[From Litha to Lammas]: Flammifer, gen, 2/7, Realm of Song series

[lomonaaeren]

Thank you for all the reviews!

Part Two

The spiders saw Xenophilius Lovegood in a small circle right outside the house. Harry crouches down and stares at the circle in some perplexity. It really is a circle, marked out from the rest of the grass around it by a light line of sand and bare ground.

Harry lets his hand hover above that line without touching it. It’s never wise to experiment with something a Lovegood has already experimented on.

He gets a feeling of suddenness and power from it, and when he asks the sand, the sand agrees. Xenophilius was either doing some kind of ritual magic here, or got snatched away by someone doing it.

Or both.

Harry nods and steps back. He draws Stargazer, and the blade softly chimes in his hand. Harry closes his eyes. He doesn’t exactly hear his mother’s voice whispering in his head, but it’s something close, loving and warm, and he knows that if she were here, she would want to make sure that Luna’s father gets found.

Harry walks around the field with the blade in his hand, noticing her slight waverings. But when she decides to point him in one direction, there’s really nothing subtle about it. She’s practically dragging his arm along.

Harry runs into something and stops, opening his eyes. Stargazer’s tip has plunged into the trunk of a rowan tree. Harry steps close to it and leans his hand on the bark, and hears the sleepy, lazy murmur of a hundred summers.

It can be hard to get trees to focus on the present when they live so long, and on humans, who generally don’t help them and may harm them only once in a lifetime, when they cut them down. But Harry shows the rowan the feeling of suddenness, and the tree complains about something embedded halfway up it.

Harry raises one hand without looking. And his hand comes to rest on a small nugget of metal.

He smiles as he extracts it and holds it out to Luna. The nugget isn’t speaking to Harry, maybe because it’s still shocked from what happened with the ritual circle, or from being shot into the tree at a high speed by whatever interrupted Xenophilius’s ritual. “Do you recognize this, Luna?”

“Oh, yes.” Her voice has gone back to its gentle serenity, which Harry finds himself glad for. Luna trusts him completely, and knows that he’ll never stop the hunt for her father until he finds him. “Father was trying to analyze Muggle bullets and think of different ways to use them in tracking creatures like the Crumple-Horned Snorkack.”

“Huh. Why did he think that would work?”

“Muggles use bullets in hunting animals. The tracking connection exists.”

Harry smiles. That’s the exact kind of connection he never would have made or thought of himself. People like Luna and her father make the world a better place.

Harry cups the bullet in his hands and reaches out and downwards, asking it politely to wake up from its shock. The metal stirs sluggishly. Now it wants to tell Harry of the indignity of being kidnapped by someone who didn’t know how to use it and how it was in a shop before this and its feud with the other bullets in the surrounding area.

Harry keeps thinking of Xenophilius, pushing meaning through the name, and the bullet finally sighs and tells him that Xenophilius put it on the ground and placed a piece of slate next to it. Then something happened, some flare of white light, and it was tumbling through the air. It doesn’t know what happened after it got lodged in the tree.

Harry politely thanks the bullet for its assistance and hands it back to Luna. She tucks it away in a pocket. Harry knows it will be well-cared for.

“What do you think happened to Daddy?”

“I think he was experimenting with the bullet at the same moment someone else used a tracking ritual to find him,” Harry murmurs. He goes back to the circle and crouches down next to it, sweeping his fingers through the grass. Brown blades prickle at him and complain about the cold.

But Harry does find what he’s looking for, which are crumbs of the piece of slate that must have exploded. He picks them up and holds them close, warming them in his hands. Slate is temperamental, and it doesn’t always like goblins.

This slate doesn’t want to talk. Harry prods as its sulking, and it just tells him to put it back into one piece.

Harry draws his wand and murmurs, “Reparo,” and the slate’s various rubble glitters and gleams and fuses again.

The slate pauses, then concedes that Harry isn’t like other goblins, and offers up its impressions of the ritual. Someone ran towards Xenophilius when he was casting, and the flare of white light happened when they did something to drag him out of the circle. The slate is indignant that the flare of white light both broke it and left something of the attacking witch behind.

Harry smiles. With Bellatrix Lestrange dead and Alecto Carrow taken care of in the battle outside the Room of Requirement last year, there’s only one witch who’s likely to be working with Voldemort’s forces.

“Do you know who took Daddy?” Luna asks, as Harry lays the slate back in the grass and strokes it to thank it for its help. It tells him his hands aren’t that bad, for a goblin.

“Araminta Selwyn,” Harry says, standing. “The slate mentioned a witch. Voldemort just doesn’t recruit that many.”

