11 - Reflection
Berix
Toa of Twilight
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Harry
Harry's mouth was set in a grim line as the Mirror came into view. It stood here, buried deep within the labyrinth, the broad limestone chamber perfectly reflected in its golden frame. Harry had the strange feeling that he wasn't seeing another instance of the Mirror, or somehow looking at a copy. Instead, it felt like looking at the same Mirror he'd seen in the Hogwarts dungeons, just from… another angle.
The last time he'd seen the artefact, it had given up its hidden treasures to Earth's greatest dark wizard, and simultaneously imprisoned one of the only people who could have stood in his way.
This time, at least, there was less time pressure. This time, Harry intended to approach the Mirror with the appropriate level of caution.
<Zorian, stop the disc. Do not let us be reflected in the Mirror.>
The floating disc on which their group was moving jerked to a sudden halt, a few metres before they would have seen their own reflections. Sensing the tension in Harry's mental communication, Zorian gently moved the disc back around the corner until the Mirror was no longer visible. He then lowered it to the ground, and dismissed it.
Harry turned to face his companions. "The Mirror of Noitilov is one of the only surviving artefacts of Atlantis. It has power over whatever is reflected. I conjecture that it serves as the gateway to Earth, coalescing all other pathways into one, and serving as the gatekeeper."
Alustin scratched his chin. "How does it work? Do we just walk into it?"
Harry shook his head emphatically. "I strongly suspect that will not work."
Voldemort had sent the Fiendfyre surging into the Mirror to demonstrate its stability. It had wound up here. So it seemed likely that walking into the Mirror from Earth really would send you outside the Atlantean's sheltered homeworld, and into the labyrinthine multiverse in which he now found himself.
The journey back to Earth, however, seemed extremely unlikely to be quite that simple.
There wasn't a lot Harry knew about the Mirror - just what he'd been told by Voldemort. That being said, he knew of exactly one thing which had come from the Mirror into Earth - phoenixes. If the Mirror was in some way judging the alignment, or risk, of potential entrants, and the only known example of a successful entrance to Earth was phoenixes…
Although their sense of morality was clear to all who beheld them, the resplendent flaming birds really didn't seem to have agency in the traditional sense. They would call to those who might rise to the challenge, and empower them to face down dangers they would not otherwise survive, but Harry had never heard of a phoenix taking action on its own behalf, rather than acting through a witch or wizard.
At this point, Harry felt fairly confident both that the sign of his effect on the universe was positive by his own metrics, and that its magnitude was likely to be relatively large. That being said, he could only guess at the Atlantean utility function and the extent to which it overlapped with his own. Even though he was originally a native of Earth, it felt plausible that a device like the Mirror would judge him as far too risky, and refuse him entry.
Then what would happen if someone walked into the Mirror? Would it instantly incinerate someone it deemed to be a threat? That didn't seem to mesh with the general Atlantean approach.
"Would it be dangerous if I tried to interface with it, like I did with the Exile Splinter?" Rain asked.
Harry frowned. Dumbledore's exile had come as the result of a process he himself had set in motion - Voldemort had called it 'Merlin's method of sealing'. It seemed unlikely that a similar process would occur without deliberate guidance, and they did need to explore the Mirror's properties at some point, regardless…
"I think it should be safe, but I'm by no means certain. If any functions do present themselves, please do not use them without consulting with me first."
Rain nodded, and grasped the simulacrum by his side by the hand. "Zorian?"
The simulacrum nodded, and a moment later, Rain was on the other side of the Mirror. He stepped forward, and touched a gauntlet to its golden rear face.
There was a moment of silence, as they all waited to see if Rain would vanish, or be incinerated, or shout in surprise. He did none of those things, merely stood with his eyes shut, as if meditating.
Harry took the opportunity to turn to Kanderon's Librarians. "Now, if we do indeed reach Earth, there are certain things I need to make very clear. Earth is not like Anastis. War and violence are very rare, and the standard approach to resolving conflicts is to cordially discuss the matter. If that fails, it is to seek mediation before a neutral third party or authority. Under no circumstances should you use physical violence unless you are confident that lives are already in danger, and even then I recommend that you show as much restraint as possible."
Talia rolled her eyes.
Harry stepped a little closer and spoke again. "I would like to be perfectly clear. This world is under my protection. Any threats to this world, or to its people, will be dealt with. Is that understood?"
Talia met his gaze for a moment, then nodded and looked away.
"Secondly. The existence of other worlds is not public knowledge on Earth. Nor is the information I've told you about Atlantis, or the full extent of my own capabilities. If you encounter any natives of this world, please do not mention any of this. In fact, it would be best if you avoid conversation with anyone you might encounter, and avoid allowing anyone to see your abilities - let me do the talking wherever possible. I also advise that you continue to wear the dreamfire amulets at all times. Mind reading, or legilimency, as it's called on my world, is not common, but it is present."
There was silence, then Rain spoke. "I'm getting… something. It's not really like the Splinter at all. The Splinter wasn't crude, exactly - it just wasn't designed for anyone to communicate with it. It was like I was looking at the outside of a Mars rover, or something like that. The Mirror is different - it's trying to understand me. It's continually rewriting the interface."
A strange expression came over his face. "I think it wants to help me."
Harry turned to face Rain. "What do you mean?"
Rain furrowed his brow, clearly trying to communicate something very confusing. "At first, it was completely incomprehensible. I sent it a few signals, and it almost immediately adapted to my language and communication format. It's showing me two pathways - two options."
Harry immediately held up a hand in caution. "Don't select either yet. Can you tell what the pathways are? What options is it offering?"
Rain closed his eyes again and breathed in and out deeply. The air in front of his face was lightly misted with the condensation of his breath.
"One of them is 'Enter', I think. It's the one I think the Mirror wants me to choose. It's hard to say - the parts of the system that I brought here with me are struggling to interpret what the mirror has to say. I'm not sure what it means by 'Enter', but I think it would be safe to choose - at least, that's what the Mirror wants me to think."
Harry's pulse increased. "And the other option?"
Rain exhaled again. "Authenticate."
Harry swallowed.
Rain withdrew his hand from the mirror and opened his eyes.
"And there's nothing else? Can you ask further questions? Can you ask it to explain the options further?"
Rain shook his head. "The Mirror is helping me understand it, but it's… not human. I mean, it's not sentient the way humans are. There's intelligence here, but it's deeply alien. When I ask for clarification, it's just repeating the options - 'Enter' or 'Authenticate'."
Sabae shrugged. "We want to enter, right? To go to Earth?"
Now that the Mirror had failed to disintegrate anyone, or lock anyone in a timeless prison, Harry's heart rate was beginning to return to its usual pace.
Would 'Enter' take them to Earth? That didn't seem likely. If it was that simple, why hadn't more labyrinth travellers wandered into Hogwarts?
Then again, maybe it was only offering the option to Rain because he was originally from Earth. Despite the alien magic now surrounding his soul, at its core there might still be a remnant of the shell designed by Atlantis, acting as a key.
There was a way to test that.
"Zorian, can a simulacrum try? If it offers you the option to 'Enter' as well, then it's almost certainly not going to take us to Earth."
The simulacrum by Rain's side nodded, and raised a hand to touch the golden back of the Mirror. There was a long pause as everyone waited in suspense.
And then Zorian vanished. All of him - not just the simulacrum who had interfaced with the Mirror, but also the ones scattered throughout the room, and the original standing by Harry's side. They simply winked out of existence in a single instant.
Harry's wand jumped into his hand, and the others leapt into action too, but no other threats presented themselves.
Sabae's face was twisted with concern. "Did the Mirror take him?"
