Disclaimer: Don't own Harry Potter. It belongs to Rowling.
Author's Note: I give my most grateful thanks to those kind enough to take the time out of their day to review my most humble work.
Mentioned here, and in an edit to the first chapter, timeline is ten years ahead of canon. Therefore the attack on the cottage at Godric's Hollow is in 1991 rather than 1981, and all dates should be adjusted accordingly.
Prologue, Part II: Learning is Important, but so is Living
It was a week and a half after his birthday, Harry was staring curiously around the workshop as he happily ate a sucker, the walls were covered in countless drawers and cabinets, with a wooden workbench with a few tools laying on it in the middle of the room.
Uncle Moony was talking rapidly in German with the nice old lady who had given him the candy, and even though he could understand them he wasn't paying attention to the conversation. She was a little over five feet tall, with long white hair and a cheerful face. Upon seeing him, she had called him adorable, given him the sucker he had (cherry it was, though he now frowned as he finished it), and told him to call her Granny Alana.
The reason he was able to understand her was because Uncle Moony had paid for all five of them to have a spell cast on them by a native German who spoke the language. The spell allowed all of them to speak and read the language as if they had grown up speaking it. The cost, while not exorbitant to the point of non-purchase, is high enough to discourage most people from randomly learning languages.
The International Confederation of Wizards kept a register of 'approved' vendors for this particular service after a rather appalling number of scams at the beginning of the nineteen hundreds, it was relatively easy to find someone who 'sold' the language they needed. Harry found it quite amusing to be able to speak multiple languages, and so when he had asked Moony how many he could learn this way, all he got was a strange stare.
Remus was more than a little startled. One part of the preparation for the emergency contingencies was that both children be taught as many languages as possible, including non-human ones. They had to be able to hide any where in the world if necessary, and here Harry was asking to learn more languages.
So he unleashed his puppy-dog pout, and got a quick 'ask me later, we'll see' before Remus turned away.
Uncle Remus had said it was one of the conditions of all his teachers that he would be able to speak and write in their native language, so he would be learning quite a few other languages. Though he hadn't explained why he was here, other than to respond to that, "No this woman is not going to be one of your teachers."
When Remus and Granny Alana had finished their conversation, she turned to Harry and said, "Now Little One, I need you to hold still while I cast a few spells to learn more about your magic, it will tickle a little, but I need you to stand as still as you can."
He nodded vigorously and said, "I can do that, Granny Alana."
Pulling out her rather short and stubby wand, she made come complex motions with it while chanting liltingly under her breath. After five minutes she frowned and conjured a chair that she directed Harry to sit in. She then continued casting various spells on the boy for ten more minutes before stopping and repressing a scowl.
Smiling at Harry she said, "Little One, why don't you go up stairs and see my granddaughter Sophia. She was baking cookies, and they should be just about finished."
As she and the were watched him leave the room, she scowled as soon as the boy had exited and rounded on the amber eyed man. "I will not be able to properly make a single wand for him, let alone two, so long as that dark magical... thing is attached to his forehead."
A look of surprise crossed Remus's face as he quickly asked, "You actually know what that is? I have been trying to find someone to diagnose whatever it is since I took him back since after that horrible Halloween..."
Her expression softened and she replied, "Which meant you haven't taken him to see any specialists who deal with sicknesses that attack one's magic... You are quite fortunate that the spells that narrow down a wand fitting are nearly identical to the diagnostic spells that those kinds of Healers use.
"The dark magic attached to young Harry's scar is some kind of spiritual remnant of the monster that attacked him. All that I can tell is that the magic of it is trying to feed off of his magic, and it is creating interference. It is also likely why his magic as stabilized so early. It needs to be stable to more effectively fight it off. Likely his magic is also growing more quickly to better fight it."
Remus frowned for a moment, paging through what he knew of experts on spirit and soul magics before saying, "Some of the best experts in the world in the branches of magics needed to counter something like this are a few Navaho shaman... Thank you for your time Madam Wilhelm."
The old woman cackled and said, "I'm old enough for you to call me Granny Alana, Lycan. My eldest granddaughter is going to be teaching your charge charms until he passes his N-Levels, as I think they are called now, and she lives here with me, so you might as well drop the formality."
Since Remus wanted Harry to start learning something about magic, and Ginny had absolutely no interest in starting to study the non-wanded magical subjects early, Harry began his study of Herbology, Magical Creatures, Potions, Runes, and Arithmancy by himself. When it would come time for one of his lessons, he (and often one of his guardians) would walk through one of the portals set into one of the rooms of the house. The portal would take them to the country where the master he would be learning from resided, and he would then take a trip on that nation's Floo Network to where ever he needed to go. And so a month after his birth he started his studies.