“And you think we can track her?”

Harry nods. Then he stands up and reaches for her hand again. Luna promptly comes over to him, and Harry closes his eyes and focuses on the rhythm of the name in his head, repeating it over and over again.

Araminta Selwyn. Araminta Selwyn. Araminta Selwyn.

The words echo through him, and out into the air. Harry is seeking the air that has borne her name. He is seeking the grass that is like the grass near Luna’s house and has known her footsteps. He turns in slow circles, Luna following him and bringing her feet into the dance.

Araminta Selwyn is somewhere. She might not have Luna’s dad with her, but she’ll know where he went. And Harry can find Voldemort from there, if he has to.

Araminta Selwyn, whispers what feels like a strand of air a good distance away.

Harry draws both his daggers and holds them out, making sure that Luna tucks her hand into the crook of his arm. Then they both thrum, and follow along the path of the daggers pointing straight and true at the air that bears Selwyn’s name, and are gone.

Shorn of Ebony

They come out of the Apparition, and into shouting.

Harry promptly ducks, and nudges Luna back behind him with one leg. She goes willingly. Harry smiles as he stands up. Unlike some people, Luna knows she isn’t a trained warrior and has no problem sheltering behind someone who is.

The runes on Harry’s silver shield crackle and light up. Someone must have flung a spell at him that he didn’t see. Harry shifts his arm behind the shield in thanks as he moves into a defensive crouch and stares around the room they’re in.

It appears to be a large dining room in a house that might be a manor. The table is made of mahogany and has twelve or sixteen chairs around it. The chandeliers overhead dazzle Harry with their blaze of light. And around the table are Death Eaters scrambling to their feet and aiming wands at him.

Including Araminta Selwyn.

Harry smiles.

They start firing curses at him, and Harry holds up the shield as well as casting a Shield Charm. It won’t last for long, but it will last for long enough. Harry can hear the table groaning because of the food and plates piled on it.

When he asks if it wants to tip over, it does so willingly, and the crash pins two of the eight Death Eaters and thoroughly distracts the others. Harry stands up and takes a step forwards, Luna following lightly behind him.

“Where is Xenophilius Lovegood?” he demands.

More than one of the Death Eaters flinches. Harry frowns at them. Are they that upset that he figured out one of them kidnapped Luna’s dad? They aren’t good warriors or good spies, then. Harry wondered why Voldemort kept them around.

“Where you’ll never find him,” spits Araminta Selwyn. She’s a tall woman with long dark hair and pale skin like a vampire, but she has ragged, bitten nails where any self-respecting vampire would have claws. She glares at Harry and points with one of her fingers. “You’ll never get the answer out of me.”

“Thanks for confirming you’re the one we need to question,” Harry says cheerfully, and asks the chandelier overhead if it minds dripping some candle wax on Selwyn to burn and distract her.

Selwyn shrieks when the wax falls. Then she shrieks harder when Harry asks the floor to buckle up beneath her feet and trip her, and it does.

The other Death Eaters are shouting, but none of them are actually casting spells yet. Harry keeps an eye on them. He has no idea why they’d be hesitating—

Oh, wait. What if they think that they’ll get into a war with the goblins if they hurt Harry? That would make some sense.

Well, they’re already in a war with the goblins. And Harry will inform them of that, but later, when he and Luna have her dad back.

“How dare you!” Selwyn is on her feet and pointing her wand at him, shaking.

“Why do people always say that?” Harry complains. He glances back at Luna. “Do you know?”

“They don’t believe that you’re a goblin, and they don’t know that you would dare anything,” Luna points out.

“Huh, yeah, that must be it.” Harry turns back to Selwyn, who’s looking baffled. “Well, I dare, and I’m here to get Xenophilius Lovegood back, and you could make it easier by handing him to me, but somehow I don’t think you will.”

“Ha! No, I will not!”

Harry shrugs. “All right, your funeral.” And he throws the basilisk-fang dagger at her.

Selwyn dodges, but is distracted by the dagger and bangs into the overturned table. Its legs grow out and around her waist. Harry blinks. He didn’t ask it to do that. But then he hears it grumbling about Selwyn spilling hot soup on it and scarring its surface, and he nods.

“You should watch your table manners,” he tells Selwyn, and advances towards her with the shield held in front of him and Luna standing behind him.

The other Death Eaters exchange nervous looks before running out of the room. They’ve probably gone for reinforcements, but Harry doesn’t mind that. As long as they’re out of the way and he and Luna can question Selwyn without anyone interfering and leave with Xenophilus before they get back, everything will work out. Harry dislikes sharing a room with cowards, anyway.

