Chapter Four: The Mirror

Tucked between a little shoe store and a florist's shop on what passed as the main street in a hamlet near Wiltshire was a non-descript café. Not even the oldest inhabitants of the hamlet knew the name of the café, though all could tell that it had a name at one time from the sign that—though now unreadable—still hung over the doorstep. The only curiosity that the townsfolk would allow the café was to wonder how it had existed for so long, as the pastries it sold were nearly always stale, the coffee always just shy of acting like a true liquid, and thus the café could only boast to hold the fewest of regular customers. These regulars were such more because they knew the very nice middle-aged woman who owned the café than for the actual business itself. When questioned about how the café could possibly make a profit, she would laugh and say something about how it had been in the family for generations and completely evade the question itself.

And if sometimes the odd, non-descript, person or two walked out of the café that none of the townsfolk had seen walk into the café in the first place, no one bothered to notice.

Harry yawned as he walked out of the apparition room in the back of the café and headed for the door. It was very early in the morning and the air outside hadn't yet lost the slight nip of frost. He was even earlier than the slight bustle that would have been expected of a muggle main street as they headed for work and, as he yawed widely again, he couldn't quite remember why it had seemed like such a terribly good idea to get up so bloody early to start looking. It seemed obvious that if Malfoy Manor had been in absentia for so long, a few hours wouldn't make a whole lot of difference.

But he was here now so he might as well get started. He headed south through the waking hamlet as if he knew exactly where he was going. Not that he expected anyone—muggle or wizard—to be watching, but he'd learned from experience that if he appeared to know exactly what he was doing, no one bothered to wonder exactly why he was doing it, no matter what the action was.

He had decided to approach the Manor, or at least the spot where the Manor was supposed to be, on foot. He truly doubted it was an illusion spell, but—just in case it was—illusion spells often gave themselves away when a change in perspective was involved.

The sleepy main street became a dirt road only a few minutes' walk out of the more populated areas, which continued south for a kilometer or so before it turned and meandered west through a couple of farms. The sun was high in the sky overhead when Harry paused only for a moment at this junction, looking at the field that spread in front of him before easily vaulting over the wooden fence and continuing on his way. This land wasn't owned by the Malfoy family, but Harry suspected that they had been responsible for the neglect of this particular field in one way or another.

Though many other fields appeared to stretch on behind this one, all in similar states of disuse, Harry knew that once he passed this field he would be over the barrier that protected the Manor from curious muggle eyes. Of course, what he would see when he was over that barrier was the question of the morning.

He eyed the rickety wooden fence as a surveyor might, but he could see no flaws. No matter how he concentrated on the wood, he could find no seams in the spell that would herald two illusion spells cast over each other.

Really, that would have been too easy, anyway.

He half expected to run into a tree when he climbed over the fence, but instead he found himself on the top of a small ridge, looking down at the forest Ron and the other Aurors had found.

Harry leaned back against the fence and just looked at the forest. He'd read the description and seen Ron's conviction the night before, but experiencing it for himself was quite a different thing.

Trees, almost as far as the eye could see, all lush and healthy and green. The sounds of a healthy forest permeated the air: bird calls, and the rustlings of other living things. He could smell the forest on the wind, the scent of leaves, dirt, and dew. And there was no trace of magic anywhere. He could feel no traces of a spell, no lingering residue of the powerful magic that it must have taken to create this.

"Ten points to Slytherin, Mr. Malfoy," he murmured, pushing himself off from the wood. "This is a very impressive bit of magic."

Nothing was out of place as he descended to the forest, the magic—whatever it was—

was seamless and perfect. The bark of the first tree he touched was rough and real. He ripped a piece of it off and it was still bark, brittle and wooden, in his hand. He let it drop to the forest floor as he continued forward.

There was, of course, no sign of the gates that he remembered, but he'd seen the maps of the forest compared to the Ministry copy of the Manor's blueprints and the forest covered only that which was the Manor and the Manor's grounds. He continued onward, through what would have been the Manor's front grounds, and still nothing was out of place.

As Ron had said, there wasn't even a single peacock. Though Harry did wonder if perhaps the forest's birds were the peacocks.

He reached what would have been the Manor's front doors and paused. This was around where Ron had apparated and there was still only forest, just as Ron had said. Harry could very easily visualize nearly apparating into one of the trees, so closely packed…

Wait. They were denser here than they were on the outer parts of the forest. Yes, that was to be expected of any forest but…

The best lie was always that which was nearly the truth.

Harry continued forward slowly, following the flow of the trees as they got thicker and thicker, packed closer and closer together, never past the point where one could say there was no way trees wouldn't grow that way in nature.

And still, he found nothing. He could see why the Aurors hadn't searched the forest very thoroughly. It was almost depressing how perfectly normal it was… which was, of course, what made the forest so suspicious. He sighed, leaning against a nearby tree.