Harry raised a hand to stop her from charging into the Mirror immediately. "Realistically, there is a very good chance he was frozen in Time, or instantly killed. Even if the Mirror took him somewhere else - which I admit, looks possible at this point - then charging into the Mirror is the exact opposite of what we should do. There is some chance he has arrived on Earth, as desired, but there is also a significant probability that he has been contained."
That earned him a strange look from the others.
"Zorian is not from Earth. He is a mind mage of prodigious skill, with the capacity to create independently-acting images of himself, and no shortage of destructive capabilities. He is a threat. If the Atlanteans built this device to protect their home, they might have wanted to do so without indiscriminately destroying those who failed to enter. If so, there is a chance that Zorian is inside somewhere, unharmed but unable to act, or to reach Earth itself. If we enter, then we might be deposited in a similar protective zone with no ability to reach Zorian either."
Talia gestured questioningly. "Alright then, what do you think we should do?"
Harry's eyes flickered between Kanderon's Librarians and the Mirror itself. "I'm not sure. Rain, can you try the 'Authenticate' option?"
Rain raised a hand to press it against the Mirror, and lowered it almost immediately with a forlorn look on its face. "The Mirror… it's telling me I'm not safe, whatever that means."
Despite the inconvenience of that result, Harry couldn't bring himself to disagree. It was extremely good fortune that Rain was friendly - if the strange man put his mind to it, he could probably have exterminated Muggle civilization in a few days.
Harry stepped forward, face set. "I'll try."
He walked down the tunnel toward the Mirror, and walked carefully to avoid appearing in the too-perfect reflection.
He pressed his palm against the gold of the frame. It felt cool, as if its heat capacity was so immense that it wouldn't change temperature even if bathed in flames.
Like Rain had said, he could somehow feel the two options the Mirror was presenting. Rain's version of this interaction was probably a lot clearer, thanks to the system-built interface in his soul, but the meaning of the two paths still felt obvious, and he was interpreting them the same way Rain had.
Harry took a deep breath. How would the Mirror respond to the bearer of the Line of Merlin Unbroken?
Almost immediately, he felt the stirrings of a strange kind of intelligence, scanning his thoughts and mind as if he were transparent. And in less than an instant, he felt the response.
The Mirror was almost apologetic, in an alien way. He now understood what Rain had meant when he'd described the alien intelligence - it wanted to help. Not the way a human would want something, but rather the way a current wanted to flow between varying electrical potentials, or the way a stone wanted to roll downhill. And yet it was unable.
Harry knew why - the Mirror had told him.
Like Rain, he wasn't safe.
For a moment, he felt a flicker of regret. Then his conscious mind took over from instinctive responses, and he remembered the data points available to him. Phoenixes had passed through, but there were no other known examples of successful passage. In all probability, a lobotomy would be the minimum requirement for the Mirror to deem a human 'safe'.
Even so, he was still going to run the obvious experiment. One by one, under Harry's instruction, Kanderon's Librarians stepped forward, and placed their own hands against the golden surface, and one by one, they turned away. Each time, despite having known them only for a few days, Harry recognised the strange expression on their faces. It was a kind of regret. Not the kind one has when one disappoints a mentor or friend, rather the regret of disappointing ones' self.
Harry did not fail to notice that Alustin and Talia seemed less affected than the others. Alustin merely looked grim, as if he'd already known what the Mirror had told him, and Talia looked a little chuffed to be told she was too dangerous.
At this point, having exhausted the obvious courses of action, it became clear that there was little he could do to hold his companions back.
"Alright," Rain said. "Zorian is in there somewhere, possibly in danger. I'm going in. Would anyone like to come with me?"
Most of the Librarians nodded with confidence, and Harry couldn't help but put his palm over his face. "Are any of you familiar with the sunk cost fallacy? Whatever other possibilities there are, there is a significant chance that Zorian is dead, or otherwise permanently and unrecoverably imprisoned outside of Time itself. While rushing headfirst into the Mirror may seem like the kind of heroic action taken by characters in books, we are not in a book."
Harry didn't really expect to reach anyone with that, now that they were swept up in a display of heroic solidarity, but Talia actually seemed to hear his words. Her stance shifted to one of contemplation, and she tilted her head to its side. "That's a good point, actually. Are the books on your dirt-world any good?"
Harry gritted his teeth. "Maybe you'll get a chance to find out if you don't rush into the poorly-understood ancient artefact."
And yet, Rain was still moving, the expression on his face resolute. Maybe he had more confidence in the Mirror's desire to help, and thus didn't deem it as great a danger, maybe his interface had somehow transmitted a sense of safety and good-will that Harry hadn't quite parsed - or maybe the strange man was just under the thrall of the heroic instinct to protect his friends. Either way, he stepped forward, clearly about to raise his hand to press it against the Mirror, and -
Before Rain's hand reached the frame, Zorian reappeared. Not just his original form, but all of him - five nanotube reinforced simulacra included. He looked unharmed, more curious than anything else. He briefly raised a hand, examining it and finding it real - before he was submerged in a sea of hugging arms as the Librarians reacted to his return.
Harry let out a deep breath. Before he could even ask, Zorian sent him the memories of the last few minutes, and he sank back to silently digest them.
Zorian
Examining the Exile Splinter had been useful. Spell formulas had clearly developed in a vastly different way on Anastis. Given a few days or weeks to work with the device, the techniques used by Kanderon and the other creators of the device would have been useful additions to Zorian's repertoire.
He did not feel the same way about the Mirror.
His initial attempts to sense the internal flow of mana had been immediately refuted. The rippling sheets of energy surrounding the device had reacted instantly, swirling around them in response to his probes. It was as if he was trying to examine an object from all angles, and it constantly rotated and shifted so as to only let him see a single perspective. And that perspective was clear:
I will assist you.
Enter, or authenticate?
Zorian wasn't about to accept any kind of assistance from strange magical devices without more clarity on what it was offering. He'd pressed deeper, forcing more mana into his probes and constraining the movement of the Mirror in response. He'd tried to hold it in place so he could get a better picture of what he was dealing with.
And then it had reached past his defences, sweeping through his attempts to protect his mind. Not to destroy him, but to help him. It had found his desired destination - Earth. And it had taken him there.
The instant after he'd vanished, Zorian found himself in a small chamber, not entirely unlike the one in which he'd met Rain and Harry for the first time. This time, however, the walls were a soft white marble, lit with soft golden light by a series of flickering, floating candles.
In the centre of the room stood a simple and unornamented golden frame: the Mirror of Noitilov.
There was a door on one side of the room, but the wall next to it had been unceremoniously carved out to make an alternate entrance. The edges of the hole were blackened and melted, and there was no debris - Zorian was reminded of the gash the Fiendfyre had left in Artur's stone armour. He noted the angles and positioning of the Mirror - whoever had carved that pathway wouldn't have been reflected in the Mirror as they entered the room.
As he arrived, a series of complex wards fell into place around them. There was no visible result, but Zorian and his simulacra sprang into action to counteract their effects. Simulacrum Number Three conjured a layer of illusory information to foil a complex divination ward - probably a magical attempt to discern his identity. Simulacrum Number Two punctured a temporary hole in a field which seemed to be designed to disrupt the flow of outsider's magic, which reminded him of the shaping-disruption field he'd encountered on the train to Cyoria. Simulacrum Number One layered the boundaries of the room with a subtle dimensional barrier - invisible to the naked eye - to delay the flow of external magic into the room, and leave him with some more room to operate.
Still, the wards here were shifting and complex. There were layers of magic here that went deeper than Zorian could discern, and even now they were twisting at the edge of the dimensional barrier. Unless he took drastic actions to destroy the wards, he didn't have long before his protections broke down and he was at their disposal.
So he took a quick look around, memorising the space, and scanned the vicinity for minds. Finding none he could detect, he stepped back, and reached out to the Mirror once more.
