[From Samhain to the Solstice]: Shadow-People Singing Ancient Songs, Realm of Song, 2/7

[lomonaaeren]

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Wandering Beams of Light

“I don’t know why I’m here.”

“I mean, I’m the one who wrote to you. You’re the one who chose to come. If you don’t know why you’re here, I don’t know why you are, either.”

Crouch scowls at him. Harry smiles back. He’s keeping his hands away from his daggers with an effort, but then again, he did promise Crouch they could meet in neutral territory where they didn’t have to duel. The grounds of Hogwarts are that, because they’re not goblin territory and Harry would have to specifically ask for a duel if he wanted one.

And although Harry still wants to duel Crouch for putting his godfather in prison, Crouch has already shown plainly enough that he won’t accept a duel. So Harry has come up with another means for him to pay his debt.

“I formally withdraw my challenge to a duel,” Harry announces.

He might be the only one who sees the glimmer of light flashing from the hilts of his daggers, because he’s the only goblin there, but Crouch at least has the sense to stiffen warily. “What are you talking about?”

“I challenged you to duel, and you refused, because you’re a coward,” Harry tells him cheerfully. “That means I’ve thought of another way for you to pay back your debt for putting my godfather in prison without a trial.”

Crouch licks his lips. “I—I refuse to pay a weregild, too.”

Oh. He still thinks he has some kind of power here. Harry pulls Stargazer and buries it in the dirt between Crouch’s feet with a flick of his wrist. Crouch jumps and swears.

“Do you think you have the power to choose?” Harry asks softly.

“No?”

Harry nods, satisfied. Humans who have a bad case of cowardice can still learn better sometimes. “Then pay attention,” he says, and Summons Stargazer back to him. “I want your help in making sure that we can have a class in Goblin Dueling that can be examined by goblin proctors at the NEWT level.”

Crouch goggles at him. Harry stands there and waits for the inevitable questions, because a human recovering from a case of cowardice always has them.

“You think—you think I can make this happen?” Crouch finally asks in a subdued voice.

“You had power in the Ministry. Even if you don’t have as much as you used to, you had enough to help arrange the Triwizard Tournament and get people to listen to you.” Harry steps forwards, and Crouch flinches back from him. Harry controls himself. He was moving too fast for someone who’s in recovery from cowardice, apparently. “I want you to speak with the Wizarding Examinations Authority and get this NEWT established.”

“I can’t do it in a few months!”

By the end of this term, Harry realizes. “No, for next year,” he says. “So that people who are taking it now can take it for a NEWT next year.” That will be kind of unfair for the seventh-years in the class, but Harry is happy to duel them and give them pointers if they like. And once Goblin Dueling is an established NEWT, maybe they’ll be want to come back and retake it. Harry has heard people can do that with NEWTS they missed, because of sickness or the like.

Crouch wipes his hand down his face. “Why would I want to help your kind gain more power in the magical world?”

Harry is so charmed by Crouch recognizing him as a goblin that he nearly misses the larger import of his words. Then he leaps nearer and rests his basilisk-fang blade against Crouch’s leg.

The man goes very still. Harry nods to him. “I withdrew my challenge to the duel, but I can put it back at any time,” he says softly. “And you know very well what this blade can do. Isn’t it the reason you refused to fight me in the first place?”

Well, in truth, there are probably lots of reasons Crouch refused the duel, Harry realizes, the most prominent of which is that he’s a dishonorable coward. But Harry’s deadly dagger was a factor.

“Give me some time,” Crouch croaks, not moving. “I—I have some things to achieve. And I took a leave of absence from the Ministry. I’ll need time to get my power and influence back.”

Harry nods. “All right. But this is conditional on you actually working for it, Crouch. If I find out that you’ve backed out again—”

“You haven’t been able to find a way to duel me for the past several months.”

“If you refuse again,” Harry continues, ignoring the interruption, “then it does become larger than a matter of individual vengeance between one goblin and one human. This class can indeed lift my people, as you said, and if you try to back out of helping, then that’s enough for other goblins to start a war with you.”

