lomonaaeren (
lomonaaeren) wrote2020-09-29 07:31 pm
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Chapter Four of 'That Glorious Strength'- Fortius Academy
Chapter Three.
Chapter One.
Title: That Glorious Strength (4/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Background canon couples, otherwise gen
Content Notes: Massive AU (no Voldemort), blood prejudice, mentorship, angst, drama, violence, torture, gore
Rating: PG-13
Summary: AU. Instead of becoming Voldemort, Tom Riddle established a school of “secondary importance” for Muggleborns, half-bloods, and Squibs. Since the school frees Hogwarts to continue drifting more towards the purebloods’ whims and wishes, they haven’t raised any large fuss. Besides, everyone knows that half-bloods and Muggleborns don’t have any real power. Just look at Riddle, who had ambitions that outpaced his magical strength. They don’t see the revolution coalescing under the surface.
Author’s Notes: This is a story idea I’ve been brewing in my mind for a long time, and finally decided to write. I don’t have any idea how long it will be at the moment. The title is a twist on “that hideous strength,” used as a title by C. S. Lewis and from a poem by David Lyndsay.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Four—Fortius Academy
“I know you could have Apparated us, sir,” Harry shouted into Riddle’s robes as they soared over the walls of Fortius on the back of an apparently invisible demon winged horse. “Why did you decide to have us ride the thestral instead?”
“I wanted you to absorb the sight of Fortius from the air. Look down. If you are not too afraid, of course.”
After that, Harry would have looked down even if he was afraid, but he truly wasn’t. Being in the air on the back of something just felt natural to him. He wasn’t sure if he would have felt the same way if he’d ever ridden in an aeroplane, but at this point, that didn’t matter.
He looked down.
A heavy stone wall was passing beneath them, and so were the gates in that wall, which looked as if they were made of iron braided together. Harry would have thought they and the wall were just decorative, but when he really concentrated, he could see the subtle golden glow that ran around them and bound them together.
“What happens if someone hits that glow on the wall?” he yelled at Riddle.
Riddle chuckled in a way that promised absolutely no good for anybody who did that, and gestured ahead. Harry supposed that was an answer of sorts, and looked.
Before him sprawled what had looked like a blank landscape before they crossed the wall. Harry supposed that made sense. You wouldn’t want to have Muggles in balloons or something getting a glimpse of this place that had preserved space, incredibly, within the city of London.
There was a long path that might be made of glowing white stone which ran up the center of grassy grounds. It split off into lots of other paths, too, which led to various buildings of stone, brick, and more glowing white stuff that Harry supposed might be marble (not like he’d ever seen it before). Water was everywhere, too, gliding alongside the central path and the side paths and sitting around in pools. It looked cool and marvelous. Harry wondered if they taught you how to swim at Fortius. He hoped so.
There were all kinds of buildings: what looked like a garage for cars but probably wasn’t, a wide-open one with pillars that the wind could blow through and flat roofs, greenhouses, small sheds, one like a small castle that Harry wondered if people slept in, slender towers, blocky towers, and a huge round one that towered over everything else. Harry thought it should be in the center, but instead, it was on a hill to the left side of almost everything.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“I can’t see where you’re pointing, Harry,” said Riddle’s pleasant voice. “Describe it.”
Harry scowled. This was already becoming a thing. Riddle wanted him to describe things, and speak in complete sentences, and all this other nonsense. Besides, if Riddle knew he was pointing, he could probably tell the direction Harry was pointing, too.
“The big thing that looks like a church.”
“Nothing here has a steeple.”
Harry sighed as the thestral slanted over to the side and the big domed building came closer. “I mean, it looks like churches I saw on the telly sometimes. It has a huge round dome and it’s not reflecting the sun the way those do but those were made of gold, I think, and it has what look like giant doors on the side—”
“Take a breath, Harry.”
“You said I should speak in complete sentences.”
“I did not mean run-ons.”
“What does that even mean?”
Riddle laughed at him. Harry scowled some more. Riddle’s laughter didn’t feel the way that the laughter of other children in his primary school had, or the teachers who sometimes uneasily tried to laugh off what he knew now must be magic. But Harry still knew when someone was laughing from a position of superiority, and this was awfully like this.
“Run-on sentences are ones that do not have enough pauses in the middle of them.” Riddle touched what must be the thestral’s head and said something in a low murmur, and it flew further on towards the huge domed building. “You’ll learn some of the grammar in Professor Owens’s class.”
