The Language of Scars

Harry learned to measure silence by the way it pressed on his eardrums in the Department of Mysteries. The corridor beyond the veiled arch murmured with its own breath. Around him, sealed chambers held quiet that wasn’t empty, but waiting. On his desk, a cluster of parchment pages lay in precise stacks, annotated with the same clipped handwriting that filled years of case files. “Uncatalogued resonance,” he’d written in the margin three times, and still it didn’t look right in ink.

He rubbed at the scar on his right hand without thinking and pushed the chair back. The room he had been assigned was narrow, crowded with crystal vials and brass instruments whose needles didn’t point north so much as toward purpose. The Memory Basin held the ghost of a silver thread at its surface, a distilled viewing of the first incident two months ago—a pocket watch inside a containment box brightening like a coal before blinking out of existence. Whatever it was, it left nothing but a smell like singed cedar and the faintest pressure in the air that faded in seconds.

The watch had been the first. Then the six-inch blade of a ceremonial Athame from Egypt. A music box that played a song no one in Records could identify. A shard of stained glass that sometimes bled color into the light around it. Not inherently dark, and not particularly powerful. Not connected, except that two days before each vanished, monitors registered a flare—a spill of something untraceable against a spectrum Harry had learned by heart. He’d sat awake long enough nights staring at the jagged peaks and valleys on the parchment charts that he knew them like the feel of his wand in his palm. Foreign and the opposite of it, a whisper against a wound he hadn’t known he was still carrying.

He touched the tip of his wand to the Memory Basin and leaned in. The silver thread rose, the room tilting with it, and he let it take him.

He stood in the first containment chamber, a ghost in his own memory. The watch gleamed under dragonhide glass. The energy flare began as a shimmer in the corner of his eye and drew itself into a single point over the watch’s second hand. He felt it in his bones, the way a thunderstorm announced itself beneath the skin—without the charge, without the prickle of known magic. This was smooth and cold, a note that didn’t belong in a familiar chord. The glass rattled. The watch blazed white. Then it was gone.

He came back to himself with his breath too fast.

He’d checked the wards until his head hurt. He’d recalibrated the resonance meters Juno had insisted were as accurate as anything Muggle-built, and even he trusted Juno’s certainty. He’d let an Unspeakable twice his age talk for twenty minutes about hypothetical plains of energy and paracausal spillover and had nodded like it didn’t leave him hollow. None of it matched what he felt.

He felt it again now, standing in the hallway outside the Time Chamber, wanting to walk past the heavy door as always and step instead into the rows of glass spheres where futures never chosen slept on dusty shelves. He didn’t. He exhaled and turned right.

“Potter,” Croft said when he reached the last chamber, voice scratched thin from too much tea and not enough sleep. Croft wore his tiredness like a robe he liked too much to replace. “You’re early.”

“Couldn’t sleep,” Harry said, and watched the older man’s eyes flicker toward his hand like they always did when he said that. Croft waved him inside.

The obsidian mirror sat on the pedestal like a wound dressed in black silk. It wasn’t the last on his list; it was the last still here. His gut told him it wouldn’t be for long. It had never reflected right. Even when he leaned close enough to see the tiny bump in his ear from an old scar, the glass gave back a version of his face smoothed soft, the wrong green in his eyes, a jaw set in a way he didn’t recognize. They’d catalogued it five years ago and left the rest alone. Until artifacts started blinking out of existence, and this one, tagged for observation only, began to twitch the needles on the sensors every time he entered the room.

“Readings?” he asked.

“Flat since yesterday,” Croft said, and flicked the topmost gauge with a fingernail. It bobbed, settled. “If you’re going to tell me it feels wrong, you can save the breath. I’m not entirely numb.”

“It feels wrong,” Harry said anyway. Croft huffed and left him with a nod toward the observation window and the button that would lower the protective shutters if needed.

He liked procedures. He liked the language of them, the way they held you still when everything else wanted to pull you apart. He walked the perimeter of the room checking for the hairline cracks that appeared in glass after a spellwork test, checked that the lines of his own shield pattern etched into the floor last week hadn’t worn underfoot. He checked the monitors. He stood in front of the mirror and forced himself to breathe slowly, to feel for the current of the Department’s magic that had already taught him a different rhythm than Hogwarts had.

