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(Enchanting Melodies) Chapter 422: Inquisitive Outsiders
🕑 Added 2025-02-06 14:00:12 +0000 UTCChapter 422: Inquisitive Outsiders
23 May 1995, Hogwarts, Scotland
Without even motioning everything, he pinned all three of them to the wall, and spoke up, “Now, with that out of the way, why don’t you tell me what you’re doing here, and also how this girl right there is using the Zabini family magic? You’re not supposed to be here, are you?” Given the panicked looks on their faces, Harry was right that they were up to something very fishy.
Harry stared at his three attackers. Or were they his captives now? Did they even mean to attack him? Standing around under an invisibility spell wasn’t really a reassuring thing, but he also knew that only Daphne knew where exactly he was performing his experiments. He always came there discreetly and often used portals or just warped space, if anyone was following him, and he always knew when that happened.
Were they just trying to use the room but couldn’t since Harry was already inside? It was technically possible, but that still didn’t explain how the girl was using Blaise’s magic.
Now that he had moved past his surprise, he took the time to observe all of the intruders without any issues. They all looked familiar, but he didn’t know where he had seen them before. He took a closer at the girl who used Blaise’s magic and froze as he made up her features. She was like a clone of Tracy, only a bit more dark-skinned. Now that he looked at the others, the girl who had sent the lightning bolt was obviously more powerful and did look a bit like Angelina, and the boy looked a bit like Neville, except for the hair, which was brown and far curlier.
It made sense, didn’t it? The magic, the fact that he hadn’t seen them before despite being the same age as him – not that this was very impossible – and now that he thought about it, he slowed down his perception of time and started to analyse their energy for any sort of temporal contamination.
He froze as he realized what was seeing. He expected them to be dimensional travellers, more than anything, but he could tell that their souls, their very essence, matched perfectly with this universe. That only resulted in a single conclusion, something that he had long thought was impossible. No, something that he had proved arithmetically that it was impossible.
Time Travel.
It couldn’t be a form of projection through divination given how time turners worked. The artefacts relied on the properties of what the Department of Mysteries called time sand. It had a very peculiar property of affecting the user before using it as if each grain of sand could divine perfectly how it would be used before being consumed. This got the person in the past to create a projection of themselves and act, but the side effect was that the magic needed to be similar from that point in time, giving the user the memories of the projection when used. It was why going back too much caused some form of psychosis, especially if there had been a traumatic experience in perception in the interval. The change in the perception of the world just destabilized the consciousness, causing the wizard to turn mad.
That was beside the point, what was important was that time turners, no matter how experimental or powerful they could ever be, needed the person in question to cast the projection, which these intruders obviously couldn’t, given the fact that they hadn’t even been born yet.
That just left genuine Time Travel.
How was that possible? Time could be looped, stretched, or contracted, but this would have literally broken the entire dimension.
Did any of them figure it out? Given their age, it was very unlikely. It might be an arrogant thing to say but understanding, truly understanding, concepts like space and time was something that people would need lifetimes to do. Harry’s case was unique, and he didn’t even think he’d ever be able to go back in time.
He needed to understand how that was possible.
Harry gave them a pointed look, “Let me rephrase that, how about you tell me what three time-travelling teenagers are doing in this school?”
Yes, he was definitely right, given the fact that his three attackers stopped thrashing, watching in with their eyes wide, gaping. The girl who looked like Angelina spoke up first, “Time travel? Is that even possible?”
“Yes, it is. You don’t belong here, and by here, I mean this timeline. It’s very obvious that you’re using magic that you shouldn’t be able to know, and I’d recognize that family crest anywhere. Also, your clothes are a bit modern. It’s hard to see because of the robes, but these shoes haven’t been released yet. They’re a muggle brand that I recognize. I could also mention the fact that I could detect the way time is being shifted with every move you make, so why don’t you save us all some time and just say what you’re doing here?”
They stayed in silence for what seemed like a good minute, processing Harry’s rant, before Tracy’s daughter spoke up while staring at him in disbelief, “Who are you?”
“Harry Potter, at your service,” he answered while bowing mockingly.
He was about to ask them their names, only for the three of them to stare at him in awe and disbelief. The boy spoke up, “Are you serious?”
That freaked Harry out a bit, “Yes, I think I’m serious about my own name.”
Angelina’s daughter, who had been the leader of their little group and obviously the more serious one, spoke up, “You’re THE Harry Potter. You?”
“Oi, I think I know my own name thank you.”
