Devil Doesn't Bargain

The Mirrors

Everything was going fine until level seven.

The banshees on the twelfth floor were alarming, but nothing they couldn't handle. The underwater tank on level nine only partially drowned them. And level eight was embarrassingly simple. Honestly, aside from the brief panic on level fourteen, Hermione was feeling good.

Or at least she was.

The door to level seven slammed shut with a crash, and they shuffled forward awkwardly. Hermione thought she could feel the outline of crisp tiles beneath her feet, but without any lighting, she couldn't be certain.

Stay alert, Malfoy cautioned.

She nodded, then remembered he couldn't see her. Got it.

She twirled her wand nervously between her fingers. The silent levels always gave her the creeps. She held her breath, waiting for whatever new kind of madness the tower would bring. They took a few more steps forward, and something in the flooring clicked. Before she could prepare herself, blinding light illuminated the room.

"What the..."

Even Malfoy was gaping. It was something out of a sci-fi film. The walls and ceiling were a sterile white, in such contrast to the other levels that it left Hermione squinting. Unfortunately, that was the most normal part. Beneath their feet were not tiles, like she originally suspected, but glass. Glistening panes lined the floor, offering a perfectly transparent view of the contents within.

Hermione dropped to her knees, tentatively reaching a hand towards the nearest one. Malfoy remained frozen behind her, his breaths coming out in uncomfortable gasps. There, not more than a meter below lay a human. She couldn't understand it. The man was middle-aged and portly, slightly balding, and breathing slowly. His eyes were tightly closed, and a thin smile adorned his lips. She tapped lightly on the glass; he didn't stir. Nausea rolled within her core as her mind pulled up a picture of a child at an aquarium, rapping on the glass to get the fish's attention.

Her eyes traveled upward. At the head of the glass pane, sat a mirror. Hermione's brows furrowed in confusion. It looked like an ordinary mirror, but that didn't make any sense. She stepped closer. When she was only a foot away, the surface rippled; a strange scene began to play.

It seemed to be a memory, as the same man below her entered the scene, but he was slightly younger. He appeared to be in a large magical household: portraits were chatting amiably, a duster flew about on its own, and in the peripheral, a house elf brought in some tea. None of this was the focal point, however. There, at the table, sat a little girl drawing on some parchment. The man smiled warmly at her and scooped her into his arms. She giggled when he twirled her, and Hermione glanced down at the current version of him to determine if he was seeing what she was seeing. Sure enough, a wide grin had spread across his face. She turned back to the mirror.

The man and his daughter had moved to the small garden outside, and the little girl was picking flowers with glee. The man pulled out his wand and instructed her to stay back, that he wanted to try a new spell to cut the grass. She tilted her head in curiosity but nodded, turning back to her blooms.

He turned back to the yard. Something felt odd about the scene. There was so much love between the two characters, but Hermione began to tense. She looked over her shoulder at Malfoy. He hadn't moved a centimeter.

Malfoy...

Hush. Watch.

She turned back to the mirror. The man flicked his wand in a complicated movement, muttering an incantation under his breath. Nothing happened. He frowned, glancing down at his wand. He tried again, tweaking the execution. Still nothing. He began to grow frustrated, his movements becoming jerky and unmeasured. On and on and on he went, until finally, a burst of violet light flew out of his wand. A slice of the largest magnitude Hermione had ever witnessed decimated the tips of the grass until the entire yard had lost most of its height. After a moment of stunned silence, the man whooped, jumping into the air with his wand arm raised, celebrating his own cleverness. He whirled around, screaming at his daughter, "Did you see that? Did you see Daddy?!"