Chapter 291: Shades of Crimson
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I tend to upload drafts of early chapters on there to get people's opinions of them so you can read up to 20 chapters ahead as a bonus.
I would like to thank my beta, Awdyr, for his help in this chapter.
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23 November 1994, Rome, Italy
Harry Potter was on a mission… He needed to find out who the girl who was sacrificed in the ritual was, and he only had an entire country to search to find out who it was. Lily had told him that she had already done it and had found nothing. It was perfectly possible for the girl not to have been Italian, that Dumbledore had found someone in another country, maybe even not in Europe, to sacrifice for his ritual. After all, if that vampire was telling the truth and Dumbledore was really working with Grindelwald, then kidnapping some girl from halfway around the world was perfectly possible.
He wanted to take Lily's word for it… But there was something on the back of his mind, a weird feeling in his gut that something was missing, that something wasn't really right… There was a very good chance that Lily had missed something when she looked for the girl and he wouldn't be satisfied until he saw it himself…
His first stop was one of the police stations in Rome, which would have helped him eliminate the muggle world as a place to look for. The truth was that the girl had to be a young witch… So, as unlikely as it might have been, there was the possibility that she was muggleborn. It was a very remote possibility since it was unlikely that any muggleborn would have a magical effect that could release so much power… But eliminating the muggle world was a good first step.
Mages tended to neglect the muggle side of things… If a child was missing, there was the very possibility that a muggle missing person's report was filed. A quick visit to the muggle police station was a very easy way to confirm this.
Harry used his invisibility cloak to sneak around the police station, and found one of the detectives sleeping in the break room… It took a simple compulsion charm with a mental image of the girl for the man to start investigating the disappearance… It took half an hour, and a bunch of calls, but he confirmed that there was no girl with the same age and looks that was missing sometime in the last three years… The man quickly started to suppress the urge to find the girl and continued his nap.
This was his best lead in the muggle world… If the girl was muggleborn then whoever covered things up must have a very deep knowledge of the muggle world to pull off such a disappearance without the police noticing.
That left the magical world… Harry had already checked the three magical orphanages in Italy, one in Venice, one in Rome, and one in Milan, and found nothing unusual in them. He only had to check with the ministry if anyone filed any missing reports with the Aurors' office. It would make sense for them to hide any signs of crime with the huge spotlight they had over them because of the European magical tournament.
It was a lot easier than it should have been to sneak into the Italian Ministry of Magic. All it took was some directions for the muggle entrance, a compulsion charm for one of the workers to take it just for the fun of it and sneaking in with his invisibility cloak.
Honestly, the cloak was such a cheat during stealth missions. Everyone relied very heavily on magical methods of detection like wards… The fact that he could bypass most wards with his cloak made things very easy… There were ways to bypass the cloak like Lily had done before, like through detecting the oxygen and carbon dioxide output, or it would be easier to just use some kind of mist which would detect if it touched any physical object, maybe even pressure plates… Then again, no one really knew about the real power of the cloak and Harry wasn't planning on advertising them.
The Italian Ministry of Magic was a lot milder than the British one. Well, it would be better to say that it was more organized. The fact that most mages must have had some kind of military training must have engraved efficiency in their brains. Harry also noticed a distinct lack of women. There were a few walking around, but not nearly as many as men… An interesting effect of having the main magical school in Italy for boys only. Harry didn't really know how the girls in Italy were educated, but they had to be… An untrained mage could be a severe danger to society after all.
Unfortunately, Harry didn't have the time to explore women's role in magical Italy; he had a mission to accomplish. He followed up one of the wizards wearing a military uniform, hoping that it was an Auror. He was proven to be correct when he arrived a few minutes later in a large room that looked more like a war camp than an office.
Inside, the room was buzzing like a busy command centre. Maps of various regions were spread out on large wooden tables, surrounded by all sorts of magical gadgets that glowed softly, kind of like the ancient tools Roman seers might have used. There were piles of scrolls and books everywhere, not too different from what you'd imagine a Roman general's strategic pile to look like. The walls had moving pictures of wanted dark wizards, similar to how the Romans might post drawings of their enemies. The Aurors moved around with focused energy, their robes sweeping over the stone floor etched with runes, giving off the vibe of a Roman war room just before a big battle. It was definitely more of a tactical hub than a typical office, alive with the buzz of impending action.
