Shadows in St. Mungo's II - The Secret of Avalon: Chapter 04

The alley behind St. Mungus Hospital was one of those forgotten gaps in the fabric of the world, as if time itself, passing through there, had chosen to look the other way. There were no signs, no living memory to name it; only the persistent smell of wet stone, of mildew ingrained in the cracks of worn runes — like words from an extinct language that no one dared to translate. In the air, the sour, insistent scent of spilled potions lingered, spilled days or decades ago, it was impossible to tell — fermented rue, old mandrake, perhaps broken essence of narcissus. A mixture that clung to clothes like a warning, like a cold touch on the neck that refuses to disappear.

Harry arrived before the agreed time. Not out of nervousness, nor out of caution. But out of habit. Good habits formed through years of pursuit, war, and loss. He leaned against the worn wall, cloaked in the Invisibility Cloak — an ancient piece, a relic from another time, which now made him more shadow than man. He was still, but alert. His fingers, cold despite the lack of wind, gripped the wand with uneasy familiarity. The night itself was not particularly cold. And yet, there was a peculiar density to the darkness, a stillness that wasn’t the absence of sound, but the presence of something still unrevealed. Harry knew that feeling well. It was the prelude to ambushes, the resonance of the world just seconds before a duel. Or death.

He didn’t need to check the clock. The punctuality he carried was of a different nature — silent, automatic. Two minutes to three.

It was then that the sound came.

A light creak, metallic, the kind of sound one doesn’t want to make. A side gate opening with the care of those who hesitate. Harry didn’t need to see. Some certainties don’t require confirmation.

Daphne.

He removed the cloak slowly, appearing in the open like something that, long awaited, was already part of the scene. She didn’t flinch. She simply lifted her eyes and met his with the serenity of someone who recognizes an old ghost. A reunion without surprise — but filled with things left unsaid.

She wore a healer’s tunic, discreet, dark, without any crests, although the cut of the fabric betrayed its institutional origin. The hood was down, and her hair, tied in a practical style, was already starting to give way, loose strands dancing in the air as if resisting order. Her face was calm. Too calm. But her eyes… ah, her eyes. They had that strange gleam that comes from sleepless nights and poorly buried secrets. As if something inside her trembled, even though her body refused to show it.

“I thought you’d be late,” Harry said, his voice tired in a way that wasn’t just from lack of sleep.

“I thought you’d run away,” she replied, with a small smile, the kind that forms at the corners of the mouth when one is too exhausted to sustain the rest of the face.

Between them, the alley seemed to contract. No breeze. No sound except for the intermittent dripping of a clogged gutter further ahead. It was as if the world, there, had been reduced to two bodies and an ancient absence between them.

“Last chance to back out,” Harry said, and it wasn’t an invitation, but a delayed kindness.

“I didn’t come to back out.”

He nodded with a slight tilt of his head. He carefully folded the cloak, almost ceremonially, and extended it toward her.

“Put it over your tunic. The fabric of yours still reflects under sweeping charms. We’ll be passing too close to surveillance corridors.”

She accepted without hesitation.

“I trust you to guide me.”

“That’s reckless.”

“That’s what’s left when caution fails,” she said, as if giving a clinical diagnosis — without passion, but fully aware of the gravity.

Harry didn’t argue. With a brief motion, he traced an arc in the air. The silencing charm rose like a translucent bubble around them. For a moment, the sound distorted, and then… disappeared. As if the night itself had decided to respect the conversation.

“The healers’ shifts change at 3:15,” he murmured. “We have twelve minutes. We’ll enter through the supply room, cross to the magical ventilation shaft, and go straight up to the Psychiatric Wing corridor.”

“And if someone sees us?”

Harry didn’t answer immediately. He simply turned his gaze toward the side entrance, now shrouded in thick shadows. His tone, when he spoke, carried no bravado — only a melancholic certainty.

“We improvise.”

