Pale fuchsia-colored sunlight cast from the rising dawn turned the red dirt of the Australian grasslands into shades of pink and orange. The dry, chilly morning air rushed into Harry's lungs as he stepped out from his traveling tent, breathing in deeply. Squinting at the scraggly shrubbery of the arid grasslands as he stretched, Harry yawned from the relaxation of a good night's sleep, ready for a long day of runic analysis.
As Harry began to stroll along the rough gravelly path towards the excavation pit, he thought back to how just a few years ago, he would have never imagined he could experience such a state of peace and contentment. During his Hogwarts years, danger and fear were omnipresent in every second of his life. Even sleep would bring no reprieve - if the traumatic glimpses into Voldemort's mind didn't torment him, then it would be the constant nightmares and guilt from Cedric's and Sirius' deaths.
After the Battle of Hogwarts, however, Harry finally began to heal from his absolute disaster of a childhood. Going back to get his NEWTS with Hermione, Ron, and his friends from the D.A., helping to rebuild Hogwarts, taking care of Teddy with Andromeda, throwing himself into studying Ancient Runes and Arithmancy - the normalcy of peacetime and the comforting drive of having a goal to work towards soothed the pain of losing so many during the war.
Stepping into the tent containing a magically expanded canteen, Harry made himself a cup of coffee and sat down with a copy of the Daily Prophet (delivered from London to Sydney). Looking at the headlines, Harry smiled. Nothing about Harry Potter, the Man-Who-Won. Only some political pieces on Shacklebolt's new policies and the promising career of Hermione Granger, Head of the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures.
Although Harry's life after the war was still hounded by the obnoxious Daily Prophet and the adoring British public, the annoyance of public expectations was lessened by a deal Harry had made with the new post-war Ministry. Harry would make occasional public appearances to endorse the policies the new Shacklebolt cabinet would propose, and in return the press would stop reporting on his every move, and Harry would have the chance to join the Unspeakables and research the Veil.
As a recent Hogwarts graduate, Harry wouldn't have had the chance to work with the research division studying the Veil unless he got a Mastery in Runes or Arithmancy, and that would have taken years. However, Harry wanted to begin working on retrieving Sirius immediately. Harry needed a meaningful distraction from the guilt and pain that still hounded him; furthermore, the researcher team often traveled to study artifacts and magic from around the world, allowing Harry to escape from the stifling familiarity of Britain and finally be able to go someplace where not everyone could recognize him from miles away.
Harry stepped out from the kitchen, still nursing his mug of hot coffee. He looked around the rest of the campsite, noticing that many of his fellow researchers were also 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. Unfortunately, Harry had fulfilled a lot of her expectations by saving her from the basilisk in 2nd year and then defeating Voldemort in a dramatic duel to death in his 7th.
The problem was, Ginny's fantasies of marrying her knight in shining armor right after Hogwarts and then having a big family were fundamentally incompatible with Harry; instead of a golden knight, Harry was more like a traumatized victim. Instead of wanting to settle down immediately in a fairytale ending, Harry wanted to make amends for the people who died because of him. He could only smother his guilt by throwing himself into researching ways to bring back Sirius.
This eventually led to a rather public breakup in Diagon Alley that was the talk of Britain for months. Thankfully for Harry's sanity, he finally had a chance to get away from his friends' concerned inquiries into how he was holding up, and the gossiping whispers that would pop up every time Harry appeared in public.
As part of a British team of Unspeakables and scholars, Harry was here to study a newly discovered stone gateway that bore striking similarities to The Veil that was present in the Department of Mysteries. 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.
Harry chuckled as the name Wagga Wagga 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 Wagga Wagga. 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. The dark stone making up the walls and pedestal was not native to anywhere in Australia, smooth and cold to the touch. 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, while his dark hair was cropped short. As Harry approached, the man turned his piercing yellow eyes onto him and tilted his head slightly.
"Tell me, what do you make of this?" The man's name was Trevor Lapis, a famous Rune Master, the lead investigator of this expedition, and Harry's mentor for his Mastery in Runes.
"Yes sir! The runic language is unknown and unlike any other human language we know of. The carvings are imbued with no magic themselves, but instead draw on natural leylines from underground to power the gateway. Both muggle and magical dating methods place the stone pedestal's age at around five thousand years old." Harry stood in place and furrowed his brow, listening closely. "The whispers from the Veil are always just quiet enough that nothing meaningful can be heard."
After thinking a bit more, Harry shrugged his shoulders. "So pretty much the same as the Veil back in Britain? We still have no clue where it came from and where it leads to."
Master Lapis gave a solemn nod, though his lips formed a small smile. "Good observations Mr. Potter. However, not completely correct. If you observe closely …" Here Master Lapis raised a finger to point at the very top of the gateway, at the keystone. "... you can see that there is one small symbol that is different from the symbols found on the London Veil."
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. Harry sucked in a shocked gasp, and chills ran down his spine.
"That's … the symbol of the Deathly Hallows! That wasn't present back in the original Veil, was it Sir?"
"Correct. Although many of the runes carved in this new gate are identical, some are not. I need someone to compare every single rune on this gate with the runes from our London Veil, as well as copy every symbol down so we can send the inscribings to our other team of specialists in London. After all, we can't risk using any direct transcription spells around this unknown gate, can we?" With an evil smirk, Lapis handed a quill and a thick stack of parchment to Harry. "Get started copying. You can compare the runes between the two Veils after you've finished."
Harry gazed with a mixture of dread and despair at the thousands of tiny runes scrawled on the archway. This was going to take ages! However, Harry was long used to the menial tasks given to him by Master Lapis - after all, 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, meaning 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.
'If this particular Veil has a connection with the Deathly Hallows, 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 in his tent. The fluttering disturbances in the middle of the archway had always reminded Harry of his Invisibility Cloak as well. He wondered if he should try comparing the two directly? Surely if Harry made sure to stand far away from the gateway, he could make sure no strange effects would happen from the two being near each other.
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 continue his mind-numbingly boring task of copying every rune on the gateway while straining his eyes. Walking down the path to the pit with the Cloak hidden beneath his robes, Harry thought about the other two Hallows and where they were now. Harry had buried the Elder Wand in Dumbledore's grave after the Battle of Hogwarts. Although Harry had dropped the Resurrection Stone in the Forbidden Forest, later on he realized he didn't want a Hogwarts student to just pick the stone up randomly, so he had gone back, retrieved the stone, and then threw it somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean.
As Harry was wondering whether the Veil would only react to all three of the Hallows, he suddenly realized that it was very hot. At first he attributed the temperature to the daylight from the sun, but then he found that the heat was coming from the Invisibility Cloak under his robes. Immediately stopping, Harry 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, 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 yanked in the direction of the excavation pit and the Veil. Desperate to keep hold of his treasured possession, Harry grabbed hold of the Cloak to hold it back, but the force was too strong.
"Bugger me!"
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 spring up! 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.
The last thought Harry had was that Master Lapis was going to fucking kill him.