Harry didn't think much about the interaction with Mistress Morgan for the rest of the month, as Hermione had them all on nearly-permanent study for their exams.
Finally, the last of their tests were finished, and the Gryffindor first-years were all relaxing on the lawn in the lingering sunlight after dinner, enjoying one of the first nice days where they hadn't been too busy to take in some sunshine. In fact, the upper-years had insisted that the lower-years go away while they all studied for their much harder exams, starting the next week. If you didn't have those to sit, the last month of school was mostly a period of free study.
"Exams go okay, yeh lot?" Hagrid asked, spotting them all as he walked across the grounds with Fang.
"They were pretty easy," Harry nodded.
"They were… harder than I expected," Ron corrected him, and Seamus nodded.
Hermione rolled her eyes, "We offered to let you study with us. Maybe next year you will?"
"Maybe," Ron allowed. Everyone that had attended the study group regularly didn't seem concerned. Even Neville.
"Well, Dumbledore should be back tonight or tomorrow," Hagrid assured them. "I reckon I'll have ter tell 'im 'bout Norbert."
"Forgiveness, not permission," Harry nodded.
"An yeh lot ain't usin' yer free time ter go tryin' ter get past Garm, are yeh?" Hagrid tried, still discomfited about how the kids hadn't shown any interest at all about the mystery he'd been dangling in front of their faces for months.
"He'd bite us in hal'," Seamus suggested. "Can't imagine how anyone could get past a wolf tha' big."
"True enough," Hagrid admitted. "He's a softy if yeh know the trick ter put 'im ter sleep, but not too many can play Peace o' Winter ter his satisfaction." He gave it a beat and said, "Oh, I shouldn't'a said that."
"I guess all the staff knows it, though," Harry nodded. "In case he got loose."
"No. Jus' me an' Filius, really," Hagrid shrugged. "Tryin' ter keep it secret, yeh know."
"Then why has Morgan been practicing it?" Harry wondered, idly.
"Huh. That's weird. She shouldn't'a known 'bout it," Hagrid said, watching carefully.
Finally, Hermione's face started working like she was putting things together, eventually asking, "When you got Norbert's egg from the man in the Market… did you tell him about the song?"
"Might've come up," Hagrid admitted.
"But if she's working with the lizard guy and after whatever it is," Dean contested, "she's had months to steal it."
Harry shook his head, "Besides that she had to learn to play, she told me that Dumbledore swore her to a magic oath to stay here for the full year."
"An' ter protect the students," Hagrid added. "He weren't just gonna trust a hag that'd hurt poor Professor Quirrell without an assurance."
"Except that's over today, since she's done teaching classes," Harry suggested.
"She could be going after the treasure right now!" Ron realized, hopping up. "She wasn't at dinner!"
Parvati cautioned, "She'd have to come back out with it, and the headmaster will be back soon. Hagrid just said."
Harry said, "But what if she didn't have to?" He put together what Glenelg had told him about falling stars and suggested, "What if she came from space? Once she's through the convergence to another world, she might have some kind of communicator that could just call a spaceship to come pick her up. She could have probably gone straight there in a spaceship if she'd just known where the convergences ended."
"Little green women from space? Seriously?" Dean checked.
"I'm sure it's fine," Hagrid assured them. "But I'll go warn Minnie. Maybe yeh lot jus' check an' make sure the prefects're patrollin' the third floor like they're supposed ter be." With that, he strode off.
"The prefects that are all killing themselves studying for next week?" Lavender wondered.
"I guess we could at least check it out. And warn someone if there's a problem," Hermione allowed, not liking how this was going.
If anyone would have been worried by the entire contingent of Gryffindor first-years (and one's Ravenclaw sister) heading inside and up to the third floor, it probably would have been Percy Weasley, even now buried behind a stack of books in the library, along with most of the other upper-year students. So many of them had traded their post-dinner patrol slots around to get more study time that it wasn't even clear who was supposed to be on the third floor.
The staff would later untangle that Mistress Morgan had offered to watch the floor for the prefects that had wound up with the duty, and they hadn't thought themselves anything other than fortunate by agreeing.
"There's the door," Hermione gestured to the end of the forbidden corridor.
"It's open," Harry spotted, his improved glasses prescription paying off. "And whatever's inside looks like it's laying down."
"I don't hear any violin music," Dean cautioned. "She must have been through already."
"Well," Hermione tried to head them off, "we should definitely warn the other professors…"
"But…" Seamus realized, "...the wolf's asleep now, and it might wake up soon, and then nobody could get through."
"Hagrid could," Hermione insisted.
"No, he's right," Ron was warming up to the idea. "We could just slip through while it's asleep, check things out… maybe see what's going on."