~HP~

The storage room, at first glance, seemed unchanged. Yet, Harry had the distinct sensation that the walls had moved closer. Perhaps it was the memory distorted by time, or perhaps it was the reality—silently deformed by forgetfulness and neglect. The space, once wide enough for discreet maneuvers, now closed in like an ancient throat, swallowing the sound and returning only weight to the shoulders. The ceiling, burdened with stacked boxes like columns of a profane cathedral, cast peculiar shadows. They wavered, although there was no visible draft. Enchanted sheets covered part of the load, fluttering lightly as if they breathed—not as living things, but as if they housed something that, by courtesy, pretended to sleep.

With every step, broken potion bottles cracked under his boots. The sound was muffled by the silencing charm, yes, but not by the vibrations rising from the floor like a mute warning. It was as if the floor itself remembered that someone was walking over it—and did not approve.

The air inside was different. Denser, as if someone had slowly brewed it, for years, in invisible cauldrons. A sweet but stagnant scent. The kind of smell that clings to the skin, that enters the nostrils and doesn't leave. A residue of magic that wasn’t new, nor old—but suspended. As if time had stopped to breathe with the forgotten spells.

Daphne walked just behind. She was concealed by the cloak, but her presence was perceptible in a way Harry knew well: the way her steps matched his, like a sharp note after a deep one; the tension in her shoulders, invisible but felt; the subtle vibration between them, like the taut string of an over-tuned instrument.

They stopped in front of the ventilation grate. It was an old piece, discreet—a square of corroded metal fixed to the wall like a functional scar. Harry raised his hand and snapped his fingers. The frame reacted like a dog reluctantly recognizing a forgotten master. It glowed blue for a moment—hesitant, almost offended—and then disappeared, leaving the path exposed.

“Through here,” he murmured, though he knew Daphne couldn’t hear him. But there were rituals that didn’t need explanation. Certain words serve the speaker more than the listener. And, at that moment, serving as an amulet was all that language could offer.

The shaft swallowed them with a smoothness that bordered on feigned. There was no wind, no traction—only the feeling of being carried upward by a silent, invisible force. The walls vibrated faintly, studded with runes erased by time and neglect. Symbols of containment, redirection, protection... or imprisonment. It was impossible to tell. The greenish light that seeped from the metal corners cast dancing shadows on their faces—and for a moment, Harry thought they seemed like ghosts rising from the abyss, not intruders descending from the world.

They emerged.

And before them stretched the corridor of the High Containment Psychiatric Wing.

It was a long, narrow corridor, entirely without windows. Yet, it was lit—with erratic light from enchanted torches, whose glow seemed to protest. They didn’t flicker with the wind. They flickered with something unsaid. The air was cold, but not the simple cold of the weather. It was a cold that came from within—that rooted itself in the skin and seeped through the ribs like a whisper that couldn't be shaken off.

Harry stopped. The walls were... listening.

He felt it. And she did too. Daphne, invisible, responded with a brief nod. There was no need for words. They both knew what the silence there contained. It was the kind of silence that only exists when there is something to be hidden—not the silence of peace, but the silence of fear.

And then, the sound.

At first faint. Then, persistent. Like a soaked cloth dripping in the dark.

“Potter... Potter... Potter...”

The voices came from the doors. All were shut, sealed with visible runes. None indicated occupation. And yet, they spoke.

“…crucio... doesn’t hurt... doesn’t hurt...”

“She saw. The sister saw. But the sister doesn’t speak.”

Harry stopped walking. The words didn’t come from mouths—but from the walls themselves. As if the building had learned to speak with voices that no longer had bodies.

“This isn’t residue,” murmured Daphne, in a tone that said more than the words. “This is alive.”

“Mind magic,” Harry said. His voice was dry, and perhaps that made it stronger. “Not an echo. A pulse. Someone is still feeding this.”

They continued. The corridor, in a calculated gesture by the architect or fate, bent at a sharp angle.

And there, at the end, was the door.

Silver. Without a name. Without a number. Without a crest.

But it didn’t need one.

Wing 9.

Daphne stepped closer.

“Are you sure?”

Harry didn’t respond immediately. He kept his eyes fixed. He felt something behind the wood and metal. Something that didn’t make a sound. But pushed.

“No. But since when has that mattered?”

He raised his wand. Cast a Revelio, then a Symbolic Vanishing—a rare, ancient spell, learned from pages the Ministry didn’t recommend citing. The runes on the door reacted like overly trained dogs, too proud to resist, but too well-mannered to bite. They vibrated. They retreated. And, finally, they gave way.

With a dry snap, like ice giving way to a blade, the lock unraveled.

The door opened.

The air that emerged was damp. Cold. But not like before. This cold had intent. A smell that wasn’t just clinical, nor simply old. It was a smell of a sick dream, of contained fever, of contaminated memory. A smell that seemed to carry meanings the mind was not yet ready to decipher.

Daphne took a step back, instinctively.

Harry tightened his grip on his wand.

They entered.

And what was inside was not what they expected.

~HP~

The room was far too large for just one man. And yet, it seemed to contain more than met the eye. There were no windows. No entry for natural light, as if time itself had been refused or simply forgotten. The only illumination came from a low fireplace, whose flame danced with an elegance devoid of purpose, casting thin shadows that crawled across the walls like whispers with form. They were not common shadows, those obeying the logic of light; they were, perhaps, impressions—echoes of movements that never happened, or that happened in some other time.

The tapestries that covered the walls seemed to have been chosen more for silence than for beauty. They were in muted tones—gray, moss, a gold that no longer dared to shine. The embroidered symbols on them, from the Department of Mysteries, were worn like a poorly kept memory. There was something in the threads—or perhaps in the way they hung, immobile, not even swaying with the warm air from the fire—that suggested a deliberate will for forgetfulness.

In the center of the room, upon a stone floor that returned no echo, lay an iron bed. Tall, with austere bars. And in it, sitting with a composure bordering on discomfort, was Adrian Rosier.

He was awake. Or, at least, his eyes were open.

But there was no attentive gleam of wakefulness, nor the confused fog of unconsciousness. There was, instead, a stiffness in his body—the shoulders too rigid, the hands placed on his knees as if they had been placed there by foreign hands. The skin was pale in a way that didn’t evoke illness, but absence—absence of time, of sun, of anything that justified life. His dark hair had been cut carelessly, perhaps by a hand unfamiliar with the act of care. And the face, that face, remained youthful in a disturbing way, as though time had passed around him, but not over him.

He did not react to the opening of the door. Nor to the sound of Harry’s wand whispering protective charms. Nor to the advancing footsteps, which had, by habit, become silent.

Then, as though obeying an unspoken command, he turned his face. Slowly. As if moving each muscle were a negotiation with some greater force.

His eyes landed on Daphne. They fixed on her with an intensity that was, at once, tender and imprecise. As if he saw her—but only the part of her that still belonged to the past.

“You came back,” he said.

The voice was surprisingly clear. Clean, like a bell heard through a thick window—sharp, but distant. Something in that tone felt contained, like a sound that knew it shouldn’t escape.

Daphne froze, her mouth slightly open, as if hearing the name of a deceased person whispered in error. She took a step. Just one.

“Adrian… it’s me. Daphne.”

He blinked. Slowly. As if processing the name took longer than it should.

“You… weren’t here anymore. But now you are. Is this… before, or after?”

“After,” she replied, her voice trembling. “Much after.”

Rosier lowered his gaze to his hands. And in that gesture, there was something delicate—as if only then he became aware that they belonged to him.

Harry moved closer. Slowly. As though the stones beneath his feet might awaken dangerous memories.

“Rosier,” he said. “My name is Harry Potter. I…”

Those eyes turned to him. For a second, there was hesitation—not full recognition, but an echo. A remnant of an old name crossing a dense fog.

