Harry Potter's green eyes were listless as he guided a terrified and shell-shocked Ginny Weasley away from the freshly slain basilisk. The sound of Ginny's sobs, interspersed with choked out apologies, echoed throughout the cavernous Chamber. Leading Ginny along was quite an arduous task for the twelve year old young man. Having a limp female clinging to your left half while carrying a longsword and a ratty old hat in the other hand proved to be a rather difficult venture. After dropping the sword for the third time in as many minutes, Harry, reaching the frayed ends of his sanity, forced the Sorting Hat into Ginny's arms.
"Pull yourself together, Ginny," he reprimanded sharply. "Are you a Gryffindor or not?"
Seeing her shrink away in fear, Harry sighed and regretted his harsh words almost immediately. He recognized even his his tired state that snapping at an eleven year old girl who had been possessed and nearly died is very cruel, Gryffindor or not.
"I'm sorry, Ginny, I didn't mean to shout at you," Harry started in what he hoped was a comforting tone. "This isn't your fault, and it was wrong of me to take my current frustrations out on you. None of this came about through any fault of your own."
"Yes! Yes it did! If I hadn't written in this stupid diary none of this would have happened! I petrified all of those people and almost killed you! I'm going to be expelled and thrown into Azkaban!" she cried out, bursting into a fresh set of tears.
Harry had no idea what in the hell an Azkaban was, but he had a pretty good idea where the guilt for this years' basilisk related misadventures fell.
"Ginny, look at me. This is not your fault. Remember back to this past summer when your dad got into a fight with Lucius Malfoy outside of Flourish & Blotts?" he asked. "I think Malfoy Sr. slipped you the diary when he put your books back into your cauldron."
Seeing the hope light up Ginny's eyes would have been comical if they had currently resided anywhere but next to the corpse of a giant snake. To Harry's dismay, however, that hope disappeared as quickly as it had arrived.
"Malfoy may have given me the diary but I didn't have to write in it! I could have stopped at anytime... ." Her words lost all cohesion and she wrapped herself around Harry in a comfort-seeking hug that would have made her mother proud, her existence once again reduced to frantic tears. Harry awkwardly patted Ginny on the back, trying his hardest to comfort her, but from what he could tell, it was a futile gesture. He settled on the ground with his second skin still clinging to him and so that he could be more comfortable while Ginny, hopefully, cried herself out.
Ginny's sobs had relented to occasional sniffling when a shrill, piercing sound assaulted the childrens' ears. An overwrought Ginny fainted dead away; the noise was the last blade needed to rend away her consciousness. Hesitantly, Harry turned around and nearly fainted at the sight himself.
The basilisk corpse was rapidly shriveling; air was seemingly being forced out of every pore and orifice the giant snake possessed as the King of Serpents hissed its final insult to mankind. The carcass desiccated itself at an incredible pace, collapsing as the flesh dried up and magically rotted awayas the the shrieking noise continued its incursion on Harry's brain. However, as quickly as it started, it had finished, the ancient basilisk reduced to a skeletal form that would give him nightmares for weeks. Looking around with trepidation, he saw yet another sight in this hellish chamber that he would remember forever. The mist that was once the flesh of the basilisk now hung along the walls and ceiling of the chamber, sickly looking and ominous. The unnatural gas began to cyclone around the unconscious girl and her minder, spinning faster and faster and migrating its way towards the center of the chamber.
Harry began to feel magic in the air. The feeling was not unlike what the atmosphere felt like in Lockhart's failed dueling club – all of the spells being thrown around gave the air a humid feeling and it made his skin tingle. The "magic" in the air that night was an insult to what was being discharged by the decomposing basilisk.
The air around the gas began to become charged thanks to the unnatural magic and natural friction and bursts of lightning made themselves known. Caught flat-footed by a phenomenon not likely witnessed in millennia, Harry absurdly had his mind wander to an educational show he caught on the television while the Dursleys were away.
It's like a Pyroclastic flow, except without, you know, a volcano, Harry had mused.
Meanwhile, the gas had picked up even more angular speed, and the lightning was becoming more frequent, and the entire system, Harry noticed, was getting very close. Being a second year, he knew very little about magic beyond, "wave your wand and speak in Latin with intent and desire and stuff happens," but, almost instinctively, he knew that having that vapor touch him or Ginny would have dire consequences.
Ginny had awoken sometime during the maelstrom and was staring at the swirling, infectious looking mists in awe.
The miasma was no more than ten feet from the children, the lightning close enough to brush them, leaving blackened, charred flesh behind. Harry and Ginny curled in on themselves, screaming in pain as the barrage of electricity peppered their bodies. Harry began to think that death was inevitable, and, were he older, he would have been contemplating the irony of being killed by something he had, literally, just killed. He thought of Ron and Hermione. He thought of the first friends he was ever allowed to have. He thought of Hogwarts, the first place he had ever belonged to. He clutched Ginny in a painful embrace as he watched his Death approach.