And blinked. Stood upright and then leaned back down.

A flash of gold out the corner of his eye. He looked intently at the tree, and in the fuzzy background of his vision, the gold took shape.

An illusion. But only on one small clearing in the forest. Harry headed for it, pausing every few minutes to close his eyes for a bit so the strain of concentrating on something near while looking at something far wouldn't cause him to miss something.

The clearing was tiny, and as he stepped into it what was a tree became the golden object he'd seen glinting in the morning light.

It was a mirror. Before stepping too close, he quickly cast through the standard detection spells he'd long memorized, beginning with the most obscure and powerful and ending with the classic Finite Incantatem. When nothing occurred, he felt it was safe enough to step forward and inspect the mirror more closely. From the back it appeared to be all gold, as tall as he was and nearly twice as wide. Probably solid gold, since he was dealing with Malfoy, he thought, reaching out to touch it. The metal was cool under his fingers, but that was all.

Quite anti-climactic. Though he was positive that the mirror must have something to do with the Manor's disappearance and the forest that took it's place, it must be more a passive role than an active one.

Slowly, he circled around to the front of the mirror, standing back a ways to look at it.

It was broken. As if someone had taken something huge and heavy and hurled it at the mirror's center. The glass was fragmented and broken. Pieces were missing, and others were only barely connected, jutting out at odd angles to the mirror's back. But what was oddest of all was that there was no broken reflection to match the broken glass. There was no reflection at all.

Slowly he stepped forward. Once. Twice. And still, the glass remained blank and opaque, as if the mirror was suspended in a world of nothing. He reached out to touch one of the shards, and as his finger felt the cool glass underneath, an image appeared, spreading out from the point of contact.

It was his reflection, though unbroken, as if the mirror was whole, except for the pieces that were completely missing. He stared at himself for a moment, before moving his finger away.

The image shifted, so subtly that Harry didn't see the difference at first. But the reflection staring back at him was… wrong. It wasn't his reflection anymore. Though it wore his face, it wasn't him.

And then the reflection smiled at him, and Harry jumped back, away from the mirror and the damning reflection. But the reflection didn't fade, if anything it became clearer for the distance.

It was like watching a nightmare unfold, just separated by a thin slice of glass, and all the man in the mirror had done was smile at him.

But it was enough. In that smile, Harry didn't know whether he'd seen himself or the deceased Lord Voldemort smiling at him.

"A mirror?" the man sitting across the small café table asked.

It was odd to hear Zexion's voice coming from the visage that sat across from him. The man's hair was a rich brown, long and tied back into a horsetail in a composed manner which Zexion's normal hair was incapable of being. His eyes were a sultry green, and even his mouth looked different—though Harry couldn't say exactly how. The voice was the same, though Harry had the distinct feeling that Zexion had only kept that so Harry could tell who he was.

He would have walked right past him, even though he'd known Zexion would appear different when they met in the café. It was only when Zexion had actually spoken, greeted him like an old friend who he was completely surprised to see, that Harry recognized him.

Harry personally felt that his surprise at seeing how his "old friend" had changed in appearance over the years they hadn't seen each other was particularly genuine.

They'd talked for a few minutes, about mundane things that Harry was almost positive Zexion was making up as he was going along—though he wasn't completely positive, which was the most off-putting. Zexion was a very different kind of contact than the ones he'd worked with before. The ease with which Zexion blended truth with lies made him wonder exactly how long Zexion had been stuck working as a contact in the Field before he'd finally been moved into Intel. But after a few minutes, he'd felt the slight tingle of Zexion's magic, a two-person privacy spell that would allow them to say whatever they wished while to the rest of the café it appeared they were still catching up on old times.

"A mirror," Harry repeated, forcing down the sludge that didn't even really pass as coffee. He would have opted for tea, but that was—according to the local rumor—even worse.

Zexion had ordered the tea, and obviously without any thoughts towards drinking it. He was pensive as Harry described the mirror, interrupting whenever he wanted clarification.

Really, Zexion was very hard to talk to.

"And the reflection was still you?" Zexion pressed.

"It was and it wasn't," Harry muttered, looking into the depths of the coffee as if it would suddenly produce the tea-leaf specter of the Grim, remembering the chill that had run up his spin at the reflection's visage.

Harry hadn't run, had forced himself to stare at the reflection until it faded. He had touched the mirror again, though reluctantly, and the same thing had happened again.

He hadn't felt the need to test the mirror in triplicate.

"Explain."

"I don't know if I can," Harry said truthfully. "It was like looking at myself, but me in the sense of myself as I would never want to be."

"A nightmare version," Zexion murmured thoughtfully, sitting back in his chair.

