Harry amidst the Vaults of Stone

Chapter 3


Harry felt honoured that his parents had let him try for the gadammeruk as early as the day of his eighth birthday. They had been reluctant at first, but he had persevered until they eventually admitted that his skills and canniness were the same as those of the other goblins his age. The actual goblin blood in their veins seemed to give them little natural advantage. Or if it did, he had made up for it with his dedication to his schooling over the last five years.

The feeling of pride was eclipsed, however, by nervousness. Nobody – nobody – spoke of the threefold test. He had no idea what was in store for him, only that it would be dangerous. Badluk his foster father had cut back his metalworking time and halted the stonecarving training he had just begun, and given him extra knife practise instead.

A scattering of goblins were hanging around the lower passages as he made his way to the tunnels of trial. His older friends and cousins who had already passed the trial were making a show of solidarity. These goblins were fully of the Brotherhood, they understood what this meant. The pretty Gitztick clasped his arm for a moment, and Ratspan and Buvolok slapped him on the back as he passed amongst them. Others hung back, and simply nodded to him. None spoke a word; nobody could until he emerged from the tunnels of trial in a day's time.

The tunnels wound around and around and down to where the air began to grow warm and heavy in the bowels of the earth. Harry's footsteps slapped quietly on the smooth stone, and he counted them, trying to relax.

Six hundred and eight, six hundred and nine. At last the tunnel levelled off, and he stepped out into a small cavern. By the look of it, two huge quartz geodes had formed in close proximity, and somebody had carved out the rock wall between them, leaving a path of bare rock with a field of glittering crystals to either side. Standing in the middle, in the bare area, were three motionless figures.

Harry picked his way through the quartz towards them, heart thumping in his chest.

"Harry Potter!" the first figure cried as he reached the edge of the quartz floor. All three goblins were swathed in robes and wearing masks of dark obsidian. Harry could not see an inch of skin anywhere on them.

"You stand before us on the eve of goblinhood," spoke the second in a deep voice.

"Here you shall learn the use of gold," said the third.

"Here you shall learn the cost of death."

"Here you shall learn the worth of effort."

"Here you shall learn the value of wit."

"Here you shall learn the price of experience."

"Here you shall learn the truth of Brotherhood."

"Do you stand before us, willing to learn, Harry Potter?"

Harry spoke as steadily as he could, his mouth dry and his hands sweaty with nerves. "Y-Yes. I do."

One of the masked goblins walked carefully to one side of the chamber and another to the opposite side. The remaining figure lowered his voice. "You stand at the entrance to the maze of gadammeruk. Turn around."

Harry turned on the spot. The entrance to the tunnel he had arrived by had gone. In its place was a silver metal door. There was no handle, only an hourglass. The sand was all in the top of the hourglass, but was not flowing.

"The door before you is one of many in the maze. These doors are only for the use of the maze watchers, who will guide your steps. You are never to use them, or rust shall devour your craft. The hourglasses on these doors will tell you how much time you have spent in the trial. You have exactly twenty-four hours to win your goblinhood. Your time starts now."

Harry had turned back as the goblin spoke, and now he received a firm nod.

"We shall see you on the other side."

A crack opened up on the other side of the cave, and became a tunnel entrance. The goblin stepped to the side, and Harry half-walked, half-ran forward between the two fields of crystal.

Darkness swallowed him up.


Harry moved through the empty tunnels, running where the floor was smooth, picking his way more carefully when it was rough. His eyes were getting better in the darkness, but he could still just barely see his feet in front of him. Occasionally he passed a dimly glowing silver door, with a fine trickle of sand flowing through the hourglass set in each one.

He met two forks in the tunnel, and each time chose the left-hand path. He tried to maintain a map in his head, as he had been taught, but the tunnels twisted sharply and often went up or down.

At one point, Harry entered a large, pitch-black cave. He moved carefully forward with his wooden staff out, probing the floor for pitfalls. He found some obstacle in the centre, and the shape of it beneath his hands proved to be an anvil on a small dais. He searched the cave carefully, but there was no clue as to whether he should do anything here. Reluctantly, he continued on.

Perhaps an hour had passed before he found another cave. It was of a similar layout, but was lit up dimly by glowing coals beneath the smoked glass of a furnace. A magic bellows inflated and deflated slowly with a wheeze, regulating the forge temperature.

