[From Litha to Lammas]: Flammifer, gen, 3/7, Realm of Song series

[lomonaaeren]

“Harry! I have good news!”

Harry looks up and smiles as Ginny bounces into the train compartment he’s sharing with Luna. Well, was sharing with Luna. She’s gone to ask a few other students in Ravenclaw about some spells they know that involve spidersilk. “What is it?” He notices that Ginny looks happy and hopeful, and that doesn’t always happen when she’s spent time with her family.

Ginny flings herself onto the opposite seat and smiles at him. “Mum told me that if I don’t have a boyfriend and don’t want to date anyone until I’m out of Hogwarts, then that’s okay with her.”

Harry smiles more broadly. “That’s great. Do you know why she changed her mind?”

Ginny shrugs. “She asked me near the start of the hols what I planned to do after Hogwarts. I told her that I wanted to keep training as a warrior and I was going to see if I could go abroad and find a goblin clan who wanted to adopt me, if your clan didn’t.”

Harry nods. His clan has, in fact, considered adopting someone who has the heart and soul of a goblin warrior so clearly contained in a human body, but they won’t do it until Ginny’s seventeen. Draco could only swear to Harry last year because he was already of age. Toothsplitter and the rest don’t want to deal with the adult Weasleys, and Harry can’t blame them. “What did she say?”

“She got all quiet. Then she asked if I would ever visit. I told her I would visit as often as Charlie does.”

Harry grins. Charlie, Ginny’s brother who studies dragons, is pretty cool, but Harry also knows that he spends almost all his time in Romania and almost no time at home. “So she wasn’t happy about that.”

“No.” Ginny beams at him and swings her legs. “I think she could tell she was losing me, and she was willing to promise whatever I needed so I wouldn’t leave her and Dad behind.”

“And now that she’s accepted you?”

“I’ll probably visit as often as Bill does.”

Harry grins again and reaches out to shake her hand. “And if you get adopted by my clan and spend a lot of time at our territory in Diagon Alley, then you can see your mum just as much as you want.”

*

It probably costs him some effort to do it, but Dumbledore summons Harry to his office a few days after the term begins. Harry attends. He’s still willing to share information with Dumbledore and keep a sort of eye on him, although he’s no longer Blackeye’s patient and that means Harry won’t owl her about him.

It’s such a waste, in Harry’s opinion.

“I wanted to ask,” Dumbledore says, direct and sharp, after Harry has come into the office and taken a seat on the chair in front of the desk, “whether you have found out any more information about Horcruxes.”

Harry nods in appreciation of the Headmaster’s tone. He hasn’t forgotten Dumbledore’s indifference to Luna’s suffering last term or the way that Dumbledore was willing to act against goblins in general because he was frustrated with Harry. But at least now he’s treating Harry the way he would other goblins. “Yes. The snake is the last Horcrux. And she can’t be destroyed by basilisk venom the way the others were. It’ll need Fiendfyre.”

Dumbledore’s eyes widen. Then he says, “That spell is very difficult to control.”

“Yes, sir. I’ve been studying it, but it’s so hard to control that I can’t cast it yet. Sirius has offered to cast it for me. Or maybe someone else can.” Some other goblins have tried, but mostly goblins don’t have the experience with wands or wizard magic that Harry does. And he has enough claims on vengeance against Voldemort that his people would want to leave it up to him, anyway.

“Please,” Dumbledore begins, and then stops. He watches Harry in the silence that is broken only by Fawkes’s soft crooning and the desk’s grumbling and the fire’s crackling. Then he begins again. “Please don’t cast it, Harry. It’s too Dark for you.”

“Do you mean too powerful?”

“No, I mean too Dark. It’s Dark Arts, not the kind of spell a young boy should be allowed to cast.”

Harry sighs. And here they were doing so well. “If you’re worried about the effects a Dark Arts spell might have on a human, please don’t bother, Headmaster. You should remember that I’m a goblin.”

“But you said it was too powerful for you to cast.”

“Yes, right now. So I’ll go on practicing it, and not cast it on Nagini until I think I’m ready.”

Dumbledore closes his eyes. “Would you allow me to cast it for you?”

“Well, if you wanted to,” Harry says dubiously. He’s mostly dubious that Dumbledore would keep his promise. He would probably find some other way to get out of casting a spell he thinks is Dark, and then Nagini would still be alive, which means Voldemort would still be alive, which means Harry would be annoyed enough to complain to Blackeye.

