It’s chapter three-ilicious!

…don’t ask.

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Prophecy Bound
Chapter Three
The Itch

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Mystery upon mystery upon mystery… That was what it seemed that the Potter boy was around to cause for the investigators. The first mystery was one that had been easy enough to solve; why hadn’t Harry answered his letter had such a simple, if horrifying, answer. How had he died was a question that they had only begun to touch upon before they were confronted with this new and most unusual of magical mysteries.

Of course, if one was to go back ten years, then they still had the greatest and most speculated mystery involving the young Potter: How did a baby kill the Dark Lord? That particular mystery was actually leading to a bit of speculation between Writewind and Calden, even as Jonas continued to take note on the tiny. He had forbidden Calden to come any closer to the body than ten feet, worried that whatever it was that had jumped between the man and the body may have formed some sort of connection between them.

Calden had shuddered at the thought of that; bonded to a corpse! Even if it was the “Boy-Who-Lived”, he dearly hoped not.

“Are you absolutely positive that it’s not some obscure dark magic?”

Khufu shot Calden a rather sour look, “I have told you a dozen times, Jon. My family is of Egyptian descent, not bloody European. If this is a dark spell then it’s from the European branch, not Egyptian. And I wouldn’t have a bloody clue either way as I am pureblooded not bloody dark.”

“Still,” Calden was certainly struggling; desperately trying to figure out what it was that was still ‘trapped’ within the corpse, “No one knows what happened that night! You-Know-Who may have left something behind like… like… like a bomb!”

Jonas didn’t even raise his head, though it was quite a surprise to realize that their victim was that child. Neither of his fellow investigators seemed to realize that they had accidentally let the cat out of the bag, as it were.

Writewind’s sour gaze had turned sharp and mocking, “Oh yes. Because a bomb is the first thing any true pureblooded European wizard things of when they want to leave something behind for the Aurors.” Granted, the only reason why Khufu was as familiar with bombs as he was had to do with his family’s personal history. That wasn’t the point of this argument, however.

“I didn’t that itwas a bomb, you Egyptian bastard!” Calden snapped back, “I said that it was like a bomb: something that was set to detonate after a certain period of time.”

Jonas figured that now was about the time to stop this argument before the other two really got into it. When they switched from Writewind’s normally mocking curiosity of muggles and Calden’s admittedly laughable attempts to “subtly” understand pureblooded culture to insulting one another’s ethnic backgrounds, experience told him that it would only be a few moments before they started to act like ten year old boys. And as everyone knew, ten year old boys tended to get pretty physical in their fights.

A physical battle between two men in general, and these two in particular, especially one that was in this lab was not something that Jonas wanted to deal with. After all, this little boy wasn’t the only murder that the department was currently dealing with, and any destruction of evidence in any case would come back to bite them. Suspension time, and internal investigation, notoriety in the muggle world, possible jail time…

Oh no, Reginald Jonasdefinitely didn’t want to have to deal with any of that.

“Jon, if that were the case, then it would have gone off ten years ago, not wait around in a corpse just so that you could set it off with your touch.”

Calden stared at the other investigator for a long moment before seeming to deflate, “Yeah. You’re right. I was being daft, huh?”

“More than,” Writewind grumbled, “Reg is right. Any magic “bomb” that may have been left behind would have wrought its destruction shortly after the death of its caster.”

“Hmm…” Calden was agreeable to that, at least, though as a thought struck him, he slanted his head towards the corpse that he couldn’t get close enough to investigate for himself, “Do you think that that could have contributed to his death?”

“If that were so, the spark would have been just a remnant of whatever it was,” and Writewind was perfectly willing to agree with this line of thought. “There have been documented cases where an enchantment long thought to be faded had one last ‘spark’ of life to it.”

“There is a small possibility of it,” Jonas nodded, “Thought I wouldn’t put any stock in that theory. The standard ‘exit’ regions of any such magical expulsion are the eyes, the ears, the nose, the mouth, and the groin region on the human body.”

“The natural openings of the body,” Calden was doing his best to attempt to see those areas from ten feet away. It wasn’t working out too well, given his lack of hawk eyes.

“Correct,” the self-proclaimed technomancer pointed to the eyes with the tip of a metal pointer, though he was careful not to let it actually touch the corpse, “Now look here… I meant Khufu, not you Jon. Do you see any damage at all?”

Khufu shook his head, “None. He looks like he was in pain as he died but—”

“Actually, that’s fairly normal for mummies,” Jonas chuckled a bit, “The muscles in the face relax after death, and the mouth gapes open. The lips will dry out and shrivel up, giving it that look of screaming pain. It’s a lucky man whose mummy doesn’t look pained without some outside help of mummifiers.”

Writewind looked rather surprised, “You’re kidding me. How do you know these things?”

Jonas chuckled, “The muggles have an amazing store of data on mummies and the process of mummification. It’s been featured a few times in some of the scientific publications that I follow.”