I will assist you.
Exit, or authenticate?
So the choices were different from here? Interesting.
Exit, please. I would like to return to my companions.
The Mirror assented, and he was back, standing at Rain's side.
After a moment, Harry opened his eyes, having digested the memory.
"You were in Hogwarts," the boy said. There was a look of cautious optimism in his eyes. "The Mirror sent you to Hogwarts, and then it let you leave if you wanted."
Zorian nodded. "That was your home? Or your school?"
Harry was clearly deep in thought. "A bit of both, I suppose. You don't need to worry quite so much about the Hogwarts wards, I think. There are no records of the wards harming anyone, at least not that I know of. They're largely designed to protect students and inform the Headmaster of relevant goings-on."
That didn't do all that much to reassure Zorian. If the Hogwarts wards had anything in common with the Mirror, then he wasn't about to underestimate them.
Alustin looked chuffed. "So it worked, then! The Mirror wants to help, like it told us."
Rain nodded, and put an armoured arm on each of Harry and Zorian's shoulders. "It seems that way. Time to go home, Harry?"
The younger boy nodded slowly. "If leaving is as easy as it appears, then even if where you arrived isn't actually Hogwarts, it doesn't seem to be any more dangerous than the labyrinth. And we can't stay here for too long without risking another confrontation with the Fiendfyre, which we should avoid if at all possible." Harry nodded more decisively. "Let's go."
Their group linked hands, and stood together in a rough semi-circle, arrayed around the back of the Mirror. As one, they reached out, and touched their hands to the back of the frame. Zorian felt the cool golden metal, and despite the mind-shield surrounding his consciousness, he could sense the distinct and odd sensation of the helpfulness of the Mirror affecting his mind.
The options presented themselves, as they had before. Rain counted them down from three, and as the count reached one, he reached for the familiar trigger.
Enter.
And then he was inside once more, the marble room lit with soft golden light. Like last time, his simulacra were here too.
Alustin breathed out, a sound of relief. "A new world."
Artur whirled around, surveying the room. At the same time, Zorian's instinctive mental sensors swept outwards and revealed a deeply uncomfortable truth.
Not everyone had made it.
By his side stood Alustin, Artur, Talia, Sabae, and his five simulacra.
And that was all.
Zorian sighed. The wards were already trying to probe at his magic, but now that he was prepared, the simulacra were doing a better job at disrupting them. "Stay here. I'll be back in a moment."
He reached out to the Mirror, and asked its help in travelling back to the Labyrinth.
The limestone tunnels were empty, with no trace of the others.
He returned to the marble room, which held no more or fewer people than when he had left, and told the others.
Artur was already on high alert. A layer of marble armour had formed around his limbs, and he was stalking toward the room's single exit. Zorian hadn't spent a lot of time in the mind of the formidable stone-mage, but even so, his dedication to his son was clear. If they didn't recover Godrick quickly, Artur was probably going to start tearing apart castles.
Either the Mirror had rejected some of their group, and refused them entry to this place, or they had somehow been split up, and scattered elsewhere. Fortunately, Zorian had prepared for an eventuality like this.
He reached outward, pouring energy into a spike which he drove through the wards, leaving himself with an unbroken connection to the outside world. He couldn't hold it for long - maybe a minute or so, without draining himself dry - but hopefully that would be enough. He reached out, trying to contact his missing companions via the telepathic relays he'd constructed for them.
<Harry, Rain, are you there?>
Almost immediately, there was a single response - from Harry.
<I'm here. I'm with Hugh, and we're safe. I've been sent to Oxford, which is several hundred kilometres to your south - to my parents' house. I presume you're with the others, by the Mirror in Hogwarts?>
Harry's mind felt oddly calm given the situation.
<We are by the Mirror, but combining our groups doesn't account for everyone. I'm with Talia, Sabae, Alustin and Artur. We're still missing Rain, Godrick and Mackerel.>
Zorian tried again, reaching out to project the tendrils of his mind over as much of this strange new planet as he could.
<Rain?>
There was no response. The Hogwarts wards, reconfiguring themselves into a form better suited to suppress his magic, collapsed his spike of access to the outer world.
He relayed the information to the others. "Harry and Hugh are somewhere called Oxford several hundred kilometres south of here. Rain, Godrick and Mackerel are unaccounted for."
Artur stopped at the door to listen, then turned away as Zorian finished. More stone was pouring into his armour, which was growing in stature by the second.
Peering through the hole in the wall, Zorian saw Artur rip the next door in his path off its hinges. Even if he couldn't sense any minds within his range, it wouldn't do to have Artur start a war with the local government over a misunderstanding. With a sigh, he turned to follow.
Rain
WIth his palm against the golden rear face of the Mirror, Rain counted down for the others. On the prearranged signal, he reached out to the alien intelligence in the Mirror and asked for its help.
Enter.
The Mirror assented, and in an instant, he was on Earth.
Familiar walls rose up on all sides, although the space seemed far smaller than he remembered it. The bed looked different, and it was pressed up against a different wall. With the additional height from his armour, his head almost reached the ceiling. By his side, Godrick was stooping to fit into the small space, and Mackerel flitted around them in confusion.
The biggest difference between what he saw before him and his recollection, of course, was that his mother wasn't lying in the bed, slowly wasting away as he tried to care for her.
It took less than a second for Rain to put together what had happened. He turned to Godrick with a pained expression on his face.
"I'm sorry, this is exactly the kind of thing I should have considered when touching an alien teleporting machine."
Godrick was reeling, looking in every direction to take in every detail of his first visit to another world. "Where are the others?"
Rain grimaced. "I think that I've led us astray because of my existing connections with Earth. That's just a theory, though."
Godrick was still turning on the spot, taking in details of the shabby apartment and staring out the windows.
Rain went on. "While I was touching the Mirror, I was thinking of going to Earth, and I thought of here. I lived here for most of my life... This room is where I took care of my mother."
Godrick looked up at Rain. From the sudden change to his demeanour, it looked like he'd picked up most of the story from Rain's facial expression. "I'm sorry," he said, managing to sound genuinely apologetic despite his clear excitement.
That's a relief. I didn't want to have to explain.
Rain looked across the room. He and Godrick looked comically out of place in present-day Earth. Rain was wearing the Myriad Plate Tallheart had made for him, while even without his characteristic stone armour, Godrick's clothes made him look like some kind of medieval reenactor, or a ren faire attendee.
Not that they needed to worry about being found or interrupted, even though they were intruders standing in the centre of what was now clearly someone else's apartment, judging by the unfamiliar pictures on the wall.
Because, despite their location near the centre of one of Canada's larger cities, there were no people within Rain's Detection radius.
That doesn't make sense. Regardless of the time of day, there should be people around.
"Something's wrong. It shouldn't be this quiet. Come with me."
Godrick and Mackerel followed as he left the apartment and took the elevator to the ground floor. Rain gave the crystal spellbook a thorough scratching along the spine as a reward for its good behaviour. Godrick and Mackerel were both endlessly fascinated by the elevator. Godrick, reaching out with his steel affinity, fairly quickly figured out the mechanical components, and was particularly intrigued by the electrical power supply and control mechanisms. Rain attempted an explanation, but his heart wasn't in it, and his mind was elsewhere.
The elevator's still working, so there must be electricity. But where is everyone?
Mackerel, for his part, tried to eat the elevator buttons - but since they were set into the elevator's wall, rather than protruding, the angles didn't quite work out, and the spellbook couldn't do much more than press a few buttons by accident.
After a few Mackerel-scheduled interruptions, they reached the ground floor of the building, and stepped out under an overcast sky. In the year since Rain had been taken from Earth, it looked like not much had changed. Construction on the building opposite had finished, and the restaurant next-door had changed names.