There. A hum, so subtle he could have misspoken it. It wasn’t the low, thrumming heartbeat of the Veil or the cold sweet ache of Time nearby. It was a thread wrapped around something he knew and couldn’t name. He closed his eyes and let it pull at him.

“Harry,” Croft’s voice crackled over the intercom. “If you’re about to do anything stupid, let me pretend I didn’t see it. We’re on thin patience upstairs.”

“Just listening,” Harry said. He reached without moving his hand and found that sensation again, like pressing his ear to a wall and hearing a conversation in the room beyond that didn’t follow your language’s rules but meant something anyway.

He thought of the first time he’d flown, the pitch in his stomach matched by absolute conviction. He thought of the Room of Requirement opening for him when he didn’t know why he wanted it. The mirror’s surface darkened, and because he refused to be superstitious, he refused also to step back.

This isn’t ours, he thought, and didn’t know what he meant. But it brushed against him like a thing that had read him once and hadn’t forgotten. The energy signature on his charts was a jagged rise and fall—this was a breath held and released. It skimmed along the wards and tugged at the corners where their geometry made seams. It liked seams.

He adjusted the pattern in the floor with a touch of his wand, not changing the ward, only opening his own shield to the right angle and frequency. Not a crack. An ear.

Juno would have scolded him for anthropomorphizing a monitor reading. Croft would have said not to invite things that knock. He stood all the same, breath even, the tip of his wand hovering a hair above the stone. The obsidian gleamed. He didn’t see his face anymore. He saw a shape that might have been a line of bright points. He filed the feeling away like a fact.

“Got you,” he murmured, and the gauge nearest his hand trembled up one mark. He didn’t know what it was. He knew where, for the first time. Not here. He recorded every change with a steady hand and set a timer, because even with his heart marking off something urgent under his ribs, he would not rush the next step. He would not give whatever this was a reason to think him foolish or afraid. He would listen until it spoke in a way he understood.

The first tremor was so fine it could have been a trick of breath. Harry felt it in his molars, a pressure that made his jaw want to clench. The obsidian’s polished surface rippled once, like a pond disturbed by a thrown pebble, and every needle on the nearby meters twitched a fraction and held.

“Croft,” he said, not loud, eyes on the glass.

“I see it,” came the dry reply over the intercom. A beat. “Readings spiking.”

The hum rose, turned thin and sharp. It wasn’t the low throb of a ward under strain; this sound sliced, a filament pulled too tight. It slid into a frequency that prickled the tiny hairs in his inner ear and then—he winced—went higher.

“Shutters,” Croft said.

Harry thumbed the panel. Steel plates began to descend behind the observation window, sealing the room from prying eyes. He drew his wand without looking away, flattening his palm toward the floor. The etched lines in the stone woke at the contact, pale light bleeding through the grooves. He fed the pattern with a steady stream of intent and power, locking it to the room’s existing containment.

The mirror shivered. Not a trick of light now. The obsidian pulsed, a heartbeat he could see. The gauges jumped again—one, two, four marks—and the high thread of sound knifed upward. Glass rattled on shelves lining the walls. The tone doubled on itself into a chord that made nausea crawl under his skin.

“Harry, shield now,” Croft barked.

He’d already started. The containment shield he preferred wasn’t a dome; it was a series of planes, angled to intersect and absorb. He flicked his wand in a clean, practiced figure and layered the first pane of force between the mirror and the rest of the room. It took. The second locked against it, then the third, an overlapping hexagon that would catch impact and disperse it along runic seams in the floor. The pattern drank his magic fast, faster than it had any right to. He set his jaw and fed it anyway.

The sound peaked. For a split second, the mirror’s surface wasn’t a surface at all. It liquefied, blackness softening into mercury sheen. In that shifting plane a skyline flashed—towers with angles he didn’t recognize, lights strung like beads—so quick he might have imagined it. The pane nearest the pedestal vibrated visibly. Harry reinforced the joints, siphoning power from the outer layers and bracing the inner ones.

