Title: Child of Quetzalcoatl
Author: TardisIsTheOnlyWaytoTravel
Setting: Sixth year. Book-compliant up until then.
Plot: On his sixteenth birthday Harry undergoes some startling changes, and new knowledge is brought to light. James Potter is not his father; Harry is not even human, but something he never imagined. Meanwhile, the Otherworld is fading, and the old magics are draining from the world. Harry enters his sixth year with carefully-guarded secrets, changing loyalties, and the emergence of his Slytherin side…
Author notes:
This story was inspired in part by the HP fanfic 'Faith" by Dragongirl16 here on ffnet.
Rhiannon rings like a bell through the night and wouldn't you love to love her
She takes to the sky like a bird in flight and who will be her lover
All your life you've never seen a woman taken by the wind
Would you stay if she promised you heaven
Will you ever win?
She is like a cat in the dark and then she is the darkness
She rules her life like a fine skylark and when the sky is starless
All your life you've never seen a woman taken by the wind
Would you stay if she promised you heaven
Would you ever win?
Will you ever win…
~ 'Rhiannon', Fleetwood Mac
CHILD OF QUETZALCOATL
CHAPTER ONE
-
The woman moved along the Paths, sadly taking in the state of the Otherworld. The twilight sky had faded to grey, and the Paths were shrouded in mist. No green things, and no life stirred but her.
The Otherworld was slowly fading, just like everything else. She didn't know precisely how long it had been since she had once seen one of her counterparts, but she knew that it had been a long time indeed.
Once, the Otherworld had flourished. The light was dimmer than the mortal realm, but greenish rather than grey. Plant grew everywhere between the Paths, and strange, queer creatures had been seen often, while the gods and goddesses watched. But then, the One God came and they had been forgotten. Slowly they had faded, one by one, until only she was left, a mere ghost of her former self.
Rhiannon sighed at what the Paths had become and returned to her lands.
oo o0o oo
Harry Potter stared out the window, unable to sleep.
This wasn't particularly unusual. Since his godfather's death at the end of the school year, and the disastrous battle of the Department of Mysteries – not to mention that prophecy – Harry had found himself brooding a lot. Most nights he had trouble sleeping.
Instead he would sit by his window, staring out at the silent, moonlit neighbourhood. It was rather peaceful, really.
Harry glanced at the watch Hermione had sent him. It was a special wizarding watch, that not only showed the time and date, but could be programmed to monitor the status of friends and family.
11.59pm. Harry smiled mirthlessly. In another minute he'd be sixteen. Another useless birthday. He counted down the seconds. 9… 8… 7… 6… 5…4… 3…2…1…
Pain erupted throughout Harry's body and he lost consciousness.
-
Harry slowly became aware of a dull ache that pervaded his entire body. He groaned, opening bleary eyes and wincing as the pale morning light hit them.
Merlin, he felt different. It wasn't just pain, it was… something else. Slowly, muscles throbbing, Harry pulled himself into a sitting position.
Staggering to his feet, Harry unsteadily made his way to the bathroom, to see if his reflection revealed why he hurt so much.
Harry blinked to clear his blurry vision, and his jaw promptly dropped.
-
The being that he saw in the mirror was not the boy he was used to seeing. His reflection was far taller than he was, and was far more muscular. His hair was no longer springy and messy, but had tamed somewhat to become disordered waves. His face was thinner, and more angular, and his green eyes glowed with a strange light, their pupils slitted like those of a snake. He didn't need glasses, either.
Most astonishing of all, however, were the enormous, feathered, golden wings that had sprouted from his back.
"This is weird," Harry muttered. He was in shock. "Oh so weird. Even for me. I've got wings, bloody wings. And snake eyes. And why do I feel like I've had a personality transplant?"
At this last thought, foreign knowledge floated to the top of his mind, knowledge that he instinctively knew was part of his mysterious transformation.
Harry closed his eyes at the rush of information that whipped past his minds eye.
