XXX
It was weird, not having the lightning-bolt scar on her forehead. Not to mention her sudden lack of upper-body strength, though that at least was being rectified. Her height was unfortunately a lost cause, but then she'd never been much taller than 'average', so she hadn't lost that much.
Though there was still the possibility that she'd manage to squeeze a few more inches out of it, seeing as she was biologically closer to sixteen, than the eighteen that her legal identity claimed. Permanent aging-potions were finicky things, and it was best not to skip any more years than absolutely necessary.
As for Yharnam, it'd been three days, and Harriet had reached the point where she felt she had a pretty decent grasp of what to expect.
The beasts were numerous and made Aragog and his brood seem like nice and friendly members of society. The beast-hunters that could still move around were unchanged enough to be identifiably human, and were all stark-raving mad when they were capable of speaking at all. And the weapons and armors that the beast-hunters were using had definitely been enchanted somehow, to the point where the blades would cut through stone and their clothes would deflect a lot of the curses unless hit dead-on. The fact that they were also capable of moving at speeds that Harriet would've more commonly associated with vampires was just icing on the cake.
Harriet wholeheartedly understood why so many Curse Breakers had been of the opinion that Yharnam should've just been burnt to the ground, instead of explored.
She didn't really agree, but she definitely understood them.
She'd had plenty of too-close encounters with werewolves and other magical monsters over the years, but nothing quite prepared you for the madness of Yharnam. Nothing quite prepared you for the stench of blood and rot, for the labyrinthine layout of the city, for the frightened screams of things that'd once been human, and for a lot of sharp teeth attached to things that moved so fast that Harriet barely registered them moving at all.
If she'd entered Yharnam with a team of Curse Breakers, she would've probably retreated a long time ago. But Harriet's specialty was surviving, and whenever she stopped to think about what was going on, she'd end up thinking about the fact that everyone she knew and loved were lost to her.
That Hermione and Ron and Bill and Fleur and the Weasleys and Andromeda and Teddy, all might as well have been dead-... No, that wasn't true. They were still living happily in that world, it was just Harriet who'd gone and gotten herself killed. Except she hadn't even died properly, so she wouldn't be able to meet all the people she'd lost in the war against Voldemort.
Harriet side-stepped the charge of a rat-like thing the size of a horse, lashing out with her wand to make sure that it wasn't alive enough to attack a second time, and scrambled on top of a nearby roof.
The beast-hunter took that as an opportunity to strike, and Harriet rolled away from the sledge-hammer that cratered the shingles where she'd been moments before.
She wasn't a very good duelist, in truth. She didn't know nearly as many spells as Hermione, and she didn't have the smooth transitions between attacking and defending that Ron did. She didn't have the creativity with her spells that Luna did, or the frantic maneuverability that Ginny had.
All that Harriet really had was experience, and the fact that she hadn't actually specialized in any one thing. Hermione always fumbled between attacking and defending, worrying about which spells to use. Ron was too predictable with his small collection of spells. Luna got so caught up in creativity that she didn't think far enough ahead to plan. And Ginny usually exhausted herself with her constant movement.
It didn't really matter how magically resistant the beast-hunter's cloak was, when Harriet turned the roof underneath their feet into quicksand. They tried to dodge to a part of the roof that was untouched, but that just meant that they ran straight into a piercing-charm designed to punch through armored tanks.
There was a moment of flailing from the beast-hunter as most of their head disappeared, either magic or biology causing the body to nearly brain Harriet with their hammer. But she'd expected as much. The beasts of Yharnam never died easily.
Harriet glanced around the rooftop that she found herself on, trying to fit her position into a mental map of the city.
You'd think it'd be easy enough to guess where you were when you were standing on a rooftop, but of course Yharnam's architecture was about as consistent as the Burrow had been. Less in the sense that only magic could possibly be holding the shambling mess together, and more in the sense that Harriet was standing on a rooftop that was also a stairwell to a bridge the was a house, and to her left was a cathedral that might be a warehouse leading into the sewers.
Quite frankly, whoever had designed the sprawling madness that was Yharnam, they definitely deserved whatever ungodly thing might've happened to them in this city.
It was still beautiful, with its grand spires and foreboding gargoyles, with its sheer depths and terrifying heights. Though it was kind of obvious that – for all that it'd once been as modernized as it got – the sewer-system of the city was more than a few centuries woefully out of date.
XXX
Yharnam had originally been hidden from the inside, and Harriet wasn't entirely sure how they'd managed to create a ward that covered the entire city, when the city was already overrun.
She had a suspicion that it had something to do with the clergy-members, but no Curse Breaker in her own time-line had really solved that mystery. In fact, there wasn't much of any kind of mystery that they'd managed to solve about Yharnam.
After the first few dozen Curse Breakers died, the following ones adopted a scorched earth protocol, and a lot of things were lost as a result. It saved a hell of a lot of lives – comparatively anyway – but it left them with a lot more questions than answers.
There weren't really any wards worth speaking of, but there were a lot of things that didn't quite die. Clinging to life even when they'd been reduced to nothing more than bone and dust. And that made her wonder if there was some kind of animation-curse over the whole city.
