Chapter 17

A/N: All praises to beaweasley2 and Clairvoyant for their untiring help and support – I am indebted to you ladies, thank you! I would also like to thank those of you who review my work - I really enjoy reading your thoughts!

JKR owns it all, but graciously allows us to experiment....

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Chapter 17

The girl was standing there as if frozen to the spot. She was holding her wand out in front of her, pointing it blindly towards the doorway, and blinking tears out of her eyes. By her side, Severus lay unconscious on a low trestle bed. The left side of his face was bruised and swollen, his eye puffy and closed, and the skin covered by a yellow paste that made his flesh look cracked and sickly. His naked chest was rising and falling steadily, up and down... up and down. His collarbone was clearly broken, sticking up unnaturally above his chest, the skin around it stretched and discoloured.

Conviva took a faltering step forward, holding out the palla he was returning to the girl with both hands, almost like an offering. There was a crackling in the atmosphere, similar to the feeling in the air before a summer thunderstorm, and he was a little afraid.

He liked Hermione. He had been pleased to meet her, pleased to see that his dour, saturnine friend seemed to have finally found somebody prepared to put up with him. Marcella had once told him that Severus was pining away for some great lost love. Conviva had thought he was simply living the life of a vestal and needed to go with a few of the women in the local bars – they weren't even that expensive!

But now Hermione had appeared, the girl from Severus' portrait in his dining room. Conviva remembered teasing Severus mercilessly about the beautiful little image one evening. The older man had coloured up, muttering some sort of rubbish about a 'niece', which had not fooled anyone. Was this Severus' great lost love? He really wanted to ask – there had clearly been something between them yesterday when they showed up out of the blue at his party looking as guilty as a pair of teenagers. But the atmosphere was so odd here in this unpleasantly dingy chamber that asking her intentions did not seem to be appropriate.

He stopped wordlessly in front of her, the palla soft in his hands. He wasn't sure what to do.

After a moment, she seemed to shake herself and lowered her hand, stowing the stick into a small pocket at her side. Her shoulders slumped, and she suddenly looked like a much younger woman than she had appeared to be at his party.

"Hermione?" he prompted softly, hoping that his smile would encourage her.

She sighed, wiped her hand across her face, and scrubbed at her cheek, but stood a little taller for all that.

"H-hello, Aulus Vettius Conviva." She stuttered over his formal name, stepping back from him to stand closer to the inert man on the bed. "Severus was hurt...." She didn't finish the sentence.

"I saw his slave's body on the pallet by the front door." Conviva's voice was gentle. "I suppose he was killed when Severus was injured in the earthquake...?"

She was blushing and didn't answer, but he barely noticed as he moved to stand closer to the unconscious man.

"Has his spirit left him?" Conviva asked, a little nervous himself as he looked down at Severus' pale face. Up closer, the livid bruises across his friend's upper torso and the grazes on his neck looked worse than his first impression.

"Yes," she agreed after a moment. "I need... I need to fix the bone here before he wakes up. Would you help me?"

Looking over his shoulder at the girl, he saw similar-looking grazes on her arms and dirt on her face and clothes. They had clearly been through some trial, although so far, despite the fallen masonry and brickwork in the street, he could not remember seeing any damage to Severus' house....

"Of course," he said, smiling at her, and placed the palla gently at Severus' feet.

**********************

"Professor, please would you explain to us exactly what the Wiggenweld Potion actually is and what it will do to our daughter?" Helen Granger's voice was strained with concern. Sitting beside her, Robert was still simmering with barely suppressed frustration and annoyance at being made to look an idiot in front of the Healers a few hours earlier. The reappearance of Professor Spleen at their daughter's door, this time without his gaggle of apprentices, had reawakened their anxiety for their daughter. Hermione had been still for a long time. Her chest continued to rise and fall in a quiet rhythm attuned to the throbbing of the magical life-support net that surrounded her. Her eyes remained closed, her cheeks wan and pale through the haze of the magic.

