JAMES POTTER AND THE VAULT OF DESTINIES

is dead. As dead as the gazebo. As dead as her dolls back in the bedroom of the farmhouse. Izzy is dead, and I am the one who has killed her.

       'No,' I insist. It can't end this way! I made the right choice! I fought the darkest desires of my soul, and overcame them, all by myself, with no outside intervention. I chose good. Good owes me!

       'No…,' I say again, raising my voice, 'this isn't how it's supposed to turn out. You're supposed to be alive! This isn't how the story ends!' My voice is rising, both in pitch and volume. I stare down at the pathetic figure below me, refusing to believe what I see. Izzy's body lays in the center of the gazebo floor, soaked and limp, filthy on the rotten planks.

       'No!' I scream now, scooping the small body into my arms. 'NO!'

'Yes!' the voice in the backroom of my mind commands coldly. 'You cannot fight your destiny. You tried to in the chamber of the pool, and you tried to tonight, and yet… fate prevails! You and I are one! Give in to your powers. Embrace the paths you have opened. It is too late to turn back now. All that is left is power, but that is not a bad thing. In time, you will come to accept what happened here tonight. In time, you will be glad of it, for it makes you who you are, who you were meant to be from the very beginning. Fight it no more. You are tired of fighting, aren't you? Now, at the end, you see that fighting was always futile. Fighting your destiny only destroys you, and all that you love. Embrace it now. Embrace it, and perhaps destiny will repay you. After all, the path of power has many, many benefits…'

       I listen to the voice. I am helpless not to. For the first time, I listen, and I do not argue with it. The voice is right. There is no fighting my destiny. What had been meant to happen in the Chamber of Secrets had not been prevented, only postponed. I gained nothing by choosing good, succeeded only in raising the price that I must inevitably pay. Now, Izzy is dead, and good is annihilated. The voice is right. All that is left is the path of power.

       I stand slowly, lifting the light body of my murdered sister. I will bury her, in the woods, beneath the cairn that represents her. And then I will leave. I don't know where I will go or what I will do, but I have a strong feeling that those decisions will mysteriously take care of themselves. Suddenly, it is almost as if I am merely a passenger in my own mind. My body seems to move of its own accord, carrying me back along the dock, my sister's cold body dripping lake water in my arms. I am glad to give in. It is too hard to fight, too hard to think. Destiny has claimed me, and I am happy now to relinquish control to it. What is left now to fight for anyway?

       In the darkness overlooking the lake, the great old tree stands in Grandfather Warren's field, its leaves whispering like a thousand voices.

       Sometimes, I can still hear those voices. Even when I am awake.

       James dropped the last page onto the small sheaf of parchments. He was shaking and his forehead was beaded with sweat in the dark confines of the upper bunk. His mind raced as he considered the remarkable, inexplicable implications of the story.

       If any of it was true at all, then how had Petra performed the magic? In the story, she admitted that she had broken her own wand, for reasons James couldn't begin to guess. So how had she performed a feat as amazing as levitating a long-sunken gazebo out of a lake? Obviously, that part simply couldn't have actually happened. But then, James remembered the events of that very morning, remembered how Petra had simply closed her eyes, as if in deep thought, and then, a moment later, how Henrietta's harness chain had magically reattached to the ship, allowing them to escape the pirates' trap.

       James tried to remember if Petra had had her wand in her hand at the time and realized he couldn't. Frankly, he couldn't remember seeing Petra's wand even once since her arrival at the Potter home, months earlier. But that was simply crazy, wasn't it? No witch or wizard could do magic without their wand, at least not anything specific or meaningful. There had to be a reasonable explanation for it, and James had a strong feeling that it all revolved around the question of which parts of Petra's dream story were true and which parts were just that: a dream.

I think she asks me to come because she needs me here to prove that the dreams aren't true, Izzy had said the night before, while Petra had still been writing. She needs me here to prove that I'm still alive.

       In James' memory, Izzy's words mingled with those of Professor Trelawney, the horrible prophecy she had made on the morning that he had left Hogwarts: The fates have aligned… night will fall, and from it, there will be no dawn, no dawn, save the dawn of forever fire…

       Strangely, powerfully, James felt a deep sense of fear and doom. It hovered over him like a shroud, almost like the pall of a Dementor. He shook himself, and then, almost desperately, tapped the parchments again with his wand, closing them once again into the seamless, featureless packet, hiding Petra's words, shutting off the voice of Professor Trelawney in his memory.

       He jammed the packet of parchment under his pillow and leapt down to the floor, hungry for light, for the sane babble of the voices of his friends and family. He very nearly slammed the door to his stateroom as he entered the narrow corridor, heading for the galley. Ralph and Lucy would be there, as would Albus and Lily, his parents, Neville Longbottom, and the rest. What James wanted most was to tell someone what he had read, but of course he couldn't. He had promised Petra that he would keep her secret.

       Perhaps she would be in the galley, though, as well. Maybe he could tell her, and ask her about what was in the dream story, find out how much of it was real, and how much (hopefully most of it!) was just a dream. Suddenly, he wanted that more than anything.

       But Petra wasn't in the galley. A cursory look around the decks and the narrow corridors revealed no sign of either her or Izzy. Apparently they were in bed already.

Later, however, James would wonder otherwise.

       The next morning dawned hazy and bright, still as a tomb. The ocean was nearly flat, with barely a breath of breeze to disturb it, so that the wake of the Gwyndemere lay like a highway behind her, spreading into the shimmering distance. Henrietta plowed on, her great scaly head occasionally breaking the surface and flinging fans of water all around.

'The doldrums,' Barstow explained to James, Ralph, and Lucy after breakfast. The four stood on the bow, watching another mate operate the steering pole on its brass chair. 'Technically, it's where a bunch of huge Atlantic currents all meet and cancel each other out, making a sort of dead space in the middle of the ocean. But it's more'n that if you ask an old sailor like me. It's a cursed place. If Davey Jones really does have a locker, it's right below our feet, fathoms down, in the still darkness of the deepest deeps.'

       'Cheerful stuff, that,' Ralph commented, shaking his head.

       'It is pretty queer, when you think about it,' Lucy said, leaning on the railing and looking down toward the shadow of the ship on the rushing, leaden water. 'It's almost like we're floating on a cloud, high up over some alien, hidden landscape. Who knows what wild creatures live down there, not even knowing there is a surface, much less magical ships that can scoot along the top of it, sitting on the mysterious boundary between the air above and the secret world below. Puts things into perspective, in a way, don't you think?'

       Merlin had approached along with Harry, Neville Longbottom, and Percy Weasley. The Headmaster smiled faintly at Lucy but didn't say anything.

       'So,' James asked, looking between the three men, 'where were you lot yesterday morning when we were getting squeezed between three pirate ships like a walnut in a giant