Disclaimer: In chapter One.
AN: Hi, sorry for being really lazy and not getting any work done for a few months. Can't promise any regularity with this story.
A week after the ball, an official was waiting outside of the guest suite. "Monsieur Potter, your second task will be three weeks from today. You will be tasked with rescuing a hostage who Madame Maxime has already selected." He nodded towards Tanwen. "Mademoiselle Darian shall serve as your hostage, this is not for debate. In the Pyrenees lives a rare species of Carcohl. This shall be the threat to your hostage, she will be placed within its territory and you must recover her." He turned on his heel and walked away down the corridor. Harry looked at Tanwen, a frown on his face. She rolled her eyes at him and pecked him on his frowning lips before leading him down to the Great Hall for breakfast.
Carrog and Cysged arrived shortly afterwards and after being told of the second task offered to help Harry in any necessary way. They mentioned that the Cadair, in which Harry and Tanwen had trained for the last year, was previously the mountain home of a Carcohl. The death of whom had caused the summit of the mountain to collapse into a bowl shape.
It was another two days before Carrog had permission from the Headmistress to take them both off-site to visit an archive of the Guardsmen. They arrived in the rather fertile Nile river valley. To one side of them the seemingly endless blue waters rushed past, the Nilometers clearly marking that the river was either about to flood or had flooded recently.
They walked through flat-roofed sandstone buildings and a sprawling bazaar enveloped them before eventually they came upon a dead end. A little boy with sand blonde hair and torn clothing leapt across the narrow alley way from one roof to another. The wall before them shimmered and became a light blue. Three golden circle were marked into the wall, each larger than the one below it. A bright red flame danced atop the largest circle. Carrog put a hand to the middle circle and the wall collapsed into dust.
An elderly man, wearing robes of the same light blue as the wall that had just stood at the end of the alleyway, stepped forwards. He grasped Carrog's hand in both of his and kissed it gently before pulling the hand to his chest and releasing it. Carrog nodded to the man, even as the man shrunk and his hair faded into a sand blonde.
Though not quite the age of the boy that had leapt over them outside he was now very much a young man. "Curator, it has been a very long time since you visited this archive. I had feared that you had lost interest in the knowledge that you had entrusted to us."
Carrog smiled slightly, "In truth, Theo, I have come here such that my ward and his life mate can study a topic of interest to them. Though may just have a browse, one never knows what can be found in these places."
"And which topic might interest the Curator's young ward?" Theo looked towards Harry.
"We were interested in finding out about carcohls." Theo nodded before closing his eyes and humming a short tune to himself.
"This way then young sir, I trust that you know this place better than I do Curator?" Carrog nodded and began to wander down a tunnel leading under the streets of the Egyptian river port above. Theo took a hand of each of Harry and Tanwen before rushing into another tunnel. "This the Hall of Records young ones. The Curators set this up many, many years ago, before even the demise of Atlantis, although there are other, older archives elsewhere also." They entered a large stone cavern with bookshelves as far as the eye could see. There was no obvious source of lighting yet the cavern was well lit. The roar of falling water could be heard off to the right.
Theo led them to a desk several smaller aisles down. A single tome lay open on the desk. "These pages will answer the question you seek to answer. They will." He then turned and disappeared around a corner and out of sight. Harry looked at Tanwen in amusement.
"Curator is a new name." Tanwen whispered.
"A member of the Hand wouldn't call them by a military term I suppose. Why are you whispering, there's no one here, and if there was there's a waterfall that's way louder than you are?" Harry replied.
Tanwen slapped his arm. "It's a library." She put a finger to his lips and sat down at the desk. The book was handwritten, it was a detailed account of the slaying of a carcohl that inhabited Cadair prior to the use of the mountain by the Guardsmen. Harry slipped into a chair beside her. They began to read through the passage.
It had been a harsh ice age, but the glaciers were retreating and the thousand year winter was thawing. The Guardsmen had come across the Cadair when a member of the group was pulled into a nest of tunnels by a long green tentacle. The rest of the group had rushed into the mountain network. They had been too late to save their colleague and in vengeance had attempted to penetrate the thick hide of the carcohl. When that had failed, they regrouped outside of the mountain. The set camp at the entrance to one tunnel and carved a toilet into the glacier that would eventually retreat into the heights of Snowdonia. The thawing ice age had left many such glaciers unstable.
A large section of the glacier shattered into thousands upon thousands of shards as it slid through boulder fields and into foothills before colliding with the mountainside The Guardsmen scattered and an acrid green smoke billowed forth from the tunnel network. Upon re-entering the main chamber that the Carcohl had lived within the group discovered the carcohl's carcass, thin shards of ice still reacting with the blood of the Carcohl that painted the walls of the cave.
Tanwen looked thoughtful. Her right hand went to play with her own hair and the left pulled her lower lip free from her teeth before allowing them to toy with it again. "So you just need to get ice into its blood?" Harry nodded, it seemed that way. "Well magic didn't penetrate its hide so I suppose you'd need a Muggle weapon, a bow and arrow maybe, with ice tips." She looked up at Harry.
"That wouldn't be too difficult, we can both shoot and Alexander can bring our bows from Sammuntia, the ice tips would be more difficult. Maybe Carrog or Cysged could make ice arrows, ones that don't melt of course since it isn't an ice age anymore." Now Tanwen nodded in agreement.
