Chapter 54: Guidance
The second night arrived, and just as expected, Harry Potter crept back into the abandoned classroom.
Huddled beneath the fluid, silvery folds of his Invisibility Cloak, the boy sat cross-legged before the towering, ornate mirror. His face was slack, utterly dazed, his emerald eyes glazed over with a sickening blend of obsession and desperate longing.
Meanwhile, Tamara Riddle stood perfectly still in the freezing shadows of the corridor. Through the half-open door, she watched the pathetic display, her expression so dark it practically bled ink into the gloom.
'Why did I even come here?'She snarled at the System in her mind.'If Potter wants to rot away in front of a piece of enchanted glass, that is his business. Let the boy starve. Why should I care?'
[Ding! Task Triggered: The Lost Lamb.]
[Task Description: Indulging in illusory happiness will only lead one to lose themselves! If the savior goes mad, who will serve as your meat shield? For the bright future of the wizarding world, please pull this lost little lamb back to reality!]
[Task Reward: Courage +2.]
[Failure Penalty: Your form within the Mirror of Erised will persist in reality for one day.]
"..."
A vein throbbed violently at Tamara's temple. She ground her teeth together until her jaw ached.
Taking a slow, measured breath to suppress the urge to cast a Blasting Curse at the wall, she wrapped her cloak tightly around her shoulders and glided silently into the classroom.
The air in the room was biting cold, thick with the scent of old dust. Harry was leaning forward, whispering softly to the glass, as if casually chatting with the dead parents trapped inside.
"Potter."
Tamara let the name drop from her lips like shards of ice.
Harry jumped violently, his shoulders jerking up to his ears as he whipped his head around. The moment he realized it was Tamara standing in the gloom, his tense posture collapsed. He let out a long breath, and that foolish, eager smile reappeared on his face.
"Tamara! You came too? I knew you'd come back!"
He scrambled to the side, patting the dusty floorboards excitedly. "You want to see too, right? That... although you said you didn't like it yesterday, maybe you could see something else..."
"I am not looking."
Tamara stepped forward, her shadow falling over him as she looked down with thinly veiled disdain. "I am here to drag you away."
"Leave? But..." Harry's smile faltered. He cast a desperate, longing glance back at the glass. "I want to stay a bit longer. Just a little longer..."
"How much longer?" Tamara cut him off, her voice cracking like a whip. "Until your blood freezes solid? Until your brain rots and you can no longer tell reality from a dream?"
She reached down, her pale fingers clamping around Harry's arm like a vise, and yanked him upward with brutal force.
"Get up! This thing will ruin you!"
"No! Let go of me!"
Driven by a sudden, frantic surge of adrenaline, Harry ripped his arm out of her grasp. He stumbled back, chest heaving. His eyes were bloodshot, swimming with a volatile mix of despair and raw anger. The lightning-bolt scar on his forehead stood out starkly against his pale skin.
"You don't understand at all!" he screamed, his voice cracking. "You have so many people who like you! But I have nothing!"
He pointed a trembling finger at the mirror. "I can only see them here! This is the only place I feel like I have a home!"
His roar echoed off the damp stone walls, ringing loudly in the empty classroom.
Tamara froze.
She stared at the collapsing, weeping boy before her, and a dark, twisted sense of amusement bubbled up in her chest. She suddenly found the entire situation utterly laughable.
'This is the future savior of the wizarding world?'she mocked internally.'A pathetic fool bound by fragile, useless emotions.'
"Home?"
She let out a short, cold laugh, the sound entirely devoid of warmth. "You think the phantoms in that glass are a home? That is nothing but a pathetic lie woven by your own brain to escape reality!"
"I'm willing even if it is a lie!" Harry argued stubbornly, wiping furiously at his eyes. "At least here, I'm happy!"
"Happy?"
Tamara took a slow, deliberate step closer. For a fraction of a second, the heavy, suffocating aura of the Dark Lord bled through her carefully constructed facade. The air around her seemed to drop several degrees.
