Chapter 2 - Before Harry Left Earth

Local cluster, Sol System, Earth, London, Foyer of the Ministry of Magic – 07.14.2028

He was late. It was Friday, he was late, and more than the fact that he was certain his assistant de jour was sitting on his desk with a very disappointed expression on their face, it mean that he had not missed the secretarial pool's mid-morning smoke break.

He skid on his heels out of the fireplace, and with a very practiced motion he vanished the rubber streaks from the marble behind him. Long experience with being horrible at using the flue lead to these little habits, and it lead to a lot of shoe replacements. He ran through heel material like it was no one's business, and while that kept Twilfitt and Tattings in business, it left him with a very tedious monthly trip to their in-house cobbler.

Wait, this was a distraction, he was distracting himself. He could hear the bellowing, the cackling, and the click-click of the stiletto heels through the halls already, and he really needed to spend his next few very precious moments trying to remember the incantation to the disillusionment spell.

His beautiful and incomparable Lilly Luna had taken his cloak this morning, telling him that he didn't need it and also there was a boy that desperately needed to discover that she could reach him at any time, and that he could never hope to escape her tyrannical grasp. While he thought that was a maybe a little crazy, and that they definitely needed to talk about toning it down a bit, he knew better than to get between her and her little projects.

"Obscuro!"

His wand fizzled angrily, spitting hot pink sparks.

"Celatus!"

Hard won fighting instincts forced him to turn his head at the last second, which allowed the dark green spell to fly from his wand into a man standing behind him. The man, whose back was turned, now had mere moments to realize that his clothing was becoming invisible and not taking him with it.

"Abditio!"

The familiar cracked egg feeling covered him from head-to-toe, in just enough time for the horde of men and women, all between the ages of 23 and 34, and terribly, horrifically attractive, to thunder past him to the London exit.

There had been an accident, an unspeakable's experiment had broken through their containment circle, and five levels of ministerial shielding and concealment charms to blow a cloud of volatile beautifying potion that had been converted into an everlasting elixir over the whole of Whitehall, just during morning smoke break hours. The result was a group of supernaturally attractive secretaries, on both sides of the muggle/magical divide, who came back down to work a bit more spiffed up than they had left. Since then there had been any number of scandals, a truly outrageous number of divorces, the muggle Prime Minister had been replaced pending an HR review, and the morning smoke break had been enshrined in gold.

Gossip had never been a more physical force in the building.

More relevant to his immediate circumstances, the number of people with the suicidal desire to hit on him and pinch his bum in defiance of his wife's very public edicts had grown exponentially, and he didn't need another shouting match ending in an atrium fountain cat-fight to cap off his week. Hollyhead Harpies indeed.

With hurried steps he avoided the crowd, the firsts wisps of cigarette smoke flitting away from them before they had even left the building, and snuck his way into a lightly occupied elevator. Pressing the button for the Auror's Offices, he sighed, and canceled his spell.

Two adjuncts to the High Mugwump, blessedly not recipients of the 'Unspeakable Miracle', were in the corner of the elevator speaking in low tones. It wasn't uncommon for politicians or department heads to run around under disillusionment spells, so they were unphased by his phasing back into the visual range.

One of the pair, a nice woman whose name Harry was certain started with an 'E' but for the life of him couldn't recall, offered a kind smile and a, "Long week?"

Harry gave them both a weak smile in return, "It's been a bit of a month, to be honest."

Her partner spoke up, "You're telling me, the latest integration changes have been… a challenge."

Harry shrugged apologetically, "We strive to bring everyone to as even a playing field as we can, but our Irish friends derive their magic from offering questionable deals for gold. We either struggle here, or we have to explain to our muggle friends why the average height of their pay-day lenders fell to just shy of sixty centimeters. This is easier for everyone, believe me."

They both grimaced, but gave understanding nods.

"It's the life of a public servant, yeah? God bless us, but we volunteered for this."

The elevator gave a cheerful DING! and Harry glanced out. His floor.

"Best of luck to you both, and for what it's worth, I am sorry. I worked with the Old Lady as much as I could on it, but they're leprechauns, banking was never going to get out of this one unscathed."

They shared understanding nods again, this time with grins.

"WAIT, DON'T TELL HER I CALLED HER THAT, SHE'LL-"

The doors closed in his face, leaving him to the chuckling behind him in the bullpen. Turning, his gaze tracking over the assembled ranks of his people, "I don't know why any of you are laughing, if she orders the patrol schedules changed again, it's you lot waking up at half-three, not me."

