//------------------------------//
// Chapter 36 
// Story: On the Implications of Parallel Worlds 
// by computerneek 
//------------------------------//

“Say what?” Dumbledore asked, over the Castle wards.  He’d just turned around to head back to Hogwarts- a mere two minutes before, Snape had reported that his door monitor spell had been triggered.  Someone was entering the sequence.
“Three more entering,” Snape repeated.  “Could be lackeys, I think it was those Gryffindors.  Which included Potter, if I’m not mistaken, so hurry back.”
“In the meantime,” Professor McGonagall volunteered, “we’ll go in after them- get them out alive.”
“Very well,” Dumbledore answered.  “To get past fluffy, you’ll need to play him some music.”





Of course, even when Silver had tried, there had been no stopping Harry when he saw the open door.  He’d charged forward, drawn the flute neither of the girls knew about, and played Fluffy to sleep.
When Harry wouldn’t listen to their relaying Bonbon’s command to fall back, Bonbon changed tactics, and told them to go with, to keep him safe.  She was also, of course, on her way- and had even told them what to expect after Fluffy.
Apparently, it was a two hundred meter drop to a Devil’s Snare.
“It’s a soft landing,” she’d told Diamond, down in the Slytherin dormitories, “but it will attempt to kill you.  Either get away from it before it can grab you or light a fire to drive it off.”
So Silver, who had yet to find the limit of the Equestrian levitation Hermione had taught her, had gone first.  Her magic had effortlessly ripped the plant away from her, then had similarly effortlessly caught the other two, placing them gently down on the stone floor next to her.
Then there was the room full of keys.  For some reason, once Hermione examined the lock on the door and described the key, it had taken Silver a matter of seconds to locate the key, and snag it with her magic.
The chess game had been…  scary.  They’d replaced a few pieces, then started play- then Silver, who was guiding the black pieces, had missed that she was in danger, and her piece was ‘taken’.  A white bishop had stopped in on her square, raised its arm, and swung.
She had ducked- then, when it swung again, thrown it from the board with her magic.  The rest of the pieces had moved to pounce on her, so she had panicked- and a few moments was all it had taken for her magic to convert all of the pieces to piles of broken marble around the edges of the room.
Then there had been the room with the troll in it.  It was already out cold, though.
Then the room with rows of potion bottles in it.  It had taken Hermione only a few seconds to solve the riddle, though she spent almost a full minute double-checking her work.
So Harry had gone through first.
Then, out of curiosity, Hermione and Silver had both walked through the purple flame…  and promptly returned to the room, to find the bottle to go through the black flame refilled.
So Silver had sent Hermione through the black flame next, and dodged both ways through the purple flame again.
Finally, she swallowed the potion for the black flame, and stepped through it.





When she reached the other side, she didn’t like what she found.  Harry was tied up on the floor, and was trading words with the back of Professor Quirrell’s turban.  Hermione had been…  she supposed ‘tied up’ still described it, but she looked almost like a mummy, wrapped up in a truly ridiculous amount of rope and knots.  She was untying herself with her magic, albeit slowly.
Then, as she stepped further into the room, a voice answered Quirrell’s question.
“Use the boy,” it said.  “Use the boy.”
Quirrell didn’t look, but snapped his fingers to untie Harry.  “Potter!  Come here.  Tell me what you see in the mirror.”
Harry glanced up at Silver, pointed at his feet, and then at his wand, lying on the floor about a foot away from him.
Silver blinked, remembered that Harry was an Etrah, realized that the room was well under fifty feet across, and used her magic to quickly remove Harry’s shoes and socks.
Harry scrambled to his feet on the stone floor, and turned to Quirrell.  “Why should I?” He demanded.
Quirrell turned.  “Because-!”  He froze upon seeing Silver, then snapped his fingers again.
Silver suddenly found herself bound with ropes…  that her magic made quick work of, snapping them clean in half.
Quirrell snarled, and snapped his fingers again.
Except, Silver was ready for it this time.  Combined with her Cutie Mark talent, that meant the large number of ropes appearing out of thin air to bind her again missed, as she leaped out of range just in time.  She rolled when she landed, and came right back to her feet.  “What are you doing here?” she demanded.  Even knowing he was a Professor at the school, she found his attacks against herself, Harry, and, presumably, Hermione to be inexcusable.
Besides, the man seemed to have two voices- that were certainly not controlled by the same mind.
Quirrell drew his wand, raising it to point at Silver.
She wasn’t sure what to do.  Dodge the spell?
“Expelliarmus!” Hermione cried suddenly.
Quirrell’s wand left his hand instantly.
Silver glanced towards Hermione.  She was still tied up, but she had her wand out, floating a foot away from her in her icy blue aura and pointed straight at Professor Quirrell.
Right, Hermione was an Aethr- she could do that as far as six feet away.  Though the magic aura part was most certainly not Aethr magic.
Quirrell snarled, and snapped his fingers to resummon his wand.
“He can do that?” Silver asked.
“I guess,” Hermione answered.  “He’s a Raeth.”
“Well this looks climactic.”
Everyone turned immediately to look at the door, to find who had spoken.
“Lyra?” Hermione asked.  “What are you doing here?”
Quirrell cast a spell at her, but she blocked it with a gleaming golden barrier, the exact color of her magic aura.  “Oh, me?  I’m just looking after my future children-in-law.”
Harry gave her the stare.  “Did you have to do that?”
Lyra shrugged.  “What, are you going to deny it?  Diamond’s, ahh, partnerfinding magic activated a week ago.”
“So she can feel what I’ve felt all along,” Silver stated.
“That early?  That’s unusual,” Lyra muttered, then she shrugged.  “Then again, just about everything about you is unusual.”
Quirrell was getting furious.  “Crucio!”  The bolt of light also bounded off of Lyra’s energy barrier.
Lyra looked at him.  “Oh puh-lease, that’s an Unforgivable Curse.  And you do not want to find out who’s looking out for me.  The hard way, at least.”
Silver blinked.  “Who is?”
Quirrell instead decided to escalate.  “Avada-!”
Then, he…  disappeared, with an echoing BOOM.
Bonbon stepped out of the fresh rectangular hole in the wall next to the black fire.  “That would be me.”  She glanced at Lyra, then across at the wall next to the Mirror of Erised.  “How flat do you think he is?”
Silver looked…  and gasped.  The piece of the wall from Bonbon’s rectangular hole was flat against the wall there- and looked to have slammed into it with some significant speed.
Lyra shrugged.  “I don’t know how durable British adults are just yet,” she stated, “but I’d wager to guess he’s pretty flat.  That was about mach seventeen.”
Bonbon wrinkled her nose.  “Eh.  Still not good enough.”
Professors Snape and McGonagall stepped through the hole behind Bonbon.  “Mach seventeen?” McGonagall asked.
“Yep,” Lyra answered.  “That wall crossed the room- and hit Quirrell mid-killing-curse- at about seventeen times the speed of sound.”
Snape blinked.  “No human could survive that,” he stated.  “No matter what potions they drank.”

Lyra peeled the wall away from the other wall, on the side facing away from Harry, Silver, and Hermione, wrinkled her nose, and pushed it back against it again.  “Yeah.  Very, very flat.”  She looked up at McGonagall.  “I hope you weren’t planning on taking prisoners.”