Heroes of Magic and Might
Chapter 16 – A Rose's petals are
…
The first rays of morning touched lightly the parapets of Hogwarts castle. Gentle smoke wafted up from the kitchen in playful billowing rings. Birds sang their morning report, perched on a giant crystal stone some distance from the gates and hopped about industriously among the woodpiles in search of bits for their nests.
It was calm, peaceful, tranquil.
In other words, boring; so, lets jump a few dozen miles, as the dragon flies, and look at something more interesting.
A small clearing, no; a small battlefield lie still under the rising sun. Signs of recent conflict arranged the small space like a mural of nature, the violent sort. A once magnificent buck had been doe'd by a rampaging Caladonian boar; now deceased. His ultimately fatal struggle responsible for the rearranging of the small forest clearing.
He'd been a magnificent beast, escaping a dozen hastily magicked snares and traps; entangling vines, three mud pits, even a spike filled hole. It was only through time and persistence the great beast was bested. His vital energy drained nearly dry, allowing a fatal wound to slip through his armor like hide.
It was a good death, an exhausting death.
Exhausting for Harry anyway who'd done most of the fighting and trapping. Harry who still needed to deal with two corpses worth of hide, meat, and other assorted parts. Harry, who lay exhausted near the remains of the fire pit while the well sated vampire went about her business out of the sun, under her overturned wagon.
What that business was he didn't know, nor care. Somewhere throughout the battle with the boar his give-a-damn had been broken and the repair crew was taking their time to fix it, lazy union bastards.
Left to his own devices he may have lay there significantly longer, but outside forces were moving against such a poorly conceived notion.
"UNBELIEVABLE!"
The cry of outrage had him sitting straight up faster than was necessarily healthy. "What! What is it?"
There was much grumbling from beneath the wagon before a response came. "Three spools of thread and not a damn needle to be found."
He considered her words for a moment, then abruptly flopped back into the trampled earth, groaning. "I am too tired for this shit." And he couldn't go to sleep either. He needed to process the deer and the boar before the smell of meat attracted other things.
"Harry!"
"What!"
"Do you have a needle?"
No, but that wasn't hard to change. "What kind."
"The pointy kind."
Smartass. "What size?"
"Finger size."
"Which finger?"
"Pinky."
"Mine or yours?"
"Uh, mine."
Dragging himself upright he located a bit of twig and held it in his closed hand. It was a first-year transfiguration; he felt, and by extension saw, the transformation; his wand lay on the splintered log where he'd dropped it earlier.
"I'm getting pretty good at this whole wandless thing." He could almost imagine a day when he'd no longer need the wand at all. Not today though, he had stuff to do.
He lifted the back gate of the wagon just enough to stick his arm inside, "Oo, that'll do." The needle was taken, and he pulled his arm out.
"Call if you need anything."
She didn't respond and he didn't wait.
Locating his bag, he pulled out some meat, broke off a bit of cheese and filled a cup from his water jar. "Not much of this left," he said of the cheese. Water was easy and he'd just come into a wealth of meat; cheese on the other hand he had no way of making and since it didn't grow on trees, when it was gone, it was gone.
Unless he located some sort of civilization soon. The idea gave him mixed feelings, mostly with concern to the nature of said civilization.
Unlike most people his age, Harry had seen both the bright and the dark side of two worlds. The beautiful façade painted over the ugly base. He didn't believe Rosebud was as innocent as she appeared but there was no ambiguity about the nature of the men she had killed.
The truth of the matter was likely somewhere in the middle, but he didn't really have time to think about it. Even with food and drink he felt like a lead weight, but he needed to work.
Sitting roughly, he went through several of the exercises he'd learned as part of the enhancement magic. Fifteen minutes, he felt mostly human and only slightly dog. It was enough to pull out his grimoire and read through the spells Jake Curry had taught him.
