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lomonaaerenTitle: Flammifer
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Mostly gen, with mentions of background canon pairings
Content Notes: AU (Harry raised by goblins), violence, angst, minor character deaths, gore, animal sacrifice, human sacrifice, Dark Arts
Wordcount: This part 4400
Summary: The second half of goblin-raised Harry’s seventh year at Hogwarts, in which he carries the war to Voldemort, works on the task of Ministry reform, helps his friends, deals with humans being very human, and, oh yeah, sometimes studies for those NEWT exam things.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “From Litha to Lammas” fics, short chaptered fics being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. This is also the eighth and last part of my Realm of Song series, and sequel to “Music Beneath the Mountains,” “In Their Own Secret Tongues He Spoke,” “The Dragon-Headed Door,” “More Marvellous-Cunning Than Mortal Man’s Pondering,” “Harmonies Unconquerable,” “Light To Us Who Wander Here,” and “Shadow-People Singing Ancient Songs.” Read those first, or you won’t understand this one. The title of this fic and most of the section titles come from Tolkien’s poem “Song of Eärendil.” The word “flammifer” literally means bearing fire, or light.
Flammifer
“…ever still a herald on
an errand that should never rest
to bear his shining lamp afar,
the Flammifer of Westernesse.”
-J. R. R. Tolkien
To Journey In
“You are sure you wish to do this.”
Toothsplitter’s voice is quiet, but she doesn’t stop hanging the heavy granite and iron medallions from Harry’s belt and boots and body. Harry nods, shaking the harness of chains that encircles his chest and winds about his arms to hold the medallions. He can still move, he notes. Good. If he has to face a threat in the depths of Realm of Song, that will be important.
His daggers might defend him on their own, but there is no reason to ask them to do such a strenuous task, especially if they need time to consider it.
“I have to,” Harry says, when he realizes Toothsplitter is waiting for an answer other than a nod. “We have to know what’s coming, Toothsplitter. We still don’t know how Voldemort got his body back. We don’t know why so many people have started disappearing. And we need to know the location of the last Horcruxes.”
“If there are any others at all.”
Harry nods. So far they have hunted Horcruxes mostly by confronting them when they appear, or noticing their influence on people and tracking them from there. But he thinks that tactic has worn out its usefulness. If nothing else, the disappearances and likely murders are surging, and they have to know if they can kill Voldemort now or if they need to find other Horcruxes first.
“You know that they might not grant you the answer you’re seeking.”
Toothsplitter can’t hide a flicker of discomfort in her eyes. Harry reaches out and hugs her. He remembers the time when she used to loom over him, and now he’s a little taller than she is. “I know. They might kill me for seeking it.”
Toothsplitter smiles then. “No one can doubt your courage.”
“At least not without facing my daggers.”
“Or being human.”
Harry nods, smiling faintly. He knows humans who listen, who value goblins, who take goblin training, and who fight for the rights of all magical beings. But few of them.
Toothsplitter raises her head and Harry ducks his, so that their foreheads are touching and they are staring into each other’s eyes, the most intimate posture any two goblins can take. “May the blessings of silver and gold walk with you, Harry.”
“May the remain here with you,” Harry whispers.
She could have invoked lots of different metals and stones to bless him with, but the particular ones she chose mean that Harry will be the most well-protected. Silver and gold run everywhere in the Realm of Song, in lakes and rivers and veins and fountains.
Toothsplitter moves back. Harry raises his arms and lets them fall once more, and then walks towards the far side of the cavern they stand in, not looking back.
He has until his strength gives out and he can no longer move under the weight of the iron and granite. Then, if he lacks the strength to return, the ones he goes to seek answers of will eat him.
A black tunnel opens up before him, a smooth round darkness in the stone wall. Harry steps into it and finds himself gliding through space that has no up or down, no friction or touching.
He glides, and then he falls. He stands on a floor of black stone that he should not be able to see, but does. Light that should illumine nothing should not gleam on the walls, but does. Harry reaches out and touches narrow walls on either side of him, kicks back with one foot and touches a wall there.
No way to go but forwards.
He moves on, and hears, behind him, the stone wall that blocks any retreat following him steadily.
*
Harry walks and walks. Pain bleeds through him and burns itself out on the fire of his will. Fear cuts at him like swords and departs. Fear means nothing when you can defeat it, and Harry has his daggers.
He rounds one last corner, and comes into another large place, this one lit by no visible light, and with a pattern in front of him like a chessboard, made of alternating jet-and-ivory diamonds. Harry halts. The denizens of the Inner Halls he came to meet will be here, or not at all.
And they come.
Cold limbs dance on the walls. Cold eyes open in various corners. Harry has no idea how many there are or how their bodies are connected. He stands and waits, his hands on the hilts of his daggers, and a hissing voice speaks at last, not the language of snakes but more akin to it than anything goblin.
“Why art thou here?”
“To ask for knowledge of the future.”
“And thou art afraid.”
“I am not fearful enough to run.”
“Thou wilt taste delicious.”
One of the limbs dances down towards Harry, acquiring form and shape as it comes. It’s a tentacle now, with something like a claw at the end, and things lining it like suckers. Harry draws his daggers and crouches.
When the limb comes close enough, Harry lunges. He cuts off the tip, and the claw clatters on the floor.
There is no scream. The limb simply withdraws, and several of the cold white eyes cluster together in a corner where the wall meets the floor. Harry smiles at them and waits, and after a long moment, they chuckle in concert, a sharp sound that bounces from the white parts of the floor but not the black.
