Shadows in St. Mungo's II - The Secret of Avalon: Chapter 05

The room on the second floor of 12 Grimmauld Place still slept in the shadows of dawn when Daphne awoke, as if returning from a long and inhospitable dive. She gasped as though air had become a scarce commodity, and her trembling hands sought support in the sweat-dampened sheets. The fireplace in the corner cast an almost extinguished light — the timid crackle of embers sustained, perhaps, by some gentle heating spell. There was something careful in the choice of temperature, in the arrangement of the blankets, in the way silence seemed protected rather than imposed. Harry, no doubt.

For long seconds, she remained lying down, trying to recognize the darkened ceiling, the old frames decorating the walls, and the bookshelf unfamiliar to her. It wasn’t the hospital — that she knew with a certainty born of instinct, not reason. But it wasn’t home either. It was another place. A waypoint between wakefulness and forgetting.

She sat up with effort, her legs heavy as if burdened with too many memories. She ran her fingers along her nape — there was a strange pressure there, like the trace of something that had already gone… or worse: something that remained. Not in flesh, but in presence. A remnant that didn’t hurt physically, but did hurt, in some deeper way.

As she stood up, her legs nearly gave out, forcing her to walk slowly to the door, leaning on the walls with the reverence of someone crossing an ancient sanctuary. When she turned the doorknob, the soft creak of metal seemed louder than it should have, and she held her breath.

He was there.

Harry, sitting on the stairs, his back against the wall and a mug in his hands. Hair disheveled, eyes sunken, his expression bearing an exhaustion that no longer bothered to hide. He looked like part of the house. As if time had carved him into it.

“You sleep restlessly,” he said, without turning his face, voice low and contained, like someone stating a fact rather than making a complaint.

Daphne stopped, her body still tense from returning. “You hear?” she asked, and the sound of her own voice seemed too fragile to hold what she meant.

“The whole floor hears,” he replied, now turning to look at her. “I just stayed close. In case… it was necessary.”

“And was it?” she asked, with a breath of irony that didn’t mask the vulnerability.

Harry nodded, and though he didn’t smile, there was a kind of silent recognition — as if both knew that, sometimes, the most honest answer is the one that doesn’t comfort.

She sat on the step above him, arms crossed over her knees, posture almost childlike in her attempt to shrink away from the world. They stayed like that for a while, framed by the distant sound of thunder and the insistent melody of rain against the windows. The old house creaked in its wooden bones, as if it too was listening.

“I don’t remember everything,” Daphne said at last. “But I saw things. Fragments. Whispers with faces. A circle of black mirrors on a marble table. Each mirror showed something different. None showed me.”

Harry kept his eyes on nothing, brow furrowed. He remembered Rosier — the broken words, the mirrors, the names that came before lucidity. “You saw that when…?”

“During. Or after. Or before,” she answered, with a faint frustration. “It was like… I was pierced by a memory that wasn’t mine. Like something was trying to tell me a truth… that I didn’t know how to bear.”

She rubbed her arms, shivering. “Will this stop?”

Harry watched the last embers dying in the fireplace. The light faded, as did the hope for simple answers. “I don’t know,” he said, finally.

Daphne let out a short, joyless laugh. “Terrible answer, Potter.”

“It’s the only one I have.” He paused. “But you’re not alone.”

She turned to him, and in that gesture was an unguarded vulnerability. “Have you ever felt… broken?”

Harry took a while to answer. When he did, his voice seemed to come from another time. “After the war, every day. I had the feeling that a part of me didn’t come back. That something stayed on the battlefield. A fragment that wasn’t mine. A voice that wasn’t mine, but knew me.”

She looked at him more closely. “And did it go away?”

He sighed, ran a hand through his hair with the weariness of someone who’s told that story too many times. “No. But I learned to pretend. To trick the shadow. And for a while, I thought it was enough. But now…” His eyes returned to her. “Now it’s different. Now it feels… like the beginning again.”

“Maybe it never ended,” she said, softly.

The silence that followed was thick. Neither of them tried to break it. The rain outside persisted, almost like a spell holding the world in suspension.

“You brought me here?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“And took care of me?”

“I did what I could.”

She lowered her gaze. “You should’ve pushed me away.”

“I should have,” he replied, without hesitation. “But I can’t.”

She smiled — a faint, genuine smile that faded almost as quickly as it appeared. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For not letting me disappear.”

