The soft voice of the Defense Professor seemed to speak in Harry's mind. Surely, if Lupin truly cared, he would not need special instruction for something as simple as thinking for five minutes before giving up...
Yes, he would, Harry answered the mental voice. Human beings wouldn't suddenly obtain a skill like that just because they cared. I learned about it because I'd read library books, produced by a huge scientific edifice -
And that other part of Harry said, in that soft voice, But there is also another hypothesis, Mr. Potter, and it fits the data in a much less complicated way.
No it doesn't! How would people even know what to pretend, if nobody had ever cared?
They don't know. That is what you observe.
The two of them walked onward toward a certain house, past a long row of occupied wizard cottages and other cottages overgrown with vines.
Coming finally to the house with half its top blown off, and green leaves growing over into the inside; behind a shoulder-high wild-growing hedge lining the sidewalk, and a narrow metal gate (Mr. Hagrid had probably stepped right over it, being unable to fit through). The gap in the roof was like a giant mouth had taken a circular bite from the house, leaving spines of wood, what had maybe been support beams, sticking out. To the right side a single chimney still stood upright, uneaten by the giant bite, but leaning dangerously without its former support. Windows were shattered. Where there should have been a front door were only splinters of wood.
To this place Lord Voldemort had come, silently, making less noise than the dead leaves slithering along the pavement...
Remus Lupin put a hand upon Harry's shoulder. "Touch the gate," Mr. Lupin urged.
Harry reached out a hand and did so.
Like a fast-growing flower a sign burst from the tangled weeds in the ground behind the gate, a wooden sign with golden letters, and it said:
On this spot, on the night of 31 October 1981,
Lily and James Potter lost their lives.
They were survived by their son, Harry Potter,
the only wizard ever to withstand the Killing Curse,
the Boy-Who-Lived, who broke You-Know-Who's power.
This house has been left in its ruined state,
as a monument to the Potters,
as a reminder of their sacrifice.
In a blank space below the golden letters were written other messages, dozens of them, magical ink that rose to the surface and gleamed brightly enough to be read before fading and giving way to other messages.
So my Gideon is avenged.
Thank you, Harry Potter. Fare well wherever you are.
We will always be in the Potters' debt.
Oh James, oh Lily, I am sorry.
I hope you're alive, Harry Potter.
There is always a price.
I wish our last words had been kinder, James. I'm sorry.
There is always a dawn after the night.
Rest well, Lily.
Bless you, Boy-Who-Lived. You were our miracle.
"I guess -" Harry said. "I guess that's what people do - instead of trying to make it better -" Harry stopped. The thought seemed unworthy of this place. He looked up, and saw Remus Lupin gazing at him with a look so gentle that Harry wrenched his eyes away to the blasted and broken roof.
You were our miracle. Harry had always heard the word 'miracle' in the context of how, in the natural universe, there was no such thing. And yet looking at the ruined house, he suddenly knew exactly what the word meant, the note of grace all unexplained, the blessing inexplicable. The Dark Lord had almost won, and then in one night all the darkness and terror had ended, salvation without justification, a sudden dawn from out of the darkness and even now nobody knew why -
If Lily Potter had lived beyond her confrontation with Lord Voldemort, she would have felt that way when she saw her baby alive, afterward.
"Let's go," whispered the baby boy, ten years later.
They went.
The graveyard's entrance was guarded by a lockless gate of the sort that kept out animals, with a place to stand while you moved the door from one side of the standing-place to the other. Remus took out his wand (Harry was already holding his) and there was a brief blur as they stepped through.
Some of the stones rising up from the ground looked as old as the wall in Oxford that his father had said was around a thousand years old.
Hallie Fleming, said the first stone that Harry saw, in a carving almost invisibly faded with the erosion of time. Vienna Wood, said another.
It had been a long time since Harry had visited a graveyard. His mind had still been childlike the last time he'd come to one, long before he'd seen within Death's shadow. Coming here now was... strange, and sad, and puzzling, and this has been happening for so long, why haven't wizards tried to stop it, why aren't they putting all their strength into that like Muggles do with medical research, only more so, wizards have more reason to hope...