In fact, it was possible that someone had built the entire city as a ritual of sorts. It'd explain why the alleyways were so confusing, if they'd been partially designed like that to convince its residents not to pay too much attention to the exact nature of the layout of the streets.
They did know that at some point or another the Church of Blood-Healing had poisoned the water-supply, likely as a way to make sure that the citizens willingly participated in the experiments with healing magic that they were doing.
But, considering how the wards surrounding the city seemed to have been set up by a single individual rather than a group of people, there was definitely something strange going on with Yharnam.
Even if Yharnam hadn't been a plague-ridden wasteland of murderous beasts, the idea of a single person setting up wards like that was-... It was possible, technically, but it'd likely take them years upon years to do, and would likely unravel as a result, since they wouldn't have been made already weaved-together, which was kind of an important thing to do with wards that you wanted to last.
Still, if the layout of the city was somehow involved, Harriet needed to make a map. A proper and very detailed map.
And she needed to do that, and take the measurements she needed to, all without getting herself killed when a nearby pile of bones sprung to life and started trying to tear her limb-from-limb.
Which was why she'd had to rethink her clothes, since she'd be wading through the sewers as well. And that had led her to thinking about the fact that she was a young woman now, instead of a nearly-middle-aged man.
It hadn't been too difficult to get used to thinking of herself as Harriet Azalea instead of Harry Potter. In fact, it'd been suspiciously easy ever since someone had done some kind of magic one evening that'd left her writhing in pain as if her blood had been on fire.
She'd never experienced it before, but she was pretty sure that that'd been Rose Potter being disowned from the Potter family, to make sure that nobody used her blood or body against her remaining family-members.
It was common practice when purebloods were exposed to grave-robbers or people were confirmed dead without an available body to bury.
There were a lot of things a person could do to someone if they had access to their unresisting blood-relatives.
Still, it'd only been when she'd been forced to take a break from her constant life-or-death fights with the beasts in order to make a map, that Harriet had started to realize that she wasn't an old man anymore.
As in, she wasn't capable of growing a beard anymore, so she didn't have to worry about stubble. And apparently, she actually got her period and all of that nonsense as well.
Thankfully, despite ending up in a different body, Harriet still knew herself well enough to be perfectly aware that she had no interest in being a parent. She'd had her child already, and Teddy was already old enough that he was probably graduating from Hogwarts right now.
That already stung more than enough for her, without being constantly reminded of the memories she'd already made raising Teddy.
No, Harriet had no interest in having children. And so very sensibly reacted to her first period by setting up a magical ritual designed to basically completely remove her womb and all its associated organs.
It'd originally been a kind of punishment in some distant part of India, designed to completely remove a woman's ability to have children. Considering that that particular area had at the time been of the belief that having children was a woman's entire purpose in life, it'd been considered a form of torture, despite the process itself being relatively painless.
It'd fallen out of use since then, whether that be due to women actually beginning to be treated like human beings, or because that particular civilization went and dropped a mountain on top of themselves. It was really all the same for Harriet's purposes.
She didn't want children, and she didn't want to suffer through periods, so now both of her problems were solved.
That still left her with mapping out Yharnam however, and for all that its insane layout made it feel as if they'd crammed all of Manhattan into the space of a suburban backyard, Yharnam really wasn't a small city.
XXX
Whatever it'd been before it'd transformed, now it was the size of a giant, and looked a bit like a cross between a deer and a werewolf.
It'd been nearly three months since Harriet had slipped through the wards surrounding Yharnam, and she'd made a pretty good approximation of a map for most of the city. The city was still completely overrun with beasts, and her measurements were likely inaccurate, but there were definitely patterns emerging.
It wasn't like any ritual she'd seen before, but it was deliberate enough that Harriet had been forced to start trying to brute-force the arithmancy for it.
Someone had made the city as a sort of gigantic focal-point for what looked vaguely like a vision-amplifying ritual. Considering that one of the religions Yharnam was based around seemed to reference 'the formless Oedon', Harriet was willing to bet that the religions really hadn't been about keeping the muggles from looking too deeply into the truths of the Church of Blood-Healing.
Someone with a lot of knowledge about magic seemed to have been trying to commune with a god. Though, Harriet was willing to bet that whatever this 'Oedon'-thing was, it was more likely to be an Other, which was an entirely different can of worms.
Why anyone would want to worship a creature so out-of-touch with reality that it literally warped reality around it until it started to dissolve, Harriet didn't know.
People were weird about religion though, and it was entirely possible that the Church had decided that they needed to 'ascend' into whatever hellish nightmare of unreality existed beyond their own dimension.
It wouldn't be the first time, and it probably wouldn't be the last. Though it made Harriet wonder about how truthful the theory of Yharnam experimenting with lycanthropy really was.
And if they hadn't been experimenting with werewolves and blood-magic in order to accelerate healing, then what the hell had they been experimenting with and why had they all turned into monsters?
It was also interesting that it seemed as if those who'd been part of the clergy turned into bigger and more monstrous creatures than the ordinary citizens.
