[HP]Timepiece Countdown

VOL.3

尽秋

ENDLESS AUTUMN

After graduating from Hogwarts, Harry became an Auror as he wished.

Throughout the Auror Office, and indeed the entire British Ministry of Magic, the hunt for a dark wizard whose whereabouts are mysterious is the top priority.

But amidst the turmoil, Harry actually found Voldemort holding the hand of his girlfriend on the streets of Paris.

The Dark Lord was quite frank about this.after all……

"The best thing we can do is never see each other again."

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"...With all due respect, asking the giant to control the strength to prevent the ants from being trampled to death is a challenge in itself."

As soon as he heard this sentence, Harry knew that he was dreaming again.

It was a large oval-shaped room, and the layout was almost the same as the dark room in Harry's trial, even the lighting was similar.Probably no wizard court in any country likes an environment that is too bright, he guessed, and poked his probe hard at the farthest position behind him on the left——

Exactly the same result as the previous attempts, it is still empty.

The trial bench, jury, and gallery were filled with wizards, and the court clerk took his place.Everyone was whispering, and there was no shortage of low-pitched arguments.Occasionally, words like "Muggle", "bad luck", and "justifiable self-defense" floated into his ears, but Harry couldn't hear them clearly, because the owner of the memory he was in had been staring at the side front door.

Suddenly, there was a creaking sound from the door frame, and everyone fell silent for an instant.

A blond woman enters, and the door closes silently behind her.With her head down, without looking at anyone, she went straight to the front of everyone and sat down on the chair reserved for the accused.

In the middle of the trial seat, an old man with gray hair and serious expression coughed lightly, announcing the official opening of the trial.The first question was of little importance, and Harry, who had already heard it, didn't pay attention.Like many people, he was watching the accused.The face of the blond woman was hidden in the shadow of her long hair, and she was slightly bent, her hands on her knees were shackled, but her feet were not.

"...so you don't deny that you killed the male Muggle, Armand Bernard, who lived near the Alexandre III Bridge?" one of the jurors asked the question that everyone cared about.

"Indeed." The woman replied, motionless.

There was a muffled gasp in the courtroom, and someone moved uneasily in the narrow chair.

"Could you please explain the whole story, Ms. Duran?" Another juror immediately asked, "After all, as far as we know, you have no previous bad records?"

There was something palpable in his words, and he thought she had something to say, Harry thought.

But the blond woman remained indifferent. "Because I made a mistake," she said, in a flat tone. "I tried to establish a romantic relationship with Armand, but this attempt turned out to be my stupidity. Due to the existence of the law of secrecy, I cannot tell Armand Mann revealed my real identity. This made Armand have some doubts that I was not sincere to him. But he was completely infatuated with me, and he couldn't leave me. I didn't catch his dangerous thoughts in time, which As a result, I woke up one day and found myself tied to our bed. Armand illegally imprisoned me."

The uneasiness in the room grew louder, mixed with the anger of some people. "How dare he!"

"I told him not to do it. Many patients are waiting for me to go back, and their condition cannot be delayed." The woman continued as if completely unaffected, "but he didn't believe it. He said that he had searched all the hospitals in Paris, and there was no one." A doctor named Freya Duran. He thought I had fabricated a false identity to approach him, intending to abandon him after taking his money and affection."

"But of course you wouldn't do that, would you?" A female juror asked, Yuanyuan's face was full of sympathy, "I read the case file, and it says that you two are..."

"Soul mate, yes." Freya Duran's voice appeared for the first time to be shaken, "I thought he would believe in the true love of soul mates for the other half as much as I did, but it turns out that I thought too much Too easy."

"What happened next?" the previous juror continued to ask, his body leaned forward slightly, his movements and tone were full of concern, "How did you escape?"

Freya Duran swallowed silently, as if what she was going to say later made her feel difficult. "Armand took all my belongings, including the wand. But he didn't know what the stick was for, and he didn't know that the wizard's magic power was not only cast by the wand. I mentioned it to him several times To leave, it ended in a fight every time. The last time, he tried to force me. It hurt so much..."

Her voice dropped, almost choked, more like suffocation, the brokenness and pain in it couldn't be more obvious, "I want to stop him, I want to protect myself from harm. The thought may be too strong, and he— bang He flew out of me and smashed the ceiling. When he fell again, his head hit the marble statue that decorated the room."

It must have been quite a tragic sight, Harry's body trembled uncontrollably.Then he remembered what was going to happen next, and turned his head quickly——

"As we promised the Muggle government before, it's not your fault..."

"With all due respect, asking the giant to control the strength of the ants so that they don't step on them to death is in itself a difficult task."

These two sentences came out almost at the same time.Originally, everyone was immersed in that kind of righteous indignation, but the speech in the last row of auditorium made them look at each other in dismay.Everyone turned their heads in unison, but only saw the indistinct figure of a man in the darkness.

"Silence," said the old man at the beginning dissatisfied, "the auditorium has no right to speak."

The man didn't respond.This was taken as a tacit sign, and almost everyone turned back to Ms. Freya Duran in the dock.Harry knew she had lifted her head now, revealing startlingly blue eyes and a startlingly beautiful face.He gasped slightly when he saw it for the first time, the Muggle named Bernard was obviously justified in being crazy about her; but what surprised him even more was the sentence——

Not just content, but people.

It was Voldemort's voice.

The owner of this memory was one of the few people still paying attention to the gallery, and Harry was able to look into that corner for a while.In fact, he didn't hear any sound, and couldn't see the other person's face clearly, but he just felt that the Dark Lord was sneering at the old man's request.It doesn't even take reasoning to verify this, after all, the Dark Lord is that kind of person; but more importantly, why did the Dark Lord, who has been invisible since the escape from Azkaban, attend this trial himself?

