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At the end of that week, Harry found himself sitting face to face with Tonks, in her room.
How he got there though, was... unexpected.
It started with a wand malfunction in the middle of Duelling Club. One of the fourth-years decided it would be a brilliant idea to modify a Disarming Charm with a charm meant for setting tea kettles on fire. It worked, in a way... except instead of disarming his partner, he'd sent his wand spinning across the room while setting his own sleeve ablaze.
Tonks had put it out with a quick charm, grinned like it was the highlight of her evening, and told the kid to keep the combo. "You will terrify your opponents and your tailor."
Club wrapped not long after, with most of the older years sticking around, chatting over the day's pairings and pretending not to limp. Hermione stayed to pack up the magical logs. Daphne was sketching out a tighter sparring rotation on the blackboard. Tracey was making fun of Pansy's shield posture while also stealing from her snack pouch. Tonks hovered near the dummies, adjusting the feedback triggers on one of them.
Harry crossed the mat and handed her a bottle of enchanted water... one of the ones that stayed cold through three castings of Incendio.
She accepted it, cracking it open. "Thanks. You lot don't half-arse anything, do you?"
"Comes with the territory," Harry said. "You either learn fast, or you get floored by Fred."
Tonks laughed, sitting on one of the low benches near the edge of the room. "He nearly took Zabini's kneecaps off. Still can't tell if that was on purpose."
"Oh, it was," Harry said, deadpan. "George gave him two sickles to do it."
She blinked, then laughed again. "That explains the smug look."
"Always does."
She stretched her legs out, leaned back slightly. "I heard you've got a stash of unauthorized duel logs. The real stuff. Not the Ministry-approved curriculum."
"Rumors," Harry said, half-smiling. "But if I did, what would you want with it?"
"Comparison. Most Auror drills are designed for pair work. Yours lean group-based. I saw that in the sparring format."
Harry didn't confirm or deny. "I ran simulations. Found flaws in the standard drills. Too many assume clean casting conditions."
Tonks sipped from the bottle. "Exactly. No one casts clean in a street fight."
"You mean duel?"
"No," she said, looking amused. "I mean street fight. That is what it turns into once someone flips a table."
They both sat in silence for a beat while Daphne wrapped the chalkboard in a privacy shimmer and left with a wave. The rest followed, one by one. Hermione left last, already muttering about log errors.
Tonks looked around. "Feels weird when it is empty."
"You get used to it," Harry said, flicking his wand once to snuff out the overhead lights. The room dimmed except for the glow of the dummy triggers.
"Come on," Tonks said, grabbing her satchel. "I will trade you for that duel data."
"Trade me what?" Harry asked.
Tonks pulled something out of her satchel and held it up between two fingers. "This."
It looked like a fragment... broken, maybe. About the size of a Snitch, flat on one side, jagged on the other. It caught the light strangely, like it had a shimmer just under the surface. Not a reflection exactly, more like light bending away from it. Sometimes it flickered. Once, it showed a corner of the room that definitely didn't exist.
Harry narrowed his eyes. "What is that?"
Tonks sat on the bench, flipping it over in her hand. "The Glimmer. Picked it up during training. We were cleaning out an old vault near Edinburgh. Half the junk was cursed, the other half was rubbish. This didn't fall into either."
"And you just… took it?"
"The Unspeakables said it was an anomaly. Didn't respond to any trace spells, no magical signature, couldn't categorize it. They were going to toss it in the dead inventory. I figured, pretty and weird? Might as well keep it."
She tossed it over casually. Harry caught it.
It was cold to the touch. Not ice-cold, just… empty. Like it wasn't meant to be held. Smooth on the front, fractured at the back, and even though it didn't glow or pulse or hum, it felt wrong. Just slightly off from everything else he'd touched.
He activated Observe.
Nothing.
[System Message: Item cannot be seen through.]
He froze.
Tonks didn't notice. She was busy digging in her bag again. "You want it or not? I don't care either way. It just sits on my shelf like a weird decoration."
Harry didn't answer right away. Only two items had ever triggered that message. The Cloak. The Stone. Both linked to those primal forces Nigel once called "the three," whatever that meant.
But this?
He slipped into Astral Sight.
Nothing like the other two. No glowing mark. No anchor line. No presence humming underneath.
He turned it over slowly in his palm. "This thing ever… do anything?"
Tonks shrugged. "Sometimes it pulses. Not often. Couple of times all together, maybe. No pattern. Thought maybe it was reacting to magical flux, but it did it once in a Muggle coffee shop, so I gave up on that theory."
Harry deactivated Astral Sight and tucked the Glimmer into his coat pocket without a word.
Tonks watched him. "You alright?"
"Yeah," he said. "You've got a deal."
And just like that, Harry was in her room, trading duel logs for the weird fragment she'd tossed him. Tonks had cleared off her desk with a flick, dragging two chairs closer before plopping down into one with her boots kicked onto the edge.
"Right," she said, spinning a spare quill between her fingers. "Show me what you've got, Potter."
Harry dropped into the seat opposite, pulled out a folded set of parchment from his jacket pocket, and unrolled it onto the desk. There were ink marks everywhere, lines, diagrams, wand arcs, even short notes in the margins that looked like they'd been scribbled mid-duel.
Tonks leaned forward, whistling low. "Alright, not bad. You actually formatted it like a real training sheet."
She studied the first set... group rotations, field response pairings, mirrored drills, countercurse layering. Half of it looked like stuff Harry had lifted from official Auror methods, then rewritten to actually work under fire. The rest? Pure improvisation that came from being hit too many times and learning how to avoid it.
Tonks pointed at a page. "This one... triple defense triangle, rotating anchors. Where did you come up with that?"
"Daphne and Luna. We were trying to stop Tracey from getting flattened by Pansy's wide arcs. Figured if we rotated the stabilizing casters, it wouldn't collapse if one of them got hit."
"Makes sense." She tapped the parchment. "This is the kind of stuff they don't teach until specialist field work."
"That is because they don't expect students to build a miniature army."
Tonks looked up, smirked. "You are not wrong."
She flipped to another page, eyes skimming the drills designed for speedcasting with partial obscurity... firing spells through minor cover, adjusting angles around debris. Most of it had little side notes like "Works better when tired" or "Remind Fred not to shout the spell name like a lunatic."
Tonks snorted. "He really does that?"
"Yells 'Stupefy' like it is a battle cry."
She shook her head, still chuckling. "Alright, Potter. Trade is done. I will look through this properly and return it after. I won't show anyone else."
Harry pushed himself up from the chair with a stretch and waved a hand. "You can't, even if you try."
Tonks blinked. "What is that supposed to mean?"
He waved his hand, not explaning. Almost everything he wrote, especially sensitive notes, were done using his Phoenix Feather Quill. He could control exactly who saw them, how long they lasted, whether they faded after reading or turned to gibberish if one try to copy. Temporary viewing, conditional access, failsafe encryption... he could tweak it all. Technically Tonks could memorize them then write them down but he wasn't worried.
He stepped out of her office, and took the side passage toward the dungeons. Harry dropped onto the far sofa, pulling the strange item Tonks had given him from his coat pocket. It felt the same... cool, smooth on one side, fractured on the other. Still no glow, no hum, no reaction to magic. Just a quiet wrongness that didn't belong to anything else.
He turned it over in his fingers a few times, then muttered, "Do you know anything, Nigel?"
A beat passed before the answer came.
"No, Harry. But items like these rarely appear for no reason. They are almost always connected by fate."
Typical.
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