An hour or so later, the rain had largely died down. It was still quite cloudy, though, the clouds seeming almost low enough to turn into fog, and worse was that the sun had set and so everything was now quite dark – even darker than when the clouds had been thick with rain.

Harry wasn't nearly confident enough in his navigation to be able to find his way to Hogwarts at night, in low cloud, and especially when he didn't know where he was starting in the first place. He could have flown past Hogwarts so he'd need to fly back south, or maybe he'd ended up to the east of the castle – or even not have made it all the way, so he'd still have to go further north.

It was all quite a puzzle.

Harry was sure his friends would be worried, as well, but it might take a while for someone to remember that they could send Hedwig with a letter and find him that way.

Still, the young dragon thought, it could easily be worse.

He picked up a pine branch, sniffed it, then ate most of the smaller branches leading off it. That left him with a short length of wood, and after considering for a moment longer he cast a Bluebell Flames spell and breathed over the end of the pine branch.

The result looked quite good, and it would be easier to explain if he happened to end up in a Muggle area than using a magic wand for light. It wouldn't be perfect, because most flames weren't blue, but he could just say it was something to do with pine resin.

That still left Harry wondering which way to go, and whether he should take off at all, and after a bit of thought he decided he should make a little pattern of lights on the ground with a second torch and come back to it. It felt a bit like the kind of problem-solving that Neville and the others did in their dungeons and dragons game, though Harry had to admit he'd much rather be doing this kind of working out in a dungeon back at Hogwarts instead of lost somewhere in an unknown part of Scotland.

Harry was in the middle of trying to find a good place to take off – somewhere where he could have a good landing path and aim for it in the dark – when there was a cough behind him.

"Oh, um, hello," Harry said, turning. "Do you have any..."

He was about to continue by asking if the person had any idea where he was, but the sight of the person who'd spoken was enough of a surprise that he had to blink.

"Any what?" asked the centaur, a man to the waist and a horse below it – with a red beard and red hair and a chestnut lower body, and a belt a little above his waist which had some pouches hanging from it.

"Sorry," Harry said. "I've never met a centaur before, it was a bit of a surprise."

"You must be Harry Potter," the centaur declared. "I have never met a talking dragon before, but Rubeus Hagrid has told me of you."

"You know Hagrid?" Harry asked. "That's great – that must mean you know where Hogwarts castle is!"

"Indeed I do," the centaur told him. "And I also know that the name your headmaster gives this forest is the forbidden forest."

"I was on my way back to the castle and I got blown off course," Harry explained, then remembered he'd been very rude. "Oh – what's your name?"

The centaur bowed. "I am Ronan."

He looked upwards, then returned his attention to Harry. There was a long silence, and Harry felt a sudden urge to cough.

"Mercury is bright, tonight," Ronan said, eventually. "But Mars is shadowed."

Harry looked up as well, and saw nothing – the clouds were still thick and grey.

"Ah..." he began, not wanting to be even more rude than he'd already been, and Ronan chuckled.

It sounded a little bit like a whicker, or a neigh, or one of those horse noises, but maybe that was just because part of Harry was expecting that sort of thing.

"The planets and the stars do not change greatly from one day to the next, Harry Potter," he explained. "I looked last night."

"What does it mean, then?" Harry asked. "If Mercury is bright and Mars isn't, I mean."

"Mars is the bringer of strife, and Mercury of change," Ronan told him. "But wise Saturn also rests in the sky, below Mercury."

"So certain types of things happen on certain days?" Harry tried.

"What do they teach you at that school of yours?" Ronan asked, sounding amused.

"Well, quite a lot about Astronomy," Harry said. "But we're told that the planets are all really predictable, so you can know how they're going to look years in advance. And if there's anything about telling the future, it would be in Divination and I don't do that subject."

There was another long silence, and Harry shifted his wing so his bag wouldn't keep getting wet.

"A strange choice, to not do Divination, for someone such as you," Ronan said, eventually. "But it is good to hear that astronomy is taught."

He beckoned. "Come. Your castle is this way."

The man – or stallion? Harry wasn't sure of the words here either – waited until Harry had gathered his things and started moving, then slowly sped up. He reached a fast trot by the time Harry was having a bit of trouble keeping up, and backed off a little – leading him along a path through the trees and undergrowth, here going up a small hill and there down one, and then passing around the sodden edges of a marshy area.

"Actually, is there a reason why I haven't seen a centaur at Hogwarts?" Harry asked.

Ronan stopped, so suddenly that Harry nearly ran into the back of him, and turned to give Harry a long and considering look.

"What." he said.

It was a question, even if he hadn't said it like one, and Harry hurried to answer it. "Well, there's a sphinx, and two kitsune, and a selkie, and one of the wolf pack from the forest, and a three-headed dog. So I think a centaur would fit in pretty well."

