The storm finally broke that night.
Lightning crawled over the clouds like something alive, flashing the towers of Hogwarts into stark silhouettes. Rain came hard and fast, hammering the old roof tiles, filling the courtyards with silver ripples. The castle took it all in silence, the way it had taken war and death and resurrection another kind of weather.
Harry barely slept. When he did, the dreams were all balcony and fire and screaming stone. Every time he jolted awake, his scar didn't hurt, but somewhere deeper in his skull ached like a pulled muscle. By dawn, he gave up and dressed.
McGonagall's owl found him halfway through his second cup of bitter black tea in the Great Hall.
The bird dropped the note in his porridge with surgical precision.
He wiped off the worst of the gravy and unfolded it.
Mr Potter,
I would appreciate it if you could come to my office at nine o'clock this morning on a matter that is somewhat urgent.
- M. McGonagall
No explanation, no "hope you are well." Just that tight, controlled script.
He glanced up at the High Table. McGonagall was in her usual seat, spine straight, lips thin, talking quietly with Kingsley Shacklebolt. Kingsley being here at all was a bad sign; the Minister didn't pop in for tea and nostalgia.
Kingsley caught Harry's eye across the Hall and gave the smallest nod. Not friendly. Not hostile. Assessing.
Harry folded the note and shoved it in his pocket, continuing to eat.
If the world was going to start a new disaster, he was at least going into it with food in his stomach. He'd learned that much.
McGonagall's office smelled of ink and thunder.
The storm outside had rolled east, leaving behind low, sullen clouds. Light filtered through the windows in a tired grey. Bookshelves lined the walls, crammed with volumes that looked like they'd bite if mishandled. Dumbledore's instruments were gone no whirring, clicking devices, no spinning little planets in glass. McGonagall had stripped the place of most of his eccentricity.
What remained was a single, empty silver stand where the Pensieve had once sat. It looked like an altar waiting for a god.
Kingsley stood near the window, broad shoulders outlined against the dull sky. His deep purple robes were formal but not flashy. The gold chain of office around his neck looked heavier than it had in the old man's office.
Behind the desk, McGonagall sat, her hands folded.
"Mr Potter," she said as he came in. "Thanks for coming."
"You did say 'urgent'," Harry said. "Thought I'd better not pretend I lost the letter."
A corner of Kingsley's mouth twitched. "You look tired."
"You look like someone told you Hogwarts is about to explode," Harry shot back. "Which, considering my life, is entirely possible."
McGonagall's lips tightened, but she didn't scold him. That, more than anything, told Harry how serious this was.
"Sit down, Potter," she said instead.
He did. The chair was hard and a bit too low, which he was pretty sure was deliberate. Useful psychological trick: remind the visitor they were not in charge here.
Too bad that only worked on people who didn't have screaming Tower-cities in their heads.
Kingsley turned fully toward him. "We've had reports," he said without preamble, "of… anomalies. Primarily around Hogwarts. Minor, so far. Unstable time pockets. Repeating seconds. Ghosts acting strangely. That sort of thing."
"I've noticed some weirdness," Harry said. That was safe enough. "Castle feels… off."
McGonagall slid a file across the desk. He didn't open it immediately.
"Describe 'off,'" Kingsley said.
Harry shrugged lightly. "Malfunctioning magic. The stone feels charged some days. Yesterday a staircase moved before I got on it like it knew where I was going and wanted to be difficult. That the sort of thing you mean?"
Kingsley's dark eyes didn't leave his face. "And the storm last night?"
"It's October," said Harry. "Weather happens."
McGonagall's stare could have sliced marble. "Don't be flippant, Mr Potter. This is serious."
Harry leaned back in the chair. The movement felt casual. His muscles coiled tight.
"What are you afraid of?" he asked. "A few spurring ghosts?
Kingsley tapped the folder. "Read."
Harry flipped it open.
Inside were reports written in different hands, some messy and hurried, some neat and bureaucratic. He scanned quickly.