There was a masked goblin standing in the centre of the room, who spoke in a lilting female voice as soon as Harry entered. "Harry Potter. In your first task of three, you shall learn the use of gold and the cost of death. Here is a forge; here are tools; here are bars of pure silver and fine gold. Forge yourself a weapon and continue through that archway."

The goblin pointed her finger, and a stone arch with a gargoyle lit up on the other side of the room. The light appeared to be coming from the gargoyle's eyes.

"A ferocious creature lies somewhere on the other side of that arch. You will hunt it down and slay it, and take the measure of death. No weapons but those of gold and silver may be allowed through the arch. You will leave your staff and daggers in this cave when you leave. Do you understand?"

"Yes." Harry's mind was reeling. Make a weapon from gold and silver? Would such a thing be of any more use than his bare hands?

The goblin nodded formally to him, and ran her fingers over a silver door in the side of the cave. It opened, and she slipped away through it.

There was no use jumping right into things. Harry sat on the anvil to consider his strategy. The hourglass on the door said he couldn't have spent more than an hour here. There were three tasks, but nobody said they would all be equally easy. If he allowed a quarter of his time for sleeping, that gave him five hours per task and an hour to find each one. If later trials proved harder than earlier ones, he could forfeit rest.

He got up and went over to the tool rack. So; three hours to forge a weapon from unsuitable metals, with almost no knowledge of weaponsmithing. Then two hours to hunt some terrible monster. Or vice versa, perhaps. Harry had no idea how long it would take to stalk and kill a large animal.

He was fairly certain it would be a rock worm. Many creatures lived underground, but most of them were small and inoffensive, posing no difficulty at all. One or two others, which he had seen pictures of in ancient books, were truly monstrous. There were things in the depths and forgotten places of the world that armies of elite goblin warriors could fight and lose against.

On the other hand, he was eight. A medium-sized rock worm, or maybe a small ophiotaurus, would be all they could possibly expect him to hunt. He hoped.

Harry's hands shook as he ran them over the tools available.

There was the sound of running footsteps. He glanced at the arch with the gargoyle, but realised they were coming from the opposite direction. Harry whirled and drew his better dagger, wondering if this was a new challenge. Would they give him more than one task at complete the same time?

A goblin ran into the room, glancing behind him before turning to Harry with a slightly fearful look on his face. He was quite tall, and wore a robe the same as those of the watchers in the maze.

No, Harry realised. It was similar, but not identical. And he had no mask. Harry pushed his glasses back on the bridge of his nose, and at last recognised him as Grimrut, age eleven, from one of his foster-cousin's dwellings on Moss Aisle.

"Harry," the newcomer gasped, and fumbled in his robes. "I don't have long, they patrol regularly and I'll have to close up the secret way out again before they discover it. Listen, take this."

The goblin boy thrust something towards Harry, who stepped forward to look at it, puzzled. An iron bar?

"You'll need it. I almost died in the first part of the gadammeruk. Take the bar and make a proper blade. The thing you're up against is far too tough for gold and silver!"

Grimrut hissed as Harry made no move towards him, glanced over his shoulder again and dropped the metal rod onto the anvil dais.

"I've got to go. Use the iron, it's the only way. Good luck from all of us, Harry!"

Grimrut turned and ran out of the cave the way he had came. Harry was still stunned, uncertain about what had just happened. He shook himself and stepped closer to the iron bar, examining it without touching it.

I don't know if I can do this, he thought. Any of it.

Perhaps if he used the iron to make a proper core under a folded layer of silver, nobody would be the wiser?He looked up at the carved gargoyle, then down at the iron bar.

Perhaps he wouldn't need it. He knew a little metal magic; maybe he could make some silver-gold alloy just strong enough to work a capable blade from. Harry looked across at the hourglass. No. Nowhere near enough time for smelting. He would be wasting enough time as it was, trying to put a proper edge on silver.

He walked over to the baskets of metal. He had never worked gold at all before, and had only used silver for jewellery. He knew their basic properties, though.

He thought further. Forget edged weapons; gold was nicely heavy and he knew how to use a staff.


Just over two hours later, Harry wiped the sweat from his face and pulled his shirt back on. He grasped for the sceptre in the water trough, and brought it out, drying it carefully on the forge cloth.