“Grammar?” Harry stared at Riddle’s back, but infuriatingly, he didn’t turn around or do anything other than chuckle. “I thought we were going to learn brilliant things here! Spells, and curses, and ways to hurt our enemies!”
“Bloodthirsty, aren’t you?”
“You would be, too, if you’d grown up with some Muggles like the Dursleys.”
“Oh, Harry,” said Riddle, his voice floating over Harry like cold mist. “I grew up with Muggles who were not like the Dursleys, but at least as bad. I understand the desire to torture, to curse, to punish. But your life cannot be based only on that. I am not training soldiers here. I am training revolutionaries.”
Harry blinked and kept still for a moment. They were almost to the domed building, and he thought that meant he was going to find out what it was, but his mind was busy with something else right now. “You—you think revolutionaries need to know grammar?”
“You think they don’t?” They aimed towards the dome, and then began to spiral down in a long motion that made Harry catch his breath. But not because it was scary, because it was brilliant. He’d never dreamed of something like this when he’d lived with the Dursleys.
Just yesterday. He and Riddle had spent the night in the Leaky Cauldron—a real wizarding pub—and Riddle had briefly left on some kind of errand, but Harry hadn’t minded that. He’d chatted with Tom, the old barkeep, and eaten his first Chocolate Frog and laughed at a ridiculous song that came out of the wireless.
A magical song. He was magical. It was still almost too much to absorb.
“You never answered my question.”
Harry started to reply, but the thestral landed then, and the jolt ran right up into his mouth and almost made him bite his tongue. Harry coughed as the thestral trotted across the grass and came to a stop in front of the domed building, and finally managed to answer. “Fine, I don’t know. Why do revolutionaries need to know grammar?”
“To pass among the purebloods when they need to.” Riddle glanced over his shoulder, smiling, and Harry leaped to the right conclusion.
“You’re training spies, too!” Harry bounced in place on the thestral, who snorted, and then felt bad about it and patted the thing that felt like a scaly wing nearest him. The thestral hopefully accepted the pat graciously.
“Yes. Among other things. And a revolution that is lasting will not only destroy, and curse, and burn. It needs people who understand the way society works, and can forge a new one out of the ashes.” Riddle tilted his head towards the domed building. “But for now, come and meet one of the beings who will help us forge it.”
*
Potter was silent from what seemed like awe as they approached the vast doors on the side of the building. Tom had no delusions that it would last, though. Potter’s mind was searching, and probing, and the kind that would reach into cracks and pry answers out of them—if the probing was encouraged.
Tom meant to encourage it, although of course not the kind that would undermine what they were trying to build here.
When they halted in front of the doors, Tom turned to Potter. “Why do you think this building is so large?”
“Well, at first I thought it was a church and you had religious services in it or something.” Potter’s eyes regarded him for a long moment before he turned around and stared at the doors again. They were ancient stone, although Potter seemed to appreciate their size more than anything. “But then I thought that doesn’t make sense. There’s no cross or star or anything.”
“Star?” Tom asked.
“Sometimes churches have a star.”
Tom nodded and put the thought aside for a moment. The boy might be misinterpreting Judaism for all he knew, or perhaps it was another thing he had seen on the Muggle telly. “In this case, it is because an important ally of our school lives here, and the building has to be large enough to accommodate her.”
“A giant?”
Tom smiled. “In a manner of speaking.” He turned to face the stone doors again. “Belasha, would you come forth?”
Potter jumped at the sound of the Parseltongue, but that was only to be expected. Tom just made sure that he had a tight grip on the boy’s shoulder so he wouldn’t bolt as the doors slid open with a low creaking sound. No expense or magic had been spared to make sure that they could move easily, and Belasha wouldn’t have to nudge them with her snout every time.
The basilisk slid into the open, turning her head back and forth slowly so that her green scales would blaze in the sunlight and the boy could admire her. Tom laughed and stepped forwards. “You vain thing.”
“Vain creatures win admiration.”
That much was certainly true, Tom thought as he scratched her head that she had lowered to him. Her mouth was big enough to swallow him in a single gulp, but he was well-used to her size by now. The sensitive area of scales around her small horns made her twist her head further to the side and flicker her tongue out.
“It’s—it’s huge.”
Tom glanced down to see that Potter was pressed against the back of his legs, peering around him. “She is a basilisk, Mr. Potter, and her name is Belasha. I am sure that she would prefer, as I do, that you address her by name and as a she.”