– A fourth-year Ravenclaw had walked into an empty classroom and seen it full of students and a younger Professor Flitwick teaching a Charms lesson. The vision had shattered like glass when she blinked.
– A Hufflepuff first-year had gotten "stuck" on a staircase step, unable to move for nearly an hour while everyone else saw him frozen mid-step. He remembered only a heartbeat passing.
– A portrait in the North Tower had begun speaking in a language no one recognized, then switched back, furious when questioned, insisting it had been "years" since it had seen this corridor, what were all these children doing here?
– A group of seventh-years had been practicing defensive spells on the lawn when the sky had "skipped", clouds reversed direction, birds flew backwards, a thrown stone hung in the air like it was waiting for someone to decide which way to fall.
Below that, Kingsley's neat handwriting.
Confirmed: localized temporal fluctuations. Not standard Time-Turner interference. Origin unclear. Potentially tied to castle wards, post-war reconstruction, or unknown artifact.
Harry closed the file. The room felt smaller.
"You want my honest guess?" he said.
"Yes," Kingsley said.
"No Ministry speak?"
"No."
Harry tapped the folder once with a finger. "Something under the castle broke. Or woke up. Or both."
McGonagall's eyes narrowed. "What makes you say that?
"Because Hogwarts isn't just stone and convenience charms," Harry said bluntly. "You know that. We all felt the wards go insane during the battle. You can't hit a place like this with that much magic, patch it together fast, and expect everything to knit back perfectly. If it had a core something older it would've taken the brunt."
Kingsley's face tightened. "You used the past tense."
He met the Minister's eyes. "Maybe the core didn't 'have' anything done to it. Maybe it's doing something."
McGonagall raised an eyebrow toward Kingsley. "I told you he would jump straight to the worst possible conclusion.
"He's generally annoyingly correct when he does that," Kingsley said lightly.
"Lucky me," said Harry.
Kingsley folded his arms. "The Department of Mysteries has been monitoring the Deep Time chamber for any signs of correlation."
Harry snorted before he could stop himself. "Ah, yes, because the people who broke all the Time-Turners are definitely the ones I trust to handle more time problems."
McGonagall gave him a look that said not now.
Kingsley didn't rise to the bait. "They report no anomalies in the Ministry's temporal facilities. Whatever is happening is centred here. Which makes this a Hogwarts issue first."
His eyes weighed Harry.
"And a Harry Potter problem, I suspect."
The air in the room seemed to thicken, like a ward weighing down upon him. Harry's skin prickled.
"Why would you think that?" he asked. Cool. Not defensive.
Kingsley didn't say anything right away. Instead, McGonagall opened the drawer and pulled out a second folder. This one was thinner.
She opened it, slid a photograph across the desk.
A black-and-white picture, somewhat fuzzy. It showed the corridor Harry had gone down yesterday, but the angle looked like it was from some security charm or enchanted portrait that was a long way off.
Centre of the aisle: Harry
His hand on the wall.
The stone around his fingers glowed faintly. Runes flared in a circle that most definitely was not visible to the naked eye. For a frame or two, his outline blurred-as if something else, taller and more rigid overlapped with him. A double exposure of a man in archaic armor, a serpent sigil at his throat.
Harry's breath caught.
He forced his face to stay precisely as unimpressed as it had been a second ago.
"Since when have you had someone trailing me?" he asked.
McGonagall's nostrils flared. "No one is 'spying,' Mr Potter. Following the Battle, additional structural monitoring charms were placed over the most damaged parts of the castle. Yesterday, at nine minutes past ten, one of those charms registered an energy spike. I reviewed the record this morning."
Nine minutes past ten. Pretty much exactly when he'd walked into the hidden chamber and touched the disc.
Kingsley watched him closely. "Anything you'd like to tell us, Harry?"
He thought of the Tower, of Azelar's ring, of the taste of command.
