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(Enchanting Melodies) Chapter 469: A Glimpse Forward
🕑 Added 2025-05-11 14:00:56 +0000 UTCChapter 469: A Glimpse Forward
15 January 2001, Hogwarts
Sarah Shafiq ran from the Gryffindor boys chasing her. They hadn’t liked the fact that she’d gotten praised in Professor Flitwick’s class. When she’d come to Hogwarts, she never expected it to feel so lonely. She was actually glad to have been sorted into Hufflepuff, hoping to make some friends, but while they were all nice, Sarah didn’t exactly like her classmates all that much. They just didn’t get it, why she loved learning magic so much. Whenever she started a conversation about magic, she felt like she was being humoured, like no one was paying attention, and it drove her insane.
She didn’t exactly have any friends, and she had more than her share of people who really hated her, especially the Gryffindors who seemed to have it out for her. She didn’t even know their names.
Sarah wanted to be great, to leave her mark on the world, like Merlin, like Harry Potter. Oh, she wished she could have met him. Her professors tended to rave about him, talking about how brilliant he was, of what he could have become if he hadn’t sacrificed himself for them all.
Everyone told her that she had a lot of potential, and she hoped that she would measure up to their expectations one day. If she escaped her pursuers, that is. She ran towards her refuge, the library, animating one of the decorative medieval armours to halt them. Finally, she took a sigh of relief when she stepped foot there. Madam Pince gave her a frown, but she would punish anyone using spell fire very heavily.
Taking deep breaths to calm the exhaustion, she walked around the library, hoping to see something interesting. She liked doing that, just exploring. She especially liked the unpublished sections of the library, where students and researchers could put their notes. It was surprisingly a good source of innovative spells, and former students’ notes were especially useful when it came to certain insights.
She glanced at a few tomes, most of them going over her head. One day, she promised herself that she’d understand them all. However, Sarah froze as she opened the first page of a little black book, showing the title, ‘The Hidden Truths and Secrets of Harry Potter’, which was written by some witch called Hermione Granger.
That name sounded familiar. Wasn’t she some researcher? She remembered her name a bit from the Daily Prophet. She specialised in the World Tree’s research, didn’t she? Why would she have written a book about Harry Potter, and why not publish it?
The Raven of Nurmengard was celebrated as one of the greatest mages to ever live, an unparalleled genius of magical innovation, whose potential was tragically cut down by the horrors of the monsters Albus Dumbledore and Gellert Grindelwald. And while some of his feats were very well-known, a lot of his life was mysterious, and people would have bought any books that would have shed some light on his secrets. Even if there was barely more than a small new fact, people would have still bought this book.
So, why hide it?
The answer was unsurprisingly in the introduction.
The truths and secrets of Harry Potter
By Hermione Granger
I do not know if anyone will ever read what I have written. I’m not sure I want to, but it felt like a good idea to get it off my chest. I have no wish to publish this book or even spread its contents. I doubt it would be accepted anyway and not treated like some sort of heresy. I just wanted a place to put my research and my findings. My name is Hermione Granger, and a long time ago, I called Harry Potter my friend. I lost that privilege in my pride, in my indecisions, in my efforts to fit in, and I have regretted it ever since.
Much of the current knowledge of Harry Potter’s life has been romanticised to the extreme. He was not a self-sacrificing hero, willing to help those in need. He wasn’t a born warrior, able to kill anyone with just a glance. And that’s alright. The truth is that Harry Potter was a born researcher. I knew that from the moment I met him in our first year that he was special. He didn’t seem to care about what anyone said about him or about points in class. He tried to understand magic. I think that was always his goal, his greatest dream. People often called him a genius, but if anything, that is an understatement. Harry had this insight about magic, a way to perceive it that no one could emulate. Even as a first-year, he could modify spells to the extreme. It made me extremely jealous, that no matter how hard I worked, I couldn’t hold a candle to him.
After we went our separate ways, Harry made three close friends: Daphne Greengrass, Blaise Zabini, and Tracy Davis. I, myself, got involved with Neville Longbottom, the boy who lived, and Ron Weasley. And yet, when I needed him most, a year later, he saved me, while I was being possessed. He, along with Neville, entered the Chamber of Secrets, and they killed the monster within it. Harry, himself, killed the World Serpent imprisoned within, and that was the first domino that resulted in Ragnarok.