“You’re Harry Potter, the slayer of the World Serpent, the hero of Hogsmeade, the destroyer of Avalon, the bane of the Olympians, the Lord of Space and Time, the last Peverell, the Master of Death, the Raven of….”
Harry felt something try to warn him. It wasn’t something that he could put into words, more like an instinct that he shouldn’t let her continue, as it would have some very severe consequences. He raised his hand and silenced her, “Now, now, there’s no need to spoil anything, do we? But what was that about the Hero of Hogsmeade?”
“Didn’t you singlehandedly save the village of Hogsmeade from a Death Eater attack, capturing the infamous Fenrir Greyback and his pack, destroying the last werewolf in history.”
“Oh yeah, but it wasn’t just me, Daphne, Blaise and Tracy were with me when we did it. It wasn’t exactly that impressive. I’m also not sure about the last werewolf thing. Greyback’s been dead for over a year, and there are still werewolves around. Sure, not a lot of them are in Europe because the Red Witch turned them into Lycans, but that didn’t mean that they disappeared.”
Tracy’s daughter was practically swooning, “You seriously did all that? No wonder you figured us out so quickly. You’re the bloody Lord of Space and Time. I’m going to tell everyone I met you when we get back.”
“Look, that’s nice and all, but you still haven’t introduced yourselves to me.”
Angelina’s daughter looked away, a bit embarrassed, “Sorry about that. I’m Catherine Marinakis. The idiot here is Julia Zabini, and the nerd is Alexander Granger.”
Harry nodded, already seeing the similarities with their parents. Alexander probably took the name Granger after Neville’s disownment from the Longbottom family became known publicly. Still, it was weird that his friends’ kids looked at him in awe, as if they were seeing Merlin and Morgana in the flesh. Sure, Harry would admit that he accomplished much in his life, but they looked at him like a historical figure, not an uncle or a family friend.
There could be a lot of explanations for this, but Harry couldn’t help but be curious as to what his future holds. However, every time he even entertained the idea to ask, he felt a shiver go up his spine, with something warning him to not push.
But one thing was for certain, Harry was glad to see that the world still seemed fine after a few decades. It meant that the worst didn’t happen and that the material realm wouldn’t unravel in the events of Ragnarök. Whether the Light and Dark were destroyed, or if his plan worked was still in the air. Harry could end up refusing to allow Ragnarök to happen and get himself stuck as Mordred was. That wasn’t an option he particularly liked to think about, even if it was viable and preferable to total annihilation.
Instead of trying to figure out what would happen to the future, he decided to focus on the present, “Well, Catherine, Julia, Alexander, it’s nice to meet you all, but I have to ask why you decided to break the laws of space and time and come to this place. What are you trying to accomplish? Or more accurately, what are you trying to undo?”
This time, it was Alexander Granger who seemed the most embarrassed, “We didn’t exactly mean to come this far. We just wanted to get back a few years, but we overshot it.”
“By over two decades,” one of the girls murmured before punching his shoulder, “I told you that this was a terrible idea.”
The boy protested, “It was a perfectly valid idea. Mom was one of the people who studied the World Tree the most. She could have helped us save it from those nutjobs.”
Wait, was Hermione dead in the future? It had to be relatively far, not that he was particularly bothered about it. She would have been in her thirties, given the boy’s age and his injuries, and Harry was more concerned with Ragnarök than the girl who tried to blackmail him, dying because of some vague event. From the sound of the boy’s anger near the end, these ‘nutjobs’ were the ones who had killed her anyway, and that probably had nothing to do with him.
However, it was the detail about the World Tree that got Harry’s interest. Did he mean Yggdrasil, the world tree in Norse mythology? Harry wouldn’t say that he knew everything about dimensional magic, but he knew that they weren’t exactly structured in some form of eldritch multiversal tree.
Catherine Marinakis glared at the boy, “Good for you. You wanted to see your mother again. Too bad we’re now stuck here until we fix that useless trinket of yours.”
Julia Zabini proposed, “Well, we have Harry Potter with us. He could help us get home, huh? Maybe he’ll even help us save the World Tree.”
“What World Tree are you talking about?” Harry questioned.
“You know, the World Tree, the greatest marvel in the history of the magical world, the protector of all mages…”
The Marinakis girl glared at her, “It still hasn’t even appeared yet. You really need to focus on your History of Magic lessons better.”
“It’s not my fault it’s so boring. I suppose it’s a bit of a stretch for him to help us on that front. But he still should be able to fix that fancy time turner of yours.”
