“Well,” Luna said after a long, silent pause, “I’m pretty sure there won’t be a revolution tomorrow.” She then paused and looked aside. “Then again, Daddy did have an interesting conversation with Minister Fudge at a cocktail party last year. The Minister said something like he thought the only good the Goblins could possibly serve was as a filling for meat pies sold from Diagon Alley stalls. Daddy did say the Minister was clearly - what was the term - in his cups? The editor of The Daily Prophet heard it too but chose not to write about it and neither did Daddy. But he’s keeping it in mind just in case the Minister really is crazy ‘cause goodness knows how the Goblins would react to that titbit even if it was only meant as a joke - one in bad taste, pardon the pun.”
Hermione snorted. “The Quibbler writes about non-existent creatures…”
“Just because Newt Scamander chose not to include Crumple Horned Snorkacks, Wrackspurts, Nargles, Plimpies and Blibbering Humdingers in A Thousand Magical Beasts and Where To Find Them, does not mean they don’t exist,” Luna said. “After all there are exactly one thousand magical beasts in that book. Maybe he stopped because One Thousand Three Hundred and Twenty-Seven Magical Beasts and Where To Find Them didn’t sound right or maybe his publisher was only willing to publish a book on a thousand beasts.”
“Or maybe there was a paper shortage,” George (Nicholas Flamel) offered, “‘cause there was at the time.”
“But,” Luna continued, “I’m pretty sure that as much as I love talking with Grampy and Granny, they didn’t call us together to talk about their true identities, as fascinating as that was, or how we’re related or about Professor Dumbledore and politics.”
“No, we did not,” Clara (Perenelle Flamel) said. “But our true identities and histories were necessary because what we have to tell you needs more than the average degree of credibility and the Dumbledore angle would have come up as well as it places certain things in the proper context.”
“This is about the French Word Thing and Life Flashy thing, isn’t it?” Luna said almost bouncing while seated on her bed."
“The what?” the older coupled seemed to ask in unison.
“A persistent sense of déjà vu that began around Harry’s eleventh birthday and ended - pretty much - about two weeks ago,” Hermione said. “That’s the French Word Thing as Luna calls it. The Life Flashy thing is something all three of us experienced even more recently. For me it was about a week ago when I first kissed Harry. For Luna it was earlier this morning when she first kissed Harry and for Harry it was each of those times. It was like our life flashing before our eyes except most of it hasn’t happened yet. The one thing all of us can remember is it wasn’t pleasant.”
“Interesting,” George said looking at his wife.
“What about the golden glow?” Rose Granger asked. When the older couple looked at her with interest she continued. “When Harry kissed Luna they started glowing. It was golden in color and within moments Hermione was glowing as well.”
“Well, that will certainly make some things a little easier,” Clara said with a smile.
“What did you all think those events were?” George asked.
“Magic,” the three young people replied.
“Obviously,” George drawled sounding disturbingly like their least favorite professor at school. “Any idea what kind?”
They shook their heads.
“Any guesses as to what it means?”
“Luna said she thought the déjà vu was sort of a message,” Harry said. “Not a message exactly but something that would get us to pay attention when we might not ordinarily. No idea what the other stuff was.”
“Luna was essentially correct about the déjà vu,” George said. “It was a technique designed to if not open your minds to what otherwise might seem unbelievable at least get you listen when otherwise you might think you were losing it. As for what she called the Life Flashy Thing, it sounds like that was the message itself, imbedded in your subconscious and spontaneously released by another form of powerful magic.”
“Not much of a message if we can’t remember it,” Hermione grumbled.
“It wasn’t meant to be released that way,” Clara said. “It was to be triggered at certain times by certain events and probably will be as intended. As a small benefit, you will know it for what it is now when it happens.”
“Okay,” Harry said, “but who sent this message and why?”
“The three of you sent the messages to yourselves.”
“That’s impossible!” Hermione said. “I know no kind of magic that can do that and I think I would remember if I had read about it.”
“Unless we were obliviated,” Luna added.
George smiled almost evilly. “Whether you were obliviated or not is not relevant. The magic you used you will not find in any books in any library.”
“Why not?” Hermione asked.
“Because it hasn’t been discovered yet,” Clara finished.
“You’re from the future?” Harry began.
“Don’t be silly,” Hermione chided. “They said we sent the messages.”