Spleen danced into the room with the confidence of experience and sat carefully in one of the chairs facing the Grangers. Before he could speak, however, there was a quiet knock on the door, and Luna wafted in to the room on a breeze of rosemary and calendula. She walked up to Hermione's bed and gingerly placed the handful of rosemary and marigolds in the vase by her head.

"Here's rosemary for remembrance," she said softly in her singsong cadence before smiling dreamily at Hermione's parents and sitting down beside them. "I hope that you don't mind, Mr and Mrs Granger," she said politely, "but I thought it might help to draw out the stingers..."

Weird, thought Robert ungenerously.

Helen smiled. "Thank you, dear," she said and turned her attention back to Professor Spleen. "You can speak professionally to us, Professor," she said to the Healer, holding tightly on to her husband's hand. "We have medical training and are well versed in scientific principles."

"We are dentists, you know," Robert added with a defiant lift of his chin.

"That means a Muggle tooth doctor," supplied Luna helpfully. Robert turned to stare at her. He hadn't quite forgiven her for the 'Wrackspurt' reference.

"Ah-ha! I had forgotten that you are a medical man!" Professor Spleen clapped his hands together in evident pleasure and completely missed Helen Granger's hiss of exasperated annoyance. "Well, then, let me talk you through the properties of this potion, and then we may consider the contraindications and other concerns that you have before the Mandrake has finished stewing."

"Right, yes...," said Robert, feeling like he was about to step completely out of his depth, medically speaking.

**********************

Hermione carefully folded the palla into a long, thin bandage, the fine wool making a narrow slip of material that she could run easily through her small hands.

"If I lift him... like this," Hermione said, kneeling carefully behind the unconscious man and pulling his upper body up in front of her. Conviva was surprised to see the ease with which the young woman raised Severus from the bed. It was almost as if the man weighed nothing at all!

"Can you wrap the palla around each shoulder and across his back in a figure of eight pattern, like this?" she asked, using one hand to trace what she wanted with her finger.

He immediately understood and hastened to comply, carefully passing the rope of material around Severus' shoulders like a twisted omega.

"Good," she said, her brows furrowed with concentration. "Hold him for me, would you?" She indicated that he support Severus at the front of his chest so she could deal with the ends of the palla behind his back. Conviva was confused. What was she going to do with the palla? She seemed to know what she was doing, but he had never heard of female healers before.

Before he could ask her any further questions, she had placed her knee into Severus' back and pulled back on the ends of the palla with her upper body. Conviva saw Severus' back arch and his shoulders roll backwards. In front of his nose, he saw and heard the broken ends of the collarbone snick back into place, the abnormal lump on his chest reduced to a bruised swelling. Conviva could not see her clearly but thought that she had muttered something under her breath, and now she was fiddling with something behind Severus' back. By the time he raised his head sufficiently to look, the ends of the palla were tied into a flat knot and Hermione was lowering Severus gently back to the cushions on the bed, a peculiar expression on her face.

Conviva found his voice. "How did you learn to do that?" he asked.

"Oh," she said absently while stroking Severus' unblemished shoulder with her fingers, "an old riding accident. My parents insisted that I take lessons, and I fell off and broke my clavicle. I always hated riding, just like... oh.... Never mind...." She smiled tightly at the memory. "The doctors mended my collarbone like this in the hospital," she continued. "He should be able to breathe more easily now that he won't be in so much pain." Her eyes remained fixed upon the prone man, the same troubled expression on her face.

"It looks like you have your own injuries to salve, Hermione," Conviva said. When she looked up at him sharply, he gestured towards her shoulder and back; the material of her deep blue stola was torn and bloodied, the skin beneath grazed and broken.

Hermione blushed again. "Oh, it's nothing," she said. "A quick bath should sort me out, and some of this healing salve." She fingered a broken pot on the low table by his bed.

"Well, then," Conviva said brusquely, clapping his hands together. "Go. Take your bath."