I was hospitalised for a year afterwards, but from what I understand, Harry traded anonymity and non-interference from Dumbledore, in exchange for denying that almost an entire generation of British mages died on the headmaster’s watch. Neville was the one who paid the price for that, being slandered by the media, being accused of being unstable and insane. Harry did nothing to set the records straight. He just let it happen, selfishly coming to an agreement with his enemy, to buy himself some peace of mind. People often assume that Harry was always some selfless hero, and while he did sacrifice himself for our survival, he was also quite selfish and merciless when he felt like he needed to be. I am not saying that he was evil, merely human.
People often tried to know why he and Albus Dumbledore clashed. People often assumed that the former headmaster of Hogwarts was some sort of evil mastermind, and while he tended to behave this way, from my investigation, he appeared more akin to a man obsessed with order and safety, than an evil man, and that sometimes, he accomplished his vision through some very dubious means. It doesn’t excuse his actions, but it does shed a certain light on the man’s motivations.
A clear show of this was during Harry Potter’s infamous guardianship hearing, where he saw Harry as a potential asset, a pawn for his ambitions, but also as a future threat to his plans. Harry was an agent of chaos, one with a lot of potential, and he could have ruptured the careful balance that Dumbledore cultivated over the years, specifically relating to magical experimentation, which Minerva McGonagall later allowed during her tenure as Headmistress.
The headmaster had wanted to use Harry’s magical prowess as proof that Harry needed to be regulated, and as much as I hate to say it, he had a point. It seemed extremely unfair at the time, downright villainous, really, but looking back, it was the right choice. Harry Potter was a magical prodigy who could have made even the worst of Dark Lords look like children throwing tantrums. The magic he wielded, his planning, his cunning, his intelligence, could have easily made him a very significant threat to magical Britain, maybe even the world. The truth is that we were lucky that his temperament came out the way it did, especially given his upbringing.
Not many people know this, but Harry’s childhood wasn’t a happy one. It took quite a bit of investigating to figure this out. Harry was always secretive about his childhood before Hogwarts, and I can now see why. After the fire of Godric’s Hollow, he was sent to live with his mother’s sister, Petunia Dursley. He was neglected for most of his childhood, essentially ignored and unloved by his family. Records of him in school showed that he was a brilliant child, with surprising maturity, but with difficulties connecting with others. And if that wasn’t an apt description of Harry, I don’t know what is.
Anyway, the guardianship hearing was the first time Harry Potter publicly opposed Dumbledore. Personally, I think it was Dumbledore trying to reassert some control over Harry after his stunt during the Chamber of Secrets. The headmaster had followed Harry’s leads to the Undercroft, the previous location of the chamber before Harry had moved it as leverage over Dumbledore. Either way, Harry ended up revealing some concerning information about the headmaster’s past, including his role in his sister’s death.
What followed was an entire year where Dumbledore kept trying to get Harry to reveal his magical prowess during the Hogwarts tournament, and the young man just made a fool out of him. I was missing for most of the school year, but from what I could gather, this severely messed with the public perception of Dumbledore, enough that the man decided to arrange the boy’s death during one of the tasks, which got him banished from Britain.
This year also marked the destruction of Azkaban, which is now known to have been the work of Gellert Grindelwald, given the presence of Elder Vampires at the scene. Most people believe it to be a mystery, but what people call the Battle of Hogsmeade was likely won by Harry Potter’s efforts. It took me some time to find a few spores of plants that seemed to have released the aerosol that took out the Azkaban escapees and Greyback’s pack when they decided to attack Hogsmeade. This traces back to the Greengrass family magics, and people obviously know of Daphne Greengrass’ relationship with Harry.
I admit to not knowing for sure how Harry expected the attack and how he prepared for it so completely, but I believe it to be either the work of a spy in the escape inmates’ ranks or some form of divination, which I believe Harry could have been proficient in. We will likely never know for sure. His involvement in the Quidditch World Cup’s attack was far easier to claim, having battled many of the attacking vampires before escaping.