“Gauge Seven just redlined,” Croft said, clipped. In the chamber beyond, something cracked. A shelf made a high protesting sound.

Harry didn’t look. His world narrowed to the line where the first plane met the stone, to the tremor under his hands and the way the shield drank. The obsidian’s pulses became strobe-beats, and the tone gritted up to a scream that sat just under hearing and made his eyes water.

The first glass shattered somewhere behind him. The pop became a chain reaction as the frequency hit a point the racks couldn’t handle. Vials blew in delicate bursts. Slivers glittered in the corner of his eye. He flared the shield higher, extending it to the ceiling, catching a spray of shards before they could arc back toward his face. The panes flexed.

“Abort?” Croft demanded.

“If we drop the field, it rips right through the chamber,” Harry said through his teeth. He soldered the joints together with another surge of spellwork, feeling the sting of it in his fingertips. “Give me ten seconds.”

“You don’t have ten. The feed is—”

A shockwave hit the inner pane like a fist. The angled planes took it and bent, the force shunted along their edges and into the anchor points. The etched runes flared hot under his palm. He smelled heated stone and the faint metallic tang of his own magic overclocking. He pulled more from the well of himself and dumped it into the stabilizing weave.

The mirror’s surface moved again. Not a reflection, but depth, a distortion that pulled his gaze into it despite training and a lifetime of knowing better than to let a strange thing have his eyes. It wasn’t Legilimency, and it wasn’t a Portkey’s tug. It was the pressure of being looked at by something that had no eyes to speak of. His heartbeat synced to the pulses despite his effort to break it.

“Harry,” Croft said, voice thinner, surprised into using his first name like a tether. “Back off.”

He obeyed enough to step one pace backward and lower his center of gravity, grounding hard through his feet. He pushed his magic down into the runes rather than out, feeding the geometry instead of the surface. The next shockwave came; the shield held, but the rebound ran up his arms like slaps. The pitch of the sound shifted, oscillated, then climbed again. Another shelf somewhere fell in a rush of splintering glass.

The energy didn't match any profile he had catalogued. It wasn’t random. It ramped with intention, the way someone raised a voice to be heard through a door. His own wards wanted to answer, he could feel the way the lines of force in the room strained toward alignment with the pulses. He gritted his teeth and threw in a counter-oscillation, a stutter of cast-and-hold in a pattern designed to dampen resonance. The pane nearest the mirror steadied. Briefly.

A hairline fracture appeared along the second plane, spidering fast. He patched on instinct, running a second layer across it in a diagonal that would take some of the strain. The crack slowed, then bit through. The pane popped. The next layer caught.

“Shutters sealed,” Croft said over the shriek. “Evacuation protocol suggestion from upstairs.”

“Not yet,” Harry said. He could barely hear himself. His voice felt detached, his focus a white line running from the tip of his wand to the dark heart of the mirror.

It pulsed again and showed him a sliver of a street at night, rain mirrored in black puddles. He refused the lure of it and looked instead at the numbers on the nearest gauge—useless, darting back and forth like trapped fish. He went by feel. He’d fought in rooms with no time to count. He could hold a shield in his sleep. This was just more, too much more, an ask that climbed with every beat.

His magic answered anyway. He found a deep line and set his teeth into it, dragging power up until the edges of his vision blurred. The planes glowed a steady, hard white. The sound hit a threshold that made his ribs vibrate and then, impossibly, edged higher. He thought of the Veil’s whisper, of the way it asked questions in the voices of the dead. This was nothing like that and exactly like it in the way it made his skin think about unthreading.

“Five seconds,” Croft warned, voice going tight. “We’re cutting power to the chamber. Hold or get out.”

Harry nodded, not trusting his throat. He couldn’t get out. Not with the way the energy was testing seams. He held.

The mirror pulsed, and all the light on the panes died for a beat, like a blink. The field took the hit, screamed in his bones, and clung. He braced his knees and locked his shoulders and fed the spell until there wasn’t much fine left in his control, only grit and aim. The obsidian’s surface convulsed into liquid. A ring of silver ran around its edge.

