"My Mother and Father had long made a spectacle of their Sight," Mopsus began, his voice rasping and low as he leaned his weight into the knotted cane. James and Lily stood before him, transfixed into silence.
"In those days, the era was young and the world was dusty and many wars were raged for power. Kings sought answers from the seers - would their kingdoms rise or fall, would their names be recalled in the days to come, which land should they seek to conquer next. Seers were much in fashion, you might imagine, and they flocked forth from the shadows of every township, oracles of all sorts, seeking employment by the rich and seeking power that can only be obtained when one has the skill set to manipulate a man who is richer than he...
"My father, Octavius Mopsus was one such man. He worked in smoke and mirror, in predictions that could easily be made with a bit of logic and invention. He rose to the top - a man of great fame throughout the islands of the Mediterranean. Kings came to him and bowed down before him, requesting of him their fortunes, which the good Seer sold them for a pretty penny and a promise to be remembered should the day come in whence his predictions had come to pass. His wife, my mother Agatha, she, too, dealt in such ways, supplementing their income as seers with potions and amulets, charmed for various moods and influencing powers. She was a witch, you see, and he a wizard, ours was one of the eldest wizarding family names.
"I was born blind - of vision and of Sight. It pained my mother and father, a disgrace on the name of Mopsus. And so I was kept from society, hidden away where the world could not harm me, nor could I harm the family name. I was coddled by my mother, and forgotten by my father. A squib, they called me, and I was treated by them and my brother as though I were a broken toy, something to be pitied. It was a role I felt destined to play, and fell into with the resignation of one who knows no better, who has no options. Without even my eyes, I could not hope to be anything except at the mercy of the family who thought me useless and treated me as though my purpose in life was to be purely ornamental.
"I had no interest in the family 'business' anyway - they were peddlers of deception and manipulation, not true Seers. Their racket was made up from the reactions of the people as they spoke, bending and twisting, speaking in riddles that were indecipherable and could be applied to most anything. The art of taking advantage of a coincidence was in them, as it had been for generations of the Mopsus line. Not a true Seer among them, it turns out.
"But in this time when the gift of the Sight was so feverishly sought out, so handsomely paid, there arose others who claimed the gift, who used tricks similar to my family's, so that the trade was more and more commonplace. My father had to work thrice as hard to bring about the things which he predicted, in order to rebuild his authenticity, in order to stay in good spirits with the king whom he was employed by.
"But then there came a man with power in his sights, a man who would halt at no lengths to rise up. Asidius Calchus was his name, and he had a very, very ugly countenance, a bad temper, and a ruthless spirit. He thirsted for blood - and read entrails as his fortune telling medium, slaughtering goats and prisoners to read from."
Lily had her face pressed into James's shoulder at this. "Oh dear," she murmured.
James's face was twisted with disgust. "Reading entrails? Well bloody hell they never taught us that in Divination at Hogwarts."
"And thank gods for that," Lily said.
Mopsus shook his head, "No, Hogwarts would not delve into such dark magic - but at Durmstrang and many other schools they would train you on rabbits and other small creatures of that kind." He paused, "No, Hogwarts steers students far from the dark arts of that nature... Though this was long before any of the wizarding schools yet existed. Witches and wizards were trained up under mentors in those days, or else learned from books what they needed to know about the craft. The statute of secrecy had not yet been enforced, and magic was no secret from the muggle world."
"How old are you again...?" James ventured.
But instead of answering, Mopsus merely launched forward in his story.
"Calchus came up from nothing. He rose like a phoenix from ashes into fame as a Seer, making predictions with an accuracy so sharp that even my father questioned if his Sight might be authentic. He became first a soldier, and rose through the ranks until the man was a captain, and recognized by the kings for his Sight and his powerful magic. Within a short time, Calchus was made adviser to the throne of one of the kingdoms enemy to my father's.
"When the kingdoms sought battle with one another - each king asked of their Seer which side would win the battle, and both Octavius Mopsus and Asidius Calchus said their king would win. Well, both could not be right, for only one King could stand victorious when the dust of the war was settled. The time would come in this way that one of the two would be revealed as a fraud. Each was ruthless in attempting to gain the upperhand on the other - and their efforts to turn the tides and make their own predictions truth motivated a great many deaths in the wake of their orchestrated attempts at swaying the outcome of the war one way or the other. Years passed with the war raging, men strewn across the battlefield in pools of the blood shed on the accounts of the two Seers egos.
"Then the king of Calchus's kingdom bore a great loss - his son, the only heir to his throne, was killed in the battle, and laid before the king, who wept and mourned and in his sorrowful state, abandoned his efforts, withdrawing his men, and retreating back to his kingdom. It seemed that my father's prediction had been the true one then, and our kingdom celebrated.
