PART 2: ACT 4

PART 2: ACT 4

“Mmm. I love chips.”

Delphi was once more sitting crossed-legged on the floor of Spinner's End, picking out deliciously fatty wedges of potato from an expanse of grease-stained white paper and devouring them with relish. She had shed the schoolgirl outfit and dark hair and was back to her usual pale-haired and blue-tipped self, although this time she had Transfigured her clothes into metallic silver leggings and a tight black vest with a see-through mesh top overlaid to go with her habitual faded denim jacket and scuffed army boots.

Severus eyed her as he slowly ate some chips of his own, the taste bringing back all kinds of memories about his Muggle roots. He had to admit that she did not look like a person who had just brought down the fiercest creature in the wizarding world, and yet she'd done it without as much as batting an eyelid. There was no doubting she was brave and clever, if not overly reckless. She was a Parselmouth and therefore, he was sure, related to Salazar Slytherin himself. As was, he reminded himself, the Dark Lord. But he was quite sure the Dark Lord had no siblings, so exactly who this mysterious woman could be and how she could possibly be related to them both, he had yet to fathom out.

They had travelled forwards to September 1981, just after Severus had started teaching at Hogwarts, to be sure there was no way of him banging in to his past self. It made sense, of course, but it felt like Delphi's plan was beginning to reach it's apex and yet he still did not know how it was going to resolve or indeed, if what they had achieved so far had played out in the way they wanted it to. Severus, as usual, had many more questions.

“I have been thinking about your Fauxcruxes,,” he began after swallowing a chip. “What would happen if someone managed to release the trapped time from them?”

Delphi sucked the grease off her thumb with a smack of her lips. “That's a good question,” she replied, her eyes narrowing with thought. “It depends what spell was used I guess. We know Unspeakables use a different spell to harness the trapped time and convert it into Time-Turners. If someone were to destroy the Fauxcruxes, presumably it would cause some kind of ripple or warp in spacetime given the amount of conserved time in them. That could actually be pretty dangerous. Like a black hole.”

Maddeningly for Severus, she carried on eating her chips as if she'd just announced something as mundane as the weather.

“Shouldn't you have thought of that before we changed the book?” Severus' tone was even, but there was an edge to it that didn't go unnoticed by Delphi.

She sighed. “I think it's low risk, to be honest with you. Dumbledore doesn't get wind of the Horcrux idea until the 1990s, and You-Know-Who will die next month if everything goes to plan. So in the new future, the idea of Horcruxes will be irrelevant as they clearly don't exist as You-Know-Who will be dead.”

Severus thought about this for a moment. It made sense, but the Fauxcruxes seemed like they had the potential to be powerful and dangerous objects in the wrong hands.

“How can something with the power to destroy the world be low risk?” he asked, not unreasonably.

“Well, the thing is, You-Know-Who was very smart about the objects he chose to be his Horcruxes. Apart from his snake, which was a living entity and would of course die at some point, and Harry Potter, which he didn't know about. Oh, and his diary, which was just a diary,” she added dismissively, waving a hand in the air for emphasis. “But the other four, the ones he created as a younger man – they were trophies in the very real sense of the word. Precious objects that people would covet to own, not to destroy.”

Severus swallowed another chip as he took this in. “And what were these objects?”

Delphi counted them off one by one on the fingers of one hand. “Salazar Slytherin's locket. Helga Hufflepuff's cup. Rowena Ravenclaw's diadem. And one of the Deathly Hallows – the Resurrection Stone, encased in a beautiful yet cursed ring.”

Severus raised his eyebrows. Truly, the Dark Lord had excelled himself in finding the perfect vessels to contain his immortality. And the Hallows it seemed were more than just a child's story. But still, he had more questions.

“Do you think if would be possible to add the time from the Fauxcruxes to someone else's timeline in order to extend their life?” he mused.

Delphi finished her last chip and screwed up the paper wrappings into a ball. “Quite possibly,” she answered. “Well, that's what the Philosopher's Stone does, doesn't it? Maybe we have actually created dormant mini-Philosopher's Stones just waiting for the right spell to unlock them.” She grinned then, like she had just become aware of her own genius.

Severus suppressed a smirk but his eyes glittered at the possibilities. It looked like Delphi, whoever she really was and however she happened to be related to Salazar Slytherin, truly did belong in Ravenclaw after all.