How Fate Intended by hoboheartache on ao3

24. The Family Tree

"~Are you troubled, little friend?~"

He cracked his eyes open again, blinking the stars away a little more successfully this time. As he did, a large shadow fell over him, obscuring the low light of torches from his view and replacing it with familiar deep scales of turquoise green.

"~Jörmungandr?~" He murmured, sitting up slowly as the ache in the back of his head gave way to a stinging pain. He reached back, hissing as his finger coasted past warm blood. "~Shite. I'm bleeding.~"

He wiped the blood from his fingers onto his trousers before yanking the elder wand from its sheath, muttering a simple healing charm as he did. Immediately he felt the results of it, with the pain in the back of his head disappearing as if washed away with cool water. He sighed with relief, steadily standing back up onto two feet now that his head wasn't threatening to burst open and spill his brains across the floor.

Brushing himself off, Harry quickly started to look around to see what had stopped him, finding with mild confusion that there wasn't anything besides bookcases that he could have run head-first into, and he was too far out of the way of any of them to have done so.

"~My little friend, how thoroughly you intrigue me. It seems that the strange stone shelf has taken an interest in you.~"

"~Pardon?~"

The snake hissed a laugh, eyes pinned to the floor beneath Harry. "~I was not aware that the symbol was for anything but dramatics, but I suppose that the old man had some truth to his words after all.~"

Harry glanced down to his feet at Jörmungandr's words, freezing in place at the symbol carved into the stone below him. It was horribly, painfully familiar. So familiar that it knocked the air from his lungs and sent him scrambling back against some invisible barrier keeping him trapped inside the circle.

He was standing in the deathly hallows symbol, the circle and line representing the wand and cloak shining brightly through the aged stone. The triangle representing the stone was noticeably missing.

He tried to shove harder against the invisible barrier, realising distantly that it was all too likely that it was the thing that he had smacked that had sent him to the ground in the first place. He couldn't remove himself from it, finding with rising panic that he was most certainly stuck inside the circle, and it was all too likely to be Death's fault.

"That little bastard!"

Before he could call out for the god, however, Jörmungandr came slithering back up into his view again and disrupted his thoughts, going on about some 'shelf' as if this was all some silly little game and Harry wasn't stuck within the symbol that stood for his mastery of Death.

How utterly symbolic this is, Harry.

Would you shut up for one bloody minute, Riddle?!

"~This shelf has always fascinated those who come here,~" began Jörmungandr, sounding as though he had been waiting for centuries to speak about the topic. "~ But none have ever been able to open one of the books. Tell me, my little friend, are you a descendant of the mighty necromancers?~"

Harry stared blankly at the snake, his mind doing somersaults between claustrophobic panic and rising curiosity. The intrigue won out over the panic soon enough, though, and Harry was quick to turn wide eyes towards where the basilisk's golden gaze was pinned to.

"What in god's name...?"

The bookshelf stood out from the other shelves starkly, like white paint on a black canvas; so aggressive and sharp that Harry wondered how he hadn't noticed it before. It was smaller than the rest —almost stocky, if an inanimate object could be described as such a thing—and was made entirely of a pale, bone-like stone, which seemed to have been carved to appear as a shelf. It held roughly 50 books, he estimated, all appearing impossibly old and absolutely reeking of necromantic magic. He could smell it, all the way from inside the deathly hallows symbol, that distinctly sweet nectar of decay. He couldn't forget that magic if he tried, the smell and feel of it so incessantly tantalising that it nearly robbed his sense from his mind.