Crouch closes his eyes. Harry is sure that he’s thinking about his ability to use money, the one thing that can get most wizards or witches to pay attention when it comes goblins. “All right,” he whispers.

Harry beams. He still doesn’t like the fact that Crouch ran away from the duel in the first place, but he’s relieved to find that they can solve their difficulties like rational beings.

Things of Yore

“Harry, the stone wants to speak to you.”

Sirius is the one who makes that announcement when Harry comes back to the Realm of Song for the Easter holidays. And he has a pale, sweaty face and a subdued tone in his voice that tells Harry this wasn’t his idea.

“The stone from the ring?” Harry asks quietly as he slips his daggers into their sheaths and checks his wand. Toothsplitter and Ripclaw have both insisted that Harry go fully-armed at all times, since they still haven’t found the Horcrux or the source of the mysterious shadow-people. Other goblins have encountered them, though, and each time it’s the same: hostility but no actual pain or wounds.

“Yes.” Sirius bows his head.

Harry walks up and hugs his godfather. They’re in one of the shallower receiving rooms in the Realm, one of the few places where the ceiling is high enough for Sirius to stand up easily, but it’s still a comfortless room by human standards: no comfortable furniture, blank stone walls, songs humans can’t hear. “Why did it choose you? Do you know?” Sirius doesn’t listen to that many objects, and Harry imagines the stone would have found it easier to speak to a goblin most of the time.

“I—I—”

“It’s all right, Sirius.” Harry keeps his hands in place on Sirius’s shoulders. “I promise to listen.”

“It’s not an ordinary stone,” Sirius says, shuddering. Harry nods, because he knew that after the stone closed the holes that the basilisk venom put in it, but he doesn’t want to interrupt Sirius. “I have the feeling that it finds it easier to speak to humans, though. It said something about being from human legend and finding goblin minds impenetrable.”

“Huh.” Harry thinks about it. “Did it frighten you, Sirius?”

“Yes.” Sirius shudders and turns around to hug Harry, as tight as he can. “It gave off a cold aura and—I can’t explain it. It made me feel as if I was looking my death in the face. Which is stupid. It’s a stone, right?”

Harry has the feeling that anything powerful enough to resist basilisk venom isn’t just a stone, but he doesn’t want to scare Sirius more than he already is, either. He hugs him harder and says, “Don’t worry, I’ll go talk to it.”

But he and the stone are going to have words.

*

“You scared my godfather.”

From the pulsebeat of cold that emanates from the stone, Harry has the feeling that this isn’t the way it expected him to open the conversation.

Harry sits down on the polished marble floor of the cavern where they’ve been keeping the stone, as well as the melted remains of the other Horcruxes they’ve destroyed. “You’re a problem,” he tells it severely. “You don’t want to let yourself be peacefully destroyed, and then you couldn’t just communicate with us like a normal object. You had to frighten my godfather and make hm feel like he was facing death. Why did you do that?”

The stone is silent. Harry does his best to relax and open his mind. If it does find it hard to communicate with goblins for whatever reason, then he has to listen harder.

Finally, he hears a distant, hesitant song. He can only make out impressions, rather than words, amid the tune, though, like listening to an instrumental song and trying to guess how the person who made it is feeling.

“That can’t possibly be the only one thing you know how to do. You’re a stone. What do you know of human death?”

The stone sends a sharp skitter of notes at him, and from that, Harry gets a stronger image. One is the stone being set into a ring, overlaid with the stone resting in a human hand.

“Oh.” Harry nods. He’s heard some of the Muggleborn Ravenclaws and Gryffindors talk about this a bit. “You were someone’s pet rock?”

The song hits him like a bell to the head. Or, well, it would if it were made of anything but sound. Harry shakes his head. “Sorry, not pet, then. You’re a piece of jewelry separated from the ring?” The ring the stone showed him didn’t look exactly like the Horcrux Dumbledore destroyed.

The stone rocks and vibrates in place for a long moment. Then it tries again, this time with a song that makes Harry listen intently, because it has new and darker notes in it.