“Where is my father?” Luna asks, voice clear and resonant.

Selwyn sneers at her. Harry sighs. He was afraid of this. And he doesn’t like torturing people. He glances at Luna, waiting for her to come up with something. She’s the expert at speaking to animals and finding odd ways out of things.

Luna nods to him and takes out the bullet that got flung into the tree from her pocket. Harry brightens. “You’re going to use that to point the way to your dad?” he asks. Since the bullet was close to Xenophilius’s magic, it should be able to do that.

“Yes.” Luna says, and cuts her arm with a spell so the bullet can have some blood.

Harry watches with intense interest. It’s not the way he would do it, because blood is sacred in a way that would prevent it from being used on most goblin quests, but it does seem to combine Luna’s witch magic with listening to objects the way Harry taught her and probably some unique Lovegood magic, too.

The bullet slowly vibrates in Luna’s hand as she holds it, letting the blood remind it of Xenophilius. Then the bullet turns and smashes through the floor. Luna jumps after it. Harry gives a quick glance to Selwyn to make sure she can’t get out, and follows.

The fall is adventurous and longer than Harry thought it would be, but he waves his wand, and he and Luna both touch down gently in the middle of what looks like a dungeon corridor. There are bars lining the walls on all sides.

Harry sighs. Trust humans to have to shut opponents up in cells, instead of relying on either forged chains or their enemies’ word of honor to hold them captive.

The bullet is speeding down the center of the corridor, and turns and smashes through another wall as Harry watches. Luna chases it. Harry follows at a more leisurely pace and finds Luna placing her hands on the stone where the bullet has already formed a hole, closing her eyes and speaking with all the longing in her for it to open.

The wall is huffy about its wound and doesn’t want to, but Harry points out that both the bullet and Luna will go away if it does, and finally the wall opens wider. Luna scrambles through and over to Xenophilius Lovegood, who is chained to the wall and bleeding slightly.

Harry narrows his eyes, but then realize Luna’s dad is bleeding because the bullet is embedded in his shoulder. Harry sighs again. If he ever works magic with Muggle bullets, he’ll remember how overenthusiastic they are.

“Daddy,” Luna sighs, and holds Xenophilius tighter.

Harry tries to ask the chains to let go, but they’re stubborn and argue that they wouldn’t be doing their job if they did that. So Harry uses fire to melt the ends where they join the wall, and then Xenophilius can move and the chains are happy because they’re still clasped around his wrists and ankles. Harry does cast a Levitation Charm so that he and Luna can float her dad along. The chains will make walking difficult.

“How did you find me, my dear?” Xenophilius asks Luna. She beams and starts to tell him about the bullet magic.

But Harry is a bit distracted, because he can feel power swelling on the floor above. It might be the humans doing a goblin New Year ritual, but the chances are pretty low. It’s much more likely that the cowardly Death Eaters summoned Voldemort.

“Luna,” he asks, “can you take over the Levitation Charm and get your dad outside the wards so you can Apparate?”

Luna frowns. “Are you thinking of staying here to talk to things, Harry? I must say, I don’t think there are many spiders here. The house-elves seem to have cleared them away.”

“I’m staying here to fight Voldemort,” Harry says.

Xenophilius peers at him. “What an unusual young man. How long did you say you had known him, Luna, my love? And how much does he usually try to fight Dark Lords?”

“He’s a goblin warrior, Daddy. His battles are his own to choose,” Luna says patiently.

Xenophilius starts and looks a little embarrassed. “So they are. Forgive me, young goblin. I didn’t mean to insult you.”

Harry smiles at him. “It’s okay. But I think you need to leave now, and I need to go fight Voldemort.”

“Right you are,” says Xenophilius, and he starts giving Luna some directions that will probably make it easier for her to Levitate him. Harry accompanies them as far as the stairs out of the dungeons, and casts a spell that will hopefully get rid of any traps on the steps. Then he turns and begins moving towards the far end of the dungeons. The feeling of Voldemort’s Dark aura is strongest there.

And he needs to see if there are any other prisoners to free down here.

Was Valiant

There are no other prisoners in the dungeon, which both relieves and disappoints Harry. On the one hand, no distractions; on the other, it means that he was too late for people who have probably become Potions ingredients.

There’s another set of stairs at the far end of the dungeons, and Harry walks up them, smiling fit to break his face, despite the probable fate of the other prisoners. Voldemort is here, and not running like a coward. Harry can finally do something about him.

