Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

Then there was a burst of light. He paused, his eyes shut tight, and reached forward again. The light refracted, splitting into various colors, which pinwheeled around him like a shower of falling stars. He seemed to look through a doorway into another world: he felt heat, saw shimmering air and blue sky.

Alarmed, Draco tried to draw away, but it was as if someone had reached out and clasped his hand; he felt himself pulled forward, and then the empty space above him hollowed itself out into a pale blue sky, and the formless air beneath him became a strip of golden sand. He knew it was not real: everything around him had the soft, melting look of a dream, even the house that rose in the distance, gabled and shuttered in blue and white, looked like a dream house: faint and half-remembered. That's it, he thought, I'm in a dream, Harry's dream, and then he took a step forward and something appeared in the sand in front of him. He almost yelled out loud.

It was a boy, perhaps eight years old, perhaps seven, kneeling in the sand, a plastic bucket at his feet. Very thin, with a shock of untidy dark hair, draped in oversized clothes from which his thin wrists and ankles protruded like bundles of twigs. Harry. A child-Harry, Harry just a few years before Draco had met him. And not just Harry, but Harry the way he saw himself.

The dream-Harry raised his head, and looked up at Draco. He looked as Draco would have imagined Harry to look at that age, but the scar on his forehead burned there like a livid brand of fire. There was a lost look in his green eyes, as if he neither knew where he was, nor how he had gotten there.

“You have to help me,” said Harry, his child's voice wavering like a voice heard under water.

Draco opened his mouth, then checked himself. Could his voice be heard in a dream, a dream that wasn't even his own? “Help you?” he asked, and to his relief, his voice was audible, if odd-sounding. “Help you with what?”

“My mother built me a castle,” said the boy who was Harry, looking around at the sand. “To protect me. But I've knocked it down, and now I can't find the pieces. Can you help me build it back up?”

Draco dropped down to his knees in the sand. It was neither warm nor grainy like real sand, but almost cloudy in its texture, as soft as dust. A dream of sand from the imagination of someone who had never been to the seaside. “I'll do whatever I can,” he said, and reached for the plastic bucket with the shovel in it; but before he could take hold of it, the dream-Harry had moved it away. Draco stared at him. He seemed even younger up close, younger and afraid; the burning mark on his forehead was almost too bright to look at. “Don't you want my help?”

Dream-Harry dropped his plastic shovel; it rattled against the side of the bucket. He shook his head. “I waited and waited for you to get here,” he said. “But now I think you might be too late.”

“Too late?” Draco asked, and then he heard something — a loud clanging noise, like the tolling of a bell — it was a bell — some sort of alarm? An alarm clock? Was Harry waking up — and before he could even complete the thought, the sand vanished from under his feet, the blue sky spun away, and he tumbled back into himself, into his own shivery-cold body huddled in a milky spill of starlight on the window ledge in his room.

He clutched at the blanket, his heart pounding. The faint dizziness of dreaming clung to him like cobwebs. He felt strangely guilty — surely it was a violation of some sort to go walking into someone else's subconscious, even if he had been pulled in against his will. He wondered if Harry would recollect his dream in the morning, and how it might have seemed to him. It was almost as if they connection between them was growing stronger these days; he could find Harry as simply as breathing, and speak silently as easily as he could speak aloud. Perhaps it was the ease that came with practice, but it was almost beginning to be frightening. He wondered if the day would come when he could not tell Harry's thoughts and dreams from his own.

The Stonehenge Museum is one of the greatest museums of the wizarding world. It was founded by an Act of the Ministry in 1653 and is now governed under the Stonehenge Museum Act 1793. General management and control are vested in a Board of twenty-five Trustees (one appointed by the Minister, fifteen by the Ministry Board, four nominated by Learned Societies and five elected by the Trustees themselves.) The Museum now holds national collections of antiquities: alchemical tools, enchanted curios from around the world, rare cursed objects, a library collection (Printed Books, Manuscripts, Maps, Music and Stamps), and items of historical interest to the wizarding world. Its natural history collections were transferred to South Kensington in the 1880s, becoming the J. Natural History Museum.

The main Museum buildings are unplottable. The core consists of buildings of a floor area of about 600,000 square feet, designed by Sir Sidney Smirke and erected during a long evening in 1650 after Smirke had consumed a bottle of Giant beer; some say this is why the roof lists to the east. Major subsequent additions totalling about 340,000 square feet consists of the Whisp Gallery of Quidditch History (1850s-1870s), the Cantwell J. Muckenfuss Exhibition of Implements of Indeterminate Purpose (1884), and the L. N. Malfoy Gallery of Cursed and Abominable Artifacts. There is also the Hall of Bright Carvings (1979/80).

Guest Information: The museum is built in a circle, hollow in the middle where a small garden has been planted. In the center of the garden is the raised platform where museum visitors find themselves after being Portkeyed in; it also serves as a Portkey out. A limited amount of Portkeys are produced by the Museum, and because of this, the Museum curators always know how many visitors are in the museum, and who they are.

This is for the security of museum visitors as well as the safety of the museum; security trolls patrol the corridors so it is best to stay with the guided tour group…wands are not allowed inside the museum, and are collected from patrons upon entry.

“So,” said Ron, when Hermione had paused in her reading aloud, “are you testing whether it's possible to be both panicked and bored to death at the same time, or what?”

Harry was scratching his ear in a thoughtful manner. “Hermione, darling, don't you already know all this?”

Hermione looked up from the pamphlet she'd been reading as they traipsed down the corridors of the museum. She depended on Ron and Harry to keep her steered along a straight path so that she didn't bump into the other students while she was walking. So far, they seemed to be doing a decent job, although she suspected she'd stepped on Pansy Parkinson's toe. Not that she regretted this entirely — Pansy was almost always underfoot.

“I know,” Hermione replied, “but there's no harm in being extra prepared, is there?”

Neither Ron nor Harry replied, and she stowed the pamphlet in her bag as the group of Hogwarts students (there had wound up being about twenty five of them in total) was instructed by Professor Flitwick to stop in a high-ceilinged room whose gold plaque proclaimed it to be the Manfred Scamander Room of Artifacts from the Natural World. She could barely force herself to pay attention, however, as Flitwick pointed out items of interest — a knife made from dried dragon's blood, a basket of ashwinder eggs, the tailfeathers of a cockatrice, a vial containing phoenix tears. In the corner of the room stood a gray-skinned security troll, dressed in dark blue work boots the size of small boats, and wearing a grim expression.

Hermione looked at it and shuddered; when she looked away, she saw Draco looking at her from across the room. He smiled faintly, and turned back to talking with Pansy and Malcolm Baddock, both of whom had come along because they were prefects, and thus required.