lomonaaeren

Chapter Nine.

Title: A Black Stone in a Glass Box (10/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco, Ron/Hermione, Blaise/Astoria
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Weird magic, DH-compliant in most ways but ignores epilogue, some angst, OC character death.
Summary: Harry has made a sacrifice to protect the wizarding world. And Draco Malfoy is going to find a way to reverse it if it kills him. After all, if he doesn’t reverse it, then he’ll only die of boredom anyway.
Author’s Notes: This is based on the fairy tale of Koschei the Deathless, which is where the familiarity in the plot will probably come from. It’s going to be an action/adventure and humor story more than a romance, mostly in Draco’s POV, and although the first chapter is fairly dark, the rest are definitely lighter

Chapter One.

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Ten—The Blue Eagle

Draco came out of the Apparition in a stunning place. Well, he assumed that Potter did so as well, but he was probably at least a little more used to it.

They stood on the edge of an immense mountain, towering and jagged. Draco could see the scars of the cliff face falling away beneath him, and the snow that had gathered here and there on ledges. No snow was drifting around them at the moment, though. Besides the view, which looked out on glittering wastes of stone, the stunning thing was the blue sky above them, hard as a hammer blow.

Draco stared in several directions, and saw more mountains. No, wait a minute, far below there was a glimpse of green. He had no idea where they were. He had seen some magnificent mountain ranges in his travels, but he hadn’t seen all of them, and for all he knew, some of this landscape could be an illusion, the way the marble palace holding the dog had been.

No, not illusion. Part of the spell.

Draco vowed privately to bother Potter more about the chain ritual and the book it had come out of when he could, later, after the destruction of the ritual’s components was complete and Potter was responding like a normal human being. It must have been immensely powerful to create all this. Potter's magic had probably played a part in it, too, but the instructions that could do this…Draco wanted to see them.

“Aren’t you going to do something?”

Draco blinked and looked at Potter. Potter stood with his arms folded and his lower lip clamped between very white teeth, looking as though he wanted Draco to speak so he could know what his private opinion on this mountain range was. Draco raised his eyebrows a little and looked more closely at the mountains.

“That would depend entirely on what is coming to attack me,” he told Potter. “If it’s a goat, or something else that can leap and survive on these cliffs, then I reckon I’ll have to find some secure footing before I can attack it.”

“You talk about it so casually,” Potter said in a low voice. “Like they’re not living animals, they’re just parts of a ritual to you.”

Draco stared at him for a little while. Then he cleared his throat and said, “Potter, they are just parts of a ritual. I didn’t see you mourning before, when I destroyed the horse and the bird and the dog.”

“I didn’t have enough emotion to do it then,” Potter admitted grudgingly. “I reckon you can be proud of that, that you’ve changed me enough to feel sorry you have to destroy them.”

“Well, resent yourself for being stupid enough to bring them to life in the first place,” Draco said, and tilted his head back to scan the skies. He saw no sign of a four-legged animal, which left the sky as a logical place for his enemy to live. “If you hadn’t done that ritual, and done one that would destroy all your self-preservation and ability to keep quiet—”

He cut himself off with a sharp cry, and dropped flat to the stone. The bird above him had drifted so quietly closer that Draco hadn’t heard a thing, and now it was cutting towards him, talons spread wide to strike. It might have taken out his eyes if Draco hadn’t turned his head in the right way just at that moment.

The strike failed, and Draco heard the bird scream in frustration above him as it banked. He rolled over to stare at it. It must have other tactics, he thought. The enemies got harder as he went along, and this was attacking too much like the golden bird at the moment.

It was certainly different in appearance. It looked like an ordinary eagle, at least a little, but Draco could see the deep, satiny blue of the feathers, and the glowing eyes, a combination of cobalt and cerulean. It craned its head around and screamed at him again, the fine azure feathers on its neck mantling. Black marked the edges of its feathers, splashes like ink that made Draco want to take a picture.

Of course, finding his enemy beautiful didn’t mean that he wasn’t going to fight as hard as he could to free Potter’s heart. It just meant he got more aesthetic enjoyment than he had thought he would out of doing so.

He raised his wand, and cast a bubble net, a chained series of silver links that were joined at the weak points with tiny, bright spheres. The eagle shrieked and came around again, chopping towards the net with a confidence that told Draco it expected nothing less than a net of adamant to be capable of holding it.

And maybe that would even have been true. But this particular spell was one that Draco had learned from a drunken spellcrafter who he’d supported for a while in Rome, and Draco was forming a theory about the magic that the animals could break through and resist—namely, that it had to be magic Potter was familiar with.

