James Potter and the Crimson Thread

by G. Norman Lippert

  A split second later, Ogden’s spell did the same.

  The silence that followed was breathless with confusion.

  And then, distantly, the silence was interrupted by a chorus of distant yells and howls of surprise.

  As a single mass, the crowd of students hurried to the windows along the corridor wall, peering out into the sunlight. James saw nothing at first. Then, with a jolt, he spied something falling toward the Quidditch pitch. It was a person on a broom, tumbling end over end, followed by two more and a couple of Bludgers, dropping like stones.

  They dropped past a fringe of trees, sparing everyone the sight of them crashing to the pitch below.

  “Their brooms gave out,” Graham Warton said in a high, disbelieving voice. “They were practicing for tomorrow’s match, the Slytherins were! And their brooms gave out! Did you see it?”

  James still had his wand in his hand. He held it up suddenly.

  “Lumos,” he commanded in a dry voice.

  Nothing happened. His wand protruded pointlessly from his hand, as dead as a stick.

  He looked up from it, dread suddenly filling his chest, and his gaze met Rose’s as she pushed through the crowd, coming alongside him.

  “Look!” Nolan Beetlebrick said suddenly, pointing to the window again. “Do you see it?”

  James pressed his face to the glass again as Rose crowded in next to him.

  It was the greenhouses this time. They were shaking as if in the teeth of a windstorm, throttling so that their glass panes vibrated and cracked. Some began to shatter in places, their shards bashed aside by unfurling leafy tentacles and thorny vines. Whatever plants were capable of locomotion, they were beating at the glass, straining for release, breaking through and boiling upward in writhing, twining masses.

  Professor Longbottom burst through the door of the centre greenhouse, his robes torn, green vines twisted about his arms and legs.

  He swatted at them, pulled them off and threw them to the ground, stamping on the writhing bits and producing his wand. He pointed it back at the greenhouse, seemed to call a spell, and then raised his wand, examining it in silent surprise as nothing happened.

  Little did James know, at that moment, the extent of the event as its various effects befell the entire world.

  In nearby Hogsmeade, a group of three Muggle hikers stumbled into the High Street, having suddenly encountered an entire mysterious village where only dense trees and brush had been moments before.

  They wandered into the unlocked door of The Three Broomsticks, wide-eyed and gape-jawed, as Madame Rosemerta called helplessly, “Who are you? You shouldn’t be here, now! You shouldn’t be here!”

  In London, the recently repaired brick wall separating Diagon Alley from the Muggle city proper cracked, bowed, and then collapsed in a rain of dust, dry bricks, and fresh mortar. The proprietor of the Leaky Cauldron, an old wizard with a nose the size and texture of a blood orange, peered out the rear of his establishment, took one look at the demolished wall, and then hurried out the front, jamming an old fisherman’s cap onto his head and leaving a sign swinging on the locked front door: CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE, OR THE END OF THE UNIVERSE, WHICHEVER COMES FIRST.

  In recently reopened and repopulated New York City, thousands of Muggle denizens looked up from the brief earthquake that had only just subsided, blinking at the sight of innumerable strange signs and establishments as they materialized all over and atop the Muggle city, along with suspended thoroughfares of flying buses and broom-riders, many now struggling to stay aloft as the world’s magical field flickered disastrously. One such Muggle, an old cabbie of Pakistani descent with a tweed cap pressed down over his thick greying hair, sighed and shook his head wearily. “Not again,” he muttered to himself, as screams of awe and terror began to rise from the streets all around.

  In Philadelphia, where the quake had been worst of all, streets bulged and windows shattered for blocks in every direction as a tiny, empty lot surrounded by an old stone wall suddenly expanded, blasting outward to a size of several square blocks, shoving space and time aside like an erumpent crowding onto a bus. Vehicles screeched to a halt or rammed into each other as streets rearranged themselves, entire blocks resituated, street signs spun, reoriented, and grew entirely new names.

