Title: The Mage Wars
Author: TardisIsTheOnlyWaytoTravel
Pairings: None at present
Story Summary: A girl claiming to be Harry's sister from another universe turns up on Harry's doorstep. Her tale turns even stranger when she claims that she has been fighting a war for years – and that this war has just travelled to Harry' universe. The Mage Wars are beginning. Fighting Voldemort is going to be even more dangerous than everyone thought…
Setting: Beginning of fifth year.
Author notes:
Yep, it's another weird alternate-universe story.
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THE MAGE WARS
CHAPTER ONE
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The girl was spat out of the stone archway abruptly in the middle of the night. She collapsed on the stone floor in a heap of long tangled limbs. For a moment she looked deathly wrong; hair copper-colored, eyes the color of fresh limes, skin pale and translucent. As she lay there, however, the color trickled back into her, so that when she finally sat up several minutes later it was with hair wine-red and bright eyes that weren't quite the color of emeralds.
She scrambled to her feet, frowning as she took in the similarities and differences in the room.
She glanced back at the archway. The veil fluttered in a non-existent breeze, and for a moment she seemed to hear a whisper before the veil stilled.
"Well, it seems to have worked," she muttered. With a murmur she blended into her surroundings.
A moment later she was gone, on her way out of the Ministry and into the new world.
-
The Bibliotheca Magus is just as she remembers it, grand and imposing and in a Roman style. She climbs the imposing steps determinedly, and crossed the marble floor to the front desk.
"I'd like to review a set of family records, please," she says. "The Ancient House of Potter, all records from 1895-1995."
The librarian frowns at her. She knows she doesn't look very impressive, small and skinny, and dressed in clothing that doesn't pass unnoticed anywhere here.
"I'm afraid only members of the family are allowed access to those records," he says with disdain.
She just raises an eyebrow and flashes the family ring at him, watching his eyes widen. Only a member of the main branch of the Potter clan can wear such a ring unless they want to lose a finger.
"I kinda figured that," she says dryly. "So, the records?"
She's led to a private viewing room where she waits, until he returns with a cluster of other librarians, all of them carrying boxes full of dusty old ledgers and deteriorating pieces of parchment. The boxes are placed in chronological order in front of her, and all the extra librarians leave so that it's just her and the man from the front desk.
"Great," she mutters, looking at all the material she has to sort through.
"Do you need any help, miss?" he asks politely. She glances up.
"No thanks, I'm fine."
He lingers a moment longer, eyeing her clothes; their design had been inspired by both muggle military fatigues and traditional battle robes.
"If you do not mind my mentioning it, miss, your choice of clothing is most… unusual."
"I was in a war," she mutters, without looking up. She's already leafing through the first ledger. "Turned out this is the most efficient piece of clothing for the sort of thing."
"I see. Well, if you need any assistance, miss, there's a bell-pull to your right." He departs.
Things are as she expects, for the most part, going through them all.
Eventually she finds what she's looking for. There's a sudden proliferation of newspaper articles around 1981, and again from 1994 onwards that she finds most enlightening, her eyebrows creeping higher up her face as she reads each one. Mostly full of mistruths and half-truths, if she's any judge of the media, and she ought to be. Finally she shuts the book of clippings and goes searching for marriage and birth certificates. And there it is. It only takes a little more digging, and she's ready to move on. She rings the bell-pull and thanks the librarian.
And she's on her way.
oo 0 oo
Harry lay in the plants under the window, listening closely to the news in hope of getting some inkling of what Voldemort was up to. Not much, apparently, if they were resorting to stories of surfing budgies. It worried him. He knew Voldemort – how he knew, he didn't know, but it didn't matter, he knew – and the fact that he wasn't out causing chaos was a bad thing. It meant he was planning something grandiose and horrifying. Harry sighed. Voldemort was on the loose and here he was, stuck at the Dursleys, without a clue.
-
Harry was startled at the sudden sound of the doorbell. A moment later he heard the door open.
There was a choked gasp.
"Y-you!"
Harry sat up, wondering what could give his aunt such a shock.
"Good morning." It was a girl's voice, polite but firm. "I'm looking for Harry Potter."
"Who are you??"
Harry began to move towards the front of the house.
"My name is Lily Rose Potter. In a manner of speaking, Harry's my brother."