Time to find out, Draco thought, as he spread the net out in front of the diving raptor.

The eagle slammed into it and immediately screamed, its wings fanning out as it tried to rise again. The links tangled around its talons, though, and the spheres floated the entire net into the air, dropping it down and folding it in. The eagle was crying out in a minute from the inside of a dense cage, and its wings cleaved the air and its beak opened and shut and its eyes were wild enough to break the heart.

Draco bowed his head in its direction, and turned to face Potter. “Do you still doubt that I can destroy this bird without the silver horsehair?”

Potter put his hand over his mouth. Draco knew that motion, would have known it anywhere, although until this moment he hadn’t realized he could remember it from Hogwarts. It was meant to conceal a smile.

He whipped around, and realized that the eagle was rising in spite of his spell, carrying all the massive weight of the net on its back, between its wings. The net swayed and clashed and jangled, and it wouldn’t fly very fast, but up here, it just needed to go high, not fast. Draco would have wanted to experiment with the wind currents here, the way he had in the Pyrenees, before using the Hermes Charm.

Draco jumped up anyway, casting the charm on his ankles alone. So he wouldn’t do any mountain-skimming, he would just fly up and after the eagle until he—

The eagle turned its head and fixed him with one stunning eye. In response, a wind whirled out of the sky and pinned Draco to the ledge he had first appeared on with Potter.

Draco gasped and twisted, trying to get his feet under him. But the tiny wings beating on his ankles distorted his sense of balance, and spread his legs out when he tried to stand, and in general were a nuisance and a half. Draco tossed his hair out of his eyes and stared upwards again. The eagle and the net were already almost out of sight.

“That’s the part you would need the horsehair for,” Potter said mildly. “And even then, you would have trouble catching up and fastening the hair where it needs to go.” He patted the pocket he’d put the horsehair into.

Fastening, Draco thought. Thank you for telling me, Potter. He nodded a little. “Well, I suppose I’ll have to make do without it,” he said, and took the horsehair from his own pouch on his belt again.

Potter gaped at him in a most gratifying way. Then he said, “What are you thinking, Malfoy?” He looked back at his own pocket, and took out the shimmering length Draco had given him earlier. “Do you think you’re going to fool it with an imitation?”

Draco shrugged. “Why not?” he asked, enjoying the way Potter’s eyes kept straying back to the hair he held as if it were going to suddenly Transfigure itself. “I managed to fool you.”

Maybe he shouldn’t have said it, but it felt so good, and the setup was so perfect. And the way Potter gaped at him, his hand falling open and the fake hair that Draco had imbued with glamours tumbling towards the ground, was so perfect that Draco knew he would visit it again and again in his dreams.

For now, he winked and sprang up, after the eagle, again, casting a Tracking Charm that would orient him to the silver spheres on the net.

He heard Potter’s warning roar behind him, knew that he was aiming for his back, and that he would use the Hermes Charm. He had lost the chance for Potter’s non-interference when he revealed that he had traded Potter a fake horsehair. Draco closed his fist tight on the real hair and turned to look back.

Potter had conjured wings on his ankles and also on his wrists, more daring than Draco would have dared to be in the circumstances. His jaw was set, his eyes filled with fire.

Draco smiled at him, and called a wind like the one the eagle had used on him. He couldn’t have used this tactic in the desert, where there was no obstacle to pin Potter against, but it worked perfectly well here.

Potter spluttered as he was slammed against the rock behind him. Draco wove the wind charm with careful little passes of his wand, so that Potter would be safe but not able to get out against the almost-strangling pressure put on him, and then turned gracefully for the sky.

The tracking charm called to him, constantly crooning in his ear, and becoming louder and clearer the higher he got, until Draco cast Finite at it because the high-pitched sound was driving him mad. Besides, he could see the eagle now, no longer invisible against the sky it almost matched in color. The merry jingling of the silver spheres on the net it tugged along sang to him, urging him on.

The eagle craned its neck towards him and screamed in fury. Within seconds it was flying away again, higher and higher. Draco accelerated. He had no idea why it wasn’t using its wind magic to stop him, but he wanted to get as close as he could before it did.

Then a blast came and caught him.

Draco pulled his legs in close to his body as the wind spun and mauled him, trying to tug his hair off his head, it seemed like, and yanking at the hand he’d clasped around the silver horsehair. He rotated wildly in place, and tears flew away from his eyes like long streamers of salt water, and he was gasping, and his throat hurt, and it felt as if he might collapse to the ground and expire any second.