"But it was not over for Calchus refused to cede his power - refused to become to laughing stock. He came in the night to our village with a thousand men, whose ships surrounded the small island upon which we lived. Fire was cast upon every home, and the men slaughtered. Women and children were bound and taken, held hostage aboard the ships. Calchus found my father first, who had gone out to try and protect the people. He killed my father in the street before any who were watching.
"And then, he came for us.
"Calchus vowed to end the bloodline of Mopsus - it was the prediction that he had come to fruition. His soldiers arrived and they dragged my mother, brother, and I out onto the square. I was held and made to listen as he questioned and humiliated my family. He gutted my brother before my mother's watching eyes, and I heard the sound of his death as Calchus's sword swept him stem to stem. Next, he murdered my mother, plunging his sword directly through her heart.
"For me, Calchus had other plans. Every man and resistant woman was murdered that night so that bodies lay about the town in morbid heaps, fires engulfing every familiar feature. He left me there, among the stench of the dead, alone. This he considered justice - leaving a blind boy alone among corpses to suffer and die.
Mopsus paused, and had he not been there, quite alive and tangible, James would have believed that was the end of the tale. It sounded a good deal as though there had been no hope of Mopsus making it through that.
Finally, Mopsus continued, "I lay in the dark in all despair, I'd given up, and I would have died... had it not been for the Sight."
Lily shifted behind James and he looked at her, their eyes meeting. Her emerald green eyes were glistening with tears, and he squeezed her hand to comfort her as best he could.
"Having never seen anything at all, it was quite odd at first, and terrifying. Images faded into my eyes, clear and crisp. Not of the perspective I ought to have as a man, no, but of other things. Far off things, things that had not yet happened. And a flood of knowledge came into me, an understanding of the cause and effect of all things, and I could suddenly understand the patterns of how things worked and even the most impossible thing was clear to me. It was as though all the knowledge of the gods had come to me.
"I don't know how to explain what came next beyond to say that the deepest magic is always the hardest to put into words. I could not see but I Saw, and I knew - I knew how I survived, and that I did make it off from that place and that knowledge made me get up and I could... because I already had.
"I made a vow that day to end evil. I knew in that moment all the greatest horrors of our times, and I worked to mend some of them before they could happen, worked to stop as much pain and suffering as I could. And where I could not stop it, I tried to ease it, to comfort those who needed it, and to do whatever I could do for as many as I could.
"And above all else, this meant defeating the root of all evil.
"Calchus."
James hesitated. "Mate, he's got to be long dead by now, doesn't he?"
"Oh yes," Mopsus said, "Long dead. He was dead before I ever caught up with him. In fact, that night in the village was the last I saw of the man himself. But his bloodline, boy. His blood coursed through the veins of every evil wizard who has ever walked this earth - from Sauron to Slytherin, Grindelwald to..."
"Voldemort." James and Lily said together, their voices raising with shock.
"Yes," Mopsus whispered. "Voldemort." He fell silent, milky eyes clouded, but a strange twinge to his lip that James felt rather reminded him of the twinkle that sometimes came to Dumbledore's eyes.
"What does it all got to do with us?" James asked, his nerves trembling in his voice.
Mopsus whispered, "You, Potter. It's got to do with you."
James glanced at Lily, then back to Mopsus. "How?"
"Never traced your family line, Potter? Never researched how far into history your blood goes?"
James hesitated, uneasy. "Look, if you think I'm Calchus, I —"
"You're a Mopsus, boy! From Mopsus to Peverell and from Peverell to Potter, you can trace the line back, back, back through all the histories of the Wizarding World and you - James Charlus Potter - will find that I, Kostos Mopsus, carry the blood that runs in your veins, and will run in the veins of the Chosen One, and I, boy, have worked all of my life, all of these centuries, to orchestrate the great demise of the blood of Calchus... by the hands of the blood of Mopsus... to satisfy the deepest requirements of some of the most powerful magic there is."
James's jaw had dropped - shock vibrated through his veins, and he stared at the old man before him.
"It is why you were able to use the time turner," Mopsus whispered, "Terrible things happen to wizards who meddle with time — particularly so if they are not of the blood whose magic dictates the properties of how turners work."
"Oh my," Lily whispered.
James was shaking his head.
"You can say no, boy, but I tell you the truth. And today... today I need from you more of your precious seconds... in order to comfort another at his most perilous time of need." Mopsus paused, then added, slowly, "Both of you."
"Me too?" Lily asked confused.
Mopsus replied, "Yes... for it concerns..." he paused, looking carefully at them. "I - I beg your pardon but I cannot yet say who the recipient is or when he will need your time, but suffice it to say that he will - and it has to be you who visits him. You are the only people on earth who can give the boy the strength he needs to do what needs to be done to destroy the blood of Calchus forever."
James looked at Lily, and she nodded slightly and James took a deep, steeling breath. "Alright."