AN: Guys, you could have told me there was no link on the top of my author page…fanfiction dot net decided to delete all link for some reason, because why not, right? So now I present the address here, just copy it to your browser without the spaces. Please? This is the last chance, my paper is rapidly approaching. goo. gl/forms /FQuqpzABTv

Also, a warning: there is a discussion of religious topics after the break. I have my own ideas about the history of the wizarding world, and religion does play a part in it, so if it bothers you, stop reading after they come back home.

I own nothing!

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Alduin Apparated Harry to the forest close to Godric's Hollow that was usually used for this purpose, and as they walked, he explained: "This is not a purely wizarding village – there is only one like that in Britain, and that is Hogsmeade, near Hogwarts. But there are some more like Godric's Hollow, where there lives an above-average number of wizarding families. It normally means they were founded by wizards, in times before the Statute of Secrecy, and the wizards were joined by their Muggle friends. After the Statute came into play, the wizarding families theoretically hid themselves, but still, the atmosphere in those places is...different. You will see."

"I don't know if I will see the difference," Harry noted. "I have never been in a Muggle village. The Dursleys never let me go on field trips with school, because it would cost them money."

Alduin gritted his teeth. "Then I will take you one day," he said, "it's important to know what to expect. Anyway, here we are..."

They entered the village and walked to the square. "The first thing you need to see," Alduin explained to Harry, "is the memorial."

He led him to it and Harry watched, amazed, as it turned from a nondescript Muggle thing into a statue of a woman, a man and a child. "Those are your parents," Alduin said, "and the baby is supposed to be you."

Harry admired the statue. "Did they look like this?"

"Don't you know?"

"I never saw any pictures, and I don't remember them much at all."

Alduin gritted his teeth again. "Remind me, once we are back home, to show you some old family albums with James in them. I am afraid I don't have many pictures of your mother, except from the wedding. But anyway, yes, this is what they looked like, more or less, or what they would have looked like if they were made of white marble."

"My mum was very pretty, wasn't she?"

"Wait till you get to some photos. She was beautiful," Alduin replied honestly. He had not been an admirer of Lily Potter, but one could hardly deny her good looks.

Harry sighed and watched for a while longer before asking: "They are buried here?"

"No, they are in the churchyard. Come with me," and Alduin led him through the kissing gate to the rows of graves. First, he pointed to the grave of Ignotus Peverell. "One of your distant ancestors," he said, "very likely the most famous one. A great inventor, as well as his two brothers. Have you read the Tales of Beedle the Bard?"

"Some of them, yes."

"The Three Brothers?"

"I think so." Harry scrunched up his forehead. "It's the one about the Deathly Hallows, isn't it?"

"Yes. It's a tale that sprung from a real beginning, which were the three historical Peverell brothers, great wizards and inventors," Alduin explained as they continued their way among the graves. "Ignotus was the youngest, and his most celebrated creation was the Invisibility Cloak. He handed it down in his family, eldest son to eldest son. Then, about three hundred years ago, one of them died without children and left all he had to his sister, who was by that time married to a Potter. And so it came into your family. James had it, but I'm not sure where it is now. Hopefully in your vault at Gringott's."

Harry stopped in his tracks. "Are you really telling me that I own one of the Deathly Hallows?"

"Yes, but don't go believing that nonsense about being a master of death or something," Alduin cautioned. "It is simply a very powerful artefact. Don't go telling people it's one of the Hallows, either. They might believe the legends, and might well try to take it off you."

Harry nodded, very impressed. "This is so cool," he muttered. "Do we know where the other two are?"

"No. The second brother's family line is effectively extinct, and it isn't known what they last did to it, though it is known that they had it. As you known, the wand didn't pass as an inheritance, and its bloody history is too tangled to unwrap easily. There are several theories as to who has it. One of the most prominent ones says it's Dumbledore."

"And no one really knows where the second one is? Not even a theory? Who was the family who had it?"

"The Gaunts...whose last descendant, incidentally, was one Tom Riddle."

