Prologue
**Author's note: Hi, I'm just writing this for fun. Just to avoid burnout, writing my main fanfic. This is just for a laugh, something for me to write as I'm in bed, came up with it and thought it was cool, so, no real plans, but if anyone has ideas for what they wanna see, etc. Let me know and I'll see bout writing it in**
The air grew colder as they descended.
Each step down the spiral staircase seemed to mute the world above — the clatter of boots softened, the hum of magic faded, even the light from their wands dimmed unnaturally against the dark stone walls. There was no conversation. There hadn't been since they passed the sealed gate to Sublevel V — the floor that didn't officially exist.
Alaric Valeor led the procession, his long midnight-blue coat drifting behind him like a shadow. His face was calm, unreadable. Some mistook that for arrogance — those who didn't know the difference between still water and deep water.
Behind him came three Unspeakables, each with masks of spun silver and robes bound with threadless seams. They had worked with Alaric for six months — testing theoretical frameworks, reverse-engineering runic behavior, studying every surviving mention of the Mirror of Dismoria in forbidden texts. And still, they hesitated now.
The door at the bottom was not a door in the usual sense.
It was a pane of onyx glass, six feet tall and utterly seamless, embedded into the wall like a dark star. It didn't shimmer. It didn't pulse. It simply… was.
Alaric reached out and touched his palm to it.
For a heartbeat, the darkness rippled beneath his hand like black water. Then it vanished, folding inward with a whisper.
They entered the chamber in silence.
It was a perfect circle — a room of obsidian mirrors and no corners, no edges, no sense of scale. The walls reflected infinitely, swallowing their torchlight into endless recursion. At the center, atop a carved plinth of silver-veined marble, stood the Mirror of Dismoria. It resembled the Mirror of Erised only in that it, too, was tall and ancient.
But its surface was wrong.
Where the Mirror of Erised invited longing — showed dreams softened by sentiment — Dismoria's glass was cold. Like it remembered too much. Like it had seen the truth of everyone who had dared stand before it… and judged them.
Alaric approached slowly, wand lowered, hands clasped behind his back.
"Start the glyph ring," he said softly.
One of the Unspeakables obeyed, kneeling at the edge of the platform and beginning to trace Arithmantic circuits into the stone with a blade of starlight. Thin glowing threads spiraled out from her hand like veins, forming intricate shapes that shimmered briefly and sank into the floor.
"Stabilization at 82%," she murmured. "Feedback containment rune is holding."
"Very good," Alaric replied. "Let's not linger."
He stepped onto the platform, now ringed in silent glyphs. The glow clung to his boots like fog. He turned to face the mirror directly — and for the first time, truly looked.
He saw himself, of course.
Tall. Sharp-featured. Pale eyes focused with surgical calm. His reflection mimicked him perfectly… except for one detail.
It was already smiling.
He wasn't.
Alaric narrowed his eyes.
"That's new," he murmured. His voice did not shake, but there was something slower now. A hesitation. As though he were watching the beginning of a sentence he didn't remember writing.
"Readings?" he asked.
"Reflective delay confirmed," said the second Unspeakable, scanning her parchment as runes burned into its surface. "Temporal divergence: four seconds. No prior case logged."
"Four seconds is impossible," hissed the third, younger than the others. "It's a mirror, not a memory spell—"
"No," Alaric said softly. "It's a boundary. One we still don't understand."
The reflection's smile widened.
The glyphs brightened around his feet, sensing the activation phrase woven into his last sentence.
Lines of red and silver crawled up the mirror's frame, lighting old sigils that hadn't glowed since before the First War. The chamber pulsed once.
And then…
The reflection blinked.
Alaric did not.
Gasps behind him. Footsteps faltered. Someone dropped a scribing quill, and the metallic clink echoed a little too long in the air.
"He moved," said one Unspeakable.
"No," whispered the other. "He… noticed."
Alaric's face did not change. He took one step closer, breathing slowly and deliberately.
The mirror didn't copy the step. It waited. It studied. Like a chess player watching an opponent pick up the first piece.
"Begin primary connection," Alaric said. "He's awake."
