A Fox's Guile II

Since the dawn of time, and more recently since after the first appearance of dragons in Alagaësia, the land had witnessed many marvels and events that defied, in a way or another, what was commonly known as 'possible'. Beyond the mere application of magic words that expressed the strength of the caster in this or that way, there had been coincidences of such a magnitude that all those aware of the possibilities surrounding a particular chain of events would have screamed at the sky and accused the gods of sticking their nose among mortals' affairs.

Magic, or more correctly life itself, which permeated the land and the air (even if significantly less than what it used to), often had reverberated in a way or another to echo said extraordinary events throughout history. From when the elf Eragon found a dragon egg and chose to keep it instead of destroying it, to when the Pact between elves and dragons had been struck, from the first spark of madness in Galbatorix's mind, to when the Riders had started to fall, from when Brom had succeeded in securing an egg from the only three left, to when the only princess of the elves had chosen a life of sacrifice and battle against the usurper.

Those selected few that knew how to listen had always managed, throughout history, to 'feel' when something had changed. It was a given that said selected few were capable of doing so either because of a great deal of isolation, which allowed them to sharpen their sensibility so much that they could feel the events that changed the world in such fundamentals ways, or broken minds that had historically been discarded as 'crazy'.

The last monumental change to echo across the land had been different from any before. It had been sudden, swift and utterly unpredictable, even if Tenga, son of Ingvar would have never remembered being the main cause for said change, it had been there nonetheless.

Deep into the Du Weldenvarden, an elf stirred in his sleep, a shift of the world he was into reverberated across his being, and a minute frown that had been present for many years lessened minutely.

Across the land, hidden beneath countless tons of rocks and minerals, the dwarven king took a deeper breath from his pipe, letting the smoke fill his lungs with a feeling of satisfaction that he couldn't reconduct to any particular event he had been made aware of.

On an abandoned island, beneath layers of rocks, some of the ones that had been in fact tangentially responsible of some of the 'impossible coincidences' that one would have called 'an act of god' stilled thoughtfully and withdrew their presence from the land, cautious about the sudden flare that none could explain.

Into Urû'baen, a human mind dedicated to shatter and overcome each of his secret weapons, didn't react. The vast mass of black leather and scales, capable of flattening buildings with a swing of the tail and erase forests with a single deep breath of fire, felt his scales lift imperceptibly around his long neck, as if he was preparing for battling. Given the insanity which dominated his mind, however, and his inability to form complex thoughts, a low rumble that expressed anticipation was his only reaction.

Once he had reached the top of the nearest hill, David Taylor, mage extraordinaire, world hopper and fox, stopped running and turned his head back, witnessing at the bright light that was Fleur's flames the now scorched ground that had formed the small valley among hills in which he had landed a few hours before.

A burnt orange coloured ear twitched without any conscious input, as his lone eye witnessed the devastating effects that Fleur's temper had inflicted on the previously lush grass. The fox bit the empty air, making its teeth clack soundly together to free his ears from the ringing caused by the veritable firestorm. I guess that I should be grateful that I haven't been immolated. Was the main thought running back and forth in the fox's mind as he observed the flames wildly swing in a column that he knew was begging to be noticed by whatever was about to fall on them like a ton of bricks in this unknown world.

The fire flayed wildly for a solid minute before the brightness started to fade, and only then the fox started to move towards the epicentre of the manifestation. I need to figure out a way to make Fleur communicate in a better way, I can always keep an eye on her to figure out what's about to happen.

David assumed his human form once more only when he was close enough to see that the raging firestorm had dwindled to barely a handful of flames that flared and dimmed without any apparent pattern: "We need to move, Fleur." he said soothingly, grimacing when the flames spiked in his direction aggressively, but immediately lost whatever was driving them against the man and returned to the... is she crying? David0s intuition came to his aid, for once not pointing out how things were bout to get worse.

"We need a way to move you, I can't apparate, portkeys are out, running as a fox is our best bet, but I'm out of... wait a minute." David topped passing his hands across his untamed mane of dirt blonde hair and examined his necklace.

"Yes!" he hissed, whatever had caused the disappearance of several of his best resources had been unable to remove the heavily engraved iron parallelepiped that hung from his neck.

His hands stumbled briefly in finding the latch before they were able to remove the apparently meaningless trinket from his neck, but were quick to place it on the ground a few steps away from the sentient fire. As his hands left the necklace, it grew, revealing itself to be a tall iron trunk. Without hesitating, David opened the lid and scampered down the staircase.