His study of Herbology took place at the location of the largest greenhouses in the world in the south of France, l'institut Botanique d'Aquitaine (or the Aquitaine Botanical Institute). The man who owned and ran the Institute, Herbology Grand Master Sigmund Grenouille, had had his life saved at the turn of the century by Charlus Potter, Harry's Great-Grandfather, and was ecstatic to pay back a small part of the debt he owed by doing what he loved, teaching young minds.
Though the lessons only started with him being taught general plant care and how to identify non-magical plants that had magical uses for two hours every Tuesday and Thursday, Harry seemed to enjoy it very much, and started pestering Moony and Padfoot about getting a greenhouse built at their home in New York.
For Magical Creatures, he traveled by Floo to a creature reserve in Montana, where a man named Adam East, whose family owed the Potter family a few favors involving wards to keep something extremely chaotic contained, mostly taught Harry about a number of mostly harmless magical creatures, including crups, kneazles, nifflers, and post owls. None of these creatures interested him as companions, but he liked learning about them anyway. This took place for four hours every Friday.
In a rather large set of personal laboratories in Cairo, Egypt he started learning learning potions from two twins who owed James Potter for saving their lives while they were visiting England during the war. They were attempting to persuade their sister and her husband to leave the country until the hostilities had ended, and had been caught up in an attack in Diagon Alley.
Contrary to popular post-war belief in England, neither of the Potters had been Aurors during the war, and Mukhwsna Pili bin Chenzira bin Bomani and Ata Mosi bin Chenzira bin Bomani had made it known that they felt a debt to the private citizen who fought a trio of terrorists to save their lives.
They currently taught Harry about the preparation of various 'safe' potions ingredients and a number of the more easily understood theories and laws behind the subtle craft of potion-making for an hour and a half each Monday and Wednesday.
In Moscow, he was give tutoring in Arithmancy and non-magical mathematics for an hour every weekday by a Ravenclaw classmate and friend of Lily's named Amanda Silver. She had been in the same year as both of Harry's parents, but being a first generation witch had left England due to a combination of the legislated bigotry and the ongoing conflict involving He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, and she had settled nicely into her life in Russia by the time the war was over.
She enjoyed teaching the bright little boy who had her friend's eyes about the magical significance of particular numbers, and since he was nowhere near advanced enough yet for the more complex components of her subject of choice, she had also taken over his teaching of other mathematics, and had found an eager student in both cases.
A man in Buenos Aires, name Juan Carlos whose clan owed a five hundred year old debt to the Potters for introducing their founding father to his wife (Remus did not let Sirius know what this family's debt was), was teaching Harry the basis of what he would need to know for the subjects that involved runes. His job was to get the boy to certain level of proficiency in the basics before he was given to other more invested teachers.
Though at the moment all that included was teaching the boy penmanship, though that was a very broad use of the word. He had him writing on paper and parchment with fountain pens, quills, pencils, and brushes, on solid surfaces with chalk, and in clay with a stylus, in every alphabet he could think of
Teaching a six year old for three hours a week, two on Wednesdays and one on Saturdays, what he taught for a living, and while it was slightly demeaning to teach a student half a dozen years younger than those he normally taught, it was a nice easy service to render to his family in order to resolve a half a millennium old debt.
Remus started teaching Harry a little Magical World History, though it was only in the form of kid friendly stories with a historical basis. Harry seemed to enjoy the adventures of Merlin in particular. He also started doing to same for the mundane world. As a parallel, he seemed to also deeply enjoy the Arthurian legends. And it was generally decided that with how often they were in the mundane world, and the fact that their home had appliances that had been hardened against magic use, there was really no need for the 'Muggle Studies' that was prevalent in any magical culture that had traditional purebloods.
All of his lessons had thus far had an absolute minimum of the endless streams of essays that would be conventional in Hogwarts. Part of this was due to the fact that they were teaching a five year old, though it was also due in no small part that all five of the teachers found that Harry learned best through discussion and hands-on application.
It was a fortnight after Harry had started his lessons when Sirius took Harry aside one Sunday afternoon into one of the dens in the sprawling household.
"This better not be some prank, Uncle Paddy... 'Else I'll get Gin-gin to play dress-up with your Animagus form again."
