Dumbledore staggered forward unsteadily to stand before Ariana, her face forever fixed, unchanging, at fourteen years old. Tears streamed continuously down his own face, and his entire arm trembled violently as he reached out to touch the girl's pure, unblemished smile.
But when his fingertips came within roughly two inches of her translucent face, they sprang back sharply, as though shocked by a sudden bolt of lightning.
His tear-brimmed eyes were steeped entirely in a sorrow too deep for words.
"I'm sorry, Ariana. I'm so sorry—"
Dumbledore choked the words out through his constricted throat.
"Can you forgive me? Forgive me for the foolish mistake I made, all those years ago?"
Ariana smiled gently in response, her clear eyes reflecting Dumbledore's own aged, tear-streaked face back at him were brimming with something that looked like boundless, unconditional love.
"I never blamed you, Albus—"
At those particular words, Dumbledore wept until he could no longer form any further words at all, his whole body was shaking with the release.
Some distance behind him, even Bryan felt an unfamiliar chill of fear settle into his own chest at what he was witnessing.
"Headmaster Dumbledore?"
Bryan called out sharply, cutting through the night air, but Dumbledore seemed to be genuinely, entirely seeing something, speaking directly with someone real—he was deaf to Bryan's call entirely, as though it arrived from another world.
Bryan's own keen gaze searched the exact spot where Dumbledore's eyes remained fixed, straining his sight to its limit.
But beyond those faint, drifting wisps of grey mist still hanging in the air, he could genuinely see nothing at all himself!
"Headmaster Dumbledore?"
Things were beginning to spiral out of control. Bryan strode forward decisively and seized Dumbledore's raised, trembling arm, yanking him back hard enough to throw him off balance.
Yet even this forceful intervention failed to bring Dumbledore back to his senses.
The old man, sunk entirely in a grief he could not escape, went on murmuring his broken apologies without pause, utterly ignoring the call to him, as though Bryan's hand on his arm carried no weight at all.
Bryan pressed his own lips together tightly, forcing himself to remain calm despite the rising alarm building in his chest.
'Dumbledore must genuinely have seen something real.'
The thought flashed through Bryan's mind with sudden, cold clarity and whatever he had seen was evidently not pure illusion at all, but something real that genuinely, actually existed somewhere beyond ordinary perception.
With the formidable strength of a mind capable of condensing an entire Field of its own, however imperfectly, he could indeed sense—beyond the two powerful, familiar souls of himself and Dumbledore standing nearby—a third soul's presence stirring faintly in the surrounding air.
It was exceedingly faint, weaker even than an ordinary Muggle's soul by any reasonable measure.
He had once spent considerable, dedicated effort researching the Blood-Soul Curse, and in the process had used up no small number of frogs, rats, and similar small creatures as research material for the work.
The strength of the soul-presence he now sensed here, in this ruined clearing, was comparable to those dim, barely-sentient test subjects he'd once handled.
"You must wake up, Headmaster Dumbledore!"
Bryan lodged himself in front of Dumbledore's line of sight and called out again with urgency now.
But Dumbledore had no genuine wish to wake from whatever he was experiencing. Worse still, in the span of mere passing minutes, his wrinkled face had grown visibly, alarmingly haggard, as though he stood, quite literally, on the very brink of death!
'The Resurrection Stone draws upon its user's own life force to achieve its power of revival—just like a Horcrux drains the soul that creates it?!'
The thought that leapt suddenly into Bryan's mind left him thoroughly startled!
Fairy tales and various scattered historical records had indeed recorded, across the centuries, that those who used the Resurrection Stone might sink into a grief they could never escape from and, in the end, actually die from that very grief!
Something had to be done, immediately.
Bryan's expression turned grim with decision. He drew his own wand, fully prepared to knock Dumbledore unconscious by force as that seemed to be the only remaining option.
Only then—
A sudden, unexpected flash of insight leapt into his mind at that exact moment, and visible hesitation showed on his face, staying his hand.
"Expecto Patronum!"
A solemn, low incantation rang out into the night air, and pure white light at once illuminated the surrounding wilderness clearing.
A magnificent Quetzalcoatl, its back bearing striking black-and-white feathered wings, every individual scale rendered with astonishing, crystalline clarity, glided smoothly out from the empty air and coiled itself gracefully in the space beside Bryan.
Bryan stepped back slightly from where Dumbledore stood transfixed, his gaze began searching the surrounding space once more with focused intensity.
Beneath the steady, glowing radiance cast by the Patronus's presence, the void around them remained utterly, disappointingly empty, and frustration showed on Bryan's face at the failed attempt. He was on the verge of dismissing his Patronus back into nothing when, at that precise moment, something changed!
The Patronus, drifting serenely through the void a moment before, suddenly craned its long neck up and let out a low, mournful unsettling cry!
A Patronus, by its very nature, mirrors the spirit of the witch or wizard who casts it. Before Bryan could even properly react to his own Patronus's strange, unprecedented behaviour, his own expression suddenly shifted without his conscious direction.
BOOM!
A vast sound, like the combined ringing of countless ancient bells and Scottish pipes played together, burst forth suddenly inside his mind, so violent in its arrival that the entire physical world before Bryan's eyes dissolved instantly into a swimming, disorienting haze.
