Morning, after seeing her husband off to work, Petunia called her nephew to assign his tasks for the day. Dudlicus was still asleep, so she intended to send the freeloader into the garden to weed the beds.
But what she had planned did not happen, because the dark-haired boy who sat down across from her at the table looked at her with her sister's eyes, unobscured by his father's unsightly glasses, and she froze. Suddenly, realizing her intentions, she felt ill, and memories of her treatment of her own nephew began spinning before her inner eye. Meanwhile, his green eyes stared without blinking and continued digging deeper and deeper...
Suddenly it all ended, and she cried with relief.
"What, what was that?" she mumbled, staring at her fingernails.
"That is called spontaneous Legilimency, Aunt Petunia. Yesterday, when I saw you at the station, I was frightened by how you looked. You've all deteriorated, you all look sick..."
"That's not true, we feel perfectly fine," the woman objected, choking slightly.
Harry Potter looked around and was astonished—during all the time he had stayed at his relatives' house, every square centimeter of the shelves had been covered with framed photographs of the Dursley family. Wedding portraits of the newlyweds Petunia and Vernon adorned the walls, a picture of the couple with baby Dudley in front of the hospital, and many, many others.
Now the shelves stood empty. Some impersonal landscape with trees and either chickens or ducks beneath them hung on the wall. Harry did not wonder for long and immediately tackled the problem.
"Auntie, where are your photographs? There used to be dozens, if not hundreds, of your portraits hanging and standing everywhere here, and now they're gone. What happened to them?"
Petunia looked around the room's walls in disbelief, shrugged, and said indifferently:
"Why keep them around just so they can collect dust?"
For several seconds, the boy stared at the woman, failing to recognize his neat-freak aunt who adored her family. The woman before him had changed, and those changes did not please him. Suddenly, Potter's vision, overwhelmed by emotion, switched by habit, and he saw a dark cocoon of aura surrounding his aunt.
Since returning to Privet Drive, Harry had not yet met the neighbors and did not know what the aura of ordinary Muggles looked like, but he was sure it should not look like his aunt's. Perhaps it could be paler than a wizard's, or thinner, or less colorful, but not this muddy steel-brown color. A sharp membrane of almost mirror-like smoothness followed the shape of Petunia's body. Inside the cocoon, fibers of increasingly horrifying colors rushed wildly, twisted in an incomprehensible dance, and blended together.
But the most frightening thing was the umbilical cord—a thin energetic rope that emerged from the cocoon and passed through the walls somewhere beyond the room. Egg-shaped thickenings moved along the cord—lighter ones from outside, darker ones inward than the main color of the woman's aura.
Harry was genuinely frightened, and the primal memory, the memory of his "alter ego" Tom Riddle, whispered that someone had attached an energetic parasite to his mother's sister's aura, and probably to the rest of the Dursleys as well, in order to control them from afar. Not for their benefit.
He stood up and approached the woman, looking into her hunted, disbelieving eyes, once blue-green and now a vaguely murky color.
"Auntie, I can see your aura..."
"You freak!" Petunia shouted, but the boy, ignoring his aunt's outrage, continued:
"...and frankly, it scares me. You've been enchanted. I suspect not only you, but Uncle Vernon and Dudley as well. They turned you into a perfect zombie and are controlling you from a distance. Has anyone from the Wizarding World ever come to your house?"
"We don't need anyone from your lot in our house, we don't let them cross the threshold!" Petunia recited confidently.
Yeees, everything became crystal clear. They did not let them cross the threshold, which certainly indicated that someone had appeared here, and it did not take a genius to assume—and then correctly identify—who it had been. Some nimble fellow had waved a wand around the Dursley house "without crossing the threshold," while his snowy-white beard fluttered like a fan...
"Listen carefully, Aunt Petunia, and look me in the eyes when I'm speaking," Harry said in a lowered voice. "I'm going to follow this umbilical cord coming from your aura and find where it ends." The woman's pale lips silently repeated, "Umbilical cord, umbilical cord...?" "It may be some kind of object. I will most likely destroy it. At that moment, you, and perhaps Uncle Vernon and Dudley as well, may feel terrible pain, but it is necessary so all of you can get better. To keep you from thrashing about and screaming, I'll try to cast a wandless Silencio on you and my cousin, together with Petrificus. Pray that I can cast wandlessly, otherwise it will be more difficult."
He succeeded. Harry was quite pleased with the awakening of his primal memory, which did not burden him with unnecessary worries or an endless stream of memories under Tom's guise, but whenever a burning need for knowledge or skill arose, it obediently provided what was needed. Somewhere in the back of his mind, a quiet female voice spoke in a familiar-yet-unfamiliar language, and the fog of uncertainty surrounding what had happened slowly but surely dissipated.
Inside the garage, through its door, no fewer than four umbilical cords entered, and Harry wondered in confusion who the extra, fourth connection belonged to. The object—the generator of changes in the auras of the people at Privet Drive 4 and that unknown individual, who could be anywhere in the city or somewhere unfamiliar beyond it—was located inside the garage. It was fortunate that his uncle had gone to work and the room was empty.
Carefully following the trembling ropes, which seemed almost alive, the boy stepped inside and looked around. The energetic umbilical cords led him to an unpainted brick wall opposite the doors.
Using a wooden twig, Harry began probing the bricks around the spot where the cable woven from the four cords disappeared. The bricks shifted, revealing a round funnel inside which pulsed some silver apparatus connected to two transparent containers. The first, half-empty, contained a dark brown liquid. In the other, the liquid was light pearlescent, shimmering, and almost filled the container.
