The shockwave spread in every direction, like a ripple in a farm pond, silent and crystalline, distorting and magnifying the sky beyond as it passed. It approached the Gwyndemere, pushing a gentle swell before it, and sighed as it swept overhead, rippling the torn sails, trailing a single, soft gust of wind. James felt the breeze comb through his hair like fingers, caress his cheeks, buffet his clothes. He scented the faintest breath of floral soap and sun-warmed skin.
And then it was gone. The Gwyndemere bobbed slightly on the wake of the shockwave, and then settled. The ocean lay silent and still, as if exhausted.
James lowered his eyes. He was afraid to look back at the tatters of the storm, afraid that Petra’s silent body might come falling out of it, empty of all that had defined her, dropping through the air to splash faintly into the weary sea, and sink down through the cold forgetfulness beneath.
That probably wouldn’t happen. Petra had given all of herself to save him and everyone aboard the Gwyndemere. But believing that she had simply vanished was too tempting a thought. Like Merlin on the Night of the Unveiling, a vanished sorcerer or sorceress might not be completely dead. They might still come back.
Petra was never, ever coming back. Petra was, utterly and finally, no more.
James’ feet moved of their own accord, carrying him to the deck railing. He saw his hands reach out, grasp the railing in the middle of the stern, exactly where she had stood.
Merlin made no move to stop him, or to interrupt his moment of woe.
Voices and footsteps carried up from below. They were happy, even joyful, bursting with relief at the sudden end of the storm. James heard Ralph and Albus, Lily and his mother. He heard his Uncle Percy and Aunt Audrey and the ship’s captain, Farragut. He heard Lucy.
And he heard Izzy. She was laughing with the others, gladdened with relief, ready to rejoice on the wet bow and watch as the deck hands attempted to reparo the ship, to mend it for the remainder of their journey.
James couldn’t look back. He couldn’t bear to think of Izzy’s imminent, inconsolable grief. He couldn’t approach even his own less tangible loss.
A hand covered his shoulder, large and warm. He assumed it was Merlin.
It was his father.
Quietly, he said, “I’m sorry, son.”
And that was all he said.
The two of them stood that way for some time, until the moon arose over the silent ocean and the storm was nothing more than a fading memory. They stood there until everyone else had gone back down below decks again, much more somberly than they had appeared.
Harry Potter stood with his son, held his arm around him in the dark. Harry knew all about loss, about wounds of the heart that would never truly heal. He was acquainted with grief.
Harry stood with his son.
He was patient.
27. – The triple-six enigma
James woke up with a start, and nearly fell out of the Gwyndemere’s bunk. His heart was pounding and his mind reeled with confusion. He groped blearily, tried to scramble to his feet, still half-captured in the grip of urgent, feverish dreams.
A hand pushed his shoulder gently, pressing him back onto the bed.
“There we are,” a woman’s voice said, calm but insistent, as if she had been watching him, waiting for him to awaken. “Finally coming around, then. And what a horrible dream you must be leaving behind.
It’s all right. You’re safe.”
The hand left his shoulder, reversed, and lay briefly against his forehead.
“Fever’s nearly past,” the woman sighed with relief. “You’ll be back on your feet in no time. And not a moment too soon. The headmaster has asked to speak to you the instant you’re awake and about.”
“Are we arrived yet?” James croaked. His mouth was as dry as cotton. His throat felt like it had been scrubbed with steel wool. He opened his eyes, focused on a high ceiling and a row of bright, sunny windows, tall as pillars.
This was not the Gwyndemere.
“You’re back home, James,” the woman said, turning away and bustling over a tray, clinking vials and wiping her hands on a towel.
“Back home safe and sound at Hogwarts.”
James startled again and pushed himself up onto his elbows, glancing around in profound confusion. The woman turned quickly at the sound of his movements, a vial in each hand. It was Madame Curio.
He was in the hospital wing, lying in the middle of the ward on the only unmade bed. Morning sunbeams lay across the sleepy room, lit with dozing dust motes.
