondering the mysteries of the Veil.
... Deathly Hallows, huh? Would my cloak have any effect on it?
When Harry saw the triangular symbol, the first thing he thought of was his father's Invisibility Cloak that was sitting in his trunk. The fluttering disturbances in the middle of the archway had always been reminiscent of his Invisibility Cloak.
He wondered if he should try comparing the two directly? Surely if Harry made sure to stand a distance away from the gateway, he could preclude any strange interactions.
Shrugging, Harry finished his lunch and went back to his tent to retrieve the Cloak. The last thing he wanted to do right now was to keep at the mind-numbingly boring task of rune copying.
Walking down the path to the pit with the Cloak hidden beneath his robes, Harry's mind wandered to the other two Hallows. The Elder Wand had been buried in Dumbledore's grave after the Battle of Hogwarts. As for the Resurrection Stone, after he retrieved the stone from the forest to prevent any wandering students from stumbling upon it, Harry had thrown it far into the depths of the North Sea.
As Harry was wondering whether the Veil would only react to all three of the Hallows, he suddenly felt abnormally warm. The sun? Looking up, Harry found the winter sky the same as ever. Pausing, Harry realized the heat was coming from the Invisibility Cloak under his robes.
He looked around for any people nearby, relaxing when he saw that everyone was taking their lunches in their tents. Carefully peeking at the bundle in his robes, Harry saw the Cloak's telltale silvery shimmer, but nothing out of the ordinary. However, the Cloak was warm to the touch, and when Harry took a few more steps forward towards the pit, the Cloak began to heat up.
Alarmed, Harry considered turning back, but it was too late. An incredible force suddenly ripped the Cloak out of his arms. The silvery cloth shot in the direction of the excavation pit and the Veil. Desperate to keep hold of his treasured possession, Harry grabbed hold of the Cloak.
"Sodding thing … get back here!"
Dragged along by the Cloak, Harry cursed his curiosity. He wasn't even that close to the gateway yet, but now some strange interaction between the Cloak and Veil just had to appear! A fascinating occurrence that could potentially advance their understanding of the Veil, yes, but Harry also had a horrible feeling about what might happen if he let go.
Harry gripped onto the shimmery cloth tightly with both hands as his feet dug into the ground, kicking up dust. The Cloak jumped and jerked as if an invisible hand had grabbed onto its other end, irresistible power pulling both the Cloak and its owner towards the gate.
Just as Harry considered yelling out for help, the mysterious power decided that it had enough. The Cloak suddenly sprang backwards and up, wrapping up and smothering Harry into a cocoon. Soon, man and Cloak were both flung straight over the edge of the exposed pit, down the stairs leading into the stone room, and into the fluttering grey curtains of the Veil.
One last thought ran through his mind - Master Lapis was going to fucking murder him.