Not human, the stone is trying to say, or at least Harry is fairly sure. My origin is not human.

“Okay,” Harry says. “I mean, I didn’t think it was. I thought most stones were born from fire in the depths of the earth.”

The flicker of irritation this time is more pronounced, and more tangible. Harry smiles. He hopes that means he’s getting closer to communicating with the stone. He sits back and once again relaxes, trying to forget that the stone hurt his godfather, and understand what it’s trying to tell him.

*

What feels like hours later, Harry has gathered that the stone is a magical artifact, that it’s used to being owned by powerful people, that it was set into the Horcrux ring but doesn’t partake of the nature of the Horcruxes itself, and that it really hates him.

Harry shrugs as he stands up. “You could continue trying to communicate with a human. It’s not my fault that I’m a goblin and I’m harder to communicate with for some reason. Do you want me to take you to a human?”

The stone leaps into the air and spins, rocking back and forth. At least Harry knows that means “no.”

“Fine. Then what do you want me to do?”

Another snatch of confusing and irritated song. Harry concentrates as hard as he can, trying to translate the images and impressions into instructions, which he thinks is what the stone wants to give him. It seems to think very highly of itself, at least.

“I don’t want to use you as a weapon, if that’s what you’re hinting at. Or take you to a senior goblin of my clan, either. They’re pretty busy right now.”

The song that hits him this time sounds anguished. Harry sobers. He really didn’t mean to make fun of the pain the stone is suffering, and it seems to him that it is pain. He just doesn’t know why, or what it wants him to do as a consequence.

The stone shivers in place, and a silver glow forms around it. Harry leans towards it, and two clear images form in his mind at last. One is a cloak. One is a wand.

And the sense that comes with them…

“Oh,” Harry says softly, understanding at last. “They’re your friends, and you lost them.”

The stone wobbles to a stop. Harry scoops it up and puts it in his robe pocket.

It’s going to be a long journey to find the stone’s friends, considering how many cloaks and how many wands there are in the world, but Harry doesn’t mind carrying the stone around while it looks for them.

As he leaves the cavern, a shadowy figure soars down towards him. Harry stops to watch it. Unlike the ones with the bells that he saw earlier this year, it doesn’t try to attack him, and it doesn’t seem to have long sleeves or a bell. Instead, it forms a tall figure with a long wand in one hand and something small that’s probably meant to be the stone in the other. From its back ripples a cloak.

“You lost a human friend, too?” Harry asks the stone. “Then you do want to be taken to a human after all! I wish you could tell me their name.”

The stone glows cold with something Harry thinks is probably frustration, and the shadowy figure dissolves. Harry shakes his head and leaves. At least he knows the shadows probably have to do with the stone now, and not the Horcrux, and they’ll stop or follow him once he takes the stone out of the Realm of Song.

But now he has something darker and more worrying to think about. He’s about to join the hunt for the Horcrux that’s somewhere in Gringotts.

And the hunt for the goblin or goblins that it’s managed to corrupt.

Whisper in the Dusk

“So that’s why they wanted me to ask you over, Luna. Because the hunt for the Horcrux isn’t going well, and we can’t trust the objects we ask, because they could have been corrupted by the Horcrux since they’re the same kind. But if you can ask the spiders and the mites in the corners…”

Luna smiles up at him as she steps out of the Floo in a side room of Gringotts and loops her arm around Harry’s. “Of course, Harry. I’m honored. But why didn’t they just ask you, since you can speak to spiders as well?”

Harry ducks his head. He can feel the blush heating his cheeks, and he doesn’t have any secrets from his best friends, but this is something that’s never come up. “Um. I can talk to the spiders at Hogwarts.”

“Why not here?”

“Before I knew their language, I, uh, used to chase them when I was playing games with the other goblins in the Realm of Song. So they don’t like me and won’t talk to me. I tried to apologize, but I think their dialect is different than the one we speak with the spiders at Hogwarts. So they won’t listen.”

