"If you’d lived nearly seven hundred years, how many years do you think you’d see as reasonable to tie off the loose ends of your life? Enough that you didn’t notice when a little elixir went missing perhaps. Pyrites stole from the Department of Mysteries itself! What’s stealing from a little old man compared to that? I don’t know about you, but I don’t remember hearing that Flammel had died,"  he  chuckled mirthlessly, "No, I think that was the elixir of life alright," he suddenly sobered, struggling even more intensely with his words, "I think Pyrites was trying to take advantage of the reality crossing properties of the elixir. I don’t think he was just trying to send himself back in time, I think he was trying to cross the boundaries of reality. But not to an alternative reality - within his   own   reality, using the elixir to siphon his own time away, and the rune circle to create a gate between the present and the past,"