Hermione boggled, "There could be anything through there. There's definitely a hag that's very good with knives!"
"Time is running out," Harry added, unhelpfully. "I can see it starting to move."
Visions of glory (possibly glorious death) flashing through his head, Ron said, "No time like the present," and rushed down the hallway. Seamus wasn't far behind him.
"We'll keep them safe," Harry told them, caught up in the quest (and also part of him aware that Hagrid seemed to want them to investigate). "Go get Hagrid or Flitwick so we can get out if we need to." With that, he rushed off.
Dean shrugged apologetically at the girls and rushed after.
"All the boys are mad!" Hermione gasped. "I'm surrounded by mad people. Are you going, too, Neville?"
Kind of looking like he wanted to, the forgetful pureblood withered under Hermione's stare and said, "No?"
"Right, then, let's just go tell the teachers…" Hermione began.
"Gryffindor!" Lavender yelled, charging down the hallway for her own opportunity at Valhalla. Padma barely managed to grab Parvati before she, too, charged after her friend. Garm, a wolf nearly as big as an elephant, made one sleepy snap at Lavender's foot, narrowly missing as she disappeared through a hole in spacetime.
"Simply mental," Hermione groaned.
Meanwhile, through the convergence, Harry and Dean emerged on a frantic battle in a lush jungle, covered in night but lit by three colorful moons, as Ron and Seamus blasted bolts from their wands to try to fend off fast-creeping vines. "We didn't cover this in herbology!" Ron yelled.
Harry noted that there were several vines strewn about that seemed to have been cleanly cut loose, as if Morgan had hacked her way through. "This must keep going," he told them. "Find the next portal."
With four boys blasting magic, even weak magic, they were able to keep the vines from dragging any of them off, particularly when Lavender ran in and started helping. "Here!" Dean announced, finally noticing a spot with several long tendrils severed around it that seemed to ripple in the air.
"It's got me!" Seamus yelled, as a creeping vine managed to lasso his ankle and begin pulling him into the foliage. It was slow enough that he was awkwardly hopping rather than pulled off of his feet.
"Whip it!" Harry suggested.
"Oh, right!" Seamus agreed, grappling the vine right back with an orange rope of magic from the end of his wand. Unlike the vine, his burned, since he still hadn't gotten his energy projection totally under control. With Ron and Dean tugging on Seamus' torso while Harry and Lavender covered them, they were able to snap the tendril and all go tumbling through the portal.
"Out of the forest, into the swamp," Dean complained.
They'd moved into a world where it was daytime, and, indeed, smelled like decomposing vegetation. A shallow bog broken by patches of dry earth stretched out around them in all directions, sightlines broken by strange purple-barked trees reaching spindly gray leaves toward the red giant sun that filled up a quarter of the sky. Nothing immediately tried to kill them, so that was something.
"Do you think Madam Pomfrey can cure us of alien mosquito diseases?" Harry wondered.
"Not if those are the mosquitos," Dean said, gesturing up at a moving cloud of silvery flying creatures clustering over the treetops.
"Are those… flying keys?" Seamus guessed, still a little out of it from his brush with being eaten by a jungle.
"No," Harry said, peering up into the air, and explaining, "I think they're just like birds or bats, but they're made of metal. And they look sharp."
"Guess that makes us Hercules," Dean suggested. Everyone looked at him in confusion and he explained, "Because in one of his labors he had to fight a bunch of metal birds in a swamp? It's not only Norse mythology you can learn about." Dean's elementary school had included an illustrated book of Greek myths that had been one of the things that got him interested in drawing in the first place.
"I think they're flying around the next portal," Lavender pointed, and they could, indeed, make out another waver in the air that the metallic birds seemed to be orbiting.
"Then let's shoot them down!" Ron suggested, attempting to follow through and getting nothing out of his wand. "Hey, what gives?"
"Too far from Vanaheim," Harry figured. "I noticed I was weaker in the jungle. It's a wonder the energy that lets us use wands made it through the convergences that far."
"So… no magic?" Lavender's eyes widened, suddenly much less excited about this trip.
Dean suggested to Harry, "We definitely need to learn some of the Masters' tricks for how to do it without wands."
Harry nodded in agreement and asked, "Then how did Morgan get through?"
"Brooms!" Seamus announced after they'd been looking around the island of dry ground for several seconds. They all turned and saw he'd found two brooms propped against one of the strange trees.
"Can we get five of us through on two brooms?" Harry asked.
"If they let us through, maybe," Dean said, not really an expert on broom carrying capacity but not liking how fast and sharp the birds looked. "If those things chase anyone that flies, definitely not."