The reason that Harriet had approached this particular antler-wearing specimen of warped biology, was that she had a theory about exactly what'd been done to seal away Yharnam.
For a single person to be able to set up a ward that covered that kind of distance, they would've needed to have something to resonate against. A kind of echo to carry the wards into the place where they needed to be.
A good example would be someone using warning-beacons in old times to act as a relay from horizon to horizon. Except it was less someone at the next beacon setting their own one alight when they spotted the other, and more someone using the presence of the beacons to determine how high they'd need to aim a fireball-spell in order to light the next one.
Basically, it was finicky and extremely inefficient, but it was the only way Harriet could imagine a single person setting up a ward like this without somehow being in multiple places at the same time.
And whilst Yharnam didn't really have any conventional ward-stones surrounding it, it was built as a ritual circle of a sort. However, that still shouldn't have been enough, unless there was something inside of that circle that could be used to resonate against.
Which had been the reason she'd started tracking down what might've been some of the anchoring-points for the original ritual – whatever it had truly been meant to do. And that had in turn led her to this creature.
Now, if Harriet's guess was correct, the wards were staying up and somehow helping to reanimate even the beasts that Harriet killed, and they were being held up by the presence of these truly monstrous beasts.
In other words, if she wanted to avoid burning the entirety of Yharnam to the ground with Fiendfyre, she was going to need to destroy all of these anchor-points. Which sounded all nice and simple when she'd been imagining that the anchor-points had been some kind of religious artifact or whatever, but it looked as if it really was blood-magic to the core, and that it'd tied itself to the life-force of the giant monsters that'd once been clergy-members.
For all that Harriet had a lot of confidence in her ability to survive almost anything the world could throw at her, she really didn't want to rush into combat with something werewolf-like that was the size of a giant.
She'd much prefer to just hide in the rafters and set up something that would kill it before she had to fight it.
And there was that Mongolian siege-spell that she'd been thinking of trying out.
XXX
It'd taken her five months since entering Yharnam to get to the point where she could properly unravel the wards covering the city.
Most of the anchor-points had been unpleasant, but one in particular had been very disturbing.
Harriet didn't have a phobia for spiders. A certain trained wariness of them, after her encounter with Aragog and his brood, but not a phobia. But there was something about a giant spider with hundreds of eyes, constantly conjuring more – if smaller – spiders into existence, that kind of just made her very aware of the damn things.
As far as Harriet could tell, that anchor-point in particular hadn't so much been at the edges of the magical circle that was Yharnam, as it'd been slap down in the middle of it. Which would imply that, whatever their actual goals with the ritual they'd built the city for, the result they'd ended up with was a giant spider with hundreds of eyes.
Considering that she'd run into some texts in a lecture-hall that seemed to imply that their goal was to increase their own enlightenment by 'lining their brains with eyes', Harriet was willing to bet that it'd been something of a monkey's paw.
There'd also been a few mentions of somebody or something called 'Rom', and considering that it had at least at one point been used in conjunction with 'spider', she was guessing that that'd been its name.
She wasn't really sure what she ought to do with that information, but it was there.
Actually unraveling the wards however, required Harriet to get to the place from where they'd been made. Which had taken a lot of searching, because the caster hadn't exactly been in the center of Yharnam's magical circle at the time.
There might be plenty of reasons for that, but Harriet's general assumption was that it was because it was either locked off from the caster, or he just hadn't wanted to deal with trying to keep Rom from murdering him for long enough to actually set up the wards.
Still, in comparison to the several years it'd taken Curse Breakers back in her old world to break through all of the wards and clear out Yharnam, she was making ridiculously good time. Obviously, she hadn't died and been forced to replace herself without having taken any notes or given the newer her an idea of what she'd be up against, so that it'd taken the Curse Breakers as long as it had was perfectly understandable, considering the circumstances.
In the end, the caster turned out to have been an old man in a wheelchair. She'd found him in the middle of a graveyard, surrounded by beautifully blooming wild flowers everywhere you looked, and next to him was a human-sized doll that Harriet suspected had at some point been able to move.
From the small workshop not that far from it, Harriet was fairly certain that this was where they'd been burying the beast-hunters. And the fact that it seemed to be filled to the very brim with gravestones, painted a somewhat horrifying picture of how long and how extensively they'd been operating.
There wasn't much left of the man, in truth. There was the wheelchair, and the peg-leg that was likely the reason for it. And there was the hunter-quality armor that looked faded and worn with age, even beyond what had happened to the beast-hunters still roaming the city.
Harriet didn't know how involved the man had been with the experiments of Yharnam, but considering that he'd managed to tap into the obscure magical circle in order to set up the wards, Harriet sincerely doubted that he'd been oblivious to it.
It didn't look like he'd actually survived casting the spells however, because even now he was slowly withering away before Harriet's eyes. He'd likely been preserved by the anchor-points, and without them around, the wards were destabilizing to the point of using his flesh as a sacrificial battery of sorts.
But for those wards to be able to do that, he must've used a magical ritual fueled by his own life-force in order to set up the wards in the first place.