Maybe I can present it that way to him, so he knows what he’s risking if he does it.

“Yes,” Dumbledore says. “I want to. The human concept of honor and the goblin concept of honor are not the same.”

“Well, no,” Harry says. “I thought you knew that years ago, though.”

For a long moment, Dumbledore’s jaw ticks. Then he forces out, “What you might consider it honorable to do in battle and what I would consider it honorable to do are not the same.”

“Yes? I also thought you knew that.”

For a second, Dumbledore’s hand tightens on the edge of the desk as if he’s going to rip it off, which just makes the desk complain more. Harry eyes it and decides he ought to find a place for it with someone who appreciates it more. “The kinds of spells I consider Dark are not the kinds of spells you do.”

“Which is why you’re offering to help with the Fiendfyre. Yes, I do get it. I’m not stupid, you know,” Harry adds reproachfully, when Dumbledore glares at him.

Dumbledore closes his eyes and sits back in his seat as if exhausted. “Please go away, Harry.”

“All right. Are you going to cast the Fiendfyre?”

“Yes, if I cannot find another way to kill her.”

That’s exactly what Harry was afraid of. “There is no other way to kill her. The people I learned this from were sure about that. Voldemort has put some kind of protection on her so the basilisk venom doesn’t work.” Harry supposes he should have known that would happen, after Voldemort seeing Harry’s dagger at work in the graveyard.

“Who told you that?”

“The denizens of the Inner Halls.”

“The what?”

“There are Inner Halls inside the Realm of Song,” Harry explains. Dumbledore is watching him in silence, so Harry continues. “You can reach them by walking a certain path and wanting to ask them questions badly enough. They’ll try to keep you there long enough to make you too weak to walk back, and then they’ll eat you. They almost ate me, but I escaped. And they were sure that Nagini could only be killed with Fiendfyre.”

Dumbledore raps his fingers slowly on the desk. The desk wails. Harry opens his mouth to tell Dumbledore not to abuse it, but Dumbledore stops, and then says, “Would I be able to ask these denizens of the Inner Halls some questions myself?”

Harry blinks. “I don’t think so. You’re not a goblin.”

“If I submitted a petition?”

“I mean, if you submitted a petition to my clan, they might let you come into the Realm of Song,” Harry says. He’s sure that Blackeye would like to see Dumbledore again and perhaps fix a few of his accumulating problems. “But the petition to the denizens of the Inner Halls is to walk that road.”

“Hmmm.”

Harry waits, but Dumbledore says nothing else. Harry shrugs, nods, and takes the moving staircase again.

He would like to trust Dumbledore to cast Fiendfyre, but he unfortunately can’t. So Harry will continue practicing it, and hope that eventually, someone will get into the same room with Nagini and be able to cast it.

Upon an Emerald

“Will you be a proctor for the Goblin Dueling NEWT exam?”

Harry blinks and sets down the teacup he was cradling. Griselda Marchbanks came to the school and then asked him to come visit her. Harry didn’t think she would do that. He’s made his opinion of her cowardice clear in the past when she wouldn’t help them get the Goblin Dueling class made a NEWT at all, so this is surprising.

He studies her in silence for a long moment. Madam Marchbanks looks back, sternly. They’re meeting in Professor Sinistra’s office. Apparently she doesn’t need it right now and Madam Marchbanks thought this conversation should be private.

“I’ve been a professor teaching it, though,” Harry says. “I didn’t think professors were usually allowed to serve as proctors.” If they had been, he thinks, there would probably have been no NEWT Potions students at all while Snape was teaching.

“In this case, frankly, Mr. Potter, we don’t have many other choices.”

“You haven’t reached out to my clan to ask, though. I would have heard about that.”

Madam Marchbanks takes a deep breath, but doesn’t close her eyes or remove them from Harry’s, which makes him give her marks for courage. “Frankly, Mr. Potter, you are the only choice palatable to the Ministry.”

“Oh, because I’m human in body. Right.” Harry decides that he should have foreseen this. “Well, if you think that I can mark the NEWT impartially, then I can do that.”

“We do have people who can mark the written portion. It’s the practical portion that would give us trouble.”

“Do you have any objection to the practical portion of the exam being held in the Room of Requirement?”

“The what?” Madam Marchbanks seems to be struggling to recall a memory. Then again, she is over a hundred and fifty years old, from what Harry remembers, and for a human, that’s quite an age.

“It’s a room on the seventh floor that can change into whatever you require of it. It would be easy to create a good dueling platform there and some of the obstacles that I think my students can handle but wouldn’t be too used to.”

