Begin to Hope

The lights only got brighter as we grew closer, and the brighter they grew the more excited we got and the faster we walked. Before we knew it we were simply a mile from London and it was nearly morning.

I was finally warming up to the rest of them. I was in a better mood, happily chatting with the rest of them about what we would like best about London, even wondering if we'd be able to rent a room at a tavern and perhaps take showers and wash up.

There was a slight mist above London, giving it a glowing look as we neared it. The sun peaked over the treetops and the morning was a dimming red color.

"Red sky in the morning, sailor's warning; red sky at night, sailor's delight." Orlando said thickly to me as we walked along.

"What?"

"Er-nothing. An old rhyme I just know."

"Do you think we will need a sailor's warning today?" I teased him.

"Hopefully not. If we make it to the Ministry, we shouldn't have any problems. Except maybe with hobos. It's been closed for years; there shouldn't be anyone in there at all."

We neared the edge of London and I began to wonder whether anyone would find ten children traveling alone suspicious. I hoped not. What would we say to anyone that tried to interrogate us? "Sorry, can't talk; we're trying to save the world."

Yeah, right.

"Do you know where we're going, Orlando?" Klaus called as we entered a darkened city street. There was no one around, not a single soul, and it sent shivers down my spine as I looked around at the abandoned buildings.

"Yeah, just follow me." He quickened his pace and pushed forward to lead us towards the Ministry of Magic. None of us had ever been there before. I wondered how he had ever come to know where the Ministry was. Had he perhaps visited it when he was younger?

"My family -- the ones who I had to go to a few weeks ago -- I told them we might need directions and they gladly offered me all the maps we had -- which covers about seven generations of map collecting." He called back to us as we hurried along. "I gathered the useful ones and looked them over carefully before I came back here." He smiled broadly at me. "I guess they came in handy, didn't they?"

He led us along a few more deserted roads until we came to a crowded intersection.

"Huh?"

I looked backward at the street we had just left, and saw no one. The street itself looked dark and dreary, as if someone had turned off all the street lights on that street only. I then looked up and down the street we were on, seeing several strangers glancing oddly at me, as if fascinated by the fact that I was lost. I noticed that no one stopped to help, however.

"Why was that street so abandoned, and this one is so full of people?" Kimberly asked, looking around as eagerly as I had.

Orlando shrugged. "Magic."

Without another word, he ushered us past street after street, until we came to one of the busier streets. Orlando stopped all of us suddenly in the middle of the street, looking around to either side. Several people passed by, looking at us quite strangely, as if they were surprised to see ten children standing in the middle of the sidewalk in the early morning, alone.

"How would I go about opening this?" Orlando mumbled under his breath. I peered through the dark glass of the store that we were closest to, gasping when I saw the remains of what might have once been a splendid store. There were chairs thrown helter-skelter inside, as well as a few discarded mannequins. One of them was essentially a life-like painted wooden statue standing right inside the window, as if leaning toward us to whisper in our ears. I looked at Orlando, and he was intently staring at the mannequin.

I again looked at the mannequin, and this time I could have sworn its lips moved, just a tad.

"What--?"

Orlando hushed me, grabbed my hand, and before I could make a move to stop him, he pulled me forward and we plunged forward. I shut my eyes and squeezed his hand as hard as I could and opened my mouth to scream, thinking we'd fall forward and the glass would shatter around us. I realized quickly that no glass had shattered and we were still alive. I opened my eyes and looked around. It looked like we were in some sort of lobby. Another abandoned, discarded room lay around us in ruins. Ripped apart chairs were thrown in one of the corners of the room and plaster and glass littered the marble floor.

I turned back to where we had come from and found nothing but a blank white brick wall.

"Ugh--lumos!--where are we? How did we get in here?"

My questioning was interrupted when Klaus, Humphrey, and Tally fell through the wall we had come from. They emerged coughing and sputtering and nearly fell on top of us.

"Watch out--Annabelle and the rest are coming through--" We stepped out of the way just in time to see the rest of them come crashing through in a haze of dust and cinder. Coughing, Kimberly stood up and looked around.

"What is this place?"

