They Apparated into Wizarding London on the tail of a chill northern wind that tangled in their robes and hair like mischievous magpies. They hurried to the battered phone booth of the Visitor's Entrance and squeezed inside. Harry found himself squashed against one grimy glass wall with Hermione and Draco pressing against his back. Ron was glued against the opposite wall.

"Hurry it up. I'm getting suffocated in here," Ron complained. "I hate going through the Visitor's Entrance."

"Hold your Thestrals," Tonks muttered, flipping back a sweat-tangled lock of flaming hair and jabbing Harry with a sharp elbow in the process. She stared fixedly at the seemingly-broken phone. After a moment of deliberation she threw up her hands, this time hitting Ron on the back of the head, and declared, "Damn it, I can never remember that stupid number now. Can't they make up their minds and just stick with one number instead of changing it every week?"

"Ow!" Ron yelped.

Draco quietly reached over and opened the door of the dilapidated telephone booth.

"Stop that and get back in here," Tonks commanded him with irritation. Draco reluctantly shut the door again, grumbling softly under his breath. Tonks took the receiver off the hook, balanced it on her head, and dialed the single number three.

"Operator," came the clear cool voice of the woman that Harry still remembered from Fifth Year.

"When'd they put that in?" Ron whispered loudly.

"When we renovated the defense system," Tonks replied. "Quiet." Then in a louder voice she answered, "Visitors to the Ministry of Magic."

"Visitors, welcome to the Ministry of Magic. Please state your name and business," the voice said.

"Nymphadora Tonks, escorting Ron Weasley, Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Draco Malfoy to the Department of Mysteries," Tonks responded clearly.

"Visitors, please take your badge and attach it to the front of your robes. Auror Tonks, please read this week's password carefully. It will melt in exactly ninety-three seconds."

They each took a badge from the coin slot and pinned it to their robes. Tonks retrieved a squirming jellyskink from the same slot and held it up by the tail with a grimace of distaste. "Come on, change," she muttered, and shook it a little. The upside-down jellyskink scrabbled madly for purchase with its four tiny feet, trying to twist its tail out of Tonk's hold. "Oh no, you don't," Tonk muttered, and shook it again. The brown and tan stripes slowly faded from the jellyskink's body, leaving its midsection transparent. Tonks peered at the revealed password and grinned with what seemed like relief. The jellyskink managed to twist itself out of her hand and land with a plop on the floor. It immediately turned completely translucent and melted through the phone booth. "All right, let's go," Tonks said. The outer pavement rose up as they descended into the dark interior of the underground Ministry building.

They emerged into the Ministry's main hall and were immediately confronted by a bored-looking Auror who flicked his wand in front of them, igniting their badges with heatless flame. "Go ahead," he waved them through after the fire had died.

They stepped together down the hall, circling around the golden fountain with its group of statues. Harry couldn't help but smile a little at the figures that had replaced those destroyed in the fight for the Prophesy almost ten years ago. In place of the condescendingly noble wizard was a man with rakishly long hair, holding a wand pointing straight ahead. His robes were tattered, but carved with an exquisite sense of motion that made them flutter in an invisible wind. There was no smile on his face, but his golden eyes were alive with challenge. The other statues, too, had changed. All of them had been crafted with that unparalleled sense of life, of hidden motion, that Harry could almost believe them capable of stepping down from their pedestals to battle evil with or without the aid of magic.

Up ahead, Tonks was arguing with the guard. "But they're with me," she protested loudly, heedless of the number of people waiting impatiently in line behind her.

"Ms. Tonks, you know the procedure as well as I do," the guard stoically stood his ground.

The wizards and witches busily traversing the lobby were starting to look in their direction, drawn no doubt by the sparking ends of Tonks' suddenly neon-green hair, which were waving madly around her face like bright strands of seaweed in a restless current. Harry quickly stepped up and presented his wand to the guard. "It's okay, Tonks," he murmured quietly.

"But—" Tonks protested.

"If he has to make an exception for us, who else will he have to make an exception for?" Hermione asked reasonably. She and Draco presented their wands to the guard for inspection.

"Not that it'd do them any good anyway if You-Know-Who really came calling," Draco muttered snidely under his breath.

Tonks only responded mildly, "You might be surprised."

Finally, they were allowed to pass through to the lifts. They descended through the floors of the ministry with Kingsley Shacklebolt, who entered with what looked like a miniature pig tucked under one arm, winked, and then proceeded to ignore them completely, and a barefoot paled-eyed witch dressed all in black, who stared abstractly at the ceiling with huge unblinking eyes throughout the ride and exited at Level Two.

"That was an Auror?" Draco questioned with raised eyebrows as the lift began to descend again.

Tonks shrugged. "Came out of the northern bogs a few months ago and asked to be Auror-tested. She managed to pass all of our tests with high scores, though she wouldn't tell us where she went to school. She's also a natural at Memory Charms, even if she can never remember to put on her shoes."

