In one of the curves of the circular room, sitting directly on the carpet, was a girl whose age hovered indistinctly between twelve and fifteen years old. Oblivious to the tension in the atmosphere, the little girl manipulated a doll in one hand and a rustic wooden car in the other. Before her knees stretched a small still life of children's toys: cluttered building blocks and a small carved horse.
Albus felt confusion cloud his judgment. He advanced a couple of yards with a steady pulse, convinced that this was an optical illusion or a trap. But as the distance narrowed, when his old eyes managed to focus on the crisp profile of the stranger... his heart contracted with a violence so devastating that the tendons in his hand lost all tension. The Elder Wand slipped from his fingers, impacting the floor with a sharp clink that rolled across the tiles.
Scant steps from the little girl, the body of the greatest wizard of the century began to experience a violent, spasmodic trembling. His eyes glassed over instantly. His intellect, ever analytical, screamed at him that this was a monumental deception, a bait designed to shatter his defenses, a biological impossibility; but his elemental senses—instinct, the pulse of blood, and the unmistakable scent drifting from her skin—assured him that what lay before him was a being of flesh and bone.
His legs failed him, refusing to obey the directives of his brain. The Headmaster knelt heavily, dragging himself with difficulty to shorten the distance separating him from the figure.
"You..." The old man's voice broke into a harsh thread. His right hand, ridged with wrinkles, extended toward the girl's cheek in a tremulous fashion, hovering in the air, gripped by the absolute dread that this was a mirage that would disintegrate at the slightest physical contact.
The girl, manifesting an expression of cognitive innocence markedly childish for the maturity of her physical features, finally registered the presence of the newcomer. She tilted her head with curiosity, examining him with pupils clean of all malice.
"Who are you?" the little girl asked.
The old man was unable to articulate a single syllable. Tears threatened to spill at the exact millisecond that specific voice frequency struck his eardrums. Despite the inherently childish nuance of the tone, the melody of that timbre remained etched in fire within the catacombs of his memory.
Albus added nothing, as if a part of his being resisted absorbing what he saw. The girl in front of him should not exist. However, a tragic and purely human smile bubbled up from the deepest part of his chest upon beholding the girl's features; an expression of unshakeable peace and absolute serenity that he had never seen in her during her final months of life, while she continued to clutch the doll against her dress.
It was then that the girl scrutinized Albus's face for a few moments more, furrowing her brow in playful doubt until her features lit up.
"Albus?" she uttered, dragging out the letters with a playful shyness. Immediately afterward, she sketched the purest, most beautiful, and genuine smile the old man had witnessed in a century. She extended both arms forward, closed her small hands around the Headmaster's prominent silver beard, and yanked it with a sharp, childish vigor. "Albus! You have funny beard!"
The floodgates of self-control broke completely. Albus Dumbledore's weeping flowed without restraint, soaking his cheeks in an uninterrupted torrent of pain and redemption, while a smile of absolute capitulation illuminated his face. In the middle of Great Britain's political chaos, the Headmaster had just been defeated by the weight of his own past.
"I told you you'd end up on your knees, crying at my feet..." I commented from the gloom.
Dumbledore did not even bother to turn his head to identify the source of the voice; he knew that drawn-out, cynical timbre perfectly. However, he preferred to dilate time for one more second, devorously drinking in the beautiful lie unfolding before his eyes. His face remained creased by a tragic smile while Ariana's hands kept yanking at his silver beard with childish persistence; not even the physical pain of the tugs possessed the strength required to tear that smile away.
Witnessing that peculiar reunion stirred a glimmer of genuine emotion, but I had a tight schedule. With a subtle and fluid movement of my wand, the wooden horse lying on the carpet instantly sparked to life; its carved legs neighed with a hollow echo and it began to trot in cheerful circles around the girl. Ariana's attention fragmented instantly; she let go of her older brother's silver strands and crawled enthusiastically after the enchanted toy.
"You are a monstrously cruel being..." the old man pronounced, without removing his pupils from the girl's silhouette. "But, even in my misfortune... I cannot avoid the humiliating need to thank you for allowing me to behold this."
"Cruel? I don't consider my methods to qualify as cruelty, Headmaster." (Red)
"Playing in this manner with the feelings of an old man is the very definition of perversion," Dumbledore declared, pushing himself up with a slowness that denoted each of his years. "But the past irrevocably belongs to the shadows... There is no need for you to prolong this illusion any further."
"You are mistaken, Headmaster. This is no mirage, nor a mental projection. She is a person of legitimate flesh, bone, and magical flow."
"In that case... I beg you to remove this child from my sight," the Headmaster continued, making an effort to piece his composure back together before deigning to look at me dead on. "I only hope, for the sake of your own soul, that you have not subjected or modified the body of some innocent girl through unforgivable magic just to structure this theater."
"I believe your paranoia is clouding you... What I have brought before you is no modified shell. It is your legitimate sister."
"The dead do not return, Red," Dumbledore stated, and his voice adopted that dogmatic rigidity of one who has spent nearly a century absorbing a tragedy. "You may try to hoodwink me with ruses, you may use this apparition to fracture my will and force my persuasion... But life has taught me through blood and fire that the past stays in the past. Although I admit you have recreated her with an anatomical fidelity bordering on the spine-chilling... I know this is not Ariana. It cannot be her."