“Thou art strong as well as fearful,” they say. Harry can hear the soft humming of many voices instead of just one now. “We will answer thy questions. Ask.”
With their regard weighing on him now, Harry can feel the strength openly draining from him. The iron and granite somewhat fight their influence, but not entirely. He is limited in the questions he can ask, not by number as in some human stories (and Harry thinks that someone should try cutting a genie’s throat when it’s uncooperative and seeing what happens), but in how much strength he can shed before he won’t be able to make it back.
“How did Voldemort create his body?”
Limbs snap and gesture around him in excitement. Harry squints and sees the picture they’re drawing. He shouldn’t be able to, not when there’s no light, but no normal rules apply to this place.
Harry sees a large cauldron, stones placed around it, and silvery things he doesn’t recognize scattered around them. Then he does, and hisses in outrage. Voldemort sacrificed a unicorn. Probably several of them, from the number of limbs and pieces of flesh without fur. As Harry watches, someone in a mask stirs unicorn blood and horn and hair into the cauldron, and Voldemort’s pale body rises out of it.
Harry narrows his eyes and calms his desire to avenge the dead. They will be avenged. In the meantime, there are possible ways he and his people might destroy Voldemort’s body.
“How many other Horcruxes does he have?”
“One,” whisper the conjoined voices. “Ask, and we will tell thee.”
Harry has to smile at their tactics. Delay the answers as much as possible, and they can try to keep him here and eat him. Harry can salute such skilled and sly warriors. “What is his Horcrux?”
“The snake,” the voices sigh together. “Nagini.”
Harry nods. So his people suspected, but they needed a confirmation. “Will a basilisk-fang dagger slay a living Horcrux?”
“No,” the voices sigh. “He has placed protections on her.”
Damn. Harry takes a deep breath and notices that it drags as it comes out of his lungs. He’s probably bleeding internally by now. But he cannot hurry. “What will destroy her?”
“The fire of the fiend.”
A spell, probably. Harry can ask the lore-singers if he can’t find any human who knows it. And probably not by that name, what with the trickery that tends to live in these denizens of the Inner Halls.
A sharp pop inside him is probably damage done to his spleen. Harry grimaces. He can only ask one more question, and he will have to make it a good one.
“Why have people started disappearing, and are those disappearances connected to Voldemort?”
“He is taking them for his potions.”
As clear an answer as one so short is likely to be. Harry manages to bow despite the pain raging through his body. A warrior will have to face both pain and fear in battle, and it’s better not to act with any lack of courtesy. “Thank you. I will go now.”
“Thinkest thou we will let thee go?” Another limb reaches towards him down the walls, this time with several claws on the end. “Young fool, fool of a goblin, fool of a wizard, we will devour thee.”
This is a delaying tactic as much as anything else, Harry knows. Hold him here and let their presence wear on him until he is easy prey.
Harry draws his daggers, fixes his thoughts on the ones like Toothsplitter and Sirius who will mourn him if he dies here, and bulls forwards.
The voices snarl at him in unison, and all the claws swipe at once. It breaks something else inside Harry to do it, but he manages to roll underneath them and stab them with the basilisk-fang dagger and Stargazer both at once. He hears a shriek and sees the black lines of venom coursing up through the darker flesh of the limb.
Then he’s running through the tunnel that’s opening for him on the far side of the diamond-checkered floor, gritting his teeth as he surges forwards. He’s going to do this. He will make it—
The only way out of the Inner Halls is forwards, to the Realm of Song, not back the way he came.
Maddened howls rise behind him that sound like hunting hounds coursing at his heels. Harry runs harder and harder, and thinks of silver and gold, and Toothsplitter’s forge, and the medallions dragging at him, and the sickness and weakness the denizens have infected him with splashing off iron and granite’s protection.
Something grabs at his foot. Harry lashes down with an angrily buzzing Stargazer, not even looking, and the thing howls and lets him go.
Then there is a stretch of blank wall that breaks into carved stone ahead of him, and Toothsplitter’s anxious face, and Harry slumping over as her strong arms grab him.
Then there’s nothing.
Of Silver Were Her Lanterns Made
Blackeye has spent a long time this morning just staring at him.
Harry bows his head.
“You did not tell me that you were planning to journey to the Inner Halls,” Blackeye says, and her voice makes the necklaces of blue healing stones hung around Harry’s chest and abdomen vibrate ominously.
Harry swallows. “I know.” He could point out that he wasn’t Blackeye’s patient at the time and didn’t owe her an explanation, but he knows how she would react to that, and he won’t try to get out of a scolding he does deserve on a technicality.
Blackeye exhales with wrath. “Did you at least learn enough from them to make the journey worth it?”
Harry thinks about it, and nods. “Yes. A vision of the ritual that Voldemort used to make himself a body, details on the last Horcrux and how to defeat it, and that it is the last Horcrux. And a partial answer as to why people are disappearing.”
Blackeye considers for a long moment. Then she grunts. “Yes, that is enough. But I sometimes wish that you had chosen the path of the smith instead of the warrior, Harry.”
“I have chosen the path of the smith!” Harry is more than a little stung. His life’s work will be forging the souls of the goblins’ former enemies out of the Argent Ocean, not battling enemies.
“But you are bound to the path of the fighter until this war ends, Doomgiver,” Blackeye says, using the name Ripclaw bestowed on him when he gave Harry his scar and the clan fully accepted him as a warrior. She sighs. “Tell me your decisions to do such reckless things in the future, and make sure that I am prepared.”