The road wasn't empty - there were dozens of cars sitting stationary. A few of them looked like they'd been abandoned mid-drive, and had crashed into one another, or into parked cars. The city was oddly silent - the only noise Rain could hear was the sound of a few idling engines.
There were still no people. Nor were there any bodies. Beyond that, the space seemed perfectly normal to both his magical and mundane senses.
Rain's fingers were starting to tremble.
What happened here?
Despite their obvious excitement, Godrick and Mackerel could tell that something was deeply wrong.
It was probably time to do a more thorough search. Detection did seem to be working, since it correctly returned the positions of the nearby cars, concrete and food items.
"Can you wait here for a moment? I need to do a more thorough check of the city."
Godrick nodded.
"I'll be back in around ten minutes."
Rain stepped upwards, holding himself up with Airwalk. Despite the incongruous surroundings, his skills seemed to work normally here, and in a few seconds he'd reached the height of the tallest buildings.
The essence here was rich, far more concentrated that it was on the surface near Fel Sadanis, where he'd started his journey on another world. On some level, Rain wondered how he'd never noticed it before - how nobody had ever noticed it before.
It felt unbearably strange, to be here, somewhere he'd once called home, and for everything to be so different. Using his skills here felt improper, somehow. On Earth, people were supposed to get around with planes and trains and that sort of thing, not by expending magical energies to hold themselves aloft between eight-storey buildings.
Regardless, he didn't have time for that now. Pouring mana into Velocity, he began to pick up speed. It wasn't long before he found himself above what should have been a bustling square in the central business district. Some of the news-screens were still functioning, and one was displaying the results of some election somewhere - although the usual seats in which the anchors would sit were empty.
The square itself, both to the naked eye and to Detection, was devoid of humans - dead or alive.
Rain took a circuitous route back to Godrick, lingering above the university and the other locations where he might have seen someone familiar - his friends' houses (if any of them would have remembered him, which was doubtful) and his old school (which would at least have records of his existence).
A strange kind of fog was beginning to descend over Rain's mind. He'd spent so long in a world that seemed fantastical, and had often wondered if he was in a particularly vivid dream or hallucination. Now that he was back on Earth, it felt more like a dream than ever.
I'll give you this, subconscious. If this is your work, then you're being very creative.
A few minutes later, he landed near Godrick, who had popped the hood of an idling car and was poking at the exposed engine. Mackerel had discovered the car's radio antenna, and was repeatedly bending and releasing it, making an odd twanging noise. Godrick smiled at Rain as he approached.
"What's the news?"
Rain frowned. "Same story everywhere. The world seems to have been going on as normal until fairly recently, when every single human in the city vanished, presumably at the same time."
Godrick looked awkwardly at his feet. "Well, not that I'm not enjoying your company, but me da is probably getting worried. We should try to find the others."
Rain turned to them. "If the others went to the same place as Zorian, then I think we're probably very far away from them."
Godrick grimaced. "How far?"
Rain waggled a hand, estimating. "About five thousand kilometres."
Godrick said something that might have been a swear word. "Me da is gonna kill me."
Rain smiled sadly for a moment. "Honestly, I'd be more worried about everyone else. If there is anyone else on the planet, that is."
Rain rubbed his eyes. This was feeling more like a dream every minute. "I mean, I can only really guess where they are. I obviously should have asked Harry more details about where he lived and where he was from, in retrospect. As it is, I only have some very basic guesses about where they might be."
"Alright," Godrick said encouragingly, and Mackerel nudged at Rain's arm in what might have been an affectionate gesture. "Where do you think they are?"
Keep it together, Rain. There are people depending on you.
"Judging from Harry's accent, I'm pretty sure he's English. 'Hogwarts' is what he called his school, which sounds totally made-up, but I think that's just how they name places over there. From the memories Zorian sent me, that's probably where he is."
Rain pulled the telepathic relay from one of his pockets, and sighed with relief.
Godrick looked a little confused, then they both paused to wrestle Mackerel away as he tried to eat the thin metal disc.
"What is that?"
"It's a communication device Zorian gave me. If it works on this world, then it means we don't need to find Zorian's exact location. If we get within a few hundred kilometres of him, he should be able to contact us."
"Nice!" Godrick slapped him on the shoulder in encouragement. "So then we just have to get to this 'Britain' place, right?"
Rain half-laughed at that. "Yeah." He paused to think for a moment. "You have a steel affinity, right?"
Godrick nodded.
Despite himself, Rain grinned.
"This is going to sound a little crazy, but I think I have an idea that might work."
Not quite the same as an airship, but it's close enough.
Harry
As soon as his hand touched the back of the Mirror, he knew he was making a mistake.
Long ago, he'd once pondered the instruction, passed down in hushed words between precocious primary school students, not to think about a pink elephant. 'Resonant doubt' was the term that came to mind. If there was something he was trying to avoid thinking about, then there was little his mind could do to instruct itself to look away. In fact, his strong predisposition was to do the opposite. If instructed to avoid thinking about something, Harry's mind would instead seek it out, and try to understand this thought in its entirety, rather than distracting itself with falsehoods. It was why he was incapable of casting an animal patronus - his mind simply wasn't capable of looking blindly away from the truth.
Now, as he touched the Mirror, and it looked through him with its overwhelming injunction to help, he couldn't stop himself. He thought of the people he cared about - Hermione, Draco, Neville - and he thought about the places he'd left behind on Earth - the Hogwarts library, and the overflowing bookcases of his parents' house.
And so it was that he found himself, with Hugh by his side, standing in the living room of his parents' house in Oxford.
Every inch of wall space was covered by a bookcase. Each bookcase had six shelves, going almost to the ceiling. Some were stacked to the brim with hardback books, others had layers of paperback science fiction.
This was the living-room of the house occupied by the eminent Professor Michael Verres-Evans, and his wife, Mrs. Petunia Evans-Verres.
Right from the moment of his arrival, their adopted son, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, knew that something was horribly, horribly wrong.
Dust caked most of the bookshelves. The walls were different, too. On almost every wall, there were images of Harry. Framed photographs - mostly standard Muggle colour images, faded and yellowed with age, although there were a few moving pictures that had clearly been cut from the Daily Prophet.
Harry stepped through into the kitchen, reaching out with his carbon affinity. He wasn't sure exactly what his range was, but at this point it was approaching a few hundred metres.
He could sense the neighbourhood in surprising clarity. A scarce few trees dotted the back-yards of nearby houses, and a collection of graphite-based mechanical pencils were scattered across his parents' house, not to mention dozens of other items. There was one conspicuous absence, however.
There were no people. Not in this house, nor in the next. Nor anywhere within his reach.
Hugh followed him, looking uneasy, as Harry slammed open the door of his father's study. There, on the wall. Harry grabbed the calendar from the wall and gripped it tightly enough in his hands that it began to tear at the edges.
The most recent date Harry remembered was June 16th, 1992. That was when the Exile Splinter had taken him from Hogwarts.
His eyes weren't focusing enough to read the month or the date. He only needed to see the year, at the top of the page.
2020.
Hugh was saying something in the background, but Harry wasn't listening. There were too many problems to solve now, all at once.
He'd turned around to face Hugh, when a mental signal came through - from Zorian:
<Harry, Rain, are you there?>
Before Harry could answer, another signal came through.
<I'm here. I'm with Hugh, and we're safe. I've been sent to Oxford, which is a few hundred kilometres to your south - to my parents' house. I presume you're with the others, by the Mirror in Hogwarts?>
Harry started. It was undeniably a mental communication from himself, but he hadn't sent it.
At least, he hadn't sent it yet.
Wordlessly, Harry gestured for Hugh to come closer. He fetched a device from his bag, draped the chain around both of their necks, and spun the hourglass five times.
