'Journey to the stars, open that door, and return to the Earth of my past life.'
The Resurrection Stone ring, lying quietly on the low wooden table between them, suddenly blazed with an entirely irresistible temptation in Bryan's eyes.
A past life. It was already an entire world away from him now. Bryan had lived in this particular world of magic for more than twenty years by this point, and most of the time, he already thought of himself as a genuine "native" of it.
He loved this world, with all its transcendent power, loved the boundless possibilities magic offered at every turn, and felt a genuine, heartfelt pleasure in simply being the respected "Bryan Watson" that he had, over these years, become in his own right.
But late at night, entirely alone with his own thoughts, Bryan would sometimes still find himself missing, that ordinary young man he had once been in his previous life, before all of this.
That world still held his family. His friends, wherever they'd gone on with their lives. After his own "death" there, what had become of them? What had they thought, felt, mourned?
Bryan had to admit it to himself now, sitting in this clearing—he longed to know all of it.
And more than that private, human longing, that other world drifting somewhere out among the stars, the door itself and everything it represented, embodied the deepest, most profound truth of magic that existed anywhere in the universe.
To a great wizard like Bryan, one who yearned to keep walking further and further down magic's own endless path, that combination held a fatal, near-irresistible allure.
There were other reasons too, beyond the personal.
Whether one chose to call it his own destiny, or simply called it his pressing need to unravel this entire tangle of accumulated mysteries, either way, he understood clearly that he had to eventually make the journey to the stars himself.
The shadow left behind by the wizard known as "Herpo the Foul" had loomed over the present-day world for more than a dozen full centuries by now.
Bryan had never once, allowed himself to fully let his guard down against that shadow.
Raising his own public standing, planting his influence throughout the British Ministry of Magic, assembling an entire international joint task force—every single one of these preparations had been meant, from the beginning, to answer an unknown, deeper danger.
A mere Voldemort alone simply wasn't worth this much continued, careful caution on Bryan's part!
So then—should he genuinely make the journey to the stars now, tonight?
Bryan's violet eyes churned visibly with an unending, private struggle.
Striking first was always preferable to reacting after the fact, in any strategic calculation.
If the demon trapped somewhere in that other world broke free of its bonds and descended upon this one first, , he would undeniably find himself caught badly on the back foot.
He thought again of the nine carved murals in the central temple on the island of Avalon, depicting that world-shaking, earth-shattering battle from the distant past.
If something remotely like that were to happen in today's world, the simple exposure of magic to the wider Muggle population would be the very least of the resulting catastrophe—it might well cost the lives of hundreds of thousands, quite possibly tens of millions, of innocent Muggles caught in the crossfire.
"Bryan."
Dumbledore's own brow furrowed deeply, and he gazed with rising worry at Bryan, whose emotions were, by this point, visibly in turmoil.
Some secret lay hidden in Bryan's heart tonight, Dumbledore had come to suspect, and he found himself increasingly certain it had something to do with that world of the dead where Ariana now resided.
This was, at least, what Dumbledore had managed to piece together from the small handful of information he'd gathered across tonight's extraordinary events.
There must be some necessary precondition for Bryan to be able to travel to that world himself—perhaps it was the set of all three Deathly Hallows together. That would explain why Bryan had lost his composure so badly, moments ago, upon learning that the Invisibility Cloak currently in Harry's possession was one of the three Hallows.
The moment this particular thought crossed his mind fully, a fresh, unmistakable fervour rose in Dumbledore's deep blue eyes.
If possessing the Hallows really could open the way to the world where Ariana now existed then he wanted, desperately, to go there himself, too!
"Is it—"
Dumbledore's lips parted, on the verge of asking the question, when Bryan suddenly moved.
He gave his own wand a small, decisive flick. On the low table between them, the ring's thick golden band split cleanly away on its own accord, and the black, irregularly shaped Resurrection Stone floated free before Bryan's eyes.