“Potter,” he murmured. “Hot name. Name that burns.”

“Do you remember what happened?” Harry’s voice was lower now, as if speaking to someone on the verge of fragile sleep. “What they did to you?”

Rosier tilted his head slightly. Like a bird listening to sounds beyond human reach.

“The white room… the liquid mirror… the word that could not be spoken. I… I was someone. Afterward... I was someone with another voice inside.”

Harry and Daphne exchanged a glance. A heavy glance—of too many questions for that moment.

“Do you remember the Avalon Project?”

The name dropped like weight onto the room. The flame in the fireplace wavered, or perhaps it was just the impression they had.

Then, with a pause too long, he answered.

“Avalon… wasn’t a place. It was a question. And we all… answered.”

Daphne took a step. A bit firmer, perhaps out of pride. Or desperation.

“Who did this to you, Adrian?”

He squinted. His lips trembled. His hands, once still, slowly clenched over his knees—tense, almost mechanical.

“It wasn’t a man,” he said. “It was a face. A face with many eyes. And a smell... lavender and blood. It spoke as if… it had already been inside your head. Before it opened its mouth.”

“Mulciber?” Harry risked.

Rosier trembled. The word seemed to hurt more than any other.

“He... was just the mouth. But the hunger... came from another.”

Daphne didn’t move. But it was as though she had staggered inside.

Harry knelt beside the bed. Kneeling there was less of an act of proximity and more of respect. Rosier was no longer just a patient. He was a witness. Or perhaps, evidence.

“Do you know what they did to you?”

Rosier stared at him with eyes now much darker. There was a profound absence there. An absence of self.

“I was split,” he said. “The body stayed here. The mind... stayed there. And it wants to return. It wants to return very much.”

Daphne brought her hand to her mouth. An automatic gesture. But eloquent.

“Return to where?” Harry asked, his voice almost a whisper.

Rosier opened his mouth to answer.

But there was no answer.

Because there was no time.

The world—or at least that room—seemed to recede. The air changed. Not as when a spell is cast, but as when someone holds their breath for too long.

The tapestry blew without wind. The flames lost color. The shadows, spirit.

Daphne turned first.

But Harry already knew.

Mulciber.

~HP~

It was the air that changed first.

Not a sound, not a step. Just the subtle — yet undeniable — sense that the world, for an instant, had drawn back, like a room holding its breath on the verge of a secret. The fireplace, until then steady, faltered. Its light flickered like a candle's flame at the exact moment someone enters unannounced. The tapestries swayed with a wind that came from nowhere, and the room’s warmth became an uncertain memory.

Daphne felt it before anything else. Her body reacted with the involuntary grace of someone who had learned to recognize what can’t be seen. The tensing of her shoulders was small, but eloquent. Harry noticed. He himself felt that old warning: a dry shiver, a contraction at the nape of the neck. The kind of sensation that used to precede, in the old days, the worst kinds of ambushes. Or the most absolute kind of death.

And then, he appeared.

Mulciber.

There was no sound of footsteps. He was simply there, as if he had always been. His robe was black, without crest, without adornment. Yet there was such immaculate precision in its stitching that it became impossible to ignore: this was not the absence of vanity, but the complete mastery of calculation. His hair, slicked back with almost clinical precision, gave away the same. Pale. Impeccable. As if every movement had been rehearsed before a mirror that never contradicted him.

"Potter," he said, his voice low and oily, as if the name slid off his tongue with the taste of restrained poison. "And Miss Greengrass… so devoted. So… intrepid."

Daphne said nothing. Her eyes fixed on him, her body upright as if held by an invisible thread. Harry, in turn, rose with calculated slowness, wand firm in hand, gaze sharp as a blade just drawn from its sheath.

"How long have you been watching us?" Harry's question wasn’t a threat, but a statement.