He advanced with a faltering step toward the center of the office to gather the Elder Wand from the floor, but as he wielded it once more, his fingers completely lacked the military determination and firmness with which he had arrived.
"And that is where your great mistake lies, Headmaster... Because what you have sitting on your carpet is the authentic, biological, and spiritual Ariana Dumbledore. Although... I concede your initial premise is correct: this is not the Ariana Dumbledore you allowed to die in that three-way duel." (Red)
There was no need for the old man's features to register a single twitch to perceive how the framework of his heart constricted under unbearable tension. That statement, which by any academic standard would have been dismissed as the delusion of a charlatan, found an echo in the most hidden and incredulous facet of his intellect, disrupting the order of his mental defenses.
"Would you have the kindness to break down the meaning of your words for this ignorant old man?" Dumbledore inquired. He removed his half-moon spectacles with slightly trembling fingers and pulled out a silk handkerchief to clean them—a deliberate and protocol-driven attempt to simulate a serenity he completely lacked.
"To explain it to you in simple terms... she is the Ariana from an alternative timeline," I declared with a relaxed smile, leaning my back against the office's stone column. "Imagine that I designed a cosmic-scale Time-Turner, traveled to a past, and extracted her from her reality before destiny claimed her. She is alive, Albus."
"You did WHAT?!" The old man roared with a power so heartbreaking that the air in the tower vibrated.
Ariana startled at the thunderous sound; her features contorted and her eyes filled with tears, on the verge of bursting into a cry of childish panic.
"Calm down, Headmaster. I said to think as if I had done it, not that that was the exact methodology... It is a considerably more complex framework," I intervened, waving my wand lightly to endow the toys with even more eye-catching movements, managing to dissipate the girl's fright before the tears could spill. "What I did was enter a castrated timeline. An isolated segment, completely foreign to our continuity. I did not alter a single millimeter of the space-time in which we operate."
Dumbledore's incredulity was total—a cognitive paralysis so absolute that his jaw tightened without managing to articulate a coherent retort. On its own, the mere theory of a temporal displacement of such magnitude was considered a myth barely brushed upon by the most secret investigations of the Ineffables in the Department of Mysteries. But for the student sitting in front of him to claim credit for turning it into a consummated fact...
"You mean to say you kidnapped this Ariana from her own reality!" the old man reproached, and his tone became tinged with a bitter resentment, with a protective fury as his mind finished absorbing that the flesh before him shared his own blood. "You tore her away from her family... You had no right to perpetrate such an aberration. How do you expect me to sympathize or negotiate with someone capable of stripping another version of Albus and Aberforth of their own sister?"
"As I already mentioned to you, Albus, it was not a conventional chronological trip," I replied with an exasperating casualness, downplaying the matter. "That timeline possesses a specific origin and demise. It lacks a future. It only gains existence when one is inside it, and it vanishes from reality the instant it is abandoned. It is an orphan loop."
The implications of my words embedded themselves into the Headmaster's psyche. His heart, subjected to such a violent emotional bombardment in such a ridiculously short span of time, threatened to give out under the pressure—a physical collapse that could well have cost him his life right then and there.
"This is a complete, functional Ariana Dumbledore, exempt from consequences," I declared. With a subtle magnetic tug of my magic, I drew the girl's body toward my position.
The movement was so sudden that Dumbledore was a millisecond away from unleashing a torrent of fire against me to defend her, but he froze mid-gesture upon witnessing the little girl's reaction: Ariana simply clung to my robes in a spontaneous embrace with absolute familiarity.
"We are going to eat cake, Ari..." I murmured to her softly.
The girl let go of me immediately, running with childish enthusiasm toward the office desk, eager for the banquet. At that moment, I turned my pupils toward the old man, pinning him with a look heavy with irony.
"And yes, I concede that perhaps she isn't the Ariana Dumbledore you remember... For the time being. If memory serves, there exists a certain proscribed ritual in the region of India that ancient wizards used when one of two identical twins perished prematurely... And don't you think, Headmaster, that this Ariana and yours bear an identical symmetry to that of two blood twins?"
I sketched a mischievous smile loaded with double meanings as I began to walk at a leisurely pace toward the table, leaving the question suspended in the air like a verdict.
That final suggestion was the coup de grâce for the wizard's intellect. Silence reigned in the tower once more during a few dense and endless seconds. If someone had assured Albus Dumbledore a few hours ago that he would show himself so docile, so stripped of combative will before a student, and even that his soul would experience the humiliating need to beg for more information... he would have laughed with contempt. Now, stripped of his dogmas, he had no choice but to accept the conditions of the board and try to rescue the final tatters of his institutional dignity.
"Come, Professor, sit down. We have an extensive itinerary to debate..." I invited him, taking a seat next to an Ariana who was already waiting, swinging her legs with excitement. "I took far too much trouble to guarantee that this would be a friendly chat. You have no idea how much it cost me to find your house." I accompanied the final words with a playful reproach.