Hermione did not move, uncertainty crossing her features.

Conviva grinned. "When Severus first came to Pompeii, we cared for him in our house as he recovered from his wounds. Two days ago, you and he helped my family escape the wrath of Vulcan, and Marcella and my children are now safely on a boat, travelling to my estate near Salernum. I came to return your palla and to thank him for the warning about the volcano. After the feast day tomorrow, I shall be joining them. We are friends, Hermione. My family owes him a life debt. I am certainly capable of sitting with him for a little while until his spirit returns from its travels. You seem exhausted; take time to heal yourself."

Hermione looked at him again with a strange mixture of emotions running across her expressive face. Conviva saw gratitude, guilt, and almost a flash of anger. But she picked up the broken pot of the yellow salve and made to leave the room.

"What if he wakes?" asked the Roman, settling himself down beside his friend on a low bench seat.

Hermione flashed him a quick look, then regarded Severus' passive face. She seemed to be fingering the piece of wood in her pocket.

"Oh, he won't wake just yet," she said with a confidence that seemed almost unsettling to Conviva. She paused again. "Thank you," she said quietly. "I need time to think about things. Thank you for sitting with him."

She walked to the doorway and then seemed to remember something and turned. "Please don't touch anything in here," she said. "I won't be long."

*

About twenty-five minutes later, she was back.

Conviva recoiled slightly at her outfit.

"I thought you were supposed to have been cleaning yourself up?" he blurted out as he saw what she was wearing. Hermione was dressed in a crude tunica made from a dirty grey material and roughly belted around the waist. The cloth came slightly below her knees and seemed to be too big for her in general. Her hair was as it had been before, although she seemed to have tied it back further away from her face. She did not even appear to have washed! Conviva shifted uncomfortably on his seat, thinking, Why is she dressed like a cheap household slave?

Without a word to him, she walked to the pot that sat on the bench in the centre of the room. The air around the metal pot seemed to shimmer for a moment and then was still. Hermione carefully placed the length of wood onto the bench and picked up a curved ladle, which she slowly dipped it into the cooking pot. She ladled a quantity of the liquid into a nearby dull glass bottle, holding it carefully by its handle as she decanted the silver liquor into the container. When the bottle was full to her satisfaction, she stoppered it and placed it on the table.

Conviva cleared his throat. "Will that help him?" he asked, looking at the bottle on the bench. It might have been his imagination, but he thought he'd seen the air shimmer above the cooking pot again when she had put the bottle down on the bench.

"Sort of," Hermione answered. She frowned, lost in thought, and rubbed her hand on her chest bone between her breasts as if soothing an itch. She looked as if she had been crying. She picked up the broken pot of yellow paste and crossed the room until she was standing close to Severus' left, uninjured, shoulder. Snape lay quietly, although sweat was still beading on his forehead and running in channels down his face and neck.

"Would you watch over him for a while longer, please? There is something I need to do for a little while." She traced the outline of the sleeping man's stubbly jaw with her forefinger.

Conviva suddenly felt that he was intruding on a very private moment between the two of them. He wriggled uncomfortably again on his hard wooden seat, casting his mind about to try to think of something lighthearted to say that might break the tension.

Conviva cleared his throat, "Well," he began, "I had promised to visit Restitutus later this morning...." One look at her face, however, and he knew that he could not refuse her. Pulling a face, he moved his buttocks on the stool awkwardly. "Well, could you pass me a cushion or something?" he grumbled, pleased to see her face lighten into a small smile as she gently tugged a cushion out from underneath Severus and passed it over to him.

"Where are you going, dressed like that?" Conviva asked, now sitting more comfortably as she walked back over to the bench and picked up the glass bottle with the silver liquid in it. He looked again at the battered face of his unconscious friend and felt a shiver of uncertainty once more.

Hermione turned, stowing the smooth stick of wood in an unseen pocket in her skirts. Her eyes glittered, and her face was resolute. He thought that she looked rather impressive despite her ridiculous garb.