In other words, even if he'd participated in the rituals, even if he'd participated in the experiments, it was obvious that he'd attempted to repent somehow by forever sealing away the horrors of Yharnam from the outside world.
And, as Harriet carefully brought the final ward down to make sure that it didn't trigger a cascade-failure, she was left to see as the last remnants of the man's body turned to dust in the breeze. And for a moment she could've sworn that she'd seen a relieved smile on his lips, even when he'd been nothing but a corpse.
XXX
One of the problems with Yharnam was that Harriet couldn't just donate the dig back to the people it ought to belong to.
In a way, that was why she'd gone looking for it in the first place. It'd been politically and culturally disowned by literally every country in Europe, mere weeks after its reported disappearance. In fact, it'd been the main contributor to all blood-magic in Europe being banned practically overnight.
Yharnam had not been a popular city-state. It'd been hated for its meteoric rise to fame and fortune, and it'd been hated for its ability to perform miracles with healing that had left even their magical neighbors in awe, and it'd been hated for its constant disregard for the Statute of Secrecy.
The only reason it hadn't literally been invaded was that its neighbors were too terrified that the other neighbors would gang up on the instigator in order to protect Yharnam, and possibly annex it outright for the sake of defending it better.
In other words, Yharnam's miraculous abilities with healing magic had left its neighboring countries unable to really do much about its policies. And they'd hated it for that too.
No, unless Harriet wanted to adopt the Gringotts-policy of selling everything in the dig to the highest bidder, she was in a bit of a rough spot.
When Harriet had started to go on digs by her lonesome for the first time, she'd decided that it was more important to give back the cultural heritage to the people who'd lost it, than it was to make more money for herself. She'd had plenty of money in the bank, after all, more than enough to live comfortably until her dying day.
That situation was a bit different now, seeing as she'd used up pretty much all of the money that she'd stolen from the Lestrange's vault, but by now it was a point of pride for her.
She wouldn't sell history to the highest bidder. She wouldn't let some rich snob fill their private library with things that the public ought to have access to. She wouldn't.
So, if she wasn't able to sell it cheaply to whatever people it ought to belong to, and she wouldn't sell it to the highest bidder, that left her with two options.
One, she could try to sell it as a shared academical thing to several of the magical schools and universities in the neighboring countries. Or two, she could try to sell it to the ICW.
Considering that the European part of the ICW had very explicitly tried to force bans on blood-magic on the rest of the members ever since it'd been created, there was a distinct chance that the ICW would react to the idea of owning Yharnam by gleefully figuring out an excuse to quarantine and burn the entire city to the ground.
Which left somehow brokering a united sales-pitch to several rival universities and schools, and not have them laugh her out of the room.
Then again, she could maybe just donate it outright, instead of trying to get some kind of money for it, and then just use the fame she made from that to promote her book. Which was-... It was a lot better of an idea than the other options, but it also reminded Harriet that she'd need to rewrite her entire book from scratch, which sounded like a tragedy all by itself.
She didn't think she'd need to actually publish it before she donated Yharnam away. Just-... She'd need to write it out properly before her name completely faded out of memory, which likely meant that she still wouldn't have a lot of time available to do it.
Thankfully, she'd kind of burnt several pieces of the book into her brain word-for-word, thanks to a note-taking spell that she'd resorted to after a few mishaps where all of her previous notes had been destroyed. And it seemed as if those notes hadn't faded from her memory during her entry into this new world.
So she'd probably manage to get it published before the end of summer. It wouldn't be a pleasant experience, but then very few large projects were remotely pleasant to actually work on. Relieving and satisfying, yes. But not exactly the kind of thing that was just pure enjoyment.
So, after having gone through several weeks worth of paperwork to make sure that none of the rival academical institutions decided that they had somehow 'more access' than the others. She really hadn't wanted to stick around any longer than absolutely necessary, citing that she was writing a book and really needed to get back to her own academical pursuits, before legging it out of the country.
Which was why, by the time July rolled around, Harriet found herself back in Britain.
It was mostly down to habit, but there was a certain familiar comfort with being back in the country of her birth, even if it was in a different world. Though she hadn't quite expected what she'd found on her return.
Now, she'd known that the Potters had realized something had happened to their daughter's grave. What with the experience of being forcibly disowned from her blood-family. But she hadn't really expected them to take up arms about it.
Except, that was clearly what had happened.
Lily and James Potter had spent the last several months all but holding the Dark families of Magical Britain at wand-point, demanding them to confess whom among them had desecrated their daughter's grave.
Needless to say, none of them had confessed to anything of the like, and there was a lot of political unrest as the family of the Boy-Who-Lived started picking fights with a lot of very highly esteemed Noble Houses.
The Ministry was floundering between of course being on the side of the Potters, because necromancy was Dark magic and anyone employing it ought to be sentenced to Azkaban, especially if using it against a pureblood family. On the other hand, they were very keen on being able to continue to enjoy the various bribes paid to them by the Ancient and Noble Houses, and were very offended on their behalf that the Potters could accuse them of such a thing.