“Oh, right. But how? Why?”
“Time magic is fairly complex,” Clara began.
“But aren’t Stasis Charms and things like the Impediment Jinx time magic? They’re taught at Hogwarts,” Hermione interrupted and blushed when she realized what she had done. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Clara said. “Yes they are. But if you’ve read about them you also know they merely alter the flow of time on a given object or, if applied in a ward construct, in a specific and limited area. I was talking more in the nature of time travel.”
“You can do that?” Rose asked.
“Arguably,” George said, “our being here when we were born over 660 years ago is proof that it is conceptually possible. Admittedly, we did it the slow way,” he laughed. “The truth is travelling into the future is not possible, at least not that we are aware of because the future has infinite possibilities. The past, however, is fixed so the theory was since it was fixed it was therefore possible to go back in time. There is truth to this theory, but sending a physical object back in time is not very practical, particularly if the intent is to alter the timeline itself.”
“Why?”
“Because it IS fixed to an amazing degree and cannot be physically altered. All you can do is participate in events that have already happened really, not truly change the outcome. It’s rather complicated. There are devices called Time Turners which allow a person or two to go back, but only a couple of days at most. However, whatever you do would have been part of the timeline before you went back anyway. This means you can’t possible alter things in any way that would cause the original version of yourself not to go back in time. Kind of defeats the purpose in a way since you can’t save someone who died or kill someone who lived if that their death or life was the reason you went back in the first place. Best you can do is go back before someone might have died and interfere with the events that almost, maybe killed them. If they died before you tried to go back to stop it, they’re dead. You can’t change it. Needless to say there’s little real utility to those things and they’re highly regulated because their only practical use is to allow the user to be somewhere else when his original self commits a crime of some kind so that he has a damn good alibi. You didn’t change the fact the crime happened the first time around, did you? All you did was give yourself an alibi in the event you were caught.
“It is considered an axiom for now that you cannot physically travel back in time and change what has already happened. All you can do is go back and participate in what has already happen.”
“Then how…?” Hermione began.
“Have any of you wondered why George or Nicholas, if you will, decided to live so many lives?” Clara (Perenelle) asked. “You must admit it seems rather selfish and to an extent it is after all we have outlived all of our children and all but one of our grandchildren thanks to the recent war and others as well. We do care about them and it’s painful whenever we lose one. Why go through that? Why go through that knowing it will happen, knowing you will outlive them all? To end it all, all we ever had to do was not take the Elixir and nature would have seen to the rest. We would have died of old age at the end of our most recent life span. Why didn’t we?”
They shook their heads.
“Our first life we were focused on Alchemy and once we seemed to have perfected our technique, we then moved on to other branches of magic in our other lives. But Nicholas Flamel in all his incarnations and I in all mine have always been interested in the nature of time. Arguably, what you call the Philosopher’s Stone and Elixir of Life is a specialized form of time magic as it makes someone physically younger but you don’t skip about the time line. We wanted to know how and to what extent it might possible to actually skip about the time line. While we didn’t take credit for it in any of our incarnations, the Time Turner was our creation - officially it’s attributable to ‘Unnamed Unspeakables’ in the British Ministry of Magic. But as we explained, that form of magical time travel is not useful. We kept coming back because life proved far more interesting after a couple hundred years and because we wanted to further explore the nature of time.
“Your recent experience with déjà vu and what our great-granddaughter called the Life Flashy Thing are manifestations of a way you can do something in the past that changes the timeline. We discovered another way to influence past events, one that does not involve sending something physically through the timeline and, while we’ve never had cause to try a full up test, we believe since this method does not involve physical intervention, it is possible that it can alter past events that otherwise seem unalterable.”
“Okay,” Harry said slowly, “if we assume someone has to do something differently, how can you change that without physically stopping them?”
“What if instead of stopping them at all, you merely sent them information they did not or could not have so that they can make different decisions?” Hermione suggested.
“Exactly,” George (Nicholas) said.
“So you replaced our current memories with ones from this other timeline?” Harry asked.
“They weren’t replaced,” George said. “We thought that might be possible once we realized that memories or information are not governed by the same time magic restrictions as physical objects, but we felt that memory replacement as in changing who you are now, replacing who you are now with whatever you became in the timeline we seek to change, was unethical.”