"This is the old St. Mungo's Hospital, where people could be fixed up by Healers." Orlando helped Annabelle to her feet and looked around to make sure the rest of us were okay. "There should be some sort of entrance through here to the Ministry of Magic."

"Why didn't we just go to the Ministry of Magic entrance?"

"It's blocked off. It was wrecked years ago, after the Ministry Massacre. Voldemort came back later and blocked off the main entrance so nobody could get down there. However--there should be another way--" Kicking pieces of rubble out of the way, he motioned for us to follow him through an area that looked something like a lobby.

"Are you sure we're going the right way?" Humphrey voiced the concern we were all thinking as we watched a fat white rat scamper across the cement floor in front of us. We turned a corner, went through several corridors and down a flight of crumbling steps.

"Of course. Just a little farther. I think--there should be some sort of entrance right through here." He pushed past a swinging wooden door and it almost rammed back and hit me. "Oh, sorry, Kerry!" he muttered under his breath as he turned back to me. He held it open as we all passed through.

"Right this way. Just a little farther." Orlando pushed a thick cobweb out of the way of his face as he pressed onward. We carried on for just another moment longer, until we stopped in front of a thick wooden barred door at the end of a long hall.

"Is this it?" Tally asked, looking suspiciously up at it.

Instead of answering, Orlando got out his wand and tapped the metal door handle several times, whispering several spells as he did. He sniffed suspiciously the air around it, and I exchanged glances with Kimberly.

"There must be somehow --ah, there!" With a small click, the door creaked loudly and swung open, heavy on its hinges.

Orlando motioned us through a dark, dampened tunnel that smelled of rotting flesh. As soon as I took a step in, I immediately started to cough and had to hold my nose. Most of us took out our wands and muttered Lumos, for it was very dark indeed.

"I smell all horse-piss, and it causes my nose great indignation!" Maverick called, sputtering behind me.

"Keep quiet!" Orlando threatened, raising a finger to his lips.

"What could possibly be wanting to listen to our conversation down here?" Maverick hissed to me as he glared daggers at Orlando's turned back.

"I don't know. What could possibly be down here, even?" I shuddered at the thought, not really wanting to know the answer.

We continued following along the dank tunnel for quite a while. It wasn't until we were nearly the entire way through that I realized I had been subconsciously checking behind my shoulder every few seconds, just to be sure we weren't being followed. I kept having the fleetingly feeling that someone, or something, was watching.

Just as I thought I was about to go crazy in this dark tunnel, I spotted a narrow beam of light penetrating through the tunnel before us. "Orlando, what's that?"

"That's our destination. We're almost there. Hurry!" We quickened our pace and within a few moments had made it to the end of the tunnel; a narrow, boarded up hole in the wall.

"Maverick, help me." Orlando commanded, reaching forward to try and pry the wooden boards of the wall. Fortunately they were so old and weather-worn that they fell off the hole easily enough with just a few tugs.

"Step back. I'll go through it first."

Annabelle held everyone back while Orlando carefully ventured through the hole, disappearing into semi-darkness. I held my breath until I heard him call for us to follow him.

I stepped carefully through the hole, waving my hand in front of my face to get rid of the lingering cinders in the air. I coughed a few times and nearly fell over sideways, but luckily Orlando was there to catch my fall. He helped me back off and brushed some dirt off my shoulder. I smiled at him.

"Orlando, oh, help!" Annabelle cried daintily, waving flirtatiously through the other side of the hole. I rolled my eyes and tried to tell him to ignore her, but he, being the perfect gentlemen, went over to help her and the rest of them through.

I turned around in circles, wondering where exactly we were. It was a cold, smaller room, with only one door at the far end. I walked slowly toward it, my wand out. I reached out a hand to grab the door handle.

"Don't!" Orlando cried, running to stop me. "I mean--let me go first. Just--in case."

I looked at him quizzically but shrugged, letting him open the door and sneak through first. After a moment of fumbling around, he popped his head back out at us.

"And now--presenting the Ministry of Magic--" He let the door swing open and we weren't surprised to see a room not unlike those which we had passed through. Mostly dirty, a few broken sculptures in this one, though, and a fountain covered in murky brown water. There was also red-brown stains on a few of the walls. I could only imagine what caused them.