“Harry,” Luna says, and shakes her head, her voice soft, but thick with disappointment. “That was very wrong of you.”

“I know,” Harry whispers.

“But on the other hand, if you tried to apologize and they didn’t listen, there’s nothing you can do.”

Harry smiles at Luna. She accepts him for who he is, and that he tried, and didn’t succeed, and she’s going to help anyway. That’s only one of the many things he likes about her. “Great. Thank you. The biggest webs are in the storage rooms…”

*

“The spiders are very frightened,” Luna says solemnly, looking up from the webs in front of her.

Harry nods. He expected that. He sits down next to her on the floor of the storage room that was once used to keep parchment and quills, and now mostly holds a few crates and caskets of the same thing. Damp got into one corner, despite all the Preserving Enchantments, and goblins aren’t so careless as to keep anything delicate near it. Luna leans against him for a moment, and Harry looks at the webs.

He knows it’s not his imagination that all the spiders are scuttling to the farthest corners so that they’re not near him. Harry sighs, apologizes as best he can with a tap of his fingers on the floor, and turns to Luna.

“They say that the Horcrux is in a large dark vault with a sword, a pile of books that bite them if the spiders scurry across them, a trophy that attracts flies…”

Luna lists out all the vault contents, and Harry memorizes them as best he can. He doesn’t know what the vault is, off the top of his head, and there’s no reason for him to, since he doesn’t work counting in the coins or maintaining the vaults the way a lot of the goblins of his clan do. But he can take the list to Gorgeslitter and Ripclaw, and they’ll figure it out.

Gone Alone

“We should have known it would be the Lestrange vault.”

Harry nods. He’s only met Bellatrix Lestrange, briefly, in the Department of Mysteries, and that was an unpleasant surprise, since he thought the Ministry was keeping her under the endless sleep for prisoners that’s replaced Azkaban after his people destroyed it. But she did strike him as the type of person stupid enough to bring this kind of object into the bank, and think goblins would never discover it.

Harry is standing with Ripclaw, Toothsplitter, and several of the others outside the doors of the Lestrange vault. Now that Harry is this close and knows what he’s looking for, he can feel the sharp darkness extending through the doors, like a blade lying just above the floor, ready to cut someone or trip them up.

A goblin named Graveltooth was in charge of this vault, and has already been taken away. Harry feels sorry for her, but at least she’s probably going to be executed cleanly, a kinder death than the Horcrux would have given her if it had possessed her.

“When we enter,” Ripclaw tells Harry, “go straight for the Horcrux. Stab it no matter what else happens.”

Harry nods. He would ordinarily be considered too young for a goblin to be here, but his people are sensitive to the fact that his human body ages differently, and he has the only basilisk-fang blade in the clan.

The door swings open, cracked by a vial of Graveltooth’s blood. Toothsplitter leads the charge, her medallions swinging on her belt. Ripclaw comes slightly behind her, at her right shoulder, and Harry at her left.

For a moment, the torches flickering in the vault look normal, illuminating an enormous pile of coins and artifacts. Then Harry’s gaze is drawn up along the invisible path of the cold blade to a shelf where a golden cup sits.

He points to it with his daggers. Ripclaw nods and turns away as if looking in the nearest pile of Galleons. Toothsplitter pokes her sword at a display of broken wands along the far wall. They’re careful not to touch anything with bare skin. Graveltooth was informative about all the spells used in the Lestrange vault to protect their property.

Harry stands for a moment, as if contemplating his course, and ignores the squirming of the stone in his pocket. He’s too busy to try to find its missing friends right now. Then he turns and runs straight at the Horcrux, springing into the air and casting a spell through Stargazer as he goes.

The cup visibly recoils from him, and rocks in place. Harry can feel the cold blade swinging at him, but he’s already rising from the floor, the magic propelling him up and making him land lightly on the shelf next to the cup.

He stabs down with the basilisk-fang blade, but this Horcrux is active physically, like the diadem. It rolls and falls down towards the floor—except that it’s not falling straight down. It’s aiming at Toothsplitter’s head.

