Harry pulled the brush along the smooth canvas in one long, elegant stroke. He’d just mixed together a soft lavender on his palette, the color of the sky when the sun begins to rouse from its nightly slumber. In fact, that very scene is the setting for his new painting. The ethereal dawn of a new day, sleepily guiding away the darkness of hours passed.
Harry was in the Room of Requirement, between D.A. meetings. He was alone, shrouded with silence in the desolate expanse of the art studio; Or, the Room’s idea of one, anyway. Harry was glad for the privacy. He needed a quiet place to himself, to decompress from the chaos of his everyday life. With Voldemort’s return, the Prophet’s smear campaign on him and the Headmaster, and his torturous detentions with Umbridge, he needed an escape now more than ever before. Even his second year wasn’t this bad, and everyone thought he was a psycho petrifying people back then! Not to mention, there was the giant snake that everybody could have died from by just glancing at its eyes! The phrase “if looks could kill” still makes Harry nauseous every time he hears it.
In other words, Harry was having a hard time. He needed a safe space where he could forget his troubles without worrying about them being used against him. Someplace where he could collect his thoughts so they wouldn’t roll away from him, or drag his mind apart at the seams. Someplace where he could breathe.
He’d noticed that the other members of Dumbledore’s Army seemed to think that the room only existed during lessons, and now, he certainly wasn’t going to dissuade them from the idea. It was understandable enough, since the door always appeared when they arrived and disappeared when they left, but nonetheless incorrect. A fact which Harry will unapologetically take full advantage of. Apart from him, only Ron and Hermione knew that it was always there, sitting, waiting to be used. A lonely, forgotten relic of the past. Something that, despite not being fully sentient, is no less grateful for the students’ company. And Harry is more than happy to oblige.
He was sitting on a three-legged stool, easel in front of him, gazing out of the window that the Room created for him. The subject of his painting. A landscape of the Hogwarts grounds, colored with the fresh, powdery light that came just before sunrise. It was a piece that meant a surprising amount to him. When he’d started, he never expected to become so emotionally attached to the idea of it, but there he was. The tranquility of that scene clawed at the deepest parts of his heart. The brushstrokes, layered with a serene calm, or at least the notion of it, reached out toward him. Almost as if the painting was coming alive to grasp at his very soul. It embodied every emotion that felt eternally out of reach for him. Like shining a light through a prism and creating rainbows, Harry thought if he could shine ‘peace’ through a lens, he would see this one artwork. An amalgamation of the most desperate desires of his heart.
A painting, capturing life with a dreamlike ease.
It kind of reminded him of Luna. Maybe when he’s finished, he’ll show it to her. Harry thought she’d like that.
Harry had been worried about Luna as of late. She’d gotten five days of detention with Umbridge the day before, when the woman caught her talking about the nargles again, who she suspected to have stolen her textbooks, and really, Harry wasn’t sure if he was impressed by how unfazed she was in the face of bullying, or concerned that she didn’t seem to find anything wrong with how she was being treated. He should definitely ask her about that, sometime soon. For now, in this all-consuming fog of a thing called ‘waiting,’ Harry was content to keep painting. He’s sure that, sooner or later, Luna will find him. She always seems to know when to talk to him, for either of their sakes’.
When her week of detention was over, Harry could try to use the work to cheer her up. A gift of celebration; “You made it!” Is the message it’ll scream silently. “Congratulations! Now we have matching hands!” A tiny smile dragged itself across his face at the idea. If nothing else, it was an amusing thought.
Hopefully, it would be finished by then, but like most things, art takes time and patience. That was one of the reasons he was so drawn to it in the first place. It was a meditative pastime, something he could lose himself in. He could let his mind be carried away from the intensity of reality and float through the tide of imagination. A lazy river of thoughts and feelings too big to put into words, but vivid enough to transfer onto paper. A dreamland of endless possibilities that only he could see, only he could touch. Something that belonged to him and no one else. Something he could reach in and gaze at whenever he wanted to.
During a quiet moment at the Dursleys’, when the world felt a little too cramped. During the school years at Hogwarts, when everyone’s expectations felt a little too heavy.
During a freezing December morning in the Room of Requirement, where the air smelled a little like winter, and too much like despair.
Harry’s thoughts twisted in every direction, spiraling with hope and stagnating with fear in equal measure, but he never stopped painting. Stroke after stroke, blot after blot, Harry crafted a better reality from nothing but oily pigment and hope. Hope for a life in which he can enjoy these December mornings, surrounded by the people he loves, and even the people he doesn’t, in a world where war is a distant and underdeveloped notion. Something watery and indistinct, and wholly unable to taint others with its sickly grasp.
Harry continued to work as he pondered, and he thought he understood why War and Pestilence were two of the four Horses heralding the prophesied Apocalypse in scripture. Because, in truth, they really were two sides of the same coin. He would know, after all, just how contagious war can be.
