Kim Shimmers and the Diviner’s Curse
A Harry Potter Fanfic by me (and sequel to Kim Shimmers and the Screech Owl)
(Art not mine, couldn’t find credits. Let me know if you know them!)
This Harry Potter fanfic will be posted, if all goes well, every weekend.
Chapter 19
Green Eyes Alive
Kim followed the man in the purple robes out of the Great Hall and into an empty classroom. She looked around nervously, wondering why they were there. Without a word of explanation, the man drew out his wand and shot a blast of fire at the fireplace, setting it to a comfortable blaze. Kim approached, realizing they must be traveling by floo powder.
“My name is Huxley Branderbon. Do you know why I’m here?”
“You’re with the Department of Mysteries?”
“That’s right,” he said, pulling out a bundle from his pocket and dipping his fingers into a small pouch. He withdrew his hand with glittering sand clutched between his fingers, sliding out and back into the bag as he spoke.
“Do as I do,” he said firmly, handing the pouch to Kim and tossing the sand into the fire. He stepped into the now angry green flame and said, “Ministry of Magic.”
The flames seemed to get even angrier and ate him up completely. Kim swallowed and did the same procedure, careful to speak evenly once she had stepped into the heatless fire. Moments later she was stumbling out of a new fireplace. She batted dust off her robes as she looked around at her surroundings.
She was in a wide, clean hall with banners hanging from the tall ceilings, and witches and wizards coming and going all around.
“This way, Miss,” said Mr. Branderbon, who was standing beside the fire she’d just emerged from. He turned on his heels and headed briskly down the wide hallway, Kim hurrying to stay close to him. Wizards as well as magical things busied the main entrance so thickly that Kim couldn’t pick out just one thing to look at. Mr. Branderbon led her into an elevator-like structure, and pressed a key on the wall as the door shut, standing a comfortable distance away from another wizard who was carrying a create with small slits in the side that kept excreting puffs of vaporous blue smoke. Kim eyed the man cautiously and he squirmed a bit, struggling with whatever was in the box as it threw itself about.
But he got off before Mr. Branderbon did, leaving just the two of them in elevator. Soon they seemed to be very deep into the Ministry of Magic building. The elevator lurched and then moved forward before it finally slowed to a full stop, the doors opening. Kim followed Mr. Branderbon out of the small well lit space and into an eerie and much more dimly lit one. It was a long, silent hallway with black tiles surrounding her at all angles. Strix fluttered on her shoulder as Kim looked around nervously, seeing her own wobbly reflection in the black tile made visible by wavering blue flames that burned on torches along the walls.
Mr. Branderbon led her to the end of the hall, which seemed to be tunneling them deeper into darkness, and to a single, black door. He held it open for Kim. On the other side was a wide, round room. There were multiple doors all around the circular edge of the room, each as black and non-descript as the last. There was one notable thing about them, however. None of them had handles.
Mr. Branderbon shut the door behind them and came to stand beside Kim, clasping his hands before him as if he were waiting for something, though Kim wondered what. In response to her unspoken question, the room suddenly started to shift. The floor remained stable, much to Kim’s relief, but the doors along the round walls were spinning rapidly, too fast to see, like the whirlwind amusement ride at the muggle carnival. Mr. Branderbon seemed unconcerned, though, so Kim simply waited for the doors to stop spinning.
He held up his wand, bending his arm at the elbow so his wand point was aimed strait up and said, “Mysterious Libraries.” A blast of shimmering blue light came slowly out of the end of his wand, pulsating up to the ceiling and becoming one with a round black stone in the center of the ceiling. It seemed to absorb the blue sparkling light for a moment, shimmering with it. And then, a door to Kim’s left swung open with a creek.
“This way,” Mr. Branderbon said, walking towards the now open door. Kim followed him threw into a wide open room with walls lined in bookshelves. There was one which had shelves made of cubes of various sizes that divided the left portion of the room in half. The shelves were sporadically decorated with odds and ends that were very odd indeed. Kim walked cautiously past a stone that hovered and glistened green in its stand of onyx. The shelf beside that contained a mundane looking vase of flowers that disintegrated into smoldering fireless ash before her eyes as she passed. The ashes tumbled down into the bottom of the vase, filling it halfway with slate dust. Next to the vase was a human skull, but Kim didn’t watch, afraid of what this might do if she stared at if for too long.