Ever since he had first come into possession of this ring, Bryan had never once, in all the hours since, actually touched the stone itself.
Unlike Dumbledore, he carried no obsession he couldn't let go of. He had no wish to bring anyone back from beyond, and no particular desire to see the dead—whether from this current life or his previous one—appear before him in some uncanny, half-formed state.
Tap—
The cold black stone settled into Bryan's open palm all the same. He pressed his lips together, weighing the whole matter carefully in his mind.
Should he go now, tonight? Or should he wait until Voldemort was fully dealt with before finally making the journey to the stars?
As for Voldemort—so far, Bryan had destroyed five of his Horcruxes.
What remained was Harry himself, who could only ultimately be destroyed by Voldemort's own hand in the end, and Nagini, second to last on the list. Because the snake stayed so consistently within Voldemort's sight at nearly all times, attempting to destroy her too soon, before the moment was right, would only put Voldemort on his guard against the rest of their efforts.
Of course, if they were fortunate, those remaining two might turn out to be all that was actually left to find—though there was no way to be certain of that hope just yet. They would need Slughorn to give them some further hint.
And if there truly turned out to be an eighth, or even conceivably a ninth Horcrux hidden somewhere they hadn't yet considered, that discovery would mean they still had to wait with patience, a good while longer before the war could conclude.
Wait for Dumbledore to dig some further useful clue out of the dust of old history.
They couldn't count on being lucky forever. It might be, he thought, years before the next Horcrux was finally destroyed.
Bryan turned all of this careful calculation over in his mind. He tipped his palm slightly, and the Resurrection Stone rolled smoothly across it—one of its jagged, saw-toothed cracks turning slowly to face him directly. And then—
"Careful, Bryan!"
Before the boundless, surging emerald-green radiance could swallow Bryan whole, Dumbledore had already cried out sharply, his own face was stricken with alarm!
An old man who had lived a full century moved, in that single desperate instant, with a young man's remarkable speed—he leapt up from his own stool, and the Elder Wand, already raised and ready, swept down decisively to knock the Resurrection Stone from Bryan's hand, sending it flying up into the night air even as the spreading light held Bryan himself frozen in place.
But Dumbledore, in the same desperate motion, hadn't pulled his body away in time, and the surging green light closed over him as well, catching them both together.
The world had gone, in an instant, utterly, totally silent. Even the ordinary sound of moving air itself had vanished entirely from perception.
Time seemed to stretch, or perhaps it was simply the surging green light pouring steadily out of the Resurrection Stone that mired the two of them in place, like some ancient swamp closing slowly over its trapped prey.
Either way, Bryan and Dumbledore together could do nothing but let the green light swallow their combined will entirely, carried helplessly wherever it intended to take them.
Silent—no, that description wasn't quite accurate. It should be called peaceful instead.
In the soft darkness spreading before him, Bryan thought that he could still, faintly, make out a few sounds threading through it.
A gentle breeze stirred softly at his ear. Green leaves swayed somewhere nearby, rustling. Clear water murmured and trickled steadily by, close at hand.
It called powerfully to mind an afternoon somewhere at the turn of spring into summer, Hogwarts wrapped in warm, gentle sunlight, children out on the lawn chasing each other happily on their broomsticks, the Black Lake rippling faintly at its familiar shore, and older student couples curled together quietly behind the trailing weeping willows, purposely ducking out of sight of any professor's alert gaze from the distant castle windows.
Bryan let himself sink slowly into that entirely pleasant, familiar feeling, and without quite noticing the transition happening, the sharp wariness that had been sitting in his own heart moments before dissolved away.
A hazy, gentle light swept the remaining darkness from his eyes.
Bryan blinked slowly, adjusting bit by bit, the way one naturally does after a night's deep sleep, pulling back heavy curtains and adjusting gradually to the fresh light of a newborn sun outside.
A few minutes passed before Bryan's eyes finally, properly adjusted to the returning brightness around him.