"We are almost finally there. Just down this hallway, down the steps, and to our final destination." Orlando showed us the way down the stairways, and as he did, we all got excited about finally arriving in the Ministry. Orlando began to introduce each floor to us as we passed them. "And here we have what used to be the Department of Magical Games and Sports." We passed through several large meeting rooms which once held magical equipment for such events.

"And finally--the Department of Mysteries--where we have--our library."

Orlando flung open a metal door, and we were all overjoyed to find the library fully intact. We immediately split up and went into different directions, eager to find anything pertaining to the necklace.

"But why would the Death Eaters have left this room alone, of all the rooms in the Ministry?" Kimberly muttered to me over a bookshelf on goblins. "Don't you think they'd have taken this vast library of information, maybe deeming it useful?"

I shrugged. "Maybe they never thought they would need anything of the sort. They have so many followers--what would they need books for?"

We scoured the library for several hours, looking in indexes and dictionaries for any descriptions with the word 'necklace' in them. Several times we thought one of us had found a description of it; only to compare it to the actual necklace and find them nothing alike.

By nightfall most of them had given up. They were all tired and irritable, having been walking for so long, and then searching until their eyes gave out. A few of them had fallen asleep on top of the books they had been looking through, just collapsing on the nearest table. Only one or two remained looking, determined to find information on our mysterious necklace.

I found Orlando in a far corner of the library, tipping his wooden chair against its back two legs, almost hitting the wall behind him. He was holding up the necklace and carefully examining it, a look of mysterious distrust on his face.

"What are you thinking about?" I asked him, pulling up a chair beside him and folding my knees up underneath me.

He looked up suddenly, as if surprised that I had joined him.

"Oh, hi, Kerry. Didn't notice you there." He put away the necklace into a pocket of his pants and turned to me, a strange half-smile on his face. "I was just studying the necklace." He sighed and threw an arm around my shoulder. "Did you find anything?"

"No, and I searched for hours." I laid my head on his shoulder and made a face at a thought that suddenly came to me. "What if we came all this way for nothing? What if we don't find any useful information at all?"

"It won't be for nothing. We could easily settle down here, you know. Right here, in the library. It'd be nice, you know? And we'd never get bored."

"Yeah. Bored. Right." I turned away from him, feeling uneasy. That same feeling I felt in the tunnel, of being watched. "You know, Orlando, I think I'll go to bed now."

He slid his arm away from me and straightened up. "Bed? Really? Would you like me to join you?"

"No, I'm fine." I stood up and inched away. "I'll see you tomor--"

"I found it!"

"What?! You found it? Let me see!" Orlando jumped from his seat and sprang to where Kimberly was yelling from.

"Yes, I found it!" She set down a huge book on the long table in front of us and pointed to a paragraph on the page. "It's called the Solium Stone. Apparently there's only one in existence, and it does exactly what we figured it does. Prevents the wearer from being cursed or harmed in anyway. Solium means dominion, or regal power, in Latin."

"Let me see that!" Orlando yanked the book from Kimberly's arms as the others slowly awoke to find out what all the noise was. "Yes, you're right--a rocky metal on a gold chain, one of the pieces of metal has a bright blue gem in the middle, the Solium Stone!" He looked up at us. "Kimberly, you are a genius!"

She beamed. "Thank you."

"And looky here, it has two entire sections on it--how to use and how to destroy. How useful!" Orlando started eagerly poring through the book, leaving the rest of us to stand that dumbly.

"Um, hello, Orlando? The rest of us are dead tired. Let's go to bed and check out the book tomorrow. After all, we're safe, we're hidden now, and we have the book, so there's no hurry. We'll read it tomorrow then, alright?" Tally started to walk backwards, nodding her head at Orlando to make sure he understood.

"Oh. Right. Yeah, you all go to bed. And I'll see you tomorrow." He took the book and went back to the original chair he had been sitting in, putting his feet up on the table and not looking up as most of them called goodnight to him.

I looked away in disgust before leaving the library in search of an area somewhat comfortable to sleep in. I could deal with Orlando tomorrow.