The next pulse came with teeth. It bit down. The inner pane shattered into sparks of force that dissolved before they hit the floor. The second layer buckled. He caught it and felt something inside him strain like a pulled muscle, sharp and hot. He set the third plane deeper and laid his will over it like another layer of glass.

“Come on,” he muttered, and didn’t know if he meant the shield or himself. The mirror answered with a keening, too sweet and too sharp, and the gauge to his right blew its glass face with a pop. He didn’t flinch.

He had the field. He had it. Barely. The energy climbed again, exponential, an echo of itself multiplying. The seam in the air where the planes met flickered, and somewhere far away, alarms began to sing. He anchored harder and prepared to be asked for more.

The mirror swelled like a lung taking its first breath. The obsidian’s black softened into a viscous, impossible depth, and the planes of his shield warped with it, as if the magic wanted to follow wherever the surface went. The liquid sheen smoothed, clarified—and where he should have seen his own drawn face and blown pupils, a skyline rose.

Not London. Not anywhere he knew. It vaulted upward in hard lines and glass, towers pricked with clusters of lights like constellations dragged to earth. Between them, a river of headlights flowed, white and red, along streets that stitched the dark like veins. It looked like a city that lived on electricity instead of magic, a place that had no interest in hiding its pulse.

“Visual anomaly,” Croft’s voice crackled, thinner, stretched by interference. “Harry, do you see—”

“I see it.” His own voice shook the tiniest bit, breath slicing through his teeth. He slammed a reinforcing charm into the second plane and felt it take, like putting both hands on a door that someone stronger was trying to force open.

The skyline rippled, sharp then smeared, and a smear of silver bled along the mirror’s edge. He felt the energy change, the way water changes when it hits a drop. It went directional. The pressure on the shield shifted, focused, a palm pressing not everywhere but here. His bones recognized it before his brain did—this wanted a path.

“Redirecting?” Croft asked.

“It’s probing,” Harry said. “It’s—no. No.” He dug his heels in and angled the planes to shunt the force sideways, a clean redirect into the stone anchors. The runes glowed hotter, bright enough to paint the undersides of his hands in pale blue. Sweat cut a cool path from his hairline to his jaw. The smell of hot metal and ozone crowded his nose.

The mirror thrummed. It was a sound and a sensation, a bloom pushed through his shielding right at the frequency his wards used to hand off power between layers. It shouldn’t have known that pattern. His weave stuttered. The third plane juddered, then slipped. The overlap between it and the second thinned, an exposed seam bright as a cut.

“Breaching in five,” Croft snapped, urgency cutting the dryness. “We’ve triggered flood dampers; they’ll dump the chamber if—”

“Don’t flood it,” Harry said, fast and low. “Water’s a conductor. It’ll take the load and carry it into the floor wards. That’s the whole wing.”

“Then hold it,” Croft said, hard and close, as if he were standing just behind him. “Or drop and run.”

The city in the glass sharpened again, a hard-edged silhouette against a violet-tinted sky. He saw letters he couldn’t parse scrolling across an enormous rectangle of light affixed to a building. Voices seemed to press from the other side, or maybe that was his own pulse in his ears. The silver ring thickened. The energy sheared up, snapping his redirect and buckling the second plane like a rib. The sound pitched into something that scraped along the inside of his skull.

He cast another plane and didn’t even bother making it pretty. It snapped into place, thinner than he liked, and held long enough to buy him two breaths. He bought a third by pulling at the well again, dragging up power until his hands shook. The planes steadied. The mirror swelled, and out of the silver film a thin lash of light uncurled, testing, then tapping. It glanced along the inside of his field, seeking gaps with a patience that made him cold.

“Harry,” Croft said. “We’ve got containment alerts propagating three floors down. You’re bleeding into the network. You have to cut the feed.”

“If I cut, it surges,” Harry said. “It wants a path. It wants through. I can hold.” He didn’t know if that last sentence was true. He said it because there wasn’t room for anything else. He set another layer, angled against the first three, and felt the weak join give again, the hiss of stress wrong in his fingertips.