“How did we…?” he asked, snapping his gaze back to Madame Curio. “But I thought…!?”
“You apparated right out of the school!” the healer said shrilly, half chiding, half amazed. She put down the vials and returned to the bed. “The ban was lifted during testing, of course, like usual, although only from the inside out, just to be safe. Nobody expected anyone from inside the school to apparate out of it. But off you went! Popped away to the cemetery in Godric’s Hollow of all places! It’s just a good thing that the headmaster was able to track you and bring you back. Why, you’ve been unconscious and raving all night long! What in the wide world were you thinking?”
James struggled up to a sitting position on the bed and frowned at his spinning thoughts. He could tell by the feel of his own body that he was back to his older, taller self, once again a seventh year. “But…reality was vanished away when Petra went through the portal! The whole world was disappearing! How…?” He looked around again, amazed at the perfectly normal room, the distant rabble and rumble of students moving between classes, the waft of summer breeze pushing in through the open windows, lifting the sheer drapes into billows.
Madame Curio clucked her tongue and touched his forehead again, cursorily. “Triple-six fever,” she said with a shake of her head, making James blink at her in confusion. She saw his look and clucked her tongue again. “Don’t worry, dear. It will all come back to you. The headmaster said you might be a touch befuzzled when you came around.”
As she said this, she glanced away over her shoulder, raising her eyebrows.
James followed her glance, craning to look behind him, toward the pebbled glass ward doors.
Merlin was just standing up from the bench along the rear wall, tucking his tiny book into his robes as he did so.
“I presume our charge is back to his usual self?” he asked mildly.
“For better or worse,” Madame Curio answered, suppressing a small smile. “Presuming he doesn’t attempt any more addled cross-country apparations.”
“I think it safe to assume that such episodes are well behind us,” the headmaster nodded with confidence. “Come, Mr. Potter. A brief discussion in my office should prove illuminating.”
“They called it ‘the triple-six enigma’,” he said as he settled himself into the chair behind his huge desk. “It first began appearing as vague portents and prophecies almost five years ago. Just the three numbers, six-six-six. They showed up in old women’s tea leaves, and old men’s octocards, and even the crystal balls of students here in Madame Trelawney’s classes. People began dreaming of the strange symbol: three sixes, always arranged in a rough circle, two small ones on top, a larger one on the bottom. It wasn’t until winter of this year, however, that the prophecies became more urgent, and even Muggles became haunted by the symbol. Finally, the significance of the triple sixes revealed itself. It wasn’t a random equation, or the sign of the devil, as many understandably assumed.” He looked at James and raised his eyebrows.
“It was simply a date. The sixth day, of the sixth month, of a year equating to six. This year, as you may remember, is the twenty-third year of the second millennium. Two multiplied by three.”
“Equals six,” James answered faintly, settling slowly onto one of the small visitor’s chairs before the desk. Voices could be heard wafting in through the open window, carried on a warm breeze from the Quidditch pitch. The Ravenclaw team was getting in a last minute practice before the
tournament tomorrow.
“Elementary arithmancy,” Merlin nodded. “And yet none knew why that date—June the sixth, two thousand and twenty three—had such significance. Many seers consulted their preferred divinations.
Even the centaurs measured the portents and formulated their own dire predictions, with much drama as a result. Only recently, they came to our very courtyard in numbers, warning that if the omen came to pass, they would arise in force to wrest control of the magical world, for the good of all humanity. We were able to mollify them by diplomacy, but only just.
“Thus, as the months passed and the date approached, what began as a mysterious diversion grew into a sustained obsession, even a mania.
“People began to experience terrible, vivid nightmares. Signs were observed in the skies, the clouds and stars, even in the patterns of nature. Many of the trees awakened from their ancient slumber, and spoke to terrified witnesses. Across the world, thousands of people, both magical and Muggle, experienced apocalyptic visions. The details of every prophecy were always nebulous, but certain patterns emerged. A world slowly grinding to a fatal stop. The breaking down of natural laws and ancient rules. The darkening of the eyes of destiny until the world itself was swept away into oblivion. The power of the portent grew daily, exponentially. But alas, no one fully divined what fate was about to happen, or what could be done to prevent it, or even if it was anything more than mass hysteria, a mere corporate delusion unleashed upon the world like a virus of the mind.”