Harry looked at her for a long moment. Then looked away, as if the intensity of it hurt him. “I know that vanishing too well,” he said. “You’re still here. And that… is more than I expected.”

The house seemed to settle. The rain grew stronger, but inside, between the two of them, there was a new silence. Not the silence of exhaustion, nor of fear. It was the silence of something beginning.

And that didn’t need a name to be real.

~HP~

Harry’s office, on that solitary floor of 12 Grimmauld Place, felt that morning smaller than it had ever been. Not because of its dimensions, which hadn’t changed, but because of what now filled the air. There was a weight there, a silent gravity that made the room narrower, as if the very walls, soaked in old secrets, were leaning inward, trying to listen — or to hide.

The desk, usually austere and restrained in its methodical disorganization, now looked like the portrait of obsession. Scrolls unfolded at strange angles, magical maps with burnt corners, patient files whose names only the oldest healers still whispered with reverence — and at the center, what looked like a desperate attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible. A circle drawn in red ink, a map without place, surrounded by names that no longer belonged to everyday life.

Selwyn. Burkes. Goshawk. Vaisey. Meredith Crane.
Rosier.
And, hesitantly, written in a less certain handwriting, as if the author himself resisted the certainty of the gesture — Daphne.

Harry ran a hand over his eyes. The previous night still clung to his shoulders like a wet cloak, and even the tea Kreacher had left — with verbena, as always — had grown cold without being touched. Upstairs, Daphne slept. Or tried to. Perhaps she fought against a sleep that resembled too much the other side of consciousness.

“A circle of mirrors floating above a marble table.” Her words echoed. Not as a metaphor, but as a warning. A symbol, perhaps. An architecture.

He stood up suddenly, pushing the chair back harder than intended. He went to the bookshelf in the corner — the one he never touched without reason. Not out of negligence, but out of respect. Many of the files there had been left by Sirius. Or hidden by him. Things the Ministry, for convenience, preferred to forget.

There it was: a box lined with black leather. Locked with a spell as old as its contents. He undid the protection with a dry murmur. The lid opened like a whisper — as if even it feared being heard.

Documents. Most destroyed by moisture or corrosive enchantments. But one name — solitary, sinister — emerged among the layers of deteriorated paper: Avalon.

Not as a place. But as a protocol.

“Avalon – Phase 1: Structuring.
Phase 2: Insertion of the breaking point.
Phase 3: Escalated activation.”

Harry froze. For a moment, he felt the world slow around him. As if the words weren’t merely being read — but silently spoken by someone who already knew what would come next.

The next scroll seemed to pulse in his hand. A report, incomplete and marked by concealment spells, still allowed a few excerpts to be read:

“...cognitive instability… logical fragmentation…”

“...history of severe magical trauma…”

“...memorial mirrors as psychic conductors…”

Mirrors.

Harry returned to the desk, but didn’t sit. He stood there, staring at the map he had drawn the previous night. For the first time, he understood: it wasn’t a diagram. It was a reflection. Not a puzzle, but a fracture.

Selwyn, treated by Mulciber.

Burkes, linked to the psychiatric ward.

Goshawk, Burkes’ patient.

Vaisey, researcher.

Meredith, silenced.

And Daphne. Even without knowing it.

All of them had, in one way or another, passed through a corridor called Cognitive Neuromagic — a polished name for something that sounded like a sentence.

Suddenly, he turned. He went to the mirror in the corner. An heirloom of the Blacks, covered for years, more by instinct than aesthetics. He pulled the cloth away in one sober motion.

The reflection returned the expected image. But there was a hesitation in it. As if the time between his gesture and the mirror’s response had lasted a second longer than it should have.

Behind him, for an instant, he thought he saw something.Or someone.

Daphne?

He turned. Nothing.

When he looked back at the mirror, everything seemed in order. But he knew — the body knew. The air knew. Something was watching him.

And then, on the desk, a scroll moved by itself. It didn’t fly. It didn’t flutter. It simply shifted, with the calm of someone who already knows the house.

At the center of the page, a single word:

Host.

Harry felt his stomach tighten. The air grew denser. There was no scream, no spell. But there was a kind of terror that only grows in silence — the kind that doesn’t come from outside, but that recognizes something within.

And then he heard it.

A subtle sound. Almost imperceptible.

The front door.

A light creak. But distinct.

This time, he would not ignore it.

