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Hermione and Snape were still frozen in shock.
Not far away, the bronze door began to stir again. Its chaotic vortex spun once more, and from the swirling mist, a familiar figure took shape, long silver beard, half-moon spectacles, the faint shimmer of starlight dancing on purple robes. When the other Dumbledore stepped out of the fog, the air in the Forbidden Forest grew thick and heavy once more, like the forest itself was holding its breath.
"How… how can there be another Dumbledore?" Hermione whispered, disbelief widening her eyes.
But Snape said nothing. For once, he had no sharp remark, no answer ready. The scene before them defied even his understanding, and though he would never admit it aloud, something about this was deeply, viscerally wrong.
Silence settled over them. And in that silence, the real Albus Dumbledore did not look surprised at all.
"Are they going to fight again?" Hermione's voice cracked slightly. Her wand shook in her hand. The battle she had just witnessed had already left her pale and trembling, feeling so small, so utterly mortal in the face of the unimaginable. She had only just begun to breathe again when, horrifyingly, it all seemed to be starting over.
From the bronze door, the other Dumbledore stepped forward.
Hermione's breath hitched. The night wind stilled, the world itself seeming to shrink around the two old wizards standing across from one another. Moonlight drew a silver line between them, as though dividing truth from illusion.
Snape's expression shifted, tension flickering through every movement, his nerves wound tight as steel wire.
They were going to fight. Hermione trembled. And though he hid it better, so did Snape.
He masked his fear behind a cold, blank stare, the expression of a man who had learned to keep his emotions buried deep. He turned to Dumbledore, expecting him to raise his wand…
…but the Headmaster stood perfectly still.
Across from them, the Dumbledore who had emerged from the bronze gate smiled faintly.
"Don't be nervous, Severus. You're safe… for now. I won't attack," He said gently. "I know it would be pointless. I'm sorry I frightened you."
His tone was soft, reassuring even, and that made it worse.
"To kill you was never my intent. It was simply the choice I had to make… to escape. But now, that choice is gone."
His words carried no malice. In fact, they sounded exactly like the real Dumbledore, so much so that Snape felt the hair on his arms rise. There was no trace of imitation, no distortion. If you closed your eyes, you would swear it was truly him.
"I never fight a battle I know I'll lose," The false Dumbledore continued quietly.
That was when it became clear, this was no simple illusion, no conjured copy. He was something else entirely. Each time he had perished, he had remembered. The real Dumbledore regarded him steadily, then took a slow step forward. The hem of his robes brushed across the scorched ground.
"So… you've kept your memories," He murmured. "Does this door truly bring you back?"
His eyes turned toward the massive bronze gate, studying the intricate runes etched into its surface. Even he, Albus Dumbledore, perhaps the greatest wizard of the age, could only make sense of fragments.
If young Ian had been there, he might have realized the truth: the runes' mystery wasn't his own ignorance; it was the sheer impossibility of understanding them.
Even Dumbledore, with a lifetime of knowledge and a century of wisdom, could not fully decipher the language of that door.
It was a humbling thought.
Who could have created such a thing? What mind could have conceived magic so ancient, so vast?
Even a hundred lifetimes of study might not be enough. And though Dumbledore's pride had always walked hand in hand with his intellect, he had no illusions about his limits.
He was not being vain.
He was being honest.
For in all history, he knew of only one person whose brilliance had ever truly outshone his own. And even that person, he suspected, had never been entirely human.
Dumbledore's confidence came not from arrogance, but from understanding.
He knew exactly who he was, and how far his limits reached.
No true wizard would mistake that kind of self-knowledge for pride.
Ian certainly wouldn't. In fact, he might have agreed with him more than anyone.
From his youth, Albus Dumbledore had been a prodigy, brilliant, daring, and far ahead of his time. In his age, he became the guardian of the magical world. Even past a hundred, he still stood toe to toe with Voldemort, the darkest wizard of the modern era. His command of magic spanned nearly every known discipline.
He had long since outgrown his age… just as Merlin once had.
The only difference between them, Dumbledore sometimes mused, was timing. Merlin had been born into an age that still believed in wonder. Dumbledore, in contrast, had lived in a time that demanded restraint.
He didn't think himself lesser. Given the same beginning, he might have become Merlin's equal, perhaps even his rival.
And that was precisely why the bronze gate before him fascinated him so deeply.
To create something like this, he thought, would require either the combined genius of countless generations… or the work of one mind that had lived for centuries.
Either way, it was not a thing of this age.
"What an astonishing creation," he murmured, his eyes gleaming like deep water catching the light.
But even the greatest minds were not omniscient.
For all his brilliance, Dumbledore could see only fragments of the bronze gate's true nature. Its secrets ran far deeper than even his understanding could reach, and so he turned to the one being who might know more.
Himself.
Neither of the two Dumbledores raised a wand. Neither looked ready to attack.
Just as the version that had stepped from the gate had said: he understood himself too well. And if they truly shared the same mind, then each would know the other's next move.
That, at least, was one certainty left in this strange, shifting reality.
"One question for one question," The Dumbledore from the gate said quietly.
The wand in his hand caught the moonlight, a perfect twin of the Elder Wand. Snape's sharp eyes darted between them. Hermione, still too young to grasp the depth of what she was seeing, didn't understand the impossibility before her.
But Snape did.
If the bronze door could replicate the Elder Wand, one of the Deathly Hallows themselves, then everything the magical world believed about reality… was wrong.
And so he stayed silent, expression unreadable, but every sense alert, listening for anything that might explain what was happening.
(To Be Continued…)