Potter’s throat bobbed as he stared at Belasha, while Belasha twisted her head to the side and rolled her coils to show off the small flecks of gold and red among the deep green. “I—you said something about basilisks yesterday. How come we aren’t dying or being turned to stone by her eyes?”
“Basilisks Petrify people, they don’t literally turn them to stone,” Tom corrected. Then again, Potter wasn’t doing badly for being in front of a giant snake for the first time in his life. Tom had had students run away, wet themselves, and faint. Potter’s eyes remained wide, but he seemed to think that there was no danger as long as Tom wasn’t running. Or maybe he had actually listened when Tom had identified Belasha as an ally of the school. “And Belasha was wise enough to agree to an enchantment that gave her full control of the power of her gaze. Before, she could not look into someone’s eyes without doing as you say, Petrifying or killing depending on how direct the meeting of her eyes was. Now, she can choose to do so, even when she’s roaming the grounds of the school at night.”
“Um. Does she do it to people who are—annoying?”
It was something that Tom let some particularly mischievous students of the school believe, hut he suspected Potter was asking out of wariness that could become terror. He had known pain and the edge of hatred in his aunt’s household. Tom must not allow it to develop too much. “No. Only to enemies of our school, and those she collects as prey.”
“The child is pretty, Tom. His eyes are almost the shade of green of my scales.”
“I’m sure he’ll be flattered to hear it.”
“Um. What’s that you’re speaking?”
“Parseltongue. The language of snakes.” Tom considered Potter, and found that he had locked his hands behind his back, the better not to show them trembling, probably. Perhaps that was enough interaction with a basilisk for right now. “Have you finished eating that Nundu, Belasha?”
“No. And it was challenging to kill, too. You are finally becoming a proper caretaker.” Belasha rolled one more coil, in case Potter hadn’t had enough to admire yet, and then turned and slithered back into her lair. The doors slid shut behind her.
“Wow,” Potter sighed, sounding awed enough that Tom had to keep his lips from twitching.. “She’s brilliant. But there’s one thing I don’t understand?”
“Yes?” Tom asked encouragingly as he turned away from the building. The thestral mare had already trotted away to rejoin her herd. From here, it was certainly easy enough for Tom and Harry to reach the sleeping quarters, and Tom thought that part of Fortius better shown-off from a ground perspective, anyway.
“If the grounds are invisible to anyone outside the school, why do you need Belasha to roam around and Petrify people?”
Tom smiled. It was a properly paranoid question, the kind of thing he might ask himself. “Because there are people who can break past the magic to enter, Mr. Potter. Some of the purebloods are less convinced than others that I am the harmless half-blood acquiescing to their power that I pretend to be, and they have tried to enter the school grounds before.”
“What’s ackwesing mean?”
“Acquiescing,” Tom corrected as they rounded the corner of Belasha’s quarters, and pretended that he didn’t see the way Potter rolled his eyes. He would have had little independence and ability to ask his own questions with his relatives. Tom didn’t want to quash those qualities now. On the other hand, Potter’s attendance at grammar and elocution classes had become more urgent than ever. “It means bowing down to. Agreeing.”
“Those are different things.”
Tom raised an eyebrow. “Not the way I mean them.”
He looked from the corner of his eye to find Potter regarding him with a skeptical look. But then his jaw dropped again the way it had when he saw Belasha, and Tom turned to see what had prompted this.
Nothing, apparently, but the full view of Fortius. Potter was staring at the pool of water that spread out long, rilling fingers of creeks along the paths, and the bridges that—ah, that floated in the air, their ends a few inches above either bank. That would be remarkable to a child who was essentially Muggleborn, of course. Tom reminded himself again not to be led by the kinship between their wands and their similar childhoods into thinking that Potter was exactly like him.
“Um. Wouldn’t it be simpler to just have the bridges go from one bank to another?”
“Simpler, but we can use magic. Why wouldn’t we?”
Potter’s shoulders went back at that, and he took what sounded like a deep, cleansing breath. “Yeah. And we have just as much of a right to magic as the haughtiest purebloods, don’t we?”
“We do.” Tom smiled at him. “More, in fact, because we aren’t wasting all our money on research that attempts to prove Muggles and Muggleborns aren’t human.”
“What?”
I timed that revelation well, Tom thought as he watched the indignation run through Potter and his magic flare out around him. The air around him stained with red and blue until it glowed like stained glass. Potter turned to face him and folded his arms.
“How can you let them get away with that?”