~HP~

The teacup remained between Daphne’s hands like a warm shield against the fragility of the moment. She wasn’t exactly drinking it — merely holding it, her slender fingers clenched around the porcelain as if the heat it gave off were the last link between lucidity and something more tenuous, more dangerous. They were sitting in the library at Grimmauld Place, one of the few rooms that Harry, with rare patience and meticulous persistence, had decided to make habitable.

The fire crackled low in the hearth, casting moving shadows that climbed the shelves crammed with old, dusty volumes. Some shelves displayed forgotten titles, written in nearly faded calligraphy, as if the books themselves wanted to be left behind. Rain tapped against the windows with a timid, intermittent insistence, like hesitant fingers drumming on a door they didn’t truly wish to open.

Harry stared at the still amber at the bottom of his mug but didn’t move. There was a rigidity to his posture, as if even the act of drinking demanded more than he was willing to give. His thoughts still circled — with obsessive precision — around a single word, which had appeared like a specter on a scroll hours before: Host.

He broke the silence with a hoarse voice, like someone pushing a stone.

“You mentioned your father left something. In the documents.”

Daphne nodded slowly, as if the movement had to pass through more than one internal filter before being allowed.

“Before he disappeared,” she began, “he hid a diary. Fragmented, with access spells based on blood. I could only open it using Astoria’s.”

There was a pause. The fire crackled, filling the space between the words.

“It was reckless. Selfish, maybe. But I needed to understand.”

Harry watched her like someone hearing both a confession and an apology at once.

“And did you understand?”

She turned her eyes to the fire, her gaze fixed on the embers as if searching there for some belated revelation.

“Only parts. He suspected everyone. Even himself. In the last pages, he spoke of a circular table, of enchantments tied to identity. And of a name repeated with fear, almost as if he were afraid to invoke it completely.”

“Not Avalon?” Harry asked, frowning.

She shook her head.

“No. Castius.”

The name hung in the air, lingering like an unwanted perfume.

“That name didn’t appear in any file I found,” Harry murmured, already mentally reviewing the hundreds of names that had passed before his eyes in recent weeks.

“Maybe because it wasn’t a common name,” she said, her voice now firmer. “My father suggested it was a title. Something like… a position. A figure who controlled everything. The architect of the table. The one who decided who should forget and who should remember.”

Harry leaned back in the armchair, absorbing every word.

“A greater mirror,” he added.

Daphne nodded and brought the cup to her mouth, but the tea, now nearly cold, did little to hide the slight tremor that escaped through her fingers.

“Do you believe,” she said, after a long silence, “that the mind can be divided?”

Harry didn’t respond immediately. When he did, his voice came from a place deeper than usual.

“After everything we’ve seen? I believe the most terrifying thing is imagining it already was. And that we didn’t notice.”

She set the cup down on the table, and for the first time, didn’t look at the fire, but directly at him.

“Sometimes I remember things I haven’t lived,” she said. “I hear phrases spoken in my mother’s voice — but the words don’t make sense. That’s how it started with Astoria. A displaced memory, a name that appeared out of nowhere. Then came the delusions. The fear. The mirrors.”

Harry felt his spine stiffen.

“The mirrors are everywhere,” he murmured. “Not just the glass ones. The ones we see in other people. The ones that live inside us. I no longer know what’s mine and what was… implanted.”

Daphne leaned slightly forward.

“What if that’s the point?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if Avalon was never just control? What if it’s… reconstruction? Dismantling people and reconfiguring them. With artificial memories. Shaped fears. Loyalties handpicked. Like pieces rearranged on an invisible board.”

“Permanent curses,” he said slowly. “But silent.”

She rose from the armchair. Went to the shelf and took out a small leather case. Placed it delicately between them, like someone laying down something sacred.

“This was his. A memory-encapsulating spell. It needs blood to activate. An inheritance bond.”

Harry looked at the object for long seconds.

“What’s in there?”

“The last memory before the disappearance.”

He raised his eyes to her. He didn’t ask if she wanted to open it. He already knew the answer.

“I want you with me when I do it,” she said, her voice lower but firm.

He nodded and moved his hand, but she stopped him.

“Harry…”

“Mm?”

“Yesterday, when I fainted, I heard a voice. But it wasn’t Mulciber’s. Or Rosier’s.”

“Whose was it?”

“I don’t know. But it said something. A phrase I can’t shake.” She hesitated, then continued: “‘She is the key. But the one who locks… also bleeds.’”

