"Uncle," Harry stepped forward quickly, his voice unsteady with nerves. "It's this one."
He set the cold wooden plaque down on the table buried under parts and components. It landed with a dull, flat thud.
Douglas put down his tweezers.
He picked up the plaque, gave it one casual glance, and understood everything.
His expression didn't change.
"Sit down, Harry."
He gestured to the chair across the desk.
Harry sat, restless from the moment he landed. His hands twisted together in his lap. His palms were cold and wet.
"The thing inside it," Harry said, the words tumbling out almost faster than his mouth could manage, "it's gone. The Dementor, it just disappeared, and then my scar started hurting."
"Just pain?" Douglas asked. He didn't sound surprised.
"No. I had a dream too."
Harry tried to pull the fragments together. They churned in his head, broken and strange.
"I dreamed about Wormtail. He looked terrified. Cowering, like he was... mixing baby formula."
Even as he said it, the detail sounded absurd. Harry couldn't quite believe his own memory.
"And there was a voice. Very shrill. It kept calling out — just screaming Dumbledore's name, over and over."
"Is that so."
Douglas turned the plaque over and tapped the back of it lightly with one fingertip, drawing a dull, hollow KNOCK.
The energy inside was completely spent.
Voldemort's remnant soul was trying to re-establish its mental link with Harry — the accidental Horcrux. Those strange, fractured dreams were nothing more than spirit-fragments leaking through the gaps as the connection attempted to rebuild itself. This amulet had been doing its work in silence, using the negative energy of that unfortunate Dementor as fuel, quietly blocking the link all along.
The bond between the two was tighter than he'd estimated.
Now the fuel was gone.
The underlying mechanics of this Dark magic were too complex, too brutal for Harry to carry right now. Telling him would mean tearing open a wound that was still raw — one he wasn't ready to look at.
"I see." Douglas nodded, thoughtful.
"Uncle, what's actually going on?" Harry pressed, leaning forward in his chair. "Is it broken? Did the Dementor escape somehow?"
"No. It's not broken."
Douglas slid the wooden plaque back across the desk.
"It just... finished what it was made to do."
He stood and crossed to a tall wooden cabinet in the corner. Complex star charts were carved across every panel, and the whole thing carried the scent of sandalwood , warm and faintly calming. He opened the cabinet and lifted out a small, flat box wrapped in bright yellow silk.
He brought it back to the desk and set it down in front of Harry.
"Open it."
Harry hesitated, then untied the silk ribbon and lifted the lid.
Inside, resting on a bed of dark velvet, lay a jade plaque.
It was carved from mutton-fat white jade, warm and smooth, the color of milk, shaped into a perfectly detailed ginkgo leaf. The veins were crisp and delicate. The edges had been polished until they caught the light from the window and returned it as a soft, diffused glow. At the center, a rune barely smaller than a grain of rice had been set in the finest gold thread. The structure of it was too intricate for the naked eye to follow.
A cool, clean stillness emanated from the jade. Harry only had to look at it before the restless knot in his chest began to ease.
"This is..." His voice came out slightly rough.
"New." Douglas said. "More durable."
He lifted the plaque from the box, came around the desk, and hung it around Harry's neck himself.
The instant the jade touched his skin, something icy and warm at once moved through his chest and spread outward , flooding into his arms, his legs, every corner of him. It gathered at his forehead last.
The cold needle that had been sitting in his scar since he'd woken up dissolved on the spot.
The pain was gone. The unease with it.
"Uncle." Harry's hand closed over the jade. His voice had dropped to something quieter. "This is too valuable."
He could feel it , the power held inside this small piece of jade was a hundred times what the wooden plaque had carried.
"It's not." Douglas settled back into his chair, picked up his tweezers and the glass sphere, and said without particular emphasis: "Bring your Potions grade up from Acceptable to Exceeds Expectations. That'll cover it."
Harry's mouth opened. Everything he'd been about to say backed up behind that one offhand sentence and went nowhere.
He watched Douglas's profile, focused and steady, watched him ease the glowing filament into the glass sphere with careful precision , and felt, quietly, that maybe the things he'd been worrying about weren't so catastrophic after all.
As long as his uncle was here, the sky wasn't going to fall.
"I will," Harry said. "I'll work hard, Uncle."
He meant it. He could hear that he meant it.
"Hmm."
Douglas didn't look up. He answered the way someone answers when they've already filed something away and moved on.
"Go on, then. Close the door behind you."
Harry stood and walked out of the office, glancing back more than once before the door finally shut between them.
He kept his hand pressed over the jade the whole way down the corridor. The warmth of it, the faint smoothness under his palm, settled something in him he hadn't known was still unsettled.
The door clicked shut.
The office went quiet.
Douglas stopped moving.
He looked at the wooden plaque sitting on his desk, drained, spent, done. The easy expression he'd worn through the whole conversation was gone. His eyes had gone somewhere else entirely.
He reached out and drew one finger slowly across the back of the plaque.
A faint gold rune flickered across the surface and disappeared.
The next instant, the hard wood collapsed silently into the finest powder, drifted from the edge of the table, and was gone.
Two weeks passed. Mid-October.
The sky over Hogwarts had turned the clear, high blue of deep autumn.
The ginkgo leaf jade plaque lay against Harry's chest like an invisible wall, holding all malice and intrusion at arm's length. The nightmares that had plagued him didn't come back. Not once. He was sleeping better than he could remember sleeping in years, and even Snape's Potions class had become, if not bearable, at least less of an ordeal.
On a grey, biting morning, Harry walked into the entrance hall and found it completely blocked.
Students packed the space wall to wall, everyone on tiptoe, necks craned toward the notice board.
"Move, come on, move!"
Ron shouldered through the crowd, found a gap, and forced it wider. When he reached the front, his voice rose above the noise, carrying just a hint of performance.
"The Triwizard Tournament," he read aloud. "The delegations from Beauxbatons and Durmstrang will be arriving at six o'clock on the evening of Friday the thirtieth of October..."
He paused for effect.
"...Please ensure that you are on your best behavior and give our guests a warm Hogwarts welcome..."
➤ Next: It's Over! Ron Gets Called Out, Performs Eating a Chicken Leg in Public!
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