"Who is 'he'?" the younger asked.
"Me," Alaric said quietly.
And then, smiling faintly:
"Or… the part of me that never stopped looking for truth."
The glyphs on the floor flared again — brighter this time. Not warm, like firelight, but clinical. Surgical.
And the mirror — the Mirror of Dismoria — responded.
Its frame shifted imperceptibly. Not physically. Conceptually. Like a photograph developing in real time, becoming more real the longer Alaric looked at it.
The reflection didn't mirror him anymore.
It moved ahead of him now.
Tilted its head.
Adjusted the hem of its coat.
And then — it smirked.
Alaric didn't flinch, but his breath caught for the first time.
Interesting… he thought. It no longer pretends to be me. That means it's ready.
"Are you seeing this?" he asked without turning.
The oldest Unspeakable — a silent man with eyes like weathered bone — took a sharp breath.
"It's not copying you. It's… leading."
"Then we are past reflection," Alaric murmured. "We're in response."
A pulse went through the room — not of sound, but of pressure. The glass vibrated at a frequency the ear couldn't register, but the soul did. Somewhere deep in the stone beneath them, the castle whimpered.
The mirror image moved closer to the inside of the glass.
It pressed a hand against the surface.
And Alaric — slowly, deliberately — lifted his own to match it.
Contact.
Their fingers aligned through the cold pane. For one breathless second, nothing happened.
Then…
The glass folded inward.
It didn't crack or shatter. It simply softened, like light through water, and began to pull.
Alaric didn't move.
He didn't need to.
The mirror wanted him.
And so it took him.
From behind him, one of the Unspeakables screamed.
"The containment circle is breaking—!"
The glyphs flared white, then red, then black — and bled away into the stone, corrupted.
The air turned thin, stretched like gauze across an invisible wound.
Alaric's feet lifted slightly from the platform.
His eyes widened — not in fear, but awe.
"It's showing me—" he whispered. "Not what I want… not what I am…"
His voice faltered.
"What could I become?"
The mirror pulsed again.
The reflection's eyes — his eyes — were glowing now.
One step.
Two.
Alaric's body passed halfway through the pane.
And that's when it happened.
The mirror image turned away.
Walked deeper into the space behind the glass, vanishing into what looked like an infinite hallway of reflections.
Alaric followed.
"No!" the youngest Unspeakable shouted. "He's gone — pull him out!"
But the containment field was already collapsing. Sigils collapsed into dust, sizzled, and vanished.
The last thing they saw before the mirror froze shut was Alaric's silhouette stepping deeper into the mirror-world — not chased, not pulled, but willing.
CLANG.
The mirror is sealed.
Not with magic.
Not with energy.
With choice.
The chamber fell silent.
The glyphs faded.
And the reflections in the black glass returned to normal, just the faces of the surviving Unspeakables, pale and wide-eyed.
But for a second… just for one heartbeat… the reflection of Alaric Valeor remained.
One step behind them.
Smiling.
Cassandra Marrin had spent twelve years working in the Department of Mysteries.
She had cataloged memory echoes in the Thought Vault, drifted weightless through the gravity wells of Time Room anomalies, and once spent six months sifting through cursed music in the Harmonic Archives.
But none of it—none of it—prepared her for what the Mirror of Dismoria became that day.
It didn't break.
It didn't explode.
It folded.
Space itself rippled outward from the frame like a drop in a pond, distorting the air, the light, her thoughts. She staggered back as every mirrored surface in the chamber began to shimmer, not in color, but in possibility.
"Containment glyphs are null!" one of her colleagues screamed.
"Get out of the circle! Get OUT!"
But it was too late.
The reflection of Marcus Eldin — the Unspeakable, who had drawn the activation runes — reached out from the mirrored wall behind him and dragged him in.
No sound. No flash.
Just a hand. A touch. Gone.
Cassandra spun toward the pedestal.
The mirror had turned… liquid.
Not in texture — in definition.
It no longer showed a reflection. It showed a corridor, lined with impossible geometry — recursive arches, inverted gravity, rooms inside rooms. A dream of a place that shouldn't exist.