"That kind of false happiness will only make you weak!" she hissed, her voice dropping to a dangerous, hypnotic cadence. "In this world, only the power held in your own hands is real! Only the living are real! Clinging to this mirror serves no purpose other than making you look even more pathetic!"
Harry shrank back, genuinely intimidated by the sudden, crushing pressure radiating from her. He stared at her blankly, his mouth slightly open.
Right then.
"Well said, Miss Riddle."
A gentle yet unmistakably authoritative voice drifted out from the deep shadows in the corner of the room.
Tamara's breath hitched. Harry gasped. Both of them spun around simultaneously.
Albus Dumbledore was sitting casually atop a pile of discarded desks. The moonlight filtered through the high arched windows, spilling over his long silvery hair and beard, making him look like an ancient sage stepped out of a faded painting.
Harry turned a sickly shade of gray. "Headmaster Dumbledore? You... you were here the whole time?"
Tamara's pupils contracted to pinpricks. Her heart gave a violent, unpleasant jolt, but decades of occlumency and deception kicked in instantly. She forced her breathing to steady, burying the Dark Lord deep beneath the surface.
"Good evening, Professor Dumbledore."
She offered a slight, graceful bow, her politeness absolutely impeccable. The sharp, oppressive hostility she had just projected vanished into thin air, instantly replaced by the quiet docility of a model student caught out of bed.
Dumbledore slid off the desk with surprising agility and walked slowly between the two children.
"Good evening." He looked down at them, a faint smile playing on his lips. "It seems you have both discovered the magic of this mirror."
"Yes, Professor," Tamara replied, her tone perfectly even. "I believe this object is highly dangerous. It makes people addicted to illusions."
"Quite so."
Dumbledore nodded approvingly. His bright blue eyes peered sharply over the rims of his half-moon spectacles, gazing deeply into Tamara's face.
"The Mirror of Erised shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts." He paced slowly in front of the glass. "However, this mirror will give us neither knowledge nor truth. Men have wasted away before it, entranced by what they have seen, or been driven mad."
Dumbledore paused, letting the heavy silence settle over the room before he shifted his focus entirely.
"But I am curious, Miss Riddle."
His gaze sharpened, the grandfatherly warmth fading just enough to reveal the immensely powerful wizard beneath. It felt as though he were trying to peer straight through Tamara's skull and dissect her soul.
"You said just now that only the power held in one's hands is real. That sounds... a bit too absolute." He tilted his head slightly. "Love and memories are equally real, are they not?"
Tamara's mind raced.
'A trap.'
If she answered that love was hypocritical garbage, her entire carefully crafted disguise would shatter, and Dumbledore's suspicions would solidify into certainty.
But if she answered that love was real and beautiful, it would sound entirely disingenuous. A wizard as shrewd as Dumbledore would smell the lie on her breath instantly.
Her brain worked at a feverish pace. She didn't understand love. In nearly a century of existence, across two lives, no one had ever bothered to explain what love actually was, nor had she ever cared to learn.
Trapped in the Headmaster's piercing gaze, Tamara realized she could only twist her own twisted logic into a palatable philosophical argument.
"Love... is indeed real, Professor."
Tamara slowly lifted her chin, meeting Dumbledore's eyes directly. Internally, she triggered her system ability.
[Skill Activated: Harmless]
Instantly, her dark eyes turned impossibly clear. They carried a heavy, melancholic maturity far beyond her eleven years, radiating a fragile quality that made anyone looking at her instinctively feel a pang of protective pity.
"But I believe love is also a power," she continued softly, her voice steady but laced with a hint of sorrow. "Perhaps even... the most dangerous power of all."
"Oh?" Dumbledore raised a silver eyebrow, clearly intrigued. "Do go on."
Tamara certainly couldn't tell him that the 'power of love' had literally rebounded her own Killing Curse and blown her physical body to ash a decade ago. She had to pivot.