Sirius pales at the mention of that particular afternoon. Ginevra was starting to get very persistent in her desire to watch Sirius's 'stories' with him, and the old dog of the Marauders had promised to do any one thing for the little girl if she dropped the issue for a year. He was privately hoping that she would forget that little obsession by the time twelve months had passed. The bad part of this gambit was that he ended up attending a tea party as Padfoot in pink bonnet.
Harry and Moony made certain to have pictures of it.
"Nope, nothing nefarious planned at the moment pup... And I would appreciate it if you never mentioned that little fiasco again. What we are here to discuss is Occlumency."
Harry waited patiently while Sirius just grinned at him. Harry's eyes narrowed into a glare while the mutt's grin just widened. After a three minute long staring contest, Sirius's grin gave way to a puzzled look and he asked, "What?"
Harry rolled his eyes, pointed a small finger at his Dogfather, and exclaimed, "Explain!"
"Oh. Yeah, that might help..." Sirius said as he scratched the back of his head. "We'll this particular branch of magic comes in a few shapes and sizes, but at its most basic, it is the defense of the mind from external threat. No more or less. As it gets more complex, more bells and whistles are added to those defenses, but there are no real expansions in use. Its use in fiction from our world is insane and riddled with uses that fill people who may one day seek to learn the art with overexpectations. There is no way of gaining of instant eidetic memory, no tapping directly into you magical core; not that any such thing even exists, and any defense that includes a detailed mindscape where you store your memories is far too complex to work.
"Though if you are interested in getting a better recall of information, I think Moony knows some meditative exercises that work wonders if you are capable of using them... which I sadly am not.
"What I am going to teach you is the Black family method. Its primary method forgoes all attempts at armoring your mind, and instead what it does is hides your mind. You could be alone in a room with a master Legilimencer, which is one thing they call those who practice Legilimency the magical art of invading another person's mind, and they would not be able to find your mind even with you looking them in the eye."
"Now, normally, I would need an oath from you to not teach this to anyone who is more than four generations removed from the Black bloodline. But the oath I swore has a nice little loophole exploitable because I am Lord Black."
Harry just grins slyly at Sirius.
"Yup, this is just one more way of sticking it to my family, may all the bigoted blighters rot in Hades. Now get comfortable, close your eyes, and focus on your breathing, I am going to be teaching you to medi-ma-tate."
Groaning as he did as (one of) his Godfather(s) said, he knew this would either be very useful, or drive him to take very interesting forms of revenge upon the man.
It had taken four months of searching through his contacts, and another three of negotiating with the various Navaho tribes he had found, but he had finally found a shaman who was willing to examine and help Harry if he was able.
And so here they were, with Harry sitting on shirtless on an examination bed one would expect to see in a mundane doctor's office with various symbols drawn on his skin in some red paste, some on his chest, stomach, and back, others on his arms, and a few on his head, being examined by an ancient looking Native American who told them to call him Jack.
They were entering the fortieth minute of the exam and Jack had yet to say anything much in English beyond introducing himself and telling Harry to sit as still as possible, when he reached out and touched Harry on the forehead and said, "Sleep."
Maneuvering unconscious boy with strength atypical of those who appear as old as he does, Jack said, "I am glad you brought this young boy to me. There is a fragment of a particularly diseased and vile spirit trying to anchor itself to his soul. I don't know how much longer it would have been before it managed to fully attach itself, but now it is a simple matter of performing what you would call an exorcism, a really simple one at that, and as the spirit has been trying so very hard to anchor itself with young Harry's magic has been fighting it tooth and nail. It should be so weak that when it is expelled it will cease to be.
Before the old man started chanting, he said, "You might want to step back..."
Two weeks after Harry had the spirit purged from his body, Remus took him to see Granny Alana again, and she was able to, with a few hours of his help, find what would be the best material for his wands. It was another two weeks until she was finished and he could begin his work on the wanded subjects.
He would be learning Charms from Granny Alana's eldest granddaughter Victoria Wilhelm for four hours each week. She was one of the few teachers who would not being doing this because of a debt owed to the Potters, but rather because the two families had known each other and worked together for so long.
She started with the theory behind, and the casting of, a few basic spells, but she also worked on getting him familiar with the most common wand movements in both hands and feeling his magic as he cast his spells.
She had been directed to work his way though the levels of difficulty, first getting him to cast the most basic levels of charms, then cast them both non-vocally or non-somatically (which is often referred to as 'point casting'), followed by combining the two for silent, point cast magics. Following that would worded, wandless magic, which were always non-somatic in nature, finally ending with silent, wandless spells.