Harry’s blood froze.

He slowly raised his eyes. His face, once tired, now closed in on perplexity.

“I got that too,” he said. “In a note. Written in my handwriting. But I didn’t write it. Not consciously.”

Daphne’s eyes widened. For a moment, time suspended its march.

They looked at each other. For a long time.

It was no longer an investigation.

It was a contagion.

And they were both already inside.

~HP~

The old pendulum clock on the dining room wall marked exactly two eighteen when the second hand paused for an imperceptible fraction of time, as if even it, tired of the weight of the night, hesitated to go on. The house, immersed in a shadowy gloom that felt almost conspiratorial, remained silent, except for the constant sound of the rain — fine, but persistent — tapping against the windows like long, impatient fingers knocking to be let in.

Daphne sat at the table, her pale face lit only by the flickering light from the tip of her wand, casting across the wooden surface the outline of detailed maps and aged scrolls. The beam of light danced over lines and notes, revealing hastily scratched-out passages, enigmatic calculations, and names that seemed to have been whispered rather than written.

Harry stood on the other side of the table, brow furrowed, eyes fixed on the layout of the Ministry of Magic’s underground. There was an intensity in him that was no longer just investigative — it was almost devotional, as if every line concealed a forbidden truth.

“This entrance here,” he said, pointing to an almost invisible spot in the lower-left corner of the map, “was used by authorized transporters. A hatch, hidden behind a decommissioned Portkey maintenance storage. It’s still in the records. But no one’s touched it in years.”

Daphne raised her eyes cautiously and pulled closer a scroll marked with her father’s slanted handwriting. “He mentions a biomagical security system installed beneath the Hall of Prophecies. Are you sure this route is still accessible?”

Harry hesitated for a brief second. “Moody mentioned it once. It was an emergency exit. If it’s sealed... then I’ll have to improvise.”

She watched him closely. “I can go with you.”

The offer hung in the air for a moment before being dismissed. “No,” he said, his voice calm but firm. “Not this time.”

Daphne tilted her head slightly. “Don’t start with this protect-me narrative, Harry. I have as much right as you. If my father was involved... if my sister is still in danger...”

“I know,” he interrupted, with a softness that didn’t cancel out the resolve. “But if it’s a trap — and it very well could be — I need someone on the outside. Someone who knows the names, the symbols. Someone who can react without hesitation.”

She held his gaze longer than she should have. Then, slowly, she nodded. “And how long do you plan to stay in there?”

Harry gave a tired smile — the kind that never reaches the eyes. “If everything goes as I hope, I’ll be back before the Ministry realizes I went in.”

She leaned back in the chair, arms crossed over her chest. “That doesn’t reassure me at all.”

He crossed the room, his steps deliberate. On the armchair leaning against the wall rested an object that seemed to belong to another era — James Potter’s invisibility cloak. When Harry picked it up, the silver fabric shimmered under the wandlight with a delicacy that bordered on the sacred.

“How long has it been since you used it?” Daphne asked, almost in a whisper.

“Since the war,” he replied. “After everything… I kept it as a keepsake. It was what was left of my father. Of childhood. Of a time when the monsters stayed only under the bed.”

His fingers ran over the fabric with reverent care. Then he folded the cloak and tucked it under his coat as if preparing not to infiltrate a ministry, but to revisit a past that had never truly been closed.

“You still believe the Ministry is behind this?” she asked, raising an eyebrow with subtle tension.

Harry looked at her, and in his expression there was less conviction than before, but more urgency. “I don’t believe in coincidences. Meredith was inside. Castius — if he’s real — is a shadow moving behind the scenes. And Rosier... if he is who I think he is, the Avalon project didn’t end. It merely... went dormant.”

Daphne stepped closer. She seemed about to say something, but the silence between them was no longer empty — it was a pact. Still, she murmured, like someone offering a warning and a premonition:

“Be careful with the mirrors. Not all of them reflect who we are.”

Harry nodded, as if those words carried a weight already known.

“I’ll be back before dawn,” he said, adjusting the hood.

She hesitated. Then, with a half-smile that hurt more than it comforted, she murmured:

“And if you don’t come back?”

He fell silent for a brief moment, looking at his own steps before even taking them. When he answered, his voice was grave, almost ritualistic.

“Then follow the trail. And burn the curtain.”

She didn’t ask what it meant. Perhaps because she already knew. Or because she feared to know.

