Harry amidst the Vaults of Stone
Chapter 4
Dumbledore put down the real estate magazine, and summoned a sheet of parchment and a quill to him with a swift, decisive movement. He had to admit that he had, uncharacteristically, let matters drift.
In the aftermath of that tragic night many years ago, he had found that a great many people were extremely interested in Harry Potter's location. Who could he trust? Well, three of his staff and himself knew where the boy was, and Dumbledore considered even that a risk. To ask around for volunteers to relocate to Privet Drive and keep an eye on Harry would be even more dangerous. Better to keep the secret close until the furore died down, and he could find a watcher without drawing attention to the neighbourhood.
That had quickly turned from a reason into an excuse, and the idea lay dormant behind the day-to-day challenges of holding down three full-time jobs.
Dumbledore wrote with quick, neat strokes. He had also had doubts he could find a suitable person. Perhaps Alastor Moody, who had retired after the war, but the man would never be willing to live amongst muggles.
That wasn't the real reason, though.
The deaths of the Potters had shaken Albus Dumbledore badly. And for it all to play out in Godric's Hollow... he had sent Hagrid to bring the infant, rather than face the terrible memories that waited there for the older wizard.
And then there was the prophecy, that damnable prophecy. Harry had just lost his parents, and had saved wizarding Britain, and if Dumbledore's awful suspicions were correct... it might mean nothing but a martyrdom and an early grave. The alternative, which he had to believe, was better – but still not great.
So, things had drifted.
And how time had flown! It was Bagnold who brought the matter to Dumbledore's attention again, probing for the location of the Boy Who Lived. It was almost time to be thinking about elections again, of course, and Harry was nearly eight, surely old enough to smile for cameras and look adorable. The people's hero, rediscovered, would have been a source of immense political capital.
Dumbledore had made no promises, but offered her airy assurances and half-truths. She might have been known as the Iron Minister for her leadership during Voldemort's rise, but Dumbledore had been skilfully salving political egos in the international arena for decades. Bagnold was no real challenge.
Now he folded up the parchment and put it in an envelope, along with a clipping from the real estate magazine and a bank draft. "Take this to Arabella Figg, please, Fawkes."
Predictably enough, there was a masked goblin standing in the passageway beyond the red door.
"Harry Potter. You have completed the second task of three. Now it is again time to reflect. Think carefully, and speak: what is the worth of effort?"
After the first task, Harry had been expecting these archaic words, and had spent some of the early hours in the labyrinth second-guessing the answer. The experience with the niffler had given him pause for thought, but he still gave his prepared answer, changing it slightly on the fly.
"Without effort, there is no achievement. But the worth of effort does not lie only in the worth of the product, but also in the learning that accompanies the work, the feeling of satisfaction with the result, a person's short time alive spent productively instead of squandered." Except for the four hours a stupid person could waste trying to hunt down a niffler barehanded, Harry thought to himself.
The goblin nodded. "Very well. Then speak: what is the value of wit?"
Harry considered this briefly. He'd heard a lot about wit, in the halls and shadows of Underfoot. "Wit can achieve what brute force may not; wit can win where metal fails. Wit lets us appreciate how it feels to be the hunter and the hunted."
He ran his fingers through his hair and added thoughtfully, "Works of great craft cannot be planned without wit; works of magic cannot not be accomplished without wit; a person's treasures cannot be safeguarded without wit."
And then, because the words seemed to fit a nice pattern, he said, "The value of wit is the sum of all these values."
"Your answers are acceptable, Harry Potter. Do you wish to continue? Yes?"
"Yes."
The goblin nodded to him, then turned and moved into the next room, gesturing to the boy to follow him. Harry stepped forward, and immediately recognised the same garden grotto he had returned to several times before. Only now, the silver door had been replaced with this tunnel. And on the cavern wall opposite was a small wooden shed, quite similar to the one in his foster mother's garden.
"Harry Potter. In your third task of three, you shall learn the price of experience and the truth of Brotherhood."