She had always though that teaching students silent casting while they were working with simpler spells would work better than attempting to teach the skill post O-level, but all of the parents, guardians, and schools of the students she taught had thus far stuck to the tried and true curriculum. But now the order of the day was to see how far her student could be pushed.
For another four hours each week, Transfiguration was taught to him in New Delhi, India by Swetaketu Suresh, an octogenarian Grand Master of the subject who had become a close friend of Harry's Grandfather Harold Potter had served under him in the Great War. Given what he had first heard from his good friend before his passing about the skill Harry's father had in the field, and had then seen first hand during a few meetings he had had with James and Lily to arrange for Harry's teaching, he wanted to see how talented the boy could become.
Remus had shared with the man James's final battle, and there was no flaw in James's style of combat that he could point out, apart from taking on an opponent far more powerful and skilled than himself.
The teaching started small, both literally and figuratively. Harry was give a wooden circle, two inches in diameter, and was then given a lecture on changing the shape of an object. He was then to change it first into a triangle, then a square, and then other geometric shapes. As he was attempting to do this Surresh would describe how to focus his magic to achieve what he wanted to change. Another exercise he was given was a lecture on changing the color something, handed a square of white cloth, and then guided in changing it various colors.
When these exercises were eventually finished, the difficulty would be increased as he would then be directed to make various three dimensional shapes or patterns of colors. Only after he could perform both advanced exercises to a certain degree he would be given a wooden ball, and have to change the material it was made of. Mastery of all three exercises would have to be demonstrated before he would then be given free reign of inanimate to inanimate transfiguration and directed to transfigure various objects.
By the nature of his teacher's beliefs about the subject matter, all of this transfiguration was taught as wordless, non-somatic magics. Surresh felt that the complex wand movements, incantations, and endlessly complex theories taught to students were merely crutches that never should be used in the first place.
Transfiguration in his mind was thirty percent imagination and visualization, thirty percent strength of will, twenty percent power, and twenty percent hard practice. And that is how he decided he would teach Harry. Teach him to make increasingly complex mental projections of what he wanted to do and use his force of will to translate that picture into magic to change what he desired. Any changes necessary to the lesson plan due to the how the child learned would be made as needed, but if he was right, teaching the hows of Transfiguration was going to become amazingly easy, for the teacher at least.
It would most likely be nothing but a right terror except to the most gifted of students.
There would still be lectures on the hard limits of transfiguration, on what to (and not to) transfigure, on how energy intensive which uses of the subject would be, and many other things.
The last of his wanded subjects was Magical Defense, though the name it was called in an one local changed, it being known as Defense Against the Dark Arts in Britain, was taught by a three-hundred year old man who would only answer to the name Hop, who lived fairly close to Kyoto, Japan.
Sometime in the eighteen hundreds, while Hop was wandering through Europe looking for 'interesting times' he came across a wizard with untameable dark hair protecting a group of women and children from a dozen bandits, half of them being wizards themselves.
He watched for a moment as the dark haired man fought a losing battle before interfering and putting the brigands down. He gave the man a strange coin, saying that no good deed should go unrewarded and that if he or his descendants were ever in need of training in combat, magical or otherwise, they need only throw the coin into a bowl of water, and he would get in contact with them to arrange for it.
It had sat unused a bit of family legend unconfirmed until James had found it in the one of his ancestor's journals, unused after two hundred years.
And so here Harry was, standing beneath a cherry tree, being poked and prodded by a paradox of a little old Japanese man who looked like he was made out of old shoe leather and iron nails, yet the smile on his face and in his eyes reminded the little boy of pictures of Father Christmas.
"So, Harry-kun, what do you think it is you think you will be learning from me?"
"I can honestly say that I haven't the foggiest Hop-sensei. I'm only this many," he said holding up six fingers, three on each hand, trying his darnedest to be adorable.
Chuckling, Hop said, "Well what I will be teaching you my little student is a combination of things. Chief among my many lessons is to keep you fit. A strong body makes for stronger magic. Once you learn the exercises you are to be taught, you will do them yourself on your own time. Later, I will also be teaching you how to protect yourself without magic, both unarmed and armed."
Hop stopped, and then grinned rather evilly. Harry felt a shiver run from the base of his spine to top of his neck.
"But for now, we see how well you run..."
A few days after Harry's seventh birthday, and he was laying down in the grass under a tree a hundred or so yards from the house. His eyes were closed as he tried to take a nap, not having much else to due, and not feeling energetic enough to do his normal running about.