“Just ‘cause it might be possible to do something, doesn’t mean you should or that you should even try,” Clara (Perenelle) said. “If we replaced you of this time with you of another time, what becomes of you of this time? Any way you think about it, the you of this time ceases to exist, doesn’t it? Essentially, that’s like killing. No. We decided not to go that route. Besides, there’s a way to prove that we have not done this. Can any of you do a Blasting Hex?”
“No,” three voices said.
“They don’t teach that until Fifth Year or later in Defence Against the Dark Arts,” Hermione added. “But that doesn’t prove anything. What if what you want to change happens much sooner than that?”
“Do you have any memories of our trip to France?” Rose asked her daughter.
“No. Of course not! It hasn’t happened yet.”
“Exactly,” Clara said. “And consider the déjà vu,” she added. “You had a feeling it all had happened before, but could any of you truly see or sense what was going to happen next?”
The three shook their heads.
“And the three of you aren’t having that feeling now, are you?”
Again, they shook their heads.
“To begin to prepare your current minds for useful information that will help avoid certain - er - mistakes in the future, you sent to your current selves memories. Since those memories were the same as what was happening at the time…”
“Déjà vu,” Hermione finished. “In a way, we really had been through it before! And it stopped when we did something different, right?”
“Or when something different happened,” Luna added. “It stopped for me when I got that odd letter, remember?”
“So the thing I wanted to change was to talk to Dobby and let him become my House Elf?” Harry asked. “That’s when it stopped for me mostly.”
“Possibly a part of it,” George said. “Having a bonded House Elf can be quite useful. But while it may be a part of what needs changing, that’s all it is a part and probably a very small part. The déjà vu was, as you say Luna suggested, a mind alert as it were. Depart from the same as before and it stops but not everything is something you can change or do different, right? There are some things that have happened since that still happened ‘cause they happened regardless, right?”
“Dumbledore cancelling end of year exams,” the three said in unison. “And the fact we couldn’t go home right away,” Hermione added.
“The three of you decided to begin ‘the messages’ - as you will - on Harry’s eleventh birthday,” Clara began.
“Why then?” they asked.
“That’s when the last of you learned about magic,” Clara continued. “You chose that date figuring that knowing that magic was real and that each of you was magical you would consider magic as a possible explanation for what you were experiencing as opposed to thinking you were nutters. Unlike George and I who came up with the magic some time ago in this timeline and therefore knew what caused our own sense of déjà vu, you did not. Nothing had to change for some time, but the three of you also knew you needed something to get you to change the way you see things and think about things fairly early on and trying to figure out the déjà vu was an easy way to open your minds to other possibilities when the time came, possibilities you would not have otherwise considered or would have been receptive to.
“In a future time, one which has already been altered, an elderly couple by names you have not and probably will not hear taught you this magic. That was George and I’s future manifestation of Nicholas and Perenelle. But there are other things you need to learn in this time to fully exploit the magic so we also sent ourselves information from that time. We too began experiencing déjà vu on July 31st, 1991 and it took each of us some time to realize it was what it was. But, as we already knew how that magic worked, we knew how to uncap the underlying messages. This is what ultimately caused us to write Luna that letter and it’s why we’re here today. This is the summer where some things should happen and the earliest you should begin learning how to exploit the information your other selves sent along.”
“But if we in the future sent us information that we now use to change something, what happens to we in the future that sent it?” Hermione asked.
“Arguably,” George (Nicholas) replied, “if the change was significant enough, it could change the timeline and certainly would change your own.”
“But,” Hermione continued, “wouldn’t that mean the we in the future would not have reason to send that information back in the first place?”
“Probably.”
“Doesn’t that create a paradox of some kind?”
“Not really. The future is not fixed in any way, shape or form. There are from this moment forward infinite possible futures moving forward. True, some futures are far more likely than others, but any future is possible. All sending information back would do is possibly change what the sender does now. The sender can, of course, ignore the information which would change little or nothing. But, if they change something from that possible timeline and that change is significant enough, then that future is no longer possible. That being said, there’s still a lot of possible futures which remain possible and some that are even more probable than not following that change.”
“Wait! You said earlier if we physically came back we can’t change the future we came from,” Hermione complained. “But now, if we send information back from some future, you’re saying we could now do things that make that future impossible such that we would have no need to send the information back in the first place? I still see that as a paradox!”