James was beginning to grasp a strange sense of the headmaster’s tale. Memories were resurfacing, though very hazily: increasingly shrill articles in the Daily Prophet about people building magical shelters in their basements and yards, or about Muggles selling everything they owned to buy stores of food, and medical supplies, and weapons, hastily preparing to stave off the mysterious end.
James looked up from this reverie. Narrowing his eyes suspiciously, he asked, “What day is it today?”
“Today, Mr. Potter,” Merlin answered with a small smile, “is June the seventh.”
James felt a release of long-sustained tension. It leaked out of his shoulders and neck, slowly, sifting away like sand. He drifted back into the chair, allowed its cool leather upholstery to collect him. “It didn’t happen,” he said, almost to himself.
“Indeed,” the headmaster nodded. “It did not happen. After a night of much fretting, of midnight vigils and frantic crowds, of millions watching the skies and oceans, of families huddled in terror, and entire villages marching en masse to confront imagined harbingers of doom…the darkness faded, and the sun came up, and the birds sang their happy songs. Life, with the perfect blitheness of ancient habit, simply went on.
As of this morning, the population of the world has metaphorically blinked with surprise, shuffled its feet in mingled embarrassment and relief, laughed a little at itself, and with a bemused shrug, gone back about its normal business.”
James didn’t have any response to this. His mind was a pleasant buzz of shock, and relief, and wonderment. More memories were slowly coming back to him: his previous few years, generally uneventful but packed with regular, everyday concerns. The months of his last year of school, spooling along only loosely tainted by worries of the triple-six enigma. Up until the past week or so, that was, when the dreams had begun: dreams of a different but all-too-familiar version of reality, of an ocean journey to betrayal, and the Dark Mark hovering over a country cemetery, and Petra Morganstern leveling a wand at Albus’ chest…
The dreams and visions had mixed with reality until he couldn’t separate one from the other. And then, completely saturated with the nightmare portents of Petra and Judith, Odin-Vann and Albus and the disintegrating vow of secrecy, he had broken away, apparated out to the cemetery in Godric’s Hollow, convinced that he had the world to save, desperately and hopelessly. The world… and Petra Morganstern.
Although even in the dream, he had only succeeded at the former.
“You and I,” Merlin said in a low, secretive voice, lowering his chin and studying James closely, “are two of the only three living people who know the truth. The triple-six enigma was not, in fact, a dream. It was not a delusion, or mass hysteria. To the contrary, it was simply something terrible that almost happened… but then somehow didn’t.”
James’ heart thudded in his chest. He met the headmaster’s gaze. “So… what I think I remember… really did happen?”
Merlin nodded again. “In a reality only one small step removed from this one, yes. You alone have lived both destinies. Everyone else alive in this sphere merely dreamed of the other possibility, vaguely and in part, because it was so barely avoided. Even I only know what I do because my prodigious arts were augmented by a mutual acquaintance.
The man whom you once knew as Rechtor Grudje, among other names, may be a permanent inmate of the sanatorium ward of St. Mungo’s hospital, but his skill at reverse prophecy is as powerful as ever. He, who now goes by the name of Timothy Dumbledore, is the secret third of our trio. He assisted me, and was much gratified to be of service. He is a changed man from the villain you once knew, you may be glad to know. He has been greatly benefitted in the years since his mind was freed of the caged memories of his legendary uncle.”
James frowned, squinted with dawning bewilderment. “But…that couldn’t have happened, could it? The whole affair of the Morrigan Web, that was from the other destiny! That couldn’t also have happened here…?”
“Alas,” Merlin said almost cheerfully, pushing back in his chair and producing a sustained groan from its joints. “You shall find that there are far fewer changes in this world than you might expect. In fact, it might be simpler for me to explain the few things that have changed— apart from the fact that the world continues to exist, of course—than those that haven’t.”