"Long enough," replied Mulciber, entering the room as if he owned the house. "You are predictable. Curiosity, as always, is the first sign that the contamination has begun."

Harry didn’t hide the venom in his voice. "Contamination? Is that what you call what was done to Rosier?"

Mulciber turned his eyes — with a certain indifference — to the man seated on the bed, still motionless, still murmuring endless phrases. There was something cruel in the way he looked at him. Like one who contemplates an old tool, worn out, but still functional.

"Rosier was an opportunity. An interesting rupture. A mistake, perhaps. But a... fertile mistake. And do you really think it all began with him?"

Daphne took a step forward. There was steel in her voice, but wrapped in a velvet Harry knew well — the kind of calm that precedes either a collapse or a reckoning.

"Then who did it start with? My father?"

Mulciber’s smile was a minimal gesture. Deliberate. There were no teeth. Just a slight curve of the lip — enough to suggest the answer was already written somewhere she had never dared to look.

"Philip Greengrass was an... intriguing man," he said. "He had the rare talent of balancing morality and convenience — as far as it served him. Then... he began asking questions. As you are now."

Harry took a step forward. The wand now wasn’t just raised — it was ready.

"If you’ve come this far, you already know what I’m capable of."

"Oh, Potter..." Mulciber sounded almost paternal. "You’re a hero. An icon. And icons, unfortunately, don’t kill without consequences."

Then he turned to Daphne.

This time, the look was deeper. As if he were seeing her from the inside. There was no lust, no explicit threat. But there was something far worse: methodical curiosity.

"You… have always had a talent for opening doors. Even those sealed for good reason."

Daphne didn’t move. But the tension in her fists, the way her breath centered only in her chest, said enough.

Harry, in a lower, sharper voice, cut the air between them.

"Why are you here?"

"To observe," answered Mulciber. "And to ensure Rosier remains as he should. He’s still needed. For what comes next."

"What comes next?" Daphne asked.

Mulciber tilted his head slightly. Not in provocation, but like someone contemplating a child’s question.

"You still think of Avalon as a project. Fools. Avalon was a seed. The soil is ready. The cycle has already begun. Now, it’s only a matter of time."

Daphne replied with a dry voice: "Avalon was shut down. The Department of Mysteries—"

"The Department of Mysteries," Mulciber interrupted, in that sweet tone reserved for the naïve, "doesn’t shut anything down. It merely... pretends not to see. And if you keep forcing your eyes open, you’ll find that there are truths that cannot bear to be seen."

Then he turned. Calm. Like someone closing a book the reader wasn’t ready to finish. He took two steps toward the door.

And stopped.

"Just a warning," he said, without looking back. "You’re chasing the wrong name."

Harry narrowed his eyes. His voice came like a slash.

"What’s the right name?"

Mulciber turned just enough for his profile to catch the dim light. The smile was almost imperceptible. Almost.

"When you find it… it will be looking back."

And then, he left.

No sound of footsteps.

Only what remains when someone like him departs: a thick silence, soaked with presence.

On the bed, Rosier hadn’t moved.

Daphne remained motionless.

Harry lowered his wand.

They were no longer in the same place where they had begun.

Now, they knew someone was always one step ahead.

And that this someone never left footprints. Only invisible trails.

Trails that, sooner or later, would lead them to the right name. Or to ruin.

~HP~

There were silences that imposed themselves through the absence of noise. Others, rarer, more dangerous, imposed themselves through presence — dense, watchful, almost tactile. The silence of 12 Grimmauld Place was not passive. It was the kind of silence that observed. That judged. That knew the house's occupants better than they knew themselves.

When Harry appeared in the foyer, there was no commotion. No lights flicked on, no furniture creaked in surprise. Only Kreacher, who emerged as if he had already been waiting, wrapped in his shadow and that ceremonial manner of serving that always seemed on the verge of condemnation.