But his lips formed themselves into a grin, despite all the pressure of the air on his face that seemed like it was meant to keep his mouth still.

He was born for moments like this, when he was at the opposite end of the scale from bored.

He tucked in his arms and folded up in a fetal position. The magic of the Hermes Charm reacted, and he dropped like an eagle himself towards the distant peaks of the mountains. He heard the bird shriek above him, in what sounded like honest exasperation.

Draco pulled up and spread all four limbs the moment he was out of the current of wind the eagle had used. Then he soared up again, and this time stretched out parallel, for the insane burst of speed that he had used in racing away from Potter in the desert.

He rose, and rose, and rose, and was next to the eagle before it had worked more than one talon free from the clinging silver net. It screamed again, and Draco swung out with the silver horsehair, not releasing it but making the broadest gesture he could with it, trusting that it would know what to do.

The horsehair shivered and expanded, the loop spreading out until it encompassed most of the sky. Draco thought it would miss the eagle for a minute—how could it catch the bird, when it was so big?—but then the hair swirled, and the loop settled on the eagle’s neck and began to shrink.

The eagle tossed its head and brought its beak down on the horsehair. Draco tensed, then relaxed as he realized that the eagle was powerless to sever the thing. Of course it was; by the rules of the ritual, it couldn’t break free of the one thing that could conquer it.

But the eagle didn’t break apart, either, the way the horse had done when Draco bridled it. Instead, it tipped its head back and spread its feet wide, finally cracking Draco’s silver net down the middle and shedding it. The silver spheres clacked mournfully together as it fell towards the earth.

And Draco found himself connected by only the silver rope to the eagle, which opened its beak as wide as it could and then flew away faster than he had known anything could fly. Draco barely had time to wrap the rope around his wrists and hang on.

He was towed, he was shaken, he was flapping like another wing, and meanwhile the eagle soared up and up, into air higher than Draco had ever attained in Quidditch, while his ears popped and his lungs roared.

When Draco could get enough of the thin height to take a breath, he exploded into a whoop of joyous laughter.

The eagle jerked as though Draco had just jabbed a pin into its arse, and then screamed loud enough to make Draco’s ears pop again. It turned around, beak sawing one more time at the horsehair. As Draco had suspected, this made not a whit of difference. He was using the chain ritual’s own rules against it now, and it felt better than he could ever have thought it would.

The eagle hung one more moment in midair, like an enormous hummingbird, its wings loud enough to rival the scream.

Then it dived down the length of the hair like a misguided kite coming down its string, straight at Draco’s face.

Draco shouldn’t have dared to take a hand away from the rope in order to grab his wand, but he had dared many other less rational things in his life, and he thought grabbing his wand when a giant bird that wanted to kill him was coming at his eyes was supremely rational. He coiled his body to the side to avoid the rush of wind the eagle flung ahead of it, and jammed the wand out.

The eagle’s breast feathers collided with it, and immediately the eagle brought its talons up, trying to clench them into the delicate skin around Draco’s wrist and take the wand. Or maybe break the wand. Draco didn’t know what was going through the brains of magical eagles made from a ritual.

Draco hissed out a spell that his mother would have been horrified to realize he knew, an instant before the eagle’s claws broke skin.

The spell struck into the eagle’s breast, between the feathers, and split it in half, from chest to tail. The bloody chunks of the bird wavered for a long second, almost upright, almost still joined by a strip of skin. Draco blinked, and they faded, wavered, were gone, disappearing just the way the crushed dog’s body under the stone from the ceiling had. All that was left was a pure blue scrap of satin cloth, fluttering on the wind before the wind whipped it away, and it faded into the sky it was the color of.

And something else, something small, plummeting towards the mountains far below. The tip of the eagle’s beak.

Well, and there was also the matter of the silver rope that connected to nothing now, and the way Draco was falling. The wings on his ankles took care of that before long, though, and turned his fall into a dive. He kept his eyes wide open, locked on the falling tip of eagle beak.

Something else sped away from the mountains to intercept it.

Potter.

Draco stared, and then nodded. Of course. He had wondered why Potter hadn’t shown up before to interfere in the battle. He must have decided Draco would best his latest champion and that the best course he could take was—

To do exactly what he did, which was to scoop the falling bit of eagle beak out of the air and hold it up for Draco to see, panting. The wings on his wrists and ankles supported him, fanning wildly, as he stared up at Draco with his eyes blazing. Draco couldn’t breathe, and not because of the height he hung at or the speed he was traveling. He had never seen anything so beautiful as that fire.

Then Potter Apparated.

And Draco had no idea where he had gone.