Harry rounded the corner at a run in time to see Aunt Petunia shriek and try and push the girl off her doorstep.
"How dare you!" Aunt Petunia shrieked. "Coming here pretending to –" Her voice cut off abruptly.
The girl sighed and lowered her wand.
"Sorry. But I don't want you yelling all over the place." She turned, seemingly by instinct, to look at Harry.
She was about his age, maybe a bit younger, with dark red hair and eyes just like his. She was short, but pretty skinny, but long legs and arms so that she seemed to be all limbs. She looked remarkably like a young version of his mother.
Her eyes were wide as she stared at him, unconsciously moving closer, just staring.
"Hey."
His shock broke and he whipped out his wand to bring it between her eyes, only she wasn't there any more, and next thing he knew he'd thumped face-first into the ground beneath him, a weight on the small of his back and his wand removed from his grip by small fingers.
"Nice reflexes," she informed him. "But I'm honestly not about to hurt anybody. My name's Lily Rose, I was born in 1981, I'm a Potter, and probably most importantly right now, I'm not from this universe. I came from another one where we've been fighting a war since I was small and it's ended there, so I decided to go elsewhere. I broke into the Department of Mysteries and travelled to this universe through the Whispering Archway. Is that enough detail to begin with so that you can all stop attacking me and we can actually go inside where there's some privacy and talk like reasonable people?"
She moved her foot off his back and he sat up again, wiping dirt and grass off his face. He glanced at Aunt Petunia. She was staring at Lily Rose, her expression torn between anger and a sort of longing.
"Right then," Lily Rose said, not waiting for Aunt Petunia's input, and walked into the house. Harry glanced warily at Aunt Petunia again, who was now staring at Lily Rose's departing back but making no move to follow, and also went inside.
Dudley gaped as Rose walked into the kitchen.
"Wow." Skinny or not, he clearly thought Lily Rose was pretty.
"Hey, Duds," she said as she walked past. "You got any tea in this place?"
Dudley kept gaping for a moment, then came to himself.
"In the cupboard on the left," he said pointing.
"Thanks." She flashed him an amused smile. "You're a useful man."
Harry watched Dudley watch the girl who was possibly his sister from an alternate universe.
"She's a witch, you know," he told Dudley. "And she's been in a war. If you annoyed her she could probably kill you before you could move."
Dudley paled, and looked in Lily Rose's direction, gulping.
"Like Lara Croft?"
"Not really," Lily Rose said over her shoulder. "But I could take you down easily, yeah. No problem."
"Wow." Dudley looked at her admiringly. Harry scowled. Dudley was supposed to be scared, not find her even more interesting.
"Tea," Lily Rose announced, and plonked down two mugs. "You don't look the tea type, Dudley, so I spared you."
"Cool."
She just grinned. Harry's eyes narrowed.
"You knew him in your universe, didn't you?" he asked suspiciously.
She gave him a not-quite-guilty, caught-out grin.
"Yeah," she admitted. "Good patrol leader. We got on okay."
"Who exactly are you and what are you doing here?" Harry directed the conversation back onto its original tracks.
-
Lily Rose gazed into her tea, looking pensive.
"Well, like I said, my name is Lily Rose Potter, after my mother and my grandmother. I was born in 1981, a bit more than a year after my brother, Harry. When I was a month old, my brother and my parents were all killed. I was badly injured and almost died. I've still got the scar," and she traced a long line across her chest and stomach that ended at her abdomen, "right across here. You see, for the last twenty years, everyone in my world had been fighting in the Mage Wars."
She took a deep breath.
"As far as I can tell, you don't have many mages in this universe, mostly just wizards, with the occasional enchanter or sorcerer. It's not like that in my world. A mage has power levels and abilities far beyond your average wizard; I've seen a mage take on fifty wizards with no problem. For most of history, mages have been the upper class of magical society, with other kinds of magical people rallying around them. It was unequal, sure, but it seemed to more or less work. Then, about fifty years before I was born, we got an extraordinarily powerful wizard whose magical power was almost at the same level as a mage's. He was also very intelligent, brilliant even, and highly charismatic, and he wanted to be treated the same as the mages. He pushed for reforms for a decade or so; nothing much happened. By the time he reached his early thirties, he was sick of it. So what he did was he formed an army, full of wizards, sorcerers, enchanters, as well as various fringe groups, and attacked magical society. His name was Tom Riddle."
