“Run!” said Harry Potter, turning his head half-back to look at Draco. The silver moonlight gleamed on his face. “Run, Draco! I’ll hold it off!”
“You can’t fight that thing alone!” Draco cried aloud. A nausea was in his stomach, a churning sensation that, looking back in memory, seemed both like and unlike a sense of guilt, as though it had the sensations but not quite all of the emotion.
“I must,” Harry Potter said grimly. “Go!”
“Harry, I—I’m sorry, for everything—I” Though later, looking back, Draco couldn’t quite remember what he’d meant to apologize for, maybe it’d been that he was planning to overthow Harry’s conspiracy, all that time ago.
The seething figure, now seeming blacker and more terrible, rose up into the air, hovering off the ground.
“GO!” shouted Harry.
Draco turned and fled headlong into the woods,with the branches whipping at his face. Behind him, Draco heard another terrible hiss, and Harry’s voice rising, crying something that Draco couldn’t make out from the distance; Draco turned his head for only an instant to look back, and in that moment ran into something, hitting his head HARD, and blacked out.
Harry held a tight grip on his wand, a Prismatic Sphere glowing around him. He stared levelly at the seething, blurring form in front of him, and said, “What on Earth are you doing?”
The seething blurs resolved, reformed, relaxed back into a hooded form. Whatever concealment had been at work—a device rather than a Charm, Harry guessed, since the magic had been able to affect him—had prevented his mind from recognizing the shape or even that the shape was human. But it hadn’t prevented Harry from recognizing the sharp sense of doom.
Professor Quirrell stood straight with silver blood all down the front of his enshrouding black cloak, and gave a sigh, looking at the fallen forms of three Aurors, Tracey Davis, Draco Malfoy, and Professor McGonagall. “I had honestly thought,” Professor Quirrell murmured, “that I jammed that mirror without alarm. What were two first-year Slytherins doing alone in the Forbidden Forest? Mr. Malfoy has more sense than this… What a fiasco.”
Harry didn’t answer. The sense of doom was as strong as Harry could ever remember feeling it, a feeling of power in the air so great that it was almost tangible. Some part of him was still viscerally shocked at how fast the shields surrounding the Aurors had been torn apart. He almost hadn’t been able to see the successive lashes of color which had torn away the shields like tissue paper. It made the duel Professor Quirrell had fought against the Auror in Azkaban look like a mockery, a child’s game—though Professor Quirrell had claimed, then, that if he’d fought for real the Auror would have been dead in seconds; and Harry knew now that this was also true.
Just how high did the power ladder go?
“I take it,” Harry said, managing to keep his voice steady, “that your eating unicorns has something to do with why you’ll get fired from the Defense Professor position. I don’t suppose you’d care to explain in considerable detail?”
Professor Quirrell looked at him. The almost tangible sense of power in the air seemed to diminish, drawing back into the Defense Professor. “I shall indeed explain myself,” the Defense Professor said. “I need to cast a few Memory Charms first, and then we may go off and discuss it, for it would not be wise for me to stay. You will return to this time later, as I know.”
Harry willed himself to be able to see through the Cloak he had mastered; and knew that another Harry stood beside him, hidden by his own Deathly Hallow. Harry then told his Cloak to hide himself from himself once more, and it did; being able to perceive your future self meant having to match the memory later.
Harry’s own voice said, then, sounding strange in present-Harry’s ears, “He has a surprisingly good explanation.”
Present-Harry remembered the words as best he could. Nothing more was said between them.
Professor Quirrell walked to Draco’s form, and chanted the spell of the False Memory Charm. The Defense Professor stood there for perhaps a minute, seemingly lost to the world.
Harry had been studying Obliviations, these last couple of weeks— though he couldn’t have helped cast the spells, unless he was willing to exhaust himself almost completely, and for some reason they wanted an Auror to lose every single life memory involving the color blue. But Harry had some idea, now, of the concentration which the far more difficult False Memory Charm entailed. You had to try to live the other person’s entire life inside your own head, at least if you wanted to create the False Memories with less than a sixteen-to-one slowdown as you separately crafted sixteen major tracks of memory. It might have been quiet, there might have been no outward sign; but Harry knew something of the difficulties now, and he knew to be impressed.
Professor Quirrell finished, and moved on to Tracey Davis, then the three Aurors, and finally Professor McGonagall. Harry waited, but future Harry made no protest. It was possible that even Professor McGonagall, if she’d been awake, wouldn’t have protested. It was not yet the Ides of May, and apparently there would be a surprisingly good explanation.
With a gesture, Draco’s stunned body was lifted, and sent a short distance into the woods, before being carefully deposited on the ground. Then a final gesture from Professor Quirrell ripped a huge chunk out of the unicorn’s side, leaving behind ragged edges; the raw meat hovered in the air, then wavered in Vanishment and was gone.
“Done,” Professor Quirrell said. “I must depart this place now, Mr. Potter. Come with me, and remain here.”
Professor Quirrell strode away, and Harry followed and remained behind.
They walked through the woods in silence for a time, before Harry heard faint voices in the distance. The next set of Aurors, presumably, after the first set had fallen out of contact. What his future self was saying, Harry didn’t know.
“They won’t detect us, nor hear our speech,” said Professor Quirrell. The sense of power and doom around the Defense Professor was still strong. The man seated himself on a tree stump, one where the light of the almost-full moon fell full on him. “I should first say that when you speak to the Aurors, in the future, you should tell them that you frightened away the seething dark, the same as you did that Dementor. It is what Mr. Malfoy will remember seeing.” Professor Quirrell gave a small sigh. “It may cause some alarm, if they conclude that some horror kin to Dementors, and strong enough to break the Aurors’ shields, is loose in the Forbidden Forest. But I could not think of what else to do. If the forest is better-guarded after this—but with any luck I have already consumed what I need. Would you mind telling me how you arrived so quickly? How did you know Mr. Malfoy was in trouble?”
After Captain Brodski had learned that Draco Malfoy was in the Forbidden Forest, seemingly in the company of Rubeus Hagrid, Brodski had begun inquiring to find out who had authorized this, and had still been unable to find out when Draco Malfoy had missed check-in. Despite
Harry’s protests, the Auror Captain, who was authorized to know about
Time-Turners, had refused to allow deployment to before the time of the missed check-in; there were standard procedures involving Time. But Brodski had given Harry written orders allowing him to go back and deploy an Auror trio to arrive one second after the missed check-in time. There had been a Patronus Charm to locate Draco, which Harry had successfully willed to take the form of a ball of pure silver light, and the flight of Aurors had arrived on time to the second.
“I’m afraid I couldn’t say,” Harry replied evenly. Professor Quirrell was still a major suspect, and it was good for him not to know the details.