“If we can do this indoors within Hogwarts and not somewhere outside, that would be preferable.”

Madam Marchbanks sounds vastly relieved. Harry wonders for a second what she thought would happen otherwise, and then decides that he can just ask. “What did you think would happen if we went outside?”

“We thought—an obstacle course, like the one that was being set up for the Third Task—”

Harry grins. “You thought I would interfere again.”

“You did interfere that year, Mr. Potter.”

“Yes, but I was trying to destroy the Tournament. I don’t have any motivation for trying to destroy the NEWT exams.” Harry eyes her. “Unless you know of one I should know about? Something that makes them unacceptable to goblins?”

“No,” Madam Marchbanks says at once, looking ill. “I promise you that we aren’t mistreating objects or the like, which I understand was part of your motivation for interfering in the Tournament.”

Harry shrugs and nods. As long as a Goblet of Fire doesn’t show up during the NEWT exams, then he won’t have any reason to try and cancel them.

And if one does, then he retains full rights to intervene.

*

“I don’t understand. Why do you want us to break a stone? I thought that wasn’t the kind of care for objects that goblins were about.”

Hermione’s voice is soft as she stares at the emerald on the floor in front of Harry and half his Goblin Dueling class. The ones who are going to take it for an OWL aren’t here. Harry is meeting with them later this week so they can discuss the kinds of skills and information that will be on the exam, but his NEWT students will have the harder challenge.

Harry is asking the walls and floors of the castle to watch over his students and make sure they don’t drive themselves into the ground trying to revise for this exam. He wants them to do well, and lacking food and sleep will make them do worse, not better.

So far, the only real problem is Hermione. She seems to think that if she meditates for ten minutes a day and works on her exam revision the rest of the time, she doesn’t need more than three hours of sleep. Harry explained to her this morning that that’s not true, and she’s been visibly restraining herself during this class.

“This particular emerald wants to be broken,” Harry explains. “It thinks it’s ugly and ungainly the way we found it, and it wants to be shaped and sculpted into a different form.”

Harry actually thinks this particular emerald is perfectly handsome, with a dull green color that reminds him of the fodder his people are giving their unicorn guests. But, well, jewels are vain. If the emerald wants to be carved into a specific faceted shape, while at the same time not wanting a lapidary to concentrate on it, then Harry will do his best to oblige.

“So the challenge is just to break it?” Ginny asks. She’s bouncing slightly on the balls of her feet.

“To break it in the most efficient way,” Harry says. “And facet it. Let me show you what it wants to look like.” He casts a spell that will make light trail after his wand and daggers both, then starts making the sketch in mid-air.

It took a long time to get right. The emerald knows what it wants to look like, but it’s not like it can make its own drawing. So various goblins it told showed it faceted emeralds and made sketches from what it liked and didn’t like, and then Harry memorized the combined sketches from the parchment this morning.

The shape that takes place in the air is made of blue light and red fire, and honestly, probably impossible for even a goblin jeweler to help the emerald to achieve. But that’s where wizard magic comes in handy. Harry can just cast Reparo if a student breaks the emerald in a way it doesn’t want to be broken and restore the raw form. Then they can keep working on getting it to its end goal.

“Who wants to go first?” Harry asks, looking around. “Remember, facets, at least one of them in the way the emerald wants here—” He jabs his wand at the floating light-sketch. “And in the most efficient way.”

“I want to,” Hermione says.

Ginny was opening her mouth to volunteer, but she steps back with a shrug and a grin. “I can wait.”

Harry nods to her in gratitude. Ginny can wait, but Hermione can’t, and it might cause her mild harm if she had to. Harry gestures at the emerald and steps back. “It’s all yours.”

“Do I have to use a certain spell? A blade?” Hermione is almost vibrating as she stares back and forth between the sketch and the emerald.

“Whatever you want,” Harry says. “A facet. The most efficient way.”

Hermione nods slowly. Then she abruptly whips her wand up and casts a silent spell that causes a blade of black light to form in the air. Harry has never seen it before, and watches in curiosity as it sails across the room and sinks into the emerald.

The emerald rocks back and forth while the blade of black light carves at it. Harry counts his heartbeats, eyes fastened on it. He’ll need to compare the count to the ones that other students achieve, and see if Hermione’s choice is really the most efficient one or not.