Harry nods, feeling more than a little warm. This is more than just the fierceness Blackeye exhibits to every one of her patients. This is personal warmth, personal care. She wishes Harry was purely a smith because she cares about him and doesn’t want him hurt.
“Thank you,” Harry says, and takes a risk. He wasn’t present at the ceremony where Blackeye received her private Healer’s name, of course, since it happened long before he was born. But he thinks he may be able to guess what it is, based on what he knows of her. “Deathchallenger.”
Blackeye stares at him. Harry knows that she’s probably wondering if someone told him that name, and who she would have to punish, if so. Harry holds his hands out in front of him and bows his head. “I name you such because of how I have seen you work,” he says. Blackeye doesn’t fight death if death is truly present in the body of a patient, but she goes as far as she can, and never backs down from a challenge.
“You are correct,” Blackeye says softly.
Harry relaxes against the pillow with a small smile. Blackeye rests one hand briefly on his knee, nods at him, and then leaves the healing cavern. Harry closes his eyes and attends to the serious business of rest and healing, so he can continue to be a warrior and a smith going forwards.
*
“Harry!”
Sirius comes hurtling into the healing cavern like the overexcited dog in human form that he is. Harry is under the light of some of Blackeye’s healing lanterns, which are made of silver and shed a quiet chatter along with their light. Patients can be soothed by listening to them as well as by lying in the light.
It’s obvious that Sirius isn’t going to stop in his run towards the bed. Harry sighs and gestures lazily with Stargazer, asking for his mother’s soul-blade to cast a modified Shield Charm.
Sirius yelps as he bumps into it and ends up sitting down abruptly, rubbing his nose. Harry frowns at him a little. Both Sirius’s voice and his movements have been a little too canine lately. Harry thinks that he might be spending too much time in his Animagus form. Harry will tell Blackeye.
Sirius doesn’t let the Shield Charm dismay him for long, at least. In seconds he’s back on his feet and glaring at Harry. “What is this about talking to some creatures that were so foul they made you almost die?” he snaps.
“We needed answers about the last Horcrux.” Harry shifts so that he’s lying more on his side in the lantern light. The lanterns are clucking together about Sirius and how he could probably use a long course of healing light himself. “And a few other things Voldemort was doing, like how he got his body back when he doesn’t seem to have done whatever ritual he was going to do with me in the graveyard. So this was the best way.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You would have tried to stop me from going.”
“Because I would be worried about you!”
“Yes, exactly. This way, by the time you started to worry, you had already heard that I was back and Blackeye was healing me.” Harry smiles at his godfather, pleased that he could spare him the kind of agony that Toothsplitter told him she was feeling while she waited for Harry to come back.
Sirius takes a long, deep breath. He sounds like he might be counting to ten under his breath, a gesture Harry listens to with appreciation. The more human things Sirius can do, like counting, the more closely he’ll be tethered to his human form.
“Harry,” Sirius says, as calmly as possible. “In the future, I want you to tell me if you do something like that.”
“Oh.” Harry frowns. He didn’t anticipate that. Well, he should have let Sirius make his own decisions about the level of agony and worry that he’s willing to endure, Harry supposes. “All right, I’ll tell you, and you can wait with Toothsplitter, or someone else if she goes with me.”
“No,” Sirius says, and he sounds like he’s about to growl. Definitely too much time as a dog, Harry thinks. “I mean, I want you to tell me so that I can prevent you from doing it.”
“You can’t, Sirius.”
“Yes, I can! I’m still your godfather! I can’t let you just—romp into danger!”
“It was walking, not romping. And you know that I’m going to encounter danger as a warrior. Trying to keep me from it is an insult.”
Sirius takes another long, deep breath. Harry listens, but he can’t hear anything wrong with his lungs. Well, he supposes that the lungs of a dog and a human probably aren’t that different. “Please tell me if you decide that you need to go on this—this kind of insane journey again.”
“All right,” Harry agrees. That he can do. He sees no reason that he would ever need to consult the denizens of the Inner Halls again any time soon, but if he does, then Sirius can be informed.
Sirius slumped a little. “Merlin, you make it hard to be a godfather to you.”
“Sorry,” Harry says, patting his hand. “If it helps, you’re one of the best humans I know.”
Sirius smiles wanly. “It does, a little.”
She Armoured Her
“Voldemort has created a body, then, of the opposite of purity and innocence.”
Harry nods. The lore-singer he’s talking to, Wisdomchaser, is one of the oldest goblins Harry’s ever met. He has tufts of white hair dangling over his forehead and growing out of his mouth. His eyes seem to be dim, but his ears are so phenomenally sharp that he’s already asked Harry not to breathe so loud.
Now, Wisdomchaser is standing with Harry in one of the caverns used for the Great Singing, the annual span of five or six days around the New Year when the lore-singers gather together and sing the whole of the history of the clan, from the beginning of time to the present. They go in shifts, spelling each other when someone’s voice runs out, and usually with multiple songs and multiple symphonies of history going at once. The air and the stone are still humming with the echoes of that music.
Wisdomchaser lifts one hand and runs his claws lightly back and forth along a strand of the air that Harry has to admit doesn’t look any different from any other strand to him. But then again, he’s not a lore-singer.
And Wisdomchaser is smiling. Whatever he’s finding, it pleases him. He nods, taps one hard foot against the stone, and begins to sing.
Harry’s eyes widen. He can hear other people singing with Wisdomchaser, even though they’re the only ones in this cavern. Veins of gold and silver flash into being on the walls, playing the notes back, chasing them in circles with the sparks of light appearing on the metal. Harry hears the more distant song of granite and basalt, and the hot murmur of what has to be lava, far under the earth.