Harry can only imagine what will happen if a Horcrux that’s already corrupted one goblin manages to touch another, bare flesh to metal.

“Toothsplitter!” he shouts.

She doesn’t question him, even though as a Master Smith, she’s far more used to giving the orders. She rolls away across the floor, and the Horcrux clatters into a pile of coins.

Harry leaps down after it, and it swings that blade of cold, dark energy at him. Harry rolls underneath it, and leaps up to see the Horcrux shivering, manifesting a wave of black smoke like the kind that came out of the locket which possessed Sirius.

Harry throws the basilisk-fang blade.

It sinks into the side of the Horcrux, but although there’s a scream and the smoke starts moving more slowly, the dagger hasn’t gone deeply enough to make a fatal wound. In fact, the smoke forms into the shape of a man who looks a lot like an older version of the boy in the diary, Tom Marvolo Riddle. He kneels and starts tugging on the hilt of Harry’s blade to get it out of the cup.

Harry shouts and charges across the vault, furious. How dare that bastard handle his weapons!

Riddle looks up when Harry has covered about half the distance to him. His eyes are wide, and he’s looking at Harry with fear—

No. He’s looking at the dagger still in Harry’s hand.

Harry has no idea why, but he lets instinct, the kind of training that only a goblin warrior receives, and luck guide him. This time, he plunges Stargazer through the smoke emanating from the cup and deep into its other side, opposite from the basilisk-fang dagger.

The cup screams in two voices, one from the object and one from Riddle. Harry sees the cup groan and fall apart in blackened sections right before the smoke fades. What’s left is a collection of metallic shards, nothing more.

Harry smiles, and goes to retrieve his blades. Another Horcrux gone.

*

“Why do you think Stargazer worked?” he asks Toothsplitter later, when they’re all resting in the infirmary. Blackeye needs to clear them of Horcrux corruption before she’ll let them return to any active duty, whether that’s smithing, fighting, or being a Hogwarts student. After Sirius and Dumbledore both being influenced, she’s not taking any chances.

Toothsplitter looks solemnly at him from the next bed. “Your mother defied Voldemort to save your life, Harry. It’s entirely possible that some of that defiance lingers in a blade forged from a piece of her soul, and it would be harmful to Voldemort.”

Harry blinks. He didn’t think about that before, but it does make sense. “Huh. Well, in case we have to destroy another Horcrux, I’m glad that I have two blades capable of accomplishing it, in case the basilisk-fang one fails again.”

“It was a good throw,” Toothsplitter murmurs, closing her eyes. The curse on some of the possessions in the Lestrange vault burned her skin when she rolled to avoid the Horcrux and had to touch some of them. “But Ripclaw does want you to put in some extra practice, in order to make sure that you hit your target precisely.”

Harry nods. He really has no objection to that. And because Toothsplitter is drifting off to sleep, Ripclaw is already there, and he feels exhausted from the adrenaline high of thinking he might not have killed a Horcrux correctly or it might have enslaved someone else he cares about, he curls up and does the same.

*

In his dream, there are processions of wands, cloaks, and stones, wands, cloaks, and stones. Harry sighs a little as they zap around him like hyperactive comets.

“I know,” he tells the stone. “We’ll go searching for your friends as soon as possible, I promise. Now that the Horcrux in the bank is taken care of, I’ll have some more free time. Maybe we can even find the human who used to wield you, although you’re old enough that it’s probably a long chance. But who knows? Some wizards, like Dumbledore, live a long time.”

He hears what seems to be a howl of frustration, and sends as many comforting thoughts to the stone as possible. He would be upset if his friends weren’t around and he hadn’t seen them in a long time, too.

There’s the sense of someone leaning on his mind, with enormous pressure, and then a word forces its way through. Power.

“Right,” Harry says, delighted that he’s found a clearer means of communication with the stone at last. “You’re stronger when you’re with your friends, which is why you want to be with them. I understand.”

The howl sounds more frustrated this time, but Harry doesn’t actually need to listen to it, since he falls comfortably asleep.