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Harry is halfway through her second check of the hastily-inked runes when Archie slips through the door to Harry’s potions lab.
“Harry, this is a terrible idea,” Archie says.
“Of course it is,” she agrees. “But it's my only real option. And I'm sure it will work. Hermione’s research into curing the Fade is beyond brilliant. She’s been refining these formulae for months.”
“You know that’s not the part I’m worried about. What happens when it does work? What will you do then?”
“Well, in about two hours, whether it works or not, I’m going to be arrested and questioned under veritaserum. When that happens–”
“You don’t know that for sure,” Archie interrupts.
“Snape and Pansy both sent me separate warnings. I believe them.”
“You could run.”
“Where?” She brushes her hair out of her eyes and meets his panicked gaze. “Running after the final task worked because I could become Harry again and let Rigel vanish. This is different. They would be hunting me, not a phantom. I’m not at all confident in my ability to evade both Riddle and the Ministry for the rest of my life. No, to get away this time I have to convince them their suspicions are false.”
“But–”
“It’s veritaserum, Arch. Doing this will let me honestly say that I am not Rigel Black and don’t know where he is. If it gets me through this crisis without being tortured by Riddle or thrown into Azkaban by Fudge or grounded for life by Dad, I imagine we’ll be able to handle any other consequences then.”
“I know, but… Harry, think about this.”
“I have thought about it. Don’t worry, it will be fine.”
“How can you say that?! You’re making a separate physical body for the Dominion Jewel. It won’t be bound to you any more. Even ignoring all the problems inherent in sending an insatiable, megalomaniacal construct into the world, which you really shouldn’t by the way, you won’t have its help with your occlumency any more. You won’t have the mental defenses to hold off Riddle.”
“I trust Dom. And I have enough–”
“More importantly,” Archie interrupts before she can actually rebut his points, “how much of yourself do you have to give it so that it really becomes Rigel? What identity will that leave behind for you?”
That is a valid question, so Harry takes a brief moment to actually consider it before shaking her head. “Don’t worry. I know who I am. Sharing some of my personality with Dom won’t change that. Besides, we’ve shared headspace for nearly two years now. It will hardly take anything at all to firm up the Rigel identity into something magically true.”
Archie doesn’t look convinced, but just then Hermione pushes the door open and levitates several large metal plates inside, each of them carved front and back with line after line of tiny rune strings.
“I brought them all,” Hermione announces. “Thank goodness for the Floo connection, because these would have been extremely difficult to apparate.”
“Perfect. Thank you, Hermione.”
While she helps Hermione convey the plates to the correct positions on the floor, Harry asks her magic to create a silencing barrier on the door in case any of the adults come back to Potter Place early. Meanwhile, Archie sets out fresh robes and the moke-skin bag of Rigel’s wand and other effects.
“Are you sure about this, Harry?” Hermione asks. “I’m confident in our theories, but it’s not as though we had an ethical way to test this yet. Not to mention that shaping the malformed channels of an infant’s magical core to match a reference is substantively different from molding an entire core from scratch.”
“That’s why we’re not doing it from scratch.” Harry gestures at the bridging lines of the ritual circle. “See? We’ll be taking advantage of pre-formed structures and piece things together. It’s barely a half-step removed from the original use case.”
“How are you going to account for… Oh, that’s clever. You’ve made a sub-channel to nullify any mismatched referents, then another to catch and replace the nulls. It introduces a danger of recursion if there are too many variable inputs, though, or if the stringency isn’t calibrated correctly. I wish we had time to refine the calculations. This power flow is well outside the parameters we thought to consider.”
But there isn’t enough time, of course. Not nearly enough. And so Archie and Hermione help arrange the final components of the ritual while Harry pours her specially imbued Duplication Solution into a shallow dish at the focus of the array. Then, telling herself she isn’t nervous at all, Harry sits in the donor position.
“Now remember,” Hermione lectures, “if this is to have any chance of working, you must mentally focus on the Rigel Black identity throughout the process. I don’t want to imagine all the ways you could end up problematically entangled if the two identities aren’t sufficiently separate. So take the time you need to meditate, and we’ll trigger the ritual at your signal.”
With the ease of long practice, Harry sinks into meditation and immediately finds herself at the base of her mountain. Dom is waiting for her.
“You’re really going through with it?” Dom asks.
“I’m sorry to ask this of you,” Harry says. “You’ll be the one Riddle is chasing, now. Voldemort too, most likely. It’s… I don’t want to force you.”
“Are you kidding? I’ve been wanting to square off with some decent opponents for a long time, now. You giving me an actual physical body is the best thing I could ask for.”
“Yeah. Yeah. I’m happy for you. You’ve earned it.” This could well be the last time they speak, so Harry braces herself, forces out the honest admission: “I’ll miss you.”
Dom looks taken aback for a moment, then grins inhumanly wide. “Not for long you won’t, kid. You’re still my wielder and I’m still chief magical advisor for all your plans of world domination, right? You won’t be rid of me this easily. I’ll lay a little false trail and be back before you know it.”
“Of course,” Harry says, even though they both know that is infeasible. Rigel Black and Harry Potter won’t be able to afford any sort of contact for a long time.
Assuming they manage to become separate people, of course.
The first thing Harry does is unite the portion of her core shining at the peak of the mountain with the larger sun burning in her space room. She doesn’t want to risk leaving it divided while she is separating other parts of her mind and self.
