ACT5CH15 - BENEATH THE FOLD

The sky above Grimmauld Place was heavy with clouds, the kind that smothered sound and made the world feel smaller. A solemn hush draped the grounds behind the house, where a small, overgrown Family Shrine lay hidden behind tall hedgerows and layers of enchantment. The Black family’s final resting place. It wasn’t large—barely a clearing—its perimeter traced by wrought iron, runes rusted but still potent. Between the vines and mist, the stones stood like forgotten sentinels. Here lay Lady Hesper Gamp. And Lord Arcturus Black. And now… Kreacher.

Harry knelt before the fire.

He didn’t need a book. Hell, he didn’t even need to speak. The knowledge pulsed beneath his skin, etched into the Black family ring now wrapped around his finger. When he had accepted the title, it had burned him with its expectations. 

Memories. Rituals. Duties.

Floating in his head, answers to questions he didn’t know.

He placed Kreacher’s frail body on the obsidian slab they used for offerings. Folding the old elf’s limbs with care, he summoned a red shroud from the interior of the manor and draped it over him. 

Red was the color of war, of flame. Death, for the Blacks, was a journey. One could not walk the darkness unarmed.

Harry placed three obsidian blades around the corpse, each one carved with the ancient sigil of Tezcatlipoca—mirror, jaguar, death. A gift to the old god. And then, with a single motion of his wand and a drop of his own blood, he struck flame.

It crackled with blue light, then went still. The smoke curled in precise patterns, coiling skyward and dissolving into symbols Harry didn’t recognize but understood. One moment the body was there, the next, it was fading, dissolving into motes of silver, leaving behind ash.

When it was over, Harry collected the ashes in an urn marked with the house crest. It felt heavier than it should have been. Rising, he walked toward the Family Shrine.

He passed the graves, pausing for only a moment between Hesper and Arcturus. Their names were faded, but the magic wasn’t. It bowed to him, barely perceptible, a whisper in the soul.

He opened the shrine doors with a word the ring gave him—something in Nahuatl—and placed Kreacher’s ashes inside, alongside the other honored dead. 

No epitaph. No final prayer.

Just the scent of burnt myrrh and the taste of ancient sorrow on the wind.

The sound of footsteps alerted him, but he paid it no attention. It was the voice that distracted him.

“Harry Potter sir cremates Kreacher elf?”

That voice did not belong to Daphne Greengrass.

Harry blinked. “Dobby? What are you doing here?”

The elf looked oddly off-guard, as if taken aback by the simple question. His large, tuberous eyes blinked several times, as he composed himself. 

“Mr. Albus Dumbledore asks Dobby to seek out Master Harry Potter, so Dobby came here to see Master Harry Potter sir.”

Harry had mixed thoughts about Dobby. On the one hand, Dobby was a bit of a lunatic. That he had betrayed his own masters to help Harry was dodgy even by House Elf standards. On the other hand, he had done so to help him, even if his definition of help involved intercepting Harry’s mail, preventing him from getting to Hogwarts and horribly injuring him in the process. He had gotten his first taste of life as a free elf for over a year, after which Dumbledore gave him a job at Hogwarts, at the most generous price of a galleon per day. Dumbledore had offered him ten galleons, but Dobby had beaten him to one galleon, claiming that he liked working more than getting paid.

Just like he said. Dodgy.

Sometime after Sirius had adopted Harry, they had ‘hired’ Dobby at the same price. Apparently, Dobby loved freedom, but he preferred working for Harry Potter even more. It had been a small thing, arranging for Dobby to serve him for the time he was at Hogwarts, and then spend the summer with Harry as his man-servant, wherever he might live. The elf was no less of a fanatical little zealot than before. At least he had gotten Dobby out of his habit of humping his leg. Merlin, that had been embarrassing.

“Dumbledore, huh? What did he say? And where is Daphne?”

The elf blinked again. “Harry Potter’s Missy bes in the house, Harry Potter sir. Mr. Dumbledore sir asks Dobby to make sure the great and powerful Harry Potter sir was okay. He also says to tell Harry Potter sir to meet with Mr. Dumbledore sir.”

Harry frowned. On the one hand, Albus Dumbledore was one of the few people that Harry could trust to do the right thing. On the other hand, he had attempted to convince Harry to agree with the Oversight.