Of course, he put them in the grimoire; or to be more accurate, the twins had put them in. Since he was hiding it from Hermione, the twins had done most of the entry work. Everything he asked for was there in the index; plus, a lot of stuff he hadn't asked for.
He wasn't surprised, it was Fred and George. It would have been surprising if they hadn't done something.
The spells were relatively new to him; new and unpracticed. Since its hide wasn't a foot thick and resistant to magic, he started with the deer.
This turned out to be relatively easy; a few cuts in the right places then the skinning spell and the pelt came right off, dumping the guts and other entrails all over the ground.
The real difficulty was trying not to vomit.
The rabbit Jake had let him practice on had been so much neater; now that he thought about it, purely by virtue of being smaller and having less 'guts' to dump out.
"That hog is gonna be a nightmare." And he still had to cut up the deer.
Letting the carcass hang, he read through the spells to tan the hide. He didn't need to tan it, but Jake had assured him when he asked, "A tanned hide will last longer." He had no knowledge to the contrary, so he was gonna tan that hide.
The antlers were a total loss, which made him kind of sad. They served no greater purpose apart from looking cool, but they did look really cool.
An hour and a half and it was done. The hide was stored; the meat was both frozen and slapped with a long-term stasis charm to keep it from going bad. Cramming it all in there however had revealed a problem.
Not a lack of space, he had plenty of that. The problem was, it was getting a little messy in his bag, disorganized, "And that boar is going to take up way more room."
He could shrink things, but that came with its own problems. Casually throwing spells on top of spells was a good way to ruin something; not to mention highly enchanted objects, like the water bottle, did not like being just shrunk.
He could probably figure out how to do it. The information was almost certainly in his grimoire, somewhere. But time was at a premium and he needed to get that boar taken care of.
In the end his solution was to take out everything that wasn't meat, even the hide, and set it aside to put back in later, on top.
That complete, there was no more stalling; it was time to gut the hog. Several problems immediately became apparent.
Firstly, even dead, its hide resisted magic. Not as strongly as when alive, but just cutting it open required not only wand, but wand motion and spoken incantation. He was much better with his cutter than that.
He wasn't wandless yet, but he was well beyond the need for incantation. This set the tone for the rest of the day.
Peeling the hide was like trying to skin concrete. The guts were spilling out before he was a quarter done which forced him to stop and move his work; unable to stomach the smell.
"Most quadrupeds are fairly similar under the skin," Jack had told him. In some regards this was true. They all had four legs, the guts were in the middle and they stank. Beyond that Harry was getting a very crude lesson in boar anatomy and how it varied from deer and rabbit.
He didn't appreciate it much given his arms kept going numb as he peeled the hide; a job just half completed by lunch time.
"Bloody hell!" The right side of the boar was fully peeled as he stood panting. "If I never see another one of these, it'll be too soon."
"How goes it?" Rosebud inquired when he collapsed against the wagon to rest. "I've been smelling viscera for hours. You should probably bury that soon."
"I'm—getting to it," he said, winded after walking barely thirty feet.
"Sounds like you're working hard."
"And how's your project coming?"
"Quite nicely I think."
"Do I get to see it?"
"Maybe. If I think you've been good."
Harry snorted tiredly. Sassy little vampire.
He could practically hear the smug smile. He hadn't realized how much he missed this; having someone to talk to. The fairy was company sure, but she made for rather one-sided conversation.
"Can I ask you something," he ventured, fighting to stay awake.
"I suppose." Her put upon air made him chuckle.
"The other night, did you bury yourself?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"You wouldn't let me eat you."
He didn't know where he found the energy to laugh, but he did; long and hard. He tried firing back, but his wit had jumped ship at the first sign of madness, so he just stood there laughing till his side hurt.
"You—you may just kill me yet," he wheezed, gripping his aching side.
"And you thought I was just a cute face and nice teeth."