Right before the blackened scythe dispatched them from the mortal realm, however, Harry began to feel a tugging sensation in his chest, a feeling with which he had already been introduced.
~0~0~0~0~
A week before the students of Hogwarts were to be sent home for their summer holiday, the first years were informed that they were not to do any magic while they were away from school. Harry despised this. No, despise does not do the emotion justice. Harry loathed this. He loathed it so much so that he forgot what Professor McGonagall had told them in his second ever Transfiguration class regarding how easy it was to magically exhaust yourselves at a young age. Harry went over every spell he had learned that year in an effort to imprint them in his mind. Magic was too cool to be forgotten. He refused to forget that which now defined him.
After six transfigurations, he had started to feel something pulling on his insides. Since it was not uncomfortable, however, he continued. After three more spells, he felt something inside him, for lack of a better term, snap, and he fell back on the couch too tired to do anything but sit there. When Hermione found him in the common room an hour later, she rushed to his side. By this point, Harry had realized he had magically exhausted himself and told Hermione not to worry, so of course she went to Madam Pomfrey. After spending the night in the Hospital Wing and enduring two different lectures from the Matron and his Head of House, Harry decided that magical exhaustion was something to avoid, if only to stop two scary old women from shouting at him.
~0~0~0~0~
Mind bleary from the pain, Harry wondered how he was suffering from magical exhaustion at this instance since he had not cast a spell in hours, but the encroaching gas was a much bigger concern at the moment. The tugging reached its crecendo and he felt the dreaded snap. Immediately, a picture on the wall began to glow. The light was so bright that it was able to be seen through the green fog. Right before the sublimated basilisk remains touched the pair, the light-emitting picture pulsed a single time, and the gas drifted to it with amazing alacrity. As soon as the first tendrils of gas touched the picture, it disappeared with another piercing shriek.
Harry could do nothing but stare at the pulsating, illuminated picture with his mouth open. A palpable feeling of curiosity descended upon him. Oblivious to the pain caused by countless electrical burns, Harry hobbled over to the wall of the Chamber, and for what seemed like the hundredth time that night, gaped at the spectacle before him.
He beheld something out of a museum. Carved into the wall of Slytherin's Chamber was a two meter tall carving of... something. Intricately detailed, the carving had the body of a robed man with his torso exposed. In one hand he held an impressive staff whose head, a depiction of the sun, was the source of the light that saved them. In the other hand he held a strange cross symbol that also faintly glowed. The most disquieting part of the statue was the man's head. Resting on his shoulders was the head of a hawk wreathed in an expansive headdress and yet another idealization of the sun.
Harry knew that he had seen this figure before, but his pain addled, exhausted brain could not grasp it.
As soon as he went to turn back to a still unconscious Ginny his eyes caught the glyph's, and his mind was assaulted by image fragments. He saw an expansive desert. An indolently flowing river that was impossibly wide. A crocodile sunning itself in the dust. A black, sky-scratching monument riddled with paintings of a woman-like cat. A squat monument made of bricks. A tan colored obelisk surrounded by towering walls and gardens, images of a hawk-headed man arrayed on every surface.
Harry could not stop staring into the eyes of the carving as the images pounded into his mind. Another squat mastaba blurred by. A dark-skinned man with a strange crown looking into a mirror. The man's face bore a striking resemblance to his own, but before he could focus the stream continued to an impossibly beautiful woman; her blonde hair cascading down her back and her pale skin an exotic contrast to the dearth of dark skin surrounding her. More images. An unfinished monument made of stone surrounded by scurrying masons and carpenters. And so it continued. On and on for what seemed like hours. More stone structures. More fearsome hawk-heads. More.
Right when Harry thought he could take no more, the images stopped flashing through his brain on their own accord, but that did not stop his taxed mind from drawing up the images on their own. Images that were forever and ruthlessly seared into his memory.
"What in the hell are you?" asked a frightened Harry, his voice cracking as he remembered the onslaught.
The response caressed his body like a lover, a whisper just on the edge of his hearing, and it terrified him in ways that Voldemort could only dream of.
Raaaaaaaaaaaaa. I am Ra, mortal. I saved you from Apophis's servant because he shall not have you. For you, mortal, are MINE!
The last word echoed throughout the chamber, and Harry knew no more.
~0~0~0~0~
Author's Note:
This is the raw prologue of a story that has been percolating in my mind for a while now. It plays with the common fanfiction trope that Harry somehow connects to one of his ancestors, but rather than this connection tying him to a hogwarts founder or something, he is tied through a middleman to Djoser, Pharaoh of the Third-Dynasty, Beloved of Ra. Mostly canon-compliant up until this divergence with the only difference being a slight uptick in Harry's intelligence combined with the innate belief that magic is rather cool and there are a lot worse things he could be doing than learning it.
Chapters will definitely be longer than this as I get going. This is just a prologue. I can't give any estimates as to how quickly I will update as Texas A&M is a rather demanding school and I haven't written any of this beyond a simple outline.
Enjoy
Disclaimer: I own nothing.