Harry quickly snuck into the archive room, specifically missing persons… He checked over a year of missing reports, parsing through an entire cabinet worth of parchment, and found nothing that could match the description of the girl he saw that day…
Perhaps Lily was right… Perhaps there were no traces of the girl anywhere. Lucky for him, he had one last method to find out more about the girl. It was more of a last resort and Harry didn't really want to use it, but he had no other choice. He knew that this would continue to grate him until he solved it…
He walked out of the ministry and whipped up a quick portal to the forest where he'd battled the vampires. The ritual had clearly taken its toll—the forest was totally dead. The trees were just bare sticks reaching up into the sky, and the ground was covered in a carpet of dry, crunchy leaves. It was eerily quiet, no birds, no little critters rustling around, just the sad whisper of the wind moving through. Everything felt still and lifeless like the forest had just given up. It was more like wandering through a ghost town than a forest.
Harry walked towards the ritual's location and for the first time, channelled his magic into the ring on his finger, which also held the resurrection stone. He used his Arcane Hearing to filter through the ritual, trying to find a magical trace of its source to use as a reference for the stone.
It took some time, but the stone finally reacted to one of the signatures, and suddenly, a familiar young girl was floating in front of him…
This was very lucky. He had no connection to the girl, not really. He knew practically nothing about her, and it was firmly the ritual itself that acted as an anchor, which allowed him to summon her shade. Even months after acquiring it, and Harry barely knew anything about the resurrection stone… He was acting on pure instincts, helped out a bit by his magical crest.
The girl gave him a sad and surprised look, "Who are you?"
"I'm Harry. I was the one who tried to save you before…"
"I remember. You came for me. I was so scared…"
"I'm sorry," he uttered, "I wasn't fast enough."
The girl gave him a small smile, "It's alright… You tried… That's enough for me. It's not so bad here, really."
Harry did his best to ignore the last comment. There were rumours that the shades of the stone always tried to advocate for death. He didn't know if this was true or not, but the girl's shade was not alive. It was not her soul, just a bastardized mimicry of it, like a floating painting more than anything, that was created through the world's memory of her, "I'm trying to find out why those people used you in a ritual. So far, I haven't been able to find anything about you. What's your name?"
The shade visibly brightened up, "Oh, my name is Maria De Luca… I'm eight years old and I live at the Saint Clare orphanage. I like swimming and dancing. What about you?"
"I told you, I'm Harry. I'm from England, and I like studying magic. It's very nice to meet you. I wanted to ask you a few things first if you wouldn't mind… Do you know why those vampires took you?"
"Those were vampires? Magic is real?" the girl shouted excitedly.
Well, that was a way to confirm that she wasn't from a muggle family. He needed more data, "I think you might have been too. Have weird things ever happened around you when you're angry or scared?"
"Not really… Well, there was this time a dog ran at me, and then it was gone? I was so scared that I didn't know, but there was a man that tried to look for it afterwards… Asked the nuns and everything… But I was too scared to say anything."
"Hmm, so you did have magic. Did you know who your parents are?"
The girl shook her head, "I was put in the orphanage when I was a baby. No one knew where I came from. I just appeared one day and that was that…"
"And you never felt weak, or became very sick sometimes?"
"Not more than any of the other girls, I guess…"
It didn't make any sense. The girl had to have had some kind of curse, and a strong one at that, for a magical release of this size to be remotely possible. Something wasn't adding up…
He needed more data, "Can you tell me where your orphanage was?"
"I don't know…"
"Which city at least…"
The girl looked puzzled, "Rome, of course."
Harry nodded, "Thank you… I'll figure something out."
"Can I ask you something, Harry?"
"Sure…"
The girl's smile turned sad, "There's a nun in my orphanage… Sister Sofia… Can you tell her goodbye for me?"
Harry gave her a soft kind smile in return, "Of course, Maria…"
And just like that, Harry stopped powering the stone and created a portal to Rome. After asking a few directions, it didn't take him too long to find the orphanage in question. As Maria had said, it was managed by nuns… Harry went there with the illusion of a surprise inspector and asked for a sister Sofia.