The mirror didn’t care. It showed him the skyline like a promise. A plane skated through the sky in the distance, blinking red as it traced a line he could almost feel. The motion made the wrongness of it stronger. If this was a window, it was already open a crack.

The lash pressed. It found the bright seam and pushed. The field flared. Heat licked his palms as if he held them over a flame. He shoved his magic into the seam and welded it shut with blunt force. It held. For a heartbeat.

Then the entire structure of the field trembled in a way that didn’t come from outside pressure. It came from resonance, from the mirror singing just off his own pitch until his weave wanted to harmonize. He choked on a curse and broke his pattern, introducing noise, a deliberate imperfection that made the planes grate against each other. It was ugly, but it killed the resonance long enough for the lash to slide off and scrape across the inner surface of his barrier like a knife on glass.

Light bled along that scrape. He heard a crack, not in the shield but in the stone by his left foot, a hairline fissure lancing through an anchor rune. The floor drank power and then coughed it back, reflux-hot. The gauges on the wall swung wild and stuck. Over the intercom, someone swore, distant and sharp.

“Evac order for the wing,” Croft said, voice going clipped with decision. “We’re isolating the chamber. I repeat, we are sealing—”

Alarms wailed, not the tight internal chirp of a lab warning but the long siren that meant every ward in the building was on alert. The lights over the doors strobed red. His shield stuttered again, this time because the building was trying to peel his power out of the network and use it somewhere else, anywhere else. His planes dimmed a shade, then another. Still, he held.

“Don’t you bloody dare,” he said through his teeth, to the building or to the mirror or to himself. He dragged up the last clean line of power he could reach and threaded it through his mess, binding it into a knot. The knot tightened. The silver lash pushed, then pressed harder, and under the weight, the knot began to slip.

The mirror’s surface ballooned. The skyline warped, stretched toward him, lights smearing into a rain of white points that didn’t fall. His view of the room narrowed until it was just the edge of the plinth and the tear-bright seam of his own barrier, the world outside a dark blur. The pressure on the field tripled. The seams shone like the inside of a furnace. He could feel the moment before failure in his teeth.

“Harry, get out,” Croft said, raw.

“I can’t,” he said, and he meant it. If he moved, the balance went. If he let go, the chamber would go, and then the corridor, and then the Ministry’s wards would stand up and try to meet this thing and the crash would tear through every line they had. He could taste copper. He realized he was biting his tongue.

The lash drew back, coiled, and struck. The first plane shattered, not into sparks this time but into a spray of force that stung his skin like sleet. The second held for the length of a heartbeat and then folded. The third buckled. The new plane he’d thrown down, thin and ugly, took the lash like a punch to bone. It bent. The silver edge of the mirror curled outward, reaching. The air prickled with cold.

He pressed with everything he had left and felt the entire structure twitch, a bowstring drawn too far. The world hung on that thin strand, a breath too long, and he understood that in the next beat, it would either snap and take the Ministry with it, or hold and tear him down to match it. The skyline burned behind the liquid dark, alien and close enough to touch.

The tendril chose for him.

It moved faster than his eye could track, silver turned into motion, an unspooling filament that slipped through the seam he’d mangled and slid over the inner face of his shield. It struck the gap where the planes had sheared, needle-precise, and threaded itself into his field as if it belonged there. He felt it before he saw it, a cold bite along his left forearm, pressure blooming with sudden purpose.

Then it wrapped him.

The contact was not heat or cold, not texture he could anchor to—just force, silken and absolute, coiling around his arm from wrist to elbow in a band that was too tight to be anything but intention. The impact jerked him forward hard enough that his knees left the floor. His shoulder screamed, a hot, bright pain as the tendril yanked him off his feet and toward the mirror.

Harry swore and threw a counter-charm into the coil, a flare of Dispersal aimed to unspool whatever idea of binding this was. The spell hit like a stone thrown into a river. It sank and did nothing. The tendril tightened and he felt his wards answer, the layered protections knitted over his skin—that old standby against curse, flame, blade—rise and meet it with a thin, pale light.