"Harry and Ron are the best fliers," Lavender stated, matter-of-factly. "If the birds don't do anything, they come back down and pick us up. If they chase them, they go on and we wait here until someone else comes through or you two come back." After being attacked by a jungle and realizing her magic no longer worked, Lavender was starting to feel like she'd had plenty of adventure for the day.
Dean and Seamus both considered arguing about why they should get to continue on the death-defying quest, but then each nodded. "Don't forget your martial arts," Dean insisted.
Ron, for his part, was beaming that a simple accident of the available brooms had him continuing on his adventure one-on-one with Harry Potter. None of his brothers had a story like this. What he said was, "We'll make you all proud. Keep this spot safe for us."
Harry, who had been on the verge of common sense kicking in, suddenly carried the mission of Gryffindor with him, and instead simply stated, "We should buy some more enchanted items, if they work off Vanaheim." He was also working out whether he could get some holdouts for this kind of circumstance, and whether Pepper would let him keep a laser gun if he bought one at one of the alien-technology merchants in the Goblin Market.
"Right. Let's go!" Ron said, mounting the broom that Seamus handed him and beginning to float. Harry launched right behind him.
Sure enough, the metal birds began to flock toward them as soon as they were about ten feet off the ground. "Use the trees!" Harry yelled, as they had to dodge frantically. Neck and neck with Ron, the two boys managed to slalom around the trees, cornering faster than the birds could. Really, it didn't make a ton of sense that they could fly at all, and might have something to do with unusual physics on the strange planet. Finally, they'd gotten a good lead on the flock of aggressive creatures and pulled them away from the convergence, "We'll be back!" Harry shouted down to Dean, Seamus, and Lavender, just before they disappeared into the portal.
They blasted out into the air of a much-more-Earthlike planet. Well, it seemed to be a rocky desert with deep ravines and forbidding cliffs, but at least the sky was blue and the sun was normal-sized, if a little brighter than Earth's or Vanaheim's. Harry frantically looked behind them so they wouldn't lose track of the portal, and determined that it was floating just above a particularly notable rocky spire that stood above the nearby terrain.
"How are we ever going to find the next portal?" Harry asked.
"They've been pretty close to each other," Ron suggested, also looking around as he brought his broom to a hover. "How are we even going to know when we're at the spot where these end?"
"Huh. What if they don't end?" Harry mused. "I guess once we catch up to Morgan, we'll know."
"Oh, I wonder if it's down there," Ron suggested, having floated over a large crevasse that seemed to have humanoid figures standing on a grid carved into the stone floor of the depression.
"Leave it to you to find the giant chess board," Harry grumbled. He wasn't sure if Ron had lost a chess match yet, to the point that hardly anyone in the Gryffindor common room was even willing to play him anymore.
"I know, right! It must be my wyrd!" Ron agreed, just having the best possible time on this adventure.
They cautiously descended into the ravine, which seemed to be nearly the size of a football field with walls fifty feet high. As their eyes adjusted to the dimmer light in the shade beneath, it became apparent that the grid on the ground was, indeed, a chess board, with one side populated by immobile stone figures made of the same sandstone as the surrounding cliffs.
The other side was a meager encampment of over a dozen orange-furred trolls and their weary-looking ice giant leader. "I guess that's what happened to the trolls that attacked the school," Harry observed.
"And they had a run-in with Morgan, it looks like," Ron added, noticing that a few of the trolls were bandaging new wounds, and one lay dead and bloody toward the back of the ravine. They seemed to have several bags of foodstuffs piled against one wall, and their bandages were made from the emptied sacks. "We better hold onto our brooms. Looks like someone used magic to make the walls too smooth for them to climb out on their end." Indeed, the trolls and giant would have to get past the chess pieces to reach a part of the ravine uneven enough to climb out of.
The jotun leader finally noticed the specks against the daylight and shouted something guttural at them. "Do you speak giant?" Harry checked.
"Nope," Ron shook his head. "Mum says they rarely say anything you'd care to know about anyway."
"Oh, no," Harry realized, pointing. "They're set up right in front of what must be the next portal." The dead troll was laid out near a crevasse in the wall that was small enough that the trolls were probably too big to squeeze through quickly, and the giant wouldn't fit through at all. The faint shimmer of the portal became more obvious as their eyes finished adjusting.
"I think… I think this is a wizarding chess set," Ron pointed down to the jotun-sized stone figures. His own set at Hogwarts was significantly smaller, but enchanted to move at his commands rather than having to move the figures with his hands. "Maybe we're meant to fight the trolls by commanding the chess pieces."
"The brooms, the magical chess set, Hagrid telling us about Garm…" Harry worked out, as they continued to descend, keeping the chess pieces in between them and the trolls. "Do you think Dumbledore meant for us to come through here?"