Harry's mouth was set in a grim line as the Mirror came into view. It stood here, buried deep within the labyrinth, the broad limestone chamber perfectly reflected in its golden frame. Harry had the strange feeling that he wasn't seeing another instance of the Mirror, or somehow looking at a copy. Instead, it felt like looking at the same Mirror he'd seen in the Hogwarts dungeons, just from… another angle.
The last time he'd seen the artefact, it had given up its hidden treasures to Earth's greatest dark wizard, and simultaneously imprisoned one of the only people who could have stood in his way.
This time, at least, there was less time pressure. This time, Harry intended to approach the Mirror with the appropriate level of caution.
<Zorian, stop the disc. Do not let us be reflected in the Mirror.>
The floating disc on which their group was moving jerked to a sudden halt, a few metres before they would have seen their own reflections. Sensing the tension in Harry's mental communication, Zorian gently moved the disc back around the corner until the Mirror was no longer visible. He then lowered it to the ground, and dismissed it.
Harry turned to face his companions. "The Mirror of Noitilov is one of the only surviving artefacts of Atlantis. It has power over whatever is reflected. I conjecture that it serves as the gateway to Earth, coalescing all other pathways into one, and serving as the gatekeeper."
Alustin scratched his chin. "How does it work? Do we just walk into it?"
Harry shook his head emphatically. "I strongly suspect that will not work."
Voldemort had sent the Fiendfyre surging into the Mirror to demonstrate its stability. It had wound up here. So it seemed likely that walking into the Mirror from Earth really would send you outside the Atlantean's sheltered homeworld, and into the labyrinthine multiverse in which he now found himself.
The journey back to Earth, however, seemed extremely unlikely to be quite that simple.
There wasn't a lot Harry knew about the Mirror - just what he'd been told by Voldemort. That being said, he knew of exactly one thing which had come from the Mirror into Earth - phoenixes. If the Mirror was in some way judging the alignment, or risk, of potential entrants, and the only known example of a successful entrance to Earth was phoenixes…
Although their sense of morality was clear to all who beheld them, the resplendent flaming birds really didn't seem to have agency in the traditional sense. They would call to those who might rise to the challenge, and empower them to face down dangers they would not otherwise survive, but Harry had never heard of a phoenix taking action on its own behalf, rather than acting through a witch or wizard.
At this point, Harry felt fairly confident both that the sign of his effect on the universe was positive by his own metrics, and that its magnitude was likely to be relatively large. That being said, he could only guess at the Atlantean utility function and the extent to which it overlapped with his own. Even though he was originally a native of Earth, it felt plausible that a device like the Mirror would judge him as far too risky, and refuse him entry.
Then what would happen if someone walked into the Mirror? Would it instantly incinerate someone it deemed to be a threat? That didn't seem to mesh with the general Atlantean approach.
"Would it be dangerous if I tried to interface with it, like I did with the Exile Splinter?" Rain asked.
Harry frowned. Dumbledore's exile had come as the result of a process he himself had set in motion - Voldemort had called it 'Merlin's method of sealing'. It seemed unlikely that a similar process would occur without deliberate guidance, and they did need to explore the Mirror's properties at some point, regardless…
"I think it should be safe, but I'm by no means certain. If any functions do present themselves, please do not use them without consulting with me first."
Rain nodded, and grasped the simulacrum by his side by the hand. "Zorian?"
The simulacrum nodded, and a moment later, Rain was on the other side of the Mirror. He stepped forward, and touched a gauntlet to its golden rear face.
There was a moment of silence, as they all waited to see if Rain would vanish, or be incinerated, or shout in surprise. He did none of those things, merely stood with his eyes shut, as if meditating.
Harry took the opportunity to turn to Kanderon's Librarians. "Now, if we do indeed reach Earth, there are certain things I need to make very clear. Earth is not like Anastis. War and violence are very rare, and the standard approach to resolving conflicts is to cordially discuss the matter. If that fails, it is to seek mediation before a neutral third party or authority. Under no circumstances should you use physical violence unless you are confident that lives are already in danger, and even then I recommend that you show as much restraint as possible."
Talia rolled her eyes.
Harry stepped a little closer and spoke again. "I would like to be perfectly clear. This world is under my protection. Any threats to this world, or to its people, will be dealt with. Is that understood?"
Talia met his gaze for a moment, then nodded and looked away.
"Secondly. The existence of other worlds is not public knowledge on Earth. Nor is the information I've told you about Atlantis, or the full extent of my own capabilities. If you encounter any natives of this world, please do not mention any of this. In fact, it would be best if you avoid conversation with anyone you might encounter, and avoid allowing anyone to see your abilities - let me do the talking wherever possible. I also advise that you continue to wear the dreamfire amulets at all times. Mind reading, or legilimency, as it's called on my world, is not common, but it is present."
There was silence, then Rain spoke. "I'm getting… something. It's not really like the Splinter at all. The Splinter wasn't crude, exactly - it just wasn't designed for anyone to communicate with it. It was like I was looking at the outside of a Mars rover, or something like that. The Mirror is different - it's trying to understand me. It's continually rewriting the interface."
A strange expression came over his face. "I think it wants to help me."
Harry turned to face Rain. "What do you mean?"
Rain furrowed his brow, clearly trying to communicate something very confusing. "At first, it was completely incomprehensible. I sent it a few signals, and it almost immediately adapted to my language and communication format. It's showing me two pathways - two options."
Harry immediately held up a hand in caution. "Don't select either yet. Can you tell what the pathways are? What options is it offering?"
Rain closed his eyes again and breathed in and out deeply. The air in front of his face was lightly misted with the condensation of his breath.
"One of them is 'Enter', I think. It's the one I think the Mirror wants me to choose. It's hard to say - the parts of the system that I brought here with me are struggling to interpret what the mirror has to say. I'm not sure what it means by 'Enter', but I think it would be safe to choose - at least, that's what the Mirror wants me to think."
Harry's pulse increased. "And the other option?"
Rain exhaled again. "Authenticate."
Harry swallowed.
Rain withdrew his hand from the mirror and opened his eyes.
"And there's nothing else? Can you ask further questions? Can you ask it to explain the options further?"
Rain shook his head. "The Mirror is helping me understand it, but it's… not human. I mean, it's not sentient the way humans are. There's intelligence here, but it's deeply alien. When I ask for clarification, it's just repeating the options - 'Enter' or 'Authenticate'."
Sabae shrugged. "We want to enter, right? To go to Earth?"
Now that the Mirror had failed to disintegrate anyone, or lock anyone in a timeless prison, Harry's heart rate was beginning to return to its usual pace.
Would 'Enter' take them to Earth? That didn't seem likely. If it was that simple, why hadn't more labyrinth travellers wandered into Hogwarts?
Then again, maybe it was only offering the option to Rain because he was originally from Earth. Despite the alien magic now surrounding his soul, at its core there might still be a remnant of the shell designed by Atlantis, acting as a key.
There was a way to test that.
"Zorian, can a simulacrum try? If it offers you the option to 'Enter' as well, then it's almost certainly not going to take us to Earth."
The simulacrum by Rain's side nodded, and raised a hand to touch the golden back of the Mirror. There was a long pause as everyone waited in suspense.
And then Zorian vanished. All of him - not just the simulacrum who had interfaced with the Mirror, but also the ones scattered throughout the room, and the original standing by Harry's side. They simply winked out of existence in a single instant.
Harry's wand jumped into his hand, and the others leapt into action too, but no other threats presented themselves.
Sabae's face was twisted with concern. "Did the Mirror take him?"
