A/N: High School DxD Crossover Time!
To say that sixteen-year-old Ravel Phenex had been surprised when one of the birds her family was named for appeared to her would be an understatement. Phoenixes were creatures of Light, so much so that their songs could actually kill Low-Class Devils. Why would one willingly approach any Devil, even one they shared several traits with?
The answer turned out to be "to teleport her to a mangled corpse". Admittedly, the mangling must have happened long before the aged human's death, but that didn't change the fact that the body slumped in the hedgerow was missing quite a few pieces, including an eye and half a leg. His extensive scarring was so prominent that it took her a moment to notice the wand in his limp hand that marked him as having been a Wizard, a type of human magic-user whose lack of overall power was made up for by their versatility and casting speed.
Wizards rarely had any interactions with Devils - or any other supernatural faction - preferring instead to hide away in isolation and pretend that they were the top of the magical food-chain; they actually thought those fire-drakes they farmed were dragons, for Maou's sake! The Wizards also liked to pretend that society and technology hadn't changed in centuries, something which often frustrated other supernatural races as more and more frequently of late they'd had to scramble to clean up cases of Wizarding shenanigans being caught on cell-phone video. Someone would have moved in to shape them up were it not for the fact that nobody could agree on who should do it and anyone moving without a broader agreement between factions could stir up all kinds of trouble.
Regardless of the broader context, it was obvious looking around at the damage that the Wizard had been killed in some sort of magical battle, possibly by their death curse going by the lack of fresh wounds. That was a nasty spell for certain, one that could even kill a Phenex if cast with enough power against one without the magical reserves to resist it. Whoever this Wizard was, he was clearly no stranger to combat, and she was looking to fill in her Peerage...
-0-0-0-
The scarred old Wizard had been placed in the Phenex Clan's infirmary and kept in a magically-induced coma while they restored his body as much as they could manage and sought enchanted prosthetics for the parts they couldn't rebuild. Ravel gave tears for him regularly; as his King, her tears would be more effective than anyone else's in the family, and besides that his healing was her responsibility.
She'd gotten a further surprise when the Phoenix had led her over to a birdcage that had clearly fallen from a great height and which contained the body of what must have been a beautiful female snowy owl. On a whim, she'd pulled out one of her Pawns and been shocked when it had actually reacted to the bird.
Said owl was now also sedated, as her binding hadn't gone entirely smoothly: It turned out the owl had been someone's familiar, and between the remnants of that bond and some impressive loyalty Ravel was seriously worried that her new Pawn would have to be destroyed as a Stray. She wouldn't let that happen until she'd exhausted all other options, however, not least of which would be consulting the Wizard when he was finally awakened - it stood to reason that he'd know more about his people's style of magic than Ravel would, after all - but that was still many months away.
-0-0-0-
Ravel's second abduction-by-Phoenix at least took her somewhere nicer than a drab, battle-scarred suburb in the middle of the night. The sea-view was quite lovely, even if the breeze of the ocean was unpleasantly chilly to her fire-aligned physiology. She was also feeling a bit disoriented, her mind refusing to actually process any of her observations about her surroundings, and she felt the magical tingle of wards suffusing the area.
Of course, the crude grave in front of her didn't do the view any favors either.
"Here lies Dobby, a free elf," she read. Wait, didn't those Wizards keep some sort of Brownies as... it wasn't clear whether they were symbiotes or slaves... and call them elves? Ravel had been reading up on Wizards and Wizard-adjacent species since reincarnating her first two Servants, and recalled mentions of the bonded fey being quite potent magically and frighteningly good at concealing their presence and able to slip through most wards with ease. Such abilities could make for a very useful support Bishop...
-0-0-0-
Ravel's rooms had never been cleaner, that was for certain. Teaching her new Bishop how to speak with proper grammar would be an ongoing project. Even having gotten a Devil's innate ability to communicate regardless of language, Dobby still somehow managed to mangle his syntax. On top of that little issue, he continued to blather on at every opportunity about "Great Harry Potter Sir" - he was her servant now, bless it!
His chattering had gotten particularly enthusiastic when she'd asked about the owl, who he referred to as "Heddiewig". It turned that out her previous master was this Harry Potter, and that Dobby himself had been killed saving Potter's life from "nasty crazy dark witch lady". Two different locations, two different beings with connections to the same wizard - Ravel seriously doubted that was a coincidence.