The elf looked at Harry first, with old, tired eyes — eyes that had seen too much and forgotten what should never be remembered. Then his gaze turned to what was hidden beneath the Invisibility Cloak. He didn’t need to see to know. The tension in Harry’s arms, the silent care in his steps, the way he protected something as one protects a secret that is also a burden — it all said that Daphne Greengrass was there.

"Second-floor room. Fireplace lit," said the elf, not as one giving instructions, but delivering a verdict. And with a muffled pop, he disappeared.

Harry climbed slowly. The steps creaked beneath his weight, but like old accomplices, they didn’t protest. Daphne murmured against his shoulder. Disconnected words. Fragments of thought that dissolved before they could become memories. Her skin, cold and damp, trembled with the kind of fever that does not belong to the body — but to the mind.

He laid her down with a delicacy he was not accustomed to. He brushed aside the hair stuck to her forehead like one trying, in vain, to erase the signs of something that could no longer be undone. For a moment, just one, he allowed himself fragility. A gesture, a sigh.

This was Daphne, yes. The woman who had faced Mulciber without flinching, who had said yes to the abyss with steady eyes. And there she was — vulnerable, pale, her features relaxed not by peace, but by exhaustion. She wasn’t just a witness to what they had discovered.

She was one of its consequences.

Harry whispered a stabilizing charm. A light spell, almost elementary. It wasn’t a cure. It was merely a thin barrier between her and total collapse. A fragile truce — and temporary.

Hours. Perhaps that was all.

Hours.

As if time had suddenly become a living creature, slipping through his fingers with contempt.

He extinguished the light with his wand. The dimness fell like a protective curtain. He closed the door behind him, as slowly as one closes a poorly kept secret.

Downstairs, the study awaited him with the familiarity of an old confessional. The cloak was thrown over the chair with the automatic gesture of someone already absent from themselves. The buttons of his tunic came undone beneath fingers that could no longer distinguish cold from weariness. He sank into the armchair.

The body wanted rest.

The mind, however, was a stage where all voices continued rehearsing the next tragedy.

The fireplace still burned, but its light flickered, uncertain. In front of him, the investigation papers remained where he had left them. Like unfinished ghosts, scattered across the desk: maps, hurried notes, names that refused to stay on the page.

Selwyn. Burkes. Meredith. Vaisey. Rosier.

And among them, not connections — but wounds stitched together with red threads on a board hung on the wall. Pins driven not by order, but by desperation.

Rosier. Alive. And speaking with the lucidity of a sleepwalker at the edge of the abyss.

Harry leaned forward. Elbows resting on his knees, face in his hands. The physical exhaustion was thick, damp, like the weight of soaked clothing. But the mental... the mental was something else. It was the kind of exhaustion that settles in the thoughts, that distorts time, that makes silence an enemy.

He lifted his eyes. And, in the corner of the study, the old mirror gave back a reflection that hesitated. Didn’t blink. Didn’t move as it should.

Harry turned his head sharply.

But it was only him. Or he needed to believe it was.

He stood. Walked to the desk with the gait of someone who carries a name like a curse. Among the papers rested the parchment Daphne had handed him days earlier — her father’s letter. Still not fully deciphered. The words seemed to pulse, as if they knew they were more than text. As if they carried a consciousness.

"The key does not open the door. It rebuilds the lock."

Harry repeated the phrase silently. Thought of Rosier, of his fragile and firm voice all at once. Thought of the division — body and mind. Of Daphne, fighting not to break. Of Mulciber and his oily voice, which seemed to know more than it said — and said only what would wound.

He sat again. And wrote.

Every word. Every expression. Every silence. Everything he could remember.

In the next room, Daphne slept. Or perhaps was trapped in a dream from which she didn’t want to escape.

And between the two of them…

Between the two, there was now something.

Something that wasn’t just a mystery, nor a passing shadow.

It was a presence.

Fixed. Silent. And permanent.

Something that didn’t need a name.

Because even without naming it, they already knew:

It was waiting.