  And centred above it all, a sudden storm threw waves of boiling clouds out over the city, swirling and spiraling down over a single dark point, forming a sort of metaphysical compass pointing not at true north, but at the hub upon which the wheel of time and destiny turned—a strange and ancient device buried deep beneath the stone dome of the Alma Aleron Hall of Archives.

  In the darkness beneath that dome, two hundred feet down, surrounded by raining grit and groaning stone as terraces and iron stairways tilted, crumbled, and began to crash in on themselves, two voices called to each other in shocked alarm.

  “Destroyed!?” Petra Morganstern shrieked, her hair grey with dust, her eyes wild with horror and surprise. “How can the Loom be destroyed!?”

  “Sabotage,” Donofrio Odin-Vann gasped, his face bleeding from a wide cut across his forehead. He limped to her from the ruin of the Vault where its brass and crystal leaves lay warped in on themselves, or broken, or melted to glowing sludge by the force of the magical blast which had just shaken the entire earth. “Someone, somehow… they knew we were coming. They set up a technomancic chain reaction. It was triggered the moment that we approached with the thread and began the spell of replacing it…”

  Behind him, and all around, the walls shook violently. A dull roar echoed from high above as levels began to collapse down onto each other like dominoes, disintegrating and crushing thousands of ancient, priceless relics and their stored memories.

  Petra’s eyes sparked with furious, desperate light. “But how is that even possible! Who could have known! Why would they have risked the balance of the entire world just to stop me!?”

  Odin-Vann grabbed her arm, began to pull her away from the destroyed Loom. A snarl of frayed threads and torn tapestry smoked from the ruin. The Loom itself was nothing more than a smouldering frame of char. “It doesn’t matter! Not now! We must go before the entire place comes down on our heads!”

  “No!” Petra cried in fury, immobile as stone, her eyes steaming like dry ice. “It can’t be finished! I cannot be stopped!”

  “There is another way!” Odin-Vann shouted, shaking her and making her look at his face. “It will cost much, but there is one final option that I never told you about! A last, ultimate resort! But only if we leave now!”

  Petra glared at him, seemed to tower over him, her eyes glowing orbs of rage. And then, with a shaking exhale, the blinding glare fell away and she was just a young woman again, shaking and dirty and bleeding from a half dozen ragged scratches. Trembling, she asked, “There’s still one other way?”

  “A terrible way,” Odin-Vann admitted reluctantly, palming blood from his face. “An unspeakable way. A path to ripping open dimensions that no one has ever attempted before because it is only one way, and the cost will be great. But if we leave this plane now, Petra…perhaps we can perform it.”

  In a smaller, eerily girlish voice, she asked, “Can we capture back my father’s brooch before we do?”

  Odin-Vann cringed as more of the edifice began to cave in behind him. “We will do what must,” he rasped urgently. “But we have to leave this very second. Your Horcrux may save you. But this place is about to kill me permanently.”

  The Archive began to sink all around them. Every surface blurred and tilted, shattered and screeched out of true. The death throe of the subterranean edifice was a sustained roar, growing, shaking the very air.

  Petra took Odin-Vann’s hand. Behind her, space tore open in a blinding fracture, forming a rough doorway into a calmer place, a sunny gazebo with the flicker of water behind it. She turned to the rift, knowing it would be there, and stepped through, taking the young man with her.

  Far above, the Archive’s dome gave way. Its su
rrounding pillars tilted inward, falling ponderously into the massive pit below even as a volcano of dust and grit exploded up out of it, reaching to the boil of bruised clouds high above.

  And with that, the deed that had begun four years earlier finally completed itself: the wheel of destiny finally, ultimately, ground to a complete and fatal halt.

  In the Alma Aleron medical college, an old Cajun woman sat up in the chair next to her bed. For the first time in years, Madame Delacroix’s mind came back into malignant focus, as sharp and wicked as ever. She turned her blind gaze toward the tiny, barred window and the boil of clouds above, and a slow, helpless grin spread over her face, showing all of her crooked yellow teeth.

  In the room directly above hers, Nastasia Hendricks—or what remained of her, still wasting away in the years since her lighter half was killed—bolted upright in her bed, her mad eyes blazing with alertness.