Harry looked scandalized. "Wait, so I'm related to Riddle?"

"Harry, the Peverell brothers lived in the thirteenth century. You are probably related to every single British wizard who was alive at that time, one way or another, and so was Riddle. But, anyway, regarding the Hallows, what is important is that no one ever heard him boast of having the Stone, and it seems likely he would have told someone if he had it, so it was probably lost or hidden by the family some time before him."

Harry mused about it as they walked to his parents' grave. There, he stood looking silently and then sighed. "I haven't even brought a candle."

Wordlessly, Alduin conjured one, and Harry left it there, along with a conjured wreath of tinsel.

"Marry Christmas, Mum and Dad," he said sadly. Alduin allowed him to contemplate the grave in peace. When the boy turned to leave on his own accord, he asked: "What does it mean, the last enemy to be destroyed is death?"

"It's a quote from the Bible, meant to commemorate the fall of Voldemort as well as your parents' heroism, by which they defeated death, in a way. In the Bible, it means God is the one who destroys death," Alduin explained.

Harry frowned. "Does he? How? I mean, people are dying all the time, aren't they?"

Alduin sighed. "I suppose you never had any religious education classes?"

"No..."

"Explaining this would require explaining the entire Christian dogmatics. Maybe Christmas is the right time for it, but I would certainly rather do it at home by the fire, if you don't mind."

Harry nodded. They were passing graves, and he turned and looked at one and said: "Dumbledore? Did his family live here?"

"For a while, yes. His mother and sister are buried here."

"I can see what you meant by a wizaring village – it looks quite normal, but secretly it's all different." He noticed his cousin was leading him in a different direction than where they came from, and asked: "Where are we going?"

"To see the house where your parents died. It was kept as a kind of shrine."

Harry nodded. On the way, he said: "You told me not to tell people that the cloak my father had was a Deathly Hallow, but doesn't everyone know? If they know the Peverells had it, I mean?"

"Not really. For one, most people do not know the three brothers are the Peverell brothers. Actually, most people believe it's just a made-up story. And even those who know who the brothers were do not know the Potters are related to them in an almost direct line, even though it isn't a secret. And even the few people who do know this wouldn't know that the last Peverell bequeathed the cloak to his sister. He had been married when he died, and so many would assume it went to his widow. And while James never kept it exactly a secret that he had an invisibility cloak, outside of family, I think mostly only his friends and members of the Order of the Phoenix knew. So even though it might have occurred to someone that if Ignotus Peverell had the cloak, and Potters are his direct descendants and have a cloak, so it could be it…there were probably very few people who possessed all of these information. Dumbledore, certainly, but apart from him? James' crowd was never particularly interested in these things, in theoretical education...something else they got from Dumbledore, probably." Alduin tried to keep the sarcasm out of his voice, but he succeeded only partially.

"What do you mean? You said he did know these things."

Alduin nodded. "Yes, it is a bit of a paradox. Dumbledore himself is very broadly educated, but under his leadership, Hogwarts became extremely practically oriented. The only purely theoretical subject that remained is History, and that is taught so badly it's as good as non-existent. No one is entirely sure what Dumbledore means by this, but it is one of the reasons he is not as popular among the Ravenclaw clique as he was with your father's friends."

Harry himself was not exactly a fan of theoretical subjects, but he had to admit that if not taking them meant one missed such a connection as this and so didn't know there was one of the Deathly Hallows right in front of him, then maybe they had some merit.

They came to the half-destroyed house and looked at it in silence, Harry reading the plaque. When they turned from it, they noticed a very old lady nearby.

Alduin suddenly smiled broadly and exclaimed: "Mrs. Bagshot!"

"Is that Alduin Travers?"

"It is indeed, ma'am."

The lady shook her finger at him. "You should be ashamed of yourself, young man, for not coming to see me sooner! I know very well you have been released from hospital many months ago! Some people still talk to me, you know!"