Theoretically, Harriet could put a stop to all of this chaos by admitting that the reason why Rose Potter's grave had been desecrated was down to it serving as some kind of landing-place for Harriet after her tumble through unreality. However, that'd likely raise a lot of flags, and might very well lead to her being strapped to a table deep down in the Department of Mysteries, as everyone poked and prodded at her.
So, obviously, she was going to keep her mouth shut and pretend as if this wasn't any of her business at all.
Apparently though, the Potters had recently shifted a bit of their offense towards Dumbledore.
Turns out, when your first-born son and only remaining child ends up facing off against a thousand-year-old basilisk, you tend to hold a grudge against anyone who was even remotely responsible for things reaching that point.
They hadn't been part of influencing the Board of Governors into sacking, but they had proven instrumental in making sure that he didn't get rehired as the Headmaster of Hogwarts.
It was kind of weird, trying to imagine what having actual parents would've done to Harriet's many memories of adventures through her time in Hogwarts. But she couldn't really fault them for interfering.
If Teddy had gone through half the troubles that Harriet had, she would've probably arrived at Hogwarts to have a talk with McGonagall at wand-point. As it was, all he'd ever really done was somehow land Fleur's eldest daughter as a girlfriend.
Which, whilst both hilarious and the sort of thing that made Andromeda very skeptical to his good sense, it hadn't turned out all that bad. Oh, so Victoire had been a bit of a 'bad influence' in how he dressed, and she was absolutely unapologetic about snogging him silly in public, but they were happy together.
And really, that was infinitely more precious than anything else.
So, even if Harriet had some difficulties trying to imagine that the Harry Potter of this world was a child with parents who'd pick a fight with Dumbledore in his defense, it probably shouldn't have been as surprising as it had been.
XXX
With Harriet visiting in mid-July, Flourish and Blotts were still a month off from actually ordering the books for the next school-year.
This was quite noticeable in that there were a wide variety of books but very few actual copies of the books in question. It was actually pretty ideal, seeing as it made browsing for books a lot easier than it would've been if half of the shelves were shock full of Hogwarts books, but it left the store feeling oddly hollow.
Grimacing slightly at catching a glimpse of Gilderoy Lockhart's collection, and remembering uncomfortably that the man wouldn't have revealed himself as a fraud in this world, since he wouldn't have spent the last few months masquerading as Hogwarts's Defense Professor, Harriet tried to focus on something else.
She still wasn't actually done with rewriting her book, though she'd managed to produce the rough draft. Mostly, she was here because she'd reached the point where a part of her absolutely loathed her own writing and the awkward phrasing and complicated summaries.
It wasn't a feeling that she hadn't had before, and the easiest way of dealing with it was to remember that everyone else were even worse than she was. So she was paging through countless books held in high esteem, and trying to suppress the urge to strangle the author for being such an incompetent bastard that even she could've written it better.
Arithmancy wasn't even her field and she still wanted to kick the author of 'Numerology and Grammatica' in the crotch.
'A History of Magic' was quite possibly the most limited overview of a book that could be imagined. It was a book entirely focused on the development of Magical Britain, with a few grudging nods towards things that only indirectly affected the country, such as Nicolas Flamel who was too French to properly brag about – but who taught Albus Dumbledore, who was as British as they came.
It was... decent enough at what it did, Harriet supposed. However, it never actually specified that it was supposed to only include things that directly affected Magical Britain, and which they could brag about, so it still annoyed her to no end.
If you were looking for an overview-book of the history of the magical side of the British isles? It really was quite excellent for that. If you were looking for an overview of the magical history of the world? Toss it in a fireplace and go back to digging through bookshelves.
It inflated Magical Britain's importance far too much for it to work effectively as anything beyond a reference-book, and considering how very lackluster the structure of the whole thing was? You could probably have a library worth of books, where every book included some kind of detail on a 'special occasion in history' and it would still be faster to dig through the library than trying to track down the information in 'A History of Magic' unless you'd memorized every page.
Harriet wasn't the kind of person to send howlers to people. If she wanted to yell at someone, she wanted to watch them suffer her anger properly. But, well-... if Bathilda Bagshot hadn't died during the war, Harriet would've probably been willing to make an exception.
"A history-buff, hmm?" The manager peeked over her shoulder, apparently far too bored to leave a witch alone to her browsing. "Every school-year Professor Binn asks for that book."
A chill went down Harriet spine. A sudden keening hatred towards the state of the world.
She'd completely forgotten about Binns. He'd either finally moved on during the Battle of Hogwarts, or he'd been part of what had ended up consumed in the Fiendfyre. Neither Harriet nor anyone else had really been interested enough to investigate the details.
He'd been gone, and nobody had really mourned him-... Actually, that wasn't entirely true. When Harriet had finally discovered history as a subject outside of the ghost's classes, she'd been a bit sad to realize that she couldn't go back to Hogwarts and spend a few hours screaming at the ghost for being a useless teacher who could make so many interesting things sound like wet cardboard.
And she was being forcibly reminded of that uselessness right now. Any history professor worth their salt should look at this book and cry, not demand that every single student – regardless of year – bring it to their lessons.
