Harry Potter and the Veil of Mystery

Harry Potter and the Veil of Mystery is the first in the "Post-OotP" trilogy by the author semprini. The next two stories are Harry Potter and the Ring of Reduction and Phoenix Intuition. You can find the stories at semprini's Blogspot page. Note that the fics Harry Potter and the Antiquity Link and Harry Potter and the Amulet of the Moon are not part of the series and constitute a separate post-Deathly Hallows arc.

There are some spoilers for Harry Potter canon through to Order of the Phoenix.


 * Big Bad: Voldemort. In spades. See below.
 * Cynical Mentor: Severus Snape.
 * Eccentric Mentor: Albus Dumbledore.
 * Cool Teacher: Harry Potter. Albus Dumbledore, as well.
 * Stock Aesops: Many of the older characters who speak to Harry often to do to illustrate moral or ethical messages. As an example, Hugo Brantell, a news reporter, explains the "facts of life in the media" in order to explain to Harry why he needs to keep engaging with the public, even though he has a very strong distaste for the media generally due to the abominable way the Ministry and the Daily Prophet treated him during his fifth year at school.
 * Aesoptinum: Harry Potter's ability to use the is rooted in a mindset that requires a state of mind akin to that attributed to Jesus Christ's "they know not what they do" level of forgiveness.
 * Moral Dilemma: Many characters in this fic arc discover truths about themselves, some pleasant and some very unpleasant, through engagement in moral dilemmas, or in some cases, the blowback from decisions they made in canon or in the fic arc. Example: Hermione Granger's decision to forbid Rita Skeeter from writing any articles of any kind.
 * Deal with the Devil: Voldemort He crows about how he even did this to himself and gleefully gloats that he believes this will help him win against Harry. Draco Malfoy  He's not a nice person in this arc.
 * Anti-Hero: Severus Snape. After, he had a My God, What Have I Done? moment. Snape was sufficiently regretful to go to Dumbledore and try to redeem himself by means of spying for him. Additionally, Snape's point of view, in contrast to some of the more nuanced moral perspectives offered by others, is extremely pragmatic based solely on the goal of defeating Voldemort. It is this which prompts him to.
 * Grey and Gray Morality: There's moral ambiguity to go with the above tropes. Harry's initially relatively black and white moral system takes on a leavening of grey as he tries to reconcile the real-world acts he sees with the moral code he's developed, which was in response to regarding the abyss of casting the Cruciatus Curse on Bellatrix Lestrange in Order of the Phoenix.
 * Heroic Sacrifice: A prominent example is, assisting Harry in his task to defeat Voldemort once and for all.
 * Shipping: Fairly bog-standard, but there's a few surprises. It's mostly kept in the background, but the romantic trials and tribulations of the teenagers do occasionally provide fodder for the above Moral Dilemma issues.
 * Heel Face Turn: spies for Harry in Slytherin House and provides a crucial warning to Harry, saving his life when a student.
 * Chekhov's Gun: Actually, it's more like Chekhov's Small Arms Factory in these fics. Everything the author introduces as a special skill or special item, even if not obvious, gets used in the fic arc to accomplish something. Example:
 * The Woobie: Blaise Zabini. He ends up basically being cannon fodder.
 * Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: Through a very unique set of circumstances,
 * Right Makes Might: Mostly averted, but it exists in a small measure when Harry comes up with His acts can be justified on the basis of some woo-woo involving the  and that, by authorial intent, it paves the way to