Ronan stared for several more seconds, then shook his head and resumed trotting.

Harry was glad to have cleared that up.

The forest was very confusing in the dark, even when accompanied by a centaur who'd lived there (presumably) all his life. Harry did his best, but he really couldn't tell why one path was better than another, or why they went around a hill rather than climbing to the top of it.

On the other paw – or the other hoof, since this was a centaur – maybe it was like how it was easy to get lost in Hogwarts until you'd lived there for long enough to have an idea of which floor you were on. So Ronan knew where they were compared to the rest of the forest, and he knew to head… whichever direction this was… to get to Hogwarts.

"Does it matter for how the stars work to tell the future that they're a really long way away?" Harry asked, as they passed through a thick patch. "Some of them are so far away it takes centuries for their light to get here."

"We read the stars to tell the future, writ large in the loom of the sky," Ronan answered. "Why would it matter to a star if it were to tell three years or three hundred?"

Harry hadn't thought about it that way before, and he supposed it did make sense. It sounded like an awful lot of work for the universe to go to just to predict things on this one planet, though.

Unless that was the wrong way to think about it.

"And do they tell the future for everywhere in the world?" he went on.

"Perhaps you should have studied Divination," Ronan observed, sounding somewhat amused.

There was a splatter of hooves, and another centaur came hurrying up. This one was younger, with incredibly pale hair and a palomino body.

"Ronan," the newcomer said, with a sigh of relief, and slacked off the tension on a startlingly large longbow he'd been carrying. "It is good to see you are safe."

"You need not fear for my safety, Firenze," Ronan informed him, and the new centaur – Firenze – fell in alongside him. "I know well to avoid the dangerous parts of the forest."

"These days all the forest seems dangerous," Firenze replied, inclining his head a little.

"I didn't know centaurs used longbows," Harry volunteered. "Isn't it a bit awkward?"

Then he waved. "Oh, I'm Harry Potter, by the way."

"A great pleasure, Harry Potter," Firenze told him, trotting to the side a little and giving Harry a slight bow.

He held up one hoof, using the frog as a support for one end of his longbow, and bent it a little with one arm. The other removed the bowstring, and he coiled it up before stowing it in a pouch on his belt.

"And we manage," he added, now carrying the main part of the bow alongside his body. "We may appear as though we are a mere merger of human and horse, but our nature is not so simple."

Ronan snorted. "You had best hope Bane does not hear you, Firenze."

"Does he think us so simple?" Firenze challenged, but he sounded amused more than anything.

"Perhaps it would be better if Bane heard none of the events of tonight," Ronan mused. "I do not wish to imagine what he would do with the suggestion that a centaur attend the human school."

Harry felt like sighing. It seemed as though everyone had their own version of Disgusted of Uxbridge.

It was perhaps another twenty minutes later that they finally came out of the edge of the forest, and Harry smiled in relief at the familiar sight of Hogwarts looming overhead.

"Thank you both," he said, turning to Ronan and Firenze. "You've saved me from either a night in the forest or quite a lot of crashing into trees."

"Then it is a good thing we helped you," Firenze observed. "There are only so many trees in the forest."

"Take care not to be lost again," Ronan added. "You may not get so lucky. The forest is a dangerous place."

Harry said he'd do his best, waited a moment to see if there was anything else to say, then took off and flew to the front door.

As he'd sort of expected, it wasn't as simple as just coming in the door and going up to Gryffindor Tower. He'd been out past curfew, after all, and his friends had all been worried about him – indeed, Hagrid had gone out to look for him, and Harry's route back to the castle had missed him entirely.

Professor McGonagall had been worried and angry at the same time, and she'd told him off for staying out so late. Harry had to admit that he had stayed out late, but (as he tried to explain) he hadn't exactly planned to be hit by a storm, so it wasn't entirely his fault.

Somewhat to his surprise (and much to the surprise of Fred and George) their head of house didn't actually give him a detention, since she did agree that it hadn't been something he'd been trying to do. He was however told to pay much more attention to the weather when he went flying out to a Muggle town, and that he'd have to write an essay on ways to get word to Hogwarts and/or get back to Hogwarts if a similar situation happened again – before the next time he went out there.

That was kind of annoying, because it seemed a bit like a punishment, and Professor McGonagall had agreed that it had been largely the storm's fault. But he thought about it a bit, and realized that it was also making sure he actually had a collection of ways to solve the problem if it happened again.

Hagrid got back a few minutes later, along with a distraught Nora (who'd been helping to look), and Harry had to go outside to get everything sorted out.

Nora sniffed him carefully, looking him up and down, then declared that he was "Harry!" and gave him a hug.

"Thanks for coming to look for me," Harry told her, with some difficulty because Nora's hug was particularly enthusiastic today.

"I helped?" Nora asked.

