Phoenix Triumphant, Chapter 4
Severus had to say, he had been rather excited at first. Human wizards were rarely if ever called to meet goblin dignitaries, much less the king, and even those who were were usually government officials (in the GLOWW: Goblin Liaison Office With Wizards, of course) or soldiers and cursebreakers who had proven themselves worthy by goblin standards. A poor half-blood brewer, even a with a Potions Mastery, would rarely if ever be called upon to meet with the goblins, unless something in his accounts was drastically out of order. And he, Severus Tobias Snape, was going to be meeting with Director Ragnok himself!
Now, striding through the halls of Gringotts behind a pair of goblin guards with Potter by his side, Severus couldn't help feeling a bit out of place, and more than a little worried, too. The light in the tunnels was most likely meant for goblin eyes only, emanating from baskets of chunky fungus with a dim and sickly green light, and each successive corridor seemed to grow narrower and narrower. Severus already had to hunch over slightly, as the tunnels were not quite expansive enough for one of his height, and the air was so thick and close down below that he could scarcely breathe, nor could he cast a bubblehead charm without drawing the goblins' ire down on himself, both at the perceived insult and at the fact that drawing one's wand in Gringotts was a blatant breach of koboholdic law. Beside him, Potter muffled a cough with the sleeve of his wizarding robe, shooting a nervous glance at him with his tearing eyes.
"It is safe for humans down here, right? They wouldn't take us down here to smother us or something?" The boy worried, his mental voice carrying the connotation of alarm along with the barely-stifled disgust at the closeness and stench.
Severus was about ready to reprimand the boy for his rudeness when he realized that the other had not spoken out loud. "They most likely do not mean any harm to us," he replied, leaning into the connection between them. "It is quite possible that the atmosphere simply doesn't bother them."
"Wish I could cast a localized cleanser charm," the boy grumbled, increasing his pace a little. "Professor?" then, hesitantly "Severus? I'm worried."
"It's going to be ok," Severus managed, finally realizing how others could find it in themselves to manage some trite saying when trying to reassure others. It probably would be ok, wouldn't it? This summons could scarcely be a bad thing; if it were something bad the goblins would definitely not be so courteous. Right?
"Professor, I'm in your head, you know," Harry broke in. "You're worried too, aren't you."
Severus was, and the claustrophobia only made it worse. They passed by metal grates in the walls, at intervals, and fire-drakes or small dragons hissed and spat sparks at them through the wire mesh of their prisons. The deeper they went, the warmer and wetter the tunnels grew, as well: the walls were dark and slimy with moisture now, like the gut of some gargantuan creature, and the ambient heat around them was enough to make Severus wish that he was not wearing his long, dark teaching robes. And then the goblin guards drew up before two great stone doors. One of them ran up, and, picking up an adamantium baton, pounded on a great gong secured beside the left door which seemed to have been carved out of some enormous gemstone- an emerald, it looked like- and then drew back and waited. The clinking chimes had scarcely died away when the great stone doors slid silently into the floor, and an enormous hall was revealed.
If Severus had thought that the Great Hall of Hogwarts was enormous, that was as small as a lavatory compared to this. An enormous cavern gaped before them, walls and ceiling fairly dripping with pink and pale golden crystals. Down the center of the room was a canal, neatly etched into the dark stone floor, but said canal flowed not with water but with what must have been lava, or molten metal. At the farther end of the room was a great raised dais, bisected by said fiery canal, and there were two enormous craters set in the dais on either side. One was inlayed with gold, intricately carved into a thousand patterns, and the other was inlayed with wood and set with thousands upon thousands of tiny sparkling gems. Behind this dais was a great golden hanging, seeming to depict some sort of koboholdic sociopolitical or religious figures, and just in front of that hanging the lava canal flowed off in either direction, sizzling along the perimeter of the cavern in either side until it disappeared through twin grates of stone on either side of the doorway, and it was this molten rivulet which seemed to give the crystal cavern its twilight glow.
Of more immediate importance, however, were the hundreds of hundreds of goblins in full armor, weapons unsheathed, who were arrayed in ranks sitting all across the floor up to the dais, their teeth all displayed in frankly terrifying grins.
Harry, who had been looking around at all this in awe, squeaked when he first noticed the goblin warriors. Severus would have been inclined to do the same, except for the fact that, though fully armed, the goblin soldiers were seated, and did not seem truly threatening beyond those unnerving smiles.
At that moment, however, there was an enormous crashing sound, and the entire hall went silent and still. Even the lava seemed not to dare to bubble in its allotted place.