Alduin grinned sheepishly. "Abdullah told on me, didn't he? And he calls himself a friend..."

"Don't you dare blaming him for your own laziness!"

"It wasn't laziness! I was busy. Let me introduce my new ward, Mr. Potter."

He put Harry forward, and the boy smiled uncertainly and said: "How do you do."

"How do you do, Mr. Potter. It is quite charming to meet you – I last saw you when you were one year old! It's good to see Alduin is taking care of you. Would you two care to come for a cup of tea?"

Alduin assented, and they followed Bathilda to her cottage. "You are right that I should have contacted you sooner," he said, "if only to be able to introduce Miss Burke to you. As far as I know, you two haven't met."

"No. I rarely meet new people these days. I'm getting very ill."

"I'm sorry to hear that. It will be a loss felt dearly once you pass through the veil. But I hope you will do me the honour of allowing me to introduce Miss Burke to you. History is her passion, and I think you would have a lot to talk about." Thinking about it, it really was unforgiveable that he hadn't done it yet. Harry was obviously occupying more of his thoughts than he had thought.

"I know her great-great-grandmother quite well, but she isn't very mentally fit these days anymore, unfortunately. It shows in her letters. The current lady of the house is something of a friend of mine, too, though we don't have many common interests – both her and her husband, as I'm sure you know, are Potions enthusiasts. The grandmother and mother are no more than distant acquintances, and so I never met the youngest one. A pity, it seems."

"I'll try to remedy that as soon as possible. Now tell me," he said as they entered her house and took their seats, "have you seen Abdullah recently? I haven't had time for more than brief morning visits in the last month, I'm afraid."

"I saw him a little over a month ago, so nothing new I can tell you. The children are true dears, but then you would expect Isobel's and his children to be such."

"I can tell you with perfect confidence that Abdullah is often very far from being a true dear."

"Oh, don't think I don't know." Her elf brought tea, and she turned to Harrry and asked: "How are you enjoying your time with your cousin?"

"It's been great!" Harry enthused. "I even went flying for the first time a few days ago, and I met Neville Longbottom and he's really nice..."

"Can't deny he is a Potter, can you?" Mrs. Bagshot noted. "What about your studies?"

"Oh, yes, my cousin and Miss Burke have been teaching me -" here the old lady gave Alduin an almost imperceptible look, to which he slightly nodded and she smiled - "and it's all very interesting. I think I like History the most."

"I am very glad to hear it! And I hope Professor Binns won't manage to spoil it for you...Merlin knows he was boring enough when he taught he, and he had still been alive then!" The she turned back to Alduin and said in a serious voice: "Tell me about coming back to the world. Was it hard?"

Alduin sighed and look at Harry. "Very." He said. "I don't want to go into details, but the radical change in political situation made it complicated. The first month, I just sat at home and read old newspapers, and later corresponded with Abdullah and Mercurius. Nathan and Kingsley, too, later."

"Did you contact Eliza?"

"I did. We even saw each other once. It was painful, both for her and for me. I never invited her again, and we mostly avoid each other at parties. Perhaps it will get better in time, but now..."

The old lady nodded.

"I started to ask old friends for visits later, and that got me invited to social gatherings. Within three months, I was effectively back, but I still encounter gaps in knowledge sometimes. It is...unpleasant."

"I can imagine. Here, have some trifle."

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They Flooed home from Mrs. Bagshot's cottage just in time to get ready for dinner. Over the food, Harry asked: "What did she mean by saying that Professor Binns was boring enough when he was alive? Is he dead? How can he teach if he is dead?"

"He is a ghost...and , unfortunately, a very bad teacher."

"Oh, right, ghosts. I keep forgetting all those things are real." Harry muttered.

Alduin raised his eyebrows. "Then remind me to take you to the attic after dinner. We have one family ghost living here, but she normally keeps to herself and doesn't come down. I hope she won't mind a little interruption of her solitude."