"NO!" he shouted, holding his screaming, quivering side. "No more. You won't get me today, do you hear." He staggered away from the wagon, fully conscious of the muffled tittering, and went back to work. Any more rest like this probably would kill him.
He managed the remainder of the hide in an hour, easier with one half already done. Then it was time to cut him up which revealed two things; it wasn't just the hide that resisted magic, and it was a good thing he wasn't called Harry Butcher because he did an absolute hack job of it.
He was certain the bacon was in there somewhere, but hell if he could find it.
By the time he'd finished spelling and storing it his bag was looking quite crowded and he had reached a level of exhaustion where he was too tired to sleep, leaving him to lay, groaning, next to the newly repaired firepit.
With the sunset came darkness, and with darkness, the vampire. "Good evening."
Barely able to turn his head, Harry observed her mostly out of the corner of his eye. "Nice dress." It was surprisingly frilly albeit quite simple and completely black.
"I would have liked something with lace, but you wouldn't expect a bunch of men to be carrying that."
Speaking of carrying, "What's the book?" A heavy black tome framed in metal bones with a metal skull on the cover.
"This, is a necromantic tome. A book of spells for the raising and managing of undead," she said. "This is why I was captured."
"You steal it?"
She nodded, plopping down on the log next to the one that was his pillow. "From a group of book burners."
"Book burners?"
"Servants of the holy empire. To them all magic that doesn't come from their god is considered an abomination and should be destroyed. Necromancy though, that's like an abomination's abomination. They really hate undead."
"You mean more than other people," he said, too tired for tact.
"Oh yes," she replied, entirely unfazed. "As much as the living and undead are antagonistic to one another, the holy empire takes it to a whole other level. It's their god that's the problem."
"How's that?"
"He's a god of light. All the gods of light and true life stand in opposition to the gods of undeath. It's why holy magic hurts us like it does."
"Huh," he was learning so much; now the question was, how much would he remember when he woke up? If he ever managed to fall asleep. "So, is that why the sun hurts you."
"Yes and no. There's actually two parts to that."
"Double trouble."
"Are you going to continue being so silly?"
"Maybe." He was too tired to be serious. He was also too Harry to be Sirius.
"Vampires, as a form of undead, are highly magical. However, we are aligned entirely to two elements of mana, earth and air."
"Mana?"
"The energy that allows us to perform magic. How do 'you' not know that?"
Bad student probably, "Never heard it called that. We just called it magic."
"Huh, odd. Anyway. Because we are purely aligned to only two elements, we are essentially in opposition to the other two. The sun, besides being the scornful eye of light, is also the richest source of fire mana outside the elemental plane of fire."
"Then that would mean your weak to water?"
"Correct."
"How do you take a bath?"
"A special concoction of herbs mutes the mana, mostly. You fell a little weak if you take too long but at least it doesn't burn."
"I thought you'd just bath in blood or something," vampire after all.
"Doesn't exactly get you clean does it?" she pointed out logically. "Though I do remember hearing of a cult that used to bathe in blood ritually. Carmilliites."
"Human blood?"
"Naturally."
"Of course." Stupid question really. "So, that book, any good."
"I haven't had a chance to read it yet. I spent most of the day working on this and listening to you grunt and curse while you worked."
"You heard that?" Oops.
"A vampire's senses are much keener than a human. If I concentrate, I could hear a conversation a mile away like I was standing right there."
"Eavesdropper," he said, making her chuckle. "Was it worth it you think, after everything you went through."
"I suspect so," she said. "I know so little necromancy. My master was many things, but a powerful necromancer was not one of them. Wasn't much of a teacher either."
"I just mean, staked to the ground. And then what that one guy almost did to you."
"Almost? Oh him. That wasn't almost, just almost that night."
It took Harry a moment to comprehend what he was being told. The horrible, disgusting truth of the matter. "You're saying he…" the word wouldn't even leave his mouth.
"Several times," she said flippantly. "What of it."