Alaric Valeor was walking deeper into it.
And he was smiling like he understood every lie the world had ever told.
"Pull him back!" Cassandra yelled.
But the third Unspeakable, Farrow, had dropped his wand. His mouth opened like he meant to scream — and his body shattered into jagged floating shards of glass, suspended in air like confetti in a storm.
The mirror reacted.
The glyphs on the floor flared black.
The glass walls hummed.
And then, Cassandra saw it:
Her reflection was no longer copying her.
It stood still. Watching her.
Smiling.
And then — it stepped out.
She didn't scream.
She couldn't.
Her voice had been stolen, ripped from her mouth, and hung behind the mirror like a trophy.
She stumbled backward, wand raised, heart hammering like a ward alarm.
"Finite Incantatem!" she tried. "Finite! Oblivio—! Prote—"
Her reflection raised its hand.
She collapsed, twitching, blood seeping from her nose.
Across the chamber, the mirror flickered like a dying star.
Alaric had stopped.
He stood at the edge of the mirror world's horizon — beneath a ceiling of fractured constellations, before a door made of silver veins and silence.
He turned, just once, and looked back—not at the real world, but at her.
At Cassandra.
Their eyes met.
And for a moment, she swore he was trying to say something.
But the mirror gave no sound.
Only light.
Only blinding, recursive light—
CRACK.
The sound split the world.
The chamber walls fractured — not physically, but conceptually. The enchantments holding reality together failed. For a single moment, the rules of space, time, and magic unraveled like threads soaked in acid.
The last sigil on the floor burned white-hot and vanished.
The mirror snapped shut.
Like a book being closed.
Like a coffin lid.
Cassandra hit the floor hard.
Her reflection did not follow.
The air was still again.
Just the sound of dripping blood. Fading wards. Her heartbeat.
She was the only one left breathing.
And the mirror?
It was still.
As if none of it had ever happened.
"He's gone," she whispered, voice hoarse. "God help us. He's gone."
From across the room, unnoticed, the faintest shape of a boy's silhouette shimmered in the mirror's surface. Watching.
Still smiling.
1978 — The Day After
The door to Sublevel V was sealed by sunrise.
Seven layers of wards, each laced with Ministry-grade memory charms, tangled themselves across the black threshold. The hallway beyond was erased from every internal map. The project file — MIRROR-D — was purged, marked as archivally unstable and theoretical only. The three surviving Unspeakables were reassigned or politely removed.
Cassandra Marrin never spoke of it again.
Not publicly.
Not even to Dumbledore.
She didn't need to. He already knew.
1979 — An Empty Seat
At the spring symposium of the International Confederation of Magical Researchers, a chair was left unfilled.
Alaric Valeor had been scheduled to present a lecture titled: "On Magical Constants and the Myth of Perception." A provocative title. A brilliant mind. A ghost, now.
They left his name on the program.
Some said it was a tribute.
Others knew it was a warning.
1981 — The Fall of Voldemort
The wizarding world erupted in joy.
Cheers echoed through Diagon Alley. Families emerged from hiding. The Ministry claimed victory, as if prophecy had been forged by policy.
No one mentioned that the boy who lived did so while the world's most promising magical theorist remained missing, presumed dead.
Dumbledore celebrated quietly.
He didn't drink. He didn't dance.
He spent the evening standing alone in the Astronomy Tower, staring at the sky.
The stars did not blink.
1982 — The Last Valeor
In the northern Isles of Skye, the Valeor estate burned.
Some said it was an accident. Others said it was grief.
Alaric's mother had not spoken since his disappearance.
His father… well, no one found his body. Only ashes.
Their vault was sealed by Gringotts the same week, not for lack of funds, but for lack of identity.
No one could legally claim to be a Valeor anymore.
The name fell into disuse.
The line fell into legend.
1984 — The First Rumor
A child in southern France claimed her mirror spoke to her.
She drew a man's face in charcoal: pale, sharp, kind.
She said he told her how to fix her mother's broken wand.
When asked his name, she didn't hesitate.