The door closed with a muffled thud. And in that house now emptied of his presence, Daphne remained standing for long minutes, eyes fixed on the still-open maps, the smudged notes, the red line Harry had drawn hours earlier — the same one that now connected her directly to everything.

In the rain outside, the world was being washed clean.

Inside, the truth was only beginning to be revealed.

And she no longer knew who would emerge whole on the other side.

~HP~

It looked more like a tomb than a corridor.

Harry descended through the bowels of the Ministry as one who returns to a place that, though unknown, already recognized him. The invisibility cloak, once a symbol of youthful adventure, had now become a shroud — draped over his shoulders with the silent reverence of a condemned man on his way to the gallows. Beneath his feet, the uneven stone floor absorbed each step with a strange gentleness, muffling even the whisper of his boot soles.

The hatch through which he had entered — hidden among forgotten corridors and phantom pipes — had opened with an unsettling docility. Locks that should have groaned, protested, resisted the passage of time, had yielded with the lightness of a sigh. There was something indecent about how easily he had been let in. Like a door ajar in a house that should be empty.

The air grew denser with each turn of the spiraling staircase. The walls sweated old dampness, and the torchlight — which lit automatically as he passed — cast shadows that danced out of sync with his movements. They didn’t follow him: they surrounded him. And when he reached the final step, at the end of a descent that seemed to go down not in meters but in centuries, he came upon the door.

It was simple. Aged iron, unadorned, no inscriptions. Nothing about it cried importance, and yet, it exuded presence. A single rune, nearly faded, rested over the silver lock.

Harry approached cautiously. Wand in hand. Voice low.

“Alohomora.”

The lock turned with a sound that was not merely mechanical. It was organic. A dull crack, like the shifting of an old bone remembering its place.

The door gave way.

The chamber beyond did not seem to belong to the world they lived in. It was circular, wide, lined with polished black stones that did not reflect light: they devoured it. The ceiling was an invisible void. Nothing delimited it — only the absolute absence of any visible end. In the center, a metallic structure rose like a profane altar: tall, elongated, resembling a dissection table or a sacrificial slab, depending on the memory it evoked.

Above it, suspended by invisible chains, rotated a ring. A circle made of fragments of mirrors — broken, cracked, curved as if they had been forged not to reflect, but to deceive.

Harry stepped forward.

And the mirrors responded.

In the first, he saw himself still young, covered in blood, eyes fixed and wearing the expression of someone who did not understand what he had lost.

In the second, his irises were black as spilled ink. Lifeless. Impossible.

In the third, he was laughing. A strange, ragged laugh, like that of a man who no longer controlled his own mouth. A laugh that, with sudden horror, he recognized.

Voldemort.

He stepped back. One step. Then another. But his eyes remained locked.

The structure at the center seemed to call to him. Not with a voice — but with an older language. Etched into faded inscriptions along its sides. He approached, hesitant. Read aloud, almost involuntarily.

“Phase 2: Insertion of the rupture point.”

“Phase 3: Staggered activation.”

“Host recognized. Identity subject to restructuring.”

The final word seemed to pulse. Not written. But alive. A revelation sealed in metal.

Harry felt his stomach churn. His chest tighten. It was true. Avalon wasn’t a project: it was a system. A ritual machine. And he was there, right at the center of its mechanism.

Then something tinkled.

Soft. Distant. Like glass brushing stone.

Harry turned swiftly. Wand at the ready. Heart alarmed.

But the corridor was empty.

There was no one.

Except…

The mirrors.

In the reflection of one, he saw something that froze him.

Daphne.

Lying down. Eyes open. Lifeless. Eyes that didn’t blink. Body unmoving.

“Daphne!” — he shouted.

Or at least thought he did.

In the reflection, his mouth didn’t move.

And then came the impact.

A spell from behind. Not lethal. But effective.

His legs failed. His body dropped to its knees. The wand slipped from his hand.

His vision blurred. The ceiling — or the darkness where the ceiling should be — seemed to draw closer.

And then, as if emerging from behind a curtain that had never been pulled, a voice.

Cold. Precise. Unhurried.

“Curious that it took you so long.”

Harry tried to lift his face, but his muscles didn’t obey. He saw only the feet.

Polished boots. A robe as black as the chamber itself. And hanging from the neck, gleaming like a confession, the symbol of Avalon. A ring. Ancient. Restless.

Above all, he heard the sound.

The chains turning.

Like clocks.

Like machines.