"The Dumbledores lived in Godric's Hollow too?" Harry said, as they walked past a pair of relatively new stones saying Kendra Dumbledore and Ariana Dumbledore.
"For a long, long time," Mr. Lupin said.
They walked further into the graveyard, far toward the end, past many deaths that had been mourned.
Then Mr. Lupin pointed at a linked double headstone, of marble still white and unaged.
"Are there going to be messages there?" Harry said. He didn't want to deal any more with the way that other people dealt with death.
Mr. Lupin shook his head.
They walked toward the linked white stones.
And stood before -
"What is this?" Harry whispered. "Who... who wrote this?"
JAMES POTTER
BORN 27 MARCH 1960
DIED 31 OCTOBER 1981
"Wrote what?" said Mr. Lupin, puzzled.
LILY POTTER
BORN 30 JANUARY 1960
DIED 31 OCTOBER 1981
"This!" Harry cried. "The inscription!" There were tears welling up in Harry's eyes, at the brightness out of place and unexplained, the touch of grace where no grace should have been, the mysterious blessing, tears welling up at
THE LAST ENEMY THAT SHALL BE DESTROYED IS DEATH
"That?" Mr. Lupin said. "That's the... motto, I suppose you could call it, of the Potters. Though I don't think it was ever something as formal as that. Just a saying handed down from long, long ago..."
"This - that -" Harry scrambled down to kneel beside the grave, touched the inscription with a trembling hand. "How? Things like that can't just be, be genetic -"
Then Harry saw what tears had blurred, the faint carving of a line, within a circle, within a triangle.
The symbol of the Deathly Hallows.
And Harry understood.
"They tried," Harry whispered.
The three Peverell brothers.
Had they lost someone precious to them, was that where it had begun?
"With all their lives, they tried, and they made progress -"
The Cloak of Invisibility, that could defeat the Dementors' sight.
"- but their research wasn't finished -"
Hiding from Death's shadow is not defeating Death itself. The Resurrection Stone couldn't really bring anyone back. The Elder Wand couldn't protect you from old age.
"- so they passed on the mission to their children, and their children's children."
Generation after generation.
Until it came to me.
Could Time echo like that, rhyming, between this far into the future, and that far in the past? It couldn't be coincidence, could it? Not this message, not in this place.
My family.
You really were, my mother and my father.
"It doesn't mean resurrecting the dead, Harry," Mr. Lupin said. "It means accepting death, and so being beyond death, mastering it."
"Did James tell you that?" Harry said, his voice strange.
"No," said Mr. Lupin, "but -"
"Good."
<
br /> Harry rose up slowly from where he had been kneeling, feeling as though he were pushing up a sun upon his shoulders, raising the dawn above the horizon.
Of course other wizards have tried. I am not unique. I was never alone. These feelings in my heart, they're not so special, not in the wizard world or the Muggle one.
"Harry, your wand!" There was a sudden excitement in Mr. Lupin's voice, and when Harry raised his wand to look at it closely, he saw that it was gleaming ever so faintly with a silver light, welling out of the wood.
"Cast the Patronus Charm!" urged Mr. Lupin. "Try casting it again, Harry!"
Oh, right. So far as Mr. Lupin knows, I can't -
Harry smiled, and even laughed a little. "I'd better not," Harry said. "If I tried to cast the spell in this state of mind, it'd probably kill me."
"What?" said Mr. Lupin. "The Patronus Charm doesn't do that!"
Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres raised his left hand, still laughing, and wiped away some more tears.
"You know, Mr. Lupin," Harry said, "it really takes a baroque interpretation to think that somebody would be walking around, pondering how death is just something we all have to accept, and communicate their state of mind by saying, 'The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.' Maybe someone else thought it sounded poetic and picked up the phrase and tried to interpret it differently, but whoever said it first didn't like death much." Sometimes it puzzled Harry how most people didn't seem to even notice when they were twisting something around to the 180-degree opposite of its first obvious reading. It couldn't be a raw brainpower thing, people could see the obvious reading of most other English sentences. "Also 'shall be destroyed' refers to a change of future state, so it can't be about the way things are now."
