Chapter Text
Glass crunched underfoot as Harry, slowly, made his way down into the carcass of the Ministry.
Wand in hand, he had held the carved end of the Elder wood enough to have worn callouses in his palm. An enchanted half-mask kept him from breathing in dust; a separate enchantment on his glasses kept his vision clear.
His other hand rests gently on pulverized stone walls, caked with the dust of mortar, stone, shredded wood and ash. The fire has been put out for a few hours now, but where it burned there are still embers of heat.
Few were left alive enough to risk dousing the bones of Wizarding Britain with water. Better to let it burn and flee into the hills.
Well. Flee farther into the hills.
Harry, however, is draped under the invisibility cloak, which he knows from experience can keep him hidden even from Muggle technology. When he figured that out, he wasn’t the least bit surprised. If the cloak could hide him from Death, why not from Muggle tech as well?
After all, they were creatures of death in their own right.
Harry worked his way down the spiral shaped crater, made that way from the countless floors of the Department of Mysteries collapsing in on themselves, until the very heart was revealed.
He’d always wondered why they put the Ministry in such a highly Muggle area. Why not move it out into the wilder areas, where magic was more stable, where the lay-lines ran through, where one could more easily access Hogwarts or even the Stone Circles of the Old Works.
Why have it here? Where it could be so easily discovered? Where it could be so easily destroyed?
Harry came to a stop at the bottom of the crater. There was a clearing here, a border where the ward magic had finally given up under the onslaught of a targeted missile strike.
The Veil stood before him now as it had so many years ago, a blackened archway of indescribable material, with an indiscernible covering that could have been described as a veil, if one were morbid enough to see it that way. Personally, Harry had always thought of it as a moth-eaten curtain like those that had been inside of Grimmauld Place when all was said and done.
Only, the difference between the Veil he saw now and the one that he’d seen when he was fifteen, was the crack. Right through the center of the keystone.
Harry stood there, watching the veil. It was late into the night by now. The smoke overhead hid the moonless sky, but that only meant no one would see him here, now.
No one would see him do this.
Harry tightened his grip on his wand.
The Ministry had been built on top of this Veil. To study it.
To hide it.
The Veil itself, however, was built on top of the Fissure.
It wasn’t the only one in the world. Harry had been to at least two other Fissures. He had worked to close them as well, not realizing at the time that while he closed those two it would make the others stronger—that it would make this Fissure bigger.
Not realizing at the time that the Veil was a Fissure at all.
It was obvious now, though. Harry could see it even without the use of a Seeing Glass.
Harry took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He lifted his wand.
The last time he’d stood before a Fissure he had been working to close it with twenty other mages and a runic circle that had been three days in the marking. It had been done during the one minute and twenty seconds of a total solar eclipse and half of the mages had sacrificed themselves to the magic of it, burning from the inside out in order to close the tear in their world.
The work that had been done then was all for the preservation of the world, both magical and muggle. It had been difficult and terrifying and painful. Harry himself had suffered from magical exhaustion both times.
Magic built up in his core. Harry prepared to cast.
“Ron, Hermione, Ginny,” his voice cracked, “Kids. I’ll see you soon.”
He flicked his wrist. The keystone slipped from the frame with a clatter of stone on stone and the two halves of the arch collapsed inward on each other. For a moment, nothing happened and the Veil continued to stand there, broken archway and fluttering curtain and all.
Then one side slid backwards as the other slid front and the curtain pulled taught. Runes, ancient and faded, red with blood and gold with magic, flared brightly and attempted to keep the frame in place. Silently, Harry cast another slicing spell and tore the veil in half.
The resulting crack of magic was soundless but deafening as the Fissure split open before him like an overripe pear, the skin of the world splitting open to expose the soft fruit inside. As cold air swept past him, blowing ash and dust back up into the air, Harry stepped forward, undaunted.
He moved through the rippling edge of the Fissure and tossed himself into the Veil.
Harry walked.
There was ash up to his knees. Bones of long dead beings jutted out, the only recognizable parts of the landscape.
On his shoulders he bore the cloak of his father, shielding him from the sight of the creatures of the Fissure.
In his hand, his wand sang, pointing him forward.
Harry walked on.
Marjorie Ann Greengrass had been an Unspeakable for sixteen years.
She’d gotten in on account of both her high scores of NEWTs and her Gift with Runic Warding. She’d applied because being an Unspeakable was the only thing her mother would permit her to be instead of married to Andrew Goyle and if she married him she knew she’d be a widow or he a widower within a year.
Marjorie Ann Greengrass wanted to live, thank you, and so she became an Unspeakable instead.
She had been working in the room just off of the Death Veil, working on her latest translation of the runes on the Veil—it was almost impossible to read them as just getting close to the Veil itself was asking for death. There were various wards on the floor to warn about intruders and people getting too close to the Veil—the last thing they needed was some Ministry official getting sucked through and vanishing away on some foolish tour the Minister approved of.
Three of those alarms went off all at once—the proximity one a meter from the Veil, the warning one of someone under an invisibility cloak, and one that Marjorie had never heard before.
Something had come out of the Veil.
Putting her work to the side, she took up her wand and hurried out into the main chamber. With the invisibility cloak in play, she was prepared to cast a person detecting spell, but it proved unnecessary as whoever it was in the cloak was caked in ash from the waist down, making for a strange image indeed.
Still, she lifted her wand and demanded, “Lower your hood and identify yourself!”
The figure stopped and turned towards her. She saw the cloak shift and thought she heard a general sort of muttering. Then the hood was pulled back and she saw a man.
Just, a man. Dark hair, green eyes, brown skin. Merlin, he had glasses on, and a face mask, which also had dust and grime on it.
“Any chance you’ll let me be so I can get a damn bath?” he asked her.
Marjorie stared at him. She’d been told what sorts of things were on the other side of the Veil. One of her colleagues had even made a very convincing argument that Dementors had come through the Veil at some time in the past. She had even seen some things that she’d had partially Obliviated from her mind because she couldn’t sleep with the knowledge of them.
And here was a man. Or at least, the floating head of the man.
“Identify yourself!” She demanded, “Who are you!”
The man sighed. He set his shoulders and lifted his chin. Marjorie heard the doors open behind her, the shuffling footsteps of her colleagues gathering up. The man’s green gaze swept over the whole room and he spoke.
“Hello all. You might know me as the Man-Who-Conquered, the former Boy-Who-Lived, or alternatively as the Minister’s biggest pain in the arse, the Bastard Who Refuses to Lay Down and Die or, my favorite, Harry Fucking Potter,” he spat on the ground with that announcement and then after a moment, added, “Unless you haven’t heard of me at all in which case, forget all that and just let me through, hm? I’m not really in the right head space for some questioning.” He lifted his wand and made a broad, sweeping gesture with it.
Marjorie Ann Greengrass had been an Unspeakable for sixteen years.
She stopped for a moment, standing in her workshop just off the main room where they kept the Veil. She tried to remember why she was here, at the door, rather than by her desk. What had she just stepped out for? Lunch? No, it wasn’t time yet, a clock by the wall said so. Her colleague’s notes? No… no. She’d gotten those this morning.
She patted her pockets down and noticed some dust on her sleeve. Or was it ash? Oh drat, had she not properly cleaned her robe since her floo call with the Swedish Runemaster?
Sighing to herself, she cleaned her sleeve with a flick of her wand and hurried back over to her desk to work on the runes she’d managed to copy from the Veil’s, well, Veil. It was such a dangerous artifact—nothing ever came back out that went into it and nothing good ever came out on its own.