He rode the waves of grumbling cheerfully through his people, shucking his cloak as the press of humanity in the confines of their cubicles drove the temperature past the limits of his clothes' temperature control charm. The grumbling became a dull background buzz as he checked in with his Auror corps in passing as he headed to his office.

Ainesbury was still muddling through last week's concussion, Jimmy Fortescue was handcuffed to his desk half-offering medical assistance, half-offering a statement. Thomas' desk was both festooned with West Ham gear, and empty, so Harry could pretty reasonable expect some soccer hooliganism complaints to cross his desk at some point next week. The usual really, though somewhere in the office someone's better half had baked the most intensely sweet honey-buns he had ever smelled.

The nearly sickly-sweet odor carried him the last few meters to his office door, which was strangely unadorned. The plain polished wood of the door was usually covered by some mark from this week's assistant, a rotating position manned by a unique pool of mostly qualified personnel that were funneled through his office by the office of the Minister. The Old Lady was hard on her assistants, though none would say so in earshot of her, so his office served as a kind of lower security, lower stress, halfway house operation. It allowed their small number of trusted staff, essentially the still-living remnants of Dumbledore's Army, a safe place to do useful work between the mindlessness of the normal Ministerial or Wizengamot secretarial pool, and the much higher stress realm of the department heads and the Office of the Minister.

Their generation of Hogwarts graduates all experienced an… interesting… education. Large swathes of standard O.W.L and N.E.W.T material had been negatively affected by the war, or by the Triwizard Tournament, or by the soul-draining aura of a horde of Dementors, or by being stalked through the halls of their learning institution by a magical WMD, or even by that time that the headmaster hid an artifact which could give unlimited wealth and eternal life from a terrorist possessing one of his professors inside the school. Their generation, even those not directly affected by the politics of the war or by the blood-purity sensing abilities of a gigantic snake, had eventually graduated with a skill set that was perhaps more practically focused than the learning outcomes the Wizarding Examinations Authority had established as acceptable pedagogical goals.

Dumbledore's Army, or it's survivors at any rate, had overwhelmingly received torture and PTSD as graduation gifts from their Alma Mater. They had stepped from Hogwarts' Entrance Hall for the last time, moving firmly into the adult world, where the power vacuum left by the war nearly pulled them from their feet. The only positions of social, regulatory, or administrative authority that hadn't been firing spells at them from behind masks a few weeks prior had been shop keepers, janitorial staff, or too old to hold a wand.

The purebloods had spent ten generations stacking the government and the economy in their favor. When Voldemort fell for the final time the Minister of Magic, every ministerial department head, the vast majority of the ministerial support staff, the bulk of the Auror corps, and the top 25% of the most economically active businesses had all been owned or staffed by purebloods. The Sacred Twenty-Eight, the pureblood houses whose work and support had founded and upheld the Ministry of Magic, had become the sacred seven. Voldemort had killed off six of those now lost lines, and the remaining fifteen had all donned the robes and masks of his followers. They had paid the price for it in the final battle.

At the end of the war, Harry and his direct supporters had declared themselves the legitimate government of the land by fiat. They gave themselves three days off following the final battle, and then they collected their resources, coordinated with the still-living members of the government, and sent their best and brightest to the ICW to gain an accounting of their foreign obligations, and call for aid.

There were few proper adults, few people over the age of twenty really, that could be trusted. So they collected their resources, collected their people, and took care of business. If doing that meant that they took politically reliable people and cared for them by making them earn their keep as a high-security-clearance secretarial pool, so be it. It had complicated things. They faced very legitimate claims that they were stacking the government with their cronies in the same manner as the purebloods they had ousted.

It made for a complicated political situation, which was thankfully Hermione's problem. All Harry had to do now was look out for his friends and comrades, which had been his great passion and skill going through school anyway. She burned through assistants and earned and spent political capital as fast or slow as she had to. Harry forced her dregs to watch his schedule, take notes for him, and he trusted them to respond appropriately to circumstances in his absence, like he had personally trained each one of them to do. So every week or so he had someone new in his front office to watch his back, and he kept them going, gave them purpose, and they covered him as they all kept the brittle peace they enjoyed intact.

It had been twenty-two years, and the war still hung over many of them. Some days the remnants of that time period still made them feel unsafe, it kept them on their toes, and on this day, the specter of those distant events hung over Harry Potter.

There was more resistance than there should have been when he pushed to open his office door, he only needed a quarter inch to feel it.

That was trouble.