He ran down, ignoring the floor that looked like an orchard in full summer as the suffused light mimicked the dawn for the plants benefit, and he didn't spare a glance even for the chickens roaming over an enclosure on one side of the 'room' and a rooster that got ready to sing. David kept going down the spiral staircase, reaching soon enough what could have been mistaken for an apartment. There was a library with the aisles' depth that wasn't something that could be picked up with a mere glance, a brazier that warmed the whole room, a kitchen, a bedroom, and a proper living room, in which was present a couch, and comfy armchairs. There were bottles hanging from the ceiling: they had once contained light in various forms, either fireflies, bluebell flames, glowing mist... David ignored the grimace that he felt rising as he saw that many of his previous attempts at creating an eternal source of light hadn't survived the trip across worlds.

Still, the one-eyed man reached one of the blackboards that hadn't seen much use in several months and lifted it off from the wall, revealing a cabinet holding several glass jar characterized by a single wooden handle that created a sinuous curve over the open end.

At least I always believed in having a Plan B. He snorted quietly to himself before climbing out from his trunk once more. H quickly closed the lid and tugged briefly on the delicate-looking chain that hung from one side of it. Answering to a command that had been inscribed into it many years before, the trunk shrunk itself, resuming its innocuous appearance of a necklace, which David wasted no time with securing around his neck.

He turned once more towards the desolate-looking handful of white flames on the burnt ground and quickly approached. "I don' know why you regained your senses only now Fleur," he started, feeling like there had to be something more than he could do than simply talking to her, "But it means that now there is hope for you to regain your body, or a new one... I can't make promises about results, but I can promise that I will keep trying, if only so that you can slap me with your own hands if I take too long."

Having said that, David scooped up the fire with his hands, before delicately and almost wistfully letting it into the glass jar.

Turned into a fox once more, the one-eyed canine heard the familiar flapping sound of Raven covering his blind spot as he closed his maw around the wooden handle over the top of the glass jar containing Fleur.

Without further waste of time, the fox turned and started to throttle north, in the direction where his enhanced senses informed him of the presence of a course of water. Hiding their arrival, given Fleur's actions would be difficult, but hiding their tracks? That was something the one-eyed fox could easily accomplish.

They found a river a few hours later, just as the dawn started to break through the thin mist that covered the grass planes that they were crossing. The sun broke through cleanly, erasing the deep dark of the night into lighter and lighter shades of blue, until David could actually see as far as his eye could reach.

Beyond the random crop of trees here and there, and the pat of the landscape hidden behind the hills, he couldn't see anything worthy of particular interest in sight, so, after having drunk from the calm and relatively small river (marvelling at the cleanliness of the water), David returned into his human form, picking up the jar containing Fleur from where he had left it: "I'm about to cross a river, I don't think that ordinary water can do something to you, but I'd prefer to not risk it."

The fire, which had kept its dim behaviour for all the time that David had spent running around as a fox, didn't react in any way to his words, causing a grimace to mar his features for a few seconds, before e surrendered and put the jar back inside one of the inner pockets of his leather overcoat.

His head then turned towards the white-feathered raven, noticing that she was busy trying to peck away her reflection from the clear water. "Sometimes, I don't know why I bother considering you smarter than you actually are."

Raven croaked outraged and flapped off the ground: "What do you hold,

but never keep?

If you take your last,

make it deep."

David's eye narrowed: "I'm not keeping my breath to cross this river underwater." he answered correctly interpreting the riddle as the suggestion and challenge that it was. Considering his previous mocking statement, it even made sense that his familiar would suggest him to keep his head underwater for a while. Under the cold, clear water.

David shivered as he prepared himself to his next challenge. On one side, the river was barely thirty meters large, and it didn't look like there were any impossible predators waiting to spring an ambush on him, and he could swim better as a human than as a fox. But then he would have to remain wet until the sun managed to dry him, since resting in his trunk wasn't an option until he figured out a safe place where he wasn't going to be picked up randomly while he couldn't keep watch.

With a deep breath to steel himself, David owned once more his enchanted trunk, folding his clothes and leaving them on the first steps of the spiral staircase before closing the trunk and securing it back around his neck. At least I'll have dry clothes once I pop out of the water.

He shivered a bit in the cool air that suddenly bit him, and, knowing that staying still wouldn't help him, he ran into the water.

