Chapter 5: Chapter 5
I shivered from the cold. My hands were blue. I lay curled up in a ball in the darkness.
"It's just a game to you, isn't it?" I heard someone say. "You could have gone to the cup and warned them. You could have had Hoopy directly apparate them out. You could have prevented the whole thing."
I shake my head weakly. "If not them, there would have just been another victim. Then I'd just need another reset to plan. It isn't so easy to change the big things," I said shivering from the ground.
"There's always an excuse. How much more time can you afford to waste before you realize the truth," the figure said approaching me.
I looked into Peabody's face, his skull half-rotten with teeth poking out from the broken skin. "You're just a coward. You stole my body, and you're just a bloody coward."
I awoke in the Room of Requirement with a start. The cold was real. I shivered slightly from the chill and from pain. I looked up to see the serpent pedestal.
A crack ran down the length of the serpent's body where golden liquid leaked like a grievous wound. Over half of the snake's scales once fully luminous were now gradually becoming dull.
"No, no, no," I cried out crawling to the pedestal, attempting to stop the golden liquid leaking from the crack in the serpent's body.
My mind raced to recall the events. My ambush of the death eaters seemed to succeed. I rescued the two sisters. The response of the aurors was faster than I anticipated. They managed to catch me, and then...
There was the sound. The rasping. The creature reached from the water and pulled me to another place. My memories after that were a frantic mess.
I watched powerlessly as the dripping of the golden fluid gradually stopped. Well over half of the scales were now dull.
The pain had never followed me through a reset. I'd never faced such a creature before.
Seeing the cracked body of the serpent and that the bleeding had ceased I numbly stood and exited the room. I paced outside the door. "Show me books about creatures like dementors appearing in the water," I said.
I entered the room to find a single battered manuscript lying on the floor. It appeared to be handwritten. The title read "The Strange Tale of Olivia Stone."
Asking for a sofa, I sat my aching body down and began to read. Olivia Stone was a woman that appeared suddenly in the early 1900's claiming to come from the future. She mentioned an accident with an item called a time-turner that had catapulted her far into the past.
I skipped through the book as it mentioned she settled down and attempted to lead a normal life. She had no identity or money, but several magicals in the community where she appeared donated her a home and material things to help her start a new life.
After several months, her sanity turned brittle. She mentioned strange creatures stalking her at every turn. Creatures that only she could see. She claimed they appeared in reflections. Soon after she was found drowned in a pond near her home.
A photograph fell out of the book stuck between the pages. It was a black and white picture of writing on a wall. The standard crazy person writing. It said, "If you can see them, they can see you."
The book was handwritten and very well may have never been published. It was written as if someone visited the village and interviewed the people living there. The woman was left a mystery, with no real record of the beginning of her existence, but only of the end.
I did know at least that if the claims of the dates in the book were true, the woman knew about the existence of time-turners before they were even invented.
I exited the room again, pacing back and forth and repeating the process as I tried various topics. I focused on reflection as doorways.
Many cultures considered reflections or even mirrors as portals to other places including the spirit world. This was actually fairly common in divination and scrying using water as a window to another place. Some ancient rituals claimed to summon the deceased through such reflections.
I sat in a constructed library within the Room of Requirement staring numbly at the remaining scales of the serpent.
If Olivia truly was a time traveler as she claimed, there was already a common link between us. I was reminded of a term distantly from my past from before. Time wraith.
There were various explanations on magical time travel, and how you couldn't create a paradox because if you did you would just be smashed out of existence. It was nature's book-keeping, keeping the ledger balanced. But then there was me.
Half-assedly gallivanting through time-loops. It seemed impossible, but I was in Harry Potter. Not even just that, an AU Hary Potter. I was pretty much passed impossible. Nature very well may have a natural defense against people screwing with time.
In the other place, my wand appeared as a unicorn horn, a symbol of its core. My body appeared as different colored lights. Within the lights there was a snake.
It only made sense that the pedestal and I shared a connection. When I first touched it, the serpent seemed to bite my hand, and it drew blood. Blood was old magic and always powerful. I wasn't aware of a physical connection, but there very well may be a spiritual one.
Or maybe I was going in the utterly wrong direction, and it was not the spirit realm, but magic itself that I saw. The wraith could be a completely magical construct, and the lights I saw were the representation of my own magic.
I shook my head. I was just blindly speculating. The pedestal itself was a mystery with seemingly no record in existence other than its reference to Ouroboros. I knew the image seemed to originate in Egypt, but in all of my research, I found no signs of the pedestal's origin among the magicals there.
Seeing as how the artifact created time loops, the imagery could be just that. A symbolic reference to eternity.
I shook my head. I would worry about it later. The chill finally left my body. I still felt an ache in my bones, though. It had also been several hours since I'd last eaten.
So far the only thing I knew was, the serpent was damaged, and the wraiths seemed to be able to find me through reflections. Thinking back to the times I heard the rasping sound, the first time was in the car. Whether it was the windows or the bottle of coke I was drinking, the sound appeared. The second was when I was drinking coffee from a tin when I was hovering on my broom. The final time was when it appeared from the stream where I crashed.
If that was the case, how in the hell was I going to drink water? Or pee? Or take a shower? They seemed to find Olivia fairly quickly. Yet I had been looping for years. Perhaps the nature of the resets themselves confused them.
Not to mention that the timing seemed sporadic. There were a few months from the first incident in the car while the next two happened practically back to back.
Maybe it was only the one that caught my scent.
I shuddered. There was only one way to find out.
"Hoopy," I said.
With a pop my house-elf appeared. "Ohhhh, maasssssster. Where did Peabody go? Hoopy thoughts master dead."
I nodded tiredly. "I know Hoopy. It's just been a few hours though. I'm sure the teachers must have panicked when I missed the train."
"But the mean aurors surrounded you, and then you were go-"
I froze. I was out of my chair and grasping the house-elf by the shoulders. "Hoopy, what did you say? What are you talking about?"
"The night of the World Cup. Master was gone. And then, and then, I waited and waited," the house-elf went on again breaking down into tears.
I felt dizzy for a moment, catching my self on the conjured rug of the Room of Requirement. I reset. I appeared in the room in front of the pedestal. Hoopy couldn't remember, unless.
Unless the reset shifted.
"How long was I gone, Hoopy? What day is it?"
"It's Monday, sir."
"No Hoopy, how long have I been missing?"
Hoopy large glistening eyes bore into my own, looking confused. "It's been three years, sir. And sir is still so very tiny," he said blubbering and blowing his nose on his pillowcase.
I settled back on the floor. "Well, fuck."
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone