“Back home safe and sound at Hogwarts.”
James startled again and pushed himself up onto his elbows, glancing around in profound confusion. The woman turned quickly at the sound of his movements, a vial in each hand. It was Madame Curio.
He was in the hospital wing, lying in the middle of the ward on the only unmade bed. Morning sunbeams lay across the sleepy room, lit with dozing dust motes.
“How did we…?” he asked, snapping his gaze back to Madame Curio. “But I thought…!?”
“You apparated right out of the school!” the healer said shrilly, half chiding, half amazed. She put down the vials and returned to the bed. “The ban was lifted during testing, of course, like usual, although only from the inside out, just to be safe. Nobody expected anyone from inside the school to apparate out of it. But off you went! Popped away to the cemetery in Godric’s Hollow of all places! It’s just a good thing that the headmaster was able to track you and bring you back. Why, you’ve been unconscious and raving all night long! What in the wide world were you thinking?”
James struggled up to a sitting position on the bed and frowned at his spinning thoughts. He could tell by the feel of his own body that he was back to his older, taller self, once again a seventh year. “But…reality was vanished away when Petra went through the portal! The whole world was disappearing! How…?” He looked around again, amazed at the perfectly normal room, the distant rabble and rumble of students moving between classes, the waft of summer breeze pushing in through the open windows, lifting the sheer drapes into billows.
Madame Curio clucked her tongue and touched his forehead again, cursorily. “Triple-six fever,” she said with a shake of her head, making James blink at her in confusion. She saw his look and clucked her tongue again. “Don’t worry, dear. It will all come back to you. The headmaster said you might be a touch befuzzled when you came around.”
As she said this, she glanced away over her shoulder, raising her eyebrows.
James followed her glance, craning to look behind him, toward the pebbled glass ward doors.
Merlin was just standing up from the bench along the rear wall, tucking his tiny book into his robes as he did so.
“I presume our charge is back to his usual self?” he asked mildly.
“For better or worse,” Madame Curio answered, suppressing a small smile. “Presuming he doesn’t attempt any more addled cross-country apparations.”
“I think it safe to assume that such episodes are well behind us,” the headmaster nodded with confidence. “Come, Mr. Potter. A brief discussion in my office should prove illuminating.”
“They called it ‘the triple-six enigma’,” he said as he settled himself into the chair behind his huge desk. “It first began appearing as vague portents and prophecies almost five years ago. Just the three numbers, six-six-six. They showed up in old women’s tea leaves, and old men’s octocards, and even the crystal balls of students here in Madame Trelawney’s classes. People began dreaming of the strange symbol: three sixes, always arranged in a rough circle, two small ones on top, a larger one on the bottom. It wasn’t until winter of this year, however, that the prophecies became more urgent, and even Muggles became haunted by the symbol. Finally, the significance of the triple sixes revealed itself. It wasn’t a random equation, or the sign of the devil, as many understandably assumed.” He looked at James and raised his eyebrows.
“It was simply a date. The sixth day, of the sixth month, of a year equating to six. This year, as you may remember, is the twenty-third year of the second millennium. Two multiplied by three.”
“Equals six,” James answered faintly, settling slowly onto one of the small visitor’s chairs before the desk. Voices could be heard wafting in through the open window, carried on a warm breeze from the Quidditch pitch. The Ravenclaw team was getting in a last minute practice before the tournament tomorrow.
“Elementary arithmancy,” Merlin nodded. “And yet none knew why that date—June the sixth, two thousand and twenty three—had such significance. Many seers consulted their preferred divinations.
Even the centaurs measured the portents and formulated their own dire predictions, with much drama as a result. Only recently, they came to our very courtyard in numbers, warning that if the omen came to pass, they would arise in force to wrest control of the magical world, for the good of all humanity. We were able to mollify them by diplomacy, but only just.
“Thus, as the months passed and the date approached, what began as a mysterious diversion grew into a sustained obsession, even a mania.
“People began to experience terrible, vivid nightmares. Signs were observed in the skies, the clouds and stars, even in the patterns of nature. Many of the trees awakened from their ancient slumber, and spoke to terrified witnesses. Across the world, thousands of people, both magical and Muggle, experienced apocalyptic visions. The details of every prophecy were always nebulous, but certain patterns emerged. A world slowly grinding to a fatal stop. The breaking down of natural laws and ancient rules. The darkening of the eyes of destiny until the world itself was swept away into oblivion. The power of the portent grew daily, exponentially. But alas, no one fully divined what fate was about to happen, or what could be done to prevent it, or even if it was anything more than mass hysteria, a mere corporate delusion unleashed upon the world like a virus of the mind.”
James was beginning to grasp a strange sense of the headmaster’s tale. Memories were resurfacing, though very hazily: increasingly shrill articles in the Daily Prophet about people building magical shelters in their basements and yards, or about Muggles selling everything they owned to buy stores of food, and medical supplies, and weapons, hastily preparing to stave off the mysterious end.
James looked up from this reverie. Narrowing his eyes suspiciously, he asked, “What day is it today?”
“Today, Mr. Potter,” Merlin answered with a small smile, “is June the seventh.”
James felt a release of long-sustained tension. It leaked out of his shoulders and neck, slowly, sifting away like sand. He drifted back into the chair, allowed its cool leather upholstery to collect him. “It didn’t happen,” he said, almost to himself.
“Indeed,” the headmaster nodded. “It did not happen. After a night of much fretting, of midnight vigils and frantic crowds, of millions watching the skies and oceans, of families huddled in terror, and entire villages marching en masse to confront imagined harbingers of doom…the darkness faded, and the sun came up, and the birds sang their happy songs. Life, with the perfect blitheness of ancient habit, simply went on.