"Careful!" Hermione whispered as Harry jumped down onto the bench below the uppermost level.
The veil continued to flutter as though in a breeze. Harry moved quickly down farther and farther below until he was in the pit itself.
"Sirius?" Harry whispered.
His wand held tightly at shoulder height, Harry moved slowly around the dais until he could see the other side of the veil. There was no one there.
"Let's go," Hermione called as loud as she dared. "This isn't right, Harry. Come on, let's go..."
"Harry, come on," Althea said, panic raising her voice as he still refused to move.
"What are you saying?" he called, as though clarifying some garbled statement.
Hermione and Althea shared scared looks.
"Nobody's talking Harry!" Hermione said.
"Can't anyone else hear it?" Harry asked. "Someone's whispering behind there."
"I can hear them too," Luna said softly.
"Harry, come on!" Althea pleaded.
"Harry, we're supposed to be here for Sirius!" Hermione said in a high-pitched, strained voice.
"Sirius," Harry repeated, sounding slightly dazed. Then, as though snapping out of a trance, he quickly climbed back up to them, muttering, "Let's go."
Sharing exasperated looks, Althea and Hermione followed him out as the others trailed behind. Once the door had been shut, first having been marked by an X, Althea closed her eyes, bracing herself for the spinning. Once it had stopped, Harry approached a door at random and pushed. Nothing happened.
"What's wrong?" Ron asked.
"It's...locked," Harry said, throwing his weight into it.
It still wouldn't budge.
"Harry, we can worry about locked doors after we try the unlocked ones," Althea said nervously.
Once the door had been marked with another X, they tried another door. This one opened with ease.
The moment Harry looked inside, he cried, "This is it!"
The glittering Harry had described turned out to be due to several large, ordinate clocks that covered the whole room. Every kind of clock imaginable covered every surface imaginable. They went inside, closing the door behind them. A loud ticking reached their ears, coming from the hundreds of clocks. It was ominous to listen to.
"This way," Harry said.
They walked down a narrow space between two long lines of desks, being careful not to hit or touch anything. A large, crystal bell jar stood at the end of the room. If the rest of the room glittered, it did so a thousand times more. It was taller than Althea and seemed to be full of a billowing, glittering wind that was constantly in motion.
"Oh, look!" Ginny said, pointing.
Inside the heart of the bell jar, they caught sight of a tiny, jewel-bright egg. It was slowly rising, steadily growing larger and larger in size before the egg suddenly hatched, revealing a hummingbird. It rose to the very top of the jar, maturing to full growth before it began to descend again, shrinking from an adult hummingbird to first a baby and then finally an egg once more.
"Keep going," Harry said sharply.
"You dawdled enough by that old arch!" Ginny retorted crossly.
Even so, she made no further protest as they continued to the end of the room.
YOU ARE READING
The Disgraced of the House of Black - A Multi-Character Fanfiction - Part One
FanfictionEvery family has its black sheep...even the Black family. Althea Black. When she was young, she never understood why her mother refused to speak of her father. As she grew older, it began to not matter who he was or had been. She had her mother and...