For a second, they held.

For a second, he hung suspended in the drag, boots sliding against scuffed stone, right hand clawed against empty air. The field around the mirror crumpled into chaos behind him, planes failing in cascades of quiet, brittle sounds. He tried to get his feet under him, to set, to brace. The tendril gave him nothing to work with. It didn’t pull like a rope. It drew like the tide.

“Cut it, cut it, cut it,” Croft was saying, a drumbeat in his ear. Doors sealed with a heavy thunk, the chamber’s wards recoding themselves to isolate. The sound hit his nerves like a second alarm.

He slashed his wand at his own arm and whispered “Sectumsep—” stopped himself, teeth clicking. He wasn’t going to sever his own limb. He aimed instead at the coil and spat, “Diffindo!” The shimmering band shuddered. It did not part. The magic went strange when it touched the silver—thinned out, as if it were traveling too far too fast.

He tried heat. “Incendio.” The flame skated over it without taking. He tried cold. “Glacius.” Frost bloomed and vanished, devoured into the gleam like breath into winter air. The tendril pulsed once in answer, a gentle flex that was the opposite of gentle, and his forearm lit with pain under the protective lattice of his charms.

Those charms—Merlin, the layers he’d earned, the gratitude-thick gifts woven into his skin by friends who had asked that he not die so easily—they bit down. His arm haloed in pale gold, the old school-bred shield rising as if to meet a curse. The tendril seemed to notice. It pressed tighter, not crushing, simply compressing until the light around his skin looked like a bruise.

The first of his protections blew with a pop he felt rather than heard. The sensation was as subtle and harrowing as a thread snapped across skin—small, intimate, wrong. The next layer lasted longer, straining with a fine, whining tone. It reminded him of glass under a too-hot tap. He armored himself with focus and threw another shield outward, not around himself but against the mirror-face, a rough slab of force set at an angle to catch the pull and make it slide.

It didn’t slide. The slab took, held, and then the tendril went through it like a needle through fabric, tugging the whole weave along with it.

“Harry!” Croft’s voice was too near, or his own hearing had tunneled so far down that it felt that way. “Drop the wand and anchor to the floor. Anchor to something, Potter—”

He drove his heels down. Rubber squealed. He grabbed for the anchor ring bolted into the base of the plinth, fingers closing on cold iron. The tendril jerked again, quick and decisive, and his grip ripped loose with a flare of pain in his knuckles. Something in his shoulder gave with a deep, ugly click that turned his stomach. The world tilted.

The mirror had growled, maybe, or that was the air being pulled forward with him, a wind without source. Papers lifted in slow-motion on the other side of the room and drifted toward the plinth. The tingle in his teeth, in the roots of his hair, all the small ways his body told him a storm was happening even in a closed room, spiked. The mirror’s surface was all he could see now—black and silver and that impossible skyline shining from a depth that wasn’t a surface at all.

He dug. Not his feet, not his hand—he dug into himself, found one last lean line of power left at the edge of what he could bring to heel. He threaded it into a banishment and flicked it into the coil at the wrist, imagining open, imagining out. “Expulso,” he said, clean and clipped.

He might as well have told it please.

The tendril flexed. His last, stubborn skin-ward shrieked and blew in a shower of sensation down his arm, leaving the hairs on his wrist standing up as if his body were trying to reach away from itself. The feel of air on his skin went too real. The wand in his right hand shook. He forced his hand still, lined up on the mirror, and pumped a brute-force surge of raw shield between him and the world, an old Auror move for moving walls and riots.

The wall formed. The wall bowed. The tendril pulled, patient and steady, and with sick clarity he knew this was not a grapple he could win by strength. This thing had made his field sing with it. It had plucked him out of his geometry like he was a wrong note and it wanted silence.

The floor slid under him. His hip struck the edge of a toppled stool on his way past; pain flared and vanished beneath the bigger sensation that was momentum. The intercom crackled with someone shouting a sequence he’d trained to respond to with evacuation. He couldn’t go anywhere but forward.