"Voldemort?" Harry asked sharply.
Lily Rose looked as surprised as he did.
"Voldemort is your Tom Riddle?" she questioned. Harry nodded. "Huh, figures, he's one of those people key events collect around, I guess. Anyway, magical civilisation collapsed, more or less. The mages were torn over what to do. Some of them supported Riddle, others thought he should be killed. Others were in between. What happened was that for the first time in a millennia, the mages were disagreeing. They all formed different factions, which started fighting each other. And that's how the Mage Wars began."
She sipped at her tea.
"So, the wars had been going for twenty years when I was born. My father was a fairly ordinary, middle-to-slightly-higher-than-average-level wizard of an old and respectable family. My mother, as far as anyone knew, was a first-generation witch. What hardly anyone knew, though, was that her great-great-grandfather had been one of the fey, so that as well as having wizarding powers, she had a small number of fey powers as well. I don't know what powers my brother had; he was only a bit over a year old when he was killed. I grew up with several of my father's friends, who had a permanent camp inside the forest near the most fought-over territory, Hogwarts School of Magicraft, but fought in different areas all over Britain. As I got older it became evident that somehow, I had throwback genetics – instead of being a witch with a few fey abilities like my mum had been, I had proper fey blood. A lot of it. Over 70 percent of my genetics are fey, in fact. I was a changeling – a fey child born to human parents. In my world, almost all the fey had bred out, and the rest had taken residence on a plane of reality inaccessible to anyone else, so the fey didn't really have any place in the Mage Wars. If they had, the fey wars would probably have turned out very different, because the simple fact is, a single, average member of the fey is usually more powerful than your strongest mage. So the discovery that they had a fey among them meant that all of a sudden, the side my father's friends fought for could become a major faction in the Mage Wars. You with me so far?"
Harry stared at her. She looked completely serious.
"So, you're saying, the entire magical world was fighting a terrible war, and that since you were fey, you were powerful enough to be an important fighter?"
"Right," Lily Rose agreed. "Only there were two problems. Firstly, I wasn't pureblood fey, I had wizard blood as well, which meant that my power and abilities weren't as strong as a normal fey person. Secondly, and more importantly, I was only a kid, and I wouldn't reach full power or ability until adulthood. So they did their best to train me and keep me hidden until I was old enough to fight. Meanwhile, all the mages have been fighting against each other for the last thirty years or so. By this time, most of them are dead. Unfortunately, the reason they've survived is because they're the either the most powerful magically, or the most skilled. Because there's so few of them, and there's still a lot of the other types of magical peoples about, they've all banded together to form one great big alliance of mages – the Coalition of the Magi."
-
"So, did everyone else form one big group, too?" Dudley asked. Harry sent him a startled look. He hadn't realised that his cousin had been following the conversation.
"Unfortunately, no," Lily Rose said sourly. "They bickered, and quarrelled, with the result that only a few years ago, the Coalition triumphed."
Harry blinked. This didn't make sense.
"But… what, so you came here because they won?"
"Sort of," Lily Rose said. She sighed. "By this time, almost everybody was dead, but for the Coalition and my group, which had done some fighting, but mostly spent its time avoiding the mages. All the plants had been destroyed in the fighting, and most of the animals had been killed. So, no plants, no animals, no people left: how are the Coalition meant to survive?"
An icy feeling crept down Harry's spine as he dimly began to see where this was going.
"They decided to travel to another universe, one where the Mage Wars had never taken place. I'm not sure of the exact technique, but it involved some pretty complex arithmantic equations and several sets of runes, some of them obscure. They left our world not quite a week ago. None of us could duplicate their methods, but there was another way, one that could be performed only by someone with fey magic. So I did it. My intentions were to first find my family in this world so that they could help me work out whom the Coalition would ally with, and who their immediate opposition would most likely be. As it turned out, finding out what had happened to my family in this world was enough give me the answers to my other two questions." Lily Rose looked him in the eyes.
"The fact that I'm here talking to you means that they're probably allying with Voldemort at this moment. The Mage Wars might have ended in my universe, but in this one they're about to begin."