He had had a birthday party away from the house for the first time in his life, the chief reason being that Sirius was a Black (who all were by their very natures extremely paranoid) and was also the one in control of the wards around the second most heavily defended private house and grounds on the planet, so he was not willing give anyone access through said wards unless absolutely necessary. And Harry had wanted to invite a few friends from his football (Remus pranked him when ever he called it soccer, though Moony did reward him quite well whenever he called American football 'rugby for wimps') league.
Aunt Hestia had actually been the one to fight for it after it became apparent that he would not be attending public school. She was damn well going to see Harry socialize with kids his age, magical or not. She didn't have many issues with this for Ginny as a few of her co-workers had daughters that Ginevra had hit it off with, but there had been no such luck for Harry. So given how much he kicked around the black and white ball around with anyone in the house, it had seemed like the most obvious thing in the world, though he had also expressed an interest in ice hockey of all things.
She later learned that he watched it with Sirius, who enjoyed watching fights break out on the ice.
She wasn't quite ready to put him in a rather violent sport where the chief form of movement was on razor sharp blades. Truthfully, she'd rather break her promise to keep Harry away from real brooms before the age of nine and then sign him up for junior league Quidditch before she would put Harry in a hockey league.
She vaguely suspected that the crazy haired little boy was forcing her to make just that decision... She admitted to herself that it was entirely possible that she was being paranoid, but two of the three people raising little Harry had been Marauders.
It had done some good, though it did show one thing about Harry's personality that showed up once when he got outside of his 'pack'. It really was something they should have been expecting. Remus had developed a slightly more Alpha male personality after he had become in sync with his inner wolf. With the Marauders cut from four to two, and Sirius recovering from the stint in Azkaban, Remus had taken up James's leading position, and had never really given it up. Harry had apparently developed a 'lead, follow, or get out of the way' attitude somewhere along the way, though he never really came out and said the phrase aloud, and he much preferred to be the one leading.
Harry had made quite a few friends at the expense of making a few annoyances, because he refused to call any antagonistic children within a few years of his age enemies, with this attitude, and there had been a few fights (and a lot of pranks) when a few of the more dominant boys didn't like the fact that he had taken up ad hoc leadership of the team.
And strangely enough to all of his teammates he brought his little sister along to the party. There had been two not so bright guys who complained about being forced to hang around with Ginny, though they were shut up by a glare from Harry that all the members from the team knew meant that something embarrassing would happen to the offending party if ignored. Most of the presents had been attempts by his friends to get him interested in their favorite teams. Otherwise the party had been quite enjoyable.
Thinking about it now, Harry realized that he never really watched football, finding playing the game far more exciting than watching it. In fact the hockey that he watched with Sirius was the only mundane sport that he actively watched, and Aunt Hestia was actively opposed to Harry being taken to any form of Quidditch game. She knew just how violent the game was when played on a professional level, and quite frankly she preferred that he watched hockey.
Not that there were many teams in the States apart from their international team, and they didn't play many games in their home country, getting most of their games in as exhibitions against other countries' national league teams. Most of his exposure to Quidditch was rebroadcasts on the the Wizarding Wireless (though a group of enterprising first generation wizards and witches had found a way to make electronics work in magical environments, no one had yet to find an effective way of mass-transmitting video recordings securely enough to be safe from mundane people, though it wasn't for a lack of trying), though Sirius was getting to the point where he was going to hire someone to record matches for him...
And then he had the idea of buying the broadcasting rights to various games and then marketing the recordings. He was in contact with his solicitors within forty-eight hours. The Black fortune started growing quite a bit soon after.
Sirius got his Quidditch fix, and then some. Harry however was left high and dry, because Hestia had threatened to decrease Sirius's chances of producing an heir from slim to none if Harry was shown even one frame of the game. It wasn't fair, really it wasn't. And he couldn't get even with her...
The only reason the Hestia was generally immune to retaliation via pranking was that the elves were more likely to listen to 'the lady of the house' and they cooked two out of three of the meals a day. Harry had had one too many encounters with the vile brussels sprout to risk her wrath again.
He sighed and opened his eyes, staring up into the tree above him. From what he knew, his magical education was as far from normal as anyone could get. He knew that the vast majority of magical teaching started at the age of eleven, largely due to the fact that almost all magical children had stable magic by that age.