Ritual… pregnant Lily Potter… paternity replacement – divine invocation… succeeded… Harry was actually …
"Bloody hell!" Harry's eyes flew open. "I'm the child of Quetzalcoatl! And I'm a god!"
As this last piece of information assimilated itself, Harry's nervous system decided that this was just one shock too many. For the second time that night Harry Potter crumpled to the floor, unconscious, this time in a dead faint.
oo o0o oo
Harry regained consciousness a few minutes after he had fainted.
The back of his head smarted, and when he tried to sit up pain stabbed him between his eyes and blackness crept back again, so that he flopped back onto the tiles.
The blackness dispersed again after a moment, leaving him staring at the ceiling, still in a fair amount of pain.
"Note to self," Harry muttered, "never faint when you only have hard tiles to break your fall."
As Harry lay and waited for the pain to subside, he thought about the new knowledge in his head and his new state.
He knew what had happened to the gods and goddesses. Their power was tied to the people's belief in them, and when they began believing in the One God instead, first their power and then their existence had faded into nothingness.
Harry thought that humanity had made a silly choice, really. True, the Old Gods could be cruel, and wild, and unpredictable; but they could also care, and intervene, in a way that the One God did not. The One God was a watcher, detached and impartial, quite distant from humanity. The Old Gods resembled the people in a way the One God did not, and interacted with the people in a way that was possible only for them.
Harry knew that he was lucky that he was the child of a mortal. Otherwise he would have ceased to exist as well. But the mortal blood in his veins grounded him, tied him to reality in a way that the other gods could not access.
Only two others still existed, he knew; his father, and Rhiannon.
Quetzalcoatl had survived purely because he was an oddity.
The Winged Serpent, Harry thought. He did not need the belief of humans to survive, because he had his snakes. Somehow, Harry knew, in a way that was beyond his understanding, each of the snakes in existence was bound to Quetzalcoatl, and they provided his grounding force. He didn't exist properly – he was suspended in time and space, and could do nothing unless called upon – but nonetheless was awake and aware. Harry almost laughed as a sudden thought came to him.
No wonder I'm a Parselmouth. As Quetzalcoatl's child I'm Lord of the Snakes. It was nothing to do with Voldemort after all.
Rhiannon was a different case from Quetzalcoatl. The Moon Goddess, like Harry, had mortal blood in her veins. He didn't know much more about her, though.
-
Harry sighed.
He could think about all of that later, though, really. What he needed to do right now was work out how to hide his sudden changes.
Gingerly Harry sat up, but it appeared that he had recovered from bashing his head on the tiles as this time he was able to remain upright.
He stood and gazed into the mirror. His other changes he could pass off as normal, if slightly odd, but his wings and eyes had to be hidden.
Harry tapped the smooth surface of the cabinet top as he thought, carefully rifling through his new knowledge. After several moments of thinking, Harry carefully began to construct an illusion of non-existence to hide his wings.
Harry delicately nipped a strand of magic with his fingers and pulled it across to twine with another one. He let it go to do the same to another strand. Slowly Harry wove a net of magic around his wings. By the time he finished, no one would be able to tell that they existed.
It took half an hour, but once the web was complete Harry felt a great deal of satisfaction. No one would be able to detect his wings by either sight or magic, and if his wings revealed themselves by coming into contact with something then no one would notice.
Tired, Harry took several deep breaths before beginning on his eyes. It didn't need as much effort as his wings had, but was far more difficult. Each strand had to be handled very gently, and slowly tugged into place around its fellows.
Finally, Harry finished hiding both his wings and his eyes. Exhausted by the morning's revelations, transitions and tasks, Harry made his way back down the hallway to his bedroom and promptly fell asleep.
-
If Albus Dumbledore had known about the events that had taken place at Privet Drive in the early hours of the morning, he would have been greatly disturbed by the possibilities that Harry's transformation had set in motion.
As it was, however, the only sign of what was to come was a faint ethereal breeze that blew through the Otherworld. Nothing had stirred in the Otherworld for many long years. Rhiannon felt it, and wondered.
-
END CHAPTER