The maze watcher presented Harry with a large iron key. He took it carefully, examining it instinctively for obvious opening-charms and finding none.
"The third task is up to you to discover. But before you undertake the final step, there is something more you must do. Listen carefully, Harry Potter. As a child, you wandered without care upon the land and used its resources without thought. Now, to be a true goblin of the Brotherhood, you must give something back to the ground."
This sounded familiar. A lot of goblin custom involved respect for the land and the ores within it.
"People draw resources from the land, to shape with their craft," the goblin continued. "Metal, stone, gems, this is the obvious grist to the mill of endeavour; but empty space, nutrients, and groundwater also have value. We only have the right to use the land because we respect it, we know its worth. Acknowledgement of the land's worth means we return to it that which is un-needed and that which will nourish it. This is the cost to you, before you find your third task."
Harry opened his mouth to ask more, but was interrupted. "We can provide no more guidance at this point. Respect the ground, Harry Potter."
The heavily robed goblin retreated to the tunnel, and the silver door reappeared, hourglass flowing, blocking him from sight.
The key turned in the heavy iron lock, and Harry opened the door of the small shed. He had spent half an hour with his eyes closed, leaning against the stone wall in rest. He had eaten and drunk a little. Now it was past time to continue.
The wooden shed was filled with various typical tools. Harry brought them all out and laid them on the ground, taking inventory. There was an empty sack, a rope, an oilstone, a stepladder, a small barrow, a very long pry-bar, a carving knife, two shovels of different sizes, and a wood-axe.
Harry supposed he could return something metal to the soil, but that didn't seem like an act of respect. For one thing, it would be too easy. For another, it would be disrespectful to the new-looking metal tools in front of him. And finally, metal rusted; it didn't provide anything the land needed or anything which later generations could extract and use.
He felt similarly about burying his wooden staff. It was fire-hardened, and from what Beckflub the Ancient had taught him about earth, there wouldn't be enough wood to it to help the soil fertility. The core was of iron, too, which had the same problem. There was no sense in putting refined iron within the earth. It could not become a source of metal any more than a buried cogwheel would grow into a clock bush.
Harry wandered to the centre of the little grotto, and knelt to examine the topsoil more closely. He dug through it gently with his fingertips, as he did when weeding Sibilig's garden. Soon his hands were buried past the wrists.
This was only a little cave garden. The soil was much deeper than it ought to be.
His fingers, worming through the loose dirt, snagged on something. Harry hauled at it. A large root? A goblin's respectfully-buried staff, from a gadammeruk long past?
...No. He brought the thing to the surface, and jagged bone gleamed pale yellow in the mushroom-light.
Harry looked thoughtfully up at the large hole in the ceiling.
Harry walked in circles around the bloodied corpse. He didn't want to mutilate the firebat's body, but had realised he would have to do something about the wings. They were unwieldy, and made up too much of the creature's body mass.
He wrinkled his nose at the smell of blood and reeking animal. It was only going to get worse.
"One-two, one-two, and through, and through," he muttered to himself. The axe came down.
By the time he got to the fourth and last wing, he had found the exact place in the joint where the axe would separate two bones with relative ease. He dragged each folded leathery limb over to the hole and threw them down into the mushroom cavern, stepping down onto the ladder and galumphing back to the cavern below.
Harry took up the shovel, glad that he had decided not to bring the entire firebat down at once, since he hadn't remembered to dig a hole under the ceiling entranceway first.
He found a spot near the edge of the dirt, out of the way, and carefully put several fungi aside to be re-planted once he was done. He got a feel for the soil with the smaller shovel. It was only a shallow excavation, but the digging was made harder by the numerous bones he uncovered. He didn't recognise any of them, except for the skull of a rock worm.
Harry struck a more difficult layer, made from the rotten chitinous plates from some unknown beast, and stopped. He buried the bat's wings there, covering them over with rich topsoil, and tenderly replaced the mushrooms in the newly-enriched ground.