Voldemort stands at the top of the stairs, in a room that might be a ballroom. Harry looks around hopefully, but Nagini is nowhere in sight. He sighs. There goes his chance of trying to kill her. Sirius said “fire of the fiend” is a wizard spell called Fiendfyre, and Harry could probably learn to cast it.

He did look ill when he said that, but Harry has done a lot of ill things in this war. He will probably have to do some more.

“Potter,” says Voldemort, and his face is enraged. “You have cost me servants.”

“And Potions ingredients,” Harry thinks he has to point out.

Voldemort goes still, staring at him with fiery red eyes. Harry wonders idly if those eyes, so different in color from any other human’s he’s ever seen, help or hinder Voldemort in seeing. But he doesn’t think Voldemort would want to answer such a question, so he doesn’t ask.

“You have freed the prisoners from my dungeon,” Voldemort whispers.

“There was just the one down there. If you think there should have been more, don’t look at me.”

Voldemort spits something in Parseltongue and casts a curse at Harry. Harry catches it on his daggers and sends it into the floor, since he doesn’t know what it would do to the walls and the floor seems sturdier. He winces when he hears a wail and sees the floor simply vanishing, some parts of its voice silenced forever.

“Why do you have a shield, little boy?” Voldemort hisses at him, beginning to prowl in a slow circle around the ballroom. “Do you think it will be of use against me and the curses that I can hurl at you?”

“Well, yeah, obviously. Why else would I have brought it?”

Voldemort screams and hurls another curse. Harry catches this one on the shield, and one of the runes hisses and melts. But that’s better than the floor. The shield was created for jobs like this, and it accepts the sacrifice. Harry makes a mental note to absorb everything he can with the shield from now on.

“Why are you not casting at me? Are you such a goblin that you have no need of a wand?”

“That’s nice of you to say,” Harry murmurs, flattered. “But no, I have a wand. I just haven’t needed it yet.”

And when Voldemort starts to swirl his wand and make long streaks of blue appear in the air, trailing the motion and creating some nonverbal effect, Harry casts his first spell. It’s one that will snap Voldemort’s hamstrings. He learned it from an interesting book he found in the library last year.

Voldemort shrieks, but manages to tap his wand against his heel and stop the damage. He does limp a little as he stares at Harry. And in his eyes there’s something like fear, which wasn’t there at the beginning of the duel.

Harry beams at him. Voldemort isn’t a coward, to face a fully-trained goblin warrior. And he isn’t running away even now. Honestly, even with all the terrible things Voldemort has done, Harry respects him more as an enemy than someone like Bartemius Crouch.

Of course, that isn’t going to stop Harry from killing him.

And the lore-singer’s vision comes back to him. Harry doesn’t have a cadre of goblins here to sing unicorn-made armor to death, and Voldemort’s body is different than armor, anyway. But Harry can try a few experiments and see if they work.

Voldemort sends some more curses. Harry catches them all on the shield, which grows hot against his arm. Harry strokes the back of it, hearing its valiant song softly dimming, and knows that only a few more curses will break it.

But he’s had the chance to think, and come up with the first spell that he wants to use for his experiment.

“Falenifarrik,” he murmurs, a goblin word, but he pictures a wizard spell-effect as he jabs his wand and his daggers forwards at the same time.

The spell flies straight and true and breaks the humerus in Voldemort’s wand-arm. It snaps with a clean sound, but Voldemort doesn’t scream. Instead, he grins, a rictus that makes it seem as if he constructed his head out of a skull.

“You will not win so easily, Harry Potter,” he whispers.

Harry nods calmly. That suggests something to him. Offensive spells like the Bone-Breaking Curse won’t work well, if at all, on Voldemort’s body, made of sacrificed unicorns’ tainted purity and innocence. They might even strengthen him—or just give him time to recover, the way Voldemort is now, healing the bone negligently. Offensive spells’ affinity is war, and the unicorns were casualties of war.

What is needed is innocence and purity, the very things that Voldemort sacrificed.

Harry lays down his shield. He lays down his daggers, even though it costs him a pang to do it, and Stargazer buzzes angrily at him. He stands before Voldemort with his arms spread, his body undefended.

“What are you doing?” Voldemort snarls at him. He doesn’t strike, for some reason. Harry thought he would. He stares at Harry and spins his wand around and around. Harry listens to the wand’s smug song and wonders why any wand would want to serve a wanker like Voldemort. Even the Elder Wand, with its endless bragging, wasn’t as bad.

“Trying something,” Harry says, and starts walking towards Voldemort.

