AEU Chapter 29

"Yes Professor? What do you need?" Charles Hardy said to the headmaster as he marched through the emerald green flames, barely pausing in his stride to swipe the soot from his uniform.

"Lord Voldemort had in his time at Hogwarts a ring of historical significance, a ring he was quite attached too. He wore it for some time after he came into possession of it before it mysteriously disappeared from his presence. Since I have discovered that this ring was not only a valuable heirloom of Slytherin, his house's namesake, but also personally attached to the young Tom Riddle for some time, I suspect it to be-"

"His first attempt at making Horcruxes?" Hardy asked, pondering on the implications of maniacs who couldn't die.

"Just so, or at least, it's the most likely starting point. Finding where he hid it is one thing, obtaining it so we can destroy it will be even more difficult."

"Exactly how tough are these things going to be?" the old soldier asked, already calculating the possibilities of merely finding the target location and then bombing it to smithereens.

"Alas, it will be difficult. It has to be put beyond magical repair which if you remember from your days in the field-"

"You people can fix just about anything..." Charles murmured back.

'Damn, looks like this is going to be more difficult than I thought,' he thought grimly, leaning over the table to get a good look at the map that had just appeared there. "Secluded little village in the countryside...well, at least it won't be too difficult to keep people away."

"Hmm, pinpointing the exact house location will be difficult. I just pray he hasn't put it under a Fidelius Charm, if so it will be nigh on impossible to find," Dumbledore said, frowning heavily under big bushy eyebrows.

"Didn't you say you had a memory about this house?"

"Oh yes, but that was over fifty years ago. The brush and shrubbery will have grown out since then, and regardless, Voldemort will have certainly made it irritatingly difficult for people to find the hiding spot, even if they knew where the house was originally."

"What do we do then?"

Dumbledore leaned back, winced as his aged bones cracked unpleasantly, and sighed. "I think we need some help with this one. I will go first on a reconnaissance mission to find the charming hovel, then I'll come back with some curse breakers and a platoon of Rakers," he decided, glancing at the other man to weigh his own opinion.

"Sir, I recommend you having guards with you as soon as you arrive. Let's all go in, cordon off the area and then let you and the curse breakers go through this...hmm, bit small for a road...lane, top to bottom, systematically."

Dumbledore smiled ruefully, "Ah, here is where I must tell you that I am a teacher more than fighter. Of course you are right Charles. When will your troops be ready?"

Charles Hardy grinned at him, "We're always ready sir."


"Okay, okay Sirius. I promise I'm serious about not calling you 'Doggie' again. Can you please stop peeing on the carpet?" Harry begged the overly large wolf/dog/Grim (whatever a 'Grim' was), who was currently running throughout the house, stopping only to pee and howl.

The howling was because of Kreacher and his saucepan. The peeing was of his own volition.

"All it took was the magic word, pup," Sirius said, laughing as he transformed back into the matchstick man he was normally.

Harry glared at him, "You are NOT calling me that!"

"Oh, and why should I not? Are you going to start defecating?" Sirius said in mock fear.

"Note: Must look up how to neuter pets," Harry muttered darkly, causing Sirius to jump backwards slightly, sending him sprawling into Kreacher, who was not best pleased at the way he was treating the most Noble and Ancient House of Black.

"Ah, you need to lighten up my boy, James was never..." Sirius tailed off before slapping a hand to his mouth.

Harry had frozen in place.

"Um...okay. I'm not going there again," he said weakly as Harry regained his composure.

'Nice one mutt, comparing a child to his dead parent. Smooth.'

"Okay, this is obviously a little sore for both of us..."

"No, I'm sorry. It's just...I'm only ever compared to my parents. I rarely hear anything about them, except from Hagrid...and well, you know how he makes everyone out to be.

"Oh..." Sirius said dumbly, not entirely sure how to proceed.

It was the third time in as many days that he cursed giving up drinking.

"Whilst we're on the subject...is there anything you would like to know more about?" Sirius asked, cautiously treading over the ice that was threatening to spread through the room.

They had had a few chats about his mum and dad before but it wasn't enough, not nearly enough yet to go through everything that Sirius remembered or that Harry wanted to know about.

Harry idly kicked softly against a chair before throwing himself down in it, his usual elegance noticeably lacking as he thought.

"How did you guys do it? Become animagus so easily?" he said, curious not just because he wanted to hear another story but because he was quite interested in trying it out himself.

"Hmm, background knowledge first, since I know what you're thinking right now. It took us years to figure it out, it took some complicated transfiguration, potions and a great deal of luck in the timing for us all to do it in our fifth year. We risked our lives and took exceptionally stupid risks because we were arrogant pricks and though we were invincible."

