Harry spent the entire next morning buried beneath books.
The flat above the bookstore had transformed into a battlefield between research materials and Harry’s increasingly unhealthy obsession with solving impossible magical problems before they killed him.
Open books covered the living room table.
More sat stacked beside the couch.
Three different encyclopedias regarding dark creatures occupied the kitchen counter because Harry apparently lost all sense of organization halfway through the night.
Dobby disapproved silently, bringing tea every few hours while watching his employer descend gradually into academic madness.
Harry barely noticed.
He focused entirely on one subject: Spirits, ghosts, spectral entities.
Anything remotely related to the creatures infesting the isle.
Unfortunately, magical classification regarding spirits appeared to be very inconsistent.
Some books separated ghosts into wraiths, revenants, banshees, poltergeists, shades, phantoms, and dozens of other categories while others simply grouped everything under “ethereal undead manifestations” and moved on.
Wizarding academics, Harry concluded, desperately needed some organization.
Still, patterns emerged quickly.
Most dark or hostile spirits shared similar weaknesses.
Light.
Positive magic.
Protective enchantments.
And above all else—
The Patronus Charm.
Apparently the Patronus functioned as the magical equivalent of a universal anti-horror solution.
Dementors.
Banshees.
Wraiths.
Spectral parasites.
Cursed spirits.
The spell could repel, weaken, or outright destroy an absurd variety of dark entities.
Harry stared thoughtfully at one paragraph while sipping tea.
Well, that certainly sounded useful.
More importantly, Harry would eventually need the spell regardless.
If the future memories remained accurate, Hogwarts would become infested with dementors next year thanks to Sirius Black’s escape from Azkaban, which meant learning the Patronus now solved two problems simultaneously.
Assuming, of course, his increasingly chaotic interference with the timeline had not already derailed future events entirely.
At this point, Harry had no idea anymore.
According to “canon,” Harry was supposed to spend the summer suffering at the Dursleys’ house before eventually turning Aunt Marge into a human balloon.
Instead, he was fighting for his freedom, buying real estate, and investigating ancient curses.
Honestly, his life had gone completely off the rails somewhere, and canon was rapidly collapsing into irrelevance.
Still, learning one of the strongest defensive spells in wizarding history seemed worthwhile under any circumstance.
Unfortunately, the Patronus Charm was infamous for a reason.
The spell ranked among the most difficult defensive enchantments known to wizardkind, generally considered far beyond ordinary school-level magic.
Even many qualified adult witches and wizards struggled to produce proper Patronuses consistently because the spell did not merely require magical power.
It required emotion, not any type of emotion, but positive emotion.
Focused positive emotion.
Which was considerably harder when your childhood mostly consisted of emotional neglect, bullying, murder attempts, and near-death experiences.
Harry sat cross-legged on the living room rug while reading another section carefully.
The Patronus Charm—Expecto Patronum—channeled positive memories and emotions into protective magical energy.
When cast successfully, the spell created a Patronus: a spirit guardian formed from light itself.
There were two known variants.
The incorporeal Patronus appeared as shapeless silver mist.
It was weaker, simpler, and easier.
The corporeal Patronus, meanwhile, possessed a fully defined animal form unique to the caster.
That version was vastly stronger.
Also vastly harder.
Harry would have happily settled for any version at this point.
For the next two days, the flat became filled with increasingly frustrated attempts at advanced defensive magic.
“Expecto Patronum!”
Nothing happened.
Harry sighed heavily.
Again.
“Expecto Patronum!”
Silver sparks burst briefly from his wand before fading.
Again.
“Expecto Patronum!”
This time, faint mist appeared for approximately half a second, then vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
Harry flopped backward onto the carpet dramatically.
“This spell is wicked.”
Nearby, Hedwig watched from the couch, judging his performance while Dobby attempted to encourage him.
“Master Harry is already doing wonderfully!”
“I’ve spent six hours producing white smoke.”
Harry appreciated the effort, even if it was blatantly false.
The hardest part was not the wand movement or incantation, it was the emotion itself.
The spell required genuinely powerful positive memories strong enough to overwhelm fear and darkness.