Such tales are, of course, superstition- he thought of the sentence in the book.
"Yeah," he said. "You should probably upgrade your security charms. That recording quality's rubbish.
McGonagall's eyes flashed. "Potter-"
"I went for a walk," he interrupted. "The wall felt weird. I checked it. Hogwarts freaked out. Not the first time that's happened to me. Or have we already forgotten that the castle once rearranged itself to let me get to a possessed teacher faster?"
McGonagall's mouth shut with a snap. She remembered.
Kingsley made his way closer to the desk, placing both palms on the polished wood. His voice wasn't loud, yet somehow it filled that room.
"I'm not here to accuse you of anything. If you were causing these anomalies on purpose, the last thing you would do is stand here making jokes about them."
"You'd be surprised," Harry growled.
Kingsley continued as if he hadn't spoken. "But I am here because, like it or not, you are a point of convergence. Prophecies, Hallows, war, Voldemort. Now the old wards under this castle are acting up with you at the center of the record."
Harry's fingers curled over the arm of the chair. "So what, you want to chain me to a monitoring device? Ship me off to the Department of Mysteries as a test subject?"
McGonagall bristled. "No one is chaining you anywhere."
"Then what?"
Kingsley's expression was one Harry had never seen on him before: not sympathy, not authority. Calculation.
"We need your cooperation," Kingsley said. "If something under Hogwarts is awakening, and if it's… choosing you to interact with-"
Harry laughed sharply. "Great. I'm a magical lightning rod again."
"-then we need to know what it wants," Kingsley finished. "Before someone else decides to use it."
That landed.
Harry cocked his head. "Someone else?"
McGonagall exchanged a look with Kingsley; he sighed.
"The anomalies are not the only thing shaking," said Kingsley. "The war left… gaps. Power vacuums. There are people, old families, radicals, ex-Death Eaters masquerading as repentant citizens who would very much like to get their hands on whatever is stirring here. And on you."
Harry felt a cold little thrill slip down his spine. Not fear. Recognition.
"The Keepers of the Line," he whispered.
This time, both of them reacted. McGonagall's eyes narrowed. Kingsley straightened.
"Where did you hear that name?" he asked.
Harry shrugged. "You're not the only one who reads reports." That was technically true: Hermione had ranted about them last week a group of pure-blood purists rebranding themselves as "traditionalists," lobbying for "heritage protections," and sniffing around every ancient artifact rumor like dogs.
Kingsley let his breath out slowly. "Yes. Them. And others. The Temporal Circle, for one. A splinter group of Unspeakables and independent scholars who think the destruction of the Ministry's Time-Turners was an act of vandalism, not caution."
"People who think they can do better," Harry said.
"People who think they can do worse," McGonagall muttered.
Harry let that hang in the air for a moment. Then he leaned forward.
"Here's my problem," he said. "Every time I've been 'honest' with the Ministry about weird magic, they've either ignored it until it killed someone or tried to weaponize it. I'm not thrilled to toss a possibly sentient time-bomb under Hogwarts into that system."
To his credit, Kingsley didn't bat an eyelid. "That system is different now."
"Because you're in charge?" Harry said. "You won't be forever."
These words came out sharper than he'd intended, dipped in something acid. For one frozen moment, the air between them crackled.
Azellar, somewhere at the back of his skull, gave approval.
There it was again - that little dark satisfaction. The thrill of pushing, of prodding at a fault line just to see if it would break. It all felt disturbingly natural.
Kingsley's jaw went tight, but he nodded. "You're right. I won't. Which is exactly why we need to understand this before someone less careful inherits it."
McGonagall's voice cut in, crisp. "Mr Potter. Whatever you found, wherever you were in that corridor… you cannot handle it alone. That is not a request.
Harry thought about telling them all. About the disc, the vision, Azelar-the book.
He pictured the look on McGonagall's face. On Kingsley's. The quiet horror. The scramble to bring in experts, to seal the chamber, to catalogue and classify and maybe destroy.