Well, 'sceptre' was a bit much. He could look at the weapon without flinching, but only barely. It was almost all silver, with a few bits of gold, mainly in case that was required by the challenge – it hadn't been clear. He hadn't wanted to waste the precious metal, though.

Harry's fingerprints had already slightly squashed the soft metal of the gold filigree handgrip. There was a knobbed ovoid at one end of the sceptre, heavy gold underneath the silver giving it greater weight.

The other end – well, he had done the best he could. The silver was pointy. He could jab it in an eye and do some damage, or maybe tear skin once or twice before it went blunt.

Harry placed his two knives and his wooden staff carefully on a bench at the side of the room.

The sceptre was short and stout; he didn't want it to bend as he was flailing artlessly about with it. He picked it up, weighing it carefully. A weapon he couldn't use was no weapon at all. He would have to allow for a little time getting used to it.

Fifteen minutes and a short set of staff exercises later, Harry approached the archway. The gold-and-silver sceptre was the worst weapon he had ever swung; he could probably do better with a sharpened chairleg.

Still. It was too late now to re-forge it. Maybe he could wrestle the rock worm down. Harry settled his shoulders, straightened his back, and walked carefully through the arch.

Perhaps it was his imagination, but the light seemed to flicker as he did, as if the gargoyle had winked at him.

The iron bar lay untouched on the floor of the cave.


Here, rock worm, rock worm, Harry thought.

Badluk had explained to him about his ability to speak to serpents. It was meant to be quite rare. The consensus was that the act of speaking Parseltongue actually magically embedded a measure of intelligence in the animal. Nobody knew if the snake would remain permanently intelligent, or if it eventually reverted back to normal.

Something made a clicking sound, in the darkness.

Here, rock worm, rock worm.

Harry didn't call for the monster aloud. His goblin-honed instincts said that turning a rock worm from a dumb creature to an intelligent one, befriending it, and then killing it was a viable strategy, but probably not the right one in these circumstances.

Of course, instilling a measure of intelligence in a monstrous creature was probably a bad idea anyway.

He crept from one stalagmite to another, sceptre at the ready. The set of caverns he had emerged into was large and shadowy. The arch had closed up behind him.

There were three discrete caves, large and gloomy but certainly not large enough to be hiding some of the creatures he had secretly feared. No earth krakens or mole titans could be lurking here.

Where would a rock worm be? A normal one would have made itself known by now. Of course, if it was really young, like Prettyroot, it would still be able to fly.

Harry looked up just in time.


The human boy repeated every Gobbledegook swearword he knew inside his head, over and over. He didn't say them aloud. He couldn't waste that much breath.

The firebat swooped in for another run, clicking wildly, and he scrambled back behind another rocky outcrop. Flames licked around its edges. He stood ready to strike as it shot past, but it was too quick and too far away.

Blinking back tears of fright and shaking cinders from his hair, he watched the large, four-winged, fire-breathing creature as it rocketed to the other side of the cavern and turned back towards him. Right. Use your wits, he thought.

The firebat was headed straight for him, wisps of flame trickling excitedly from its black lips.

Um. Wits, please.

Run, said another, more primal voice in his head.

Harry ran. But he ran craftily. He dodged randomly around stalagmites, and listened to the noisy wingbeats and the echoing clicks the creature made. At the point where the monster must surely be upon him, he stopped running and flattened himself against a piece of rock.

The huge bat shot past once more, flames dribbling to the ground in its wake. Harry ran to the side of the cavern, to the tunnel leading to the next cave.

What was your mistake? said a voice in his head that sounded like his foster father.

Only thought about tunnel creatures, Harry thought grimly. Firebats lived in caves, and sometimes forests, at ground level. Those that lived deep underground made lairs in the huge caverns and stayed out of the tunnels.

What will be your next mistake?

Harry reached the end of the short rock passage and flattened him against the rock to the side of the entrance in the next cavern, sceptre raised ready.

He thought rapidly. Trying to fight it on its own terms. It's twice my size, it can fly and breathe fire.

That seemed like a good answer, and he thought about it some more, as clicks and scratching sounds came from the stone passageway beside him.

Right, he decided after a few seconds, and began to climb the rough stone wall.


The firebat was angry. It had dropped silently on the prey creature, and the prey had seen it.

