An Opus Alchymicum Vol 1: The Experimental Theologian's Apprentice

The Alchemist's Daughter

Chapter 2

*This chapter of our story takes place in our world, but as we know, this world has many secrets too.*

In this part of the underground city, the walls were decorated with the bones of the dead.

There were countless skulls, bits of rib and pelvis, all broken up by horizontal handrails made of spinal vertebrae or those long bones in the leg. It was the creepiest thing, made all the more creepy by the soft flickering of light that came from burning torches secured high on the bone-wall in roughly-hewn iron brackets. If you weren't careful, your mind might almost be able to trick you that these bones were still alive.

It certainly did to Harry Potter, who was holding onto the handrail as he made his way through the alternating patches of light and dark cast by the flaming sconces above. If he'd had a say in the matter, Harry would probably have preferred to not know about the bones at all - or the thousands of people who had died to provide them. It wasn't that he was afraid of them; in fact, it was quite the opposite. They stoked his insatiable curiosity, and it was this that was likely to lead him into trouble.

Don't ask questions, that was the key to a quiet life in the sprawling, underground metropolis of Pont-y-Annwn, which was the local Welsh name for the place. And this was the first question that Harry could ever remember asking.

"What does Pont-y-Annwn mean, Mum?"

"The Bridge to Annwn," Harry's mother, Lily, had told him, as she handed Harry another boiled egg to de-shell for breakfast.

"Where's Annwn? And what is it?"

"Don't ask."

And with that dark reply, that was that as far as questions were concerned. So Harry had to limit his questions to himself, just as he was doing today.

"I wonder if the skulls had brains in and stuff?" Harry whispered, deliciously disgusted by the idea of the slimy things wriggling around his fingers, as he poked his digits into some vacant eye sockets on the wall. "I bet they must have, so I should stop fiddling with them, really."

Harry often spoke to himself like this. After all, as the only child in the city, and with no-one to tell him that this habit was somewhat peculiar, Harry had simply gotten used to doing it.

Another thing he'd gotten used to, which was far more exciting, was investigating the labyrinth of tunnels he'd found under the city ... for in a location already seven miles underground, what else could be hiding even deeper than that?

Harry had come to decide that it must be big or secret or important, and definitely dangerous, to be buried so deep. So, naturally, he was on a mission to find it, whatever it was. And Harry's curiosity was further driven by something that his father had once told him, which - with hindsight - he probably shouldn't have.

"Always in this world, Harry, there is the sense of what might have been, if it hadn't been corrupted," James Potter had said to his son, after telling him a bedtime story one night. James never read to Harry from books, always made up the tales on the night. Tales of magic and dragons and far-off heroes doing daring deeds. Harry never tired of hearing these fanciful tales, and James never tired of inventing new ones.

"How easy would it have been for Eve to not eat her apple, for Pandora to have left that box closed," James went on. "Or for Tom Riddle to have not gone to Godric's Hollow on Halloween, if they'd only known the consequences. They had a world teeming with plenty, of beautiful oceans, verdant fields, lush valleys and temperate weather, peace and prosperity ...

"... and despite all this, they still wanted more."

It was a message, Harry knew, meant to warn against his curiosity. But all it did was inspire his imagination, to see just how far people were prepared to go for 'more'. He adopted the notion that this is why his city had been created in the first place, that the answers must lay close to the very centre of the Earth, and that these corridors were the way to get there. He imagined that this was where all the great and the good would gather for elaborate banquets, to have lofty discussions on subjects that Harry couldn't conceive, and to engage in unmentionable rites.