Not a chance! This was dangerous—explosively dangerous! How could anyone call a person a Muggle-lover if he installed a Schwartz apparatus in a house where two children lived? In a house located in a densely populated Muggle neighborhood? Harry, flaring with anger, remembered everything about this damned device, through which the effect of a Dementor's presence outside Azkaban had been studied. It should be destroyed immediately, but that would have consequences, the first of which would be an explosion. The destruction of the apparatus would release enormous quantities of energy that would leave not one stone standing in the garage and, with high probability, in the Dursley house as well. The houses across the street would likely suffer too.
Of course, the creator of the apparatus would be notified immediately of the accident and would rush over to investigate the problem. Most likely, that fool was Dumbledore himself. Brrr! The plan had to include a safeguard for Petunia and Dudley, the house—as much as possible—and it was necessary to come up with a version, so to speak, "for publication," something plausible that would explain the garage explosion to investigators—the police, the fire department, the insurance companies, and most importantly, to the Headmaster of Hogwarts and his followers.
Right, right, the most natural explanation would be a wall collapsing onto the apparatus and logically destroying it—that would play its role with the Headmaster. Muggles would buy a simple fire story as well—gasoline cans ignited by these two live wires and that was all. But how had the wires ended up dangerously close to the can? And how could the scenario be arranged so that a spark would naturally jump between them?
Harry left the garage and began looking around, searching for a solution.
The solution appeared in the form of a huge old birch tree leaning toward the garage. The weakness of birch wood was common knowledge, so a tree falling for no apparent reason was an ordinary occurrence, unlikely to surprise or puzzle anyone.
Looking around, and checking once more in an additional visual spectrum for safety, Harry made another astonishing discovery—the existence of a dome over the Dursley house.
POV Harry.
What I saw stunned me—the game being played here involved far higher stakes than simply winning a war against Voldemort. And I, during my time as the Hero of the Wizarding World (HWW), had been at the very center of the vortex, a kind of Maelstrom[1], the eye of the hurricane. The magical Britain expected Harry Potter to continue being the queen's pawn in the Grandmaster's game, and I—Tom Riddle or the heir of House Potter, whoever I truly was—was myself to blame for becoming entangled in all of this.
There was no need to guess who hid behind the Grandmaster's mask; my old memories combined with my current observations pointed to the image of the long-bearded Headmaster of Hogwarts. I had no uncertainty about that. But there was one "but"—why?
Why would an outstanding wizard who had reached every conceivable and inconceivable pinnacle of existence—Supreme Mugwump of the Wizengamot, Chairman of the International Confederation of Wizards, Headmaster of the only magical school in Britain—do this? In addition, he possessed worldwide fame, recognition in the field of magical science, the respect of the global magical community, awards, orders, and medals! Why the devil, after all that, had he embarked on this elaborate, decades-long intrigue that had led to the deaths of many good wizards and the downfall of several magical families?
Why? What was he so patiently and relentlessly striving to achieve?
Looking at the situation in the Wizarding World over the last eighty to one hundred years, only the blind and the foolish could fail to see the performance directed by Albus Dumbledore—for a single spectator, Dumbledore himself—according to his own mysterious script. A performance in which nearly every distinguished family had been assigned a role—even children had their places in the script.
It was worth thinking through all of that in detail, but later. Right now, the priority was eliminating the magical setup built in the garage and above my relatives' house—innocent and practically helpless people drawn into someone else's game by the will of malicious outsiders.
It was also worth spending some time thinking about the sudden manifestation of aura sight. Was it a hereditary Potter Gift, or was Salazar Slytherin's blood, with all the benefits associated with it, showing itself? Or perhaps the fragments of the Philosopher's Stone I had found in my trouser pocket among the folds of a handkerchief were somehow connected to this ability that had proven so fateful for me?
I knew nothing about my family. I was a pathetic ignoramus and fool. How else could I describe myself when I had spent an entire school year in a magical school with a library containing all the information about previous graduating classes and had not read anything about my parents or their classmates? My disgust at my own lack of curiosity and laziness was answered by a series of internal images in which I saw myself lying on one side before the Gryffindor common room fireplace, playing Gobstones with Ron, talking about nothing worthwhile, only competing with him in sarcasm and in throwing mud at Slytherins and Draco Malfoy in particular.
The moment I remembered Malfoy, the spectrum of memories shifted to our many clashes with the blond boy. I should not have done that. A wave of self-reproach flooded my mind so strongly that my eyes filled with tears. Lost time could not be returned, so all that nonsense—Gobstones, fights, arguments, insults, and mudslinging—had to stop.
I am Harry Potter, a well-known figure in the Wizarding World, the queen's pawn of a player whose true motives are unknown to me. I do not know whether he wants me to become a queen in the endgame or whether he intends to promote some other pawn instead, but he must not learn that I have already crossed an inner boundary and begun turning into a queen on my own.
Therefore, we do not need the Schwartz apparatus to explode.
First and foremost, we need to patch the holes in the protective dome over Privet Drive 4 that were gaping so ominously.
I need to have breakfast, calm Aunt Petunia down, and sleep for at least an hour so my delirious thoughts can sort themselves out and my mind can clear. In the dimensions of sleep, I will figure out this shield over the house, and I will be shown how to strengthen it so that not a single scrap of information about my manipulations escapes beyond the dome.
I must not forget, when I lie down on the bed, to take Rowena's Diadem out of the trunk and place it on my head, no matter whether it makes me look insane or not.
End POV Harry.
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