"Because... love makes people weak," she murmured, casting her gaze downward for a fraction of a second before looking back up. "It gives them vulnerabilities. It makes them lose their reason, all for the sake of protecting certain things."
She pointed a slender finger at Harry, her tone softening into genuine-sounding pity.
"Look at Potter. His love for the parents he never knew has made him indulge in this fantasy, making him entirely forget the very real dangers of freezing to death in an abandoned room. Is this love not acting as a poison to him at this exact moment?"
She took a small breath, letting her words hang in the cold air.
"That is why I say only power that can be mastered is real. Whether it is magic, or whether it is love. If one cannot master it, and is instead controlled by it... then no matter how beautiful it appears, it will eventually become the root of their destruction."
A deep silence fell over the dusty classroom.
Harry stood to the side, only half-understanding the heavy philosophical exchange, but he felt a strange knot in his chest. What Tamara said... it made a terrifying amount of sense to him.
Meanwhile, Dumbledore stood perfectly still, lost in deep thought.
He studied the eleven-year-old girl standing before him. Those words were far too deep, far too cynical to have come from the mouth of an ordinary child. Though her logic was extreme and carried a clear, ruthless utilitarianism, it was also logically irrefutable.
But more... she had acknowledged the existence of love. She merely believed it was a wild force that needed to be tamed and mastered.
This was fundamentally different from Voldemort's extreme, absolute ideology of completely denying, mocking, and despising love.
"An interesting perspective."
Dumbledore finally broke the silence. The hard edge in his expression softened slightly, though the trace of lingering doubt deep within his blue eyes did not entirely dissipate.
"To be aware of both the power and the danger of love shows that you are a child who thinks deeply, Tamara."
He called her by her first name for the very first time.
"You are right. It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live." Dumbledore turned his attention back to the boy. "This mirror will be moved to a new home tomorrow, Harry, and I ask you not to go looking for it again."
"Yes, Professor," Harry mumbled, lowering his head in shame.
"Now, put on that marvelous Invisibility Cloak of yours and go back to bed." Dumbledore winked, the grandfatherly twinkle returning to his eyes. "While I know exactly how you two have been sneaking out these past few days, I can pretend I haven't seen a thing."
Harry pulled the silvery fabric over his head, leaving only his face visible. He looked at Tamara hesitantly. "Tamara, do you..."
"I don't need that."
Tamara coldly refused the offer to squeeze under the cloak with him. She smoothed out the front of her robes and glanced up at the Headmaster.
"I trust the Professor won't deduct points from Slytherin, right?"
Dumbledore chuckled softly, nodding. "Of course not. For the... clarity and sense of responsibility you displayed tonight, your house points remain safe."
Tamara offered one last, polite salute, turned on her heel, and walked briskly out of the classroom, her footsteps echoing down the dark corridor.
After the two children had gone, the room fell dead silent once more.
Dumbledore remained seated on the desk, his eyes fixed on the empty surface of the Mirror of Erised. His gaze grew incredibly complex, burdened by decades of regret.
"Tom back then... never said anything like that," he murmured to the empty room.
"This child is indeed very much like him, yet... fundamentally different."
He frowned, his long fingers tapping a slow, rhythmic beat against the wooden desk. "That strange sense of incongruity about her... where exactly does it come from?"
Dumbledore shook his head slowly, a heavy sigh escaping his lips.
"Perhaps I should give her a little more time. Let us see where this path ultimately leads her."
In the freezing corridor.
[Ding! Task Completed: The Lost Lamb.]
[Reward: Courage +2.]
[Current Courage: 14.]
[Detected that Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore's evaluation of you has undergone a slight adjustment: from 'A tragedy destined to repeat'to'An unknown variable requiring guidance'.]
Listening to the System's cheerful prompt echoing in her mind, a chilling, mocking smile tugged at the corners of Tamara's mouth.
'Guidance?'She sneered into the darkness.'Old fool.''In the end, you will find out... who exactly is guiding whom.'
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