"You helped," Hagrid told her, a bit gruffly. "Good work."

Then Hedwig turned up with a letter for him, then Padfoot came bounding up, and after that Professor McGonagall asked everyone to please let Mr. Potter go upstairs.

For some reason Harry didn't quite understand, everyone went "wahey!" when Harry came in through the portrait hole.

It seemed like one of those things that school children everywhere learned by a sort of subtle magic, the same way that there were those games from playground in primary school that never turned up in books written by adults even though the games must have been around for generations.

Or maybe Harry was overthinking it.

Several of the Gryffindors asked him what had happened, and he had to explain how he'd been blown off course and got lost on the way back from Fort William. Then he mentioned how he'd met the centaurs, and apparently that was significant if the reactions of the magically-raised students was anything to go by.

It took almost five minutes for him to get through to join Ron, Neville, Hermione and Dean, and when he did reach their table (it was the one with the wider seat so Harry could sit on it with all four legs) the first thing that happened was that Ron said sorry.

"...wait," Dean said, giving Ron a wary glance. "I didn't know you could make thunderstorms, Ron."

"No, not that," Ron explained. "I didn't notice you were late back, and when I did notice I should have sent Hedwig with a letter for you earlier. I only just remembered a few minutes ago."

Harry shrugged his wings a bit. "I don't think anyone else thought of that either."

"But you told me about it, back when you first went to Fort William," Ron insisted. "And I feel like a prat for forgetting."

"I do have to write an essay about ways I could have solved the problem," Harry said. "That's just going to be one of them."

"Are you sure Professor McGonagall didn't get you mixed up with Hermione?" Neville asked. "That seems like the sort of thing she'd do to make sure Hermione didn't panic."

Hermione grumbled something about stereotyping.

"I got your sketchbook, Dean," Harry said suddenly, remembering what he'd been shopping for in the first place, and got it out of his bag. His glasses came next, going back onto his muzzle where they usually were, and then he got the Spelljammer book out and put it on the table.

"Huh," Neville said, looking at it. "Ron, is that what space ships normally look like?"

"No, they're more like big planes or rockets if they have to be down in the air, or spiky things with panels if they don't," Ron answered. "What is that?"

"It's a book I found in a second hand bookshop," Harry explained. "I lost track of time reading it, and the storm showed up while I wasn't paying attention. The ships are kind of… what Dungeons and Dragons worlds do for flying into space."

"Isn't that a bit like that thing you said there was in the Lord of the Rings?" Ron said. "Where if a human sails west, they just go around the world, but if an elf sails west they sort of keep going into the sky?"

"I never really got that," Neville admitted. "What if there's a human and an elf on the same ship?"

"It depends if they're a Ring Bearer, I think," Hermione replied. "Were there any human Ring Bearers? I don't think so."

"I'm more wondering if you could make one of these," Ron said, tapping the cover. "It's kind of silly looking, though. Are there any other ones?"

Harry demonstrated, opening the book and leafing through to a picture of a more conventional-looking Spelljammer. This one was sort of like a normal wooden sailing ship, like the ones in Swallows and Amazons but a bit bigger, and with a few changes.

"There are Bubble Head charms," Ron muttered to himself, looking at it. "And maybe you could do runes or something to make the wood not explode and stuff?"

"Runes would be tricky," Harry pointed out.

"I know," Ron agreed. "But it'd be cool."

"And how would you make sure you didn't explode?" Neville asked.

"Space suit," Ron answered, with a shrug.

Everything felt very normal the next day, which was nice. People did talk about him getting lost a bit, but that felt more like the sort of thing that happened when something interesting happened rather than anything else, and the lessons went just the same as normal.

In Transfiguration it was one of those times when they studied a topic much more closely than they had in a previous year, but didn't actually start casting it yet. That was a little bit disappointing in a way, because Switching Spells were one of those things that sounded really useful for all sorts of things, but Professor McGonagall made sure to point out how dangerous the spell could be and that if they got it wrong it might be one of the hardest to reverse.

She mentioned one student who'd ended up with cat ears for three months until they'd finally managed to reverse it, which made everyone wince.

It seemed to Harry as though that was probably because of not concentrating properly, though. It was a bit like the Patronus spell, where focusing was so important, and if you thought of the wrong thing then the spell wouldn't work or would even go wrong.

That was just a guess, though.

"Hey, Potter," Draco said, walking over during lunch. "What was it like getting lost in the forest?"

"It was a bit annoying," Harry replied. "I couldn't pass the time by reading a book, because it was raining."

"You weren't scared?" Draco pressed.

Harry shook his head. "Not really. It was a bit dark, but I didn't really see anything scary. I don't know if there's anything really scary in there at all, come to think of it."