Three times it had breathed flame at the running mammal, and three times the food creature had avoided it. This was unacceptable. A prey of such size would feed it for weeks.

After some early screeching, the wingless creature had concentrated on running quietly, and had disappeared into a burrow. Now, unable to use echolocation and hearing nothing but the roar of the furnace in its stomach, the firebat was tracking the prey by scent.

The firebat emerged, walking on its wings, into what its echoing clicks told it was a large open space. The scent was all around it now. The prey creature must be nearby. But the bat could hear only a slight movement in the air.

And then it could only feel pain.


Harry turned every unvoiced swearword into another blow of the club.

His muscles gave out after the animal stopped squealing, but before it stopped twitching. He collapsed forward onto its velvety back, shaking in terror.

After a minute, the creature's superheated organs, roiling beneath its skin, began to burn him. He managed to roll off it, and even stand up.

Then he was sick, and fell over.

After a few wretched seconds, he rolled to face the winged beast. Were those slight movements just death throes? Its head was mangled, oozing blood and fluids. Surely it couldn't be alive.

Harry got up on hands and knees and retched again, and once more for the blood, and twice for the killing and the fear, and then there was nothing left to come up.

Finally he sat, put his head between his knees for two minutes as he had been taught, and thought calm thoughts. Eventually he stood up with a long, shuddering breath, and picked up his glasses from where they had fallen in the struggle.

Now that he could see properly again, he examined the end of his sceptre. The soft metal of the club part had been beaten into a much flatter oval by repeated contact with the firebat's head. He hadn't used the sharp spear part.

But now he had to be sure.

With a grunt of effort, he lifted one wing, dragging it back off the creature's chest.

There would be... ribs and things, right? Getting in the way? He felt along the side of the creature, found a gap in the ribcage, put the point of the sceptre to it, and stopped.

Harry put the sceptre down and walked about until he found a fist-sized, flattish rock, then came back and lined the sceptre up like a chisel. Five huge blows and the firebat was impaled; the sceptre could be driven in no further.

Harry staggered back, sat on a rock, and trembled, staring at the body. Why had he wanted to do this? Why had he wanted to do this on his eighth birthday?

There was an unexpected cough from the darkness, and now he screamed for the first time.


A masked goblin stepped forward from the gloom, and Harry rose respectfully. His heart was beating just as wildly as it had when he leaped onto the firebat's back from above the mouth of the tunnel.

"Harry Potter. You have completed the first task of three. Now it is time to reflect. Speak: what is the use of gold? Think before answering."

Harry thought carefully, first trying to understand the question. He had a few tutors who asked questions like that. The answers were always formulaic. You had to twist at meaning like a piece of wire and bend it to your will. The trick was usually to match the shape of your answer to the shape of the question.

Seconds ticked by, and then minutes, and then he spoke.

"The use of gold lies in its value, or – or more specifically in what is accomplished with it. Gold has no use as a weapon. It is the usefulness of things for some purpose that makes them valuable. Gold has worth because it's used to make things of beauty. Gold has potential. It's not valuable because it is scarce, but because of its use. That means that, just as for all things, the use of gold is its worth, and the worth of gold is its use."

The goblin nodded. "Then speak: what is the cost of death?"

Harry thought again. Wasn't there some proverb, the cost of killing is innocence? He had never killed before, but it honestly wasn't the case that once upon a time he'd had a feeling of not-ever-having-killed, and that he'd now lost that feeling.

If anything, he had gained the knowledge of what it felt like to kill a living thing. It wasn't nice knowledge, but it didn't have to be. It was still a gain, not a cost.

He looked at it a different way. The sceptre he had crafted had been damaged beyond repair, in the process of killing the fire bat. But the metals were recoverable. All that it had cost him were two hours of his time, from the forging. That didn't seem like the right answer either: the cost of death is two hours' work at an anvil.

Alright, who had incurred a cost, if he discounted himself and the weapon? The firebat, obviously, but it had been trying to kill him. What if it had succeeded? He assumed there had been goblins watching, that the firebat wasn't really free to incinerate him, but...

Well... yes. That sounded right.

"The cost of death," he said, sounding more confident than he was, "is risk. To kill is almost always to risk your own life in some manner. This cost is imposed on the, um, killer. The cost of death for the victim, is freedom. A living creature has choices to make every second of its life. A dead creature has no choices. Costs cannot be imposed on the dead, because they have no capacity to choose to repay such costs."