“Please have a seat, Miss Simmers,” said Mr. Branderbon as he came to stand at the desk that was centered in the squared off section of the room between the cube shelves and the walls of book cases. Kim approached the desk and sat in the ornate wooden chair that was situated across from Mr. Branderbon. Her eyes kept wandering around, landing on the oddities in the shelves or on the titles of the books that lines the wall to her right. With titles like Seeing the Unseeable and Deep into the Abstract Existence of Magic, Kim would’ve loved to have some hours alone to thumb through their selection.
“So, let’s begin with a bit of an introduction,” Mr. Branderbon said. “Here at the Department of Mysteries, we take great interest in prophecies, and in extension, in witches and wizards who possess the Sight. Normally, we work closely in tandem with just such wizards to keep our library of prophecies up to date, and as accurate as possible… Now, Dumbledore has informed us that you have made several true predictions. Is that true?”
Kim nodded carefully. She felt Strix resituate on her shoulder and hoped desperately she didn’t decide to have a dislike for Mr. Branderbon and swoop from her shoulder to attack. Thankfully Strix remained grounded, at least for now.
“What form do these predictions come?”
“I… I see things. And feel things sometimes, which leads me to see things.”
“Visions,” Mr. Branderbon said, sounding impressed. “That is a rare gift.” He opened the drawer of his desk and pulled out a file. He opened the folder and dipped his quill into his ink well.
“Have you attempted to seek out these visions?” he asked Kim as he started to write something. “Spur them on in any way.”
Kim hesitated, worried her truthful answer was the wrong one in this instance. “…Yes. I mediate and burn shrivelfig root and moly stems to induce a meditative state.”
“That’s… that’s quite impressive. You may not realize it but the practice you’re following is called Hepto—
“Heptomology, I know,” Kim said, nodding. “That’s where I learned to do it. Reading about it, I mean.”
Mr. Branderbon raised his eyebrows and scribbled down something quickly. “Quite the developed witch… Tell me about one of the times you saw something that you know for certain came true.”
Kim thought for a brief moment and went with the easiest to explain. “I saw Harry face a dragon at the end of last year. This year he faced a dragon in the Triwizard Tournament.”
Mr. Branderbon nodded and continued writing for a long while this time. When he finally looked up he set the quill down and closed the folder.
“Dumbledore was certainly right to call us. Let’s give you a quick test.”
“A test?” Kim asked nervously as Mr. Branderbon got up from his seat.
“Nothing to fear. This way, please.”
Kim rose from her chair and followed Mr. Branderbon, but he didn’t take a right around the shelving to go back the way they’d come. Instead he continued down the line of books until they reached a break where there was an archway. They traveled down the attached hallway and went through a door at the end of the hall. The door led into a room that dramatically changed from the warm carpet and teal paint. It reminded Kim of the passage they had taken to get into the circular room in the first place with dark tile and flickering blue torches.
This room was a square room, with very little in it. There was a seat in the center that was very low to the ground so that a person would have to crouch all the way to the floor to sit. A beam of cool light came down from the ceiling to encircle the round seat which seemed to be set in a square inlay of sorts that had small holes at the four corners of the square. Other than this seat, there was a couch in the corner of the room with a potted plant on either side of it.
“Please sit in the center seat there,” Mr. Branderbon said, gesturing to the grounded seat. Kim moved to it as he walked briskly to the center of the room as well and flicked his wand at the ceiling. A trap door folded slowly open as Kim sat down, folding her legs before her as she stared up at the ceiling above. Something round and shimmering was lowering from the ceiling’s trap door, lowering into the cool beam of light that Kim was situated directly in the center of. As the light caught the sphere, Kim thought it looked like a beautiful three dimensional model of a planet with swirling blue waters and fading white clouds that whirled just under the glassy surface.
“It’s a diviner’s pensieve,” Mr. Branderbon said, drawing Kim from her dazed staring. He had placed some familiar looking plats into the four bowl-like holes on all four corners around her. “We call it the Oracle here in the department.” He flicked his wand and sent four quick and small blasts of fire into the four corners around Kim, igniting the herbs and sending them smoking.