Which brings us to the European School Tournament, which is now often called the Potter Tournament in passing, where Harry ended up revealing some of his skill during the first task and aided his teammates to victory in the second one. This also marked the official beginning of Ragnarok, with Harry somehow realising that Dumbledore and Grindelwald were destroying prophecies to power their ritual, something that researchers today are still unable to fully grasp.
From the looks of it, his investigation had seemingly been halted in Durmstrang, where he ended up disappearing for a few months. Very little is known about what happened, and I wasn’t able to secure an invitation to the fortress to be able to get a clearer idea of what happened. What I can say is that Harry’s return occurred before the official announcement from Arcturus Black, likely due to his interference in the task in Greece. I am unsure of the specifics as I was stuck in Hogwarts with the rest of the students my age at the time, but I always found Carmichael, one of our champions, to have acted and made plans that reminded me of Harry. This was supported by the fact that Daphne Greengrass had stopped grieving and entered the tournament. As I do not need to mention, this resulted in the destruction of Mount Olympus, but it isn’t well-known, but this was also the day the Red Witch perished, or as I knew her, Lily Evans, Harry’s supposed dead mother.
I theorise that the blood mage seen during the battle of Nurmengard was Daphne Greengrass, who I know for a fact had studied under Lily Evans for a few months and could have crafted the blood ritual that wiped vampires from the face of the Earth.
Of course, I am not writing this as a way to detract from Harry’s achievements, and I am happy that the world didn’t end, but the point I’m trying to make is that Harry wasn’t some god; he wasn’t some incorruptible hero. He could be petty at times and slow to forgive; he was definitely dangerous and played with magic that would have terrified the masses. He used soul magic to bind me in ways that I still feel to this day. To be fair to him, I went too far, but the boy who was once my friend had looked at me with no mercy in his eyes, and it terrified me to my core. He was a flawed man who was just as obsessed with destroying Dumbledore and Grindelwald as they were with the ‘greater good’.
He was also extremely secretive, and his actions can still be seen to this day. I still believe that the World Tree is the product of his actions. It wasn’t fully discovered until a couple of years after his death, We know that there were some enchantments hiding it until its influence covered the entire planet. It was the perfect shield against the likely war against the Muggles that a lot of experts predicted. It is known that Grindelwald had used this inevitable war as a way to rally his forces and justify a lot of his misdeeds, and Dumbledore had shown that he had similar concerns in his later years.
The World Tree had solved one of their biggest problems, one of the reasons why they wished to summon Ragnarok, and I can easily see Harry doing this out of pettiness, as proof that Dumbledore and Grindelwald were wrong, that they were nothing more than power-hungry mages that sought nothing more than control and obedience, a final insult to whatever legacy they might have had.
Of course, this is barely more than a theory, even if it would explain the energy requirements for the tree’s existence in the first place. The exact age of the tree is still a mystery, but it fits the timeline and my calculations.
All in all, Harry Potter was a brilliant young man, but he is far from the godly figure that most people worship. He was flawed, just like everyone, and it is a shame that the world will never get to witness his full potential, but in a way, I believe that his death, his sacrifice, was far more valuable for us as a society than he would have been alive. It united us in ways that we could never have. His brilliance showed what was possible and sparked a new wave of interest in magical innovation once more after decades of stagnation.
I’ll go into more details about my investigations and findings in the next chapter, proving that my conclusions are not invalid. Perhaps one day, someone in the future will know the truth and finish what I started.
Sarah re-read that introduction for what felt like dozens of times. It seemed so unreal to have such a negative opinion of Harry Potter. No, calling it a negative opinion was too much; it made him feel more human, more prone to mistakes, and that contradicted everything that she had ever read about the legendary figure.
The rest of the book was mostly her findings. Sarah skimmed most of it, and while a few arguments were a bit fragile, a lot of it made sense, if they were true. She had always wished to be like Harry Potter, to be celebrated like him, to have everyone respect her. The curiosity was too much, even for her. There was one way to see if this Granger woman was telling even a smidgen of truth, that wasn’t impossible for her to manage, and that was finding the Undercroft room that it talked about.