"I'm going to deliver this to one of Severus' customers," she said. "It is important that he is kept satisfied, or he'll take his, erm, business to another city," she continued. "I hope that I won't be long. If Severus wakes up..." She cleared her throat and seemed to change her mind about what she was going to say. "If he wakes, would you tell him that I understand why he did what he did? And I don't blame him for it."

"You... understand what he did, and you don't blame him for it," Conviva repeated, faintly baffled.

"Yes," she confirmed, and with one final look at the room around her, she walked swiftly to the door, and her footsteps sounded loudly on the stone steps.

*********************

"And so, you see, Mr and Mrs Granger, the Wiggenweld Potion works by encouraging the sleeper to actually metabolise it into a potent auto-immune response which forces the patient to awaken," Professor Spleen concluded with a flourish and paused. Helen Granger had the distinct impression that he was expecting a round of applause.

"So... essentially what you are saying is that you are going to give our daughter a powerful poison in order to stimulate her body to reject it and, in so doing, force her to consciousness?" Helen frowned as she processed the information the Healer had been imparting for the last thirty minutes.

Professor Spleen's eyebrows lifted in surprise. "Why, yes, Mrs Granger, in a Puffapod, that is precisely what I am saying."

"'Nutshell', Professor," corrected Luna thoughtfully. "I think you mean 'nutshell' – Muggles don't have Puffapods." She was still in the room, sitting quietly next to Helen Granger.

"A poison," repeated Helen Granger carefully.

The Healer shrugged. "Is not that the same theory that lies behind your vaccination process? Helping your body to create sufficient anti-toxins to counter the original infection." He smiled what seemed to be his biggest, most encouraging smile.

Helen blanched at the mangling of medical science. "Not exactly," she replied. Her husband was very quiet, and she turned to look at him. Robert's attention was fixed on Hermione upon the hospital bed.

"She looks thinner than she did yesterday," Robert said. "More drawn." He reached across to the bed, fearful of trying to touch her through the magical net covering her body.

*********************

She did not know where Sabazios was.

The absurdity of that fact was not lost on Hermione Granger as she stepped into the street outside Snape's house.

She stood, blinking in the bright Pompeiian sunlight, gripping the Metamorphmagus Potion that she had brewed, dressed in one of Pertus' old tunicas with her wand in her pocket.

She felt utterly alone.

Far from taking time to think, after she had left Conviva looking after Snape for the first time, Hermione had mechanically cleaned and healed her wounds and quickly slipped into her comfortable Muggle clothing.

Thinking was not something she had wanted to do.

Thinking meant coming to terms with what she had seen inside his head when he had slipped into unconsciousness.

Thinking meant trying to understand how he could have made such a Dark object to save himself and why he had tied it to her. After all, she had tried to save his miserable life when he had been lying there eleven years ago, filthy and abused with his throat half ripped out. The second most hated man in wizarding Britain.

So many things began to fall into place. How she couldn't get over his loss... couldn't settle down... couldn't move on... couldn't maintain relationships. The bastard! Fucking bastard. Controlling... selfish... self-centred... self-serving egocentric...

Ahh yes, a small, treacherous voice inside her head argued, but he made you feel whole here. Her heart flared, a warm wash of emotion flooding her chest and torso, as if to emphasise the point her mind was making. You enjoyed touching him, healing him... making love with him...

But love, real love, cannot come out of something as perverted as a Horcrux, can it?

She shook her head angrily, banishing the dangerous, ambiguous thoughts. No time for them now.

She needed to find Sabazios. Snape had said he was in one of the disused water cisterns in the city.... She wracked her brains. The largest water cistern in the city was in the north, where the Pompeiian branch from the mighty Aqua Augusta aqueduct came in to the city. Hermione began to walk quickly through the now-familiar streets.