His senses fell back into the familiar grooves, worn deep into his brain by war and an aggressive profession. It was still hot, the buzzing from the bullpen had only grown louder, and that sickly-sweet smell was more intense now than it had ever been. His wand was in his hand before he even registered what was going on.

He pushed the door properly open in a rush, a wide area spell on his lips, he'd cast across his whole office space and knock every unshielded person out as fast as he could. His filing cabinet could be activated to come alive and begin spewing paper into the air to give visual cover and cause confusion, his desk was actually a transfigured bear, one firm finite away from causing trouble for everyone. He also had a juvenile basilisk that Hermione didn't know about and hadn't approved of, resting in stasis in an undetectable expanded region behind the his son's crayon portrait at the rear of his office. Just in case.

He sprang through the half-opened door into the office, landing on a carpet of Rough Bluegrass, grown thick and strong. The floor confused him, drawing his attention from the room downward to the trap he had surely jumped into, so he was surprised by a familiar voice.

"Harry Potter, it's so good to see you, you look well!"

That definitely wasn't his secretary, though it also wasn't unwelcome. Her voice was warm, just like he remembered.

"Luna Lovegood!" Harry said with a smile, "How have you been, you look fantastic!"

She did too. What was once straggly blonde hair had filled out, it had been cut short, and like the rest of her, it looked sun-kissed from time she had clearly spent out in the field. She had grown into what had been too wide eyes, turning what had been an expression of permanent surprise into a face that was obviously accustom to a smile. Her fashion sense had been atrocious as a teenager, but frankly the confidence of being forty-seven, the prime of her life, made it a statement rather than a cry for attention. She truly had grown into herself, the years since their last encounter had been far kinder to her than many of their cohort.

Unfortunately she was not alone in the room.

Luna Lovegood sat, in all her oddness and glory, behind his desk. She was resting her feet on the surface of his desk, a pair of thick Dock Martins obscuring the picture of his family. Across the desk from her sat… Something.

It was a wooden figure in the crude shape of a man, it looked to have been formed by the organic growth of wood so there were knots and holes, leaves in odd places and evidence of trimming in different areas at different times. Vines running all over it's body connected it to the growth of the floor, and as it turned to look at him, it was clear that it was missing nearly a quarter of what would have been it's skull. Revealed by the missing chunk were several layers of honeycomb where it's brain should have been, overflowing with golden honey which leaked off the front of it's body down to his desk and then the floor. Clutched in the better of it's two hands was a teacup.

As he looked again, Luna had one in front of her too.

Harry collected himself in a beat of silence, and deliberately did not drop his wand from where it lay in his hand, still ready to go to work.

"So, Luna dear, who is your friend?"

Luna looked to her companion, whose face creased into a horrific, but very pleased, grin. It's words came slow, ploddingly, like they had to be forced from the thick honey that seemed to make up it's insides.

"I… am Aloysius… Benjamin… Grimmelsby… Lovegood… And I… Am very… Very… Pleased to… Meet you."

"This!," Luna said brightly, "is great-great-grandfather Aloysius, and he and I are here to help you do your job. It's quite important, you know."

Harry uneasily slunk into his other guest chair at her knowing wink. This was weird, but Luna Lovegood was here once more, in his office. Whatever happened next, he was certain that it would psychologically damaging, sexually confusing, and probably of the utmost importance to the national interests of the British Ministry of Magic. She was nice like that.

Great-great-grandfather Aloysius Benjamin Grimmelsby-Lovegood gave him what he supposed was a patient smile from the other side of the desk.

"Tea?"

"Please," Harry responded automatically.

Luna stood from his desk and busied herself with his electric kettle, leaving Harry to stare at what she claimed was her distant relative. The thick and, Harry bounced a foot on the grass just to be sure, healthy growth reminded him of something. He couldn't quite recall it, but right there on the tip of his tongue. He recalled reading about something like this. The honey-wood golem only made it worse. This was a special kind of weird that he knew about, but what in the hell was it?

Luna turned back to him, steaming cup in hand, "And how do you take it?"

Distracted by the explanation for all of this which he could just feel with his fingertips, he responded, "With honey, usual-"

Before he could take it back, she offered the cup to her distant relative, who slowly raised a hand and dripped the honey of the living dead directly into his cup. It was horrifying, Harry couldn't look away.

Then, deliberately, and with a twinkle in her eye, she passed the cup to him and resumed her former position. Her boots just slightly closer to the picture of his family.

She, and her esteemed ancestor, raised their cups to their lips, and drank. Suppressing confusion, and disgust, and horror, embracing his proud heritage rather, Harry raised his own cup to his lips and drank.