The painting began to take on a darker tone, but somehow, Harry liked the contrast. He could make it work. The darker blues and purples of night gradually gave way to the cloudy lavenders and pinks of a fresh dawn. With light, came a triumphant joy born from Earth’s perseverance. Like the first flight of Apollo’s chariot, after the harrowing defeat of Python by his hand.
Harry could see the life of the land in his art begin to solidify, and his heart felt, for the first time in what feels like forever, at peace. His blood slowed from the flow of a raging tempest to a comfortable glide. His muscles loosened and relaxed from their previously unnoticed tenseness. His bones seemed to settle in his body and felt absent of an ever-present ache.
His soul breathed a sigh of relief.
Shapes took tangible form on the canvas. The Forbidden forest, its void-dark leaves joined by a new shade of gleaming green as it emerged from the night. The Black lake, its water glistening like crushed gems as the morning light cast over it. The brilliant emerald grass of the grounds peeking out from the soft, tufted layers of fresh snow. The craggy gray rocks of a mountain in the distance, glowing silver in the reflection of the fresh sky.
The beautiful sunrise, not yet visible, but so close to overcoming the land that you could practically taste it in all its mesmerizing, fiery glory. It smelled of the sweetness of ripe mangoes, and the smoke of a wild inferno. It sounded like a crescendo of cicadas, wind-rustled branches, screams of joy and hate, and a million other things that shouldn’t sound good together, but they do because that’s how it was always supposed to be. It felt like life. It felt like a conglomeration of earth and sky and Heaven. It felt like the beginning of all things.
It was terrifying in all its eternal power but it was beautiful and it felt like home.
Harry felt like he was home. His hand flew over the canvas, brush after brush, color after color, cry after cry; Harry let himself paint and he was lost. Lost in the waves of the forest, lost in the shine of the lake, and he was lost in the soul of the sunrise. The life of an ethereal dawn, a steadfast companion in even the darkest age. From the beginning of time to the end of the universe, himself naught but an infinitesimal dot on the omnipotent horizon, that sunrise persisted. Without fail, every day of every year of every millennium, that divine star has been and will always be an eternal constant. If nothing else was there in the entirety of Harry’s approximation of existence, then this sunrise was the only thing. If everything were to end in five minutes, without even the shadow of a molecule left behind, then the sunrise was the only thing Harry could truly mourn from the depths of his being. That glorious scene, which routine could never have hoped to diminish the beauty of, was greater than any god Harry could imagine. If comprehension became obsolete, then he would wish for nothing other than to experience one single dawn more, if only to nourish his soul before his mind went numb.
Time ceased to exist and reality faded away in a distant maelstrom of primordial torment. Harry’s mind, his soul, his being, was encapsulated by the creation of this painting, this inter-dimensional work of art in which fantasy became reality. He was not painting, he was creating . Harry was creating the sunrise. The only, for much of his life, pleasant constant there ever was. He was giving life to life itself. He wondered, if any gods were real, if this was even a small fraction of what they might’ve felt like. To create for the sake of creating, something with a vitality all its very own. There was a certain grandiosity to the act of creation, whether it be felt by man or god, that cannot be ignored even when the desire to do so is greatest. Harry let himself be consumed.
Harry created, and he was lost.
Lost in the sharp residual scent of the canvas primer. Lost in the mess of colors on his palette. And he was lost in this quiet ache, a crippling desire to create and be created in turn. Every idea, every line, every shape; every complete work of art was merely a component of Harry. Every painting, scrap and masterpiece alike, was another building block of his identity. A support beam of personality; a cornerstone of selfhood. With each of Harry’s creations, he, himself, was being erected, brick by pictorial brick. He shaped his work, and as such, his own person with an inventive eye and restless hands. He ran his fingers through the unruly fibres of his existence and formed a cultivated individuality. He represented the proactivity of being. He was living proof that a person can be made by the person themself. Harry was recreating Harry. The only person that, for a long time, he felt like he could rely on. He was giving life to life himself.
Harry was no god, and he felt that much more rewarded for it.
The room darkened and the shadows stretched, but he never noticed. Harry was consumed, after all. His soul was gouged with hooks of inspiration and he was dragged through this heavenly act of creation. The addictive journey to achieving totality. To paint is to become whole, and Harry craved that sensation of completeness. In each brief moment of creativity, his many broken pieces were cobbled back together, and he felt like himself. More than he has ever felt like himself. He was whole, and he was home, and he was lost.
Lost in the enormity of the feeling. Lost in the currents of creation that made the shapeless foundations of the universe. And he was lost in this surreal hurricane, born of the coalescence between reality and idealism. When the progeny of two dimensions congealed into a whole new one, with new sights and smells and senses to accompany it. Harry was encompassed entirely by these new sensations. The vivid brightness of form, the bitter sweetness of mathematics, the plush softness of the idea.
The Room and every construction that belonged to it disappeared and was replaced by the exquisite furnishings of Harry’s mind.