The lift halted at the bottom level, and they stepped into the corridor leading to the Department of Mysteries. They stopped in front of the plain black door, looking expectantly at Tonks.

"All right then. Password. Um, right." She took a deep breath. "She sells seashells by the seashore; the shells she sells are surely seashells, so if she sells shells on the seashore, I'm sure she sells seashore shells!" she declared in a strangely-accented voice that had the others wincing.

For a moment everyone held their breath. Then the little door swung open in front of them, and they were through.

"Glad it was just the seashells this time," Tonks commented cheerfully. "The one about the madly meeping Meermupple I can never do in less than three tries. The Americans do such strange things to their A's and U's that I can never keep it straight."

"Seashells," Draco muttered. "You're pitting seashells and bad American against the most powerful Dark Lord in five centuries."

"Well, not just that, of course," Tonks replied, leading them into the black circular room with its shimmering floor and ring of unmarked doors. As soon as the door closed behind them, the ground shook and the walls began to whirl around in a dizzying circle.

"Everyone go stand in front of a door," Tonks directed them. "On my command, open your door and tell me if you have one with a waterfall." The walls stopped spinning. Hermione, Ron, and Draco obeyed. Harry, his heart pounding, walked forward to stand in front of the door directly opposite the entrance. "All right, ready? One, two, open!"

They each opened a door. Harry stared through the doorway into a black void filled with bright dots of light that swirled together to form spinning disks and wheels and spirals. He gazed at it with wide-eyed fascination, awed by its beauty.

"Anyone?" Tonks asked loudly.

There was a crash from one of the rooms, quickly followed by the slamming of the door. "No, but I think someone's experiment got loose," Draco replied dryly, his wand in his hand.

"Ron, Hermione, Harry, close your doors," Tonks instructed. "Let's give it another try."

Again the floor shook and the wall spun. The next door which stopped in front of Harry appeared exactly the same as the others, with one difference: the door was locked.

Harry touched the black door with the tips of his fingers, puzzled. It felt familiar, warm, almost alive, but he could not quite pinpoint the feeling. And yet he was almost sure—it suddenly felt almost like... A gentle sound whispered softly at the edges of his hearing, a voice, a lullaby.

Quite suddenly Harry knew exactly what lay beyond the door. Albus had once said that it was a door kept locked at all times, because of the force so wonderful and terrible that resided within. But now he knew that the thing inside was neither weapon nor treasure, as he had once thought. He whispered softly to the door under his breath, and heard the small click as the lock disengaged and light began to seep out from beneath the door.

"All right, one more time!" Tonks called.

When the doors stopped spinning this time, Harry gazed quietly through the doorway into the room that had so often haunted his dreams for the last ten years. It was exactly as he remembered it, an ancient crumbling archway standing in the center of a silent amphitheatre, hung with its tattered veil of black. A thousand nights of imagining, of sleepless planning and tortured hope grated sharply into the reality in front of him and froze him where he stood.

"Here!" Hermione shouted excitedly somewhere to his right. Footsteps crossing the room followed, but Harry did not turn around to see. Instead, he was tracing the movement of the veil, straining to catch the shapes pressing against it. He took a step inside.

"Harry?" Ron called from behind him.

Harry stopped, eyes still struggling useless to pierce that black curtain hanging between their two worlds. Sirius?

"Harry!" Ron called again, a note of impatience in his voice.

Harry strained towards the archway, but no reply came in answer to his call. He stood very, very still for a moment, his head bowed, then spun around and closed the door gently after him.

Ron was waiting for him outside the room Hermione had found. They slipped inside to join the others.

A gentle glow like the moon's path on the dark sea emanated from white marble walls into the windowless gloom of the room they had just entered. The light revealed a circular curtain of water falling from the ceiling to obscure the center of the room from view. It splashed musically somewhere far beneath them, into an unseen abyss below the marble floors.

"Close the door," Tonks instructed, as she drew her wand and murmured a quiet charm.

The water parted smoothly, gradually revealing the circular dais standing at the very center of the room. On the dais gleamed a tiny golden harp.

"It's beautiful," Hermione murmured quietly into the reverent silence.

Tonks' second charm elevated a block of marble in the empty space between the dais and the rest of the room. "You can touch the harp, but don't play it," Tonks instructed forcefully, as they crossed the pathway and approached the harp.

"Why not?" Ron asked curiously.

"Because...to hear it once means that you'll pine to hear it again until the day you die," Harry answered softly. Then he blinked and shook his head a little dazedly as Ron stared at him. "Sorry, Ron. I just...I don't know where that came from..." he trailed off uncertainly.

"Harry, mate, what did you have for lunch?" Ron asked him very seriously.

"Lunch," Harry repeated blankly.

"Lunch," Ron nodded. "You know, mashed potatoes, roast chicken, corned beef...pumpkin juice? Because whatever you had, I am not having it for dinner. In fact, we should probably make sure the house-elves haven't been dipping into the butterbeer."