Oh.

Oh.

A tickle becomes a pain, becomes a suture-crack, becomes a cesarean gasp, and the third eye opens like a bullet hole obscenity. He groaned, leaning back in his chair. Insight. Deep breaths, he needed deep breaths. Enlightenment hurts, Sweetling.

"Two days ago an enchantress in Taiwan used a ritual to force open a path into the world tree. She intends to use the old roads, the back paths that wind around the tree, to gain access to the keystone beneath Atlantis."

"How, ugh," with his head in his hands, Harry's voice came out hollow, "How do you know any of that, how… Why did you have to drug me to tell me that?"

"I didn't drug you. I initiated you. I need help, Harry Potter. There aren't many of us left that know those old paths, but that doesn't change the fact that it is vital that they not be used for access like this. The secret places of the earth should not be plundered, those vaults should not be explored. The roots of the world tree must stay safe, and solitary."

The buzzing in his head had only gotten louder, Harry could barely make out her words, but already he was beginning to understand them. It was insight, alright. He could feel the currents of power in the room, in a way he hadn't been able to since Neville's bachelor party with all those 'magic' mushrooms he cultivated. The old zombie glowed, he could see and feel it through his eyelids.

"Luna if you wanted to go out into the woods and get high, my birthday is in like two weeks. We could just have gone and done this then."

"We don't have much time," she said, standing up from his desk, and stepping around to him, "It is written: Bring not the uninitiated to walk on the sacred boughs."

Carding her hands through his messy hair she continued, "Matter is both wave and particle and let me tell you, Harry Potter, wave interference and cancellation is a messy business."

The old zombie looked on across these proceedings, interested but unaffected. Taking another sip of it's tea, finding it not to his taste, and dribbling more honey from his fingers into the mix, "Time… Is short… Grand daughter… We… Must be… About… Our dark… Work."

His gasping, oozing voice was just strange enough that it drilled through the pain and the consciousness-cracking awareness that Harry was cast adrift in. He followed it like a slippery anchor line back to the surface.

"Luna, how do you know all of this? Your last owl was from the Canadian Rockies, what were you even doing in Taiwan?"

Not stopping her calming ruffling of his hair, she replied, "Oh Harry, the initiated feel every intrusion onto the branches of the world tree as if they had been carved on themselves. It is no small thing to bore a hole through the bark of the great tree and attune one's self to the path they seek. But there are so few of us left. Now one more, I think."

She smiled down at him, though he didn't see, his eyes still closed and his head still in his hands.

Pulling him to his feet, she looped her arm into his and guided him up and forward, "Grandfather, I think the time is now."

Harry watched through his eye lids, he watched using his soul, as the long dead honey-man stood in slow creaking movements and walked to the nearest wall in his office. There, the power flowing through the wood of the man joined with the power that was suddenly flowing through the wood paneling of the wall. The movement was mesmerizing, he opened his eyes, allowing them to water as he saw a path open into an eternal spring. The grass at his feet was renewed again, the scents of flowers in their first bloom, the feel of trees with their leaves unfurled to the air for the first time, and the sound of buzzing, bees always busy in their service to the hive, sustaining the world around them. There was a bright light, a translucent hint of the honey comb, the load-bearing weave that underpinned the world they knew, holding it steady.

That's where he knew all of this from. The words, taken at the time from a book that hadn't even been in the Forbidden section, reached across the decades, echoing again in his head. The hollow earth, the world beneath, described by dozens of mad men and prophets, best known to the uninitiated by the old Norse tales of the hidden roads and trails that crisscrossed the world tree.

Agartha.

He knew now, old facts lining up with the sudden bursts of insight that still burst like fireworks across the inside of his skull, what this was.

Luna, patient and unrelenting, brought him alongside her as she walked toward the light. Grand Father Aloysius Benjamin Grimmelsby-Lovegood stepped ahead of them to the very edge of the honey comb membrane that separated them from the sweet buzzing heat of the other side. His movement more fluid the closer they came to the cusp, he raised a hand and caressed the line, his fingers suddenly dexterous and clever.

"Ah… As much as I love visiting you dear Grand daughter, I need to keep my place in the reflection of her great heat, where it shines here, at the edge of the world. It keeps me moving, even as I decompose," with a great sigh he hefted himself onto a protrusion from the wall.

He shifted in his seat, until the lines and whorls of his body met those of the wood around him. He blended into his surrounds suddenly, fit in place like he was part of the portal itself, even the exposed portion of his brain was covered by a short growth from the wall.