Draco wasn't the only one who looked confused at that, so Harry explained. "Well… the thing everyone usually says is in the Forbidden Forest is werewolves, but they really just mean Wargs like June. And we've met her family, they came to the Christmas feast in her first year."

"So you're saying you're not scared of the Forbidden Forest?" Draco asked. "Think the school rules don't apply to you, now you didn't even get a detention for it?"

"I didn't mean to go in there," Harry tried to explain. "I wasn't sure which way it was back to Hogwarts."

He had the feeling that Draco wasn't really listening, though.

After a few more minutes, Draco went back to his lunch, and Hermione gave Harry a quick, tight smile.

"Don't let him get to you," she said. "He's always trying to wind you up."

"He is?" Harry asked, thinking about that.

It did make a lot more sense now he thought of it that way.

The young dragon took a bite of his pie dish, then shrugged. "He's not very good at it."

In between school work, homework and club work, Harry spent quite a lot of the next week or so first planning out and researching his essay – and then writing it.

It was difficult, but not because it was hard to do. Instead, it was just that there were so many ways of doing it, or possible ways of doing it, and Harry kept thinking of more that he had to jot down on note paper before researching.

(He couldn't go to Fort William to do research, obviously, but even so he could think of a few Muggle methods he was pretty sure would work.)

First there was the ones he'd already thought of, like the idea of carrying a mirror so he could call Sirius or someone at Hogwarts – which wouldn't actually get him back, but would let people know he was going to be late and that he was safe. That would also let him ask for one of the other methods to be started, which he noted down as well.

The radio was basically the same, and Harry explained as best he could how it seemed like radios would work even at Hogwarts. He'd have to be more careful with it, because it might lead to a Muggle overhearing something that would break the Statute of Secrecy. But Muggles never seemed to overhear the Wizarding Wireless, and that meant Harry spent half an hour in the library trying to find out if you could carry a Wizarding two-way radio.

Sadly he had to just note that one down as a maybe.

Talking about a radio led to talking about a mobile phone, as well as a thing he'd heard about on the Muggle news called a satellite phone (which worked by satellites, and so was able to work in places a mobile phone didn't work). He had to say that that probably wouldn't let him contact any actual wizards, unless he was able to telephone someone like Ted Tonks who had a phone number despite being a wizard, but he could instead call the Muggle emergency services and ask them to help him… if he knew he wasn't in somewhere like the Forbidden Forest.

Not being able to check any of the books in Fort William library, Harry couldn't tell you if there was a Muggle way to tell where you were if you were stuck on a hillside in the middle of a storm, which meant that that was just another one of the ideas which he'd have to be careful with.

After a bit more thought, Harry added the message form of the Patronus, and said he was still learning how to do it. It wouldn't help him find where he was, but it would mean he'd be able to ask someone to send him an Owl.

That was what a lot of those methods really boiled down to.

With that out of the way, Harry started to get more creative. There was compass navigation, which just meant knowing the right bearing to fly to get to Hogwarts from Fort William (which wasn't guaranteed to work, but would be a good start and get him in the right idea), or there was one of those ideas which was so simple Harry wanted to kick himself for not thinking of it before – just finding and following the railway line leading to Hogsmeade. It went right near Fort William anyway, so it'd be somewhere easy to find, and he couldn't really get lost following it.

On that same topic, Harry added following the coastline north to somewhere near Hogwarts and then flying directly east from there, which was the same sort of thing again. Then he came up with flying north and west until he either ran into Skye or Kyle of Lochalsh, or north until he ran into the railway line from Inverness to Kyle of Lochalsh, and using that to locate Portree on Skye (and subsequently to ask one of the Pride of Portree for the use of their Floo).

When he finished writing that one down, it was quite late in the evening, but Harry didn't really want to go to bed until he'd stopped coming up with new ideas. He'd dug the Marauder's Map out as a reminder that it existed, and was just writing about the possibility of a really big version of Remus' Hogwarts Maps that showed the location of the map parchment itself and of something in Hogwarts – which he could use with a compass to find his way back – when he noticed something a bit odd.

There were always a few dots moving around, mostly prefects doing their rounds, but Harry knew who all the prefects were and was pretty good with a fairly big chunk of the rest of the school body. He couldn't remember anyone called βασίλισσα in the entire school, and it was the sort of name he thought he'd probably remember – and they were moving around not far from where Nora's bedroom was.

Writing down the Greek letters on another piece of scrap parchment, Harry watched what βασίλισσα was doing, and was more than a little confused when they vanished entirely.

"Xerographia," he declared, tapping the parchment, and looked at the two identical copies. Then, "Xenographia".

The one he'd tapped shimmered and changed, turning into a single English word, 'Empress'.

It was a little hard to tell what to think about that.

AN:

And here's the other half of that pair.

I don't know if all of Harry's ideas would actually work, but it's interesting to think about them.