Mindful of her new status as the lowest form of human life in this society, she took care to keep her head down, avoiding passersby and other obstacles in the street. When she needed to, thoughtful of her position, she jumped down lightly into the filthy streets to allow citizens to pass before regaining the pavement. She was heading north again, following a similar route to the one they had taken to the Vettii House. She was looking for a huge building close to the Vesuvius Gate, which was later called the Water Stronghold, the Castellum Aquae.

Hermione tried to visualise the academic journal papers she had read about the water system to the city. The earthquake of 62AD had fatally damaged the water supply to the city, and the water supply from the aqueduct had been cut off. Archeologists believed that the baths and fountains were served by rainwater, which was collected in vast lead-lined tanks across the city. She remembered the other guests complaining to Marcus about it at Conviva's party. She was certain that the aqueduct had not been reconnected before the volcanic eruption buried the city.

The Castellum would, therefore, have been dry at the time the eruption took place... With more than one hundred square feet of space, it was a perfect location to hide a number of people.

It was a good place to start.

*

The city was clearly gearing up for the Festival of Vulcan, which was scheduled for the next day. Lines of colourful bunting were being strung between the houses, and shop keepers along the main streets were dragging braziers outside in preparation for the bonfires that would be lit along the streets in order to honour Vulcan. Hermione was well aware that the Forum would be a hive of civic activity – orchestrated by Marcus Fiducius, if indeed he was still in the city (a slight thrill of fear ran through her at the thought).

As she marched along the high pavements, with city life unfolding around her, her chest... itched. She still felt the loss of her pendent. She was so used to its reassuring presence around her neck. The bottle itself was the perfect shape to nestle safely and comfortably between her breasts beneath her shirt.

She rubbed her breastbone nervously and felt her chest burn again in response. Maybe she should not have left it behind. She had been foolish to overreact in the way that she had, throwing the lovely thing across the room. She pictured it lying abandoned in the shadows in the corner of the laboratory and knew a brief, crazy wish to turn around to reclaim it. Pull yourself together, Hermione – it's just a habit! You couldn't wait to throw off Slytherin's locket, she told herself sternly. You'll be better off without it clouding your thoughts and judgement. It's obviously been doing that for years. You know what you have to do. Deliver the potion. Persuade Sabazios that there is more to come. Buy yourself time to get back to the house and work out the runes around the stupid portrait so you can activate it again and get back home. Buy time so Severus can recover his strength. His bones are healed, but it will take a little while longer for the soft tissue to knit as effectively. Buy time until the mountain explodes and there is no time for anything anymore.

Why did she suspect it would all be easier said than done?

*********************

Later that day, Harry knocked lightly on the door to Septima Vector's apartments in the Tower. He felt her wards shiver in response and heard her cheery welcome from inside. He pushed the door open.

Septima's rooms were in their usual state of epic chaos.

Even with two active young boys and a baby, it was still possible to see the floor for most of the time in their apartment! Harry gingerly made his way across the sitting room, carefully placing his feet in between piles of books and academic journals, sheets of parchment and odd, undefinable piles of papers, bins overflowing with scrumpled-up papers, discarded clothing falling off the furniture onto which they had been discarded, and other detritus.

Vector's messy habits were the stuff of legend at Hogwarts. It was widely rumoured that house-elves refused to clean her rooms.

Hermione had taken private lessons with Septima here during her additional NEWTs year. Harry glanced over to the mantlepiece in the room. Various cups and glasses were lined up along it, fighting for space with a Muggle clock, a small plaster copy of Rodin's The Lovers, and a vase of perpetual flowers. Harry remembered Hermione telling the fascinated and appalled Potters how, when she was a student, she had watched a pear slowly decay on Vector's mantelpiece over a number of weeks. It had eventually dropped off the mantle and onto the carpet, where it had gradually become a dark stain on the floor.

Vector had not appeared to notice.

She looked up and smiled as he came in. "Good morning, Harry," the witch's rich New England drawl greeted him warmly as he approached. "Did Filius send you over?"