“Ahhh,” says Wisdomchaser, somehow speaking at the same time he’s singing. Now that is breath control. Harry is envious and humbled, wondering how many, many years it’s taken Wisdomchaser to learn how to do that. “There is one instance in our past like that. Goblins who faced a Minister who tried to invade our land.” He lifts his voice, no longer speaking, and the song floods into Harry and through his brain.
He can see it, now. A tall woman walking towards the outside of Gringotts, clad in what looks like crawling black light. His eyes flinch away from it. But he can make out the swimming heads and terrified eyes of unicorns.
It seems this Minister used the sacrifice of the unicorns’ purity and innocence to create armor instead of a body, Harry thinks. Then again, not everyone is an immortal wraith-kelpie-thing like Voldemort.
The woman halts a few meters beyond the end of the steps leading up to the front entrance of Gringotts. She lifts her hand, and part of the crawling black energy snaps up to her fingers. The woman smiles. Harry shakes his head. It’s such an obviously deranged smile that he wonders if perhaps the humans who followed her had even less sense of politics than the current ones have.
The woman hurls her hand forwards, and the black energy strikes, crackling, for the stone of the bank. It lands and cracks some of the stone into dust and nothingness.
A song rises in response, but the Minister doesn’t seem to hear it. She takes another step forwards and aims her hand again.
The goblins step out of the bank then, and also rise up from the stone around her, singing. The cobblestones around this part of Diagon Alley are supposedly under human rule, but humans never listen to them. Treating them as polite allies has saved goblins more than once in the past, Harry knows.
The sharp banging of axe and hammer and blade and shield disrupts the song of the energy around the Minister’s hand. There’s a moment when it’s completely silent and makes no sound at all.
And then the energy begins to sing again, but in the voices of unicorns. Harry’s eyes water at the beauty of it. The black energy turns and gathers around the Minister, the armor winding inwards and crushing her as the goblins and the murdered unicorns sing in harmony of justice and vengeance.
The Minister falls dead, and the goblins move forwards to collect and bury what they can of the unicorns’ spirits. Their music changes, so that the unicorns’ song can be remembered and resung in goblin voices.
The vision ends. Harry blinks hard at Wisdomchaser, who has stopped singing and is looking at the walls longingly. Harry has heard that some lore-singers turn into pure song and become voices that resound through their caverns forever after when they die. Wisdomechaser is old enough that he might be looking forward to that kind of reunion.
Harry bows with one fist on his forehead and one on his heart, to show that he appreciates the time Wisdomchaser has shown him and that he has put off joining the song for long enough that Harry could learn from him. “Thank you, Wisdomchaser. We will need different tactics as Voldemort has built his body of unicorns’ bodies and spirits instead of using them for armor, but I will learn what we need to defeat him.”
Wisdomchaser smiles at him. His fangs gleam, sharp and deadly. Harry is still disappointed that no one will let him file his teeth into fangs the way he wants to. “I plan to join the song soon, amaraczh. But I will put it off long enough to listen to what becomes of this battle and weave it into the song.”
Harry bows again, overwhelmed. He never thought he would be worthy of a place in the voice-crafting of such an esteemed lore-singer. Yes, of course the war against Voldemort will be remembered, but it is only one war in the long history of his clan, and personally significant to Harry in a way it is to no one else.
“My thanks,” he whispers, when he thinks he’s able to speak.
Wisdomchaser nods to him, and then turns away to ask the walls a question. Harry walks out of the humming space as quietly as he can. His heart feels bruised with wonder.
Just when he might think he know the outlines of everything there is to know about his people’s culture, he meets some new form of generosity or kindness or greatness, and has to rethink it.
To Ward All Harm
It’s a day before the Hogwarts Express will carry students back from the Yule holidays, and Harry planned to spend it working on the Argent Ocean. But an urgent message has arrived from Luna, an owl that made it all the way into the caverns of the Realm of Song. It says only that she must talk to the goblin warrior she knows.
Harry goes armed not only with the daggers but with the first shield he’s ever carried, a small silver disk covered with runes and the scratchings of lore-song. He waits on the steps of Gringotts for Luna, who Apparates into being a few steps away.
Harry didn’t know Luna could Apparate, since she’s not supposed to know how yet, but he’s not surprised. He’s much more concerned about the fact that Luna’s face is streaked with tears, and that she runs towards him and hurls herself into his arms. Harry staggers a little with the force of the hurling, but catches her.
“Luna, what is it?” he whispers.
“Daddy,” Luna chokes, leaning further into Harry and hugging him as hard as armor. “He’s gone. I thought he was just searching for the Granite-Horned Snorkack for a little longer than usual, but I performed a seeking for him on the wind yesterday, and—he’s gone.”
Harry’s belly goes cold. That means Voldemort must have taken him. Harry doesn’t know it in the way of books, of course, but he knows it in the way he knows how to swing his daggers.
“We’ll find him, Luna,” he says. “Do you know where the last place you saw him is?”
“Yes.” Luna pulls back, swiping at her eyes. She looks a little less desperate now, which Harry is glad of. He will keep all harm from her, including worry. “And I know where the spiders last saw him, which was after I left the house.”
“Excellent,” Harry says, and makes sure that his shield is clasped close to him before extending his arm to Luna for the Side-Along Apparition.
Excitement bounds through him as they squeeze through the tube.