Harry felt that was a fairly good answer, although he wasn't entirely sure he knew what he had meant by it. For his tutors in speaking and decorum, the words would have been enough. For his history tutors, he would be in deep trouble, because the next question would be to compare and contrast the two costs, to the killer and the victim. Harry thought he'd better wait and see whether he was asked to.

There was a long, long pause before the masked goblin spoke.

"Your answers are acceptable. Do you wish to continue?"

Harry remembered he still had two more tasks in his gadammeruk, and could find no voice for a few seconds. Then he managed, "Yes."

The goblin nodded and bowed slightly, then backed into the darkness. At the same time, another watcher of the maze stepped forward from the impenetrable shadow of a large stalagmite.

"Harry Potter. In your second task of three, you shall learn the worth of effort and the value of wit. Here is your staff; here is the knife given you; here is the knife forged at your own hand."

The goblin passed him each of the weapons in turn as he spoke, then bent to the floor and ran a long finger in a circle on the rock, leaving behind a faint silver marking.

"Continue to the passageways below. Within them lurks a wild but harmless creature. Retrieve what it carries without recourse to injury, and bring the item before the ruby doorway to gain entry to the final rite of passage. Do you understand?"

Harry finished strapping the wooden staff to his back, and nodded. "Yes."

He wondered what creature he would be up against now. He had to admit that he liked the sound of the word 'harmless'.

"Very well," the masked goblin said. The silver ring on the patch of stone where the watcher had traced a circle flowed away, leaving a wide hole. There was a drop below it to another cavern.

Harry peered down into it, and when he looked back up, the goblin was gone, along with the sceptre of silver and gold.


Harry landed neatly on the floor and looked around the cave. The walls had been partially smoothed. Three tunnel mouths were apparent, as well as a silver door.

The floor was flat, and in the centre of the room gravel gave way to an expanse of cave soil. Several luminous mushrooms were growing in it, kept damp by a trickle of water flowing down one wall. The rivulets pooled in the centre of the grotto, and kept the tiny underground garden.

Harry recognised monkey's hand fungus, luminescent yellowcaps, cave potatoes, amanita comida, and albino fern. He plucked a faintly glowing yellowcap and wedged it in the neck of his leather shirt, in case he would need light. He also gnawed at one of the pallid, juicy fern fronds to settle his recently-emptied stomach, washing it down with a scoop of water from the puddle on the ground.

If he had learned anything from the last task of his trial, it was to plan and pay attention. Harry forced himself to stop thinking about the monstrous firebat, and consider what had been said to him.

He couldn't hurt whatever creature he was seeking. Right. He had been given his weapons back, presumably because they wouldn't be of any use – but you never knew. Okay. He had to retrieve an object from the creature. Fine. He had to be on the lookout for a ruby doorway. Yes.

He was going to learn 'the worth of effort and the value of wit'. It was probably safe to translate that to mean the task was going to require not just hard work, but cunning. Well, there wasn't much he could do until he knew what he was up against.

Harry chose a tunnel at random, and set off.


Four hours later, Harry was beginning to panic.

He was now extremely weary. His first task had tired him out, and even before that he had spent the morning walking through a maze of tunnels and beating out silver and gold. Then there had been the trek through this latest labyrinth. It had all been walking, until just now.

The last ten minutes he had spent running, but to no avail. Harry had got exactly one proper glimpse of his animal adversary, and it had outrun him.

From the low shape in the darkness – that thin body, that long snout – he was sure it was a niffler. It had been wearing a golden necklace wrapped around its neck. He had tracked its hurrying footfalls through the stone maze for hours. And the moment he had managed to get close enough to actually see it, it had sped up. The creature ran faster than the nose of Grok the Diseased.

Time and time again in his exploration, he had found himself back in the little underground garden, which lay at roughly the centre of the maze. He had returned there deliberately twice, to rest and eat raw mushrooms and to gather drinking water from the moisture on the wall and floor.

Harry had found the ruby door half an hour in, and placed it carefully on his mental map. The door in question was masterfully hewn from a single slab of red cinnabar. It had no handle, only a small tray set halfway up it where a small object - such as a necklace - could be placed. The polished surface of the door had a floral pattern inset with rubies.