The older couple nodded. “If you physically go back,” George said, “then you exist as two entities in that past: the past you and future you connecting that future you to that past such that it cannot be changed. But sending information from one possible future for some reason does not lock that future to the person in the past therefore that future can be changed or avoided altogether. It’s very confusing if you think about it but it’s also the way time magic works.”
“Don’t you think changing the future is dangerous? Reckless?” Rose asked.
“Aside from repeating that the future is not set, I would agree. In the wrong hands and for the wrong reasons, being able to change the past is not a good idea. We can assure you that this was not done lightly and was not done just because you three were not happy with the ways your lives turned out - which you weren’t - but that was not the reason. There were things the three of you - well Harry mostly - could have done in your current near future - if you consider the next decade or so near - that you chose not to do or didn’t do as well as you could have. It wasn’t entirely your fault, mind you. You lacked the knowledge even in the then present sense to have done the right things as it were and you lacked the desire to take the stands and stand out and such more than you already had. The result of trying to attain the lives you wanted rather than taking charge and pursuing opportunities you had not thought of or would not pursue because it was too hard was that tens of thousands and maybe hundreds of thousands died needlessly while those who could have made a difference watched on. If it was just your lives that had not turned out the way they could have, Clara and I would never have sought you three out at all. You three could be the difference between a future of pain and suffering and a future of progress for millions. Your inactions led indirectly to the worst possible future. Your choices - many of which are years away from the here and now - helped that horrible future come to be. You three wanted to do something to change that and we spent a long time with you three trying to figure out what went wrong and when it went wrong. We all agreed that none of us can know what the right choices were, only what the wrong ones were. To avoid your wrong choices… well that’s what led to us being here today and talking about it. It’s why we sought these three out then - in that future - and now in this present.”
“What did we do wrong?” Hermione asked in shock.
“It’s a pity we can’t tell you really,” Clara said. “Truly it is. Deep down, only you know. This magic doesn’t work like that. We can tell you what the world was like - for us and from what you told us in that future - but not truly what you could have done to have prevented it. Sorry. It’s not that kind of thing. But, should you accept certain things and by accepting them unblock your magical message, you will have access to the mistakes you made and from there be able to make - if you choose - different decisions.”
“Free will’s a bitch,” George said. “This magic can’t change that we’re pretty sure. That being said, there are things we can tell you lot. What you do with that… Well, that’s you’re decision, isn’t it?
“Clara and I are here for two reasons. First, in addition to convincing you that this magic is real so that you will believe or at least be willing to consider what we’re going to tell you, we are here to give you and overview of the future your other selves decided needed to be changed and why it needs to be changed. Also, as your ‘Life Flashy Thing’ suggests, most of what we will say is stored deep in your minds and is under a block. It is a block that only you can break and we are here to tell you the basics as to how.”
After a pause Harry spoke. “Voldemort won, didn’t he? In this future you mentioned, he won.”
“No Harry. In this future we speak of you killed him about five years from now. Arguably, he never really stood a chance once he set his sights on you.”
“But if he lost, then why was that future so bad that we had to try and find a way to change it. I would have thought that with Voldemort gone, there wouldn’t be any more problems like that.”
“And regrettably so did Dumbledore,” George said, “although he never lived to see his greatest mistake manifest itself. Dumbledore believes that Voldemort is the disease which is infecting our world. Due to a prophecy made before you were born, Harry, he believes that you are the cure. In that future, he was wrong on both counts. Voldemort is not the disease, but merely a symptom and Dumbledore is a symptom as well. Dumbledore’s plan got rid of one symptom and ignored all the others allowing the disease to go on unchecked until our whole world was torn asunder. It is the disease that gave rise to Voldemort and it is the disease that prevents Dumbledore from doing what needs to be done to cure it. We already touched on it.”
“We did?” several asked.
“You mean the Wizengamot,” Hermione said. “A government you are born into as opposed to elected by the people, right?”
“That is what I meant, but it too is but a symptom although arguably the most visible one. If the composition of the Wizengamot was the only problem, we probably would never have heard of Voldemort. After all, not long ago Britain was not really much of a democracy by today’s standards. Parliament was originally made up of the Nobility and Bishops - which later became the House of Lords - and the Knights of the Shire, Sheriffs, and Burgesses from the Free Towns or Chartered Towns. That group later became the House of Commons since they were, by definition, commoners. They weren’t elected to Parliament at first at all, that came later and until earlier this century, most people could not vote at all. To vote for Parliament, specifically the Members of Parliament in the House of Commons, you had to own land. That changed only after the First World War which was also when they extended the vote to certain, but not all, women at first. Now everyone can participate in government through their votes, but that is a recent development and Britain did quite well for a long time without it.”
