James remembered. “Because Black is where all the other colours come together. It’s every hue in one.”
Harry smiled. “That’s as true as our minds can understand. Black is the junction of all the other facets of humanity, where they combine and blend together. Black is the alchemy of love and hate, cowardice and courage, jealousy and intellect, revenge and redemption. It orders all the other colours and makes them into something cohesive, something larger and greater than the mere sum of their individual parts. The Black guardianship, James, is the element of Story.”
James blinked at his father, unsure if he had heard him properly.
Harry nodded again. “We think stories are mere letters on paper. Just words spoken into the air. But in a multi-universe of infinite possibilities, there is technically no such thing as fiction.
Somewhere down the line of the endless dimensions, every beautiful story is true. Our very lives may be some other universe’s favorite tales.”
James met his father’s smile with a tentative one of his own.
“So… this Book?”
Harry looked down at it again, his eyes clearing. “It’s the ultimate true story. Yours, mine, everyone’s, in every version of our world, where they all tie together into the greatest plotline of them all.
It’s not like the Loom in the Vault of Destinies. That is a mere recording of what happens. This Book is the future story that is yet to come, and the promise that it will all be worth it.”
James looked back down at the simple little Book. His intellectual mind found the idea preposterous on the very face of it.
How could all good stories be true? How could this little book contain them all? But his deeper mind, the mind that had once called upon his love’s hidden powers to save her life—to save it so that she could eventually find redemption for her own soul—understood completely.
“The only real fictions,” he said, trying out the idea, “are the ugliness, the pointless tragedies, the losses without resolutions. They are lies written into the world by hate. But hate is a mere vandal, sadness only graffiti on the architecture of glory. Someday, if we are careful with our charge, hate’s work will be erased. All of those unfinished details and loose threads and unsatisfying heartbreaks will find their resolution.
It will all be tied up in a perfect conclusion that redeems everything, erases all the losses, and compounds all the joys.”
Harry nodded. “Our charge is simply to assure that the Book remains open. To never assume that the last word has been written on a tragic chapter. To let the stories always go on, all drawing slowly to the universal and perfect conclusion that no single one of us can quite imagine. As long as the Book remains open… the storybook ending hasn’t yet been written.”
James wanted to touch the Book. He peered at it closely and realized that it wasn’t, in fact, completely empty after all. There were words there, forming and flowing, flitting like angel wings on the paper, almost but not quite invisible. He wanted to lean close, to try to read, but didn’t dare.
“This is a duty greater than either of us.”
“And yet,” Harry said, a little ruefully, “Men much smaller than you have borne it, and with hearts of pettiness and pride. For the stewardship of story does come with its benefit. There is just a bit more serendipity, a hint more luck, a touch of extra coincidental happenstance that somehow manages to always work in our favour, at least in the long run. I have known it in my life, even before learning of the Book. I expect you have as well.”
James nodded. With a wistful sigh, his eyes still on the not-quite-empty pages, he asked, “Tell me about the other two times you came into the Vault.”
Harry grew sober. “When Granddad died. I was very sad. I needed to see that there was still hope to be had. Hope for a future where even death might be obsolete.”
James looked back at his father now. “And the third time?”
Harry met his son’s gaze, his expression serious. “The Book called to me. Just as it called to you tonight, and for me to join you. It happened late during your seventh year of schooling. It was a dark time, if you recall. People were afraid, tormented by visions of doom. And no one was certain that they were mere visions. Many believed that the end was upon us. It was the night of the Triple-Six enigma when the story summoned me. And when I got here, when I opened the Vault, the Book was closed.”
James nearly gasped at the idea. He whispered, “But how is that possible?”
Harry shook his head gravely. “I don’t know how it happened, or why. No one had been inside the Vault. Perhaps the story closed on its own, simply because hope was so thin in the world. Perhaps some dark and inexplicable force had been involved, shutting the Book’s pages via its own evil fascinations. But the Book called to me, it’s custodian.
And when I arrived, I found that it wasn’t completely closed.” He smiled faintly. “There was a bookmark.”
He produced something else from the same pocket that had held the key. He offered it to James, delicately.
It was a chocolate frog card, beaten and dog-eared, its cardstock softened with age to the point of flimsiness. The portrait space on the front of the card was empty, but the banner beneath was still legible, if barely.
James read it.
Then he blinked and read it again.
He shook his head and looked helplessly at his father. “That’s…my name,” he said wonderingly, a little worriedly. “‘James Sirius Potter’.” He turned it over and saw a block of text, white on dark blue.
The first few lines read:
JAMES SIRIUS POTTER
Headmaster,
Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry,
Order of Merlin First Class, Double Awarded.
Son of the legend, and legend in his own right.
Famed for his pursuit and dispatch of the
villainous and dastardly cabal know as…
Harry covered the card with his hand, gently taking it back with a smile.
“The future, apparently,” he said, peering wryly at James over his glasses. “No one should know too much of their own. I don’t know how this came to be in the Story, keeping its place. But clearly, like the Book, your own story is not yet finished. Never finished. And tonight, a new chapter begins. The key is now your responsibility, as is the Vault and its Book.”
James nodded, although his mind was spinning, reeling. What could the chocolate frog card possibly mean? How could it have gotten into the Book, saving the proper place, from whatever distant, mysterious future was its origin?
He followed his father back out into the much more prosaic darkness of the cellar.
James closed the Vault door carefully. It was his duty now. He twisted the key back, relocking the cell and its strange talisman of hope.
With a shimmer of purple, the door vanished away again. James tugged the key out of the invisible keyhole.
He pocketed it, and patted the pocket, content to feel the small, powerful weight therein.
From that day forward, he kept the key with him at all times.