He imagined Unspeakables in black robes walking circles around the disc, poking it with spells they barely understood. He imagined the Tower offended, pushing back, tearing wider.
He could also imagine someone else clever, ruthless, patient, and the whispers of an ancient time-rending power under Hogwarts, and the steps being taken to reach it while everybody argued about committee jurisdiction.
He needed time.
"I'll tell you what I know when I know more," Harry said finally.
McGonagall's eyes flashed. "That is not acceptable."
"It'll have to be," he said, matching her gaze. "You dragged me into this office because your monitoring charms had a panic attack the moment I touched a wall. You think if you shut me out now this place will just… behave?"
The castle hummed faintly under his feet, as if in agreement. Or maybe he was imagining it.
"I'm not asking to run off and play cursed artifact games on my own," he went on. "Let me investigate. Quietly. Off the books. No Unspeakables, no committees, no twenty-person task force tramping around the dungeons pissing off whatever's down there. You get regular updates. If it starts looking like something I can't handle, you bring in your experts."
"You assume a great deal about what you can manage," McGonagall said, but there was a crack of doubt in her voice.
"Minerva," said Kingsley softly. "He has a point.
She turned on him. "He is barely eighteen. He has spent his life at the center of every magical disaster we've faced. And your solution is to what, throw him at another one?"
Kingsley's eyes held on Harry in a long moment.
"My solution," he said slowly, "is to acknowledge a fact I would very much like to pretend isn't true: the castle is already throwing him at it. We can either work with that, or pretend we have a choice."
McGonagall's shoulders slumped, only slight. The lines around her mouth deepened.
Harry realized for the first time how old she really was. Not in the wizarding sense she'd live decades yet, but in the bone-deep exhaustion of someone who had buried too many children.
She looked at Harry as though she was weighing one more risk against the thousand she'd already had to take.
"When," she said in a quiet voice, "not if, you encounter something you can't control, you will immediately tell us.
"Yeah," Harry said. "I don't particularly want to break in half again."
Kingsley nodded once. "I'll instruct the Unspeakables to keep their distance officially. Unofficially, they'll be sniffing. They can't help themselves. Consider this a race, Harry. Whoever understands what's under Hogwarts first sets the terms."
A wicked little spark lit in his chest at the word race.
He knew exactly what Azelar would have done with that. Use it. Turn it into bait. Let the others rush at an illusion while you worked in the shadows.
He wasn't Azelar.
He repeated that to himself as he stood, as he nodded, as he walked out of the office with the weight of two leaders' expectations on his shoulders and with the taste of old thunder on his tongue.
He wasn't.
Not yet.
It was midnight the first time he deliberately tried the disc.
He waited until the castle settled into that deep, strange quiet where the only sounds were the far-off shifting of stone and the occasional muffled thump of Peeves doing something illegal. He slipped the Invisibility Cloak over his shoulders, more out of habit than necessity. Old instincts died hard.
The corridors down to the hidden chamber felt different in the dark: the torches burned lower, shadows pooling in the corners like spilled ink. His footsteps made barely any sound, but he was aware of each one in a way that made his skin hum.
Upon reaching the blank wall, he did not bother with his wand this time; he pressed his palm flat against it, just as he had previously.
The cold rushed over him, but it was less of a shock this time. He braced for it, pushed into it, and stepped through.
It received him like a heartbeat.
Torches flared to life, their blue-white flames now much brighter. The air tasted of metal and rain. Even without his touch, the disc in the floor glowed faintly, silver veins pulsating slow and steady.
He stepped to its edge.
"Hi," he said, "it's me again."
No answer.
He exhaled a breath he hadn't realized he was holding.
"Okay," he said. "Ground rules. If you're going to throw me into someone else's memories again, can we try not to give me an aneurysm this time?"
He squatted and lightly touched the sigil.
