Eliezer Yudkowsky - Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Albus looked unhappy at that, but nodded. "I see. There will be no further attempts of that sort, of course, but do not relax your vigilance. And when Amelia has been told all this, tell her that I have information for her."

The head of Pius Thicknesse vanished without another word.

"No further attempts...?" said Minerva.

"Because, dear Minerva," Severus drawled, having not quite taken off his habitual sneer, "if the Dark Lord had planned to free any of his other servants from Azkaban, he would not have left behind the vial of potion to tell us how it was done." Severus frowned. "I confess... even so I do not see why that vial was left there."

"It is some kind of message..." Albus said slowly. "And I cannot see what it means, not at all..." He drummed his fingers on his desk.

For a long minute or three, the old wizard stared off into nothingness, frowning; while Severus also sat in silence.

Then Albus shook his head in dismay, and said, "Severus, do you comprehend this?"

"No," said the Potions Master, and with a sardonic smile, "which is probably all the better for us; whatever we are intended to conclude from it, that part of his plan has misfired."

"You are certain, now, that it is You-Know... that it is Voldemort?" said Minerva. "It could not be that some other Death Eater conceived this clever notion?"

"And they knew about rockets, too?" Severus said dryly. "I don't believe the other Death Eaters were so fond of Muggle Studies. It is he."

"Aye, it is he," Albus said. "Azkaban has endured impenetrable for ages, only to fall to an ordinary Animagus potion. It is too clever and too impossible, which was ever Voldemort's signature since the days he was known as Tom Riddle. Anyone who wished to forge that signature must needs be as cunning as Voldemort himself to do so. And there is no one else in the world who would accidentally overestimate my wit, and leave me a message I cannot understand at all."

"Unless he has gauged you exactly," Severus said tonelessly, "in which case all that is just what he intended you to think."

Albus sighed. "Indeed. But even if he has tricked me perfectly, we may at least rely on the conclusion that it was not Harry Potter."

It should have come as a relief, and yet Minerva felt the chill spreading through her spine and her veins, her lungs and her bones.

She remembered conversations like this.

She remembered conversations like this from ten years ago, from a time when blood had run through Britain in wide rivers, when wizards and witches she had once taught in class had been slaughtered by the hundreds, she remembered burning homes and screaming children and flashes of green light -

"What will you tell Madam Bones?" she whispered.

Albus stood from his desk and paced to the center of the room, his hand lightly touching the devices, here an instrument of light, there an instrument of sound; he adjusted his glasses with one hand, used the other to center the long silver beard against his robes, and then finally that ancient wizard turned back and faced them.

"I will tell her what little I know of the Dark Art called horcrux, by which a soul is deprived of death," said Albus Dumbledore, in a soft voice that seemed to fill the whole room, "and I will tell her what may be done with the flesh of the servant."

"I will tell her that I am reconstituting the Order of the Phoenix."

"I will tell her that Voldemort has returned."

"And that the Second Wizarding War is begun."

Some hours later...

The antique old clock upon the wall of the Deputy Headmistress's office had golden hands, and silver numerals to make the clock-face; it ticked and jerked soundlessly through its motions, for there was a Quieting enchantment on it.

The golden hour hand approached the silver numeral of nine, the golden minute hand did the same, the two linked components of Time nearing each other, soon to be in the same place and never to collide.

It was 8:43 PM, and the time approached when Harry's Time-Turner would open, to be tested in the one way that no imaginable spell could fool, unless that spell could bypass the laws of Time itself. No body or soul, no knowledge or substance, could stretch an extra seven hours in a single day. She would make up a message on the spot, and tell Harry to take that message back six hours to Professor Flitwick at 3PM, and she would ask Professor Flitwick if he had received it in that hour.

And Professor Flitwick would tell her that he had indeed received it at 3PM.

And she would tell Severus and Albus to have a little more faith in Harry next time.

Professor McGonagall cast the Patronus Charm, and told her shining cat, "Go to Mr. Potter, and tell him this: Mr. Potter, please come to my office as soon as you hear this, without doing anything else along the way."

Minerva gazed up at the clock, the golden hands and silver numerals, the jerking motion. Muggles had invented that, and until they had, wizards had not bothered keeping time. Bells, timed by a sanded hourglass, had served Hogwarts for its classes when it was built. It was one of the things that blood purists wished not to be true, and therefore Minerva knew it.

She had received an Outstanding on her Muggle Studies N.E.W.T., which now seemed to her a mark of shame, considering how little she knew. Her younger self had realized, even then, that the class was a sham, taught by a pureblood, supposedly because Muggleborns could not appreciate what wizardborns needed to be told, and actually because the Board of Governors did not approve of Muggles at all. But when she was seventeen the Outstanding grade had been the main thing that mattered to her, she was saddened to remember...

If Harry Potter and Voldemort fight their war with Muggle weapons there will be nothing left of the world but fire!

She couldn't imagine it, and the reason she couldn't imagine it was that she couldn't imagine Harry fighting You-Know-Who.

She had encountered the Dark Lord four times and survived each one, three times with Albus to shield her and once with Moody at her side. She remembered the damaged, snakelike face, the faint green scales scattered over the skin, the glowing red eyes, the voice that laughed in a high-pitched hiss and promised nothing but cruelty and torment: the monster pure and complete.

And Harry Potter was easy to picture in her mind, the bright expression on the face of a young boy who wavered between taking the ludicrous seriously and taking the serious ludicrously.

And to think of the two of them facing off at wandpoint was too painful to be imagined.

They had no right, no right at all to set this on an eleven-year-old boy. She knew what the Headmaster had decided for him this day, for she had been told to make the arrangements; and if it had been her at the same age she would have raged and screamed and cried and been inconsolable for weeks, and...

He is no ordinary first-year, Albus had said. He is marked as the Dark Lord's equal, and he has power the Dark Lord knows not.

The terrible hollow voice booming from Sybill Trelawney's throat, the true and original prophecy, echoed once more through her mind. She had a feeling it didn't mean what the Headmaster thought it did, but there was no way to put the difference into words.

And even so it still seemed true, that if there were any eleven-year-old within the Earth entire who could bear this burden, that boy approached her office now. And if she said anything at all like 'poor Harry' to his face... well, he wouldn't like it.

So now I've got to find some way to kill an immortal Dark Wizard, Harry had said on the day he had first learned. I really wish you had told me that before I started shopping...