"Let me explain: your animagus form is a reflection of you...not exactly your inner spirit or whatever, that's Divination bullshit, but still a truthful image of your absolute base qualities. You might be surprised, shocked, offended or even in denial over your form should you ever succeed, but anyone who knows you well will immediately grasp on how much your form actually reflects you."

"We started in third year, Christ that was a while ago...when we learnt the term in class. Most of that year was spent figuring out how each individual of our group would do it...it's a very personal brand of magic, which is one of the reasons why hardly anyone does it. There's not very many books, just fairly vague hints and tips on the subject. The theory underlining the whole process is written in stone, how all transfiguration works, but how you interpret it...well, that basically sums up how well you'll do."

"There's another thing too. We had most of the niggles figured out, or we thought we had at least, by the end of fourth year. Thing is, you have to be in a surge year, at the right moment, for your first transformation, or you'll never be able to subconsciously or consciously control yourself in animal form. Even if you are out by a few minutes, it can have adverse effects."

"Surge year?" Harry said confusedly.

"Ah, yeah. You know how a wizard's...endurance, his stamina, how much he can perform and cast spells before exhaustion, and how powerful those spells can be? It grows every year, slowly and steadily, a little trickle that constantly keeps filling you, expanding your powers and capability. It also has the side effect of giving magic users rather longish lives. Well, that and our great healthcare system and incapability of dying by any non-magical accident."

"Fascinating," Harry said, quite enthralled by the connotations that the information had in regards to his own body. He would become much more powerful in time, and from the sound of things, had more time than the average person to develop himself further.

"Well, every decade, you have a surge year in which your magical core grows much more quickly. On your tenth and twentieth birthday for example, you will have a surge in power that will abate only after a year has passed. Think of it as a magical reservoir building up somewhere, feeding you a trickle constantly. Then it bursts, giving you everything. The surge takes a year to finish, before its back to the trickle again. Same every tenth year until you drop."

Harry nodded, indicating that he was following.

"Well, in your teen years, you have some extra surges, on your sixteenth and seventeenth birthdays respectively. So we could only begin to do our thing when each of us turned sixteen. At various points in that year there were points when the surge peaked in intensity, we had to predict those moments down to the minute in order to give us time to prepare."

"We also had two other surge years coming up soon but if we waited that long, we'd have less time to spend with Moony when he was the Moony at school, which was the main reason why we were doing it in the first place."

"I'm still not seeing the very difficult part of this project that makes it hard for everyone," Harry said.

"Hmm, well I suppose our group effort did make things easier. However, remember that that can only get you so far. It took us nearly three years of hard graft before we figured it out. We were subconsciously tailoring the three individual rituals to be more in line with each other. You...are on your own."

"Hmm, that's quite heavy stuff Sirius. Got any funny moments in any of that?" Harry said, half-jokingly, still wondering how he could work out his own ritual by the time he was that age. Or if he even wanted to try with that level of apparent risk.

Sirius chuckled to himself, then laughed aloud after about three seconds of recollection.

"Okay, so James had transformed a few times. He had successfully done it on his first peak purge event, but we were still cautious at that point at transforming. This was, what? Part way through fifth year."

"We were trying to figure out what he was. He looked...well he sort of looked like the Stag he was going to be but he was a much darker colour, much smaller and had no antlers at all. The weird things was that is form wasn't quite stabilising as well as mine or that rat's was. He seemed to be unsure somehow. Sometimes there would be streaks of silver and white in his pelt, sometimes he wouldn't be able to convert his clothes back onto himself when he had finished frolicking. The Fat Lady took three weeks to forgive him for bounding up to her naked one night, demanding to be let in."

Sirius sniggered at that point.

"Interestingly enough, he was resigned to spending the whole years as 'Shag-pile' as we called him then, when he...well, he basically saved a twit's life, saved me from prison and stopped Lupin being put down like an animal."

Sirius looked down in shame and Harry swiftly spurred him on with the story, making a note to ask him about that later.

"So any way, it was the darnedest thing...but the next day, there he was. Prongs, king of the forest and all that. A massive, white stage. Made me feel even worse than before. I not only nearly killed my best friend but now my other best friend had a cooler form than me."

Harry sat back, thinking about the mysterious man, then a much younger one, his father had been.

'Christ, God, whoever is up there. Please don't let me be a bunny rabbit,' Harry thought desperately, before he began plotting as to exactly how he would be ready and waiting on his sixteenth to take hold of his inner 'animal'.


'I know what to do,' Lucius Malfoy thought to himself.

For the first time in far too many years he walked with a new found optimism and delight, causing all who knew him well to withdraw from his presence slightly, in order to better protect themselves from whatever scheme he was planning. His slave in particular was removing his disgusting visage from sight far too often these days...but no matter, no matter.

'Who would have thought something so simple would have confirmed my faith in the old ways? I shall be the great instigator, and shall be heralded when He rises once more.'

All thanks to a mere dusty diary.

"Luciusss..."