"Something like that, yeah," Harry agreed.

"Mirrors that reflect that which—for whatever reason—would not normally be reflected are not uncommon, but they would normally have to remain intact to do so. The fact that the mirror's charm—or curse—would still work when it was shattered in the manner that you described…" Zexion trailed off. "One would only try to shatter a mirror if they wanted it to stop working."

"So someone else thinks that the mirror is to blame for… whatever," Harry waved his hand as if to encompass whatever exactly it was that was occurring at Malfoy Manor.

"That would be my guess. And the question of who shattered it is indeed an interesting one."

Harry nodded. "So is there anyone particularly gifted in be-spelled mirrors that you can get in touch with?"

"Mirrors feature in a wide spectrum of spells, from the most dark and nearly illegal to the most simple and common. There may be one or two experts in the world," Zexion responded sourly. "But even they cannot work on the hypothetical. Is there a possibility that you could obtain a piece of the mirror? Were there any shards on the ground near it?"

"No," Harry shook his head, "but I could probably easily break off a piece."

Zexion nodded. "Good. Judging from what kind of reflection it provided you with, I will assume for the moment that we are indeed dealing with the Dark Arts. Nightmare-inducing items especially are commonly dark artifacts. And we have several in the Ministry who specialize in dark artifacts. I will contact those sources and see if such a mirror is, perhaps, something easily explained."

Harry very much agreed that the mirror had something to do with the Dark Arts but, knowing Malfoy, he doubted it would be a commonly used artifact. Though Malfoy had surprised him in that way before, and it was at least a start.

Also, if he'd learned anything in his time in the Aurors and in the Unspeakables, it was often the most well-known classic spells that were the biggest problems.

"But there was nothing else out of the ordinary other than the mirror?" Zexion quired for the third time.

"Nothing," Harry answered as he had the first two times. "It's just like Ron—Head Auror Ronald Weasley—said. It's like something picked up Malfoy Manor and moved it and put the forest in its place-"

"The likes of which would have been obviously visible and left behind a miasma of magical residue."

"-or just transfigured the whole thing, grounds and all, into the forest."

"Which would then categorize Draco Malfoy as a missing person, and is impossible." Zexion muttered.

"Gotta love the exceptions to Gamp's Law," Harry muttered, punctuating his gloom with the rest of the disgusting coffee.

"Of course. Food, land, money, love, and sentient life," Zexion agreed, though he did not sound nearly as gloomy as he should have, in Harry's opinion.

"So all that leaves is this bloody mirror," Harry griped, standing. "I'll get a piece of it and send it through to the Ministry."

"Bring it by in person," Zexion replied, standing as well—and Harry felt the privacy rise off them like steam. "We can discuss it then."

Despite the fact that sunset was rapidly approaching, Harry headed for the forest. He'd get the mirror piece and then floo back home. He could bring it in to Zexion in the morning. Of course, by the morning Zexion would probably have interrogated all the dark artifacts experts in the Ministry and would be moving on to the lesser known experts hidden in the Web.

But something about the mirror was still nagging at Harry, and it was something he couldn't quite place to put into words. He wouldn't deny that it was a magical artifact of some sort, but it didn't feel like it was be-spelled or cursed with anything.

If anything, looking at it made him feel like he was looking into a very different mirror that he hadn't seen since his first year at Hogwarts, but where the Mirror of Erised had been engraved, this mirror had no words or engravings at all.

The mirror was still there, just as it had been for the past two days, though—even in two days—Harry could see that the forest itself changed as did a real forest in that same passage of time. Just as he had remembered, there were no fragments of the mirror to be seen anywhere in the clearing. He'd have to rip off one of the fragments that were about to fall off.

He reached for a small one—about the size of his palm—that seemed to be supported only by one point and pulled. He stumbled a bit when it didn't budge. Fingers still grasping the glass, and pointedly ignoring the not-Harry that was grinning out at him, he surveyed the broken mirror with a new respect. Whatever broke the mirror must have been really damaging, whatever it was.

But the shard wouldn't move. He reached for his wand, wincing as his palm grazed the tip of the shard. He watched a drop of blood hover on the tip for a moment before it rolled down the side of the mirror and dropped to the ground…

…where it dripped onto a polished wooden floor.

The room was warm, lit and heated by firelight, the mirror just another golden object among other gilded objects.

"Well done, Potter."

Harry whirled around at the voice, wand raised, but the speaker wasn't even looking at him, lounging on a plush sofa as if without a care in the world, watching the fire cackle merrily in the gold-encrusted marble fireplace before him.

"A lot of people have tried to undo the Mirror of Lies, but very few have actually undone it," Draco Malfoy drawled. "You have very powerful blood."

to be continued...

status: beta'd by Ayeshah Harvey-Lomas