There was an electric thrumming running up his arm, but the intensity didn't spike. Instead, the connection slid into place with a disturbing sort of ease, like a key in a familiar lock.
Images pricked at the edges of his mind. Not full visions. Slivers.
A hand, his and not his, on this very disc hundreds of years ago.
Voices chanting in a circle.
Blood welled into grooved channels and illumined them crimson, not silver.
The big, intelligent eye of a dragon stared through him.
He jerked his hand back.
"Right," he muttered. "Noted. This is… a lot.
He paced the edge of the disc.
"What am I?" he asked out loud of the empty room. "Worst idea I ever had in a previous life? A battery? A prison?"
The air pressed upon his skin, his body rushing toward a word not quite recalled but almost grasped.
Anchor.
"To what?" he whispered.
Time.
The answer wasn't a word so much as it was a concept, heavy and inevitable.
Of course.
He rubbed a hand over his face. "You were holding it together. The city. The… threads. And when you broke it…"
The shard of memory answered, unbidden. Dragons falling from a torn sky. Wizards unmade. The world cracking like ice.
"Aye," he growled. "You made a mess.
He wasn't certain which one of them he was referring to.
He knelt again and let his fingers drift just above the carved serpent. No contact this time. Just proximity. The silver brightened a fraction.
"Can you still do it?" he asked. "Bind time? Or is that trick gone?"
No apparent response. Yet the chamber seemed to inch forward, perked up.
He thought of the reports from the Ministry. Of first-year students frozen mid-step. Of the sky skipping. Of portraits speaking from the wrong century.
"Those glitches," he said slowly. "Are they… leaks? You waking up? Or… me?"
A small surge of warmth against his palm. Encouragement.
Not helpful.
Harry scowled. "Listen, if you are a part of me, we need to make one thing clear. I am not going to be doing the whole 'tear the sky open, kill thousands, rule for eternity' thing. That's off the table.
A pulse. Not warm. Not cold. More like…amusement.
"Oh, you think that's funny?"
Shadows thickened along the edges of the room. For an instant, he felt something-not outside of him this time, but inside-stretch, testing. An instinct, bone-deep, to reach out, grab those loose threads of time he could feel for the first time, faintly there in the air, and just. twist. See what happened.
The urge was brilliant, addictive.
It would be so easy, that internal voice whispered. Just a nudge. A small experiment. Slow a flame. Freeze a falling drop of water. You don't have to rip the world apart to learn how it works.
Harry closed his eyes.
He could practically hear Hermione's voice in his head, exasperated and frightened. Harry, this is literally exactly how every Dark wizard biography starts.
He took a breath.
"Fine," he said. "We start small."
He drew his wand.
A simple spell first. A base line.
"Lumos."
The tip of the wand illuminated.
"Finite."
Dark again.
He pointed his wand at one of the torches.
"Incendio."
The flame obeyed, reaching higher for a moment before settling.
Nothing unusual. No time distortions.
He focused, not on the fire, but on the moment of ignition. The half-second where magic bridged intention and result. It had always been a blur before, a thing you rode but didn't examine.
Now, he could almost see it.
A thread.
He reached - not with his hand, not with his wand, but with that new sense the disc had opened.
Softly.
The world narrowed. His ears filled with a rushing sound. The flame of the torch danced then steadied.
Literally froze.
Not like it had gone out. It still burned, orange and blue. But it no longer flickered. It hung in the air like a painted thing. The heat on his face stayed the same. No smoke rose. No wax dripped. Time around that tiny area had stopped.
Harry's heart hammered.
He held it, counting in his head. One. Two. Three.
A tremor shook his arm. Pain pricked behind his eyes. The rushing sound grew louder.
He let go.
The flame shuddered and snapped back into motion; smoke burst upward, catching up. Wax dripped rapidly for a second, as if making up for lost time.
Harry staggered backwards, gasping for breath.
The room buzzed. The disc thrummed like a contented cat.
"Okay," he panted. "Okay. That's… that's a lot."