"Lucien," she said. "Lucien Valeor."
The Ministry dismissed it as accidental Legilimency.
But the Unspeakables noticed.
They redoubled the wards on Sublevel V.
They didn't understand that the mirror wasn't trying to break free.
It was leaking.
1987 — Dumbledore Remembers
IDumbledore kept a journal in the quiet of his office, behind a locked drawer and beneath several nested Fidelius charms,
Not for memories.
For regrets.
He wrote one name in it, once per year, every June:
Alaric Valeor.
He remembered a boy who had read Theorem Arithmantica by age eleven, and disproved part of it by twelve.
He remembered how the Sorting Hat had paused, long, and whispered:
"He'll see too much."
And how Alaric had replied, calmly:
"Then you'd better put me somewhere I can learn to lie."
Dumbledore kept the final letter Alaric ever sent him, folded in his sleeve, always.
It ended:
"I do not fear what I may find in the mirror, Professor. I only fear that it may not be enough.
If I am wrong, forgive me. If I am right, remember me."
1989 — The Mirror Hums
No one is present in the sealed chamber.
The walls are still. The pedestal is unoccupied.
But the mirror is no longer dormant.
A faint ripple passes through the glass.
Not a crack.
Not a call.
A heartbeat.
1990 — A Whisper
In the silence between seconds, in a corridor that no longer exists on any map, a voice speaks inside the Mirror of Dismoria.
One year.
The chamber had not been entered in thirteen years.
No feet touched its floor. No voices echoed within its walls. The wards, more complex than those guarding Azkaban itself, had been designed to rot slowly, altering the access logic over decades, erasing even the possibility of entry.
By 1991, the Ministry believed the room had never existed.
But the mirror remembered.
It began as a tremor. Not of sound — of ought.
A ripple in the stillness.
Like a held breath.
Then, light—pale and colorless, bloomed inside the mirror's surface. Not reflected light, but original light. Born from within. Born from him.
The glyphs surrounding the pedestal — once dormant — flickered.
Just once.
Just enough to make space.
And then the glass pulsed.
Soft. Rhythmic. Like a heartbeat.
Once.
Then again.
Then — a shape.
A hand.
Small. Slender. No longer that of a grown man.
It pressed gently against the inside of the glass — fingertips first, palm second. There was no urgency. No fear. Only intent.
The surface of the mirror rippled like water around it.
Then, as if the boundary meant nothing at all, the boy stepped through.
His shoes made no sound on the stone.
He stood barefoot, dressed in dark, age-faded robes — too large at the collar, too short at the wrists, as if scavenged from half a dozen different wardrobes.
His hair was shorter than it once was.
His eyes… were the same.
Sharp. Cold. Thinking far beyond the room around him.
"Thirteen years," he whispered.
His voice was high, a child's, but carried something behind it.
Something that wasn't.
"I thought it would take longer."
He raised a hand and flexed the fingers experimentally.
The light in the room responded. Shadows curled around him like loyal pets.
"The world's slowed down without me," he muttered. "Pity."
He turned toward the glyph-lined walls, observing their remains. The seals were still in place, but the magic had decayed — entropy embedded in design. Good.
It meant no one had come looking.
It meant they still believed he was dead.
They had forgotten his name.
They had let it fade.
Perfect.
The boy took a slow breath.
His lungs strained slightly — still adjusting to form, to shape, to being. He had spent so long in the mirror-world, where time folded and identity was optional, that existing as a singular self again was… nostalgic.
"I will need a new name," he mused.
He glanced toward the obsidian wall, where the faintest mirror-glint reflected his youthful face.
It smiled.
"Lucien," he said to it. "Lucien Valeor. Yes. Let's begin again."
The reflection tilted its head.
It did not follow when he turned.
Lucien stepped down from the pedestal and toward the sealed archway.
It didn't open for him.
He didn't need it to.
He reached up — and the stone itself bent under his fingers, like wet parchment.
The door yielded.
Reality was already responding to his return.
He stepped through into the black corridor between levels.
No one saw him.
No alarms sounded.
The hallway restructured itself to forget.