I am carrying the war to you again, Voldemort. Guard yourself.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Mostly gen, with mentions of background canon pairings
Content Notes: AU (Harry raised by goblins), violence, angst, minor character deaths, gore, animal sacrifice, human sacrifice, Dark Arts
Wordcount: This part 4400
Summary: The second half of goblin-raised Harry’s seventh year at Hogwarts, in which he carries the war to Voldemort, works on the task of Ministry reform, helps his friends, deals with humans being very human, and, oh yeah, sometimes studies for those NEWT exam things.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “From Litha to Lammas” fics, short chaptered fics being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. This is also the eighth and last part of my Realm of Song series, and sequel to “Music Beneath the Mountains,” “In Their Own Secret Tongues He Spoke,” “The Dragon-Headed Door,” “More Marvellous-Cunning Than Mortal Man’s Pondering,” “Harmonies Unconquerable,” “Light To Us Who Wander Here,” and “Shadow-People Singing Ancient Songs.” Read those first, or you won’t understand this one. The title of this fic and most of the section titles come from Tolkien’s poem “Song of Eärendil.” The word “flammifer” literally means bearing fire, or light.
Flammifer
“…ever still a herald on
an errand that should never rest
to bear his shining lamp afar,
the Flammifer of Westernesse.”
-J. R. R. Tolkien
To Journey In
“You are sure you wish to do this.”
Toothsplitter’s voice is quiet, but she doesn’t stop hanging the heavy granite and iron medallions from Harry’s belt and boots and body. Harry nods, shaking the harness of chains that encircles his chest and winds about his arms to hold the medallions. He can still move, he notes. Good. If he has to face a threat in the depths of Realm of Song, that will be important.
His daggers might defend him on their own, but there is no reason to ask them to do such a strenuous task, especially if they need time to consider it.
“I have to,” Harry says, when he realizes Toothsplitter is waiting for an answer other than a nod. “We have to know what’s coming, Toothsplitter. We still don’t know how Voldemort got his body back. We don’t know why so many people have started disappearing. And we need to know the location of the last Horcruxes.”
“If there are any others at all.”
Harry nods. So far they have hunted Horcruxes mostly by confronting them when they appear, or noticing their influence on people and tracking them from there. But he thinks that tactic has worn out its usefulness. If nothing else, the disappearances and likely murders are surging, and they have to know if they can kill Voldemort now or if they need to find other Horcruxes first.
“You know that they might not grant you the answer you’re seeking.”
Toothsplitter can’t hide a flicker of discomfort in her eyes. Harry reaches out and hugs her. He remembers the time when she used to loom over him, and now he’s a little taller than she is. “I know. They might kill me for seeking it.”
Toothsplitter smiles then. “No one can doubt your courage.”
“At least not without facing my daggers.”
“Or being human.”
Harry nods, smiling faintly. He knows humans who listen, who value goblins, who take goblin training, and who fight for the rights of all magical beings. But few of them.
Toothsplitter raises her head and Harry ducks his, so that their foreheads are touching and they are staring into each other’s eyes, the most intimate posture any two goblins can take. “May the blessings of silver and gold walk with you, Harry.”
“May the remain here with you,” Harry whispers.
She could have invoked lots of different metals and stones to bless him with, but the particular ones she chose mean that Harry will be the most well-protected. Silver and gold run everywhere in the Realm of Song, in lakes and rivers and veins and fountains.
Toothsplitter moves back. Harry raises his arms and lets them fall once more, and then walks towards the far side of the cavern they stand in, not looking back.
He has until his strength gives out and he can no longer move under the weight of the iron and granite. Then, if he lacks the strength to return, the ones he goes to seek answers of will eat him.
A black tunnel opens up before him, a smooth round darkness in the stone wall. Harry steps into it and finds himself gliding through space that has no up or down, no friction or touching.
He glides, and then he falls. He stands on a floor of black stone that he should not be able to see, but does. Light that should illumine nothing should not gleam on the walls, but does. Harry reaches out and touches narrow walls on either side of him, kicks back with one foot and touches a wall there.
No way to go but forwards.
He moves on, and hears, behind him, the stone wall that blocks any retreat following him steadily.
*
Harry walks and walks. Pain bleeds through him and burns itself out on the fire of his will. Fear cuts at him like swords and departs. Fear means nothing when you can defeat it, and Harry has his daggers.
He rounds one last corner, and comes into another large place, this one lit by no visible light, and with a pattern in front of him like a chessboard, made of alternating jet-and-ivory diamonds. Harry halts. The denizens of the Inner Halls he came to meet will be here, or not at all.
And they come.
Cold limbs dance on the walls. Cold eyes open in various corners. Harry has no idea how many there are or how their bodies are connected. He stands and waits, his hands on the hilts of his daggers, and a hissing voice speaks at last, not the language of snakes but more akin to it than anything goblin.
“Why art thou here?”
“To ask for knowledge of the future.”
“And thou art afraid.”
“I am not fearful enough to run.”
“Thou wilt taste delicious.”
One of the limbs dances down towards Harry, acquiring form and shape as it comes. It’s a tentacle now, with something like a claw at the end, and things lining it like suckers. Harry draws his daggers and crouches.
When the limb comes close enough, Harry lunges. He cuts off the tip, and the claw clatters on the floor.
There is no scream. The limb simply withdraws, and several of the cold white eyes cluster together in a corner where the wall meets the floor. Harry smiles at them and waits, and after a long moment, they chuckle in concert, a sharp sound that bounces from the white parts of the floor but not the black.