Finding those consistently proved… difficult.
Harry eventually discovered that his strongest memories centered around simple things: flying for the first time, receiving Hedwig, laughing with Ron and Hermione, Christmas at Hogwarts, Dobby’s expression when Harry freed him, the small family photograph resting beside the window nook,…
Those memories worked best.
Not perfect happiness exactly, but moments when Harry had genuinely felt safe, wanted, or loved.
By the end of the second day, progress finally appeared.
“Expecto Patronum!”
Silver mist erupted from Harry’s wand in a sudden, brilliant wave, swirling across the living room with enough force to knock papers off the table before slowly dissipating into sparkling light.
Harry blinked, then grinned immediately.
“I DID IT!”
Dobby looked seconds away from crying proudly, while quickly snapping several photos.
The result remained incorporeal.
No defined shape formed within the mist, no animal guardian emerged from the silver light, but it was still a real Patronus.
Weak, incomplete, unstable… yet undeniably real.
It felt absurd, considering that Harry technically should not even have been capable of casting the spell at his age.
Unfortunately, the Patronus remained wildly inconsistent.
Some attempts produced proper silver mist, others collapsed almost immediately, and a few failed completely whenever Harry lost concentration for even a second.
Maintaining the spell also drained his magic far faster than he expected, leaving exhaustion settled deep in his bones by the end of each practice session.
Still, it was enough.
He hadn’t mastered the spell, but he could cast it.
And for Harry, that was enough so that this time the thought of returning to the isle no longer filled him with helpless terror.
Which meant Harry immediately decided to return to the cursed estate instead of behaving like a rational human being.
Dobby reacted exactly as expected.
“Master Harry learned one advanced anti-spirit spell and immediately wishes to challenge the haunted island again,” the elf muttered tragically while preparing Harry’s supplies.
“Dobby fears this is what parenting feels like.”
Harry chose not to comment on that sentence at all.
The next morning Harry returned directly to the isle and this time he did not waste hours scouting the wider estate from the air.
He already knew where the heart of the curse rested.
The lake.
The isle.
The ruined tower.
Under daylight, the place looked less terrifying than it had during the night, though not by much.
Grey clouds drifted slowly overhead while pale sunlight filtered weakly across the dark waters surrounding the isle.
More importantly, the spirits were gone.
Harry hovered cautiously above the trees atop his Nimbus while scanning the island below through binoculars.
Nothing moved.
No drifting lights, no pale shapes wandering between ruins and no glowing figures watching him from broken windows.
This supported his theory nicely.
Many dark creatures are weakened by sunlight or strong sources of natural light.
Perhaps whatever infested the isle simply lacked the power to fully manifest during the day.
Hopefully.
Harry would very much prefer that explanation over “the ghosts are invisible right now and watching him silently.”
He descended slowly toward the isle.
The moment his boots touched the ground, the atmosphere changed.
The air felt colder there—not physically freezing, but dead cold.
The sort of chill found inside abandoned crypts and old churches where sunlight never seemed to reach properly.
Harry swallowed uneasily before drawing his wand.
“Right,” Harry muttered to himself.
“No horrible ghost encounters today, please.
That’d be brilliant.”
The isle itself was densely overgrown, filled with twisted trees and stones half-devoured by moss and ivy.
The remains of old paths barely remained visible beneath roots and dead leaves.
And everywhere… There were bones.
Harry froze the moment he noticed the first skeleton partially buried near the shoreline.
Then he spotted another farther ahead.
Then more.
Dozens of them lay scattered across the isle beneath dirt, tangled vines, and collapsed stone.
Most were so old that only pale, weathered bones remained after centuries of exposure.
He crouched carefully beside one set of remains.
Harry was no expert—far from it—but something about the skeletons bothered him.
Most appeared strangely intact.
There were no shattered ribs, no obvious bite marks, no claw damage, nothing suggesting some giant magical creature had torn them apart.
Others, however, absolutely showed signs of violence.
One skeleton still had an old rusted blade lodged between its ribs.
Another possessed a cracked skull.
But many looked… untouched.