But that wasn't the fault of the manager, he only ordered what he knew Hogwarts demanded. Harriet sent a strained smile his way. "Sorry, but do you have a history-book that's actually worth the ink it's printed with?"
The manager's jaw dropped open, but even after he recovered from the shock, he didn't really have any recommendations worth to be called such. So Harriet smiled politely and got the hell out of his store.
She'd come to be reminded that she wasn't the most awful author in the world, but there was a difference between being reminded that a long-published author was shit at writing, and being forcibly reminded that the subject that she loved with all of her heart had been turned into a mockery by a professor who refused to even have the decency to keel over dead.
Clearly, something needed to be done about that.
XXX
Since she was breaking into Hogwarts anyway, Harriet decided to be productive by dealing with the Diadem at the same time.
Thankfully, because it was already late July, the school was pretty much completely abandoned, so she didn't need to dodge any hordes of students.
As far as she understood how things had changed without Dumbledore being allowed back as Headmaster of the school, McGonagall had become the new Headmistress. Which likely meant that she was keeping herself busy with looking for a new Transfiguration Professor.
Considering that she'd been Head of House as well, she'd probably need another Head of House for Gryffindor, along with someone else to step into the position of Deputy. Though, if things followed Harriet's memory, she'd also be trying to accommodate for Hagrid as the new Professor for Care of Magical Creatures.
As far as the newspapers had been concerned, Dumbledore's only real comment on his sacking had been to admit that he would miss the brightness of so many youngsters running around underfoot, and that he wished McGonagall all the best.
Harriet distinctly remembered what Hogwarts had been like under McGonagall during that mess of a year that she'd been the DADA Professor. Admittedly she'd mostly suppressed it for the sake of her stress-levels, but it'd clearly been ticking along just fine without Dumbledore around to keep it afloat, so she wasn't overly worried about it.
Also, she'd only seen it with her own eyes from the perspective of a Professor, and from what she'd heard circling back to her from Ron and Hermione's kids – because Teddy was a proud Hufflepuff and didn't exactly frequent the Gryffindor common-room – McGonagall had been a lot less involved in the life of her House than most.
If Harriet were to guess, the woman had been juggling what probably amounted to several full-time jobs at once. Head of House wasn't necessarily a full-time commitment, but it definitely ate more than a few hours. Professor was very much a full-time job. And whilst Deputy Headmistress might not sound like it was all that much more work than being Head of House, she'd been working under Dumbledore, who Harriet was pretty sure ended up sticking her with doing most of the paperwork – because he was busy trying to keep the politicians from thinking up new and corrupt ways to ruin the lives of muggleborns and muggles everywhere.
From what Harriet remembered of her own school-days, it hadn't been too bad, and they'd all been more-or-less autonomous thanks to the efforts of the Prefects – and McGonagall's much-appreciated ability to actually give that kind of power to people who didn't abuse it. But when comparing notes with the other Houses, and her successor? McGonagall had been a very distant figure.
It did make Harriet wonder who'd end up as the new Head of House for Gryffindor though. Tradition dictated that it needed to be a Gryffindor alumni, and that they were already an established professor in Hogwarts. Unfortunately, the only one of the current professors whom Harriet could say with certainty had actually been in Gryffindor, was Sirius Black.
And the idea of Sirius Black being left alone with a whole slew of young and impressionable children was-... Harriet honestly wasn't sure if it was hilarious or terrifying. Either way, she could imagine that similarly conflicting feelings were running through McGonagall at the thought of it.
Regardless, with Hogwarts closed down for the summer, breaking in was easier than ever.
In truth, breaking through the wards of Hogwarts generally translated into simply walking through them and not throwing any Dark magic at the castle or its inhabitants. And even then, it was more that the wards would start causing a great big ruckus for everyone to notice that someone had in fact used Dark magic, and that somebody should get on that and deal with it.
The only reason anyone could call Hogwarts 'the safest place in Magical Britain' was because of its staff-members. Never underestimate a master of a craft, who's then spent years teaching others in that craft and slowly accumulated even more creatively destructive ideas from their students.
But as long as you didn't arrive at Hogwarts with Dark magic, or with malicious intent towards its students or staff, the wards didn't really care more about you than they did about mosquitoes.
Certainly, someone could've tried turning Hogwarts into a fortress, and it did have some good defenses in the case of an outright war breaking out, but Hogwarts was first and foremost a school. And schools needed to be able to accept new students, and guests, and new staff-members, and-...
It was possible to simply screen everyone entering and leaving the castle's wards, but with how many people that amounted to, it wasn't exactly a painless procedure. And it would probably need to be updated regularly, weighing in between making sure that it allowed students to return from Hogsmeade weekends, and that it wasn't completely ineffectual at stopping graduated alumni – which would be most every wizard and witch in the country.
The basics of it translated into the idea of trying to frisk anyone stepping onto King's Crossing. Sure, it'd make everyone 'safe', but it'd cost a hell of a lot of time and effort, be hilariously inefficient, be a massive inconvenience for literally everyone involved to the point of violence, be highly likely to be abused for the sake of molestation or blackmail, and maybe stop a 'danger' once every decade-or-so since the people actually introducing the dangers would know to think of a way to bypass being frisked.