Harry was near speechless. How could someone be so cavalier about – THAT. "It doesn't bother you?"
"If I were that fragile, I'd never get anything done." Seeing his horrified look, she sighed. "My master was many things. Not least among them, an unrepentant pervert. That fool stuffing his prick up my butt is the least of the things that have been done to me. If there weren't tentacles involved its hardly worth thinking about."
Far from feeling reassured he was only more horrified. "Why did you—I mean how did you—that is…"
His brain was having difficulty forming whole sentences. She tried not to laugh but it was a clearly a strain. "How did I become a vampire?"
"Yes! That." Anything to change the subject.
"I was turned, same as most. I was eleven, a skinny little scarecrow of a child, out by myself well after I should have been. He was a relatively young vampire, only fifty years dead and recently emancipated by the death of his own master.
"He drained me nearly dry. Then, rather than waste a corpse, he turned me. He had no servants of his own then and I was as good as anything else. He turned me, then we went to my house and ate my family, then the rest of the village."
"Geez!"
"It's not that impressive. It wasn't a big village, but it was a start. I spent the next two hundred years following him around. Then the world ended, and I came here."
"What happened to him?" he was almost afraid to ask.
"Tragically, he was unable to make the trip."
"Tragically?" His eyebrows were not as loud as Minerva McGonagall's, but they adequately expressed his disbelief.
"Very tragic," she said, "I made sure."
Her wicked little smile was returned with his own. "Very traaaaaa—aagic," he yawned.
"Sleepy time?" she chuckled.
"My vital energy is dangerously low," and he punctuated with another yawn.
"I suppose there's no point in eating you then."
"That's right," he declared, consciousness flagging quickly. "Outsmarted you I have, hahaha."
He didn't see her smile at him, eyes too heavy to stay open. He didn't feel her hand gently brush his hair, or her lips softly touch. He certainly didn't hear her whisper, "Goodnight sweet prince," before opening her book and losing herself in the text.
None of these things he knew as deep sleep stole swiftly over him, and in turn, a strange phenomenon, that of the dream. Not that it was strange for Harry to dream, he did so often. What was strange was that the dream was not of the usual variety, the kind that woke him, screaming.
This was the sort he quickly forgot come morning; vague and indistinct. Yet at the same time, in the moment, it was the sort he never wished to wake from. Hands and lips, stroke and caress, burning brand and fevered touch and everything in rolling waves of crimson plush.
Wakefulness came hesitantly, as though it too wished to bath in red velvet. Alas, twas not to be, mores the pity. A speckled haze met his fluttering eyes; a moments concentration and the world came into focus.
The chirping of the birds and lack of anything gnawing on him allowed a feeling of tranquility to steal over him. A welcome change from the past two days, and with no task needing done, he was content to bask for a time.
Eventually someone else decided he should get up, and he was pleased to see her all the same. "Didn't see you much yesterday."
Not that he worried about the fairy, she often went off by herself to later return. She obviously had some way to find him, so he didn't worry. Though the little blue wisp buzzing around in the aura of her glow was new.
"What's this then?" he asked stupidly, knowing full well he would not understand her. He didn't.
Whatever it was she seemed pleased about it, which was good enough for him. Levering himself vertical he scanned the clearing. Miraculously there were no surprises. Things were still all tore up, but in a familiar way. The wagon, with vampire beneath, was right where it should be and the wolf was lying next to it looking at him, perfect.
Perfect?
He was forced to rewind a little before he realized where the dissonance was coming from. By then the wolf had grown board of him and lay his head down.
"Where did that come from?" It hadn't been there last night, had it?
The fairy tinkled something at him, which made as much sense as anything else she ever said to him. Incautiously he strode toward the wagon. The wolf saw him coming and fangs bared with a meaningful growl. Rising to its feet it stared, daring him to take another step.
Harry was exactly the sort to take such a dare, but in this instance he paused. He didn't know where it had come from, what it was doing, or why it was doing it.