There’s a small ringing noise, and the emerald splits down the length of a facet. The jewel promptly starts admiring itself, and Harry conjures a mirror near it so that its magnificence will be more visible to other people. He grins at Hermione. “What spell was that? I haven’t seen it before.”

Hermione flushes brightly. “I just—I found a spell in the library to conjure a knife, and I started thinking about what it would take to conjure a goblin blade, and that’s what I came up with.”

“It’s very good,” Harry says. He doesn’t know if she’s saying that she invented a spell, or just modified one, but either way, a warm contentment pulses through him. Yet another human who has seen value in learning from goblins and managed to come up with something new and important. He glances around at the other students. “Who wants to go next?”

Beneath the Moon

Harry wakes up with a start. It takes him a moment to realize what’s wrong. Hogwarts is shouting to him through the floor and his curtains, in the unified voice of the castle. Harry has never heard it like that before. It’s always been individual walls or floors or stones or staircases or the like who spoke to him.

Harry rolls out of bed and grabs his daggers. Michael pops his head through the curtains of his bed and glares at Harry in sleepy protest.

“There’s an attack,” Harry tells him, and starts running. He hears Michael grumble and follow him. Harry hopes that if he decides to join the battle, he’ll concentrate on it and not on thinking about dating Luna.

One of the staircases is already waiting for Harry, pointing the way straight down towards the others that for once have frozen in position instead of trying to move. Harry slides down a banister and leaps off when he gets to the end, somersaulting through the air for a moment before landing on the next banister. He can hear other people waking up and shouting and asking questions and in general behaving inefficiently.

Harry grimaces. He hopes that Ginny can make her way down from Gryffindor Tower soon. She’s the one besides him who comes the closest to being properly trained.

But then again, he has allies who will help him if no humans can.

Harry skids out the front doors, the flagstones themselves providing a rippling concourse that takes him straight onto the grounds, and promptly glances around. Yeah, he can see the subtle glow from deep within the Forbidden Forest.

“Come on!” he calls over his shoulder, hearing the footsteps that are following, and starts running towards the glow.

He hasn’t got all the way there when he hears a wavering howl rising from the Forest. Harry glances up, and yes, the moon is full.

Harry smiles grimly. Well, then. He’ll just have to show the werewolves Voldemort probably recruited that coming to attack an upset castle and its goblin and human defenders is never a good idea.

An enormous splash catches his attention, and Harry turns his head. A wave is curling up from the Black Lake, as faceted as the vain little emerald his Goblin Dueling students were practicing on, and contained within it is the form of the merfolk’s Queen, her hands spread wide.

Harry grins. The goblin and human and merfolk defenders.

He bows to the Queen, and surges towards the Forest, his daggers singing songs of battle in his hands.

*

Harry meets the first werewolf just inside the Forest’s boundary.

There’s not much warning of its coming, at least in terms of noise; it bounds silently, and it’s not panting. But the leaves whisper that they are being walked on in unnatural quiet, and the trees are alert to the presence of a new predator in their Forest, one they haven’t made the ancient treaties with.

The werewolf springs from darkness onto Harry, snarling, paws outstretched, and Harry whirls from beneath the pounce and stabs with both daggers at once. It’s possible that a werewolf in wolf form, who he’s never fought, might be more resistant to the basilisk venom.

But it doesn’t seem to be the case. The wolf screams and crashes into the ground, dying, writhing. Harry can see now that she’s a female wolf, and he feels sorry for a moment for the human woman she is most of the time. But he honors her more as a fallen enemy than he would by letting her get into the castle and bite the students.

Howls rise. More werewolves are crashing towards him. Harry can see at least two pairs of gleaming golden eyes opening up in front of him.

Harry smiles. Battling two at once, who are obviously aiming to flank him, will be interesting.

There’s one moment when the air seems to pause, breathless, between them. Maybe the werewolves are waiting for him to scream or run. Harry raises his blades.

Then it turns out that the werewolves weren’t the only ones waiting. Harry catches a smell of weed and water, and the wave raised by the Queen crashes between the trees. It’s full of merfolk warriors, rising on their tails and jabbing their spears forwards. The werewolves, paddling in sudden awkward doggy-style, are easy targets.

“Harry!”

That’s Ginny. Harry takes off running to her side, as much as he’d like to linger and admire the precision of the mer-warriors’ strikes. He finds Ginny with her back against a tree, facing three werewolves who all have actual drool dripping from their jaws. Harry frowns. He thought that was human exaggeration.