In short, Hogwarts had a lot of holes in its wards, because it was a school. And nobody was crazy enough to think that making it into an authoritarian fortress would be a good idea.
In Harriet's case, this meant that she basically had free rein to do what she was there to do. She was there to remove a Dark artifact before it could hurt anyone, and to save the students from an incompetent instructor. The fact that she was planning on saving the students by exorcising their professor into moving on into the afterlife, why she might even phrase that as a favor which she was granting him.
Not that she was going to do that. In fact, if she could've found an exorcism that was deliberately more painful for the ghost, she would've picked it without hesitation or guilt. She was really rather cross with the professor.
Still, there was no point in wandering through the corridors when she knew exactly how to get to her target from the outside. So, first things first, Harriet used a variant of a sticking charm in order to climb the outer walls up to the seventh floor, and then used a lock-picking charm to get through a window. After that, she walked back-and-forth a few times in front of a certain painting, and entered the Room of Requirement.
Harriet didn't really want to carry around a horcrux anywhere, because they were nasty and she didn't like them. However, she didn't actually know the location of the Amulet, and wasn't sure if Nagini had been turned into one yet.
The Ring, the Cup, and the Diary were all accounted for – considering the fact that the Chamber of Secrets had been closed again. But with Sirius Black alive and well, who knew where the Amulet had ended up after Regulus's sacrifice, and Harriet really didn't fancy the idea of trying to break into Grimmauld Place for no reason. So, Harriet needed something to help pinpoint it, which was where the Diadem came in.
All horcruxes were connected to the soul who'd made them, and that soul was in turn connected to all those horcruxes. Highjacking that connection to locate the others wasn't exactly easy, nor without risks, but Harriet would rather try doing it with the Diadem than with the Boy-Who-Lived's scar.
If the Diadem accidentally melted-... Well, Harriet didn't really want to kill a kid, so that was preferable.
Said and done, after getting a bit of clear space for herself in the Room, Harriet took a deep breath and started with the ritual.
Divination was a woolly subject, and shouldn't really be wholeheartedly trusted. However, magic was what it was, and like called to like.
A few checks with a mapping-spell, and Harriet nodded. The Amulet was in London, except obviously not, because it wasn't anywhere in London. Which meant that Grimmauld Place hadn't lost its rather impressive collection of wards. A loose-floating spirit was hiding away somewhere on the continent, another horcrux was straining helplessly against wards it couldn't overcome, and there wasn't a single trace of anything else.
The Cup, the Ring, and the Diary, had already been destroyed. Which left the Diadem in her hands, the spirit of Voldemort floating freely, the scar on the Boy-Who-Lived's forehead, Nagini not-yet-created, and the Amulet in Grimmauld Place. All seven accounted for.
With that over with, Harriet hurriedly destroyed the horcrux.
Theoretically she might succeed at saving the Diadem from destruction, but she didn't really feel like it'd be worth summoning a greater demon to ruin the country-side should she get it wrong. And even if she succeeded, it'd just end up being an old Diadem with some fancy jewels on it, the magic that would've made it so precious being washed away along with the horcrux.
So, with that over and done with, all she needed to do was track down Binns.
Which was really easier said than done, but honestly not that big of a deal. Behind a few layered invisibility charms, and with the Stone as an eye, hunting down the lingering dead was really not all that complicated.
She finally found the ghost in an office that might've been his when he'd been alive, and which he clearly still considered to be such. She even found out how he'd been grading the students' assignments, what with the long-suffering house-elf with a pen who was also present. It wasn't like a ghost would be able to write down the grades on his own, let alone turn the page.
A quick sleeping-spell sent the house-elf into a comfortable sleep, and then Harriet threw up the first ward to keep Binns from running away. The second ward, for making sure that no outsiders interfered, soon followed. The third ward was probably superfluous, as it was only there to stop creatures like Peeves from attacking the exorcist, but Harriet was nothing if not thorough about her work.
By now, Binns was starting to realize that something was wrong. And so Harriet turned to the main focus.
After a long day of breaking-and-entering and horcrux-hunting, Binns' ghostly wails of pain and terror were like music to her ears.
XXX
"What the bloody hell do you think you're doing?!"
Harriet blinked dumbly up from where she was cleaning up the traces of the exorcism, more than a little bit startled to see Minerva McGonagall in the doorway. The fact that the woman looked furious enough to chew nails didn't exactly help matters, Harriet had been a Gryffindor once after all, and McGonagall's temper was rather intimidating for a young person.
Still, Harriet had never allowed herself to be intimidated into silence before, and she wasn't about to start now. "Right at this moment, or life in general?"
A wand came up as McGonagall clearly decided to hex the answers out of her, but even if Harriet was more interested in Curse Breaking than dueling, she wasn't exactly-...