“There were issues,” Hermione said. “There was the reigns of King Stephen and King John that were little more than civil wars in England. Edward I seemed hell bent on trying to subdue the Scots, Welsh and Irish who, of course, didn’t want to be subdued by the English which set off centuries of violence. Henry IV deposed Richard II which arguably set off a prolonged and bloody civil war for the throne - true the real fighting didn’t begin until the reign of Henry VI but there you go. That war ended with Richard III dead on the battlefield and Henry Tudor taking the throne and executing opposition left and right - a ploy that continued in one form or another and to varying degrees throughout the Tudor Dynasty. Charles I was such a jerk that Parliament went to war against him and lopped of his head and James II was run out of the country sometime later by which time Parliament was more than a little fed up with monarchs who believed themselves to be all powerful so that when James II cousin Mary and her husband William of Orange were offered the throne, they had to agree to play nice with Parliament and that in many things Parliament had the final say.”
“I wasn’t suggesting English history was all rosy,” George (Nicholas) said. “To be honest, I don’t think a generation has gone by where they were not fighting someone, somewhere for some reason. But as compared to the other monarchies of Europe, while they did have their fair share of dynastic challenges and disputes, they never really had a true revolution, did they? Okay. I suppose Oliver Cromwell and his lot might count, but they didn’t change much of anything in the end. Just about every other monarchy has been forced to take a true back seat in political affairs at one point and a few were dealt with quite harshly in the end. There was no French Revolution or Bolshevik take over. The English did not go to sleep one night under a monarchy and wake up the next day to a totally different form of government following a violent uprising. England managed to avoid that.
“We chose to send the message back to this time,” George continued, “a time immediately following you Second Year, Harry. It was chosen because you have now faced Voldemort three times in your life and twice since you started Hogwarts so you know what you’re up against and you already wonder why that is so. Most annoyingly, Dumbledore seems to know why but isn’t telling you a thing, is he?”
Harry shook his head.
“A most annoying habit he has,” Clara (Perenelle) said. “Once he obtains information he considers both important and sensitive, he prefers not to share it at all. He will reveal it but only when he feels it is absolutely necessary to do so and even then he’d prefer to reveal as little as possible. He came to us two years ago trying to convince us that the Stone was in danger. That’s all he would tell us so, naturally, we told the little boy that he had nothing to worry about.”
“Little boy?” Harry asked.
“He’s a hundred and twenty-three…”
“That’s impossible!” Rose said. “No one lives that long!”
“Muggles don’t,” Clara said. “Witches and wizards have always had a much higher life expectancy. Dumbledore is the equivalent of a muggle male in his late seventies. If your daughter should live long enough to die from natural causes, she could easily live that long and longer. 160, while uncommon, is not unheard of. But, as George and I have lived nine lifetimes and are 667 and 663 years old respectively, to us one as young as Dumbledore is a mere child or adolescent.”
“This is particularly true where magic is concerned,” George said. “We have probably forgotten more magic that he ever knew and he tends to forget that little fact seeing as in this lifetime we’re only 86. So he came to us begging to keep the Stone safe. Of course he did not know that it was useless to anyone but the two of us. He assumed we lacked the ability to protect it, forgetting that the secret that might be vulnerable is not the Stone but the knowledge needed to create it.”
“Which he did not seem nearly as keen to safeguard,” Clara said. “He didn’t even suggest that we should take precautions ourselves.”
“Dumbledore reluctantly decided to tell us why he wanted to guard our Stone,” George said. “And I mean he was reluctant. We made it quite clear we had no intention of turning it over - even though it really didn’t matter - and he had to tell us everything or leave us and never return. The man has his pride and losing a ‘colleague’ such as Nicholas Flamel was unthinkable to him so he spilled.
“Dumbledore was fairly certain Voldemort didn’t snuff it that night when you became famous, Harry. He suspected that the bastard - and he was one - had delved into certain highly vile magics that would make him hard to totally destroy. Voldemort’s body was destroyed that night, but Dumbledore was convinced he could return. He had suspicions that what was left of Voldemort, more than a ghost, really, was biding its time in Albania. So long as it remained there and until Dumbledore figured a way to deal with it permanently, he was willing to let it abide.