Most teaching occurred one of three ways. The first was pioneered (at least in the western magical world) by the Four Founders of Hogwarts, and could be most easily paralleled to public education of modern day. The next was an Apprenticeship, in which a Master taught his or her apprentice one on one, and could last a very variable period of time, depending on how much of what the Master knows is being taught to the apprentice. The last was vaguely similar to what was going on with Harry, tutors hired to teach one or more (though no more than a few) students.
What was different was that all of his teachers, save for Señor Carlos (who had started teaching him about the various runic alphabets after about three months of working on his ability to write) and maybe Hop-sensei, all held Masteries in the specific subject they were teaching. He sat up, remembering that two of his teachers were Grand Masters of their subjects. He was vaguely aware of how good you had to be at a field of magic to even try for a Grand Mastery, and had heard Moony mention to Aunt Hestia that there were anywhere between one and two dozen Grand Masters in any given magical discipline.
He was being taught with the intention to excel... and he was more than a little worried at why that was. He also wondered just what Hop-sensei had in the way of credentials, and how much he was going to be run into the ground by the old man for asking...
It was early April as he laid beneath a cherry tree at the house in Kyoto. His tenth birthday was in a week short of four months, and while his advancement in the three wanded (or they would be for the vast majority of students) subjects. He was only roughly equivalent to a student somewhere in the middle of second year for Transfiguration, Charms, and Defense, though the amount of polish he had on the spellwork for what he did know was at or beyond students gearing up to take their International N-Levels (or as the Brits refer to them, NEWTs).
Ginny had been more than a little miffed at first that Harry was also learning 'real' magic so much sooner than she would, but the point eventually got though that it would hurt her talent if she started learning actual spells before her magic was ready.
In charms, he was finally capable of casting either non-verbally or non-somatically shortly after learning a spell, and the combination of the two skills was becoming much easier. His worded, wandless magics were intermittent at best, and his wandless, silent casting was still non-existent. His grasp on the theory of the subject however was phenomenal, probably due in part to his understanding of Arithmetic equations behind the spells he was using.
His transfiguration had finally advanced beyond both the three exercises that had driven him to near madness and inanimate to inanimate transfiguration, and Grand Master Suresh was confident enough in his visualization and ability to begin animate to inanimate transfiguration. Master Suresh had stated with supreme confidence that the hard part was over, and he would advance through the coursework much more quickly now.
Defense was behind where he would be if he had attended a normal magic school not because of a heavy focus on the basics, but rather because Hop-sensei taught so much in addition to what he would normally learn. To prepare him for his eventual International O-Levels (of which the Brit equivalent was the fifth year OWLs) he was slowly taught a number of spells that would have a broad use in a fight, the complete catalog of which being a moderate cutting curse, a heavy bludgeoning hex, a pair of piercers that could be easily alternated for a rather effective spell chain, a set relatively weak blasting and exploding curses, an arc concussion hex, a few lesser elemental curses, the standard stunning spell, and a trio shields; a power fixed shield and a weaker mobile one for hexes and curses with the third being a mobile kinetic barrier the size of a riot shield.
He was also slowly given assigned reading on most of the 'tamer' Dark Creatures, the more monstrous of which were saved for N-Levels. Hop-sensei also spent at least half an hour a week on identifying what spells were being thrown your way. It was drilled into Harry's head to dodge anything that looked either green or yellow, unless he advanced to Mastery level in Transfiguration, then he would be more than capable of conjuring physical barriers capable of blocking the Unforgivables.
Having talked with all three of his teachers, Remus had concluded that he would likely be ready to take his first set of standardized tests for this subjects in somewhere to a year and a half to two years.
As for his other magical subjects, he had advanced to some point in late fourth to early fifth year, with one exception. In potions, he was a more than adequate brewer, capable of following and completing the directions on almost all of the potions his teachers had given him, though they were disappointed that he lacked the inborn talent and technique that marks most Potions Masters. Mukhwsna and Ata had truthfully told him that he was more than capable of doing very well on N-Level for the subject, but going after a Mastery was going to be an excessive amount of extremely hard work, and there were probably other fields of magic that he was better suited for. They had already wished him good luck for when he finished his time with them, as he would be having a new teacher after he finished the O-Level coursework with them.
In Herbology, he again was doing quite well, and while he enjoyed gardening at home, his teacher sadly noted the innate love of growing things that marked those who devoted themselves to the field. Harry had already decided that while he would pursue a N-Level in this subject, if only to familiarize himself with potentially deadly (or amusing) plants, it was not something he truly wanted to do for a long period of time.