“Thou art strong as well as fearful,” they say. Harry can hear the soft humming of many voices instead of just one now. “We will answer thy questions. Ask.”
With their regard weighing on him now, Harry can feel the strength openly draining from him. The iron and granite somewhat fight their influence, but not entirely. He is limited in the questions he can ask, not by number as in some human stories (and Harry thinks that someone should try cutting a genie’s throat when it’s uncooperative and seeing what happens), but in how much strength he can shed before he won’t be able to make it back.
“How did Voldemort create his body?”
Limbs snap and gesture around him in excitement. Harry squints and sees the picture they’re drawing. He shouldn’t be able to, not when there’s no light, but no normal rules apply to this place.
Harry sees a large cauldron, stones placed around it, and silvery things he doesn’t recognize scattered around them. Then he does, and hisses in outrage. Voldemort sacrificed a unicorn. Probably several of them, from the number of limbs and pieces of flesh without fur. As Harry watches, someone in a mask stirs unicorn blood and horn and hair into the cauldron, and Voldemort’s pale body rises out of it.
Harry narrows his eyes and calms his desire to avenge the dead. They will be avenged. In the meantime, there are possible ways he and his people might destroy Voldemort’s body.
“How many other Horcruxes does he have?”
“One,” whisper the conjoined voices. “Ask, and we will tell thee.”
Harry has to smile at their tactics. Delay the answers as much as possible, and they can try to keep him here and eat him. Harry can salute such skilled and sly warriors. “What is his Horcrux?”
“The snake,” the voices sigh together. “Nagini.”
Harry nods. So his people suspected, but they needed a confirmation. “Will a basilisk-fang dagger slay a living Horcrux?”
“No,” the voices sigh. “He has placed protections on her.”
Damn. Harry takes a deep breath and notices that it drags as it comes out of his lungs. He’s probably bleeding internally by now. But he cannot hurry. “What will destroy her?”
“The fire of the fiend.”
A spell, probably. Harry can ask the lore-singers if he can’t find any human who knows it. And probably not by that name, what with the trickery that tends to live in these denizens of the Inner Halls.
A sharp pop inside him is probably damage done to his spleen. Harry grimaces. He can only ask one more question, and he will have to make it a good one.
“Why have people started disappearing, and are those disappearances connected to Voldemort?”
“He is taking them for his potions.”
As clear an answer as one so short is likely to be. Harry manages to bow despite the pain raging through his body. A warrior will have to face both pain and fear in battle, and it’s better not to act with any lack of courtesy. “Thank you. I will go now.”
“Thinkest thou we will let thee go?” Another limb reaches towards him down the walls, this time with several claws on the end. “Young fool, fool of a goblin, fool of a wizard, we will devour thee.”
This is a delaying tactic as much as anything else, Harry knows. Hold him here and let their presence wear on him until he is easy prey.
Harry draws his daggers, fixes his thoughts on the ones like Toothsplitter and Sirius who will mourn him if he dies here, and bulls forwards.
The voices snarl at him in unison, and all the claws swipe at once. It breaks something else inside Harry to do it, but he manages to roll underneath them and stab them with the basilisk-fang dagger and Stargazer both at once. He hears a shriek and sees the black lines of venom coursing up through the darker flesh of the limb.
Then he’s running through the tunnel that’s opening for him on the far side of the diamond-checkered floor, gritting his teeth as he surges forwards. He’s going to do this. He will make it—
The only way out of the Inner Halls is forwards, to the Realm of Song, not back the way he came.
Maddened howls rise behind him that sound like hunting hounds coursing at his heels. Harry runs harder and harder, and thinks of silver and gold, and Toothsplitter’s forge, and the medallions dragging at him, and the sickness and weakness the denizens have infected him with splashing off iron and granite’s protection.
Something grabs at his foot. Harry lashes down with an angrily buzzing Stargazer, not even looking, and the thing howls and lets him go.
Then there is a stretch of blank wall that breaks into carved stone ahead of him, and Toothsplitter’s anxious face, and Harry slumping over as her strong arms grab him.
Then there’s nothing.
Of Silver Were Her Lanterns Made
Blackeye has spent a long time this morning just staring at him.
Harry bows his head.
“You did not tell me that you were planning to journey to the Inner Halls,” Blackeye says, and her voice makes the necklaces of blue healing stones hung around Harry’s chest and abdomen vibrate ominously.
Harry swallows. “I know.” He could point out that he wasn’t Blackeye’s patient at the time and didn’t owe her an explanation, but he knows how she would react to that, and he won’t try to get out of a scolding he does deserve on a technicality.
Blackeye exhales with wrath. “Did you at least learn enough from them to make the journey worth it?”
Harry thinks about it, and nods. “Yes. A vision of the ritual that Voldemort used to make himself a body, details on the last Horcrux and how to defeat it, and that it is the last Horcrux. And a partial answer as to why people are disappearing.”
Blackeye considers for a long moment. Then she grunts. “Yes, that is enough. But I sometimes wish that you had chosen the path of the smith instead of the warrior, Harry.”
“I have chosen the path of the smith!” Harry is more than a little stung. His life’s work will be forging the souls of the goblins’ former enemies out of the Argent Ocean, not battling enemies.
“But you are bound to the path of the fighter until this war ends, Doomgiver,” Blackeye says, using the name Ripclaw bestowed on him when he gave Harry his scar and the clan fully accepted him as a warrior. She sighs. “Tell me your decisions to do such reckless things in the future, and make sure that I am prepared.”