"We've come back—"
Dumbledore's voice, edged faintly with astonishment, reminded Bryan that Dumbledore remained right there beside him throughout, present in whatever this place actually was.
The familiar corridor built of cold, hard stones stretched away before them, and beyond it, visible through tall windows, the open lawns and the distant edge of the Forbidden Forest.
Professor Sprout's familiar greenhouses were gone from the landscape. So, too, was the small wooden hut at the edge of the Forbidden Forest.
"Hogwarts?"
Dumbledore said it with instant certainty—he would never, under any circumstance, mistake Hogwarts for anywhere else in the world. But there were changes here, that he genuinely couldn't fail to notice on closer inspection.
The Forbidden Forest still stretched on as boundlessly as ever in the distance, but its treeline reached far closer to the castle's walls than it should have, and the stone construction before them looked, on close inspection, considerably newer and less weathered than the Hogwarts either of them knew from the present day.
Before the two of them, close enough to properly observe, stood a boy and a girl—students, evidently, judging by their robes—leaning together shoulder to shoulder against a stone archway, gazing out together at the view stretching beyond it.
The boy's pale golden hair was combed with visible, careful precision; the girl's smooth chestnut hair shone warmly under the mellow sunlight falling through the window.
Dumbledore's eyelids flickered rapidly at the sight, a trace of increasing confusion passed through his eyes.
He and Bryan stood some ten-odd feet away from the pair of unfamiliar students, who seemed, from their closeness, to be caught up in something resembling courtship. From his angle of view, Dumbledore could make out only half of the boy's face.
These were not, he was certain, students belonging to any year, Dumbledore recognised from his memory of Hogwarts—of that fact he felt entirely certain.
And more than that single detail, the wizard's robes the pair wore weren't cut in anything resembling the current style at all; they were, unmistakably, far older in their fashion.
'What in the world was this—'
Out of the corner of his eye, Dumbledore caught sight of Bryan's remarkably calm expression throughout all of this, and something stirred with fresh suspicion in his mind.
Bryan's evident composure, faced with all this, genuinely made no sense on its own. Either he had somehow foreseen exactly this particular turn of events unfolding which seemed, on reflection, unlikely given everything else—or else, more probably, this simply wasn't the first time Bryan had found himself standing inside a scene rather like this one.
So then, precisely where—or perhaps more accurately, when—were the two of them standing right now—
Dumbledore narrowed his own eyes thoughtfully, studying the two unfamiliar students closely for any further clue, then turned his attention back toward the window and its unfamiliar view once more.
'The Hogwarts of long ago, then. The green light released by the Resurrection Stone had carried us both back into the past—no, it would be more accurate, to say it had instead drawn us into a memory of some kind.'
So, Dumbledore privately, tentatively concluded, working through the possibilities with careful logic.
Even the most powerful Time-Turner ever created simply wasn't strong enough, by any measure of magical theory, to send wizards as genuinely great as himself and Bryan backward through actual time like this.
Dumbledore's pensive expression did not go unnoticed by Bryan, who observed it out of the corner of his eye throughout.
Compared to Harry and his circle of friends, Dumbledore's eye was, without question, far sharper in these matters—he had clearly, already guessed at a portion of what was actually happening here.
"What are the two of you doing?"
A voice, sinister and icy sounding, suddenly sounded from behind Bryan and Dumbledore while each of them were still lost in their thoughts.
Even fully knowing, on some level, that this entire scene was only an illusion or memory, both Bryan and Dumbledore reacted instinctively, their wands snapped up together simultaneously as they both spun around to face the source.
The boy and girl who had been leaning together at the window were startled far worse by the sudden voice than either Bryan or Dumbledore had been.
"Oh, we were just—"
They snapped up immediately, visibly trembling now before the sharp, assessing gaze of the middle-aged wizard facing the pair down.
The girl was too frightened to speak at all. The boy forced himself to answer instead in a stammering rush:
"We-we were just talking about our homework for after class—oh, when did you get back, Professor Slytherin?"
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