His Arithmancy was advancing at a fair clip, it being one of the farthest along of all his classes. The two chief branches of the subject were given equal basis, and he would then be given the choice to pursue one more deeply during N-Level study. The first, the predictive equations and computations, along with the magical properties of certain numbers, was covered in broad strokes, with the simplest uses being given for practical work. The second was the mathematics of power behind the spells he was being taught, the often complicated and sometimes horribly lengthy mathematical constructs that described what the magic was doing. His first practical work in this subject was the light spell, lumos, and its counter, nox.
Magical Creatures promised to eventually become much more interesting after the family found out Harry was a Parselmouth during a trip to the zoo for Ginny's seventh birthday. They had gotten separated from Harry after the Reptile House, and when they finally realized that he was no longer with them, Remus activated the tracking charm that he kept on Harry (he also kept one on both Ginevra and Padfoot) whenever they went out into public.
They found him deep in a conversation with a Komodo dragon. Not only were they surprised that he was demonstrating an extremely rare magical ability, he had now shown that he wasn't only limited to snakes, but usable on most reptiles.
They were having trouble convincing Hestia to allow Harry to visit a Dragon Reserve in Romania.
The animals they had been studying had gotten more interesting (and therefore almost always more dangerous) including Salamanders, Ashwinders, Jarveys, and Diricawls. There were no creatures more dangerous than the British Ministry's class XXX, though there were a few class XXXX slated to be covered before the O-Levels, that is until a Quetzalcoatl decided to crash the class...
The lesson on mooncalves, having been rearranged to take place during the night of a full moon, was just wrapping up when Harry was dive bombed by something that had both feathers and scales. Before he fully knew what was happening, a meter and a half long snake with wings had loosely coiled its vibrant green body around his torso while it rested its rainbow colored wings on his shoulders.
§So, I heard from Ouroboros, who heard from Osiris, who said Jormungadr, who, all three by the way are not the ones from legends they are just pretentious bastards, was told by Jack, that you speak the serpent tongue. You talked to Jack a few months ago in a zoo in New York. Is it true?§
Confused and cautiously, Harry replied, §Yes... Why?§
§Because you can only spend about a century and a half talking to snakes before you get really bored with them. You're human, we speak the same language, and I've got a bunch of nifty powers comparable to those of phoenixes... no wait that doesn't sound right... phoenixi? Bah, whatever, whatever the plural of phoenix is.
§I can travel, and bring people and things with me, in a burst of lightning. What phoenix tears do for critical wounds, by venom does for long term health. And yes, there really are idiots out there who dump large fortunes on getting a supply of phoenix tears to use as a preventative treatment and it does jack shit for them. I may not be able to sing uplifting songs like those fiery turkeys can, but I am an awesome conversationalist.§
Adam East stared blankly at Harry and the incredibly rare magical creature that had wrapped itself around him. "What is going on Harry?"
Glancing at his teacher for a moment Harry said, "This wiseguy is trying to talk me into keeping him... Aren't I supposed to beg my parents to let me keep the animal that follows me home?"
§Oh, and I can do this!§ There was a blurring of light, and where the snake was on Harry, there was now a bright green leather jacket with rainbow colored wing designs going from the shoulders to the cuffs. §And I can still talk while I'm doing it... Though I serve next to no protective value other than keeping the weather off you. Though if you don't like me as a jacket, I can make myself into a nifty overshirt.§ The serpent shifted again and it was now a bright green button up long sleeve shirt that was open at the front, with the selfsame rainbow colored wing design on the shoulders and arms. §Sadly I can't do anything longer than your waist... I wish I could become a badass longcoat. But sadly I can't... So how about it, do you need a familiar?§
Harry sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose, and then asked, §Just what are you and what is your name?§
The snake shift back to its natural form and said, §I'm a Quetzalcoatl, and my name is Jean-Claude Van Damn I Look Good!§
Harry glared slightly at the snake whose head was resting on his left shoulder.
§No? Well then, hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.§
Harry glared a bit more, though he did have to suppress a chuckle.
§Okay, okay. My name is Raiden. Seriously.§
And he wouldn't take no as an answer. So Harry gained a rare magical familiar, and they quickly became fast friends. Harry actually started watching the telly for more than his hockey fix and Raiden was actually very good company. The winged serpent was currently lazing on a branch in the tree above Harry, and was likely asleep.
Astronomy was taught by Uncle Remus mostly as a mundane subject since the ICW only issued a pass certificate on the class due to its rather central usefulness in how the alignment of certain stars and planets have an effect on ritual magic. The written would be on these various effects, while the practical would be to make and label a star chart. Moony went over the required materials enough that he would only need the help of the recall meditation exercise if he drew a blank on certain star names.