  She unhinged her jaw and belted a scream of laughter, clawed at her face, even as her eyes filled with tears and rolled, both gleeful and horrified in equal measures.

  As the destruction of the Archive subsided, Alma Aleron’s timelock tremored back into being and reasserted itself. The lot and its stone wall sprang back to its original tiny shape, sucking the city of Philadelphia in around it, shattering more windows, unbuckling the unruly streets, and leaving stunned Philadelphians dizzy, blinking, and dumbfounded.

  The magical city of New Amsterdam vanished away again, swallowed back up by its reinforced new secrecy field. The old Pakistani cabbie stood inside the open door of his yellow taxi, looking around as stunned observers frowned, speechlessly asking each other if all those strange sights had really been there, or if they had been merely another mass delusion.

  The cab rocked as a man dropped into the back seat, slamming the door behind him. The Pakistani cabbie leaned and glanced into the rear of his car. There, a thin man in a trench coat and an old fedora hat met his gaze, his face tense but composed.

  “I’ll pay you a hundred simoleans to get us out of the city as fast as this boat can roll,” he said, holding up a thin sheaf of bills.

  “Which direction?” the cabbie asked, a little breathlessly.

  “Any direction,” Marshall Parris answered. “And if you’re smart, my friend, you won’t come back afterward.”

  An ocean away, behind the Leaky Cauldron, the pile of broken bricks shuddered, vibrated, and with some difficulty, began to reassemble itself into a wall, once again, for the last time, closing off Diagon Alley from prying Muggle eyes.

  Hogsmeade shimmered and vanished away into unplottability again, leaving the three hikers dazzled and confused, having only moments before been arguing loudly with Madame Rosemerta about the use of her apparently nonexistent telephone. Now, they stood cramped in a thicket so dense that it seemed to physically force them back, stumbling, scratched with nasty thorns and briers.

  And in the Hogwarts greenhouses, the maddened plants began to settle, withdrawing slowly, retracting their vines in sheepish curls.

  Dangling in James’ stunned hand, his wand suddenly and silently burst alight, shining with the Lumos spell he had called only moments before. Stunned and deeply worried, he raised his wand and looked at it.

  Rose raised her eyes from the wand in his hands to his face.

  “What… was that?” she asked in a bare whisper, nearly mouthing the words.

  James weakly shook his head. He had no idea, although he would know the truth soon enough. For now, he simply had a deeply sinking sense that, whatever it was that had just happened, it was the beginning of the ultimate end.

  And in that, of course, he was sadly correct.

  22. – The end of the beginning

  Professor Odin-Vann didn’t return that night, or at all on Saturday.

  James, Rose, and Ralph finally grew impatient on Sunday afternoon and knocked on his door, but to no avail. The sound of sneezing had stopped from within—either the recording had worn out or the trained mimicking beast had finally grown bored and either given up or escaped.

  “Maybe he’s asleep,” Ralph whispered, listening close to the door, but Rose shook her head.

  “There’s nobody in there. You can tell by the silence of it. He’s not returned yet.”

  As they wended their way disconsolately back through the weekend silent corridors, passing through sunbeams dense with floating motes of dust, James asked, “It couldn’t have worked. Whatever he and Petra tried, it must have failed. Right?”

  Rose shrugged and sighed. Uncharacteristically, she had no hypothesis or comment whatsoever.

  The Daily Prophet weekend edition called the earthquake a “temporary shift in magical polarities”, quoting a technomancy professor from the wizarding university in Warsaw. “These things happen with cosmic regularity, though in cycles of decades or centuries, thus few alive experience more than one such event. There is nothing to be concerned about now that the moment has passed.”

  The rest of the newspaper had been filled with stories of the effects of the quake, most fairly minor, but a few with serious consequences. A few houses and buildings had collapsed, not from the tremor itself, but from the brief interruption of magical force, breaking the spells that had kept the ramshackle old structures intact and upright.

  James mused that the Burrow probably would have been one such casualty if Merlin had not shored it up himself, being part owner and occasional resident. Other stories were variously bizarre or inexplicable.