The woman who came to him was shockingly young, probably in her twenties… She had bags underneath her eyes, but she must have looked quite beautiful without them, "Ah, sister Sofia, I wished to speak to you…"
"What about?"
"Well, I wanted you to clarify a few things… specifically your role in this orphanage."
The young nun shuddered, "I'm in charge of the kids' basic education until their tenth birthday."
"Any special children that you like to speak of, Sofia? Any that you had a special connection to?"
She looked lost for a fraction of a second, "I don't like getting attached to the kids… It's just a recipe for heartbreak later on."
They were walking around, "That's a wise attitude to take if you wish to protect yourself, not so much if you wish to truly help the children… Speaking of them, are all of the students accounted for?"
"Yes, we do a name check every morning…"
Hmm, very suspicious, "Can you tell me about if this place has empty rooms?"
"There are a few, but not many. We like to help the children be as comfortable as we can…"
"And are there any rooms that you feel particularly strong about?"
The woman froze, "I… How do you know about that?"
"About what, my dear?"
"Well, one of the empty rooms on the first floor just makes me feel sad whenever I get near it… It was already odd that it was empty in the first place. We tend to prefer giving rooms on lower floors to the kids and I don't really remember why we skipped this one."
Harry hummed, "And have these mood swings been happening a lot lately, specifically in the last few days?"
"Yes, how did you know?" the young nun exclaimed.
Well, she was obviously obliviated. Harry would probably cause more harm than good for messing with it. It was probably cruel, but it was probably just better for the memories to fade properly and for the young woman to move on without knowing what she had lost, "Just a guess, dear. Out of curiosity, can I see the room?"
The young woman took Harry into the room and her breath hitched as she watched the bare room. He did his best to ignore the woman obviously mourning Maria's death. Harry slowly entered trying to see any sign of anything… There wasn't anything clear, but the clear signs of magic…
Hopefully, scrying would reveal something.
It took Harry embarrassingly too much time to find anything, just flashes of images of what happened. The first one was of the girl being abducted by wizards wearing masks… They were the ones that obviously obliviated the girl. Frustratingly, he couldn't see the faces of any of them…
The girl had surprisingly used accidental magic to throw a few of them around until one of the wizards stunned her. Her head was hit on the side of the bed. Harry knelt down where it was and saw a small dry piece of blood. He could tell instinctively that the blood was important. Maybe he could use it to track his parents, or maybe he could ask Lily to do something with it? He wasn't really an expert in blood magic… At least it was a lead.
Before he could leave, Harry received another quick flash. It was of a woman standing in his room, pointing her wand at sister Sofia… It was a woman with familiar red hair and green eyes.
It was far more recent, and it was after the attack. Lily Evans had been there… She had discovered who Maria was when he asked but hadn't said anything to him… In fact, she had probably obscured things even further.
But why?
Why would she do this?
He had his doubts about Lily Evans, but he had hoped that he could trust her.
No, it was too soon to make any judgements. He needed to gather more evidence and figure out what else she had hidden from him. He learned a very long ago that it was a bad idea to rush into things and confront someone blindly.
It still did not stop him from feeling enraged and betrayed… He doubted any discovery would stop that. He could only hope that whatever he discovered wouldn't make him lose control like he was very tempted to do…
He took a deep breath…
His fingers gripped the edges of the desk as he steadied himself, his mind racing through the possibilities, through every conversation, every look that might have meant more than it seemed at the time. The dim light of his lamp cast long shadows across the room, mirroring the darkness of his thoughts. He resolved to find the answers, no matter how painful they might be.
And if Lily Evans had truly betrayed him… then he would make her pay dearly.
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AN: I'm finally back home and I couldn't be happier. Anyway, I like this chapter a lot more than the previous ones since I had the opportunity to write it properly. As usual, please let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions.
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If you want to support me check out my patréon at https://www.patréon.com/athassprkr
I tend to upload drafts of early chapters on there to get people's opinions of them so you can read up to 20 chapters ahead as a bonus.
Thank you guys for your support in these hard times.