"I think...I missed lunch," Harry blinked owlishly. "What time is it?"

"Four," Draco supplied. "And we missed lunch because we were buried down with Snape's books. That means you're treating for dinner, Potter."

"Look, can we please get back on topic?" Hermione interrupted impatiently. "You guys can think about stuffing your face later."

"Harry's right, though," Tonks said thoughtfully. "Very strong, very ancient magics are woven into this harp—some say by a magical race that disappeared millennia ago. Only a very few have been known to be able to actually play the harp. The rest are driven mad by it."

"Just wonderful," Ron muttered. "So how is this thing supposed to give us a clue to the riddle if we can't even use it for what it's meant to be used for?"

"Maybe there's something else you're supposed to see," Tonks shrugged.

"What did the Aurors think it meant?" Hermione asked curiously.

"They think there might be a clue in the history of the Harp rather than in the Harp itself," Tonks replied. "So a group of them are researching the various bearers of the Harp, with a focus on Taliesin himself."

"But that could take days!" Hermione exclaimed.

"Time that we don't have," Draco added.

"Well, that's why I brought you down here," Tonks nodded. "Maybe you'll see something that others haven't."

They stepped closer to the harp in a circle, but only Harry reached out a hand to touch it. "It's different," he murmured absently, tracing the graceful motif of grape vines carved into the polished, sun-gold wood with reverent fingertips. "Taliesin's harp was...it didn't look like this." The harp from his dream—Taliesin's harp—had been tall and majestic, its intricately-carved frame glowing beneath the night sky as if with reflected starlight. The harp standing before him would have fit into the curve of his arm. Its beauty was of the simple elegance of clean, flowing lines, not of the rich magnificence of elaborate carvings made in silver and moonlight.

Tonks did not seem surprised by his murmured observation. "Of course," she replied matter-of-factly. "You wouldn't expect every bard to be like Taliesin, would you? This harp has been passed through many hands and through many centuries after Taliesin's death. The last bard to bear this harp was one of the last Irish harpists, Toirdhealbhach Ó Cearbhalláin, almost three centuries ago."

"Toirdhealbhach Ó..." Hermione repeated incredulously. "Turlough O'Carolan? But...wasn't he a—"

"Drunken old blind man?" Tonks finished cheerfully. "Yeah, he was an old lunatic who wandered around the Irish countryside writing songs for his friends—he was rather better known as a composer than a performer, you know. But he was a genius at writing those catchy little tunes that would have you tapping your feet without you even knowing it. The harp's been changing its shape to fit its bearer. Carrying around a harp the size of Taliesin's would probably have killed Cearbhalláin outright. Since his death it's been kept here, in the Department of Mysteries."

"Why here?" Draco asked.

"Because it hasn't found a new bearer," Tonks explained. "The harp was made to choose its harpist. But it hasn't for a while now, and we don't know why. So we're keeping it here, to protect the people who might be tempted to play it without knowing the danger. One day when it decides to belong to someone, it'll simply vanish and reappear somewhere else in another shape."

"But do we really know that this is the 'gift' the riddle meant?" Ron questioned. "Couldn't they have left behind other things, like spells or talking trees, or...or sacred rocks!"

"Sacred rocks?" Draco snickered.

"So there might've been five gifts, or ten, or..."

"Albus said there were two," Harry supplied absently.

"Two? So what's the other one?" Ron looked to Hermione expectantly.

Hermione blushed a little. "I don't know," she admitted. "I was never all that interested in fairy tales."

Ron gaped. "D-did you just say that you don't know something?"

"I think I just heard the foundations of Weasley's world crashing down around him," Draco smirked.

"The Aurors hadn't heard of a second gift either, until the Headmaster mentioned it," Tonks offered. "Most of them still don't think it really exists, actually."

Harry continued trailing his hand down the curve of the harp's frame along the path of the vines. In his dream the wide flowing leaves had been flaming feathers soaring on an invisible wind. In his dream he had touched those gleaming strings, and heard the harp's song as the Lios Alfar or the bard Taliesin might have heard it, beautiful and fleeting as a lost memory. What would the harp sound like here, in this place that had never felt the touch of moonlight or wind, in this world that remembered the Lios Alfar and their gifts only as wistful tales of fancy?

Harry snatched his hand away from the strings, shaking a little at how near he had been to giving in to temptation. No wonder the Ministry had kept it locked away for all these years. He took a deep breath and opened his eyes to look at the garland of leaves his fingers had found at the base of the harp. There, curled along a trailing vine, was a glittering cluster of tiny ruby grapes.

Rubies and silver and moonlight. "That's—" Harry took in a fast breath as he suddenly recalled the feeling of recognition from his dream. If a harp could fit its shape to the hand that held it, could a sword? Stunned, he didn't hear Hermione calling his name until Ron lightly slapped his shoulder. "I think...you might be right," he told Draco. "We need to see the Headmaster."