There were any number of ways he could have resolved the situation. A stunner or sleeping spell would have done the trick. His strength, enhanced, had allowed him to punch dragons, what chance did one wolf have. Even just calling out to Rosebud was a viable option.
Naturally, Harry chose none of these. The wolf had challenged him. This could not stand, but he didn't want to hurt it till he knew why it was there.
Its growling abruptly stopped when Harry vanished. It whimpered in confusion at the tiny thing standing in his place. The large squirrel marched up to him on its hind paws till they were face to face. Being just a wolf of no particular uniqueness, it did what it normally did when a squirrel got that close to its mouth.
This was a terrible mistake. Tiny paws clasped, top and bottom, slamming his mouth shut. If that weren't enough, it then forced the canine down to the ground so its own head was above, and its large expressive eyes could glare down.
Much was stated unequivocally through that expressive glare; most of it unfit for young readers and women who are nursing. The gist of it though was quite simple; don't cross me; no 'or else' necessary.
The message came through loud and clear without a single word being said. He lay perfectly still, even when the squirrel became a man again and knocked on the wagon gate like a door.
Receiving no response, he did it again, harder. There was a grumble, something stirring, "What!" came grumpily from under the wagon.
"Were you sleeping?"
"Yes."
"You sleep?"
"Sometimes. Was that all?"
It was not. "Did you know there's a wolf out here?"
"Yes."
Okay. "Why is there a wolf out here?"
"He wandered into camp last night. You didn't bury the viscera deep enough. He was trying to dig it up."
"It was underground, how could he smell it?"
"Most canines have excellent noses, wolves especially. Even underground things can still give off a smell. That's why corpses are buried so deep. Six feet under. You've heard that before, yes?"
"Yeah." Just never knew why. "Why is he still here."
"I decided to keep him."
"Why?"
"Why not?"
Harry groaned into his palm, making the wolf whimper. "Don't wolves usually come in packs."
"I think he was kicked out of his pack," she said. "There's no other wolves for miles and he looks like he's been in a fight."
He certainly did. Several long gashes across his muzzle and one across his eye stood out starkly against his black fur.
"You really want to keep him?"
"His names Blacky. Or Shadow. Which do you think is better?"
Neither, they're both silly and boring. "Why is he just sitting out here? Are you controlling him?"
"Kind of. Vampires have a natural rapport with certain animals. Wolves, bats, vermin. I just used that; he was more than happy to join my pack."
"Your pack?"
"You know, you, me, the fairy."
"So, we're a pack now? They why did he growl at me?"
"Challenge for dominance. You didn't hurt him, did you?"
He looked at the wolf who stared back pitifully. "No," he sighed, reaching out a hand and gently stroking the canines head; an understandable signal that all is well, all is forgiven.
At least that's what he got out of it if his tail was any indication. "Since your up, can we talk about what we do next."
"You have somewhere you're going?"
"Not really. You?"
"No place in particular, but we shouldn't stay here much longer. I killed twenty others when they first captured me, and their horses ran off the night you freed me. It's possible someone might come looking."
"So, how's that gonna work? We just travel by night?" He wasn't overly fond of the idea.
"No, so long as I'm covered, I'll be fine. Only direct exposure to the sun hurts me."
"I don't suppose they had any spare cloaks?"
"I left them where I was sitting last night. I also resized a full outfit for you. I didn't want to say so earlier but what you are wearing now is the most bizarre thing I have ever seen. That is bound to draw attention."
"I'll take your word for it." It was easier than arguing fashion.
"Let me sleep a while longer," she yawned, "and then we'll get going."
Going, he thought as his companion loudly flopped back into her bed. But where?
...
Announcement
...
Just real quick.
We're doing a NaNoWriMo in May. One new chapter ever day for thirty one days. Come check it out starting Friday. Book of Shadows. Be there, or don't, I don't really care... yes I do.