There were three or four of the forbidden silver doors in the labyrinth, too. Each had silently mocked him as he walked or ran past, the white sand in their hourglasses measuring the time slipping through his hands. He had also spotted a few goblin watchers, standing back in the shadows as he passed.

Having lost even the sound of the niffler, Harry collapsed against the wall and rubbed his nose, trying to calm his panic so he could think.

What resources were at his disposal? Two blades and a short pole. Basic food, light, water. His body, and his own artfulness. His teachers had told him never to discount things like that.

What skills could he apply? Basics of account management – well, there were no accounts here. Knowledge of the arts of metal – but, natch, no metal to work on. Knowledge of history, goblin customs, the wizarding world, the appraisal of gems, the identification of antiques. Hmmm. His knowledge of the enemy?

Harry tried to remember the bestiaries he had read. Nifflers liked precious things, and could hunt treasures, but weren't terribly effective. They couldn't so much as tell sparkly pyrite from true gold. Nor could they detect counterfeiting. They were zealously protective of their cubs, but often quite friendly and easily tamed. Harry also thought there was something about them liking to eat almonds, but he might be getting confused. Not that it was particularly helpful in either case.

In fact, none of that was really helpful. Of course, he had a knife and knew where to find a doorful of sparkling, niffler-tempting rubies waiting to be pried out. But he felt he'd rather fail than commit such sacrilege upon a masterwork like that.

Wait, that was something. Luring the creature instead of chasing it. Use my wits, he thought. He couldn't run down the niffler – certainly not without hurting it – so, the obvious thing to do was get it to come to him. Specifically, he needed a trap.

Well, he had no mechanical resources. He could rip up his cloak and try to snare it, but he'd never set a snare himself before, and he had no bait. He didn't know whether nifflers ate mushrooms. They might be drawn to the shininess of a knife edge, but he doubted it.

The maze had no blind corners to trap the creature in. There was no time to wait for it to sleep and sneak up on it then. Could he lay a trap on one of the doors with goblin magic? Wait – magic.

"Argh!" Harry slapped at his forehead, disgusted with himself. The eight-year-old immediately dropped to a sitting position and began to review every goblin-charm, every scrap of sign-witchery he had been taught, as well as a few he had seen but not quite grasped.

"Hand-keyed spells," he said aloud. They were what the Gringotts tellers used to open vault doors. He only knew the entrance ones, not the locking ones, and neither seemed relevant to the situation.

"The magic properties of certain herbs." Not helpful; all the plants in the grotto were common edible varieties.

"Basic runes for stone and steel." Most of the ones he knew were for strength or sharpness, to be etched on metal. Others stopped masonry eroding, or kept rock walls dry. He did know one rune that flared when it detected intrusion, but he didn't have any way to link that to something. So: not useful.

"Basic glamour-sight and the detection of magical forgery." Maybe there was some hidden tool in the labyrinth he was meant to find? But it would take far, far too long to search the entire maze for illusions. He could probably afford to check the ruby door, just in case.

He turned this idea around on its head. "The casting of basic deceptive glamours and minor illusions." very basic and very minor, in fact. These had been learned only so that he could detect frauds and forgeries in later life. The grim-faced tutors had spent hours on the topic of what would happen to him if he were caught using them for counterfeiting. Well, they weren't much use here. Even if Harry could glamour himself into a niffler, he wouldn't be able to mask his smell.

Another thought was hovering in the back of his mind, but it slipped away from him like a cave eel in a darkened pool. He waited, but it didn't return.

Harry moved on. "Disenchantment and magic-breaking." Again, only useful if he found something hidden, or magical. Was the necklace placed around the niffler's head by magic? Possibly, but he'd have to be almost touching it to remove it using the goblin-signs of disenchantment and unweaving which his foster mother had showed him.

There were other things he could try, if he had a magic staff, like the managers, or a wand, like some of the humans he'd seen. Things he'd read in books. But most of the goblin-charms centred around artefact magic, warding and hoodwinkery. He didn't even know how to make a creature sleep – wait.

A calming charm! He'd known that one for years. He learned it as a small child, helping watch over the infants at the crèche in his neighbourhood in Underfoot. Harry ran through the sounds in his head, making sure he knew the charm in its entirety. Of course, it had to be murmured, like a lullaby, so it would be very difficult to perform while running after an animal.