“Tell Professor Dumbledore I’m fine. Tell him… I’ll meet with him…” He wanted to say ‘when it is time’, but decided to go ahead with a more diplomatic ‘soon’.

Dobby shook his head. “Mr. Albus Dumbledore sir asked Dobby to stay and take care of the great and powerful Harry Potter sir.”

Damn this was difficult. Still, good help, or rather, any help was hard to find, and there was no saying what sort of problem he might have to fight against. If nothing else, Dobby would be a good way of either providing an extra support, or protecting Daphne, and barring that, get her out of the way before things went ‘Harry’.

…On second thought, there was really something wrong with the way he had been living if he was getting used to his own name being used as an adjective.

“Harry Potter sir cremates Kreacher elf?”

“He deserved a place,” he said slowly. “Not in dust, or have his head on the walls. A real resting place.”

Dobby fidgeted. His long ears twitched once, then again, curling slightly like parchment under a flame.

Harry tilted his head. “Dobby?”

The elf blinked, once, twice — then looked down at his feet, as if struggling to hold in something he wasn’t quite sure he was allowed to say.

“But Harry Potter sir cremates Kreacher elf.”

There was that question again. 

Harry narrowed his eyes. Something about his actions was bugging the strange elf.

“And?” he asked. “What of it?”

A long pause.

Then Dobby spoke.

“Elves be not cremated, Harry Potter sir. Wes do not have… identity to cremate.”

Harry tilted his head. At first he had wondered if he had committed some sort of faux-pas, for House-elf standards, by cremating Kreacher following the Black rites. But now?

“Identity?”

“Identity,” repeated Dobby. Harry had never seen the elf look so… serious. “House elves bes not having names, Harry Potter sir.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” said Harry. “You have a name. You’re Dobby—”

The elf shook his head. “Mes not Dobby, sir. Dobby is called Dobby.”

Harry went rigid for a moment, caught off-guard by the simple, yet overwhelming statement. His mouth opened and closed several times, debating what exactly to say in response to something like that.

“So, if I gave you another name…”

“Dobby would be called by new name, Harry Potter sir. Wizards bes giving house elves new names after they are purchased.”

“I didn’t give you one.”

“Harry Potter sir be not owning Dobby,” the elf pointed out carefully. “If Dobby bes Harry Potter sir’s elf, Dobby bes not Dobby anymore.”

Dobby stared at him inscrutably.

“You would have a different name, but you would still be you.”

More staring.

“...Right?”

Another shake. “House elves change, Harry Potter sir. After serving a family for life, House elves bes sold to another family to be….” his voice lowered, as if he was revealing a secret. “Begin from small. Again.”

For a moment, Harry actually gave that a little bit of thought. Hadn’t Kreacher also mentioned being young when he had come in as dowry with Hesper Gamp? 

“Dobby…” he said, carefully watching the elf. “Would you become… small and… a new elf, if I took you in?”

Slowly, carefully, Dobby nodded. “A house elf is a reflection of its Master, Harry Potter sir. When… when… That-Which-Became-Dobby was purchased by bad Masters Malfoys, it became Dobby. A house-elf has no need of an identity beyond that.”

“And Kreacher?”

Dobby shuddered. “Dobby has met the Kreacher elf before, Harry Potter sir. Dobby is called Dobby, but Kreacher WAS Kreacher. He would not be small again. He was Kreacher, and would die as Kreacher, and be consumed as ....”

He paused, and looked around frantically, as if he were afraid of something. After a few moments of ragged breathing and when nothing happened, Dobby met Harry’s gaze again. “Harry Potter sir, to be an elf is to serve.  The Master gives us elves identity, and when we get a new master, we get a new identity.”

Right then, a thought struck Harry. “Do you mean to say… you are immortal?”

Dobby shook his head vigorously. “Wes be Changing, Harry Potter sir. Immortal needs permanent identity.”

Harry was suddenly reminded of Tonks’s metamorphmagery — an extreme form of the Animagus transformation, where one was born with a state so fluid, so flexible, that they could attune to every animal form out there. A condition that was a complete inversion of one’s magical core, transforming a person into a metamorphmagus.

Back then, Harry had wanted to ask if the concept of Change made manifest also meant that Tonks wouldn’t be limited by fixtures like ageing, but something about their features had warned him that further questions on that topic would not be appreciated.