Harry raised a hand to stop her from charging into the Mirror immediately. "Realistically, there is a very good chance he was frozen in Time, or instantly killed. Even if the Mirror took him somewhere else - which I admit, looks possible at this point - then charging into the Mirror is the exact opposite of what we should do. There is some chance he has arrived on Earth, as desired, but there is also a significant probability that he has been contained."
That earned him a strange look from the others.
"Zorian is not from Earth. He is a mind mage of prodigious skill, with the capacity to create independently-acting images of himself, and no shortage of destructive capabilities. He is a threat. If the Atlanteans built this device to protect their home, they might have wanted to do so without indiscriminately destroying those who failed to enter. If so, there is a chance that Zorian is inside somewhere, unharmed but unable to act, or to reach Earth itself. If we enter, then we might be deposited in a similar protective zone with no ability to reach Zorian either."
Talia gestured questioningly. "Alright then, what do you think we should do?"
Harry's eyes flickered between Kanderon's Librarians and the Mirror itself. "I'm not sure. Rain, can you try the 'Authenticate' option?"
Rain raised a hand to press it against the Mirror, and lowered it almost immediately with a forlorn look on its face. "The Mirror… it's telling me I'm not safe, whatever that means."
Despite the inconvenience of that result, Harry couldn't bring himself to disagree. It was extremely good fortune that Rain was friendly - if the strange man put his mind to it, he could probably have exterminated Muggle civilization in a few days.
Harry stepped forward, face set. "I'll try."
He walked down the tunnel toward the Mirror, and walked carefully to avoid appearing in the too-perfect reflection.
He pressed his palm against the gold of the frame. It felt cool, as if its heat capacity was so immense that it wouldn't change temperature even if bathed in flames.
Like Rain had said, he could somehow feel the two options the Mirror was presenting. Rain's version of this interaction was probably a lot clearer, thanks to the system-built interface in his soul, but the meaning of the two paths still felt obvious, and he was interpreting them the same way Rain had.
Harry took a deep breath. How would the Mirror respond to the bearer of the Line of Merlin Unbroken?
Almost immediately, he felt the stirrings of a strange kind of intelligence, scanning his thoughts and mind as if he were transparent. And in less than an instant, he felt the response.
The Mirror was almost apologetic, in an alien way. He now understood what Rain had meant when he'd described the alien intelligence - it wanted to help. Not the way a human would want something, but rather the way a current wanted to flow between varying electrical potentials, or the way a stone wanted to roll downhill. And yet it was unable.
Harry knew why - the Mirror had told him.
Like Rain, he wasn't safe.
For a moment, he felt a flicker of regret. Then his conscious mind took over from instinctive responses, and he remembered the data points available to him. Phoenixes had passed through, but there were no other known examples of successful passage. In all probability, a lobotomy would be the minimum requirement for the Mirror to deem a human 'safe'.
Even so, he was still going to run the obvious experiment. One by one, under Harry's instruction, Kanderon's Librarians stepped forward, and placed their own hands against the golden surface, and one by one, they turned away. Each time, despite having known them only for a few days, Harry recognised the strange expression on their faces. It was a kind of regret. Not the kind one has when one disappoints a mentor or friend, rather the regret of disappointing ones' self.
Harry did not fail to notice that Alustin and Talia seemed less affected than the others. Alustin merely looked grim, as if he'd already known what the Mirror had told him, and Talia looked a little chuffed to be told she was too dangerous.
At this point, having exhausted the obvious courses of action, it became clear that there was little he could do to hold his companions back.
"Alright," Rain said. "Zorian is in there somewhere, possibly in danger. I'm going in. Would anyone like to come with me?"
Most of the Librarians nodded with confidence, and Harry couldn't help but put his palm over his face. "Are any of you familiar with the sunk cost fallacy? Whatever other possibilities there are, there is a significant chance that Zorian is dead, or otherwise permanently and unrecoverably imprisoned outside of Time itself. While rushing headfirst into the Mirror may seem like the kind of heroic action taken by characters in books, we are not in a book."
Harry didn't really expect to reach anyone with that, now that they were swept up in a display of heroic solidarity, but Talia actually seemed to hear his words. Her stance shifted to one of contemplation, and she tilted her head to its side. "That's a good point, actually. Are the books on your dirt-world any good?"
Harry gritted his teeth. "Maybe you'll get a chance to find out if you don't rush into the poorly-understood ancient artefact."
And yet, Rain was still moving, the expression on his face resolute. Maybe he had more confidence in the Mirror's desire to help, and thus didn't deem it as great a danger, maybe his interface had somehow transmitted a sense of safety and good-will that Harry hadn't quite parsed - or maybe the strange man was just under the thrall of the heroic instinct to protect his friends. Either way, he stepped forward, clearly about to raise his hand to press it against the Mirror, and -
Before Rain's hand reached the frame, Zorian reappeared. Not just his original form, but all of him - five nanotube reinforced simulacra included. He looked unharmed, more curious than anything else. He briefly raised a hand, examining it and finding it real - before he was submerged in a sea of hugging arms as the Librarians reacted to his return.
Harry let out a deep breath. Before he could even ask, Zorian sent him the memories of the last few minutes, and he sank back to silently digest them.
Zorian
Examining the Exile Splinter had been useful. Spell formulas had clearly developed in a vastly different way on Anastis. Given a few days or weeks to work with the device, the techniques used by Kanderon and the other creators of the device would have been useful additions to Zorian's repertoire.
He did not feel the same way about the Mirror.
His initial attempts to sense the internal flow of mana had been immediately refuted. The rippling sheets of energy surrounding the device had reacted instantly, swirling around them in response to his probes. It was as if he was trying to examine an object from all angles, and it constantly rotated and shifted so as to only let him see a single perspective. And that perspective was clear:
I will assist you.
Enter, or authenticate?
Zorian wasn't about to accept any kind of assistance from strange magical devices without more clarity on what it was offering. He'd pressed deeper, forcing more mana into his probes and constraining the movement of the Mirror in response. He'd tried to hold it in place so he could get a better picture of what he was dealing with.
And then it had reached past his defences, sweeping through his attempts to protect his mind. Not to destroy him, but to help him. It had found his desired destination - Earth. And it had taken him there.
The instant after he'd vanished, Zorian found himself in a small chamber, not entirely unlike the one in which he'd met Rain and Harry for the first time. This time, however, the walls were a soft white marble, lit with soft golden light by a series of flickering, floating candles.
In the centre of the room stood a simple and unornamented golden frame: the Mirror of Noitilov.
There was a door on one side of the room, but the wall next to it had been unceremoniously carved out to make an alternate entrance. The edges of the hole were blackened and melted, and there was no debris - Zorian was reminded of the gash the Fiendfyre had left in Artur's stone armour. He noted the angles and positioning of the Mirror - whoever had carved that pathway wouldn't have been reflected in the Mirror as they entered the room.
As he arrived, a series of complex wards fell into place around them. There was no visible result, but Zorian and his simulacra sprang into action to counteract their effects. Simulacrum Number Three conjured a layer of illusory information to foil a complex divination ward - probably a magical attempt to discern his identity. Simulacrum Number Two punctured a temporary hole in a field which seemed to be designed to disrupt the flow of outsider's magic, which reminded him of the shaping-disruption field he'd encountered on the train to Cyoria. Simulacrum Number One layered the boundaries of the room with a subtle dimensional barrier - invisible to the naked eye - to delay the flow of external magic into the room, and leave him with some more room to operate.
Still, the wards here were shifting and complex. There were layers of magic here that went deeper than Zorian could discern, and even now they were twisting at the edge of the dimensional barrier. Unless he took drastic actions to destroy the wards, he didn't have long before his protections broke down and he was at their disposal.
So he took a quick look around, memorising the space, and scanned the vicinity for minds. Finding none he could detect, he stepped back, and reached out to the Mirror once more.
I will assist you.