Then he turned his attention to a larger hole. Fortunately, the body of the monstrous creature was quite compact without its wings. It still took him more than an hour of digging before he was sure the pit was deep enough, though. He ran up and down the ladder to make sure, measuring the hole and the body against the length of the shovel.
Harry brought the rope up, and was about to try hauling the dismembered body towards the hole with sheer force before the voice in the back of his mind reminded him to use his wits.
He dragged a boulder over and brought the long steel pry-bar up from the shed, wedging it against the stone as a lever. He put all of his weight on the other end of the bar, and the dead firebat tilted and dropped into the cavern below with a terrible thud.
Harry had moved the ladder, and had to jump down after the body, landing awkwardly to the side to avoid dropping on top of it. He packed all of the bones he had uncovered around it, then scooped soil into the hole from the heap he'd excavated. He used the shovel to tamp down the large hillock as best he could, and then gathered up the plants he'd relocated, which were temporarily sitting in the puddle of water.
"Cave potato; planted deep, watered well," he said to himself as he worked. "Albino fern, planted shallow, only moistened. Monkey's hand fungus, propagated by scattering on the soil. Yellowcaps and edible amanita, planted in a little scoop, water slowly and thoroughly."
The firebat was buried. Harry sat back on his haunches and wondered what to do next. The silver door showed he had been chasing his gadammeruk for about eleven hours. Could he afford to sleep before seeking out the next task?
There were no goblins in sight. Harry snacked absently on a stray yellowcap fungus.
Then he blushed slightly as he remembered the last step of any job: put his tools away. He and the goblin children had received 'respect' talks before. They inevitably included not just respect for the land, but respect for himself as a craftsman, and respect for the tools without which he would not be a craftsman.
"Rope, ladder, pry-bar, oilstone, axe, shovel." Harry counted off the things he had used and stepped out of the shed, locking it behind him.
There was immediately a rumbling sound, and a tremor beneath his feet. Harry stuck close to the wall, just in case, and watched as the three tunnels spaced around the cave closed up. Then the iron key disappeared from his hand in a puff of vapour. As it did so, the silver door across from him melted away into nothingness, revealing a deep vertical gash in the rock.
As tended to happen when the Headmaster had a hand in events, things had fallen into place quite easily. Arabella Figg was installed at Privet Drive within a month.
Dumbledore had wondered, from time to time, if he had made the right choice. Lily had never spoken well of her sister, and Severus, upon being taken into Dumbledore's confidence about Harry's location, had gone to surprising lengths to explain that the Headmaster was quite out of his tree. Severus had known Petunia, and told Albus he might never be forgiven for handing Lily Evans' son over to the woman.
Dumbledore had mused for a long upon that strange bit of passion, delivered as it was from a master of occlumency. Nevertheless, his actions had been for the greater good. If Arabella reported anything dire, of course, he would revisit his decision.
After all, there were other hiding places, almost as safe as blood wards. Perhaps even as safe. The muggles would help prevent the boy getting a swollen head, of course – James was bad enough, and the elder Potter hadn't even had a destiny or a legacy of destroying Dark Lords. There were grim tasks still ahead of Harry Potter, and Dumbledore had felt that coddling him would not help the boy prepare for them, but he was a compassionate man. He would bring him into the wizarding world if things were as bad as Minerva and Severus had suggested.
Figg's first owl reached Dumbledore on Harry's eighth birthday, reporting that she hadn't even seen him leave the house.
Four days and four increasingly worried owls later, Dumbledore decided to stop in himself and check up on the boy.
He almost had a heart attack.
Harry followed the crevasse forward, stumbling occasionally on the jagged floor. He moved as quickly as his exhaustion would allow. The crack was closing up behind him, and he was fairly sure it was only closing at the rate that he was moving.
Fairly sure, but not certain.
Eventually he emerged into an empty rock chamber, a small, round room with walls of natural marble. There was a strange door in front of him.
As he examined it, the sound of creaking stone stopped as the narrow, rugged passageway he had come through closed up entirely.
Harry belatedly realised he should probably have brought some food and water along with him.