Remus Lupin was staring at him with wide eyes. "You certainly are James and Lily's child," the man said, sounding rather shocked.
"Yes, I am," Harry said. But that wasn't enough, he had to do something more, so Harry raised his wand in the air and said, his voice as steady as he could make it, "I am Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, the son of Lily and James, of the house of Potter, and I accept my family's quest. Death is my enemy, and I will defeat it."
Thrayen beyn Peverlas soona ahnd thrih heera toal thissoom Dath bey yewoonen.
"What?" Harry said aloud. The words had popped up into his stream of consciousness as though from his own thoughts, unexplained.
"What was that?" said Remus Lupin at the same time.
Harry turned, scanning the graveyard, but he didn't see anything. Beside him, Mr. Lupin was doing the same.
Neither of them noticed the tall stone worn as though from a thousand years of age, upon it a line within a circle within a triangle glowing ever so faintly silver, like the light which had shone from Harry's wand, invisible at that distance beneath the still-bright Sun.
Some time later:
"Thank you again, Mr. Lupin," Harry said, the tall, faintly scarred man was about to depart once more. "Though I really wish you hadn't -"
"Professor Dumbledore said that I was to portkey us back to Hogwarts if anything unusual happened, whether or not it seemed like an attack," Mr. Lupin said firmly. "Which is eminently sensible."
Harry nodded. And then, having carefully saved this question for last, "Do you have any idea of what the words meant?"
"If I did, I wouldn't tell you," Mr. Lupin said, looking rather severe. "Certainly not without Professor Dumbledore's permission. I can understand your eagerness, but you should not go trying to uncover any ancestral secrets of the Potters until you are an adult. That means after you've passed your NEWTs, Harry, or at least your OWLs. And I still think you've picked up entirely the wrong idea of what your family motto is meant to say!"
Harry nodded, sighing internally, and bid Mr. Lupin farewell.
Harry went back through Hogwarts, to the Ravenclaw Tower, feeling strange, and strengthened. He would not have expected any of that, but it had been all to the good.
He was passing through the Ravenclaw common room, on the way to his dorm.
That was when the shining creature came to him, gleaming soft white beneath the candlefires of the Ravenclaw common room, as it slithered out from nowhere, the silver snake.
Þregen béon Pefearles suna and þrie hira tól þissum Déað béo gewunen.
Three shall be Peverell's sons and three their devices by which Death shall be defeated.
- Spoken in the presence of the three Peverell brothers,
in a small tavern on the outskirts of what would later be called Godric's Hollow.
Chapter 97: Roles, Pt 8
For the second time that day, Harry's eyes filled with tears. Heedless of the puzzled eyes of the Ravenclaws in the common room, he reached out to the silver creature which Draco Malfoy had sent, cradling it in his arms like a live thing; and stumbled off in the direction of his dorm room, heading half-blindly for the bottom of his trunk, as the silver snake waited silently in his arms.
The fifth meeting: 10:12am, Sunday, April 19th.
The debtor's meeting which Lord Malfoy had demanded from Harry Potter, who owed Lucius Malfoy a debt of some 58,203 Galleons, was held within the Gringotts Central Bank, in accordance with the laws of Britain.
There had been some pushback from Chief Warlock Dumbledore, trying to prevent Harry Potter from leaving the security of Hogwarts (a phrase that caused Harry Potter to raise his fingers and silently make quote marks in the air). For his own part, the Boy-Who-Lived had seemingly pondered quietly, and then assented to the meeting, strangely compliant in the face of his enemy's demand.
The Headmaster of Hogwarts, who acted as Harry Potter's legal guardian in the eyes of magical Britain, had overruled his ward's assent.
The Debts Committee of the Wizengamot had overruled the Headmaster of Hogwarts.
The Chief Warlock had overruled the Debts Committee.
The Wizengamot had overruled the Chief Warlock.