“I lack the political power as yet to stop them. And if I had shown my magical power forth to convince them, then someone would have attempted to gain control of me. There are spells and potions that can control people, Mr. Potter. Control their minds, their actions, their bodies, or simply hurt them if they disobey.”
Potter narrowed his eyes instead of looking sick the way Tom had thought he might. “And things weren’t so bad when you were younger, right?”
Tom nodded as he escorted Potter over one of the floating bridges, a graceful arch of white wood that Potter touched with wondering fingertips. “Correct. Now, any powerful half-blood is seized and subjected to control and indoctrination—”
“What?”
“Brainwashing. To convince him or her that the purebloods are right, and they should apologize for their own ‘dirty’ Muggle or Muggleborn parent.”
Potter stopped walking, and Tom turned to face him. They were nearly to the other side of the stream, and Tom had wanted to see the look on Potter’s face when he saw around the corner of the teachers’ quarters. But he supposed that the betrayal in the wide green eyes was its own reward.
“But no one would be stupid enough to fall for that.”
Tom let his expression smooth out as he leaned an elbow on the side of the bridge. “Do you really think that, Harry? Didn’t you ever believe what your relatives said about you, if only a little?”
Harry shivered. (Tom supposed that he should give up and allow himself to call the boy by his first name when they were not in class). “I—this isn’t about me. It’s about other people who’re better than me.”
Tom leaned forwards, and waited longer than he’d thought he’d have to until Harry raised his eyes back to Tom’s face. “Listen to me,” Tom said softly. “You are stronger than you know.”
“I slept in a cupboard. I let them make me sleep in a cupboard. If I have all this magic, why didn’t I just throw them across the room and claim what was mine?”
Ah, here’s the crisis of confidence. It had, admittedly, taken longer than Tom had thought it would. He squeezed one of Harry’s hands and said, “Because you didn’t know that magic was real. And one reason we call it accidental magic before children get their wands is because it happens in bursts of potential, without conscious direction.” He left aside his own experiments in magic at a young age. Harry was a different person than Tom had been, even given everything. “You might have tried to throw your relatives across the room and only ended up turning their hair green, or something similar. Accidental magic is often more frightening than offensive. Offensive and defensive magic both take years to master. Regardless, I will not stand for you putting yourself down. Do you understand?”
Harry stared at him for a second, and then abruptly snapped to his full height—inconsiderable as that was at the moment—and nodded. “Yes, sir.”
Tom smiled, let go of Harry’s hand, and stepped around the corner of the teachers’ quarters. Harry followed him without seeming to notice what was going on in the outside world, in favor of the one inside his head.
And then he stopped and gasped in an awe-stricken breath.
Tom sighed. There it is.
*
From the air, Harry had seen that a lot of the buildings at Fortius were made of white stone that was probably marble. But he hadn’t realized what they looked like. It was probably only visible when you were on the ground.
In front of him spread a long swathe of green marked by those white stone paths and little shining rivers, and four buildings, two to either side of the green. The buildings were made of stone like the rest, but shaped like animals. The one nearest to Harry was a huge, rearing horse with wings, the wings spread out with small signs of windows and ladders on them. Right next to it was a giant bird with its wings also spread and its head thrown back, encircled by stone things that were probably supposed to be flames. Harry remembered Riddle telling him about phoenixes last night.
And on the other side was a creature that must be the gryphon, hind legs like a cat’s and eagle head and wings, although it was standing on all four legs instead of rearing. Even as Harry watched, a door opened in the huge curved beak, and someone stepped out and simply floated down to the ground. Other people followed, some of them small enough that Harry knew they couldn’t be adults. He spun around to Riddle, staring the question he couldn’t ask.
Riddle smiled at him. It had too many teeth, but it was still better than any other smile that Harry had got from an adult. “Yes, Harry,” he said simply. “Everyone learns the kind of magic necessary to living here.”
Breathless, Harry turned around to inspect the last building, which was low and curled close to the ground, unlike the others, beyond the gryphon. It was a snake of some sort, he thought, but then saw the horns on the head and changed his mind. No, a dragon. There were probably long corridors inside that coiled body, he thought absently.
“Why are they shaped that way?” he asked. “Isn’t it sort of—silly?” But he didn’t think it looked silly. He thought it looked brilliant, and he couldn’t wait to live in one.
“They were originally built as simply stone buildings, but the magic of the Houses altered them.” Riddle nodded to one of the students—at least, she was small enough to be a student—who had settled to the ground and was advancing towards them. “Look at Miss Johnson there, and you will probably be able to see it.”