He sat against the back wall, and stared tiredly at the door. Maybe this was the last challenge in its entirety? Maybe he could get through it, go home and go to sleep, then wake up with his goblin majority.
He smiled at the thought and his eyelids lowered. After a few minutes, he caught himself dozing.
"Up! Up, up, blood and shale, must keep moving." Harry rose and paced about the room, then stood in front of the door and examined it minutely.
It was larger than most goblin doors, more than six feet tall, and made of polished grey mica, bound with a lattice of steel struts. Instead of a handle there was a bronze wheel. It reminded him of a picture of a flood-door he had seen. Turning the wheel should release the lock and let it swing open.
Needless to say, the wheel did not turn.
There were strings of runes running from the central wheel to each corner of the door. At those corners there were trays built into the panels, identical to the one on the ruby door. Harry thought the runes might be old dwarf-sigil; he had no chance of translating them. There were also letters on the wheel itself. They were inlaid with black pearl, and were written in common bank-mark, which he could read.
"SACRIFICE," Harry read aloud.
He looked at each of the four small trays protruding from the door. He got down on his knees and ran his fingers over the two he could reach more easily.
There. There was a glyph carved deeply into the underside of each one, grey against the grey stone, where he might have missed it.
His fingers told him that the one on the left was a magic rune for blood. On the right, a more complex rune for molten metal.
He stood, and traced the undersides of the two upper trays. He could just reach them without having to stand on tip-toe.
On the left was... his fingers moved carefully... the rune for low-quality coal. On the right was another, more difficult, rune. Harry traced it three times, frowning, before he realised it represented a complex notion: the form of serpents.
He leaned against the cool metal of the door, looking muzzily at the wheel again. Sacrifice. Well, an obvious first start was with the blood tray.
"Don't mess with blood magic," he could hear Badluk say. He'd heard it many times. Sibilig would always temper it with, "Don't mess with blood magic unless you know exactly what you're doing."
Well, he might not know exactly what he was doing, but he didn't have a lot of choice here. Harry knelt, then took out his good knife, which his uncle had given to him. He pressed the tip to the side of his forearm. His hand shook a little. He'd been scratched up by the rough rocks, bruised his thumb in the forge, and got burned by the firebat, but those injuries had all been inadvertent.
He jerked the knife, but without the will to draw blood. He navigated the knife edge back to its starting position.
After a minute, he gritted his teeth and thought of his foster parents' proud faces, then firmly slashed the point of the knife a little way across his arm.
Blood trickled across the blade, and he tilted it over the tray. Drip, drip. A few spots, and then a few more, and suddenly the door blazed with colour.
Harry staggered back and sat down, hard, absently squeezing his forearm. He felt a little light-headed, not at losing a little blood but at the act of deliberately slicing himself.
The runes running from the lower left corner of the door lit up, one by one, blazing with orange light before settling down into a faint, steady glow. They reached the wheel, which turned slightly.
What was next? He wondered aloud. "Low-grade coal, molten metal, the shape of snakes." Well, he had the poor iron dagger he had made himself, and he knew a charm to heat metal, but nothing that would melt it. But maybe it was the concept that counted.
Harry took off his cloak and wrapped it around his right hand several time for protection, then held the dagger by the pommel. His left hand flashed through signs in the air as he concentrated.
After two minutes, the knife blade began to glow with heat. He was focusing on the very tip of the blade, hoping the heat would spread slowly through metal and not burn him.
A minute after that, his hand was uncomfortably hot, and getting worse. The cloak began to smoulder, and Harry hissed through his teeth in pain. Then he couldn't bear it any more, and dropped the heated knife in the bottom-right tray.
"Ow ow ow ow ow." He unwrapped his hand and stuck his fingers in his mouth.
The dagger lay in the tray, looking like it was getting hotter instead of cooling down. It glowed orange, and then light yellow. Harry shaded his hands against the light, which suddenly got brighter as the runes began to flare. They spread up the door, and the wheel turned a little more, and the door actually swung forward a fraction of an inch.