Exit, or authenticate?
So the choices were different from here? Interesting.
Exit, please. I would like to return to my companions.
The Mirror assented, and he was back, standing at Rain's side.
After a moment, Harry opened his eyes, having digested the memory.
"You were in Hogwarts," the boy said. There was a look of cautious optimism in his eyes. "The Mirror sent you to Hogwarts, and then it let you leave if you wanted."
Zorian nodded. "That was your home? Or your school?"
Harry was clearly deep in thought. "A bit of both, I suppose. You don't need to worry quite so much about the Hogwarts wards, I think. There are no records of the wards harming anyone, at least not that I know of. They're largely designed to protect students and inform the Headmaster of relevant goings-on."
That didn't do all that much to reassure Zorian. If the Hogwarts wards had anything in common with the Mirror, then he wasn't about to underestimate them.
Alustin looked chuffed. "So it worked, then! The Mirror wants to help, like it told us."
Rain nodded, and put an armoured arm on each of Harry and Zorian's shoulders. "It seems that way. Time to go home, Harry?"
The younger boy nodded slowly. "If leaving is as easy as it appears, then even if where you arrived isn't actually Hogwarts, it doesn't seem to be any more dangerous than the labyrinth. And we can't stay here for too long without risking another confrontation with the Fiendfyre, which we should avoid if at all possible." Harry nodded more decisively. "Let's go."
Their group linked hands, and stood together in a rough semi-circle, arrayed around the back of the Mirror. As one, they reached out, and touched their hands to the back of the frame. Zorian felt the cool golden metal, and despite the mind-shield surrounding his consciousness, he could sense the distinct and odd sensation of the helpfulness of the Mirror affecting his mind.
The options presented themselves, as they had before. Rain counted them down from three, and as the count reached one, he reached for the familiar trigger.
Enter.
And then he was inside once more, the marble room lit with soft golden light. Like last time, his simulacra were here too.
Alustin breathed out, a sound of relief. "A new world."
Artur whirled around, surveying the room. At the same time, Zorian's instinctive mental sensors swept outwards and revealed a deeply uncomfortable truth.
Not everyone had made it.
By his side stood Alustin, Artur, Talia, Sabae, and his five simulacra.
And that was all.
Zorian sighed. The wards were already trying to probe at his magic, but now that he was prepared, the simulacra were doing a better job at disrupting them. "Stay here. I'll be back in a moment."
He reached out to the Mirror, and asked its help in travelling back to the Labyrinth.
The limestone tunnels were empty, with no trace of the others.
He returned to the marble room, which held no more or fewer people than when he had left, and told the others.
Artur was already on high alert. A layer of marble armour had formed around his limbs, and he was stalking toward the room's single exit. Zorian hadn't spent a lot of time in the mind of the formidable stone-mage, but even so, his dedication to his son was clear. If they didn't recover Godrick quickly, Artur was probably going to start tearing apart castles.
Either the Mirror had rejected some of their group, and refused them entry to this place, or they had somehow been split up, and scattered elsewhere. Fortunately, Zorian had prepared for an eventuality like this.
He reached outward, pouring energy into a spike which he drove through the wards, leaving himself with an unbroken connection to the outside world. He couldn't hold it for long - maybe a minute or so, without draining himself dry - but hopefully that would be enough. He reached out, trying to contact his missing companions via the telepathic relays he'd constructed for them.
<Harry, Rain, are you there?>
Almost immediately, there was a single response - from Harry.
<I'm here. I'm with Hugh, and we're safe. I've been sent to Oxford, which is several hundred kilometres to your south - to my parents' house. I presume you're with the others, by the Mirror in Hogwarts?>
Harry's mind felt oddly calm given the situation.
<We are by the Mirror, but combining our groups doesn't account for everyone. I'm with Talia, Sabae, Alustin and Artur. We're still missing Rain, Godrick and Mackerel.>
Zorian tried again, reaching out to project the tendrils of his mind over as much of this strange new planet as he could.
<Rain?>
There was no response. The Hogwarts wards, reconfiguring themselves into a form better suited to suppress his magic, collapsed his spike of access to the outer world.
He relayed the information to the others. "Harry and Hugh are somewhere called Oxford several hundred kilometres south of here. Rain, Godrick and Mackerel are unaccounted for."
Artur stopped at the door to listen, then turned away as Zorian finished. More stone was pouring into his armour, which was growing in stature by the second.
Peering through the hole in the wall, Zorian saw Artur rip the next door in his path off its hinges. Even if he couldn't sense any minds within his range, it wouldn't do to have Artur start a war with the local government over a misunderstanding. With a sigh, he turned to follow.
Rain
WIth his palm against the golden rear face of the Mirror, Rain counted down for the others. On the prearranged signal, he reached out to the alien intelligence in the Mirror and asked for its help.
Enter.
The Mirror assented, and in an instant, he was on Earth.
Familiar walls rose up on all sides, although the space seemed far smaller than he remembered it. The bed looked different, and it was pressed up against a different wall. With the additional height from his armour, his head almost reached the ceiling. By his side, Godrick was stooping to fit into the small space, and Mackerel flitted around them in confusion.
The biggest difference between what he saw before him and his recollection, of course, was that his mother wasn't lying in the bed, slowly wasting away as he tried to care for her.
It took less than a second for Rain to put together what had happened. He turned to Godrick with a pained expression on his face.
"I'm sorry, this is exactly the kind of thing I should have considered when touching an alien teleporting machine."
Godrick was reeling, looking in every direction to take in every detail of his first visit to another world. "Where are the others?"
Rain grimaced. "I think that I've led us astray because of my existing connections with Earth. That's just a theory, though."
Godrick was still turning on the spot, taking in details of the shabby apartment and staring out the windows.
Rain went on. "While I was touching the Mirror, I was thinking of going to Earth, and I thought of here. I lived here for most of my life... This room is where I took care of my mother."
Godrick looked up at Rain. From the sudden change to his demeanour, it looked like he'd picked up most of the story from Rain's facial expression. "I'm sorry," he said, managing to sound genuinely apologetic despite his clear excitement.
That's a relief. I didn't want to have to explain.
Rain looked across the room. He and Godrick looked comically out of place in present-day Earth. Rain was wearing the Myriad Plate Tallheart had made for him, while even without his characteristic stone armour, Godrick's clothes made him look like some kind of medieval reenactor, or a ren faire attendee.
Not that they needed to worry about being found or interrupted, even though they were intruders standing in the centre of what was now clearly someone else's apartment, judging by the unfamiliar pictures on the wall.
Because, despite their location near the centre of one of Canada's larger cities, there were no people within Rain's Detection radius.
That doesn't make sense. Regardless of the time of day, there should be people around.
"Something's wrong. It shouldn't be this quiet. Come with me."
Godrick and Mackerel followed as he left the apartment and took the elevator to the ground floor. Rain gave the crystal spellbook a thorough scratching along the spine as a reward for its good behaviour. Godrick and Mackerel were both endlessly fascinated by the elevator. Godrick, reaching out with his steel affinity, fairly quickly figured out the mechanical components, and was particularly intrigued by the electrical power supply and control mechanisms. Rain attempted an explanation, but his heart wasn't in it, and his mind was elsewhere.
The elevator's still working, so there must be electricity. But where is everyone?
Mackerel, for his part, tried to eat the elevator buttons - but since they were set into the elevator's wall, rather than protruding, the angles didn't quite work out, and the spellbook couldn't do much more than press a few buttons by accident.
After a few Mackerel-scheduled interruptions, they reached the ground floor of the building, and stepped out under an overcast sky. In the year since Rain had been taken from Earth, it looked like not much had changed. Construction on the building opposite had finished, and the restaurant next-door had changed names.