The silver band climbed his arm as it dragged him. It reached past his elbow, cool and implacable, and the skin beneath crawled with pins-and-needles fire where his protections had been torn away. His heart hammered. He tasted copper again, bright and metallic, and realized he’d bitten through his lip this time. He thought, stupidly, of the river of headlights he’d seen in the glass. He wondered if it would smell like London when he landed, or like nothing he knew.

He hit the base of the plinth with his shins and lost the last of his leverage. His knees pitched over emptiness. He scrabbled for purchase on the edge, fingers scraping at smooth stone, nails catching and bending. His right hand—the one with the wand—slammed into the mirror’s frame. The mirror was colder than stone. The cold went through his palm into his bones.

“Hold—” Croft shouted, and then the channel filled with the hot pop of interference. Or the room had gone quiet in a way that made his own body the only noise left.

The mirror’s skin bulged, thin as a soap film and harder than steel, and met his chest. For one vertiginous moment he saw himself reflected, pale and wide-eyed, dragged out of his own center. Then the silver widened and took him, clean as a mouth taking water. His last intact charm flared and went out with a sound like a candle dying. The band at his arm tightened once more, sweet as a last word—and he was pulled, head and shoulders, into black shining depth that wasn’t depth at all. The world narrowed to cold pressure against his skin and the sense of being threaded through a space too small for him to be in.

He tried to say something—Stop, or No, or Tell them not to flood it—but his voice had nowhere to go. The mirror’s surface climbed over his face, his eyes, and the light of his own lab lights shattered into long, thin pieces that stretched until they snapped.

He was squeezed into nothing, the world compressing him until his bones felt granular, until he was not Harry, or body, or even a boundary. There was a high, brittle sound inside his skull like crystal under stress. The pressure turned to static, then to silence, then to absolute absence.

Black swallowed him. For a moment, there was no breath, no heartbeat, no sense of up. He hung in the shape of himself without edges.

Then gravity grabbed him by the spine and dropped him hard.

His shoulder hit first, a burst of pain that snapped him back into himself. Grit scraped his cheek. The rest of him followed with a graceless thud, the breath driven from his lungs so abruptly that his chest spasmed for it. His wand skittered away, a quick rattle against rough stone followed by a sound that could only be plastic or metal. He stared at dark that wasn’t the mirror’s and tried to make his lungs remember how to work.

Air flooded in thin and cold. It smelled wrong.

He rolled onto his back, eyes closed, because opening them took too much and the sensations were already crowding in. The surface under him was not polished stone. It was pebbled, uneven, small bits of grit pressing into the backs of his arms and the soft stretch of skin where his ribs rose. His fingers splayed without his asking them to, seeking purchase. They found tiny bits of crushed glass, the stick of something sugary dried into a tacky smear, a wet patch that smelled like old beer or something more chemical, sharp in a way that made his nose sting.

Sound came next, stacked in layers. The high, constant whine in his head sank under it. Something buzzed, electrical and steady. A rumble, deep and relentless, rolled under everything, a heartbeat that wasn’t his. Brakes screamed far above him. Voices echoed off stone or metal—too many to catch, the rhythm wrong in a way he couldn’t name yet. A car horn blared, then died. Somewhere to his left, glass shattered and someone laughed, high and sharp. There was music, tinny and repetitive, bleeding through a wall. Air rushed past in a gust, carrying the warm exhaust of something mechanical and a note of hot oil.

He opened his eyes.

The sky was cut into a narrow rectangle between two vertical walls that rose too far and too straight to make sense. The color of it was wrong for under Ministry lights. It was night, but not quiet. Light bled into the alley from one end: a pulsing, garish wash of shifting colors that moved in patterns across a surface he couldn’t see. The walls on either side of him were brick, the mortar stained dark where water had run. Metal ladders crisscrossed above, throwing hard shadows, and a fire escape rattled under the weight of air vibrating through it. A metal door stood to his right, dented and smeared with something black. A dumpster hunched to his left, its lid askew, the stench spilling warm and pungent toward him: rot, stale food, something sickly-sweet beneath it.