Behind him, the mirror pulsed once more.
A breath.
A beat.
And then it stilled.
As if it had never awakened at all.
Lucien Valeor walked with the elegance of someone who did not belong — and had decided that was everyone else's problem, not his.
The station bustled with noise and motion. Muggle voices echoed over tiled floors, mingling with the shrill whine of luggage trolleys and the distant sobs of an overtired toddler. But Lucien passed through it all like mist — untouched, unhurried, unnoticed.
His robes were new, though they didn't appear to be. Midnight-gray with faint silver stitching, cut precisely to his frame — utilitarian, but refined. The fabric hung with soft weight, swaying slightly with each step like water following the current. His wand rested against his forearm, sheathed beneath his sleeve with a quiet magnetic catch. His trunk, marked with a sigil no ordinary eye could read, rolled obediently behind him, charmed to avoid crowds, and recently filled.
The Ministry's record room had yielded the school list easily enough. A minor concealment charm, a borrowed login sigil, a quiet hour past midnight. The forms had been printed. The seal had been applied. No one had checked twice. Why would they?
The wand was his. Always had been. He simply retrieved it from where he'd left it — locked behind a false panel beneath the foundation stones of the old estate. Dust had covered the box. But the wand remembered him. It had pulsed when he touched it. Like a heartbeat.
As for the trunk — well. Some things are easier when no one sees you take them.
But his clothes were his design. Or rather, his deception. They spoke of modesty, of softness, of a boy unremarkable save for poise. A pressed shirt beneath wool, dark trousers cuffed cleanly, polished shoes muted to a scholarly matte. Even the glasses—thin, black-rimmed, chosen not for need but for narrative—contributed to the image. Kind. Precise. Slightly fragile.
His posture, of course, betrayed the lie.
He stood with the poise of a scholar-prince: straight-backed, shoulders relaxed, head angled just enough to appear thoughtful without ever seeming proud. Each step was quiet. Intentional. Not a boy discovering the world.
A man returning to it.
Ahead, a young couple struggled with twin boys and a cart tipping sideways.
Lucien veered left — no contact, no eye contact, no evidence. He moved in the negative space between others.
A mirror on a cracked pillar caught a sliver of his reflection. He paused, just a moment, to examine it.
"Close," he murmured. "Not perfect. But close."
He leaned toward the glass, observing.
A boy of eleven. But only just.
Lean and poised. Skin pale, unmarred. A face shaped by old blood and older expectation — high cheekbones, a narrow chin, a mouth set in neutral precision. His hair, dark chestnut, was swept back cleanly, the fringe parted with surgical neatness. Not messy like most boys. Curated. As if the haircut had remembered him instead of the other way around.
But the eyes were what defined him.
Wide, warm brown at first glance — until you noticed the silence behind them.
Eyes like still water. Unshaken. Eyes that remembered what others forgot.
He adjusted his collar slightly.
"A bit too pretty," he noted. "I'll underperform in year one. Keep expectations manageable."
A beat.
Then a soft smile, just at the corners of his mouth. The kind that looked innocent at eleven. Awith would be terrifying at twenty-five.
"Still," he murmured, "even at this age… they'll follow."
He moved toward the concealed barrier.
Ahead, a red-haired woman was shepherding children toward the bricks, bustling, noisy, oblivious. A large family. Six visible. One yet untrained.
Lucien waited.
Seventeen seconds.
Crowd density: mid-shift. Angle: diagonal. Path: unremarkable.
He stepped through the wall alone.
The platform opened like a memory.
Steam. Steel. Laughter. Owls.
The scarlet train waited.
Lucien paused only long enough to absorb the noise. The ritual of it. The illusion of safety.
He selected a compartment at the rear.
Empty. Clean. A window.
He sat. Folded his hands. Closed his eyes briefly, as though composing a thought.
Not waiting for departure.
Not waiting for introductions.
He was waiting for the game to begin.
Outside the window, the glass caught a flicker of movement.
A reflection.
Older. Sharper.
The man he had been. Or the one he might yet become.
It smiled.
And Lucien smiled back.