Butterfly Effect ; H. Potter

138. the potterwatch.

"But the Deathly Hallows can't exist, Antheia!"

"You keep saying that, but one of them can," said Ron. "Harry's Invisibility Cloak –"

"'The Tale of the Three Brothers' is a story," said Hermione firmly. "A story about how humans are frightened of death. If surviving was as simple as hiding under the Invisibility Cloak, we'd have everything we need already!"

"I don't know. We could do with an unbeatable wand," said Harry, turning the blackthorn wand he so disliked over in his fingers.

"There's no such thing, Harry!"

"You said there have been loads of wands – the Deathstick and whatever they were called –"

"All right, even if you want to kid yourself the Elder Wand's real, what about the Resurrection Stone?" Her fingers sketched quotation marks around the name, and her tone dripped sarcasm. "No magic can raise the dead, and that's that!"

Antheia opened her mouth to speak. Hermione sighed impatiently.

"Other than Antheia ..." said Hermione with a groan. "But even her power requires a lot more than just willing someone to appear!"

"When my wand connected with You-Know-Who's, it made my mum and dad appear ... and Cedric ..."

"But they weren't really back from the dead, were they?" said Hermione. "Those kinds of – of pale imitations aren't the same as truly bringing someone back to life."

"But she, the girl in the tale, didn't really come back, did she? The story says that once people are dead, they belong with the dead. But the second brother still got to see her and talk to her, didn't he? He even lived with her for a while ..."

He saw concern and something less easily definable in Hermione's expression. Then, as she glanced at Ron, Harry realised that it was fear: he had scared her with his talk of living with dead people.

"So that Peverell bloke who's buried in Godric's Hollow," he said hastily, trying to sound robustly sane, "you don't know anything about him, then?"

"No," she replied, looking relieved at the change of subject. "I looked him up after I saw the mark on his grave; if he'd been anyone famous or done anything important, I'm sure he'd be in one of our books. The only place I've managed to find the name 'Peverell' is Nature's Nobility: A Wizarding Genealogy. I borrowed it from Kreacher," she explained, as Ron raised his eyebrows. "It lists the pure-blood families that are now extinct in the male line. Apparently the Peverells were one of the earliest families to vanish."

"'Extinct in the male line'?" repeated Ron.

"It means the name's died out," said Hermione, "centuries ago, in the case of the Peverells. They could still have descendants, though, they'd just be called something different."

And then it came to Harry in one shining piece, the memory that had stirred at the sound of the name Peverell: a filthy old man brandishing an ugly ring in the face of a Ministry official, and he cried aloud, "Marvolo Gaunt!"

"Sorry?" said Ron and Hermione together.

"He's You-Know-Who's grandfather," explained Antheia.

"In the Pensieve! With Dumbledore!" exclaimed Harry. "Marvolo Gaunt said he was descended from the Peverells!"

Ron and Hermione looked bewildered.

"The ring, the ring that became the Horcrux, Marvolo Gaunt said it had the Peverell coat of arms on it! I saw him waving it in the bloke from the Ministry's face, he nearly shoved it up his nose!"