Molten iron bubbled in the tray.
"Charcoal is poor coal," Harry mumbled aloud through his fingers, and looked regretfully at his staff. It was only a simple one, but it had a nice balance, and he'd had it for as long as he could remember.
He used his remaining knife to carve off a long sliver of wood and put it experimentally in the upper-left tray. He wondered if it, too, would get hotter and hotter, becoming charcoal of its own accord.
Apparently not. Well, at least he had a heat-source now.
Harry dipped the end of the staff into the liquid iron. The wood burst into flames immediately, and Harry rolled it in his palms, trying to rapidly heat the staff's tip all over. Actual charcoal had to be made by steady heating while smothered, under sand or clay, but perhaps "charred wood" would be close enough.
The heat was spreading up the iron core of the staff, and he dropped it to the floor. He used his remaining long knife to pry off a few smouldering lumps of wood. These he gathered carefully on the edge of the blade, then lifted them into the upper-left tray.
Harry, cleaning the dagger on the edge of his cloak, watched in satisfaction as the runes flared and settled. A faint black line appeared as the door swung further inward. A lack of high-pressure water jetting through the crack told him that at least this wasn't really a flood-door.
Harry turned his attention to the most complex rune. The form of serpents? What could he sacrifice for that? Was form the same as shape? He had a cloak clasp in an S-shape, but wasn't wearing it today. All he had left were his clothes and good dagger. The closest thing to a serpent on him was his scar.
"I'm not going to try and slice that off," Harry told the door firmly. "I'm just not."
What about a sock? Was that similar enough to a snake? Maybe a really fat, floppy snake, he thought doubtfully.
Harry stood there for another five minutes, pondering deeply, before he realised. His shirt was made from rock worm hide. If he cut off a sleeve...
He struggled with it, jerking the knife through the tough leather. Then he laid the scrap of leather carefully on the floor and began to cut out a long, curving strip. Harry suppressed a yawn, stabbed two holes for eyes, and was done. It wasn't much, but it looked slightly more like a snake than it did anything else.
He placed the strip in the upper-right tray, and crossed his fingers.
Runes flared, white, orange, yellow. They raced down the door towards the wheel, and as they settled again, it turned. The bronze moved slowly and then faster and then the door swung smoothly into the room, forcing Harry to hurry backwards or be squashed.
"Oh, no."
Harry looked at the small room beyond, and the second door.
"You have got to be joking."
He slowly stepped forward. The first door automatically swung closed behind him.
"Okay, fine." Harry stepped towards the second door, and stopped to yawn again, his eyes watering slightly. He blinked firmly and took stock of the new door.
It was carved from some greenish, glittering stone he vaguely recognised as serpentinite. The door was plain but for a plate-sized copper disc in the middle. The centre of the disc held a large, flat opal, surrounded by tiny symbols. Carved above it, in bank-mark, was the word DETERMINATION.
Harry sighed, and reluctantly examined the tiny runes, already knowing what he would find.
Yes, symbols of warding, symbols of blunting, symbols of pain, symbols of alarm. All of them intricately inter-threaded. Mr Scintillion, one of the humans he had talked to in Gringotts, had explained the basics of curse-breaking. This was an ancient trick, a blast door. The gem was the lock, and Harry would have to shatter it as quickly as possible. As soon as he came near the surface he would be in pain, pain that would not stop until the opal was broken. And that would not be an easy task, with all these protective runes around it.
Which meant he had to start with his very best shot.
DETERMINATION, the door said to him.
Harry cleaned the blade of his good knife on the edge of his cloak. Then he sat cross-legged, and took up a fragment of charcoal from the remains of his staff.
Through a haze of tiredness, he realised that either goblin runes or enchanters' runes might not be effective here, depending on the exact spell that had been used. He would have to try both.
"Haidzruno runu, falahak haidera, ginnarunaz," Harry mumbled. I, master of the runes, conceal here symbols of power.
He started with a wizarding rune, sketching it carefully on the knife in charcoal. Nenaht, the nine-pronged hydra, for swift and steady striking.
