Here is the first spinoff story in my Avatar/Harry Potter crossover universe. The idea for this came to me while writing chapter 23 of Book 1: Purity as a potential spinoff story focusing on Regulus' reasons for leaving the Death Eaters and his journey to make amends for his actions. This is a little different as this is only my second foray into 1st person writing (the other was deleted for personal reasons) so bear with me while I try to work out the kinks. Also this is written as a memoirs so there is not going to be as much dialog and more about Regulus' feelings and views as they develop over the course of the story so there will be rambling tangents at times as Regulus tries to recall things and explain certain actions. It is going to be shorter, both in chapter length (3-6k words per chapter) and in total chapters (projected at 13 plus an epilogue). However, as with all of my work in this series, there will be a message within the writings, in this case the problems with brainwashing, echo chambers, and the struggles to break from an extreme philosophy. I had initially planned this for after the release of Avatar: The Tale of Harry: The Lost Adventures but after realizing that it was on the shorter side and there was a gap between the end of Book 2 and the release of Book 3, I decided to write it now. There are other spinoffs planned, including a potential Pyrites tetralogy, a collection addressing the philosophies of the various major antagonists, stories on the major supporters of the antagonists, origin stories for Voldemort, Hermione and the Enlightened (as well as other classified villains), and other stories based of events in Books 3, 4, or 5. These are just proposals though and many are a long way off. Enough large block text rambling, here is the first chapter in the first spinoff, stand alone, story; The Path to Redemption.
Disclaimer: I own nothing related to either the Harry Potter, Avatar: The Last Airbender, or Avatar: The Legend of Korra universes.
Chapter 1
Redemption, what is it?
To some it is a singular act, an act in which one redeems oneself in the eyes of one's own self, one's family, one's society, or even the world. It can be as simply as an act of kindness to a downtrodden stranger who needs food, money, shelter or just a friend to talk too, or as big as saving a city from the forces of a great evil. To others it is a lifetime of good deeds or actions to redeem for a misspent youth or indiscretion(s) that one must atone for. And to a few it is the ultimate sacrifice, that of one's life to save a loved one or a populace from destruction.
Though I fall into the second camp, those who perpetually seek to redeem themselves for their past indiscretions and beliefs, it is the final one that always gets to me. I am more often drawn to the sacrifice of Hiroshi Sato during Kuvira's invasion of Republic City than to that of General Moody during the Second Purity War a few years back. This is because I see some parallels between myself and Hiroshi in the fact that we both aided an evil, charismatic, insane, bloodbenders, and we both made strives to atone for our sins in the end. The differences are that Hiroshi's evil and involvement with his leader was greater than mine and as such his redemption was likewise greater for he sacrificed his own life to save Republic City. By contrast I was just a lowly follower and I am still breathing today.
Perhaps one day I will show the same fortitude to die to protect those whom I love, be it to save them, allow them to escape, or allow them to defeat the enemy who has slain me, but that day is not upon me. No, today is the story of my own path to redemption, my long journey from that of a naïve and brainwashed kid to learning the truth of the situation I had willingly found myself in and the lengths to which those I thought of as fellow believers would go to achieve the ends that we had all shared. This realization puts me on my final path to realizing my wrongs and my attempt to redeem myself for those sins.
My tale is not one of romance or great adventure. It is not of love and loss. It is not an epic. There will be no battles of heroism, though I am seen as a hero now following my greatest act of redemption to date, nor will there be any great defeats that I must overcome. There will be no bravery or courage other than my decision to walk away and survive against the odds while my former colleagues try to hunt me down. There is loss, there is humbling, there is realization of my mistakes and how all of this made me into the man that I am today. It is a tale of how I found the truth, how I began to make amends for my wrongs, how I reunited with the world and restored my name in the eyes of those who matter to me.
I do not ask for pity or sorrow for what I went through, I know that I do not deserve it for what I have done in the past and who I have helped, nor do I ask for praise for what little I have done to correct my past actions, I was only doing what I felt was right to make amends for the wrongs I have done. I only ask that those who read my journey, my memoirs of sorts, read closely and see what I went through so that others may never experience what I did all those years ago. I ask that you see the struggle of conscience I had as I was forced to question the very tenets of my beliefs, of what I had grown up believing to be the truth and how I came to realize just how wrong I was.
