Chapter - 47 : Fraudulence Part - 5

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This time the ball was surrounded by a healthy glow that shifted through all the colours of the rainbow before they all blended together into a soft silver.

Harry giddily bounced in his seat and couldn't suppress a smile. It had worked. Those more adept would be able to tell by the colours if part of an enchantment was weaker than the others, but the rainbow and the silver glow were described as being sufficient for a beginner.

"Took you long enough!" Cassandra called down, neatly piercing his feeling of achievement. "I have foreseen that you will get hungry soon and will need to have lunch. Hurry up and start gazing already."

Harry gave her a flat look.

"What?" she said defensively. "Thirteen year olds can do what you just did, or they're supposed to after taking Divination. That you cannot is a shame and not in any way my fault."

"I suspect you were never the most patient of people," he said blandly.

She scoffed. "Instinctively knowing what was going to happen before it did? You betcha I'm not patient."

Harry rolled his eyes, but nevertheless picked up the book again, flipping the pages backwards until he once again reached the instructions for a successful viewing.

"Okay, Divining is real and I believe that I can do it," he muttered, trying to psyche himself up.

"Are you sure?" the portrait called down sarcastically and Harry instinctively retaliated with a Silencing Charm.

Ignoring Cassandra's apologetic expression he took out his wand and breathed in deeply. With a confident movement born from almost eight years of wand-wielding Harry tapped the crystal ball.

"Iungo," he said softly, before dragging the tip of his wand – now carrying a taut dull golden thread – from the ball to his forehead. There, he tapped it an inch above the bridge of his nose, the location of his third – or 'inner' – eye.

Suddenly he was aware of something, some kind of presence that was half in his forehead and half in his mind, like a tiny amount of pressure between his ears that gave him an epiphany. The thread lit up until it was a bright gold before disappearing, though the awareness remained.

"Whoa," he breathed. That felt weird.

Laying his wand aside he focussed his eyes completely on the crystal ball and leaned forward until it filled his vision.

He stared.

After a few seconds he started feeling a little silly, but ruthlessly suppressed it and instead leaned even father forward, until he could almost cup the ball in his hands. With the lightest of touches both hands connected to the ball at the same time.

A rush of images crossed his vision in a second, much too quickly to recognise anything. It forced him to blink and when he opened his eyes he was just seeing a crystal ball again.

His mouth fell open.

"I saw something," he whispered, awed. Faintly, he realised he also had a bit of a headache.

Almost high on a heady feeling of achievement he slumped backwards in his seat. Just before his back hit the chair the golden thread connecting his forehead to the crystal ball reappeared, only to snap with a soft tinkling sound of broken glass. It immediately dissipated, as did much of the headache.

Cassandra was badly miming something up on the wall and he rolled his eyes as he cancelled the spell on her.

"Thank you," she said gratefully. "What did you see?"

"No idea," Harry said, still a little awed. He shook his head slightly. "Should I try again?" he asked, already reaching with his wand for the crystal ball.

"No!" she barked out and Harry stilled in mid-motion. "Don't you know that you cannot repeat a vision?"

Harry shook his head.

"Oh. Well you can never repeat a vision," she said sagely.

"Why not?" he asked, regretting it instantly. "You know what, never mind. Can I watch it again in a pensieve?"

"That's one of the reasons why the things were invented, actually. Until you get up to scratch on the Mind Arts and acquire the mental focus necessary to hold a vision in place for any length of time you're going to be stuck using one."

Harry smiled widely. "Then it's good the Room can create one, isn't it?"

A grand sweeping gesture with his arm drew her attention to a marble pedestal holding a familiar pensieve that hadn't been there before.

"Be right back," he called before diving in head-first.

Just like all the other memories he had reviewed, this one was cloudy and about as clear as he could see without his glasses. It was good enough to be able to see what was going on, though and he watched with interest as his memory-self leant forward and grabbed the crystal ball with both hands.

"Strigo," he barked, casting the spell to pause the pensieve. Everything stilled and he walked up to his memory-self to peer over his shoulder.

All the blood left his face and his hands clenched into fists.

There, in the crystal ball – hazy but nevertheless distinguishable – was a wrinkled hand with blackened veins on a bed of white smoke. On the ring-finger sat a gaudy gold ring with a stone in which was carved a very familiar symbol: a circle inside a triangle, bisected by a line.

Shakily Harry exited the pensieve and stumbled for the chair.

"What is it?" Cassandra asked curiously. "What did you see? Was it-"

The Room understood his need for solitude and vanished the portrait from the wall mid-sentence leaving him alone to think in silence.

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