Three seconds.
He'd frozen three seconds of time in a space the size of his hand, and it had almost given him a migraine.
Azelas had ripped holes in the sky.
Whatever he'd been then, Harry wasn't that now. Not yet. His body wasn't built for it. His nervous system screamed from that tiny experiment.
Good, he thought savagely. Let it hurt. Pain was a leash.
He was not going into this blind, though. That was what made the difference between him and that man on the balcony. He had the aftermath of the catastrophe stamped in history. He knew how the story ended if you treated time like a toy.
"Small steps," he said to the disc. "Tiny ones. No cataclysms. If you try to push me faster, I'm gone. I will come back here with Professor McGonagall and a demolition team and we will fill this room with concrete and basilisk venom, are we clear?"
An impression came back. Irritation. Amusement. Something like reluctant respect.
Yeah, he was completely and utterly losing his mind, bargaining with a piece of ancient magical architecture.
He stood, rolling his shoulders. His head still ached, but the pain was already fading. He could feel the temptation lingering, though. The knowledge that, if he tried again, he might be able to hold four seconds. Five. Maybe expand the area. A pocket where nothing changed unless he said so.
He pushed that thought away.
"Next time," he said, "we test what happens when I reverse something instead of pausing it. But not tonight."
For now, he had enough. He needed sleep. He needed not to bleed out of his nose on an ancient sigil and accidentally recreate some blood-binding ritual Azelar would applaud.
As he stepped off the disc, the torches dimmed a fraction, settling into a low steady glow.
He paused at the threshold, his hand on the air where the doorway would form.
"One more thing," he said. "If someone else comes down here someone who isn't me, what happens?"
The answer rolled through him like distant thunder.
They break.
His fingers tightened.
"Good," he said softly. "Let's keep it that way."
The wall dissolved. He stepped out.
He was not alone in the corridor.
The Cloak hid him, but his magic sensed the presence before his eyes did: a faint glow, a different rhythm in the air; someone standing in the shadows near the corner, just beyond where the monitoring charm's angle would catch.
Harry stilled.
A figure shifted, stepping into a stray shaft of moonlight.
Draco Malfoy.
Of course,
He leaned against the opposite wall, arms crossed, pale hair catching the thin light. His Slytherin tie was loose around his neck; his robes were half-open over a rumpled shirt. He was tired and on edge, and nothing like the elegant little princeling Harry remembered.
He was staring directly at the blank wall Harry had just stepped through.
"Thought I saw something," Draco murmured.
Harry didn't move. The Cloak billowed around him, dead silent.
Draco tilted his head, eyes narrowed. Then he spoke again, voice very soft, not quite aimed at the wall.
"You know, Potter," he said, "for someone who's supposedly trying to stay out of trouble, you choose very interesting hallways in the middle of the night." Harry remained still. Draco's mouth twisted in something that wasn't quite a smile.
"You're not the only one who reads reports. The Ministry's very worried about their favorite mascot. Kingsley's good at locking files. Not perfect."
He reached into his robe and pulled out something small. For a heartbeat, Harry thought it might be a wand. It wasn't. It was a coin. Heavy-looking, blackened around the edges. He flipped it once. The metal flashed. For a split second, Harry saw a familiar symbol engraved there. A serpent devouring its tail. A tower. An eye. "Interesting times," Draco said, watching the coin spin in his fingers. "Interesting people sniffing around them.
You should be more careful where you walk. Some doors don't lead back." His fingers shut around the coin. The corridor felt colder. Harry's skin prickled. Behind his ribs, deep, Azelar stirred, interested. He slipped silently past Draco under the Cloak, heart banging against his ribs, mind racing. He had no idea how Malfoy had acquired the coin, how much he knew, whether he was bait or spy or something more complicated. He did know one thing. The race Kingsley had spoken of? It was underway. And Harry was running in it with someone else's shadow at his back and a Tower under his feet that remembered being God.