Runes, however turned out to be a whole different kettle of fish. In a school environment it is the one class that progresses the slowest from theoretical study to practical use. The entirety of the three years prior to O-Levels are by and large spent teaching the three of the most commonly used runic alphabets (though the wizarding definition of the word was far different than the mundane textbook definition of it), the meaning and uses of each of the runes, how to properly transcribe them, and some history on each of the alphabets. What had surprised everyone was that Harry was so adept at the subject that it was more than a little disturbing.
He had ended up tearing through more than the entirety of the O-Level, including the three or so months spent solely working on his ability clearly write, in a little over thirteen months, while having an additional four runic alphabets to work with. He sat the International O-Level in that subject in November of Nineteen-Ninety-Seven.
In the ICW testing office in Oslo, Norway, he tore through that exam in record time, and the score he got was so unbelievable they graded the test a second time. In truth there were a total of eight possible letter grades that could be assigned as a final score to an exam, but the two at the farthest ends of the spectrum were so rare as to be something of a legend among students, as they were only awarded once or twice every twenty years on given continent, and one about every three years internationally, across all subjects put together. At the low end of a subject, a failure so dismal as to be a thing of true shame, the F, for Flobberworm. At the other end of the grading spectrum were passes so high that whenever the grade was received, the written test would be double checked, and a pensieve memory of the practical reviewed. The ever elusive M, the Magnificent.
Harry became both the youngest person to pass the Study of Runes O-Level, and the youngest recipient of the M grade. It was at that point that his studies under Señor Carlos ended, and it became apparent what the largest debt his parents had called in was.
It seemed that the goblin clan of Gringotts London had owed the House of Potter a massive favor. They had hired out, for a greatly reduced price, their top Warder, Curse Breaker, and Enchanter as tutors. The lessons had taken place in London branch office, and from his first teacher he learned to create runic ward anchors, build a number of common wards, and tie them together into a single ward platform. His second teacher taught him how to analyze, circumvent, and destroy the wards other than his own. His last teach taught him how to use rune arrays to imbue magic into objects, either to enhance the items current capabilities or to allow it to do something it would not normally do, for example a the former could be used to make it so that a knife would never dull, while the later could cause the same knife to carry an electrical charge, shocking those that it cuts. A fourth teacher for one more area the field of Runes was capable of had been lined up, a Runes Master who was one of the leaders in the field of Symbolic Casting, the art of transforming the Arithmetic equation of a spell into a runic diagram and cast a spell that way. He spent two hours each week with each of his tutors in these facets of the field of runic magic, and proceeded to advance at a rate that was comparable to how he covered the O-Level material.
So it was a fourteen months after he had taken his Runes O-Level that he repeated his previous feat of utterly decimating the N-Level for the subject, again being the youngest to ever pass the Runes N-Level, and being the fifth person on record to have gotten two M grades since the ICW had instituted its standardized tests back in the mid Seventeen hundreds. He continued to study under all of Runes teachers, who had been contracted to teach him all they could, not just get him past the N-Levels.
He was broken out of his doze when he heard bare feet pad softly through the grass, and saw his sister take a seat beside him. Ginny smiled softly at him as she spoke in flawless Japanese, "You don't usually stare at the cherry blossoms for so long..."
"Tired. Getting prepared for the O-Levels I will be taking in August is exhausting. Any particular reason why you felt the need to come over just as I was starting to doze off? I could really do with a nap..."
She gazed at him sharply for a few moments, inspecting her brother for any obvious defects before saying, "You do look tired, are you sleeping well?"
"Most days, though I'm not sleeping as deeply as I usually do..."
"Then get Uncle Remus to brew you up a sleeping potion, or whip one up yourself, once every week. It'll probably help if you enough sleep without you becoming dependent, or worse addicted, to them."
He rubbed at the faded scar on his forehead and sighed, "I'll talk to Moony about it later."
He remember when the scar had been much clearer, how it had caused a dull ache in his head that would never go away.
"Aunt Hestia is back at home and wants to talk to you about something, though she wouldn't tell me what."
Secondary Author's Note: My apologies for any errors (chiefly my use of Babel fish for the French location name and the attempt at researching and the attempt at using Arabic naming conventions).
Update schedule for this story (an amazing thing for me) will be once a week, on Saturdays. I may write more, but that will go into a buffer so that it will actually update weekly.
Current Buffer Status: Prologue Part III (of III) finished, save for proofing.