Well, it seems not. Just because Remus was calm and tame during the evening that Harry sang stories to him when they were in his office doesn’t mean enemy werewolves will be. Although they don’t have to drool so much that they soak their own paws. Harry thinks that’s rather bad form.

One of the werewolves, a large black one with a stripe of silver down his spine, takes a long step forwards and crouches. Harry shakes his head. “You won’t distract us from the one creeping up behind us,” he points out.

The werewolf snarls in what seems to be surprise and then rushes forwards, aiming for a shoulder block at him. Harry casts a spell through his daggers that fills the clearing with a burst of light as bright as day. Ginny will be fine. She’s used to fighting blind, in some of the lessons that Harry gave her from before the Goblin Dueling classes even started.

The werewolves either aren’t, or don’t cope well with light suddenly showing up in their darkness. The one rushing Harry yelps, and Harry is almost sure that he’s pawing at his muzzle, lying down on the forest floor.

Harry dashes forwards and whirls, bringing down Stargazer.

He gauged the position exactly, and Stargazer goes through one of the wolf’s eyes and into his brain. Ripclaw would be proud of him, Harry thinks, and turns around in a crouch to meet the one behind him, who’s charging for his back.

This werewolf is a large silver one who’s covered with old scars, and she proves that she’s wilier than the others and there’s a reason she’d survived. She whirls to the side, just outside of dagger-range from Harry, and then darts in and snaps at him before she leaps back to safety.

Harry had a dagger blade in place, though, and her teeth deflected off it. The werewolf growls at him. Harry casts a Stunner at her through his daggers and, while she shakes off the effect, checks on Ginny.

Ginny’s face is pale, but she’s standing over the body of a werewolf with an opened throat. Harry catches her eye and inclines his head in a slow nod, acknowledging her first battle kill and the impact it will have on her.

Ginny smiles back at him shakily. Then her eyes widen, and she points beyond Harry.

Harry knows the werewolf has shaken off his Stunner and is rushing him again. He goes down in the dirt beneath her, her teeth snapping a few inches from his face. But the position means that her belly is vulnerable to his basilisk-fang dagger, which she probably wouldn’t like if she knew.

This is war, though, so Harry doesn’t have to be so honorable as to warn her. His blade goes home, and she howls in agony as she dies.

When Harry stands up from beneath the corpse, he sees flashes of light filling the woods, including Stunners. It seems some of the Hogwarts professors and students have come to their aid. But it worries him that they’re using Stunners when werewolves are so resistant to that kind of magic.

“Are you up to helping the others?” he asks Ginny, who’s still shaking.

“Yeah,” Ginny says, and visibly draws the invisible cloak of warrior strength around herself. Harry claps her on the back and runs with her through the Forest, dodging branches and roots. The trees have decided that every intruder in their Forest is worthy of tripping up, and Harry doesn’t have the time to convince them that there’s a difference between werewolves, goblins, and humans.

He hopes they aren’t causing the merfolk too much trouble.

Harry is in time to find Professor McGonagall standing back-to-back with Professor Sinistra and Professor Flitwick, surrounded by five snarling werewolves. None of them seem to be injured, at least, which means Harry won’t have to deal with hysterics over their loss of humanity. Professor Flitwick has what looks like a whip dangling from his wand and is eyeing the werewolves casually.

“Hey!” Harry shouts, making more than one of the werewolves, focused on their human prey, start. “Over here, you hulking flea-bitten—”

It turns out he doesn’t even need to complete that statement for his enemies to feel insulted. Two of the werewolves spin and run towards him. Another falls to Professor Flitwick’s whip spell, which opens her throat. The other two run at the professors.

Harry will have to hope they can hold. He steps slightly to the side and throws his basilisk-fang dagger at the nearest werewolf. He goes down howling and then dying as the black veins run through his fur.

The other werewolf checks for a moment, but then just turns and springs at Ginny. She takes a deep breath and casts through her daggers, a spell with a blue glow that Harry recognizes as a more powerful form of the Knockback Jinx. The werewolf goes flying and obviously breaks more than one limb.

Harry cheers for her, and turns back to see if the human professors finally used spells powerful enough to take a werewolf down.

He blinks a bit when he realizes that there’s no sign of the werewolves, but Professor McGonagall is staring with grim satisfaction at two small wooden figurines of wolves on the forest floor at her feet.

“I Transfigured them,” she says in response to Harry’s stare. “Interrupt my sleep, will they?”

Harry gives in to his laughter, and then goes running towards other howls, exhilarated. He still has a castle to defend.