Then a goblin rune: Tinne, for metal and sharpness.
He turned the blade over and continued with another wizard rune. Purisaz, the symbol of thunder giants, for strength and destruction.
A final goblin rune, the blaze-rune Luis, and that was all he dared. Accidentally smudging the other runes would spoil his effort and waste his magic.
"Haidzruno runu, falahak haidera, ginnarunaz," he repeated, and hefted the long knife.
Crack.
Harry hissed in pain, and raised his hand for another strike.
Crack.
"Aaaaaaaaugh. Come on."
Crack.
Fire blossomed in his bones, something tightened around his neck.
Crack.
A hairline fracture appeared in the opal. The tiny runes surrounding it sizzled malevolently.
Crack.
Needles of ice were slicing his eyeballs. Blood filled his mouth as he bit his tongue.
Crack, tinkle tinkle.
Every noise was magnified to Harry's senses, but the pain was gone. The opal turned a dull black, and shards of it broke away to fall to the floor. Harry had enough control to stumble backward, the word DETERMINATION sweeping towards him as the door opened.
He stumbled into the next room, drunk on fatigue and adrenaline.
The knife dropped from his hand, its edge completely ruined by the door's magical defences. The runes he had placed on it faded away as it clattered on the stone floor.
There were two doors here. One silver, set to one side. The hourglass murmured gently in it. Another door directly ahead of him.
A masked goblin stood at the side of the room, watching silently.
Harry stumbled forward, beaming. Surely this was the last door. If he could... just...
The room swayed about him.
Harry Potter collapsed, unconscious.
After a week's frantic inquiry in every subtle channel available to him, of which there were many, Dumbledore was forced to go to the Aurors.
Madam Bones, head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, was angry, but frightened too. Angry at Dumbledore, and frightened for her job. With things the way they were in the Ministry at the moment, went things went wrong, heads rolled. The owners of the heads were usually the people who happened to be nearby when blame was being handed out.
Dumbledore looked at her gravely.
"The Dursleys have been masterfully obliviated. Whoever did it made a perfect cleanup job. They insist that they never took him in, and I'm afraid I could find literally no trace of Harry at Privet Drive. I will of course assist your investigation in any way I can. Please Floo call my office as soon as you have any news, Amelia."
"No." She made a small move towards the door as if to stop him leaving, then halted and frowned. "We need to deal with this now, Dumbledore. You started this, and you'll have to finish it. Step through to the Ministry."
"Very well."
A few slivers of consciousness squirmed about, again reminding Harry's waking brain of cave eels.
There was... something. He'd bit his tongue in his sleep? And his bed was a lot harder than he was used to. Had he fallen out?
Harry yelped as memory flooded back, and tried to leap to his feet.
His body complained, and he hastily settled on the less lofty target of sitting up.
The masked goblin was still standing in the same position as before. Or perhaps it was another one.
How much time do I have left?
Harry stumbled to his feet and investigated the silver door. Its hissing hourglass said he had about half an hour left. Maybe slightly more, if he was lucky.
The goblin's mask faced forward impassively.
Harry went to the door. It was formidable, made of solid fire-darkened steel and then braced with strips of decorative bronze, going green with age.
The lock was complicated, full of dwarf-bolts and diamond screws and charmed bars. He thought there were touch-wards on it, but couldn't be sure. It didn't look trapped, so he hesitantly touched the flat plate of goblin's silver that lurked where a keyhole would usually be.
Nothing happened. Harry peered at the mechanism, acutely aware of minutes ticking by, and frowned. He couldn't even work out exactly how the magical lock functioned, let alone try to bypass it.
The word TOIL was written in bank-sign above the locking mechanism, but there was a firm line slashed through it. Spidery letters above the word read, HONOUR.
Harry looked around carefully. The door behind him had shut and locked. The room was small. There was a cold anvil in one corner, with a hammer, file and jeweller's pliers on it.