That done, Harry reaches out with her occlumency and skims through her mind, brushing across the multilayered defenses Dom had constructed and running her awareness along the paths of memory and magic and personality. It feels very much like the meditation she’d done to find her animagus form, only instead of trying to accept and incorporate her inner raven, now she is delineating the Rigel Black persona and finding how it is distinct from her inner Harriet Potter.
It takes long minutes to demarcate the boundaries and the overlaps, and she can feel Dom watching her closely, and reinforcing the structure as she builds it. When she finally feels ready, she surfaces enough to signal Hermione to begin.
Almost immediately, a wash of cold magic from the ritual streams into her mindscape. She can only faintly see it as barely-there silver threads, but she can feel it seeping in as it traces the pathways she’s laid out for it with her mediation. The feel of the magic is mostly dull and mechanical, much like the dark defense disk’s algorithm which Hermione had used as an inspiration for her etched plates. Within that rigid structure, though, it carries faint notes of Archie and Hermione’s magical signatures, so familiar to her now after all of their Fade research together.
The ritual’s magic matches itself to the contours of the Rigel persona in her mind, coursing along the edges until that part of her is perfectly encased, the boundary solidified. For a brief moment even Dom’s avatar is limned in glowing silver. Then, that light fades from sight and the stream of magic becomes first a river and then a flood as the ritual pours more and more of itself into that shape, filling it up like resin filling a mold. But rather than settle in stillness like resin would, the magic remains in constant motion. It courses through her, suffusing memories, ideas, emotions, instincts, and other things she doesn’t have time to name.
Even while this is happening, Harry also feels a strange pressure building inside her sun, as if it’s both filling and draining at once. Rather than the usual pathway where magic emerges through the outer layer of her magical core, it’s flowing through some space in the very center of it, something that isn’t a hole or a gap or even really there at all. The pressure builds and builds, reminiscent of the times her magic fought against the suppressor in third year, except it’s almost like she has a second, smaller core occupying roughly the same space as her normal one.
It reaches a tipping point, and the phantom core somehow inverts itself in a direction she can’t truly feel, turning inside out once, twice, three times, but still aligning with her original core at the end. The now nearly physical nascent core pulls away from Harry then, and though she remains focused on her mindscape she can tell it is moving to hover over the Duplication Solution at the ritual’s focus.
When the core moves, all of the built up pressure drains away in a moment, and the ritual’s magic follows it, flowing out of her far more quickly than it entered. As it does, it draws pieces of her away with it. Not a lot of pieces–only a few dozen, in fact, far fewer and far smaller than she had expected after Archie brought up his concern about possibly mutilating her personality. They’re small moments, little thoughts and experiences that she can still recall if she tries, but that no longer feel like they belong to her. They are Rigel’s, and though she doesn’t forget them, each one leaves a sort of numb absence behind, the smoothness of a photograph in contrast to a richly sculpted carving that used to be a little part of her self.
She only has a brief moment to understand this effect before two enormous pieces jostle loose and flow away with the rest. Harry gasps, eyes shooting open as she clutches at her chest, feeling the awful absence in her heart. She feels inside with her magic, prodding at those new smooth patches and finding the places where the Malfoy and Black magics used to welcome her as part of their families. She remembers Sirius at the Order meeting thanking her and saying she could use the Black family name, but the comfort and acceptance that used to suffuse that memory is absent now, just as with the vow from Narcissa and Lord Malfoy. She hadn’t even realized until now how much of her emotional center she’d built on those two anchors, and the sudden loss is devastating.
“Don’t waver now, kid!” Dom shouts from her mind. “Keep that shape solid!”
Harry listens and pushes through the loss to firm up her occlumency as the rest of the magic filling her finishes draining away.
The ritual completes, and Harry looks up to see a new figure across from her in the circle, one who is already dressing herself in the prepared robes. Rigel is older than any time Harry had worn that face, but those grey eyes and androgynous features are still immediately recognizable. It’s disconcerting to see them outside of a mirror.
The edge of Rigel’s mouth quirks up slightly. “Hello, Harry. That was certainly an experience.”
“Yeah, it…” Harry trails off, remembering the last moments of the ritual, of Dom speaking to her when she shouldn’t have been able to hear him. A tentative probe confirms that the space the Dominion Jewel occupies in her mind is not smoothed over like the pieces that were taken to form Rigel.
“Dom?” she projects inward. “You’re still here?”
“It wouldn’t take me. I tried to follow, but, well. Apparently I’m too much a part of Harriet.”
She hadn’t expected that, but having felt the shape of the ritual, it makes sense to her. The part of her that was Harry–the part that is still her–is intrinsically linked with her magic, and their relationship today was influenced in no small part by the Dominion Jewel. The ordeal with Pettigrew belonged to Harry, and still does, that experience still as fully impressed on her soul as it had been before the ritual.
“But if you’re here,” Harry thinks, then speaks aloud. “Who…?”
The girl across from Harry smirks self-deprecatingly and wandlessly summons the moke-skin bag, opening it to pull out Rigel’s wand.
“Who is Rigel Black? I suppose we’ll have time to figure that out after your arrest and interrogation. Good luck, Harry.” And with that Rigel crosses the potions lab and vanishes up the stairs.