Harry nods, feeling more than a little warm. This is more than just the fierceness Blackeye exhibits to every one of her patients. This is personal warmth, personal care. She wishes Harry was purely a smith because she cares about him and doesn’t want him hurt.
“Thank you,” Harry says, and takes a risk. He wasn’t present at the ceremony where Blackeye received her private Healer’s name, of course, since it happened long before he was born. But he thinks he may be able to guess what it is, based on what he knows of her. “Deathchallenger.”
Blackeye stares at him. Harry knows that she’s probably wondering if someone told him that name, and who she would have to punish, if so. Harry holds his hands out in front of him and bows his head. “I name you such because of how I have seen you work,” he says. Blackeye doesn’t fight death if death is truly present in the body of a patient, but she goes as far as she can, and never backs down from a challenge.
“You are correct,” Blackeye says softly.
Harry relaxes against the pillow with a small smile. Blackeye rests one hand briefly on his knee, nods at him, and then leaves the healing cavern. Harry closes his eyes and attends to the serious business of rest and healing, so he can continue to be a warrior and a smith going forwards.
*
“Harry!”
Sirius comes hurtling into the healing cavern like the overexcited dog in human form that he is. Harry is under the light of some of Blackeye’s healing lanterns, which are made of silver and shed a quiet chatter along with their light. Patients can be soothed by listening to them as well as by lying in the light.
It’s obvious that Sirius isn’t going to stop in his run towards the bed. Harry sighs and gestures lazily with Stargazer, asking for his mother’s soul-blade to cast a modified Shield Charm.
Sirius yelps as he bumps into it and ends up sitting down abruptly, rubbing his nose. Harry frowns at him a little. Both Sirius’s voice and his movements have been a little too canine lately. Harry thinks that he might be spending too much time in his Animagus form. Harry will tell Blackeye.
Sirius doesn’t let the Shield Charm dismay him for long, at least. In seconds he’s back on his feet and glaring at Harry. “What is this about talking to some creatures that were so foul they made you almost die?” he snaps.
“We needed answers about the last Horcrux.” Harry shifts so that he’s lying more on his side in the lantern light. The lanterns are clucking together about Sirius and how he could probably use a long course of healing light himself. “And a few other things Voldemort was doing, like how he got his body back when he doesn’t seem to have done whatever ritual he was going to do with me in the graveyard. So this was the best way.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You would have tried to stop me from going.”
“Because I would be worried about you!”
“Yes, exactly. This way, by the time you started to worry, you had already heard that I was back and Blackeye was healing me.” Harry smiles at his godfather, pleased that he could spare him the kind of agony that Toothsplitter told him she was feeling while she waited for Harry to come back.
Sirius takes a long, deep breath. He sounds like he might be counting to ten under his breath, a gesture Harry listens to with appreciation. The more human things Sirius can do, like counting, the more closely he’ll be tethered to his human form.
“Harry,” Sirius says, as calmly as possible. “In the future, I want you to tell me if you do something like that.”
“Oh.” Harry frowns. He didn’t anticipate that. Well, he should have let Sirius make his own decisions about the level of agony and worry that he’s willing to endure, Harry supposes. “All right, I’ll tell you, and you can wait with Toothsplitter, or someone else if she goes with me.”
“No,” Sirius says, and he sounds like he’s about to growl. Definitely too much time as a dog, Harry thinks. “I mean, I want you to tell me so that I can prevent you from doing it.”
“You can’t, Sirius.”
“Yes, I can! I’m still your godfather! I can’t let you just—romp into danger!”
“It was walking, not romping. And you know that I’m going to encounter danger as a warrior. Trying to keep me from it is an insult.”
Sirius takes another long, deep breath. Harry listens, but he can’t hear anything wrong with his lungs. Well, he supposes that the lungs of a dog and a human probably aren’t that different. “Please tell me if you decide that you need to go on this—this kind of insane journey again.”
“All right,” Harry agrees. That he can do. He sees no reason that he would ever need to consult the denizens of the Inner Halls again any time soon, but if he does, then Sirius can be informed.
Sirius slumped a little. “Merlin, you make it hard to be a godfather to you.”
“Sorry,” Harry says, patting his hand. “If it helps, you’re one of the best humans I know.”
Sirius smiles wanly. “It does, a little.”
She Armoured Her
“Voldemort has created a body, then, of the opposite of purity and innocence.”
Harry nods. The lore-singer he’s talking to, Wisdomchaser, is one of the oldest goblins Harry’s ever met. He has tufts of white hair dangling over his forehead and growing out of his mouth. His eyes seem to be dim, but his ears are so phenomenally sharp that he’s already asked Harry not to breathe so loud.
Now, Wisdomchaser is standing with Harry in one of the caverns used for the Great Singing, the annual span of five or six days around the New Year when the lore-singers gather together and sing the whole of the history of the clan, from the beginning of time to the present. They go in shifts, spelling each other when someone’s voice runs out, and usually with multiple songs and multiple symphonies of history going at once. The air and the stone are still humming with the echoes of that music.
Wisdomchaser lifts one hand and runs his claws lightly back and forth along a strand of the air that Harry has to admit doesn’t look any different from any other strand to him. But then again, he’s not a lore-singer.
And Wisdomchaser is smiling. Whatever he’s finding, it pleases him. He nods, taps one hard foot against the stone, and begins to sing.
Harry’s eyes widen. He can hear other people singing with Wisdomchaser, even though they’re the only ones in this cavern. Veins of gold and silver flash into being on the walls, playing the notes back, chasing them in circles with the sparks of light appearing on the metal. Harry hears the more distant song of granite and basalt, and the hot murmur of what has to be lava, far under the earth.