And then King Ragnok himself (or at least that was what Severus assumed) entered from the back of the room, behind the metallic hanging (which, now that Severus had gotten a look at how it swung heavily back into place, might actually have been made of tiny golden wires) and took his seat in the great golden crater. On the other side, from behind the same hanging, a tall, dark-skinned goblin with rather large tusks protruding from his/her/their? mouth (and which incidentally seemed to have been decorated with golden inlays and tiny gems) came out and took the wooden-inlayed one. Every single goblin got to their feet at once, raising their weapons high in salute.
The silence continued. Severus bowed his head (still standing) and dropped his wand to the stone at his feet- he knew next to nothing about goblin etiquettes, but what he did know was that goblins were a race whose customs were often equal and opposed to those of wizards. Where a wizarding king would have expected his guests and followers to go to the floor, kneeling with their wand on their left side, handle away from them, goblins would most likely consider a full bow an insult. They were a burrowing race, after all, accustomed to drilling down into the earth where humans built their building up, towards the sky, and judging by the crater-thrones and the standing guard, standing higher than others did not mean one was of a higher status.
At last the goblin which Severus assumed was King Ragnok raised his head.
"Welcome to the Heart Eternal, tiny wizards," he? rumbled. "You may sit. It is rare thing for humans to be allowed here, but you have proven yourself worthy as slayers of Voldemort and his Dark Forces."
Severus could scarcely suppress a flinch at that name, even after all that time- it was almost instinctive, at this point. But he covered it quickly by moving to sit, and pulling Potter down as well. "Thank you, esteemed Sovereign," he said carefully, hoping he'd gotten the title right. The goblin laughed. Okay, not good.
"I am honored," he said calmly, "But I believe you speak to my partner, Queen Ragnok."
What.
"I...uh...thought Ragnok was a king?" Harry asked hesitantly, over Severus's mental pleas to not stir the pot any further. The royal goblin just laughed again.
"You can thank your prejudiced fellows for that," he said calmly. "When the wizards first met our race, they assumed that we were ruled by a male sovereign, and nothing that we said made any difference, especially since the traditional koboholdic word for 'King' is the same no matter the leader's gender. Our females tend to differ little from us save for their tusks, which were apparently "fierce" and "masculine" to your people, and they did not listen to us. So we simply allowed them to write what they will in their books and on their documents. It makes no difference to us."
It took a few moments for Severus to process that. "I...apologies, Queen Ragnok."
The queen goblin simply smiled. "You would not be the first to make that mistake, Severus Snape," she said around her bejeweled tusks. Her voice, interestingly, was even deeper and huskier than her partners'. "And you will doubtless not be the last, either. But enough of that; you likely wish to know why you have been called here, yes?"
"Yes," Severus replied. "I could understand Potter being summoned, but I fail to see why I am, as well."
"The two of you are bound by kinsblood, for one thing," Queen Ragnok began. "You humans have grown wand-reliant, so perhaps it is not as easy for you to sense among yourselves, but to goblins your bond is both as bright as drakkonsfyre to the ungilded eye and easily scented, and we know that in matters of importance it would be best not to take the one without the other. For another, both of you scent of Old Magics, magics which have long been forgotten by your race, and that, in itself, is also interesting to us. You are also brave and honorable warriors who have fought against Voldemort, and you, Severus Snape, killed him, which is worthy of recognition. Voldemort did not only target wizards and 'untouched': he struck our own hordes as well, and he dabbled in the Darkest of soul magics, magics which we abhor above all else. We had good reason to want him dead, and we would gladly reward those who made it possible. But lastly, and most importantly, the first of the Goblin Kings made a promise, more than a thousand years ago, and I would be remiss in my duties if I did not carry it out. You are both phoenix shifters, yes?"
"We're phoenix animagi, your majesty. I am not sure if that's the same thing as what you're referring to, since wizards call only those who have had the ability to transform since birth 'shifters'..."
"Ha. All magical humans have the capacity to transform since birth. It is just that it is easier for some, and others require artificial aids. Likely because you wizards stopped taking lessons from nature and listening to the Goddess years ago. It is much more difficult to attune oneself with a different form when one has not been accustomed to meditation and unwanded magic. But yes, for the purposes of what I am about to say, 'animagi' is a workable term for your ability." Queen Ragnok paused, staring off into the distance. "In any case, many, many years ago, before my horde was even called the Horde of Gringotts, goblins as a race experienced a Golden Age. His Abysmal Nadir, King Zarkkaj, Goddess rest his spirit, had not chosen to isolate his horde from other sentient races like future kings would, and had thriving trade relations with Egypt, and Phoenicia, and Aetheria, and Ophir, and Atlantis, and several other places whose names are untranslatable now, and among his many allies was an Egyptian king by the name of Ra Imhotep II, son of Ra Imhotep the Wise.