His stomach turned, fought, settled. He blinked hard and pushed up onto his elbows. His shoulder protested loudly, popping with an ugly slide but staying in place. Adrenaline took the edge off the worst of it. His hands were scraped raw, grit driven into the heel of his left palm. He flexed his fingers and counted the bones like he’d been taught. Everything answered. His arm—the one the silver had wrapped—felt cool and tender from wrist to elbow, the hair along it standing up as if static were crawling over his skin. The protective lattice was gone, the familiar warm hum of it quiet. Beneath that, deeper, was a hollowness that made him dizzy.

The emptiness hit like stepping into a room where a constant noise had stopped. He hadn’t known how to listen for that background thrum until it was gone. No magic hum under his skin, no press against his teeth, no subtle awareness of the threads in the air waiting for his touch. He reached for it out of habit—just a thought, the way he’d reached a thousand times since he was eleven—and felt nothing. The absence was cold and complete.

Panic tried to open and flood him. He cut it off by moving.

His wand lay a few feet away, trapped under a piece of junk: a bent piece of metal grille with sticky black residue. He crawled to it, knees and the heel of his palm burning where they met the ground. The wand felt like itself when his fingers closed around it—familiar weight, balance—even if, when he called with a thought, there was nothing to answer. He rolled it in his hand, scraped the worst of the grime off on his trousers, and pushed to his feet, keeping his back to the wall.

Standing made the world tilt for a moment. He steadied, breath slow, counted it out the way he’d learned when he wanted to survive instead of think about dying. The alley yawned in both directions, one end choked with overflowing black bags, the other opening to a brighter noise where the light came from. He turned the brighter way because it meant people, and people meant information and risk in equal measure. He pressed his shoulder against the cool brick and edged forward, keeping to shadow.

He reached the mouth of the alley and stopped.

The street beyond exploded with light and motion. Buildings climbed into the sky, and their faces burned with living images—colossal adverts throwing neon blues and reds across glass that reflected back in dizzying duplicates. Screens played scenes he couldn’t parse, letters in fonts he recognized but words arranged in ways that felt like lies. Vehicles roared and hissed as they rushed past, painted yellow in numbers that made no sense, their lights sweeping across wet asphalt so that it gleamed like ink. People flowed along the pavements in steady rivers, the clothes mismatched and vivid, a hundred different fabrics and cuts, none of them robes. A man spoke loudly to no one with something glowing in his hand held close to his ear. A woman brushed past close enough that he felt the heat of her, her perfume a clean, sharp floral that cut through the alley stink for a second before the exhaust and city smell swallowed it.

Harry couldn’t find the edges of the magic here because there weren’t any. This was noise and steel and electricity. It was alive in a way he understood on the animal level even as every other part of him recoiled. He pressed his tongue to the torn spot in his lip and tasted iron. He slid his wand up his sleeve because he couldn’t be seen with it and he didn’t yet know why, only that every instinct screamed that this was a place where you hid what made you different.

A drizzle started, fine and misting, laying a soft damp over his hair and the back of his neck. It made the lights smear slightly, halos around sharp points. A horn blared again, closer this time, and someone shouted from a window far above in an accent that curled around the vowels differently than home. He swallowed once, twice, and forced himself to step out of the alley’s cover.

He lasted three paces before a lorry thundered past close enough that the wind off it shoved at him. He jerked back into the shadow automatically, chest tight. He could feel the shape of himself too clearly, the edges of his presence under a sky that felt wrong.

The emptiness inside him laid its cold hand on his spine and held there.

He leaned his head back against the brick, closed his eyes for the space of two breaths, and opened them again to the alien city. He was here. He was breathing. He had his wand, his wits, and nothing else he trusted.

The world smelled like rain on hot asphalt and petrol and hot metal and someone’s dinner carried on a gust. It was unfamiliar and too much, and it pressed in on him from every angle with the demand that he adapt or be crushed. He straightened slowly and set his shoulders even though one of them sent a thread of pain down to his elbow.

He took another step forward. The grit ground under his boot. The city roared back.