James sat up again, placing his hands on the armrest with interest. A beam of sunlight warmed his feet as it crept slowly across the office floor, tracking the climbing sun.
Merlin seemed to be enjoying a certain smug amusement. “The Morrigan Web did indeed happen, for example, almost exactly as you remember it. The Quidditch summit occurred. Your father and aunt and uncle were temporarily arrested for destroying the Crystal Chalice.
Rechtor Grudje was confronted by his benefactor and nemesis, Albus Dumbledore, and that wizard’s captive memories were extricated from his mind, allowing him to assume his original identity as Timothy, son of Arianna.”
“But,” James interjected, still frowning in consternation. “The Morrigan Web was only prevented because Petra was there to… to…”
The words trailed off as the memory of Petra surfaced in his mind. A coolness came with it, sadness filling in the spaces around his cautious, budding relief.
Merlin drew a solemn sigh. “You are quite right. Miss Morganstern was not there in our reality. She died tragically, years earlier, sacrificing herself for the safety of many others. Thus, she did not, as you may remember, use the Morrigan Web to lure the Lady of the Lake into a fateful confrontation. She did not hire the unusual Muggle detective to track and reveal the Lady’s destructive plan.”
James was dumbfounded. “But then… who did?”
“Her sister,” Merlin replied simply, his eyes sharpening. “Miss Isabella Morganstern. Known to you and the rest of the world as Izzy.
Much of what you might remember Petra Morganstern doing in that other history, young Izzy did in this one.”
“Izzy…?” James repeated softly, leaning back into his chair again, weak with wonder. “But… she’s not even a witch!”
“Nor is she a Muggle,” Merlin said, raising a hand. “Not since her time with her departed sister. Izzy Morganstern is perhaps the most unusual living being currently on this planet. She is what might be described as a Guardian. She has subtle powers that derive neither from any witchy blood nor from the banked forces around her. She taps into something beyond all knowledge and technomancy, immeasurable and strange, so
mething imparted to her by her sister, probably without her even knowing.”
James shook his head slowly, stunned, and yet somehow not particularly surprised. He looked back at Merlin again. “What else?”
Merlin nodded and drew a deep breath to speak. “The Lady known as Judith was utterly defeated on the night of the Morrigan Web.
Her time in this world was already dwindling since her host, the unfortunate Mr. Odin-Vann, was killed the year previous, during a raid in Muggle New York City, on the night of a holiday parade. The joined forces of your father’s Auror department and the American Muggle Integration Bureau discovered Mr. Odin-Vann standing over the murdered body of an American senator, a man called Charles Filmore.
It was not your father that fired the killing spell, however. It seems that young Mr. Odin-Vann was killed by a Muggle bullet, shot from the weapon of an American M.I.B. agent named Price. Self defence, since Odin-Vann was observed brandishing a wand. Later evidence suggests that Judith sacrificed her host in order to facilitate her own escape mere seconds earlier. Already dying in her absence, Odin-Vann was left behind as a distraction. This act of desperate cowardice sealed Judith’s fate, of course, since the death of her host uprooted her from our world.
“You might be interested to know that the Lady was eventually defeated not by young Isabella Morganstern’s uncanny magic, nor by the combined force of Mr. Titus Hardcastle and his squad of Aurors. She was attacked and ultimately dispatched by a certain pink snake, a manifestation of the fractured personality of an American witch that I believe you know rather well.”
“Nastasia…?” James exhaled, a smile of astonishment dawning on his face. “She killed Judith?”
“Not precisely,” Merlin shrugged, as if admitting a mere technicality. “Firstly, Judith was not killed, at least not in the human sense. She was banished forever back into the dark netherworld from which she came. And secondly, it was only the Ashya part of Miss Hendricks that attacked and unmade her. The other half refused to betray her erstwhile comrade. But unlike in the destiny that you knew, in this world, the Ashya half survived. She rejoined her twin self, Nasti.
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