Voldemort retreats a step before he forces himself to stand still—visibly forces himself. He snarls at Harry again.

“You already tried that,” Harry points out. “And I know people with a lot scarier growls than yours.” He keeps walking.

“Stand away!” Voldemort aims his wand at Harry.

“You could make me,” Harry says quietly. “Why aren’t you making me?” He comes to a stop for a second, but only to prepare himself, and then he slides swiftly across the floor to Voldemort, reaching out a hand to touch his wand arm.

The bone that Harry broke a few minutes ago is healed, but that doesn’t matter. The minute Harry’s harmless, wide-open hand touches Voldemort’s skin, it begins to sizzle and burn. Blackness courses up his arm that reminds Harry of the black veins that spread through a Horcrux when he uses the basilisk-fang dagger.

Voldemort screams in agony. Mingled with the sound, Harry hears the distant belling of a unicorn.

And then Voldemort’s wand arm falls off.

Harry blinks. Well, he didn’t anticipate that.

He makes a grab for the yew wand, thinking he might be able to rehabilitate it, but it Levitates into the air and settles into Voldemort’s left hand. Voldemort, of course, isn’t bleeding from the wound, because his body isn’t that human and Harry isn’t that lucky. He just screams, and snarls, and then turns and runs from the room.

Harry runs right after him. No need to put off until tomorrow the body-melting you can do today.

But Voldemort must know a secret staircase out of this place, wherever they are. He’s vanished, and when Harry asks the walls, they don’t want to tell him. They’ve heard about what happened to the floor in the ballroom.

Harry apologizes, and goes back to retrieve his shield and daggers with a heavy heart. Well, he tried. He’s going to make sure that he faces Voldemort in the future, of course, but it would be nice if he could be sure that the loss of his wand arm was permanent, and Voldemort won’t just replace it by sacrificing more unicorns.

Well, it’s not like the supply of unicorns is infinite. Harry will just get people to cooperate more in protecting them.

Of Adamant

Sirius comes around the corner and stops, blinking. “Um, Harry,” he says at last. “Why are there so many unicorns in this corridor?”

The unicorns in the corridor snort and back frantically away from Sirius. Of course, they don’t like human men that much, and especially non-virgins. Harry’s not sure if Sirius was a virgin before he went to Azkaban, but he’s sure that Sirius’s slept with some people since then, so it makes sense that the unicorns don’t like it.

Harry happens to be a virgin, but much better, he’s a goblin, so the unicorns don’t mind him.

“Harry? You haven’t answered my question.”

Harry bends down next to a small foal so new that his horn still droops, and strokes his side for a second so he stops trembling. Then he answers Sirius. “I talked to Hagrid about protecting the unicorns in the Forbidden Forest, but he said he couldn’t guarantee that he could keep them safe. He’s just one person, after all. So I asked them if they wanted to come to the Realm of Song for a little while, and here they are.”

The unicorns won’t stay in the Realm of Song forever, of course. They can’t live without sunlight and fresh air, and the glow off lakes of molten gold and the breezes coaxed to blow through the cavern by speaking with the air just aren’t the same. But they can live here for a little while until Voldemort is defeated, and they can have plenty of fodder. Gold and silver buy a lot of things like wildflowers and clover that unicorns like to eat, it turns out.

The unicorn foal nudges Harry and demands that Harry keep stroking his shoulder. Harry laughs and does it. The foal’s language is full of hoof-taps and tail-turns and ear-flicks and eye-rolls. He’s going to be a handful when he grows up, Harry thinks.

“Yes,” Sirius says, peering at Harry over the shoulder of a mare who lowers her horn at his godfather, “but this isn’t the Realm of Song. This is the bank.”

“Yes, but now we’re going to the Realm of Song,” Harry says. “And you could transform into your dog shape so you stop scaring them.”

“But…a dog would still scare them, right?”

“Less than a human.”

Sirius sighs and transforms. The mare lifts her horn again, snorts, and taps her hoof against the floor. Sirius stares at her blankly.

“He’s an Animagus, he doesn’t understand regular dog-language,” Harry tells the unicorn, shaking his head. Unicorns can understand Gobbledegook, for all that they can only reply in their own tongue.

The mare gives Sirius a look of astonished pity, and then turns and rejoins the herd. Harry begins leading them down the sloping corridor and further into the bank, smiling as he imagines the meadow of white diamond grasses that Toothsplitter and some of the others have been preparing next to a lake of true water.

The unicorns will only stay here until Voldemort stops hunting them to sacrifice them, but Harry intends for them to enjoy their stay.