Harry smiled back. Septima was at her desk at the far end of the room, busily scanning through a sheaf of parchment, quill in hand. A series of rather complicated-looking mechanical devices were dipping and whirring on the table in front of her. To the left of her desk, facing him, was a large blackboard, which had a large parchment copy of Snape's portrait stuck to the centre of it. Lines of scribbled chalk notes in different colours radiated outwards from the parchment image. The notes were unintelligible to Harry, a combination of letters and numbers rather than words.

Harry was utterly baffled by Arithmancy – it was never a subject that he had studied at school, and when Hermione had tried to explain (very patiently) about the key principles that underpinned it, he had quickly felt his head spinning and had known that he couldn't keep up.

"Uh, good morning, Septima. I just wondered how you were getting on with the portrait?" he inquired, moving closer to her desk and the blackboard.

"Fine, just fine, thanks. Actually I've just arrived at a really interesting point." She reached forward and flicked one of the silver devices on her desk, sending it spinning more quickly. She watched it for a moment and then made a quick note on the parchment in front of her.

Hermione had also once tried to explain the use of such charmed devices to Harry when he had visited her as she had been finishing off her PhD in Australia. She had compared them to Muggle calculators or simple computers, but he had not really understood what she had been saying beyond the fact that they helped Arithmancers to make complicated calculations.

"Would you like some tea, Harry? I only have Chinese chrysanthemum tea at the moment, but the pot has just brewed...?"

"Ungh.... No thanks, Septima." Harry winced slightly at the thought of drinking tea made from cut flowers. He thought it sounded horribly bitter.

"How is Hermione doing?" Septima asked, waving her hand to indicate that Harry should sit down on the chair in front of her desk.

Harry shrugged, "Still the same," he replied, carefully moving a pile of papers from the chair seat onto the sofa beside the desk so he could sit down. When he was settled, Septima sat back in her chair and looked fully at him.

"Okay, well," she began, twirling her quill between her fingers. "The good news is that I think I know what the runes around the portrait mean."

"Right-oh...," Harry said, hoping that she would be able to explain things more clearly than Hermione could.

***

"Okay," Septima began, standing up and moving towards the blackboard. "Have you ever studied Arithmancy before, Harry?" At his blank expression, she sighed. This was probably going to be quite difficult. She took a deep breath and tried to think of him as a third-year.

She picked up a piece of chalk and pointed to the runes, numbers, and sigils surrounding the portrait in the centre.

"So, these Arithmantic runes define life lines. Life lines can usually be defined in terms of straight lines, like this...." Septima flipped over the blackboard and began sketching a rough grid on the board. She drew simple x- and y-axes, and then, changing the colour of her chalk with a muttered charm, she drew a diagonal line that crossed both axes through the centre. She checked back with Harry – he was scrunching his eyes and trying to stay focused.

"From the runes around the portrait, I can draw a simple, straight life line, like this one here," she explained, pointing to the coloured, diagonal line in front of her.

She flipped the board over again, back to the charmed copy of the portrait, and indicated three similar-looking runes around the portrait.

"I have isolated the requisite function which determines the rational variables for plotting the line here, here, and here," she said, pointing to the runes in turn. Harry nodded, as if he was following her.

"Okay... so far, so typical. But now look... The problem is that the runes in the portrait changed as the image changed. The functions appeared to realign. When I first looked at the portrait, the rune function that was dominant was this one." She tapped the board, and it shimmered, the patterns of the numerals in the runes surrounding the image of Snape and Hermione shifted and changed colour.

Septima looked over her shoulder at Harry, who was perched on the edge of his seat still concentrating fiercely on what she was saying.

"But a day later, when the image in the portrait changed, the runic signature had done as well, to this." She tapped the board, and the numbers and runes rearranged themselves once more.

"Then yesterday, it changed again." Septima tapped the board once more, and the original sequence shimmered into view.