"But how will you find me, if carcohls live in tunnel networks then it could take forever to find me?" A book slammed down onto a desk further along and fell open.
"Another answer for another question, young sir and miss shall find it on those pages." Harry and Tanwen jumped when Theo spoke behind them.
By the time they had turned Theo had rounded the corner again. The pair stood up from the desk they were at, Harry walked to the other desk while Tanwen jogged to the end of the aisle. Harry looked back at her and she shook her head. The man was nowhere to be seen. She jogged back.
Harry put his hand on the open page and turned to the title of the book. "The Customs and Traditions of the Atlantean Peoples. By Sofia Geros." He turned back to the page that the book had been open on. The book explained that one Atlantean town on the east coast of the island had a custom in which when a member of the town reached their magical maturity and shed their final scale they performed a ritual. The ritual involved spending the night in the salt water of the Mediterranean and marking a soft porous stone with their blood. The end result of the ritual was that the Atlanteans could see the faint traces of recent magic including those of the living magic that inhabited magical people.
However the ritual was dangerous, while very few Atlanteans died to the ritual itself, many had fallen into insanity and their magic had gone wild, fleeing the body entirely and causing devastation for a few moments. It had been when the Prince Anoitos from Atlantis City had visited the town and been persuaded to take part in the tradition that the first tidal wave had struck the island. The next morning the island had succumbed to the fury of the Prince's wild magic.
Tanwen closed the book and turned to Harry. "There's no way you're doing that. You aren't going insane, not while I'm your life mate you're not." Harry kissed the top of her head.
"Lets go find Carrog." He stood and took her hand. She shook her head before standing and allowing him to lead her out into the main aisle. Theo appeared and, after ensuring that their questions had been answered, led them through a series of sandstone tunnels to another desk which Carrog sat at with a large stone disk resting on its side in front of him.
Carrog stood and the disk rose up towards a gap in the shelves where it disappeared. "You've got what you need?" Harry and Tanwen nodded. "Then lets go back and tell Cysged what you've found." He led them to the entrance of the Hall of Records and the wall formed behind them before returning to the sandstone brick of the surrounding neighbourhood.
As they walked through the streets back to the riverbank, Tanwen pointed out the Sphinx looking directly towards the entrance of the Hall of Records.
Shortly after arriving back at Beauxbaton Palace, Tanwen broached the topic of the ritual with Carrog and Cysged. "We decided that the easiest way to defeat the carcohl would be using ice tipped arrows and a bow. While we have bows, we don't have ice tipped arrows." Alexander flamed away. Cysged nodded.
"We can conjure never-melting ice for arrow heads and craft the arrows for you." Cysged told them. Alexander returned with a dark brown recurve bow and deposited it on the table in the centre of the common room before alighting beside Auradain and nuzzling her neck.
"Thank you, we also found a ritual that some Atlanteans used to do that let them see the traces of magic left behind by spells and magical beings..." Tanwen trailed off as Carrog frowned. "I wondered whether the Guardsmen did that?"
Carrog shook his head. "I don't know of any Guardsmen, either order of the Guard or Hand, who has done this ritual. The risks are great. Indeed so much so that the people of Atlantis paid a very hefty price for its casual use."
"So Harry shouldn't do it?" Tanwen sounded hopeful.
"Harry hasn't reached his magical maturity, that is very much obvious, so it is possible that he might be more likely to resist the effects of seeing so much magical essence suddenly. His magic can still adapt quickly to the change. And I don't think we could ever stop him from trying to protect you, no matter the risk to himself."
"I don't need protection." Tanwen mumbled.
Cysged laughed beautifully "Harry will say the same about himself as well." Then Carrog and Cysged went to their bedroom.
Albus Dumbledore was a very busy man. He had several projects on the go at once and he simply couldn't allow any to be delegated. There was still the matter of persuading Mister Potter to return to Britain with his family, it was becoming increasingly clear that he was a critical piece of the game that was being played. When Madame Maxime had allowed a trip to a library in Egypt, Albus had attempted to follow them. However the family had never arrived at the international arrivals point within Cairo, from which a wizard could then travel to anywhere in Egypt. Yet he had seen them return, sand in Mister Potter's hair.
Then the Unspeakable had returned. They had rebuilt their wall. But the names that they were looking for had changed. The Unspeakable asked Madame Maxime for the chance to interview the entire Darian family. They believed that they were members of an ancient French group known as the Hellequin, who were led by the same Law-Writers that the Unspeakables had been hunting for centuries. She had summarily refused.
Reports flooded in from Magical Britain, the ongoing conflict, while certainly heading towards a ceasefire, was still causing violent skirmishes throughout the country. Even worse, the Muggle Prime Minister had summoned Cornelius and demanded an explanation for a recent magical attack on a Muggle warship. Some traders had mistaken the heavily armoured ship for a Black Knight ship that was blockading Britain. What the traders didn't know was that the destroyer had been there because the Ministry of Defence had received a message from the Guardsmen about the imminent sinking of a merchant ship in the North Sea.
The Prime Minister's threat to Cornelius had been worrying. "If magical people cannot govern magical people, then non-magical people shall."