He looked at the dark steel door again, and considered points of entry. Not the lock. The door itself? Harry tapped each panel, sketching a quick rune of undoing with his other hand. If there had been illusions in play, they would have melted away – or at least revealed themselves. Even a masterfully-worked solid glamour should have shimmered briefly.
Solid steel, he thought. Alright, the hinges?
Harry looked at them. There didn't seem to be any.
So much for the points of entry.
Harry regarded the goblin at the side of the room, wondering what the trick was here. Surely there was one.
He bowed slightly, receiving a slight nod in return. "I don't suppose you can give me any advice?"
"No."
Harry thought carefully. The third task had been up to him to discover. "Do I have to go through this door, to complete the gadammeruk?"
"Yes."
"Am I required to use these tools to do so?"
"No."
Harry thought a little further.
"Is it possible to use these tools to do so?"
"I cannot say."
Harry glanced at the hourglass, nervously biting his lip, and went to look at the tools again. They were simple and plain, and had no obvious spells on them. He touched each carefully against the door and the lock, just in case.
Nothing. The goblin's mask was still and impassive.
Well, my wits haven't failed me yet, Harry thought. So: 'TOIL' scratched away and 'HONOUR' in its place?
He looked again at the door, and quickly sketched the bank-sign for honour on its surface with a stub of charcoal.
There was no response.
Harry Potter began to panic.
Madam Bones had twenty years' experience in not panicking. She had honed the skill to an art form, and occasionally bedazzled even her most experienced Aurors with it. She might look small and old, but people who knew her saw her as a rock, able to weather any storm.
First she sent out Head Auror Scrimgeour to lead the investigation into Harry Potter's disappearance, starting at the Dursleys'. He took two trusted wizards. For now, their inquiries would be kept completely secret, while they learned what they were dealing with.
Along with Terrence Knightley, Senior Officer of the Magical Law Enforcement Patrol, she questioned Dumbledore. Madam Bones needed to discover everything he had done with regard to Harry Potter.
"Show me these blood wards," the Head of the DMLE said, grimly.
Dumbledore, rather unused to being in the hotseat, raised his hand and collected together a handful of fine silver-and-gold threads out of the air. There was the faintest sound, like a harp's strings being plucked one by one on the horizon.
Dumbledore showed them the threads of the magical ward signature. "Placed upon him by his mother with and completely unbroken, you see. Nobody who means him harm has bypassed them."
"Maybe-"
The powerful witch and wizard both turned to look at Knightley, who gulped and continued.
"...Maybe he's been rescued, then?"
Dumbledore suddenly seemed to age. "Nobody who means him harm," he repeated quietly to himself.
Harry sat on the anvil and fidgeted as he thought, trying not to listen to the hourglass. No tools here would overcome the lock. No magic he possessed would bypass it. No physical force he could summon up would so much as scratch the door.
What had the maze watcher told him the third task was about? He would learn the price of experience and the truth of Brotherhood.
Harry had the feeling that the payment due to the land was the price of experience. He'd already dealt with that, his repayment made in the form of a nutritious body twice his own weight. On the other hand, 'the truth of Brotherhood' seemed kind of important, and what had the first two doors told him about that? He'd just used his wits and magic, as in the second task, for the door marked 'SACRIFICE', and his physical strength and courage, as in the first task, for the door marked 'DETERMINATION'.
Why scratch out 'TOIL' in favour of 'HONOUR'? What might the truth of Brotherhood be? All goblins of the Brotherhood could be relied upon, a Brother was held above any other being, that was probably the most self-evident truth.
That-
Harry blinked, and stood up. He walked across the room to the watching goblin, and bowed respectfully as a young goblin should.
As the last few minutes gathered in the hourglass across the room, he asked, "Will you open the door for me? Please?"
Author's notes:
→ To the people who have asked: no, this is not a crossover fic. There have been, and will continue to be, many fun references to webcomics, literature, music, myths and so on, in varying degrees of obscurity.
→ I'd like to thank people for a fantastic response for just a few chapters! Please continue to read and review!