And so the Boy-Who-Lived had departed under the heavy guard of Mad-Eye Moody and an Auror trio for the Gringotts Central Bank; with Moody's bright-blue eye rotating wildly in every direction, as though to signal to any possible attacker that he was On Guard and Constantly Vigilant and would cheerfully incinerate the kidneys of anyone who sneezed in the general direction of the Boy-Who-Lived.
Harry Potter watched more keenly than before, as they marched through the wide-open front doors of Gringotts, beneath the motto Fortius Quo Fidelius. On Harry's last three visits to Gringotts he had merely admired the marble pillars, the gold-burning torchlights, the architecture not quite like the human parts of magical Britain. Since then had come the Incident at Azkaban and other things; and now, on his fourth visit, Harry was thinking about the Goblin Rebellions and goblins' ongoing resentment at not being allowed to own wands and certain facts which hadn't been in the first-year History textbook, which Harry had guessed at by pattern-matching and which Professor Flitwick had confirmed in a very quiet voice. Lord Voldemort had killed goblins as well as wizards - an incredibly stupid move on Lord Voldemort's part, unless Harry was really missing something - but what goblins thought of the Boy-Who-Lived, Harry had no idea. Goblins had a reputation for paying what they owed and taking what they thought owed them, along with a reputation for interpreting those accounts in a somewhat prejudiced fashion.
Today, the guards standing upright in armor at regular intervals around the bank were staring at the Boy-Who-Lived with blank faces, and glaring at Moody and the Aurors with flashes of bitter contempt. At the stands and counters of the bank's foyer, goblin tellers stared with equal contempt at the wizards whose hands they were filling with Galleons; one teller smiled a sharp-toothed grin at a witch who was looking angry and desperate.
If I understand human nature correctly - and if I'm right that all the humanoid magical species are genetically human plus a heritable magical effect - then you're not likely to become friends with a wizard just because I'm polite to you, or say that I'm sympathetic. But I wonder if you w
ould back the Boy-Who-Lived in a bid to overthrow the Ministry, if I promised to revoke the Wand Law afterward... or if I quietly gave you wands, and spellbooks, in exchange for your support... is that why the secret of wand-making is restricted to people like Ollivander? Though if you really are human, just plain human, then the goblin nation probably has its own internal horrors, its own Azkabans, for that is also human nature; in which case sooner or later I must overthrow or reform your own government as well. Hm.
An aged goblin appeared before them, and Harry inclined his head with careful courtesy, a gesture that the aged goblin returned with an abrupt half-nod. There was no wild train ride; instead the aged goblin ushered them into a short hallway that terminated in a small waiting room, with three goblin-sized benches and one wizard-sized chair, within which nobody sat.
"Do not sign anything that Lucius Malfoy gives you," Mad-Eye Moody said. "Nothing, do you understand me, lad? If Malfoy hands you a copy of The Wonderful Adventures of the Boy-Who-Lived and asks you for an autograph, tell him that you've sprained a finger. Don't pick up a quill for a single second while you're in Gringotts. If someone hands you a quill, break the quill and then break your own fingers. Do I need to explain further, son?"
"Not particularly," Harry said. "We also have lawyers in Muggle Britain, and they'd think your lawyers are cute."
A short time later Harry Potter handed his wand over to an armored goblin guard who frisked him with all manner of interesting-looking probes, and gave his pouch to Moody to keep.
And then Harry stepped through another door, and a brief waterfall of Thief's Downfall, which evaporated from his skin as soon as he stepped out.
On the other side of the door was a larger room, richly paneled and appointed, with a great golden table stretching across it; two huge leather chairs on one side of the table, and a small wooden stool on the other, the debtor's perch. Two goblins in full armor, wearing ornate earpieces and glasses, stood watch around the room. Neither side would have wands or any other device of magic, and the goblin guards would attack immediately if anyone dared to use wandless magic within this peaceable meeting supervised by Gringotts Bank. The ornate earpieces would prevent the goblin guards from hearing the conversation unless directly addressed, the eyepieces would leave the wizards' faces as blurs. It was, in short, something along the lines of actual security, at least if you were an Occlumens.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality Page 164