“Ahhh,” says Wisdomchaser, somehow speaking at the same time he’s singing. Now that is breath control. Harry is envious and humbled, wondering how many, many years it’s taken Wisdomchaser to learn how to do that. “There is one instance in our past like that. Goblins who faced a Minister who tried to invade our land.” He lifts his voice, no longer speaking, and the song floods into Harry and through his brain.
He can see it, now. A tall woman walking towards the outside of Gringotts, clad in what looks like crawling black light. His eyes flinch away from it. But he can make out the swimming heads and terrified eyes of unicorns.
It seems this Minister used the sacrifice of the unicorns’ purity and innocence to create armor instead of a body, Harry thinks. Then again, not everyone is an immortal wraith-kelpie-thing like Voldemort.
The woman halts a few meters beyond the end of the steps leading up to the front entrance of Gringotts. She lifts her hand, and part of the crawling black energy snaps up to her fingers. The woman smiles. Harry shakes his head. It’s such an obviously deranged smile that he wonders if perhaps the humans who followed her had even less sense of politics than the current ones have.
The woman hurls her hand forwards, and the black energy strikes, crackling, for the stone of the bank. It lands and cracks some of the stone into dust and nothingness.
A song rises in response, but the Minister doesn’t seem to hear it. She takes another step forwards and aims her hand again.
The goblins step out of the bank then, and also rise up from the stone around her, singing. The cobblestones around this part of Diagon Alley are supposedly under human rule, but humans never listen to them. Treating them as polite allies has saved goblins more than once in the past, Harry knows.
The sharp banging of axe and hammer and blade and shield disrupts the song of the energy around the Minister’s hand. There’s a moment when it’s completely silent and makes no sound at all.
And then the energy begins to sing again, but in the voices of unicorns. Harry’s eyes water at the beauty of it. The black energy turns and gathers around the Minister, the armor winding inwards and crushing her as the goblins and the murdered unicorns sing in harmony of justice and vengeance.
The Minister falls dead, and the goblins move forwards to collect and bury what they can of the unicorns’ spirits. Their music changes, so that the unicorns’ song can be remembered and resung in goblin voices.
The vision ends. Harry blinks hard at Wisdomchaser, who has stopped singing and is looking at the walls longingly. Harry has heard that some lore-singers turn into pure song and become voices that resound through their caverns forever after when they die. Wisdomechaser is old enough that he might be looking forward to that kind of reunion.
Harry bows with one fist on his forehead and one on his heart, to show that he appreciates the time Wisdomchaser has shown him and that he has put off joining the song for long enough that Harry could learn from him. “Thank you, Wisdomchaser. We will need different tactics as Voldemort has built his body of unicorns’ bodies and spirits instead of using them for armor, but I will learn what we need to defeat him.”
Wisdomchaser smiles at him. His fangs gleam, sharp and deadly. Harry is still disappointed that no one will let him file his teeth into fangs the way he wants to. “I plan to join the song soon, amaraczh. But I will put it off long enough to listen to what becomes of this battle and weave it into the song.”
Harry bows again, overwhelmed. He never thought he would be worthy of a place in the voice-crafting of such an esteemed lore-singer. Yes, of course the war against Voldemort will be remembered, but it is only one war in the long history of his clan, and personally significant to Harry in a way it is to no one else.
“My thanks,” he whispers, when he thinks he’s able to speak.
Wisdomchaser nods to him, and then turns away to ask the walls a question. Harry walks out of the humming space as quietly as he can. His heart feels bruised with wonder.
Just when he might think he know the outlines of everything there is to know about his people’s culture, he meets some new form of generosity or kindness or greatness, and has to rethink it.
To Ward All Harm
It’s a day before the Hogwarts Express will carry students back from the Yule holidays, and Harry planned to spend it working on the Argent Ocean. But an urgent message has arrived from Luna, an owl that made it all the way into the caverns of the Realm of Song. It says only that she must talk to the goblin warrior she knows.
Harry goes armed not only with the daggers but with the first shield he’s ever carried, a small silver disk covered with runes and the scratchings of lore-song. He waits on the steps of Gringotts for Luna, who Apparates into being a few steps away.
Harry didn’t know Luna could Apparate, since she’s not supposed to know how yet, but he’s not surprised. He’s much more concerned about the fact that Luna’s face is streaked with tears, and that she runs towards him and hurls herself into his arms. Harry staggers a little with the force of the hurling, but catches her.
“Luna, what is it?” he whispers.
“Daddy,” Luna chokes, leaning further into Harry and hugging him as hard as armor. “He’s gone. I thought he was just searching for the Granite-Horned Snorkack for a little longer than usual, but I performed a seeking for him on the wind yesterday, and—he’s gone.”
Harry’s belly goes cold. That means Voldemort must have taken him. Harry doesn’t know it in the way of books, of course, but he knows it in the way he knows how to swing his daggers.
“We’ll find him, Luna,” he says. “Do you know where the last place you saw him is?”
“Yes.” Luna pulls back, swiping at her eyes. She looks a little less desperate now, which Harry is glad of. He will keep all harm from her, including worry. “And I know where the spiders last saw him, which was after I left the house.”
“Excellent,” Harry says, and makes sure that his shield is clasped close to him before extending his arm to Luna for the Side-Along Apparition.
Excitement bounds through him as they squeeze through the tube.
I am carrying the war to you again, Voldemort. Guard yourself.