Like presences that had never stopped watching.

~HP~

The sound of the chain turning did not come from above, nor from outside. It was internal. A metallic hum that resonated not in the ears — which were no longer there — but in some forgotten place between thought and panic. It was as if the very idea of time were trapped in a circular motion, repeating itself ad infinitum without ever completing the turn.

Harry tried to open his eyes. Discovered he had no eyes.

Tried to move. Discovered he had no body.

He was a suspended consciousness, helpless in a space that recognized no ground, no walls, no sky. A non-place — an ethereal clearing where the air was not air, but condensed memory. Around him, the world seemed made of liquid glass: images formed and shattered as if reality were being blown into a crystal sphere, too unstable and too hot to be safe.

And in all those images, he was the protagonist.

He ran through the corridors of Hogwarts — but they led nowhere. He entered doors that returned the same settings. The same floor. The same wall. And at every passage, he came across versions of himself.

There was a child, wide-eyed and scared, wearing an oversized sweater. An adolescent covered in mud, cracked wand in hand, wild eyes of someone who had seen war up close. A pale man, silent, with dark circles that seemed older than him. A body wrapped in black bandages, eyes dull as frosted glass. None of them spoke. They only stared — long and hard — like old portraits someone forgot to cover.

You are a host.

The words weren’t spoken. They were simply there, written in flaming letters on a stone wall that appeared before him. Words that didn’t need a voice to wound.

“Of what?” — he wanted to ask. But sound no longer belonged to him. His very language seemed to have been denied, replaced by a muffled echo that returned before it could ever leave.

And then, emerging from the dense fog that covered everything, a figure appeared.

Dumbledore.

Or something that resembled him.

The robes were right. The posture. The distant scent of parchment and candied lemon. But the eyes... ah, the eyes were wrong. They were colder, more calculating, like those of an old man tired of lying.

“You placed too much trust in the wrong questions, Harry,” said the figure, without moving its lips. The voice simply existed, as if it had always been there and he was only now hearing it.

Harry tried to step back. The figure dissolved into particles, like sand taken by a nonexistent wind.

And then, he was at home.

Or something like it.

Grimmauld Place, perhaps — but faded. The wallpaper seemed to have lost its color, and the room’s objects were slightly out of place, like in a poorly reassembled memory. Daphne was sitting at the table, but her face... was turned. Not sideways, but turned completely around, as if her eyes stared into the back of her own skull.

On the wall frame, the photographs trembled. Rosier’s name burned slowly, like a candle on an abandoned altar.

Footsteps.

The sound was clear.

And then, he appeared.

Castius.

Or whatever answered to that name.

He had no face. His black cloak was far too long for any common being, and the hems were stitched with tiny mirrors — each one reflecting a distinct fragment. Selwyn’s death. Burke’s lifeless body. Astoria in tears. And Harry, wand in hand, pointed at himself with empty eyes.

“You want the truth?” The voice came from nowhere. It passed through. Settled like a thought planted by another.

“Yes,” Harry answered, not knowing how.

“The truth corrodes, Potter,” said the voice. “And you no longer have enough soul to dissolve.”

The figure extended its hand.

In it, a familiar object.

The invisibility cloak. But it did not protect. It burned. Slowly, with a white light at its center, as if being incinerated from within.

Harry tried to scream.

But there was only a flash.

Too much light.

And then… the cold.

The world returned with harshness.

The pain at the nape of his neck was dull but present. The stones beneath his body seemed to drink the heat from his blood. The room — the real room — reappeared like someone waking from a fever dream: the circle of mirrors still turned, slower now, as if aware of his presence.

He was alone.

He staggered to his feet, leaning on one of the columns. His legs protested. His head, throbbing, tried to reorder images that no longer followed chronology.

Beside him, on the darkened stone floor, a parchment. Simple, folded in half. It hadn’t been there before. He knew this with a certainty that came from somewhere else.

He picked up the paper with trembling hands.

Recognized the handwriting.

It was his.

“Castius is among them.”

“Do not trust those who forget easily.”

“The true mirror is broken.”

Harry closed his eyes.

Folded the note carefully.

Stored it in the inner pocket of his robe, along with his wand, along with everything that still held him together — or almost.

And then, even staggering, even wounded, he walked toward the exit.

He knew.

He knew that this was not the end.

But the exact beginning of the end.

And that, upon crossing the door, the mirrors would watch him again.

As they always had.