G. Lippert - JAMES POTTER AND THE VAULT OF DESTINIES

"Hadley!" Franklyn cried out hoarsely, reaching to touch the figure that stood before him.

"I wouldn't do that," Merlin announced loudly, halting Franklyn and commanding his attention. Franklyn glanced back.

"It's Mr. Henredon! The custodian! He's been… he's…!"

"He looks like a statue," Harry said carefully, moving next to Franklyn on the stone footpath. "It's as if he was turned to stone in the act of trying to intervene in… whatever happened."

"He's been frozen," Merlin said, approaching slowly. "From the inside out. Every drop of his blood has been frozen as solid and brittle as glass."

"Is he… dead?" Franklyn asked, peering at the eerily still figure. Hadley's face seemed locked in a permanent rictus of wide-eyed terror. His right hand was stretched out before him, the fingers petrified into a grasping claw.

"He isn't dead, precisely," Merlin answered carefully. "He is… suspended. If any of us were to touch him, however, the warmth of our skin might… shatter him."

Franklyn recoiled slightly, his face contorting.

Jackson had his wand ready. "Stand aside, gentlemen," he instructed.

With impressive delicacy, Jackson levitated the frozen figure of Hadley up out of the unfurled shape of the Vault and settled him into place on the wet stone of the floor beneath the stairs. Hadley's shoes made a sound like clacking crockery when they touched the floor and the puddle froze instantly around them, producing a faint crackling hiss.

"Can we help him?" Harry asked, watching stoically.

"Only time and a very subtle increase in temperature will answer that question," Merlin sighed. "If he had been frozen outside of this already frosty climate, the warmth of the very air might have been enough to fracture him."

"We have the means and the facility to do whatever is required on his behalf," Jackson announced. "There is nothing further we can do for him at the moment, however. Let us attend to that which brought us here.

As one, the gathering turned toward the dark shape nestled inside the unfurled leaves of the Vault. Franklyn stepped forward once more and raised his wand, letting its light fall over the object.

To James, it looked like a sort of wooden table or platform, covered in ornate curlicue carvings and painted painstakingly in shades of blue and gold. Thick beams stood upright within and over the platform, holding a complicated apparatus of hinged arms, treadles, and spoked wheels. At one end of the platform, standing like vibrantly coloured totems, were thick spools of thread. At the other end, a banner of thick, richly patterned fabric trailed toward the floor, where it overlapped onto itself in gentle folds. As James peered closer, he saw that the fabric was a sort of tapestry or rug, and that it was, in fact, extremely long, folded back and forth on itself dozens, maybe even hundreds of times. The wooden object itself seemed to be sitting on the mound of carpet, held up by it in the center of the Vault's folded leaves.

"It's a loom," Oliver Wood said, his voice low with awe.

Jackson nodded slowly. "It is indeed. Its innumerable threads represent the lives of every living person on the planet. It is their history, condensed into a pattern so complex, so interwoven, that none can decipher it."

"Then that," Harry said, gesturing toward the carpet that pooled from the Loom's end, "is all of the world's history."

Franklyn sighed and nodded toward the spools of richly coloured thread at the opposite end. "And that, as you might imagine, is the future, unmade and unknowable."

Merlin asked the most obvious question of all. "Then why, pray tell, is the Loom stopped?"

"I believe that it was annihilated," Jackson answered.

Harry turned toward the steely-haired professor. "How can that be?" he asked. "It's right here."

"This is a Loom," Jackson replied meaningfully, "but it is not our Loom."

"I'm a little lost here," Wood said, raising his hand.

Franklyn shook his head worriedly. "What Professor Jackson is saying is that the Loom equals destiny. Destinies cannot be destroyed since they are representations of things far larger, far heavier than any of us could comprehend. They are like the axles of existence, utterly unbreakable and inviolate. Theoretically, however, they can be… shifted . Given a shock of enough magnitude, the destiny of one reality can be forced into the next, causing a chain reaction throughout every dimension."

Harry narrowed his eyes. "If I understand you correctly, Chancellor, Professor Jackson, you are suggesting that the Loom of our universe was attacked in some monumental way, and the result was that our Loom was switched with that of another univ erse. Is that an accurate summary?"

"That's crazy," Oliver Wood frowned. "You can't swap destinies."

Merlin shook his head very slowly. "On the contrary, Professor, human beings swap destinies every day, at every moment. Each individual's destiny is, of course, merely the sum total of the choices that they make throughout their lives. This, however, is on a magnitude far greater."

"According to my theories," Jackson went on, squinting closely at the Loom, "our reality should have instantly rejected any foreign destiny. In other words, the very moment that our Loom was forced into another realm, and was replaced with the Loom of some other reality, the balance of the cosmos should have mandated the switch to reverse itself. Something, it appears, is interrupting the self-correcting paradigm of the dimensional continuum."

"I'm sorry," Harry said, shaking his head. "Technomancy was never my strong suit. I don't quite understand."

Zane spoke up, surprising James. "Somebody switched the destiny of our universe with some other destiny," he said seriously. "And then they jammed a chair under the doorknob, forcing that destiny to be stuck here for good, instead of reverting back to where it came from."

"What does that mean?" Wood asked, looking from face to face. "And how did it happen?"

Jackson stepped forward, still peering narrowly at the halted Loom. "It very well might mean that our reality, from this moment on, could be steadily degrading, breaking down, and grinding into chaos," he said with characteristic bluntness. "As for how it happened, what is preventing this Loom from returning to the alternate reality from whence it came… I think the answer to that is quite obvious." He bent slightly at the waist, not taking his eyes from the Loom.

James followed his gaze, stepping forward as well. Everyone did. At first, James couldn't see what it was that the professor was looking at. Franklyn raised his wand once more, however, illuminating the Loom, and the problem became immediately apparent. Something glimmered very faintly in the air over the working space of the Loom, where the countless threads came together and melded into the ever constant flow of the carpet.

One of the threads had been broken and torn out of the carpet. What was left of it was bright red, shining almost as if it was made of finely spun wire. It waved very faintly in the air, forming a curling shape over the fabric from which it had been torn, leaving only the bit that fed from the spools. The broken thread made a shape in the air almost like a question mark.

"Well," Merlin said slowly, his voice so low that it seemed to vibrate, "this… changes everything."

The Kite and Key was a small tavern built in one of the oldest quarters of the campus, on the far side of Faculty Row, near a corner of the stone wall that enclosed the school. It served many of the same drinks as James had once procured at the Three Broomsticks, including Butterbeer, pumpkin juice and, for the older students, Firewhisky. Not surprisingly, however, it also served some distinctly American drinks and potions, such as Honeylager (which tasted a bit like a Butterbeer that had been allowed to ferment on a windowsill for a week or two) and, also for the older students and faculty, a very dark brown potion with a frothy head called Dragonmeade.