In that suspended instant of clouded consciousness, a faint, building roaring rushed into Bryan's ears from every direction at once, and a sensation of the stars themselves wheeling and shifting above his head seized his entire body all at once!
Hisss—
When the swimming haze before him finally, gradually cleared, Bryan fixed his own eyes properly ahead and his expression froze entirely rigid at what met them!
He was no longer standing in that low, gloomy stretch of woodland before the Gaunt family home at all. He had emerged instead into a boundless expanse, a vast void of absolute nothingness filled entirely with churning, endless currents of grey.
Before his own eyes stood a door—so magnificent, so absolute in its evident power, that no words of praise, however extravagant or carefully chosen, could ever properly capture the full majesty of it.
And beyond that door, floating above his head, hung a slab of clay tablet, roughly the size of an open book, seemingly fashioned from the very same ancient material as the door itself.
'The Tablet of Destiny!'
Bryan tilted his head back sharply to study the tablet floating steadily above him, his jaw was tightening at the recognition.
This tablet was one he had obtained, some time ago, from the centaurs' sacred ground—said, according to their tradition, to have been left behind by Merlin himself, entrusted specifically to the centaurs to guard across the generations.
The very day he had first physically touched this tablet, Bryan had fallen into a sudden, overwhelming vision, seeing himself drift out from behind this exact same magnificent door into this same grey, boundless world.
And when he had eventually woken from that vision, the tablet itself had sunk directly into his very soul and vanished entirely without a trace, leaving no physical evidence behind.
He had never genuinely imagined it would appear again today, in these particular circumstances.
"What in the world is this—"
Even with the full breadth of Bryan's accumulated magical knowledge, built across years of dedicated study, he could find genuinely no adequate explanation for what he was now personally experiencing!
He reached out one hand tentatively, attempting to touch the grey turbulence swirling steadily around him but it was as though he himself were the illusion in this particular space, rather than the surrounding world. The grey currents passed straight through his own body and hand without resistance, their steady motion was completely undisturbed by the contact.
"An illusion, then. Or else—has the tablet truly brought me to this mysterious world?"
Bryan murmured the question to himself, working through the possibilities aloud.
Hmmm—
Just then, the tablet floating steadily above Bryan's head suddenly let out a low, resonant hum, almost as though trying to remind him of something important he'd overlooked.
Sensing the shift, Bryan immediately turned his gaze toward that mysterious, magnificent door.
And at a single glance, his entire body shuddered.
Someone had appeared within that grey expanse but this time, it was not himself standing there.
A girl's soul, marked by long, pale-golden hair drifting weightlessly, emerged slowly from within the grey currents surrounding him. She lay flat and horizontal in the void, seemingly deep asleep, drifting slowly toward the great door itself.
Before actually passing through the door—perhaps under the influence of some governing rule—her physical form was gradually, gently stripped away entirely, leaving behind only a pure, unblemished radiance that passed alone through the door's threshold, while the discarded form gradually dissolved into nothing behind her.
'No.'
Bryan's eyes shifted sharply, and he rejected his own initial reading of the scene almost immediately.
It wasn't genuinely dissolving away into nothing at all—it was, rather, reverting slowly back into the same grey currents that filled every single corner of this strange world around him.
'So these grey currents themselves are—'
Bryan was still in the careful midst of analysing everything he had witnessed when, at that exact moment, a fresh, unexpected change appeared before him.
The golden-haired girl, who had just had something stripped away from her by the power of whatever rules governed this place, and had seemingly merged back with the world itself, was—under the sudden interference of some entirely inexplicable, external force—separated once more, abruptly, from the surrounding grey currents, reappearing solidly before the great door.
Before Bryan could even properly react to this sudden reversal, a hazy, spinning vortex suddenly enveloped the golden-haired girl completely, swallowing her whole in an instant.
Hmmm——
A fresh humming sound surged directly into his ears once more, and the entire scene before Bryan's eyes blurred violently again, dissolving!
A cold, desolate wilderness. A crumbling old house. A gloomy, dense forest, and a fading, sallow moon hanging low in the sky.
Bryan turned in place, his steps were stiff and rigid with lingering disorientation, finding himself somehow returned to the ordinary physical world.
Hisss—
What leapt suddenly into view: a young girl with golden hair, her whole form somewhat translucent and unreal at its edges—made Bryan draw a sharp, cold breath through his teeth!
"You—"
Bryan's lips moved slowly, his face was filled entirely with clear disbelief.
"You're… Ariana Dumbledore's sister?"
Bryan murmured aloud. He held, in that moment, genuinely no expectation that this girl who was, at this very same instant, still quietly comforting the grief-stricken Dumbledore nearby—would offer him any kind of answer in return. But—
"I've seen you before—"
Ariana looked not the slightest bit sorrowful, despite everything.
She gazed steadily at Bryan with a smile, and the words that emerged from her, clear and bright as a nightingale's evening song, made Dumbledore's own continuous weeping stop at once—he turned sharply toward Bryan, his own face was struck through completely with mounting astonishment at what he'd just heard.
"Wh—what do you mean by that?"
Bryan himself had fallen into a shock beyond all measure. He asked the question, his own voice coming out strained.
"You have existed in that timeless, eternal place for a very long while—"
Ariana said.
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