The pureblood had to shake his head, “Unbelievable…”

“It’s unbelievable that you two would be discussing this instead of the case,” Calden’s tone was scolding, “What would our employers think?”

“They’d blame it on you,” both men were as confident as could be in this answer. The slightly younger Auror-Investigator gave them both a dirty look.

“They would not.”

“Jon… on the last four cases they’ve walked in on you not doing your job,” Jonas looked more amused that he should have been at Writewind’s comment. Even as Calden attempted to explain that taking a nap in the break room after a thirty-six hour shift was perfectly reasonable, and that their employers just liked cruel and unusual punishment, Jonas was speaking up.

“In any case, the child’s facial structure is very well preserved. There’s no damage to the skull other than the previously identified cranial damage. We can safely rule out any form of magical self-explosion.”

“What if it escaped through the damage to the skull?” Calden wasn’t quite ready to let this avenue of investigation go, and it was a reasonable question to ask.

“Then we would have seen the fragments of the skull either in the trunk he was found in, or not at all. Instead, the scalp has kept the fragments within the braincase,” Reginald directed their attention to the damaged area, “As you can see, the angle of damage is inwards, not out like you would find with a magical explosion.”

Writewind had to shake his head as Calden attempted to find another explanation that would fit both the evidence and the theory of a magical “release”. Actually, the Egyptian was trying to figure that particular theory out for himself, but all of his solutions seemed to be on the “not bloody possible” end of the scale. He frowned a bit at that thought; impossible things couldn’t be ruled out with this particular child, though, as he had a bad tendency to make them possible.

“We could attempt a magical scan and see what remains within the body, even after all this time.”

“There is a chance that it could cause some level of damage to the body,” Jonas jumped in, “While it’s a small possibility, the fact that it’s there makes me leery of attempting it. Though the child has been mummified, he is still a child of few years and therefore naturally quite fragile. There is also the fact that England is not generally conduction to the creation of mummies, and with his status as amagical mummy, I won’t want to accidentally destroy any information that his remains can provide.”

Calden blinked, as though this were the key to a puzzle he’d been trying to figure out for some time. “Is that why you’re holding off on the X-Ray?”

Jonas gave a sharp nod, “Yes. I want to have the child’s condition fully documented before we do any form of scans, either muggle or magical. The idea is to make sure that the man who could do this sort of thing to a young child cannot get away with it ever again.”

Writewind nodded as well, “That’s quite understandable.”

The muggleborn Investigator frowned, “If you would just let me back over there, we could get this done in half the time.”

“No,” Jonas’ tone brooked no argument, “We don’t have any idea of what sort of damage that may have been caused to either you or the remains from that little spark, so I don’t want you doing anything that could set it off again. There is other evidence that you can look at, Jon.”

He sighed at that, a little sulky. He wanted to work with the child’s remains; he wanted so desperately to find out what it was that had been done to the little saviour, and help to lay that child to rest. It looked like, however, that he would have to rely on working with evidence other than the mummified remains of the young Potter, “Alright. I’ll look at the chest that he was found in, and see if anything has come back from the on-site investigations.”

The man slipped out the door like an eel, though his determined expression was more likened to that of a dog with a bone. He would do his best to put this travesty before the law, and come hell or high water, he planned to see this through to the end. Writewind watched him go with something of an amused smile, “He’s going to be stuck on this for years.”

“Child deaths have always been a sort point for him,” Reginald murmured, still documenting the tiny corpse, “Always flares up about them; especially in cases of familial abduction and abuse.”

“Mmm,” the pureblood nodded distractedly, “Do you need me to remain here, Reg?”

The man looked up with a bemused expression, “Why?”

“I was thinking that I could look through some of the books and scrolls that I have access too; see if there’s any record that matches what we’ve seen so far with this child,” He was already going through a mental inventory of his family’s extensive library.

“No, no. Go right ahead,” Jonas tipped his head towards the door, “I know how much bodies disturb you.”

Writewind scowled, even as his cheeks pinked and gave away his embarrassment, “They don’tdisturb me. I’m just… not used to dealing with them for any length of time.”

“They disturb you,” Reginald chuckled. Khufu felt that the appropriate response would be to chuck something at the man’s head, but he knew better than to start something up with Jonas. He shook his head in exasperation before he, too, left the lab. There was a lot of information that he was going to have to pick through, but he was sure that he would findsomething in those records.

Family lore said that they reached back as far as Khasekemwy and the end of the Second Dynasty. And that, after all, was four thousand years ago.

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End Chapter

Still with the filler. Sorry guys! Though next chapter we should start getting some information on plot-thoughts and the like, as well as the (planned, but we know how my plans go) return of Albus Dumbledore. A few notes on the information provided in this chapter…

I’m not a forensic scientist. I’m an archaeologist. My area of expertise is the Near East, though the reason behind the focusing on Egyptian in this story (instead of Assyrian or Babylonian, which I’m far more familiar with) is due to the fact that I’m currently taking a course in Egyptian Arky, and am half using this as a way to use up the knowledge I gained from writing my term paper. Yes, I am that awesome.