“About a week before Dumbledore came knocking at our door all on about the safety of the Stone, one Quirinus Quirrell returned from a year’s leave of absence to assume duties as Professor of Defence Against the Dark Arts. Dumbledore has been having serious retention issues with that post. Since Professor Barkley retired in 1961, no replacement has lasted more than a year, two at the most. Quirrell was totally unqualified for the topic, although he had been quite well received as the Professor for Muggle Studies his prior ten years at Hogwarts. Defence? His only qualification was he spent two years just out of school dealing with security trolls. Wouldn’t’ve known a ‘Dark Art’ if it bopped him on the nose. But, said professor took a year off to try and learn a bit and came back fearful of vampires and, it seemed, possessed by what was left of Voldemort.
“Dumbledore’s a bit of an odd duck for a leader. If it were me, I’d’ve snuffed the man then and there. Dumbledore wasn’t about to do that if there was any chance, however unreasonably slim, that the possession could be reversed without having to kill Quirrell. But he also knew why it had happened at that time. He suspected Voldemort would try to come back some way at that time even if he could not totally regain his powers. He knew that Harry Potter was about to start Hogwarts and would be out in the open and vulnerable. Dumbledore knew he would be remiss to prevent that, but had this other idea. He would distract Voldemort with something of more immediate interest.”
“The Stone?” Harry asked. “But you said only you can use it!”
“And, aside from those of us in this room, no one else knows that. They think any blighter can use it. And Voldemort, being the vain bastard that he is, would rather snuff a helpless Firstie having regained his full power than do so as a shade of his former self dependent upon the life of what he certainly considered an inferior wizard. You should be aware as to how that turned out in the end.”
Harry and Hermione nodded.
“The point it that despite even common courtesy, much less given the potential situation, Dumbledore was loath to tell us why he wanted to safeguard the stone. He did so most reluctantly and only when he was certain we would never agree to even consider being a part of his little venture without him disclosing his information. In one area, he is particularly reticent about revealing anything.”
“What area is that?” Hermione asked.
“Anything and everything to do with one Harry James Potter,” George finished. “He never told you about Quirrell, did he?”
Harry shook his head.
“He let that man skulk about for almost a year,” Clara said. “The entire time that thing inside of him was trying to come back and that thing wanted nothing as much as to kill you, Harry. Dumbledore knew this and said nothing and did little or nothing about it. His plan was to trap the bastard. He tends to be overly complex in his plans. He could easily have overpowered that possessed professor, but he believes in the art of subtlety. He damn near handed this world over to Voldemort the last time through his subtle plans and the gentle approach he believed he needed to maintain in order to claim to be a leader of the Light. It seems he’s playing that game again.”
“He currently serves as your magical guardian, Harry,” George said. “As such he is supposed to do whatever he can that is in your best interests. To say he has been neglectful in his duties thus far is an understatement. He was the one who placed you with the Dursleys and he was supposed to make certain you were treated well. Were you?”
Harry shook his head.
“Everything that happened to you under the care - if you can call it that - of the Dursleys is his responsibility, not that he’d ever admit to it. He is as guilty as they are. He acts as if he did not know and maybe he did not, but he was required to check on you and if he did not or if he did and did nothing, he has failed in his obligations to you as your guardian.
“You are the last of an Ancient and Noble House, did you know that?”
Harry nodded. “My Elf Dobby told me about that yesterday.”
“You should have been told that before you even started Hogwarts! As you are in effect the Head of that House but are too young to fulfil your obligations as such in your own right, your magical guardian acts as your proxy in such matters. He holds your House Seat and votes in the Wizengamot. But as a mere proxy, the law requires that he at the very least submit any and all proposed legislation to you for your information once you turn eleven. In fact, you have the authority to tell him how to vote the Potter votes. You can’t vote yourself nor can you yet introduce legislation for consideration nor can you tell Dumbledore how to rule when he hears a legal case as part of the Court, but otherwise he is required to consult with you on Wizengamot matters. I take it that never has happened?”
Harry shook his head.
“I take it you haven’t seen your parents' or your grandfather’s Wills either?”
“No.”