This book will hopefully be a lesson to those who read it in the perils and seduction of extremism, of the manipulation of children and young adults whose minds are not fully capable of understanding the shit that they are being fed in a truly reasonable way. It is a lesson of how it is essential to challenge your inherent views and not seclude yourself in an echo chamber so that you might find your true self. I certainly do not advise going down the path I went down for I did not go down it by choice nor did I go down it easily. It may have made me who I am today, it may have matured me, but there are better ways to find oneself than my way. I hope that mine serves as a cautionary tale of how to avoid the path I took.
During my journey I endured hardships that many before me have endured, though few came from where I had to begin with. Few fell from the position I was in and fewer still did what I did and walk willingly into my hardships knowing what was to come and knowing that it was the only way forward. I experienced things that I would have never dreamed of growing up the way I did, but I did it out of necessity at the time. I did it all to save my own life and countless others, and along the way I realized the truth. Despite these hardships, if faced with the same scenario, I would do them all over again in a heartbeat.
It took many years for me to truly see what the world was like, for me to burst my bubble. Even during my initial journey, when I had set out to save my life, I did not fully realize the truth nor did I truly challenge my views because I felt that what I was doing was preserving the philosophy I had at the time by walking away from that fateful mission. It was an act of self preservation, but it led to self discovery.
It was only after years of hardship along my journey, of doing what I needed to do to survive, of seeing the world for what it truly was outside of the places I had known growing up did I even begin to realize it. However, it took me a full decade of living a life I would never have dreamed of to fully appreciate what I had come to understand during those first few years on the run. It took me 15 long years to come to where I am today but it was worth it in the end.
I am writing this story, telling the full truth as best I can remember it as this is a work of memory and is done so by my best recollections of the events, for the first time at the request of one person, a man who I respect beyond any in this world for what he has accomplished in his short life. He was the one who realized who I was, he had shown me kindness before he knew the truth but a lucky coincidence, or the divine will of the universe we may never know, he realized who I truly was. It was he who asked my own brother to bring me back in from the cold, from my self-imposed exile and punishment, it was he who realized that I deserved a chance to atone for what I had done and help bring down who I had once supported and whom I had once called my brothers. That person is none other than Avatar Harry himself.
How the Avatar found me and asked my brother to bring me in is already common knowledge. We have both talked about it extensively in the years since I was granted a full pardon for my crimes in the aftermath of the Second Purity War. What we haven't talked about, what no one but my own brother knows, is how I ended up where he could find me, what I did to get there in the first place, and everything along the way that opened my eyes to the truths of the world.
It is because of my unique story that the Avatar sought me out for my advice for a mission that he is about to undertake. At the time of writing, Harry has just left my rooms at the Elemental Academy where I am a master in the Water House and teaching as part of my personal redemption so that those who are now where I was when I was seduced by darkness might not make the same mistakes that I made in my youth. I told the Avatar all I had been through and it was he who suggested that I finally write down my story.
I mentioned to the Avatar that I am not a gifted writer but he said not to worry because I am telling my story. That is why I ask those who read my book to bear with me as I tell my story. All dialog is as I best recall it, as are what happened, and I will meander at times to try to set up certain key moments along my journey and how events unrelated to the major story, such as my hunting skills, are important to the story itself. However, for the first of what is no doubt many times to come, I have digressed. Back to the Avatar's request.
The Avatar is about to leave for a mission, one that he and his friends might never come back from, and he needed my advice as I was the only person he knew who had done something similar to what he is about to embark on. Harry knew that what I could say to him might save his life in the coming months, possibly years, as his mission unfolds. I can talk about it now as this work will be kept secret until the time comes for my work to be published and by that point the Avatar will have either succeeded or died trying. By that point, his mission will be declassified. Besides, it is a good way to set my own story.
As I write, the Avatar is traveling with his team of young, gifted, loyal friends to Ba Sing Se, though this is only a cover. From there, they will travel to the Imperial State of Golguth and in particular a secret prison there manned by Kyoshi Warriors. The prison holds a man who was once a, for lack of better term, brother in arms with me but made a deal with the Avatar for protection and may be one of only two men who can help Harry. I am the other man.
The reason why I can help the Avatar is simple; his mission is to sneak into the occupied Fire Nation and try and take down the deranged bitch who rules it with an iron fist. This is a critical mission for the Avatar as it the Fire Nation is out of balance and in need of saving and the only person who can do this is the Avatar.