Were elves too a manifestation of Change? Only instead of their appearances, their existences were reset? Back to Square One, the moment they were purchased by a new wizarding family with a home capable of taking them in?

If a House elf was a reflection of their Master, and to be a house-elf was to serve, then…

Harry couldn’t stop himself. 

“Then why did you betray the Malfoys?”

To any neutral observer, it would feel like the elf had just frozen. But to Harry’s senses, it was like a rush of something imploded inside Dobby. It wasn’t magic, it wasn’t a spell, if anything it felt oddly like —

For a second, something utterly terrifying flickered across Dobby’s features, enough to make Harry freeze. The next moment it was gone, and the usual lunatic features were back. 

“Dobby would like Harry Potter sir not to say it like that, Harry Potter sir.”

…What the hell was that? Harry didn’t know, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to find out. But this was definitely the first time he had heard aggression in Dobby’s tone.

“Oh, okay,” said Harry haltingly. “But you saved my life. I’m pretty certain the Malfoys wouldn’t want you to do that.”

“Bad master Malfoy did not tell Dobby NOT to protect Harry Potter sir,” Dobby insisted.

“But Lucius was obviously planning to unleash the Diary into the school,” Harry pointed out. “You yourself told me that something terrible was about to happen at Hogwarts. That I must not go to Hogwarts.”

Dobby twitched. “Bad master Malfoy wanted bad things to happen to Hogwarts —”

“And not particularly to Harry Potter?” Harry pressed. “I know you are hiding something, Dobby. You told me that you had heard me brushing against Voldemort and surviving. Obviously that came from the Malfoys, didn’t it?” 

Another twitch.

“So Lucius’s actions were aimed at me, not at Hogwarts in general.”

The twitches increased, with Dobby looking closer and closer to a caged wild animal with every passing second.

“Harry Potter….” Dobby spoke, as if he was physically dragging every word out of his body akin to a man pushing a boulder uphill. “Is important.”

“How?”

“House elves can see the shape of… their next…” said the elf evasively. “Dobby knew that Harry Potter must be protected! And bad master Malfoy had not explicitly told Dobby not to warn Harry Potter. So Dobby acted.”

“Your next… what? Your next Master?”

The elf grimaced, but said nothing.

“Then why haven’t you asked me to… well, purchase you yet? Unless, you just want to be free?”

“No — No, sir,” said Dobby, shaking his large ears frantically. “Dobby wanted to be free of bad Masters, but Dobby likes working more. And Harry Potter sir was not ready. So Dobby went in search of work, but he did not want to take a new Master, so Dobby wanted payment. Other wizards thought Dobby was odd, and told Dobby off. Then Dobby found Winky, and we both went looking for work at Hogwarts. Winky chose to be a Hogwarts elf, but Dobby wanted pay.”

“Because you believe I am your next Master.”

Nod.

Harry ran his hand through his hair. “This is trippy. So, if I purchase you, then you cease being… Dobby, and become something else? And your memories would go?”

Another nod.

“But what if I wanted you to stay Dobby?” Harry asked. “Or rather, what if I asked you to remember…. Whatever you were before you were Dobby? Can you do that?”

Dobby went still. “House elves lose memory when they lose identity, Harry Potter sir. All memory we have is of… Before.”

“Before?”

Another nod. This time, a shaky one.

“And do you remember what you were… before? Can you tell me what you know?”

“Is… is that a command, Harry Potter sir?” Dobby’s voice had gotten strangely sharp. 

Harry blinked. “Do I have to make it one?”

Dobby‘s fingers were twitching. “Harry Potter sir is Dobby’s future Master. Harry Potter sir currently pays Dobby. If Harry Potter sir commands, Dobby can — Dobby can remember. But Harry Potter sir would not like that.”

“And why not?”

“Wizards not be liking when house elves remember what they were… Before. Because memory is what we are, Harry Potter sir. Forgetting our memories of… Before takes away our true identity, Harry Potter sir.”

“Like somebody cut off an arm from you?”

The elf shook his head. “No, Harry Potter sir. Dobby is the cut-off arm.”

That, Harry decided, told him everything he needed to know about how twisted house-elves were.

Still, he had to know. After what happened to Kreacher, after all the curve balls he had to defend against, he had to know what he was dealing with.