"Wow, a family ghost!" Harry grinned, then ate silently for a moment, contemplating this new information. Afterwards, he said: "Okay, so how does the idea of destroying death work, then?"

Alduin took a very deep breath and exchanged a look with Alexandra. "You know that Jesus died on the cross, right?"

"Of course," Harry replied, sounding offended.

"And you know he rose from the dead?"

Harry seemed much less certain about this second point.

"Well, he did – according to the Christian belief, that is. And doing that, he defeated death in a way, you see – because he became alive again. And for reasons that I would really much rather not go into, because it's very complicated, that also ensured that other people who die can rise from the dead again, an so no one will really have to stay dead – so, death is destroyed."

"But people still die," Harry repeated stubbornly.

"But you see, they don't stay dead, so in a manner of speaking it's not really death, because the whole point of death is that it's permanent, isn't it? This could instead be seen as a very long period of sleep." Harry still looked unconvinced and Alduin sighed. "I really should have found a Gryffindor to explain this, as unnatural as that sentence sounds."

"Why?"

It was Alexandra who explained: "Because traditionally, most Gryffindor families are Christian, because Godric was."

"And you aren't?" Harry seemed surprised by the idea, which given his lack of knowledge about what it meant, Alduin found rather ironic.

"No," he replied. "Rowena Ravenclaw was actually a pagan, though that tradition wasn't exactly preserved till today. That is the kind of religion that requires community and big rituals, and with Muggles abandoning it, that is not really possible to achieve. But many of us do base or worldviews on ancient Greek philosophy, which was pagan, though of a different sort than Rowena's."

"Pagan?" Now Harry looked almost scandalized.

"It doesn't mean we worship idols, Harry, at least not in the sense you understand it. I would try to explain, but I'm not sure you're quire ready for Proclus."

Harry apparently didn't even dare to ask who it was. "What were the other founders' religions, then?"

Alexandra took the word again. "Huflepuff was…well, today we would call it non-denominational." That answer didn't seem to help Harry much, so she elaborated: "It appears, from what we know, that she believed in some kind of one God, but not really in the Christian dogma, and she didn't have any problems with participating in the pagan rituals either. She was very down to earth, you see, and the old rituals channelled magic quite effectively, so she took part and didn't much worry about it. She actually seems to have been the least concerned about religion of all of the founders." She paused. "Slytherin was a wizarding Christian."

Harry seemed confused. "Wizarding Christian? What does that mean?"

"Back when Christianity was first spreading in Britain, there was a great controversy among wizards. As you can see in case of the founders, some embraced the new faith, some kept to the old gods and some avoided any clearly formulated religion altogether. In time, enmity started to grow between those who kept the old gods and the Christian wizards, because Muggle Christians persecuted the pagan Muggles strongly." Alexandra hesitated, then added: "It needs to be said that Christian witches and wizards never took part in this, the divisions in our society were always along different lines, but still, the pagan wizardkind asked how the Christians could be part of a group that acted this way. That was when a separate wizarding church was founded, one made up entirely of magical folk. Slytherin was actually one of the first proponents of that tradition, separating the wizarding church completely from the Muggle one."

"That wasn't really a problem at Hogwarts, though, was it?" Harry argued.

Alexandra shook her head. "Not with pure-blood students, but remember there are the Muggle-born, too. It actually created a big conflict between Gryffindor and Slytherin, big enough that it made Slytherin leave the school in the end. Nowadays, it is popular to interpret that conflict as being simply about Salazar's love of pure blood – incidentally, a view propagated by Riddle, and it took hold – but it's nonsense and everyone who knows a little about history knows it makes no sense. The International Statute of Secrecy, the law that says Muggles mustn't know about us, only came into effect seven hundred years later. Back then, there was no division between the two societies as there is now, and the first families were only then appearing who lived apart from Muggles. There was no such thing as purebloods, not as a social class, even though of course there were individuals like that. The ideas they like to pretend Salazar held...it wouldn't have made any sense at the time. No, it was about something else. Salazar didn't want to accept Muggleborn Christians, because he didn't trust their families not to turn against us, once the learned there were still pagans cherished at Hogwarts."