As though people had simply collapsed and died where they stood.
Harry frowned thoughtfully.
Maybe he was missing something obvious.
Still, the evidence did not resemble ordinary monster attacks to him.
That realization unsettled him even more.
The tower loomed above the rest of the isle, crooked and partially collapsed beneath centuries of decay.
Ivy crawled across cracked stone walls while entire sections of the upper structure had caved inward long ago.
The entrance hall immediately revealed another unpleasant detail.
Rats.
Or rather…
The remains of an absurd number of rats.
Tiny bones covered entire corners of the tower floor in pale heaps while shattered nests filled collapsed rooms and rotted furniture.
At some point, the place must have been infested.
Harry stepped carefully around them with visible disgust.
“Brilliant,” he muttered.
“Because this place clearly wasn’t creepy enough already.”
Most of the original staircases no longer existed.
Time and moisture had destroyed entire sections of the interior structure, leaving dangerous gaps between floors.
Thankfully, Harry possessed a broom.
The Nimbus floated easily upward through the ruined central chamber while Harry climbed higher, exploring level by level.
And slowly… the place stopped feeling like random ruins.
This had once been a home.
The realization emerged through the details scattered everywhere: fragments of faded tapestries, broken furniture carved with family crests, old portraits rotted beyond recognition, ruined bedrooms, a nursery, and dining halls left to decay beneath centuries of dust.
People had laughed there once.
Lived there.
Loved there.
Eventually, Harry reached the room that had clearly once belonged to Edith Ashford.
The room overlooked the lake through tall, shattered windows, while traces of faded blue fabric still clung to parts of the walls.
A collapsed vanity rested near one corner beside the remains of shelves filled with ruined books, and hidden beneath fallen debris inside an old chest, Harry found letters.
He unfolded the fragile parchment with almost reverent care.
Most of the ink had faded badly with age, but enough remained legible.
And slowly, through words written eight centuries earlier, Edith Ashford became real.
She had been kind.
Romantic.
Hopelessly in love.
Her letters spoke endlessly of Cadmus Peverell with the sort of sincerity only young people utterly convinced they would love each other forever could possess.
She wrote about dreams of marriage, children, and a peaceful life together.
She missed him whenever he traveled, counted the days until his return, and wished their wedding would arrive sooner.
Cadmus’s surviving replies painted a similar picture.
Devoted.
Gentle.
Protective.
Harry found himself genuinely surprised by that.
The legend of the Three Brothers always made Cadmus sound arrogant and tragic, almost consumed entirely by obsession and death, but here, in private letters never meant for history books, he simply sounded like a young man deeply in love.
Harry sat quietly beside the broken window for several minutes after finishing the last readable letter.
It was sad.
These people had genuinely loved each other, and somehow it had still ended in horror.
Continuing upward through the tower revealed more pieces of the story.
The Ashfords themselves had not been magical, at least not directly.
They were Muggles, but wealthy ones with unusually close ties to wizarding families.
One surviving journal described healers visiting the estate during a plague outbreak that swept through nearby villages centuries ago.
The Ashford lands remained untouched.
Their people survived.
Their crops flourished.
Their neighbors did not.
Slowly, Harry pieced together what followed: fear, suspicion, and resentment.
The surrounding villages began to believe the Ashfords had made deals with dark powers to protect themselves while everyone else suffered.
And in medieval England, accusations like that rarely ended peacefully.
Harry discovered the consequences near the upper floors.
The massacre site.
The remains still lay where the victims had died.
Entire rooms were filled with skeletons collapsed together beneath centuries of dust and ruin, while rust-eaten weapons remained scattered across the floor.
Bits of jewelry still glittered faintly among bones and rotten fabric.
Harry recognized Lord Ashford almost immediately from one of the old portraits downstairs.
A heavy signet ring still encircled the skeletal fingers, and a large silver medallion rested against his ruined chest.
The man had died where he stood, probably trying to defend his family.
Harry stared silently across the room.
The Ashfords had not been destroyed by monsters; they had been murdered by ordinary people.
And Harry suspected that had only been the beginning of the tragedy.