He thought about it from every angle. The calming charm wasn't magically intensive; he could walk briskly through the labyrinth, repeating the charm, and hope the niffler would hear enough of it to let him get closer and closer.

It wasn't great, but it was the best idea he had.


Harry forced his legs to move just a little faster. The strain was getting to him, and he could feel his joints burning, but he couldn't afford to falter.

"Fnar gzut glui glui mikrok gnechi auguin, fnar bidrit zinkot frickit-frickit lauguin..."

The niffler scampered ahead of him, always keeping a corner between itself and the boy.

Harry scowled. He thought it seemed to be enjoying this.

He had to keep going.

"Fnar bezzle shribber-kupt ongi sono-auguin, fnar gibraltar hackuit glui glui auguin..."

He turned the corner, and froze.

The niffler sat in the middle of the tunnel, watching him curiously from beneath slightly lowered eyelids.

He remembered, just, to keep the charm going.

Then he took one step towards it, and another, singing gently.

Another step – oh, no. His footfall roused the niffler, and it shot to its feet. Harry's charm faltered for a moment in despair. The creature scurried down the tunnel and darted -

- through a door?

Harry approached the silver doorway, still murmuring. The door was slightly ajar. The hourglass hissed away his seconds and minutes. More than a third of his time was gone.

The noise of the creature's footfalls stopped as Harry carefully brought his face to the gap and peered. The niffler sat on its haunches, a short way down the tunnel, and looked back at him.

He recognised the tunnel on the other side of the door. It was another part of the labyrinth. He could get to it from here, if he spent about a quarter of an hour walking in a loop to it.

He could see the niffler, so close. The necklace gleamed against its dark brown fur. It's eyelids were slightly lowered again.

Harry spoke the calming charm six more times, standing inches away from the door. The niffler continued to watch him, quite calmly. He didn't dare stop singing, to try to encourage it. What if it ran off?

The doorway was right there in front of him. He had been wandering the maze, singing the charm, for the last hour.

He had to go through it. He couldn't go through it.


Harry began rendition number nine, standing in front of the doorway. His mouth was dry and he was getting hoarse. He knew he would slip and break the charm if he had to go on much longer.

And then the elusive eel of an idea which had previously evaded him returned.

It struck him like a bolt of brilliant goblin's silver. Nifflers – shiny things – glamours for counterfeiting.

Harry found new strength, and steadied his utterance of the charm. He slunk slowly backwards, watching the gap as he gathered a handful of pebbles and small rocks.

He had never tried using two different types of magic at once before. But one was all in the words, and the other only required concentration, so why not?

"Fnar gzut appleachia frickit-frickit lauguin, fnar hackuit ongi mirakazzit auguin..."

Harry closed his fist tight and thought of a brilliant emerald he had once seen, the sparkle and glimmer of it, the flash of bright moss in its perfect depths.

He opened his hand again and saw what was within it. He crouched down, guessing the distance to the niffler by eye.

He threw the emerald very carefully. It rolled to a halt about halfway to the animal, glittering slightly in the phosphorescent light.

There was a moment of tension. Harry finished the charm and began another verse, eyes glued to the creature in front of him, thinking emerald as hard as he could.

Which suddenly trotted forward to bat playfully at the beautiful gem.

Harry kept up the calming charm, but relaxed in relief. The emerald immediately vanished, leaving a pebble in its place.

There was a plaintive mew from the niffler, and Harry took another small rock from his handful, already thinking of a sapphire.


The necklace clattered into the tray of the ruby door. Thank the platinum spirits for those disenchanting spells, Harry thought. When the niffler had finally approached close enough to nuzzle his ankles, he'd found that the gold chain was indeed attached to it with magic.

In the end he had spent ten long minutes alternating calming charms, glamours of precious gems, and hand-glyphs of unweaving. By the time he was done, the tension in his body had reached snapping point, and he collapsed in a heap, gripping the necklace in both hands. The niffler had run off to find something else sparkly.

The red stone door before him vanished away into a whirl of soft mist, and the eight-year-old Harry Potter stepped forward to face the third stage of his gadammeruk, his final challenge on the way to goblin adulthood.


Author's notes:

→ To all you reviewers, motivating me to write more: Thanks, keep it up!