Hannah Abbott and Susan Bones stood in the middle of a dimly lit corridor on the fourth floor of the hospital, arms around each other as Hanna cried her eyes out. When Amelia had told her that her mother had been seriously injured in an attack, it felt like a hot knife had been driven through her heart.
A female Auror had agreed to escort Hannah and Susan to St Mungo's, and she now stood guard outside Sarah's private room.
They heard hurried footsteps coming along the corridor towards them, and Hannah raised her head from Susan's shoulder in order to see if it was a healer.
Susan felt like her eardrum ruptured when Hannah let out a sudden, loud shriek of "Daddy!" Rubbing a hand against her ear, she turned to watch as her best friend ran along the corridor and collided with her father, Edward Abbott.
Father and daughter embraced as the sounds of a fresh round of sobbing filled the air.
Behind Susan, the door to Sarah's room opened and a Healer stepped out. The man looked around before heading towards Edward and Hannah.
"Mr Abbott? I'm Healer Turpin. I've been overseeing the care of your wife."
"How is she?" asked Edward.
"She's stable for now, thanks largely to your family's House Elves who put her under stasis. We've just identified the curse that hit her as a dark cutting charm is known by the incantation sectumsempra. Two healers are casting the reversal incantation as we speak and she should be healed in a matter of minutes and awake again within the hour. Naturally we will want to keep her here for a couple of days for observation, but after that she should be good to go."
"Oh, thank Merlin!" exclaimed Edward before turning to Hannah. "You hear that, honey? Mum's going to be fine."
Hannah nodded and swiped at the tear on her cheek in an attempt to get rid of it, but more tears flowed, though now they were tears of joy.
Not too far away from them, three of the finest mind healers in Britain were currently examining Harry Potter in a private room, trying to discover what, if any, alterations had been made to his mind by Dumbledore and his people.
Harry had not wanted to be examined and had been quite vocal about his desire to leave. However, given the circumstances the decision was not his to make. The Ministry had ordered a medical examination of him and they were duty-bound to give it. In the end they'd had to sedate him in order to allow them to carry out their work.
They had been informed that Mr Potter had begun practicing occlumency and had supposedly gotten to the point where he could block out mild intrusions.
Either their information was wrong, or all of Mr Potter's hard work in learning occlumency had been completely undone, and rather viciously at that!
The many silvery spheres containing his thoughts and memories were now scattered all over the place in every direction. There was no organisation to it at all and any protections that might have been put in place were now gone.
In amongst all the silvery spheres there was more evidence of wrongdoing. Most of the spheres were standard ones, containing the thoughts and memories of Harry. But here and there, there were different spheres.
Some were as black as a lump of coal, looming ominously here and there. These were obliviated memories. As far as the average witch or wizard was concerned, an obliviation meant that a memory was erased. To those in the know, an obliviated memory was still there, but completely blocked off. There were no known means of unblocking an obliviated memory, except perhaps extreme torture, but the memory was undoubtedly still there.
Other spheres were just the opposite. They glowed with a pearly-white sheen, shining brightly amongst the rest. These were false memories, implanted within Harry's mind to replace those that were blocked.
Whoever had actually done this certainly knew what they were doing.
The healers could do nothing to reverse the obliviations, but they could remove the false memories. After that they would have to track down the various people who had been in contact with Harry during the period of time that had been obliviated from his mind. By borrowing their memories and letting him view them, he could at least bypass the obliviations to some extent.
Well, that was the theory anyway. Such a thing had never actually been attempted before.
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