As those who will read this will know, for the last 5 years, since the day of Voldemort's defeat at Harry's hands in the Battle of the Elemental Academy, the Fire Nation has been under the tyrannical and illegitimate leadership of Fire Empress Hermione the Cruel. Hermione is a girl who like me was seduced by extremist philosophies at an age when she shouldn't have ever been exposed to it but who unlike me never saw the error of her ways. Instead, she has been used by those who brainwashed and manipulated her into overthrowing the Firelord and the Fire Nation during a cowardly coup while the rest of the world's back was turned dealing with Voldemort. She has made her bed and will face the consequences if she is ever brought to justice.
Since her seizure of the throne, she has renamed the Fire Nation the Fire Utopia and imposed her far left views as the law pf the land. She has claimed the title of Fire Empress and given herself the epithet of 'the Savior'. My extremism was on the far right of the spectrum but extremism of any color is the same and Hermione has done a lot of what Voldemort did, just on a grander and institutionalized scale that Voldemort could only have dreamed of.
Hermione senselessly kills any who oppose her, she does not allow dissent, dissemination of ideas, disagreement, etc. basically it is her way or the highway. That is what Voldemort did and that is what I fled from and I ultimately broke my mind from those shackles. That is what I am seeking redemption from, my former etremist beliefs and the actions I took to further the Dark Lord's evil agenda.
However, my experiences with extremism, while useful, is not why the Avatar sought me out. No, the reason why he sought me out for aid with his mission is because when I defected from Voldemort, though admittedly still believed in the Purist philosophies I had been conditioned to believe in since birth, I did so while I was in the Fire Nation. The Fire Nation is not my homeland, I am not a firebender and before my defection in Fire Fountain City I had never been there, and for obvious reasons I have never been back since.
I did however spend two years wandering the Fire Nation countryside that I did not know, going from village to village, keeping my head low and avoiding the Purists and Death Eaters who were hunting me as a traitor while I did what I had to do in order to survive. It was during those 2 years that I saw the world for what it was, that I challenged and ultimately cast off my believes and where I began my continuing journey to redemption.
The Avatar needed my advice to help him figure out how to survive and lie low in a hostile environment that he has never been too outside of Royal Caldera City, and I am the only person he knows who knows how to do so that he could turn too for advice. The fact that it was the Fire Nation I did it in is an added bonus as I was able to give him some specific tips for areas that I had been in that he himself might be find himself in during his mission.
After I told the Avatar my story of my time there, he suggested that while he was away I write it down so that others may learn from my experiences and I agreed with him. That is why, for the first time, I am telling my full story from the very beginning to the point that I reached Omashu and settled down as a homeless man for 12 years before being rediscovered.
I will tell of my noble beginnings, my privileged upbringing, and my indoctrination into the Purist philosophy in general. Of how my brother, who is my role model for how he never bought our parents crap, was treated. And how I realized the full extent of Voldemort's evil and the lengths to which he would go for domination.
I will tell of how I defected, of my time in the Fire Nation, of how my views evolved views and how I came to realize how wrong I once was. I will tell of how I traveled from the Fire Nation to the Earth Kingdom after Voldemort's defeat to be near my brother in Omashu but how, out of shame, embarrassment and fear, I decided to not seek him out and would instead spend over a decade living as a nonbender vagabond mere yards from my only family that could understand and never sought him out.
I will tell of how was a wanted man with a death sentence on my head thanks to my father, I could not go to the authorities so I chose to live how I felt I deserved too at the time and for all that I have been through. As I have already said, I am glad I made that choice and would do so again in a heartbeat.
After that, my story is well known. It is common knowledge how the Avatar discovered who I was and who the homeless man whom he had shown kindness too in King Bumi Park was in fact a Death Eater who had defected and been labeled a traitor with a bounty on my head. Of how I was brought in, how I cooperated in exchange for a full pardon and how I fought alongside my brother, the Order of the Phoenix and the forces of good to defeat Voldemort, his Death Eaters and his Purists, even going so far as to defeat and capture my former fellow Death Eater Nott in single combat during the Battle of the Elemental Academy. All of that is public knowledge but what isn't in how I reached this point in my life and how I still believe that I have a long way to go before I am truly redeemed.
I am Crown Prince Regulus of the Norther Water Tribe and this is the story of my long path to redemption.
I know the first chapter is short, the rest will be longer, but all it needs to do is set the scene for the upcoming story. This is the style that it will be written in with Regulus interacting a lot with the reader as he tells his cautionary tale with stories of his past interspersed within the general narrative that he weaves throughout his memoirs. Please let me know what you think of this spinoff in reviews/PMs, I try to listen to constructive remarks about what is good or bad about my writing. Until next week.
Stringdog