The prompts are:

The Lies of Dark Magic
-OR/AND-
Time travel
(2 bonus points if your entry uses both)
​

To help inspire ideas, here are some from chat GPT. You are welcome to use any of them.

The Lies of Dark Magic

1. [Psychological Horror] - The Truth Beyond the Veil
Everyone says the Veil in the Department of Mysteries is a gateway to death. But when Harry hears Sirius calling from the other side, he starts believing the true lie—that dark magic can bring someone back. What he brings back isn’t Sirius.

2. [Mystery/Thriller] - The Liar’s Curse
Ron is hit with a curse that forces him to lie, even when he tries to speak the truth. But as lies pour out of him—wild stories, false confessions—some of them start to come true. Hermione suspects the magic isn’t cursed... it’s rewriting reality.

3. [Fantasy Adventure] - The Black Scroll of Avalon
A hidden scroll claims to grant ultimate magical knowledge to those who embrace the dark. But every witch or wizard who reads it goes mad, believing they've become gods. Harry, determined to end dark magic forever, decides to read it himself—to see the truth beneath the lie.

4. [Romantic Tragedy] - Her Smile Was Spelled
Draco falls in love with a girl who seems too good to be true—because she is. She’s the product of a dark love spell he cast years ago and forgot. As the magic starts to fail, he must choose: break the lie, or become someone else to keep it alive.

5. [Satire/Dark Comedy] - The Dark Lord Support Group
A group of failed dark wizards (including Gilderoy Lockhart, who thinks he was one) meet weekly to talk about how dark magic "lied" to them—promising power, fame, eternal youth... only to give them nothing but therapy bills and bad skin.

6. [Gothic Romance] - The House that Lied
A young witch inherits a long-abandoned manor once owned by a powerful dark witch. The house itself speaks, promises love, safety, truth. But as she unravels its history—and her connection to the witch—she realizes the house is still casting illusions.

7. [Dystopian AU] - Project Parselmouth
In a post-war world where dark magic is outlawed, the Ministry secretly breeds Parselmouths to create living weapons. The lie? These "subjects" are told they’re heroes, not tools. A young girl with snake-speech escapes—and finds herself face-to-face with an older Harry Potter, who’s running the project.

8. [Whodunit/Detective] - The Ink of Lies
Every Auror fears the “Veritas Quill”—a cursed object that forces anyone who writes with it to tell the truth. But Harry stumbles across a murder where the victim was killed while writing lies with it. Now he must uncover which dark curse twisted the magic, and why.

9. [Slice of Life with a Dark Twist] - The Unforgivable Diaries
Luna Lovegood starts writing a fictional story about a witch who uses the Unforgivable Curses for good. But when events in the story begin happening in real life, she questions whether dark magic really is evil—or if the lie is in how it’s taught.

10. [Surreal/Existential] - The Spell that Lied to Itself
A sentient spell, created in the height of the Dark Ages, believes it’s a force for good. It bonds to Harry, swearing to protect him and rid the world of evil. But its definition of "evil" keeps changing—and it begins to see Harry as the problem.


Time Travel
1. The 25-Hour Spell
A spell from an ancient scroll adds one hidden hour to the day—25 hours instead of 24. Only those marked by the spell can live inside it. Time doesn’t loop. It fractures. People vanish from memories, entire histories shift, and Harry is the only one who remembers what’s missing.

2. The Memory Orchard
At the edge of the magical world, there’s an orchard where each tree bears fruit from a different memory. If you eat it, you live that moment again. Harry finds a tree with fruit he doesn’t remember growing. The memories show futures that never happened—and choices he never made.

3. The Horcrux Paradox
A curse tied to the Horcruxes pulls Harry backward in time—but only his soul. His body remains in the present. Every night, his consciousness jumps into his younger self during the war. Every morning, he returns to a different present—shaped by the changes he doesn’t remember making.

4. The Sandglass Coup
Time-Turners weren’t destroyed. They were hidden—controlled by the Department of Magical Chronology. When a rogue faction steals a full-turn Sandglass (capable of centuries-long jumps), Harry is sent undercover into the past to stop them... but he discovers they’re not terrorists. They’re trying to prevent a Ministry-led genocide buried in history.

5. The Life That Never Lived
Harry wakes up in a life where the Potters never died. No scar, no prophecy, no Voldemort. He’s a nobody. Not even magical. But the world is wrong—too perfect. He starts noticing the cracks: people repeating the same phrases, missing reflections, a flicker in his parents’ eyes. This world is designed. But by whom?

6. The Hourglass Ward
At Drumstrang, students can enroll in the Hourglass Ward—a cursed classroom existing slightly out of sync with the rest of time. Spells age differently inside. Students meet older or younger versions of themselves across class periods. But when two versions of the same boy try to kill each other, Harry realizes something has gone terribly wrong.

7. The Time-Eater
Time magic isn’t clean. It has predators. When a young girl illegally uses a Time-Turner to visit her grandmother, something comes through with her—a creature made of skipped seconds and rewound minutes. It starts devouring people’s timelines. Harry hunts it, but the more he fights, the more his own life unravels.

8. The Clockbound Prince
A strange boy appears at Hogwarts, calling himself the Prince of Clocks. He claims he was born in a future where the magical world has been shattered and folded into time itself. He’s come to stop “the fracture”—a spell Harry casts fifty years from now that breaks reality.

9. The Sentence of Time
In a magical court, a convicted Dark witch is sentenced to "Time Reversal": she must relive her life in reverse, undoing each evil act she committed. She escapes mid-process, fracturing the time-stream. Harry and a legal-magical specialist must navigate her unraveling timeline to recapture her before she erases her own birth.

10. The Year That Wasn't
One morning, Ron, Hermione, and Ginny remember a full year Harry doesn’t—filled with conflict, tragedy, and a second war. Everyone else insists it never happened. But strange scars remain, and Harry begins seeing flashes—alternate selves, friends he doesn’t recognize, a daughter who calls him “Dad.” He has to find the missing year... or risk losing what’s left of his mind.