After the judge acquitted Freya Duran, Harry woke up rubbing his aching forehead.What he saw was a completely unfamiliar ceiling, and he stared at it for a long time before he realized that he had arrived in the city where the trial was held in his dream, Paris, France.

"Freya Duran graduated from Beauxbatons College, and her first job was offered by the Department of Mysteries of the French Ministry of Magic. After working for several years, she quit her job, and it didn't take long to become the most sought-after therapist in all of France. And Unlike other therapists, her patients are almost all wizards suffering from the death of their soul mates, including the current French Minister of Magic. I have sent someone to her and she will be happy to help you. But before we can Before the meeting, that happened, and she was temporarily imprisoned. By the end of the trial, she had changed her mind and declared that there must be no Muggle-friendly wizards among her patients."

The words Dumbledore had said to him before leaving echoed in Harry's head.Dumbledore is so famous, everyone knows his attitude towards Muggles, and Duran is among them.

"If the facts are what Duran said, then her change of attitude is understandable. But if Tom intervened, the nature of the matter changed completely. Anyway, after nearly three years, we finally found out that he It is impossible to give up easily.”

Harry knew Dumbledore's subtext, and the headmaster worried that Freya Duran had been recruited by Voldemort.Considering what use she might be useful to him, he thought it a likely guess.

After all, he had expended a lot of energy to learn and maintain Occlumency, and it was barely enough to keep his body and mind on a shaky boundary. If he was not careful, he might return to the bad situation he was in fifth grade.And Duran is not only good at repairing broken soul connections, but also exerts invisible influence on powerful figures like the French Minister of Magic through his professional advantages. He is indeed a target worth spending time on.

At least the Dark Lord must think that she is more worthy of attention than Harry...

Harry got up sullenly, washing himself up to stop himself from thinking about it.This quickly proved to be the right choice, as he had barely gotten himself sorted when someone knocked on his door. "Are you up, Harry?" said Kingsley Shacklebolt's voice. "Breakfast has been brought."

"Right away!" Harry snapped back, checking the rows of brass buttons on the Auror uniform one last time.

"Hurry up, we can't be late when we meet our French counterparts on the first day." Kingsley said, and the sound of pounding footsteps gradually faded away.

Of course Harry knew.Because of Dumbledore's secret push, Kingsley was able to bring him, who was still in the internship period, to the European Auror Exchange Conference held in Paris.It was a matter of routine, and he was not qualified nor interested in the meeting itself.However, Voldemort had only appeared here not long ago, and they could only seize the nearest and most legitimate opportunity.

If he had known that Aurors would follow the rules when going abroad, he should have asked for leave directly and found an illegal door key from the White Cliffs of Dover, which would be much more efficient...

Harry couldn't help the slander, but at the same time he knew it could only be slander.He was the only one in his class at Hogwarts who had entered the Auror office, yes, but it was far from being able to deal with a lot of dark wizards alone.His mission this time is to try to find clues about Voldemort or the Death Eaters, and at the same time it is best not to confront them head-on...

With this in mind, Harry left the room and found everyone there when he walked into the dining room.He nodded slightly to Kingsley and Tonks, took the last available seat, and got himself croissants, poached eggs, and vegetable soup.

Fifteen minutes later, a group of people hurried through the labyrinth of narrow streets in the sixth arrondissement of Paris, and walked to a quiet square hidden behind the German church.There are four tall paulownia trees in the center of the small square, surrounded by a slender stone sculpture of a fountain.Kingsley stepped forward first, carefully looking around.After making sure that no Muggles in the surrounding residential buildings were paying attention to them, he motioned the other three to approach him with his eyes.

"Incanté, Envouté, Conjuré."

Following this command, many living branches suddenly emerged between the stone floor tiles.They grow very fast, and in a short while they are connected to each other into tall cages.Then the elevator appeared, slowly descending with a group of four people.After a moment of darkness, their eyes suddenly brightened——

The hall of the French Ministry of Magic has a tall dome like a palace, and bright light shines in through the glass painted with complex magic patterns and symbols.It couldn't be real sunlight, but it sure looked grand.Under the dome are several arcades facing different directions, connected by a circular corridor.The ring corridor is divided into several floors. Looking down from the hollow part, the staff below are either talking or walking, and their busyness seems to be almost the same as that of the British Ministry of Magic.

"I like their decor better," Tonks said behind Harry's back, almost startling him. "At least they don't have that condescending statue."

Harry turned his head and found that Kingsley was communicating with the front desk not far away in broken French. "Perhaps," he said absently, remembering the centaur, goblin, and house-elf in the halls of the British Department of Magic all adoringly looking up at the wizard's solid gold statue, and had to admit that Tonks had a point.

"I know you're bored, too," Tonks said again, lowering her voice this time. "A meeting! Isn't the best thing Aurors should do?"

Harry nodded wildly.Only he and Dumbledore knew that Voldemort had entered the French Ministry of Magic. He could not explain to Tonks the reason for his listlessness.It's a few days until the trial, and if Voldemort is gone...

"...Come here, you guys!"

Kingsley's voice sounded suddenly, and Harry and Tonks turned around at the same time.To Harry's surprise, Kingsley stopped explaining their visit with gestures, because a familiar woman was standing beside him. "I'm sorry," she said to Kingsley with a smile, she couldn't understand the accent in English at all, "the wizard at the front desk asked for leave today, and the substitute is not very clear about the registration process for international reception."

"It's okay." Kingsley replied, his expression showed that he recognized her, "Thank you for your help, Ms. Duran." Then, he waved the shiny metal breastplate in his hand at Harry and Tonks, "We can go in."

Following his words, Freya Duran also turned to look at them.I don't know if it was Harry's illusion, but when she saw him, her eyes flickered imperceptibly.