“Just do what you would normally do when practicing Heptomology, Kim. I’ll be just over here,” he said, moving to the couch across the room, shrouded in shadow now that she sat in the light. It was all becoming bleary looking anyway, the scent of the herbs sharp and pungent in her nose already. She leaned back in the seat, which was made of some kind of very soft and yielding foam like fabric, allowing her to sink fully into it, enveloped by cushion. Strix hopped from Kim’s shoulder and landed on her knee where she could more easily sit without being pressed against the cushion. Kim’s eyes started to lull, and her head rolled back against the cushion. Looking up at the swirling blue and white of the Oracle Kim began to forget entirely where she was. Her eye lids fluttered as the room swirled and her eyes rolled back.
Voices unfurled around her from the darkness. Memories, thoughts, and things that were both and neither at the same time. Kim couldn’t tell the difference from what was and was not, what had been and what would be. It all swirled around with the blue and white in her mind.
You’ll look stunning in whatever you choose to wear. Or choose not to… Fred and I are more than friends. Whatever that means… Family’s get to come watch, but since Harry doesn’t have any family… Look after Harry. If you can…
It was dark, and Kim was tied to something hard. She could make out small statues strewn in the grass around her, but it was hard to see much else through the fog and darkness. There was a man, short and cloaked standing a short distance before her, and beside him a very large caldron. Her head was searing with an odd pain that she’d never felt before, and yet, she was certain of what it meant somehow. Something terrible was coming.
Steam billowed from the caldron and shrouded Kim’s vision farther. She didn’t move, petrified with fear and almost complete disbelief of what was happening. The foggy mist had covered everything in Kim’s sight, so that the only thing she could see was the murky outline of the caldron.
But then, there was movement. A figure rose from out of the caldron’s depths, pale and angular frame with skin pulled tight over bone. The figure rose with its head bowed, as if someone drew it’s spine up on a cord, its arms unfolding from its chest to rest at its side as it came to stand at full height. Kim’s stomach writhed. Everything in her screamed to try and escape, but she couldn’t tell her body to move. She couldn’t yet make her mind believe what she was seeing.
The figure’s head lifted just enough to make out flat snake-like features with slited nostrils and a menacing pair of lips that curled up on either end just slightly. Its eyes flicked open, boring into Kim’s mind, imprinting the image of their bloody scarlet gaze into the recesses of her brain forever.
When Kim’s eyelids flew open, the Oracle was still hovering overhead soothingly, its colors swirling gently, but Kim found that she was screaming, the scraping sound of her voice raking through the silence.
“Miss Shimmers, it’s all right,” came a man’s voice, and Kim realized where she was. She looked around and spotted Mr. Branderbon walking over to her with a look of alarm on his face. After a moment she realized it wasn’t just alarm he was showing; it was fear. It was as if he was looking not quite at her, but just past her with an expression of unknown trepidation.
“You saw it?” Kim asked breathlessly. Mr. Branderbon pulled his gaze away from Kim’s person to look her in the eye, seeming to do so with some effort.
“The vision? No… we can review them later, but not watch them as they occur.”
“Don’t,” Kim gasped, barely able to speak. “It’s terrible…” That figure, those red eyes. She’d seen them before. She knew what it must mean now, but… she couldn’t bring herself to think it. Again she’d been viewing events through Harry’s eyes. Harry. She looked up at Mr. Branderbon with a resurrected sense of importance. “I have to get back to the castle.”
He wasn’t looking Kim in the eye again, but simply looking cautiously at her. Kim realized, a bit perplexed, that he was looking at Strix who was still perched on Kim’s knee.
“Yes, that’s fine…” he said, like his mouth moved without first getting permission from his brain. He seemed to be absorbed in some other troublesome thought. “But first, I need to ask you a few questions.”
“Questions? I don’t have time!” Kim insisted. She didn’t know how, but in her stomach she felt certain that what she saw was going to happen tonight, during the third task. The vision hadn’t had any frame of reference for time, other than it was dark. But it had all been leading up to this. She’d been feeling it for months, the building of tension in her stomach, and now it was about to explode out of her.