"Now in those days, wizarding folk had not isolated themselves either. There were plenty of wizards among the ordinary untouched folk, and they were held up as priests or gods- or demons, as the case may be. Ra Imhotep was one of those early wizards, and when he was young he was obsessed with the idea of transformations. His favorite party trick was to transform his staff into a snake, which would swallow his enemies, but he soon passed beyond transfiguration into human transformations. Apparently his mother and Regent was often quite horrified when she went to find him for some official function to come upon him after he had transformed his arm into a wing, or his face into an ibis's bill, especially since he couldn't always change himself back at first. Few other wizards had dared to dabble in human transformation at that time, and even fewer tried multiple forms- most found one form that they liked and stuck with it, not wanting to press their luck. In any case, many thought that Ra's early transformational attempts thoroughly transformed his brain, to the point at which it didn't quite come back from it. But that can never be proved now. In any case, Ra, according to his writings, found that he quite loved flying early on. In that time there were certainly no broomsticks, and magic carpets were just getting off the ground in Arabia- literally- and magical flying animals had not yet been domesticated, and the untouched folk certainly hadn't yet discovered any method of travel faster than a moderately speedy sailing ship, so transforming oneself was actually the quickest way of transport, and Ra Imhotep loved both travel and flying itself.
"Ra Imhotep was perhaps the first wizard who might be called an 'animagus', although Falco Aesalon is generally considered to be the first in most of the literature now, as Imhotep's name was struck from every tablet and every statue and every carving that could be found after his death. We alone, as far as we can tell, have kept the whole story alive, and even we don't know the last bits of it, as you'll hear. But in any case, Ra Imhotep was the first to follow a procedure something like what hopeful animagi/ae use now, at least in theory. It is said that he was seized with a passion to seek, through visions, the "being most suited to my divinity", and so he took some sort of herb-not mandrake leaves, as they were almost unknown in Egypt at that time Mandrake leaves, or mandragora, as they were then known, but some sort of vision-inducing plant, which he took for about thirty successive days until he was finally rewarded with his form.
"A phoenix truly wouldn't have suited him in character, but it is likely that he was trying some other spells and self-transfiguration on the side- that is the only reason why he might have been able to take that form. But he did, and apparently he was quite unbearable once he had managed it. He believed that, having become a phoenix, he was therefore heir to all the secrets of the universe, and, being immortal, he would also have the rest of time to seek them out. He thus abandoned his kingdom to the hands of his younger brother and dove into his studies."
Queen Ragnok stopped to catch her breath, and then went on. "From there, even we do not know most of the story. Many of his later writings were burnt, perhaps because of his own fires, or, more likely, because of his daughter, Khepri, who made it her life's work to destroy his. It seemed, though, that, having discovered everything that interested him about this life, he then sought to study that which is forbidden: the afterlife. Being a phoenix, he could not die and stay dead, and so he resorted to the practice of necromancy, killing his followers and then bringing them back in order to report their findings, but they could tell him nothing, and he hated them for it. Supposedly he then attempted to replicate his own phoenix transformation on Khepri, Goddess only knows why, but it crippled her with scorching magic, turned her into a wreck that was half-human and half phoenix. After that, it is said, Khepri and her followers, among whom was Zarkkaj and his horde (for we abhor soul magic) contrived to destroy him, and Khepri then wrote up the remaining part of their story, and sealed it with wardwork so secure that not even Merlin himself could break it open. It was her last wish, that the next woman (or man, for that matter) to be cursed to be a phoenix animagus might be given those writings so that he or she might know what to avoid. For though a phoenix is all light magic, incapable of turning Dark, Ra Imhotep the Mad proved that an animagus can, and she wanted to warn all who came after."
As Ragnok's story came to a close, Severus could not help shivering. He couldn't imagine ever being drawn to experiment like that...but would he be? Could he turn dark, like Imhotep? Would Harry be enough to stop him?
"Calm yourself,"
Severus looked up to realize Queen Ragnok was addressing him.
"You should not worry until you have read what Princess Khepri has to say; I do not believe that, merely because you are a phoenix animagus, it is as dire as all that."
"Until we read what she has to say?" Harry began, staring down at the queen in worry. "What do you mean? I thought you said that all the writings have been lost?"
"Imhotep's writings yes, at least all of his later work. But Khepri's letters are still quite safe, in our care, as she gave it over to Zarkkaj's keeping with her final breath. And it was her command that we give them to any phoenix animagi after. And you, my friends, are the first shifters since to claim a phoenix as your form, so Khepri's letters are rightfully yours." She then turned back towards the hanging without giving either of the wizards a chance to respond. "Ramleg!" she shouted. "Fetch Khepri's Bequest!"