The road wasn't empty - there were dozens of cars sitting stationary. A few of them looked like they'd been abandoned mid-drive, and had crashed into one another, or into parked cars. The city was oddly silent - the only noise Rain could hear was the sound of a few idling engines.
There were still no people. Nor were there any bodies. Beyond that, the space seemed perfectly normal to both his magical and mundane senses.
Rain's fingers were starting to tremble.
What happened here?
Despite their obvious excitement, Godrick and Mackerel could tell that something was deeply wrong.
It was probably time to do a more thorough search. Detection did seem to be working, since it correctly returned the positions of the nearby cars, concrete and food items.
"Can you wait here for a moment? I need to do a more thorough check of the city."
Godrick nodded.
"I'll be back in around ten minutes."
Rain stepped upwards, holding himself up with Airwalk. Despite the incongruous surroundings, his skills seemed to work normally here, and in a few seconds he'd reached the height of the tallest buildings.
The essence here was rich, far more concentrated that it was on the surface near Fel Sadanis, where he'd started his journey on another world. On some level, Rain wondered how he'd never noticed it before - how nobody had ever noticed it before.
It felt unbearably strange, to be here, somewhere he'd once called home, and for everything to be so different. Using his skills here felt improper, somehow. On Earth, people were supposed to get around with planes and trains and that sort of thing, not by expending magical energies to hold themselves aloft between eight-storey buildings.
Regardless, he didn't have time for that now. Pouring mana into Velocity, he began to pick up speed. It wasn't long before he found himself above what should have been a bustling square in the central business district. Some of the news-screens were still functioning, and one was displaying the results of some election somewhere - although the usual seats in which the anchors would sit were empty.
The square itself, both to the naked eye and to Detection, was devoid of humans - dead or alive.
Rain took a circuitous route back to Godrick, lingering above the university and the other locations where he might have seen someone familiar - his friends' houses (if any of them would have remembered him, which was doubtful) and his old school (which would at least have records of his existence).
A strange kind of fog was beginning to descend over Rain's mind. He'd spent so long in a world that seemed fantastical, and had often wondered if he was in a particularly vivid dream or hallucination. Now that he was back on Earth, it felt more like a dream than ever.
I'll give you this, subconscious. If this is your work, then you're being very creative.
A few minutes later, he landed near Godrick, who had popped the hood of an idling car and was poking at the exposed engine. Mackerel had discovered the car's radio antenna, and was repeatedly bending and releasing it, making an odd twanging noise. Godrick smiled at Rain as he approached.
"What's the news?"
Rain frowned. "Same story everywhere. The world seems to have been going on as normal until fairly recently, when every single human in the city vanished, presumably at the same time."
Godrick looked awkwardly at his feet. "Well, not that I'm not enjoying your company, but me da is probably getting worried. We should try to find the others."
Rain turned to them. "If the others went to the same place as Zorian, then I think we're probably very far away from them."
Godrick grimaced. "How far?"
Rain waggled a hand, estimating. "About five thousand kilometres."
Godrick said something that might have been a swear word. "Me da is gonna kill me."
Rain smiled sadly for a moment. "Honestly, I'd be more worried about everyone else. If there is anyone else on the planet, that is."
Rain rubbed his eyes. This was feeling more like a dream every minute. "I mean, I can only really guess where they are. I obviously should have asked Harry more details about where he lived and where he was from, in retrospect. As it is, I only have some very basic guesses about where they might be."
"Alright," Godrick said encouragingly, and Mackerel nudged at Rain's arm in what might have been an affectionate gesture. "Where do you think they are?"
Keep it together, Rain. There are people depending on you.
"Judging from Harry's accent, I'm pretty sure he's English. 'Hogwarts' is what he called his school, which sounds totally made-up, but I think that's just how they name places over there. From the memories Zorian sent me, that's probably where he is."
Rain pulled the telepathic relay from one of his pockets, and sighed with relief.
Godrick looked a little confused, then they both paused to wrestle Mackerel away as he tried to eat the thin metal disc.
"What is that?"
"It's a communication device Zorian gave me. If it works on this world, then it means we don't need to find Zorian's exact location. If we get within a few hundred kilometres of him, he should be able to contact us."
"Nice!" Godrick slapped him on the shoulder in encouragement. "So then we just have to get to this 'Britain' place, right?"
Rain half-laughed at that. "Yeah." He paused to think for a moment. "You have a steel affinity, right?"
Godrick nodded.
Despite himself, Rain grinned.
"This is going to sound a little crazy, but I think I have an idea that might work."
Not quite the same as an airship, but it's close enough.
Harry
As soon as his hand touched the back of the Mirror, he knew he was making a mistake.
Long ago, he'd once pondered the instruction, passed down in hushed words between precocious primary school students, not to think about a pink elephant. 'Resonant doubt' was the term that came to mind. If there was something he was trying to avoid thinking about, then there was little his mind could do to instruct itself to look away. In fact, his strong predisposition was to do the opposite. If instructed to avoid thinking about something, Harry's mind would instead seek it out, and try to understand this thought in its entirety, rather than distracting itself with falsehoods. It was why he was incapable of casting an animal patronus - his mind simply wasn't capable of looking blindly away from the truth.
Now, as he touched the Mirror, and it looked through him with its overwhelming injunction to help, he couldn't stop himself. He thought of the people he cared about - Hermione, Draco, Neville - and he thought about the places he'd left behind on Earth - the Hogwarts library, and the overflowing bookcases of his parents' house.
And so it was that he found himself, with Hugh by his side, standing in the living room of his parents' house in Oxford.
Every inch of wall space was covered by a bookcase. Each bookcase had six shelves, going almost to the ceiling. Some were stacked to the brim with hardback books, others had layers of paperback science fiction.
This was the living-room of the house occupied by the eminent Professor Michael Verres-Evans, and his wife, Mrs. Petunia Evans-Verres.
Right from the moment of his arrival, their adopted son, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, knew that something was horribly, horribly wrong.
Dust caked most of the bookshelves. The walls were different, too. On almost every wall, there were images of Harry. Framed photographs - mostly standard Muggle colour images, faded and yellowed with age, although there were a few moving pictures that had clearly been cut from the Daily Prophet.
Harry stepped through into the kitchen, reaching out with his carbon affinity. He wasn't sure exactly what his range was, but at this point it was approaching a few hundred metres.
He could sense the neighbourhood in surprising clarity. A scarce few trees dotted the back-yards of nearby houses, and a collection of graphite-based mechanical pencils were scattered across his parents' house, not to mention dozens of other items. There was one conspicuous absence, however.
There were no people. Not in this house, nor in the next. Nor anywhere within his reach.
Hugh followed him, looking uneasy, as Harry slammed open the door of his father's study. There, on the wall. Harry grabbed the calendar from the wall and gripped it tightly enough in his hands that it began to tear at the edges.
The most recent date Harry remembered was June 16th, 1992. That was when the Exile Splinter had taken him from Hogwarts.
His eyes weren't focusing enough to read the month or the date. He only needed to see the year, at the top of the page.
2020.
Hugh was saying something in the background, but Harry wasn't listening. There were too many problems to solve now, all at once.
He'd turned around to face Hugh, when a mental signal came through - from Zorian:
<Harry, Rain, are you there?>
Before Harry could answer, another signal came through.
<I'm here. I'm with Hugh, and we're safe. I've been sent to Oxford, which is a few hundred kilometres to your south - to my parents' house. I presume you're with the others, by the Mirror in Hogwarts?>
Harry started. It was undeniably a mental communication from himself, but he hadn't sent it.
At least, he hadn't sent it yet.
Wordlessly, Harry gestured for Hugh to come closer. He fetched a device from his bag, draped the chain around both of their necks, and spun the hourglass five times.
Constructive criticism welcome.