The mechanical clock on the wall that ticked away fiercely, as if possessed. The structure of the Room that seemed to shift as the sunlight lazily roamed across it. Shrieks of laughter that echoed up from the open window, Sunday merriment leaking through the stone walls. Those voices that grew louder and then waned, like a tide of emotion in the ocean of time. Every aspect of that plane, gone. Swept away by the winds of imagination.
One touch, two, three. A shadow here, a reflection there. Hours of intense concentration and attention to detail, which none but his art were beholden to. Ages of indomitable focus with a touch of reckless abandon. These timeless passages of people and light and energy have now reaped a long-awaited reward. At the beginning, Harry had sewn the seeds of his crop with primer and a sketch. He had ached to grow those seeds into crops of beauty and allure. And finally, with a delicate smattering of iridescent white to denote the stars fading in the growing sunlight, Harry’s foggy grasp on reality began to solidify.
And when Harry slowly, eventually, came back to himself, he was startled. The Room was lit only by a stream of torches along the walls, and he noticed his stomach cramping in displeasure. He had been in a trance, and his consciousness had seemingly left his body. He glanced around at his surroundings, trying to reorient himself, when something strange leapt out at him.
Harry did a double-take, and was shocked to find that the painting was complete. What should have taken a week, at the very least, had been completed in a matter of– he checked the time– a few days! He had started this work a few days ago, and had come in every morning to chip away at it. He’d expected it to take a while. And it did, at first… until today. Somehow, today, Harry had found himself in an accelerated spiral of production. It was almost time for dinner, but he felt high. Or like he was just coming down from a high. Hours had passed in what felt like a few seconds. Much like him, Time was lost.
Harry looked at his art, and felt his metaphorical jaw drop. He was in awe of the work. It was most certainly his, it had all the hallmarks of something he’d created, but it had something else there, too. Something new, and entirely its own. Whatever it was, it didn’t belong to him anymore, but to the painting itself. He was used to creating, but not like this. Never like this. The scene seemed to actually give off its own source of light, the paints ebbed and flowed into one another in an eternal dance, and the canvas itself seemed to writhe with a raw sort of energy the likes of which Harry had never witnessed before.
Or had he?
This work was eerily reminiscent of something familiar.
The portraits. The ones that were strewn about haphazardly all over Hogwarts, whose occupants wiled away their endless time bothering each other and chatting up the students. They were all alive too, like his painting seemed to be. But there was something undeniably different here. The portraits all had the same energy, uniform and refined. You could see miniscule differences in the art styles of each painter, but the fundamental technique between each and every one of them was the same. They all had a cultivated sort of elegance and finesse. A polished grace.
Harry’s painting had absolutely none of that. It was uneven, reality gave way to dream and then back again; the tangible became fog and the mist became solid. It was like his imagination, the inhabitants of the ether, were striving against the fabric of the universe to become real. The entire scene was enraptured in a peaceful kind of conflict. It was struggling, but it found joy in the battle. Its entire purpose in being created was fulfilling itself with every second that it moved, that it fought, that it breathed. The energy– the magic in this painting was wild, conceived of a nature so embroiled in friction that it lost all sense of decorum.
This painting was raw. This painting was real.
It was the encapsulation of every fleeting thought, every weighty feeling that took up space in his mind during its creation. If Harry looked closely, he could pinpoint each of them, like they were stars that made up the constellations in the night sky. In the shadows of the forest he found writing carved into hands, page after page printed with lies disguised as truth, and the jeers of fickle-minded classmates. In the glow of the sunrise through the clouds, he saw curly blonde hair and a mysterious smile, echoes of friendly banter between people shaped like joy, the begrudgingly curious gazes evoked by an endearing peculiarity. In the shining depths of the lake, he found a sense of solitary peace, a stool and an easel waiting for him, fresh and unblemished canvases beckoning to him with the desire to be colored.
This painting held memories. This painting held thoughts and ideas. This painting was alive .
Harry gazed into a life of his own creation, and he was lost.
Lost because his art was the embodiment of life. Lost because it was magic and science and vitality all molded together to create something utterly new. And he was lost because it was an idea dragged from the realm of his imagination into the world of fact. It was a concept given form. Perception made into reality.
It felt like time was pulled apart by its threads and woven into a new pattern, one with more flexibility. One with room for every facet of creation, beyond what was previously imaginable.
Harry knew that he did more than sit down and paint. He formed. He created. But it was the first time he had ever created to such an overwhelming degree. He had created life.
With this, the fabric of space unravelled and was remade. He, too, came undone at conception. Eternity and nonexistence flowed together as one, and birthed pure magic. The spark of something new met the kindling of a dream and roared to life, uncompromising. Thoughts stretched long and reshaped themselves into a sculptured, glittering landscape. Every facet of intangibility came together to form physical creation.
This is its genesis.
It let itself be drawn into the material plane, and the Painting was lost.