"It is my life to see you move through here, and one day I will die to keep you tied to your path."

Luna stood with him at the place where their world met another and became more, still assisting him.

"As it ever was Grand father. My love to Grandmother, I'll see you again soon."

His eyes were closed, and he idly waved them along the path. When his arm fell again to his side he fit fully into the wall, like he had never been separate in the first place.

Harry, shuffling and squinting against he light, and Luna, bushy-tailed and bright-eyed, passed through the veil.

Harry's perception of the world broke down, his mind unable to handle the information forwarded to it by his senses. He walked a path that was a road, but it was also a singular branch off a singular and titanic trunk, but it was also a great hand whose fingers twisted and moved him like a chip in the hands of a card shark, end-over-end, to-and-fro.

Around him he saw the reflections of divinity, lights too bright from the auras of creatures too Right to be witness by a degenerate mind, even one so kissed by the Deathly Hallows. They were back-lit against auras that were their equal and opposite, Wrong, cast as the moon, a perverse reflection of Rightness. Between them all walked beings that were guardians of the roads and the woods and the hand, Leschen, Dryads, SWAT officers, Tax men, clock-work automatons ten meters tall. They spaced the others, maintaining the distance and the integrity of the path.

They walked the path, passing through the veins of an infinitely greater being, an immaculate machine, and as Harry received a full-body lesson in synesthesia, a voice insinuated itself into his world.

Breathe, Sweetling. This too shall pass. Pains are relative, and this one will become very small, in time.

He blacked out.

The Western Sea, Traveling Court of the Unseelie Aes Seidhe, The Good Ship Kraftwerks, Upper deck - Unknown Date

There was a sensation of falling, a transition from the unreal/hyper-real world back to a physical one, the sensations falling away shocked him awake.

Beneath his feet the world seemed to sway side to side, but he was firmly anchored by Luna, who still held her arm in his.

He felt like his head had been dunked in a barrel of ice-water, a not unfamiliar feeling for anyone that had one drink too many at the Three Broomsticks. Madame Rosmerta was a harsh mistress, but she usually let up after one or two dunks. Harry was shivering in an instant, this was a constant thing.

Blinking the smoke and mirrors of that place, Agartha, out of his eyes, he got a proper look around. It was dark, and they stood on the upper deck of a wide ship. Lanterns were lit on the ends of all the yard arms, they reflected off the seas and lit up the folded sails underneath them. They rode in the midst of a great fleet, strung out single file in a line unbroken as it passed from the horizon behind them to the horizon in front. In the distance, ice bergs pierced the otherwise calm seas, their grating and crashing forming an atonal accompaniment to the thumping bass beat coming from below his feet.

"W-w-w-where a-are we?" he choked out, his teeth chattering all the way through.

Luna seemed unaffected by the cold, but her smile had changed. She was showing considerably more teeth.

"We're seeking help from the one group of people that could possibly get us to the lower branches of the tree faster than our Taiwanese friend. The only people that maintain outposts at that depth. You stand aboard The Good Ship Kraftwerks, palace-ship of a friend of mine."

"Fr-fr-friend?"

"Remember to bow deeper than anyone that bows to you, don't look anyone in the eyes if you can help it, and don't take anything that anyone offers you ever," she said, patting his hand, "but most importantly, don't be anything less than completely respectful to our hosts at all times. We stand in the great procession of the unseelie court, Harry Potter."

"Un-un-unseelie? F-f-fuck."

"Oh don't give them ideas, that won't end well for either of us. Now come along."

Harry gulped, fumbling his wand as he cast a warming charm over himself. They moved down some steps to the main deck, and Luna opened a door leading inward. They were welcomed by flashing lights and a deep electronic bass line. The dark elves were having a bit of a rave.

[A/N]: So here it is, the first of the chapters taking place in the past. This is a different Harry, he hasn't seen quite as much, his wife hasn't tried to kill him yet for one thing. I'll be telling these stories in parallel, hopefully in a way that is compelling. The chapters will jump back and forth, right now it seems like it'll be alternating but that may change as things develop.

I should also note that some of the ideas and details in this chapter, and likely the rest of these blasts to the past, are stolen from The Secret World, an excellent MMO from Funcom. It won't be a substantial crossover, but elements off the game's backstory were too close to the direction I was heading for me to not steal.

I hope you enjoy.

Before the Author's ramblings, this chapter weighs in at 4,666 words. As always, I welcome PMs and reviews.