A time-turner? Given the fact that they attributed their time travel to a fucking time turner of all things, these three barely had any understanding of temporal magic. Feeling curious about the artefact in question, he spoke up, “Just show me the damn thing and I’ll see what I can do.”
For some reason, they all stared at Harry, speechless, before the Zabini girl grinned widely, “You’re really shattering my expectations of you, man.”
Harry rolled his eyes, “What expectations? Did you expect me to give you some long lesson about the dangers of messing with time?”
“Well, yeah,” the girl answered.
“Oh, don’t worry, if you end up messing up or doing something that threatens the very fabric of time, then I’ll kill you all myself. There won’t be any lessons,” Harry casually warned them.
All three of them froze in their tracks, shivering at his cold tone, before nodding stiffly. Harry wasn’t really joking though. Every breath these three kids took, ended up sending shivers down Harry’s spine, like a disaster waiting to happen. He was tempted to just kill them and be done with it. But his warnings also triggered whenever he thought about it seriously.
Deciding to get a move on, he put a fake smile on his face, “With all of that out of the way, why don’t you show me that time turner of yours.”
The Granger boy, slowly walked towards him and gave him a semi-transparent golden pyramid with an hourglass inside it. He could see thousands of runes connected into a very fancy matrix. It was far more powerful than any time turner, he had ever seen, but not in a good way. It ignored the impact of its use on a person’s psyche and just channelled more time sand just for the sake of it.
It was definitely not meant for human use, able to get someone to project themselves further back in time, but they would die almost instantly. Theoretically, it could have gotten an object to project itself back, like leaving messages, copies, and certain things. It was definitely useful, given that one did not try to alter the past but use it to benefit them in the present. It wouldn’t be an artefact since the projection would fade on the day they appeared, but messages could work, or even ways to scry secure past events. Leaving a recording device in the past to record events and be able to analyse them in the present.
However, something was for certain. These kids should have died using this artefact. As sad as it might have been, this was, by far, the most likely outcome. Them being here, in the past, meant a single thing. Something had arranged to let them through. Something was risking damaging the fabric of time, something powerful enough to make that happen, just for him to meet them, if that was even the purpose.
He didn’t like it. He definitely didn’t trust them one bit, but he couldn’t exactly afford to not keep an eye on them until he found a way to send them home. That boy, Alexander Granger, worried him given his track in reckless behaviour.
Harry quickly conjured his dove Patronus and sent it to Daphne, “Sorry, Daph. I can’t make it tonight. Something came up. I’ll talk to you later.”
It was probably a bit brusque, but Daphne would understand that something really serious had come up. After all, the fabric of time was a bit more of a priority than a date. What a kind world it would have been if that hadn’t been the case.
He turned towards the three children who were watching him with obvious awe in their eyes, “Alright, I have a good idea about what happened, so, let’s start with a few ground rules while you’re here. You will not interact with anyone. You will not try to stop anything from happening in the future. You will also not say anything to anyone about your future. Believe me, you will not like the consequences. Am I clear?”
They all nodded briskly, “Good. Now, I need you to tell me everything.”
AN: Not sure about this chapter, to be honest. It’s surprisingly hard to write characters from the future without really spoiling how the story would end, and I didn't have time to pick the chapter apart like I would have liked. Work has been crazy and they're even making me come in during the weekend for some big deadline.
Anyway, I found that Harry intimidating the kids to submission was on point with his character. I know some of you will ask what happened to him in the future, like why none of the kids knows him personally, etc… Don’t worry, I’ll address it in the next few chapters, but it's really hard doing it without massively spoiling the ending that I've been planning. As usual, I don’t mind rewriting this chapter depending on your feedback, so, please let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions.
Comments
TensorOperator
Since Hogwarts is the final level of education most British wizards get, socially it is closer to college than to high school.
Garri Sarkisov
Interesting
MonolithV
I know this story is about magic, but the part I find the most unbelievable is that 3 couples from the equivalent of high school stayed together long-term and had kids. 😅
DoodleBopCheese
If they come from 2020 or 2021, you should make Harry do some Covid jokes. Such as conjuring up masks or pushing them exactly 6 feet apart while they’re bound. Just an idea I thought of that might be funny.
Krazo
Lol MC should probably thank his future self for making that thing
Mythras Sarimanok
Now this is really exciting! I wonder how his time magic will improve after studying the thing and how he will screw with the future for attempting to make a time turner that defies something so fundamental as the progress of time!
Afterdark230
Well this is a left field arc… did not see this coming. But lead on!