It wasn't a pleasurable experience. The water would have been so cold to hurt his teeth when he drunk it if not for the lingering effects of the decades spent with a philosopher stone constantly boosting his vitality, but it was still cold enough to make his limbs feel like they were been prodded by countless needles, and Davd soon began to lose sensibility in his fingers as he crawled across the placid river.

He had never been a 'sportive' man. In a world of magic, exercising the body when you know that it doesn't influence your power had always sounded like a waste of time, while the philosopher stone took care of maintaining him at his peak condition without need for him to do a single pushup. Despite never intending for it to be so, David had a body fit to compete in the olympiads back in the Potter-verse, albeit completely lacking any kind of skill in every discipline in which he could have competed.

From beginning to end, it took him fifteen minutes to cross the river, the current, placid and almost invisible, dragging him along the course of water for a couple of hundred meters before his insensible fingers managed to scap against the rocky bottom, granting him the possibility of walking out of the water. His teeth clattering David's hands stumbled to free once more his necklace from his neck, and he almost fell down the spiral staircase in order to reach his clothes, breathing heavily as the meteorological enchantments of always-summer of the first floor of his truck washed warmly over him.

The fit of hunger that came along with his exhaustion was enough to push him to walk into his orchard, plucking peaches and whatever looked ready to be eaten. Surviving with your personal garden and house hanging from your neck is incredibly useful. He shivered once more as he filled his mouth with the mature fruits, feeling the exhaustion from the unwilling world-hopping, the night of running and his last stunt in the river finally crash over him.

I'll sit near the brazier just for a couple of minutes. He reassured himself as he stumbled down the spiral staircase. Soon enough, he had fallen into the armchair closest to the brazier, warming himself as his eyelids grew heavier and heavier. Without knowing it, he was already asleep.

Hours later, even if to David it felt like less than a single minute had passed, he was risen from his slumber by a metallic ringing. More a cluttering of blows being hammered over... Shit. He surmised lamely as he dressed with clean clothes that this time included a pair of sturdy boots made of leather as he climbed upstairs.

His trunk had survived the world-travelling without particular difficulties, even if he had to look over the storage to see if any magical creature or plant was shared between this new world and his old one. He thusly knew that whatever noise wasn't caused by his enchantments failing, but by something outside, more likely than not trying to hammer open the trunk.

David took another deep breath, realizing that Raven had remained outside, and sat on the last step of the spiral staircase, waiting for the lightning he had inscribed into the lid of the trunk to charbroil whatever was trying to pry his home-laboratory-garden-study open.

As the minutes went on however, and the more or less constant slamming echoed across the sealed environment, the one-eyed man realized that all the features that he had added after forging the trunk itself, like the enhanced defensive protocols that acted upon his understanding of the souls that created the world in the Potter-verse, were more likely than not... gone. Fucking hell this is a problem. He grimaced a bit, opting to sit quietly and trying to hear the unfamiliar words that were exchanged above his head.

The sounds weren't even remotely similar to the tongues that he knew from his previous world, but that was to be expected, really, so he remained calm, listening in, feeling the cluster of small runes etched on the back of his left ear collect sounds and associating them to the very human-like tones with which they were uttered.

It wasn't enough for him to get an actual understanding of the tongue he had never heard before, but it would help once he managed to land his gaze upon the... definitely human-like beings ...and observe how their microexpression and body language would pair up with the sounds that he was striving to memorize.

I knew that figuring out the Allspeak would become useful at some point. He briefly chuckled in self-congratulation as he picked up Fleur from the inside pocket where he had placed her and started to relay what was happening beyond the reach of her limited senses.

I wonder if I can exercise a wandless legilimens here, it sure could be useful to extract some info.

A month later

Running away from the human caravan that had picked up David's trunk hoping to sell it along with its contents had been easy enough. Given the impressive weight of the Iron trunk, the merchant that was in charge of the family-itinerant merchant convoy had deemed it worth a pretty penny, and so had got it hailed up on a wagon. When the sounds of the moving group of people, along with the occasional *twang* that echoed across the Iron trunk had faded, David had slipped out of the lid, quickly tying it back on his own neck and turning into a fox, disappearing in the underbrush of the small outcrop of trees where the humans had decided to rest for the night.

Raven hadn't been very far away, wisely knowing that following a group of unknown people without David around could easily enough spell her doom. That was why as soon as the fox had spotted the white-feathered raven he had opened the trunk, letting her free to relax in the first floor of it.