It took a couple of hours of her sneaking out after curfew, looking around the Slytherin common room, until she found it. She found the clock where it was exactly described, and with her heart pounding, she pointed her wand at it, willing it to open. The gears started to turn, and the artefact opened up like a doorway, revealing a hidden room inside.
She gaped as she looked at what was inside. It was as large as a common room and filled with portraits, tapestries, and books. It was a repository of forgotten lore and powerful enchantments that Sarah would have loved to devour in her own time.
Sarah walked around for a bit, marvelling at her discovery. Harry Potter had once been here, in this place, slaying the World Serpent. Right as she entered, something weird caught her eye. There was a painting that just didn’t fit with the rest of the room. It wasn’t a portrait or a landscape, just colours that moved around chaotically. No, it was more like they were appearing in and out of existence instead of moving around.
On the bottom, she found a few gears, which she played around with. She turned a few of them and noticed that the painting seemingly shifted with them. She tried a few combinations and smiled as she noticed that it was a puzzle, trying to make the painting take certain shapes. It was fun, but there seemed to be an end-goal, some kind of defined shape. She didn’t know how she knew this, it was more instinct than anything else. In the end, Sarah managed to make the painting have the shape of a raven, soaring.
She smiled in success, but froze as she heard a click. The painting opened like a doorway, and she froze as she entered. She found herself in what must have been a magical workshop. There were a few boards with runes written on them, dozens of tomes and notes, and a few gems pulsing with magic.
Sarah kept staring until an illusion of a young man appeared in front of her, “Welcome to my workshop. My name is Harry Potter, and I created this place in my second year at Hogwarts, I believe. I moved on from it, over the years, but this was quite nostalgic. If you’re seeing this, then I’m probably dead. That’s alright. I’ve known about this possibility for quite some time, and death is something that no one can avoid, not all the time. Anyway, if you managed to solve my little puzzle, then perhaps you have what it takes to be great, to learn to master your magic. Don’t be so excited, I removed most of my personal magic research from this place, and instead, it will have enough theory to guide you into learning your own, creating your own spells, and maybe even a new field of magic. You may do with this place what you wish, I only ask that you do not spread its knowledge too much. Then again, I’m a bit too dead to care.”
The young girl remained frozen, unable to comprehend. She had seen photos of Harry Potter before. She was in his workshop. She was in Harry Potter’s workshop. She heard Harry Potter talking to her. Sure, it was an illusion, not the real thing, but she really did. She wanted to squee in delight, but controlled herself and just murmured, “Thank you.”
The illusion smiled slightly, “No, no, Sarah, thank you, and good luck on your journey.”
And just like that, Sarah’s face paled. This was a recording, not an actual painting. How had it known her name? Sarah’s breath hitched as a chill crawled down her spine. It had spoken to her. By name. She took a shaky step back and glanced around the room, heart pounding in her chest. No matter how she turned it around in her head, there was no good explanation. Did he know somehow that she would be here even after his death?
Sarah exhaled slowly, her fear shifting into determination. If Harry Potter had truly left this behind for someone like her, then she wouldn’t waste it. Not a word. Not a lesson.
She was going to find out the truth. She was going to master this place. And one day, the world would whisper her name the way they did his.
AN: That chapter was surprisingly hard to write. I wanted it to show how people from the future perceive Harry, and him leaving something behind in Hogwarts, like a small mark that other students could explore. There are still a few chapters left, but this idea just wouldn't leave my mind, so I decided to do it. I’m not sure if this came out like I wanted it to, but I don’t mind rewriting it depending on your feedback. As usual, please let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions.
Comments
Doubledoor
cool look into the future! I like the idea of an epilogue like this, but unlike some, I hope it remains just that. I feel like it'd be better to leave Sarah as a possibility, then a certainty. Like a representation of the future the world is allowed to have, now that Harry saved it from the machinations of the Light and the Dark.
Afterdark230
Well unlike others I like the style you wrote Hermonie in. She till does not understand what happened to her was entirely her fault. Harry just helped keep her together. Is she bitter…. Yes she is, and still has not learned her lessons. As for Sarah, I like the spark. I would love to see a spin off of her being an apprentice under “Harry” ah the story lines you could go. Maybe a book two someday.