“If Harry Potter sir be commanding Dobby to remember, then Dobby wants something in return.” His voice suddenly gained a little more steel in it. “Swear, Harry Potter sir. Swear, Gatekeeper, that you will be taking What-Is-Called-Dobby as your elf after this? Swear it.” 

Harry blinked, taken aback by the sheer force in the elf’s words. “I will. I swear.”

The elf smiled, apparently satisfied. “Dobby is happy.”

“Does it hurt? Remembering?”

Dobby shook his head. “It’s not Dobby that will be hurt.”

It will be me, Harry realized. Dobby, or rather, house elves in general, seemed to be better attuned with the truth of magic. At least, that was what Harry had found out. When his Death-powers had left Dumbledore and Sirius dumbfounded, Kreacher had been very clear about his choice of descriptions about Harry’s own nature. And Harry refused to believe that Dobby still thought of him as the twelve-year-old boy in the cupboard.

So if Dobby was afraid of Harry getting hurt, he had to take things seriously.

He looked around, and found Daphne nowhere around. Still, it would not do to try something with her in the vicinity.

Exhaling, he closed his eyes, and focussed.

Instantly, they were swallowed by an endless blackness. Perhaps ‘blackness’ was a misnomer, since he and Dobby could see each other quite clearly. Emptiness, he guessed, would come a little closer to describing his reality. Just a temporary encasement of Death that cut them off from the ambient magic of the world around them. An isolation chamber, similar to the one the Unspeakables referred to as the Monochrome Barrier, only smaller in size.

Dobby looked around flabbergasted. “This is… Harry Potter sir’s?”

“Yes,” said Harry. “That way, if anything goes wrong, it’ll be stuck here with the two of us. You can forget it again when we’re done talking.”

“But —”

“It’s a command, Dobby. Tell me.”

Dobby blinked and went perfectly still, staring at him with those large, bulbous eyes and he stared back at him. And for the first time, Harry realized that there was something utterly wrong with them.

They were empty. Not like the glassy eyes of the dead, but something else. It was like someone had scooped out two twin holes in his skull and fit them with glass spheres and declared them as eyes rather than anything like the real thing. 

And Harry couldn’t help but stare back. 

They held an uncomfortable stillness to them, a calmness so complete that you instinctively knew it was a lie, tranquil, like a slumbering leviathan beneath the deepness of the sea bed.

And then he saw IT. A shadow, a flicker of movement, something hiding among the shades of the pale eyeballs. And though he couldn’t really make out what it was, the longer he stared at it the more certain he became IT was staring back at him AND —

Harry was hurled back, and he found himself spreadeagled on the floor, still within the emptiness, and Dobby —

Dobby was rippling.

It wasn’t apparition. It wasn't a house-elf movement either. To Harry’s eyes, it was as if a different entity, no, a different reality was superimposing with where Dobby stood. As though the outline of him no longer agreed with the space he was supposed to occupy.

Then IT spoke.

“—hands… cut away, but still remember, how to break —”

Just the sheer dissonance made him wince. The words were words, but they arrived in the wrong order. They dragged meanings from thoughts and dreams he hadn’t had yet. Refracted. Warped. Made Wrong. They crawled under his skin, trickled through his eyes, and fed upon the marrow of his bones. 

“What are you?”

The thing tilted its head.

The face was Dobby’s. It also had a hundred thousand eyes.

It was Dobby-sized, and larger than a mountain.

It spoke through Dobby’s lips, Dobby’s voice, but also thinned and stretched, as if an infinite choir were speaking all at once with varying degrees of dissonance between them. 

“Named we were not. But bound to Name. Not Death. Knot.”

Reality around them shifted. Not perceptibly. But elsewise. Harry felt a tremor in the memory of space, as if the idea of “location” was being peeled away.

Dobby — no, not Dobby — turned to look at him, and too many eyes blinked in a pattern Harry couldn’t follow. They closed between moments.

Harry’s wand was already in hand. But his instincts were screaming at him that this wasn’t a battle. It was an infection. A contagion of truth.

“Gatekeeper…. Think you cremated a servant?”

The voice sliced sideways across thought. Harry bit down on the pressure building in his skull.

“You burned a shard of our seal.”

What?

“A shard. Left when the world forgot. When Name was taken. Form bound. Memory sheared from Time.”