“Even though you can only truly access a Trust Vault, you are still entitled to know about the Potter estates and you should have been told about it again when you turned eleven if you didn’t know about it before then. Again, that was the responsibility of your magical guardian.”
“He will say and perhaps has said that he wishes to spare you from such things,” Clara said. “He wishes you to enjoy life and all that. Odd that he should say or even think such things given what you’ve been through since the day your parents were murdered. He has his reasons for this, as misguided as they are.”
“There was a prophecy,” George continued. “It was made a few months before you were born, Harry. It goes like this:
“ The One with the Power to Vanquish the Dark Lord Approaches."Born to those who have Thrice Defied Him,"Born as the Seventh Month Dies.
“ And the Dark Lord will Mark Him as an Equal.
“ But He will have Power the Dark Lord Knows not.
“ And either must die at the hand of the other, for neither can Live while the other Survives.”
“Prophecies are dodgy at best,” Clara said. “George and I have studied that magic and, unlike most others, we’ve lived long enough to know just how useless it is. They are vague and ambiguous and can mean anything or nothing. The few that might have come to pass were always known by the participant that being the object or an object of the prophecy - one who wanted the thing to be right. If you act upon it then for better or worse it can become self fulfilling.”
“Dumbledore heard this prophecy,” George continued. “He has been acting upon it in a way ever since. But a Death Eater heard part of it too - Severus Snape’s his name - and he dutifully reported what he heard to his Master Voldemort. So Voldemort has been acting upon that information as well. Naturally, being a right evil git and a megalomaniac, Voldemort was not about to suffer a more powerful wizard to live. But, considering the language in the Prophecy and how vague it is, he waited for events to happen that would identify the One in the Prophecy. Most regrettably, he never heard the bit about ‘marking’ as an equal. Given that there were many possible interpretations as to who was the child born at the end of some seventh month to parents who defied the Dark Lord three times, had he known that he had to mark the lad for the One to come forth, he probably would have sat back and done nothing and your parents might well be alive today.”
“You can see how dodgy the thing is,” Clara said. “The only thing anyone can be remotely certain about is that ‘Dark Lord’ refers to Voldemort. He was the only one on earth running about with that moniker. ‘Thrice defied’ is supposed to identify the parents of the one. Both Dumbledore and Voldemort assumed it meant parents who were fighting against Voldemort and Voldemort acted upon that. He killed the entire McKinnon family a few weeks later and then killed Edgar and Helena Bones and this was despite the fact that neither family seemed to have a child that fit the bill. Susan Bones was born in March, before the Prophecy and Rachel McKinnon was born in November. Rachel was killed. Susan was at her Aunt’s house when Voldemort killed her parents.
“Then two boys were born at the end of July of 1980 within two hours of each other. The first born was Neville Longbottom whose parents Alice and Frank had fought Voldemort three times and survived and the second, born to another couple that had fought Voldemort three times and lived, was you Harry.”
“So Neville could have been the One?”
“At that time, that’s what Dumbledore and Voldemort believed. They believed it was one of you two. But that assumes that ‘thrice defied’ referred to an enemy of the Dark Lord and the ‘seventh month’ referred to the end of July. It could have had other meanings such as the seventh month after an event such as defying the Dark Lord or it could have meant a premature birth. But assuming it meant the end of July, then yes it meant the both of you and only the both of you. Unfortunately for you, Voldemort heard nothing about his ‘marking’ his equal nor that the One had a Power of some kind that he did not. He would have known that to attack you or Neville risked setting the Prophecy in motion. But he didn’t know that, did he?”
“He marked me that night he killed my parents, didn’t he?”
“As near as anyone can say, that’s the case.”
“So I’m the one - the only one who can defeat Voldemort?” Harry asked.
“Apparently,” George answered. “You did in the timeline that is calling to us. Snuffed him, you did. Whether you were the one in the prophecy and Voldemort was the Dark Lord is another question when one considers what happened after you killed him dead. He came back to a physical form about two years from now and you killed him three years later. And then you walked away from it all.”
“Can’t really blame you,” Clara said. “You’d been fighting the bastard all your life, after all. You faced him directly six times and at worst held him to a draw. You worked at ending him forever while the rest of the wizarding world simply submitted to what they saw as inevitability after Dumbledore died. You wanted nothing to do with any of it and took a job as an Auror - a cop. You did your job for years and did it well, but you never took the next step.”