"But, I mean, didn't Ravenclaw mind too? She was a pagan, you said."

"Not as much as he did," Alduin answered for Alexandra, who took a sip of her wine to refresh herself.

Harry didn't understand. "But if she didn't mind, why did he care?"

"She wasn't the only pagan at school, Harry," Alexandra pointed out. "Many students were of Slytherin's opinion, or at least not as blithely optimistic as Helga and Godric, thinking that some safety precautions were necessary..."

"So who was right, then? Did something happen? With the Muggle families, I mean?"

Alexandra actually chuckled. "Each Hogwarts house has its own answer to that, I believe. The Ravenclaw one is that after Slytherin left, which made the atmosphere calmer, Rowena managed to convince the others to reinforce the school's defences, so that when the inevitable Muggle attack finally came, Hogwarts were untouchable."

"And the other versions?" Harry didn't seem too interested in the Ravenclaw opinion.

"The Slytherins say that the attack would have been successful if it wasn't for Slytherin's monster from the Chamber of Secrets, which defended the school. The Gryffindors say that it was the other way round, that the monster started to attack people and the Muggles only retaliated, and the school was saved by Gryffindor bravery. And the Hufflepuff version simply says that there was no real attack, that it was merely some kind of inside mishap at school."

"And you don't know which is true?" Harry sounded incredulous.

"No," Alexandra admitted. "We know that something serious happened at school at that point, something that at least somehow involved serious internal conflict, because the few records we have left that keep hinting at it make it clear they don't want to speak more plainly because they don't want to irritate anyone."

Harry frowned. "That's so weird. I mean, you know so many things in detail, and you don't know something this big?"

"This is how history often works, Harry," Alduin pointed out. "We only have word of the mouth, and as I have told you, it came up with four different versions."

There was a short silence as Harry finished his dessert, and then he asked: "So, is this why wizards and witches say Merlin instead of God? I mean, like thank Merlin instead of thank God? Because not everyone believes in God?"

Alduin considered. "Not exactly. Saying Merlin is actually a way to avoid offending anyone. The bitterness between Christian and non-Christian wizards grew when Christians started to persecute witches more strongly, in addition to the pagans. That is why nowadays, people tend to keep their religion very private and it is extremely impolite to ask about it or talk about it. We say Merlin instead of God because you don't want to remind people whose close friends were burned at stake in the name of that exact God that you are his follower too. Merlin is something all British witches and wizards can agree on – one of the few things, actually."

Harry was apparently in a debating mood, which pleased Alduin. "But, I mean," he said, "there is no witch burning going on anymore, is it? So, how could you meet someone whose friends were burned at stake?"

"There are still witch hunts in Africa, for example," Alduin pointed out, "but no, it doesn't happen in Britain any more. But it wasn't so long ago. It ended in the eighteenth century, and you have to remember, Harry, that witches and wizards live longer than Muggles. The last witness died about a hundred years ago, I believe, which means people who remember them and heard it from them first-hand are still alive. Mrs. Bagshot knew several personally, I believe. To speak of God in front of them was often seen as mortal offence. The tradition started this way, and is being kept because that's what happens with traditions."

"I'm sorry I asked you about it, then," Harry muttered.

Alduin smiled at him. "I told you not to be afraid to ask me things, Harry. I don't mind, but don't go asking people outside of close family."

"Not that I have much of that," Harry commented bitterly, then asked: "So my parents were Christians?"

"Your mother was your regular Church of England, as far as I know. Your father certainly was – as I've said, a good portion of the Gryffindor clique are."

Harry nodded and paused, apparently trying to come up with more questions. Drawing a blank, he asked: "Can we go see the ghost now?"

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AN: Because I wasn't buying that no one would figure out the DH thing, and that Slytherin would leave the school because of blood prejudice 700 years before the Statute (and that the others would have been friends with such a racist jerk).