  A wizarding zoo in Russia was suddenly overrun by freed beasts when its magical locks failed. Similarly, the American wizarding prison, Fort Bedlam, saw the escape of several inmates when their unplottable exercise yard suddenly burst out into the Muggle city of Phoenix, Arizona, appearing right in the centre of a busy Muggle park.

  Elsewhere, a wizarding warehouse full of crated vials of Floo powder mysteriously exploded, igniting the thousands of vials and thus sending bits of burning crate shooting like fireworks out of hundreds of random hearths all around Wales. One such Floo misfire lit a cottage on fire, burning it and a nearby barn to the ground. Thousands of injuries were reported worldwide, and, tragically, more than a dozen deaths, most from failed brooms during high altitude flights.

  “Professor Jackson says it was no normal event, no matter what the papers say,” Zane proclaimed seriously from the Shard later that afternoon. “There was an assembly in the theater about it and he told us everything. Basically, all the magic in the world is tied together in a huge invisible field, kind of like the magnetic poles of the earth.

  Something broke the field for a few seconds, completely disrupted it, like a huge hand flipping a switch, turning off magic for a few seconds. It came back on, but just barely. And nobody knows how long it’s going to last now, or how strong it will continue to be.”

  “But what caused it?” James asked, keeping his voice low and leaning close to the Shard. “Was it Petra and Odin-Vann? Did they succeed in their plan?”

  “I don’t know if it was them,” Zane admitted with a shake of his head. “I haven’t heard a peep from either of them. But if it was them, it didn’t work, and that’s the understatement of the century. The Archive’s been completely destroyed. The Loom is gone, no more than a pile of ash buried under a hundred tons of dirt and stone. Nobody knows for sure what caused it. But there’s no repairing it.”

  Rose crowded over James’ shoulder where they huddled in a corner of the common room. Awed and frightened, she asked, “What does it mean? The Loom was the destiny of the whole world! How can it be destroyed?”

  “Well, technically, the tapestry in the Loom was our destiny,”

  Zane shrugged vaguely in the mirror glass, “The Loom was just the machine recording it. And the Vault was protecting the whole kit and caboodle. For all the good it did. Point is, the Loom had been shut down ever since Judith broke into the Vault back in our third year and stole the crimson thread, bringing Morgan here. But at least there was always the possibility that it could be s
tarted up again if the thread was somehow put back, and some version of Morgan sent back to her own destiny. That’s what’s been keeping things together in our world, although less and less every day. Now…” He raised both hands, palms up, in a helpless gesture.

  “But…” Ralph said slowly, “We’re all still here. I mean, right?

  So the world’s destiny can’t be really ended. Can it?”

  Zane looked grave. “Professor Jackson says that the Loom was like the load-bearing wall in a house. Cut it down and the house may still stand for awhile out of sheer habit, but slam the wrong door or step on the wrong creaky floorboard, and boom. The whole place comes down forever. And he means forever forever.”

  James shook his head fretfully. “But Petra was so certain it would work. What could have happened?”

  Zane didn’t know, and no one else had the slightest guess.

  As the evening wore on and the sun set on Sunday night, James found himself nearly mad with worry and confusion. In a moment of desperate inspiration, he leapt from his seat in the common room and tramped up the steps to his dormitory, Ralph and Scorpius following curiously behind.

  “What are you about?” Ralph asked, frowning as James bent and heaved open his trunk.

  Scorpius sat heavily on his own bed. “I think the stress has finally cracked him. I knew it was bound to eventually.”

  James ignored them. Leaning over his trunk, he rooted inside, raking his hand through piles of laundry, wrinkled parchments, musty books, his new dress robes still wrapped in paper, some ratty and bent quills, his old trainers, his spare spectacles, and a surprising array of miscellany. Hectically, he tossed handfuls of random contents behind him, digging deeper into the recesses of the trunk.

  “Where is it,” he groused urgently to himself, his voice muffled in the depths. “I almost always carry it with me. The one time it might be really useful…”

  Ralph approached tentatively and knelt down next to the trunk.