Ron said, "Honestly, he may have made it too hard. If we'd known how to get past Garm earlier in the year, the Gryffindor seventh-years would have probably been down here all the time."
"Yeah," Harry said, still thinking. His aunt didn't have a very high opinion of Dumbledore, and he couldn't help but notice that Hagrid had been intent on showing him the various pieces of the puzzle. Maybe this whole thing was an obstacle course meant to test one Harry Potts, for reasons the boy could only guess.
Almost as if reading his mind, Ron offered, "I'm not really sure how we'll get them to fight a chess set. But maybe they'll be distracted if I start commanding it, and you can fly past them."
"You don't want to be the one that moves on?" Harry asked.
"Mate, you're useless at chess," Ron smiled. "And I think defeating an army of trolls with an army of stone warriors is plenty enough for me, today."
"I don't have a better idea," Harry shrugged, his brain still struggling over whether Dumbledore had planned on an adult hag who was terrifying with knives being in this obstacle course with him.
"And if I finish them off fast enough, I'll head in after you," Ron said, the plan settled.
Somehow, it worked exactly as Ron had planned. The redhead floated down behind the chess set, and started commanding them. Unlike a traditional set, they didn't truly seem locked to their squares, but were fully happy to lay about them as any of the trolls tried to charge past to get at the young wizard in the back. In the dry desert air, the frost giant couldn't summon enough ice to make weapons (though it was the source of their drinking water), so it was just the natural strength of the hulking humanoids against magically-augmented stone.
Really, for all that they despised being imprisoned in a desert gorge for over half a year, the trolls and giant were having a good time getting to battle something.
When everyone seemed fully engaged, Harry streaked down out of the sun into the back of the gorge and managed to slow down enough to not decapitate himself as he folded up and flew into the hole that seemed to be hiding the portal. One of the bags of food smashed off the rock near him, flung by the frustrated giant, but he was through.
The next encounter was strangely minimalist. The portal emptied into a large but bare stone cavern, and it was impossible to tell where he might be or even how deep underground. Lit by a massive bonfire fed by underground gas vents, a small table was set up between the fire and the portal he'd flown in through. On it there were seven different bottles of colored potions and a note. In Professor Snape's spidery handwriting, the note included a written logic problem, indicating that one of the potions would make the drinker fireproof long enough to get through the portal in the bonfire, but some of them were poison.
"Hermione would be great at this," Harry said, wistfully, and wondered if Dumbledore had somehow expected her to come on the adventure, and wind up with the third broom. He noticed said broom was discarded near the bonfire, as was Morgan's violin case, as if she hadn't wanted to risk them leaping through the flames. The hag wasn't in evidence, so she'd clearly figured it out and gone on through.
Even without Hermione, Harry had done plenty of brain teasers at school and in video games. And he could start from the fact that only one bottle seemed to be missing some of the potion and just work out if that one seemed to fit all the criteria of the puzzle. It did, so the hag had probably done the hard logic work for him.
"Here's to not getting poisoned. That would be a dumb way to die," Harry said, tossing back the remaining draught within the potion flask, and feeling a cool sensation coat him from head to toe. He hoped it would protect his clothes, but agreed with Morgan that it probably wouldn't protect the broom, so dropped it to the floor. "Gryffindor!" he shouted, getting up his courage to charge into the fire. Really, it didn't take much courage, after the bonfire travel he'd done over Christmas. Eliminating the flinch reflex when leaping into fire probably wasn't a real safety advantage for the people of Vanaheim.
After a moment of being surrounded by fire that couldn't burn him, Harry sprawled out onto fractured stone, in air that was cold enough that a tiny bit of snow was drifting down but refusing to stick. In the twilight space, he looked to the sky and realized whatever planet he was on was lit by an eclipse, or perhaps a black hole, just a dim circle of light in the sky where a sun should be. He was standing most of the way up the tallest structure he could see, a gigantic stone outcropping with an uneven path winding up it. From what he could make out in breaks in the fog, for miles around there were only low sandy hills and shallow pools of water. Above, immense stone monoliths rose from a platform atop the rise.
"Well, this feels like the end of the line," Harry said to himself, beginning the slow trek up the structure. It really wasn't that much of an exertion, compared to all the stairs in Hogwarts.
At a circular hole carved in two spikes of mountain, Harry finally got a good look at the monoliths above, almost churchlike as they bracketed a space open to the air, ending in two truly enormous rectangular pillars that seemed to be trying to reach up and touch the sky. But he only had a moment to take it all in, before a humanoid figure, cloaked all in shadow, floated down in front of him.
In an echoing man's voice and a German accent, it said, "Welcome, Harry, son of Lily."