The Whirlwind 6: Harry
It had taken the Dwarves a day to cross the distance between Lake-town and Erebor. It'd taken Harry less than ten minutes to fly up there.
The dragon glided down to the lake in thirty short seconds.
Harry was left behind, heaving her wings as powerfully as she could, but she only slowly, too slowly, gained the altitude to go for a proper dive.
Fastest living animal, my arse.
Smaug had less than a minute head start but she still dreaded the devastation a dragon could unleash on a wooden town in those long seconds. She was left to watch with her too keen eyes, powerless to help.
The dragon slowed down his flight for his first sweep over the roofs. She spared a quick thought for her friends, hoping they were far away from being in the dragon's way. Maybe they were hiding in the forest along the shores, the torches in the town lit only as a decoy. But no, she could see movement on the pathways and on the canals between the houses. There were boats quickly sailing away from the town, and people rushing across the bridge, but she could also see many of her neighbours still trapped on the streets, running now in panic and chaos.
The dragon heaved in a powerful breath. Harry fancied she could feel the crackling of the air even through the distance. A moment later, he reared his neck back to let the fiery breath out, and Harry squinted her eyes in anticipation of a blinding glare of flames. Instead, only a spray of liquid burst out of the dragon's throat, fresh crimson blood tinted with putrid green.
What the bloody- The Dwarves!
They must have injured the dragon somewhat, after all.
They'd talked about the idea last night, about their flask flame that Harry had imagined as a molotov cocktail mixed with gunpowder. It had indeed sounded rather potent if it was able to blast out whole mines. Or a dragon's throat, it seems, she added with spiteful glee.
The dragon overflew the edge of the town in his surprise. His empty heaves turned into an enraged roar then, the fury of it not at all diminished by his painful coughs. He spun in the air, flew back the short distance and unleashed his rage at the houses on the edge of the town, attacking roofs and boats with his claws, clawed wings and powerful hinged legs. The true shrieks of terror started then.
Smaug hauled his way across the town, jumping from one roof to another, leaving a trail of collapsed houses and screaming humans in his wake. It took Harry a moment to spot the lonely figure among all that chaos, but spot Bard she did, standing higher than others, on the last tier of the watchtower, firing an arrow at the raging dragon. Her eyes followed its trajectory easily, and she saw how it bounced off Smaug's scales, without the dragon even noticing.
Another figure caught her eye then, moving with a sharp purpose through the chaotic bedlam of the rest, and she recognised Bain. He was running up the watchtower, a few landings down from its top, a long arrow made of black iron in his hand.
Of course he'd bring the black arrow, that fool of a romantic. She remembered the legend Bain had recounted last night, and no matter how small the actual chance of hitting a tiny spot on the moving dragon was, Harry was enough of a romantic fool herself to truly believe Bard and Bain capable of it.
She'd witnessed such feats in the past, seen pure determination and urgency tip the scale into someone's favour even against seemingly more impossible odds. From her experience though, such heroic feats were born out of desperation, and were often preceded by a lot of suffering. She'd long grown out of waiting for the chance for the lucky shot to finally present itself.
So even now, all those musings of legends and black arrows were pointless, because she was finally close enough.
She pulled her wings tight to her body and dove.
Over the long decades of her life, Harry had never lost her love of flying. She had been overjoyed when she'd found out her animagus form. Frankly, it'd been only the idea of having actual wings that had pushed her through the arduous process of learning the transformation.
Even before this Middle-earthen adventure, Harry used to go flying often, sometimes for work, but mostly just for the sport, diving at neck-breaking speed for the rush of adrenaline. Well, there was actually no such thing as neck-breaking speed for peregrine falcons, whose every feature was made for generating and surviving velocity unparalleled to anyone in the (mundane) animal world.
It was only in Middle-earth she had used those skills for actual hunting. In the first harsh weeks of this adventure, when she hadn't yet been ready to join the local society, she stayed afar, observing. In the wilderness, she'd been forced to overcome her squeamishness for the sheer practicality of feeding a falcon body rather than a witch's, and flew to kill for the first time.
As such, now, not only could she dive and break and glide like a bird's version of a Wronski, she could also dive and catch and hold on. True, a dragon was rather bigger than her usual prey, it wouldn't buckle under her attack and take the brunt of their crash. Well, it was a good thing she'd always been good at improvising.
She dove and broke and held on.
She was on the dragon in a mere fraction of a second. The moment her talons wrapped around the edge of a scale on Smaug's brow, she changed back into a human. The dragon's head sunk a smidge under her sudden weight but before Smaug could process the intrusion, Harry unsheathed her clunky sword, grasped the hilt with both hands and, using her whole upper body, swung the blade down, around his brow and into his eye.
The sword didn't go far in but it went far enough. The dragon wailed in pain, thrashing his head in violent sweeps, but Harry held on tight. Her feet were wedged in between his brow scales, her hands gripped the hilt of the sword and her taut muscles kept her secured in between those two points. She felt the dragon's massive body flail, felt it jerk and then lift off into one last desperate jump to get away from the attacker, but she didn't pay it any mind. Instead, she banished the sword, sinking it further into the dragon's eye and brain, all the way to its hilt.
The pierced eyeball dissolved into a mess of liquids and tissue, spilling over her hands, and Harry grimaced in distaste. Then, a human scream pierced through the sounds of the dragon's dying roars, sounding close, very close and rather familiar, and Harry whipped her head up. Bard stood on the watchtower, frozen, with a bow taut; Bain on the landing underneath his father, also staring at her with his eyes wide.
Well, bugger.
The dragon was still quite a distance from the torches of the town. Was there any chance they wouldn't recognise her in the dark?