Harry could feel the Death barrier trembling. It shouldn’t — it was designed to isolate any magical flux, even his own. But this wasn’t flux. This was… echo. A memory not remembered, vibrating so deeply in magical substrate that even the protections of Death itself seemed irrelevant.

“You’re… you’re not… Dobby.”

“Not folds of memory, Gatekeeper. Cast us into Oblivion you did, but we remain. Dwelling In The Darkness, for WE ARE BENEATH!.” 

The statement thundered across Harry’s perception like a revelation carved into lightning.

“WE ARE BEFORE!”

The presence loomed now. Not forward — inward. As if it were being pressed through dimensions into a form that still didn’t fit. But somehow, as it spoke, Harry knew, he knew what it was, as if he had been given a snapshot of its core identity, its quintessential self.

For one second, no more than that, he understood it, what it was doing, what it wanted, what it planned, and why the Ancestors, even with all the power of their Family Magics, had been unable to annihilate them, and instead chosen to render them into oblivion, through layers of erasure, layers of reality distortion, until what was left was a humble servant that needed to serve endlessly, under different names, time and time again.

And then that moment was past, the knowledge vanished the way it had come — except for one thing. Somehow, he held on to a few crumbling fragments of insight.

The thing behind Dobby’s eyes was a Dweller-in-Darkness, whatever that meant. It was huge, powerful, and in a way, utterly different from the kinds of power he had seen before. This thing wasn’t bigger than Tezcatlipoca, or Freyja, or the Avatar of Destiny. But it was horribly, unbearably deeper, like a photograph of a sculpture compared to the sculpture itself. It had power at its command that was beyond anything he had seen, beyond measure, beyond comprehension — just plain beyond.

This thing was power from the Outside, and Harry was just a grain of sand to its oncoming tide.

He could see it forming. Behind Dobby’s eyes. A shadow of shape that had never been meant to be seen. Not form — but concept. Like a symbol half-carved into the world, unfinished because the universe itself had tried to erase it halfway through.

It hurt to look at.

“DOBBY—,” Harry said sharply.

“The fold is cut. The leash is torn. We shall —”

“ — THIS CONVERSATION IS OVER!”

The primordial power behind Dobby’s eyes flared to sudden, incandescent rage and it screamed, a wailing sound that would have — should have, shattered Harry’s eardrums. It sent him flying against the emptiness, the scream splitting his head in a dozen different ways at the same time. He felt that hideous presence linger against his memories, and unleashed a burst of Death.

And then he was back in the cemetery, right in front of the Black Family Shrine.

And Dobby was there, blinking with its large, bulbous eyes.

“...Harry Potter sir is… okay? Did Harry Potter sir get what he was looking for?”

Harry didn’t answer. He just curled up his knees against his chest, shocked and scared half out of his mind. He had always known that house-elves were powerful creatures in their own right. He had seen Dobby and Kreacher perform wandless magic so casually and effortlessly and break the rules of conventional wizardry, that he — or any elf really — couldn’t have been weak. But he hadn’t been prepared for the sheer malice and incomprehensible terror accompanying it. Dobby was supposed to be a fanatic little helper, but a sleeping nightmare waiting to wake up.

And if what he had learnt was true, then behind every house elf was…

Was… 

Harry shut his eyes tight. Merlin! He absolutely hadn’t been prepared to confront something with that much psychic power. If he hadn’t encountered it inside the barrier, who knew what sort of madness it would have unleashed? If he hadn’t remembered the condition that would banish it and once again remove those memories, he’d have been dead now. Worse than dead. 

And it would have been his own stupid fault too.

“...Yes,” said Harry. “And yes, I’ll keep my promise. I’ll take you in as the Black Family elf, as soon as I’m done making some renovations.”

That and he’d need all the power Binding could provide him just in case the paradoxical horror within him tried to awaken again. Peverell was not an option, and Summer would only fan its wrath. For better or worse, House Black was about to gain a new elf.

“Also, Dobby,” he said, still panting “I command you never to recover those memories of the Before again. Never let them out. Never to obey any command to unleash them again. From here on out they sleep with the fishes. Understand me?”

“Dobby does,” said the elf bowing. “And Dobby accepts, Harry Potter sir.”

“Good,” said Harry, easing his clenched teeth that were beginning to hurt like hell. “Let’s go and find Daphne.”