And they were humans, given the technological development that David had been able to discretely observe, he was in a world that sat comfortably in the middle of a medieval setting. From the way they lighted fires, to the weaponry. They ate their provisions without sending out hunters or whatever, signalling either that they were rich enough to be able to afford it, or that they didn't quite feel safe with roaming the grass-planes after dark.

David had no reason to believe that they followed empty suspicions, given his own experience, which had included a world where lethifolds and dementors existed, he was wary of not following their advice. For all he knew, he had been lucky on his first night to not be eaten alive by the grass-god of unjustified bloodshed.

So, he had followed them, at a distance, for the better part of a week, letting the Allspeak cluster pick up their tongue, and coming to isolate terms from their context, slowly understanding more and more. Sure, his vocabulary was limited to the common words spoken among the itinerant merchants, and they weren't enough for him to figure out anything of extraordinary importance. Apparently, there was a king, the roads weren't safe, the imperial soldiers tended to abuse their power more often than not, and the stories they told each other around the fire were more something born out of irrational fears than anything else.

Given the distance he had to keep in order to not being discovered, since a one-eyed fox with a silver patch over his missing eye would attract too much attention, David had been unable to try and delve into those people's minds through eye-contact. The one-eyed fox wrinkled his nose in distaste witnessing that they weren't used to wash their hands with soap after taking a shit. Ignorance and bacteria, this is not the most civilized world I could have landed myself in. He thought bitterly as he saw the gestures to shoo away the bad luck or the obscure presages that they could see in the dark.

A guttural sounding word came up more often than not in the whispered worries that the adults were careful to keep from the children, and from the context, David assumed that it indicated either a band of bandits, or something along the lines of a warrior nomad tribe that stole from the caravans. Every day, David remained back once the humans moved away, heading back into his trunk to keep Fleur up to speed with what was happening and to eat something, finding reassurance in the unchanged behaviour of Raven.

"I guess that we could stop at the first city they cross and figure a way to blend in." David spoke soothingly to the white flames, looking for any indication that Flaur was either approving or not for his plan.

"I have no idea if there are wizards around, if they're hidden like we were with the Statute, but given the technological prowess of the caravan I've been following, it wouldn't make much sense." he kept talking, looking at Fleur, trying and not really succeeding in figuring out her thoughts. The silent treatment continues then.

He couldn't have known, nor expected, to see a pillar of black smoke rising further along the road once he left his trunk. As a fox, he carefully ran towards the merchant caravan that he had learned to know in the past weeks in which the humans had unknowingly instructed him in their tongue and showcased a plethora of uses and costumes that he knew he would be hard-pressed to remember, and once David reached the caravan, an hour or so later, he had to bit back the instinct to puke.

Upturned wagons, bodies on the ground, splatters of blood.

His lone eyes studied the responsible ones from a distance, his fox nose picking up many smells that he could have done without while his ears twitched and picked up sounds too low for him to hear as a human.

Then the guttural sounding word that he had heard so many times spoken with badly controlled fear and terror finally latched upon those that it defined. They were roughly humanoid in appearance, but not humans, oh no. They had greyish skin, bowed legs and thick arms, yellow, piggish eyes, claws on their hands in place of nails and a pair of long, twisted horns protruding from above their ears. The smallest among them was six feet tall, and spoke in a guttural sequence of simple terms that my Allspeak had no difficulties in picking up.

Kill.

Burn.

Tear.

Most of their vocabulary, or at least the part that they were unknowingly letting David overhear, wasn't something that one would adopt for a polite conversation.

They were Urgals, and the one-eyed, world-misplaced wizard remembered of an unimpressive book he had read once, along with roughly half of the sequel, even before landing in the Potter-verse. Eragon and Eldest.

Knowing that he could do nothing to fight back, given the lack of cooperation from his usual way of doing magic, David fled the area.

AN

I've come to realize that the first-person narrative is great only if you care only for the character you're writing about, and is effective only if you spend an unordinate amount of attention to details that said character could pick up upon. Since I'm just beginning with this fic, and I'm also trying to learn how to better my writing, I'm going for a third person Pov in this chapter, I hope it works well enough.

The point of this chapter, besides setting the MC up in the new world, is to see if even when I write exclusively about him with another pov the narration doesn't get ugly hiccups.

For now, in my opinion, it seems to be working.

This is the last 'filler' chapter, from the next, the story starts in earnest.