Disclaimer:
Harry Potter and all of its characters belong to J.K. Rowling.
I own nothing but the original characters I make.
"Dialogue"
'Thoughts'
Chapter 10: Sorrow
"Urgg..." Harry opened his eyes and tried to stand up from he ground. His entire body was aching, and he felt like he had just run a marathon.
"The books did say that the creation of time-turners required a minimum of three wizards. Now I understand why." He muttered.
After recovering a little bit, he stood on the floor and went back to the table.
Harry carefully placed the box containing the newly crafted time-turner and examined it for a while to be sure he didn't make any glaring mistakes.
He smiled in satisfaction after finding no glaring problems with the artifact.
"Looks like I did an excellent job!" He could not help but feel extremely proud of himself.
This had been a colossal task where he had been forced to master several magical disciplines.
Harry looked down at the artifact and felt the need to use it right away, but he had already decided that it would be better to return to the point of origin where the temporal anomaly started.
So with that in mind, he gathered his things, mounted his broom, and flew back to the Ministry.
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Soon enough, Harry was once again standing in the Room of Time, where it all had started.
"It's been a while since I've been here," Harry smiled bitterly.
He took the time-turner out of its box and held it firmly.
"If my theory is correct, by doing a reverse turn, I would be moving time forward. It doesn't matter how much...even one second would be enough to put me back in the real world. Sigh… here we go."
Harry activated the time-turner and saw the runes illuminate. Then he waited in expectation for the results.
"...What?" He looked around but saw no change.
He was starting to feel shivers. "No… this should work!. This needs to work!."
Harry checked the time-turner again, and everything seemed correct. The artifact should work, so he tried again.
He did one turn and the runes illuminated, but once again, nothing happened.
Harry was getting anxious.
"Ok, calm down. Maybe it's not supposed to move forward. I'll just move backwards."
He turned it in a clockwise motion and waited…but again...nothing.
"This doesn't make any sense!. I know I built it properly. I have studied this for decades! The time-turner should work… so why…"
Harry started to rack his brain for an explanation, and he soon remembered an idea he had come up with a long time ago about the nature of this place that he was in.
An idea that he decided to ignore and placed in the back of his mind while he was working towards his goal.
"There is no time in this place…" He muttered out loud.
That would explain why the time-turner can't work. The artifact works by moving the fabric of space and time, but without time, there is nothing for it to move… meaning that the Time-Turner will never work, no matter what he tries.
"I should have considered that possibility a bit more… no… I couldn't."
That would have been like admitting that there was no way out of here.
"Now, the only chance I have is to wait for this plane of existence to collapse on its own, but even then, there is no guarantee that I would be able to go back. And…"
Harry could not bring himself to say it. Years back, after learning some Arithmancy, he made some calculations based on the only incident recorded that was similar to his. In that incident, a researcher was hit by a tiny bit of the silver mist that appears after the time dust contained in a time-turner gets disrupted, and it was trapped in a frozen world for a week.
He was doing an experiment with a mere five grams of time dust. A single time-turner contains fifty grams of the substance.
In Harry's case, he was hit by the combined mist of at least three hundred time-turners. A linear calculation would indicate that Harry would only be trapped for around sixty years, which would not be a problem since he had already spent over fifty.
However, he knew that it was not that easy. Increasing the amount of time dust would increase the intensity of the silver mist, but the increase would not be linear. Without being able to perform any tests, there was no way to make an accurate measurement. He could be trapped in this place for centuries, for all he knew…
"I can't do this anymore…" Harry collapsed to the ground, completely exhausted.
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He stayed on the floor for what felt like days without eating or drinking anything, and he didn't even miss it. It had been decades since he stopped feeling hungry or thirsty, and he had to force himself to eat and drink to remain healthy.
For a while, he thought that at some point he was going to die, and he was fine with that.
The human body is not supposed to function more than two or three days without water… but he didn't die.
And he just kept lying on the ground of the Room of Time without the will to move anymore.
"This is pointless…" he eventually said after being silent for so long.
"I need to do something… nothing is going to change if I just lie here forever."
Harry stood with surprisingly little difficulty, considering how long he had been staying there without moving a muscle.
He then stood there for a while, thinking.
"I still have so much to learn about magic. I can't really know for sure that there is no other solution with my limited knowledge. If I keep studying, I may find something, and if the answer is not in Hogwarts, there are other magical schools out there."
Memories of his friends manifested in his mind, reminding him why he couldn't give up.
"I promised that I would see them again. It's too early to surrender yet...I haven't tried everything yet."
With renewed determination, Harry made his way out of the Ministry.