Quite frankly, the idea of a lone person surviving through Yharnam without a scratch on them, foreknowledge or no, was insane. That place could turn a giant into mincemeat within an hour, and could do much the same to a squad of hit-wizards. Dumbledore would've probably survived, because he had some really good instincts and a lot of experience, but there was a big difference between honorable duels to the death and a gigantic chimera of blood and horror tearing its way through solid rock in order to tear you limb-from-limb.
Basically, Harriet's wand was already up and casting the moment she noticed McGonagall move, with no time in between to actually react to it.
Harriet did try to limit herself to nonlethal options, but trying to keep herself from using downright impossibly-obscure spells was a lost cause from the get-go. And McGonagall reacted rather sensibly to having spells of unknown purpose aimed at her person, and fought with about equal viciousness as she would've displayed against a Death Eater.
Which meant that Binns' old office went up in smoke. Then the hallway was covered in smoke that'd been animated to trap all who passed through it, and a couple of windows shattered completely.
A sticking charm for climbing, and Harriet grabbed the window-frame and disappeared further up the outer wall. Only to have an animated collection of glass-shards take chase after her. Followed by McGonagall on a broom, still furiously casting.
Harriet spent a few precious moments carefully disassembling the construct of glass-shards before it managed to grab her, avoiding the various traps hidden in it that would've meant that actual violence against it would've left her bombarded with thousands of glass-shards. But that gave McGonagall an opportunity to bring the gargoyles into the fight as well.
A brief spell to undo magical charms to fly, and the gargoyles went spiraling down, though McGonagall's broom was still fine. It was an obscure spell, true, but the tampering-protocols of a commercial broom was more than up to the job of countering it.
Harriet honestly wasn't entirely paying attention to the continuous barrage of random nonlethal spells she was sending McGonagall's way. She didn't really have time to think about anything complex, and there wasn't really any point in trying to do anything more complicated than herd her away from a position to counter-attack effectively.
She really should've remembered that the Headmistress would be stuck at Hogwarts, and even if the wards didn't react in outright alarm at anything Harriet had done, the fact that Binns had suddenly disappeared from the wards would've probably been enough of an alert to make McGonagall suddenly very suspicious.
Oh well, what was done was done. Besides, Harriet really had needed to clean up after the exorcism, because a few of those traces would've likely been traced back to an obscure ritual in her book when she published it. So she'd be found out if she didn't clean it up, and now she'd instead been found out in the middle of cleaning up.
A gargoyle's spiraling flight ended in a crash into a wall, and the rock-dust that resulted was again animated into something nasty. This time Harriet cut off McGonagall's control of it, rather than disassembling the creation outright, and then sent it to intercept a bunch of birds with some pretty vicious-looking claws.
Harriet sent a quick hex at McGonagall's broom to overpower the way its charms were balanced, making it buck and writhe underneath McGonagall's grip. McGonagall still managed to keep it reasonable steady with a single hand though, and continued aiming spells and transfigured constructs towards Harriet with her wand.
The birds were killed, but the rock-dust was transfigured into flour and a spark turned the rooftop of the tower they were currently on into a massive fireball. Harriet melted her way through the actual roof, with an interesting transfiguration that turned it briefly liquid, and then legged it for the nearest window as McGonagall split open the ceiling above her in order to be able to properly see and animate all of the furniture in the unused classroom.
A quick oxygen-deprivation curse kept any of the lingering fire from spreading – Harriet had seen Hogwarts go up in flame once, and that'd been more than enough – and Harriet briefly charmed her robes into a kind of flying carpet to get her safely back to the rooftops beneath the tower.
McGonagall didn't send her animated furniture after her, allowing them to remain in the tower, instead animating a few more gargoyles to go after her, now that they wouldn't need to fly in order to get to her.
A bit of creative transfiguration turned a spot of moss into a tree with an awful lot of roots, cracking one of the gargoyles into pieces, and catching another in its branches. Another application of the rooftop-to-liquid transfiguration to catch a gargoyle advancing on her, and there was plenty of room for Harriet to reapply her sticking-charm and start climbing another tower.
Just in time, as McGonagall swooped down on the scene, conjuring more birds to harass her, as the gargoyles had been left in the dust.
A mist cursed to erode magic took care of the birds in an instant, but that didn't actually do much of anything to the broom barreling through at high velocity. Transfiguring the mist into becoming a spiderweb of rope instead, Harriet disappeared behind a corner just in time to avoid the whip of slicing fire that made short work of the rope-trap, and which would've probably split her in half if it'd connected.
Harriet couldn't remember McGonagall being quite this vicious before. She'd admittedly been going up against Death Eaters in defense of her students, and she might've been trying to avoid collateral damage, but still.
Much like most members of her House, Harriet had always taken a vicious sort of pride in having a woman as fierce as McGonagall as their Head of House. And as McGonagall rounded the corner surrounded by birds made of shattered glass and sharpened stone, Harriet couldn't quite help a grin from splitting her face.
This was kind of fun.
XXX
A/n: Harriet is maybe a little bit crazy. In her defense, she had a rough childhood and some very weird friends. But yeah, definitely a bit on the crazy-spectrum, even if she's a good person.