Harry squinted, and made out a swirling, dancing white light around the girl, who had dark skin and thick hair in braids. “What’s that?”
“It’s the magic of the House, which accompanies every student Sorted into a particular one. If the student is in danger, the magic manifests to protect her, and to send a message to the professors. If there’s something else wrong that doesn’t need a professor’s intervention, like a simple argument with another student that has no bullying involved, then the magic appears and offers comfort. Or separates the two students before the fight gets physical.”
I wish I’d had that at the school Dudley and I attended. Harry swallowed and said something to distract himself. “And that, what? Turned the buildings into a gryphon and a horse and a phoenix?”
“And a dragon. Yes.” Riddle sounded amused about something, but he smiled as the student marched up to them and halted in front of him. “Hello, Miss Johnson.”
“Professor Riddle, you’re still wrong about the defensive use of that charm. I talked to Professor Alger, and she said so.” Johnson’s chin was tilted up, and she nodded as if that decided everything. The magic hovered behind one shoulder, and then another, moving too quickly for Harry to really see it, but he thought he caught a glimpse of a claw and a beak for a second, and thought Johnson was probably in Phoenix House.
“With all due respect to Professor Alger, she teaches Offensive Magic, not Defense.”
“But you’re wrong,” Johnson said, and then marched off. There were two girls waiting for her, and a boy who looked maybe a year older than Harry. They all burst into chatter as they met up, and then one of them said something excited and they broke into a run around the corner of the gryphon’s claw.
“So, um…those are where the students in that House live? And sleep?”
“And go to some of their classes,” Riddle said, and nodded.
“There are enough professors for that? Or do some students have to go from one building to another?”
“We have enough professors that we are the ones who go from House to House, for the most part, although certain specialized classes can only be held in some other places, like the Offensive Magic class that these students came from. As we grow larger, that might not be sustainable, but it’s only a few years since Fortius Academy began to have more than a hundred students at a time.”
Harry blinked. “I thought it was older than that.”
“Some decades.” Riddle shrugged. “I couldn’t establish the school as soon as I wanted or attract that many students as soon as I wanted. I had to study the magic that would allow me to defend the school, the legalities to establish it, the diplomacy that would allow me to work around the purebloods’ understandable reluctance to lose fees-paying students at Hogwarts.” For a moment, his eyes shone with that red color Harry thought he had seen once before. “The history and laws and magic that would allow my revolution to succeed.”
“How is this school in the middle of London, anyway?” Harry demanded as Riddle steered him around the animal-shaped buildings and into the middle of the green grass again. “Someone was bound to notice if that much land just went missing overnight!”
“There are charms that would prevent Muggles from remembering,” Riddle said, but his face had the kind of amused smile that it had had when he was talking to Johnson. “But it would have been counterproductive to my ultimate goals to anger the portions of the Muggle government that are aware of magic by taking a section of London away from its citizens. No, I found the land elsewhere, bought it, and then placed it in London.”
Harry stared at him. Riddle walked on a few paces and nodded to a building that looked like it was made of marble cheese, with big holes in the sides. “So you can see that this is where the students eat, and—”
“Wait,” Harry interrupted. “I’m going to need some more explanation of this.”
“Of the dining hall? The holes are windows that are protected with magic instead of glass—”
“No. I mean, the land. You bought the land elsewhere and then placed it? How? You just picked it up and plopped it down?”
Riddle turned to face him. “Yes. Essentially.”
Harry stared at him. Then he said weakly, “No one’s that powerful.”
Riddle gave him one of those smiles that seemed to emphasize his teeth. Around him, for a moment, the air was filled with curling snakes of power, and Harry was absolutely sure that Riddle’s gift of speaking to snakes was no accident. “I am.”
Harry stared at him some more. Then he asked what he thought was the most interesting thing, instead of the most frightening thing. “I could use your wand. I threw you across the room. Am I going to be that powerful?”
“Exactly as powerful? I don’t know. That’s not the best way to judge a wizard’s power. I’ll need to see you casting upper-level spells with a wand in your head before I know for certain. But…”
Riddle took a step towards him and bent down, staring at him. Harry stared back, his heart wild with excitement. Unlike the other times an adult had bent down to his level, this didn’t feel condescending.
“I think so,” Riddle whispered.
Harry felt as though someone had tied a gold medal around his neck and given him revenge on the Dursleys at the same time. He was going to be able to defend himself and maybe stand on even ground with a wizard powerful enough to plop a school in the middle of London.
He loved everything about his new life.