Silver Hourglass

Maybe I'm a Lion Chapter 58

He lay face down, listening to the silence. He was perfectly alone. Nobody was watching. Nobody else was there. He was not perfectly sure that he was there himself. A long time later, or maybe no time at all, it came to him that he must exist, be more than disembodied thought, because he was lying, definitely lying, on some surface. Therefore he had a sense of touch, and the thing against which he lay existed too.

He lay in a bright mist, though it was not like mist he had ever experienced before. His surroundings were not hidden by cloudy vapor; rather the cloudy vapor had not yet formed into surroundings. The floor on which he lay seemed to be white, neither warm nor cold, but simply there, a flat, blank something on which to be.

He sat up. His body appeared unscathed. He touched his face. He was not wearing glasses anymore. He stood up and looked around. Harry had no idea where he was, it couldn't have been a Room of Requirement. The last thing he remembered was pushing Sirius out of the way—saving him from the Killing Curse.

He turned slowly, and the world seemed to appear around him. A wide-open space, bright and clean, a hall larger by far than the Great Hall, with that clear domed glass ceiling. It was quite empty. He was the only person there, except when he heard a sound.

He recoiled. It had the form of a small, naked child, curled on the ground, its skin raw and rough, flayed-looking, and it lay shuddering under a seat where it had been left, unwanted, stuffed out of sight, struggling for breath.

Harry was afraid of it, he did not want to approach the thing.

"The last of the Horcruxes."

He spun around. Albus Dumbledore was walking toward him, springhtly and upright, wearing sweeping robes of midnight blue. "Harry." He spread his arms wide, "You look wonderful boy. You brave, brave man. Both of you. Let us walk."

Stunned, Harry followed as Dumbledore strode away from where the flayed child lay whimpering, leading him to two seats that Harry had not previously noticed, set some distance away under that high, sparkling ceiling. Dumbledore sat down in one of them, and Harry fell into the other, staring at his headmaster. "Sir... where are we?" He asked. "Are we... am I... dead?"

"A most interesting question Harry," Dumbledore said. "On the whole, dear boy, I think not. At least, I think that you are not."

"Sir!" Harry said, shocked. "But you can't be dead!"

"Death is a natural occurrence my dear boy," Dumbledore said. "Anyone who has tried to conquer him ends in failure."

"Sir?"

Dumbledore chuckled to himself and looked at Harry. "An explanation, I believe, is required."

Harry nodded and said, "I should have died. I pushed Sirius away from Lestrange's Killing Curse. I should be dead."

"It appears so, yet here we are," Dumbledore said. "I have a theory, though it will require much explanation. We should first start with the child that we both saw."

"What is that thing, Professor?" Harry asked frowning when he glanced over at where the creature was, which was now just cloudy whiteness. "You called it a... something."

"A Horcrux Harry," Dumbledore said. "I have called that a Horcrux. A terrible Dark Object that I had hoped for you to never learn of. With it, a Dark Wizard could become immortal. But it comes with a price. For you see, a Horcrux is only a container for a piece of soul."

"Piece of soul?" Harry asked.

"Yes Harry, for you see, no one can truly die if their soul is not intact," Dumbledore said.