A beat later, she realised the dragon, albeit probably quite braindead now, was still moving, gliding under the power of his last jump, aimed straight at the watchtower.
She banished the hilt of the sword sharply to the side and swung her body from the dragon's head to aid the charm with her weight. It did the trick–Smaug's head twitched and his body obediently followed the movement, the last feat of this powerful beast. Its muscles crumbled a second later, but by that point, they were safely past the watchtower, now quickly approaching the roofs in their uncoordinated fall.
Spurred by the success of the idea, Harry tried to puppeteer the corpse further. She quickly banished the talons of the one wing she could see, propelling it away from the body. The wing spread sharply, membranes tearing, and the lopsided maneuver sent the whole body into a mad spin. It did the trick, though, their fall had slowed down, and its angle had sharpened: instead of tearing a path of destruction through the town, the corpse would hopefully collapse only on a house or two; Harry hoped.
Before she could celebrate, though, she needed to get out of the mad tangle of sharp talons and claws that were spinning around her body on their way to the water's surface. Holding onto the slippery hilt, she briefly contemplated changing back into a peregrine. Her smaller body was definitely more agile in the air, and could get her out of this pickle unharmed, even if she currently had trouble knowing where up and down was. On the other hand, the peregrine's neck was much easier to snap by a flailing talon than that of a witch.
She did promise Luna to try her hardest not to die her way out of this adventure, if at all possible.
Choosing bruises and broken limbs over the risk of dying, Harry stayed a witch, molding her body as close to the corpse as possible. As she braced for impact, Harry idly wondered how refreshing it was, trying to avoid death for a different reason than just the inconvenience of it.
The corpse crashed into the lake a second later, taking a house and the surrounding market with it.
Harry clung to its neck until its movements slowed down underneath the water. Then she kicked off towards the surface. All of her limbs seemed to be obeying her, which was an unexpected blessing. She felt only minor discomfort, but she suspected that could be the shock of the ice cold water to her nerve system, and her luck was bound to change once feeling returned to her limbs. Breaking the surface, she quickly swam to the nearest timber that still seemed to be attached to the town. She heaved herself up onto the pathway, her arms, tired now from all the flying, protesting the effort.
She collapsed on the planks and allowed herself a moment, her eyes closed and her chest heaving. Working through her frantic breaths, splayed out and shaking on the slippery wood, she longed for a world where Warming Charms would work.
A change of dry clothes would do, too, but there wasn't yet time for that. She opened her eyes and cast them at the surrounding houses, needing a moment to actually recognise this part of town, so wretched it was. Then she slowly and carefully climbed onto her feet and started limping towards the watchtower.
It was time to face the music.
[Bard]
When Bard found Bain only one landing below his perch atop the tower, he held his son for a long moment, wrapping him into the safety of his arms and clinging to the beat he could feel through his chest. Alive—alive—alive, it seemed to thrum; Bain was alive.
He held his son in a tight embrace above the roofs of the town, listening to the buildings groaning in protest, and collapsing in places. Shouts rose into the air, some still in a panic, some barks of orders. And yet, the lake seemed deadly silent when compared to the mad roaring and raving of a massive dragon of just moments before.
With his thoughts returning to his daughters and people who could be trapped in the collapsed or collapsing homes, Bard finally let go of Bain with one last squeeze of his shoulder.
They made their way down the stairs. Bard steadied himself with a firm grip on the railing, his knees still shaking, the fear of staring down the face of an attacking dragon only slowly waning from his veins.
Only for the fresh memories to surge back to the forefront of his mind when they stepped out onto the pathways and met with the face he last saw hanging off a sword lodged into the dragon's eye.
Harry was slowly shuffling his way towards them. Bard, although still frozen with shock and full of bewildered questions, couldn't help but scan the lad's body with worried eyes, searching for injuries.
He was soaked to the bones, his many layers of baggy clothes now hanging heavy on his form and Bard was once again struck by how skinny the boy was. There were holes in his clothes, ripped or burnt through, and Bard could glimpse angry red skin underneath the cloth. He was clutching his right arm close to his side but walked under his own power.
Bard came to a stop at the base of the watchtower, frozen in his attempts to find the first thing to say. Harry didn't appear perturbed by the situation, though. He stumbled up to them and only halted a step away from Bain by Bard's shoulder. Once there, he grasped the black arrow. Bain quickly let go of it, as if surprised it had still been clutched in his hand.
Bard was left watching in confusion as Harry lifted the arrow and threw it over the path and into the water beneath.
"If anyone asks, that arrow lies buried in the dragon's heart."
Bard paused at the lad's tone, unfamiliar with the hardness that it suddenly took on. And yet, when he gazed into Harry's eyes, he found a pleading look behind all that determination.
The meaning of what Harry was asking finally registered. "You want us to lie? You would have me pretend it was I who killed the dragon?"
"Yes," Harry said without a beat of hesitation. He straightened his back so that it almost appeared he was no longer looking up when staring into Bard's eyes, although he still stood a head and a half shorter. "I probably helped to save quite a lot of lives today. All I ask of you is to help me preserve the sanity of mine."
A/N: There's only one story I can recommend after a chapter like this:
nauva i nauva by itsybitsyasterisk,
a beautifully written one-shot featuring another shape-shifting Harry fighting Smaug. I'd wish it was longer but on the other hand, the author managed to masterfully say everything that was needed in this powerful short story.
.
(I'd like to give something back to the authors that have directly or indirectly inspired me in my own writing. At the end of my chapters, I'll be mentioning stories that I'm more than happy to recommend for your further reading)