-0-0-0-
The mysterious Phoenix's third appearance came nearly a year after its first. Ravel found herself outside a castle that would have been quite impressive if it weren't currently on fire. From the sounds of things, this time her guide-slash-benefactor-slash-kidnapper hadn't bothered to wait until after the fighting was over. Magic was thick in the air, a mix of powerful old wards, recent spellfire, and something else Ravel couldn't identify. One thing was consistent, though: She'd been dropped next to a fresh corpse.
Thanks in part to her recent research, it was easy to recognize the Wizards' so-called "Chosen One". Harry Potter didn't really look like anything special, though she had to admit he wasn't hard on the eyes either. Though it had been hard, bordering on impossible, to separate fact from fiction where the "Boy-Who-Lived" (-Until-Recently) even just the feats she could be confident were real had to be more than just blind luck. Obviously, her avian benefactor (whose name she still didn't know) had a major interest in this human. Well, she'd already bet big on this bird's judgment - in for a penny, in for a pound...
-0-0-0-
Harry stepped onto the train, feeling like a tremendous weight he'd never noticed before had been lifted off his shoulders. He'd managed to destroy Nagini before Voldemort noticed he was there, calling on all the hate he could muster to cast his only Killing Curse. If Voldemort and his Death Eaters could use Unforgiveables to bypass people's shields, he figured it was only fair to get past that bubble shield the same way. Whether or not it would eventually heal, the aching gash down his right forearm (or was it the soul of his right forearm?) was a small price to pay to make sure that Voldemort would stay dead this time. Dumbledore had even confirmed that the link forged when Voldemort was reborn using Harry's blood meant that his fate and Harry's were linked: If Harry chose to return to the fight, Voldemort would rise as well, but if he chose to move on then Voldemort would face the final consequences of mutilating his own soul.
It wasn't a hard decision to make.
While Harry wasn't enthusiastic about leaving his friends in the middle of a fight, he wasn't so arrogant as to think that he was worth as much on their side of the battlefield as Riddle was to the Death Eaters. Also, it may have been selfish, but Harry felt he'd done his part. He'd fought, suffered, bled, and even died for the cause, and he'd bloody well earned some peace and rest. Being able to rejoin his parents, and Sirius, and all the others he'd lost helped seal the deal.
The locomotive started puffing hard and the train slowly began to pull out of the station. Everything started to fade into soft silvery light-
Something grabbed Harry in a grip of iron and yanked, like the world's worst Portkey a hundred times over. He was pulled spinning back and away and down into blackness...
A/N: General idea is that Ravel (or another Devil) fills at least a good chunk of her Peerage with the casualties of the Second Blood War in general or the Battle of Hogwarts in particular. At least Remus, Tonks, Fred and George (because no way is one twin leaving the other behind), and Harry (more about him below), with Lavender and/or Colin as possibilities. Snape is another strong possibility, and would make for massive drama-bait by his inclusion. Voldemort's soul is too shredded to be reincarnated by anyone weaker than one of the Four Satans. Other Death Eaters could be a possibility, perhaps, but seem like they'd be hard to write in as anything other than a constant problem and eventual Stray.
As for Harry, he doesn't/can't return after dying, but gets pulled back when reincarnated into a Devil. He is not happy about this: He'd finally gotten a chance to lay down his burdens, to rest, to be at peace, and to be with his family. Now he's been dragged away from all that, and is seriously worried that as a Devil he's been forever locked out of whatever afterlife his parents went to.
I'm figuring for the above chapter-ish thing that Ravel is actually older than Riser instead of younger, and that the Potterverse timeline is shifted forwards to line up so that (possibly after an adjustment/training/exposition period) the main DxD plot kicks off - Ravel could even end up joining Rias and Sona at Kuoh as a transfer student. She was the one named Devil I could think of without a canonical Peerage that could work well as Harry and company's new King. It's not like she likes him or anything, baka! *tsun* But seriously, I don't know the later DxD canon well enough to know if there are other promising candidates that wouldn't involve displacing a bunch of existing characters.
Also, I capitalized a lot more things than normal here because it's written from Ravel's perspective. Words like "wizard" and "phoenix" wouldn't be capitalized from Harry's perspective, but I've generally seen race/faction names capitalized in DxD fics.