"So, you see," she continued, "we appear to have a variable chain of functions, which in turn define an interactive Arithmantic sequence creating an asymptote. In other words, a line of a curve such that the distance between the curve and the line approaches zero as they tend to infinity. Like this." She flipped the board back to the graph she had sketched on the other side, and with a quick flick of her practiced hand, she drew a curved line that mirrored the first one, but did not touch it at all.

"It's really very interesting," the Arithmancer continued, hoping to the Three Fates that Harry thought so too. "If we apply Simpson's rule to this sequencing, it appears to describe a composite function denoting an asymptote which defines nothing less than an infinite life line."

Septima paused, taking in her companion's rather glazed expression. Ooops, she thought, lost him. He was much more of a practical man than a theoretician, she reminded herself. She thought carefully and then shrugged.

What the hell – this isn't class....

"Uh, what I mean to say, Harry, is that these runes together show the life line of a human who means to try to cheat death and live forever."

***

The ugly clock on the wall above their heads ticked loudly in the silence that followed Vector's statement.

"So... the portrait can make you immortal...?" asked Harry, desperately wishing he didn't sound so idiotic.

To his relief, Vector did not laugh at him. She shook her head. "No, Harry. The portrait is a reflection – see how the runes are aligned in a mirror image of each other? This is an inverse speculation. Now the last time I saw this pattern of runes was when I took an elective course back at Salem." At his blank expression, she smiled. "I mean I opted to take extra classes," she explained.

He nodded and gestured that she carry on. Septima took a breath. Her eyes were shining. "The course was on Egyptian attitudes towards the afterlife. It was really exciting to see how the Muggle theories matched up to the wizarding papyri.... The Books of the Dead each have slightly different variations, and this one," she picked up a worn scroll from her desk and waved it at him, "is called the Book of Thoth, and it is perhaps the most interesting of all."

"Book of Thoth," repeated Harry slowly, trying hard to keep up with this second line of reasoning.

"Sure." Septima's enthusiasm was overtaking her. "The Book of Thoth contains a set of instructions that mortals can follow in the aterlife so that they can move through the netherworld and break into heaven to converse with the gods. My old professor at Salem postulated that the Book was really a coded reference to being able to live forever – you know, to 'keep talking to gods', so to speak."

"So, the portrait lets someone live forever? So why...?"

"Oh no, Harry. The portrait is a reflection – I told you that the runes are inverted. There must be an original someplace that is the source of the power. The thing that gives you the necessary ability to extend your life indefinitely."

Hang on, thought Harry. "Like the Philosopher's Stone?" he blurted out, remembering his first year in a rush.

"Well, the Stone isn't the only magical thing that can preserve life, Harry, now is it? We know that unicorn blood can be used, for example, despite the damage that it causes. But there are other methods from other wizarding traditions that have been thought to be as effective as the Resurrection Stone and the Philosopher's Stone, and not all of them utilise Dark Magic for their success."

"So, let me get this straight," Harry said. "You are suggesting that there is something somewhere that can make people immortal, that is currently being reflected in this portrait of one of my best friends and a dead man. Something that may be connected to the Book of Thoth...?"

"Uh-huh," Septima agreed. "I'm just working on the specific time frame which will fix the temporal parameters in place.... But that doesn't really help to explain why Hermione is flat out in St Mungo's." She sighed. "Or how we can wake her up."

"How would the artifact work?" Harry asked.

Septima frowned. "Well, you would need something to activate it. Something that would make the runes function and key it into a specific genetic code or individual."

Harry pictured Hermione's face as she had been lying on the hospital bed when he had first seen her in Napoli. The pale skin, the bruised cheekbone, the dressing on her forehead covering up that nasty gash where she had cut herself on the mosaic floor...

"Blood!" Harry nearly shouted, springing to his feet. Septima frowned, considering the idea carefully, running her quill carefully between her fingers.

"Yup," the American Arithmancer allowed finally, "blood might just do it."

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A/N2: Luna is dreamily quoting Shakespeare – more specifically, part of a speech by Ophelia in Hamlet.