Harry entered the waiting room of Gringotts Infirmary and sat, trying not to stare at the goblin sitting across from him, holding his severed right arm in his left hand.

"Hello, Wizard." The goblin lifted the severed arm and languidly waved the hand at him.

Harry couldn't help his smile, though the bandaged stump looked terrible. "Hello, Goblin."

The goblin looked at his right arm currently being held in his left hand. "You can call me 'Lefty"

Harry decided that he liked goblins. "I'm Harry."

Lefty gave him an assessing look. "You don't look that hairy to me but fine, Hairy it is."

Harry decided not to respond to that. He looked closely at the stump. "Can they stick it back on? You must be tougher than me, just sitting like that."

"The pain is blocked by the charmed bandage, but it bloody well hurt when Haskswell lopped it off." Lefty scowled. "I'll have to train harder to earn a name and no, I will not be 'Lefty,' forever."

Harry wanted to ask him more about how he lost his arm, but didn't feel that it would be polite. "I never heard of charmed bandages before."

The goblin rolled his eyes. "Of course you haven't, Hairy. Wizards don't need them. A wave of the wand and hey presto, everything is fine."

Harry snorted. "I had some… shit of a wizard vanish the bones out of my arm once. It took days to put completely right and the pain was really bad. If I'd known of those bandages then I'd have wanted one round the neck."

The goblin laughed. "I suppose I should count myself lucky that Hackswell isn't a wizard. It must be nice just waving a wand and seeing an enemy vanish."

Harry frowned. "It's not that easy. Doing anything with a wand takes a really long time. I had to use a sword the last time I got in a fight to the death. Time before that, I had to go hand to hand and set someone on fire without the wand. Don't actually know any good fighting spells and the wand isn't much use for stabbing. Got a troll up the nose with it once, but I couldn't punch it through to anything vital or get it to blast the brains out of the thing's ears. All it was good for was picking troll bugies."

The goblin laughed, then looked confused. "I didn't think that wizard neaps had to face the arena. What's wrong with you then?"

Harry shrugged. "Cursed scar. Some bastard tried to see me off and came out second best. It won't heal up though. They say it might have something wrong with it."

Lefty nodded respectfully. "It's a smart one for the girls though. I hope the healers can save it for you, Hairy."

"Thanks." Harry was distracted by Dobby walking into the room. "Hey, Dobby, how did things go?"

"Master's business with… goblin be's done." Dobby looked at the young goblin and from ingrained habit didn't speak of business. In addition to the old home in Godric's Hollow, there was a hidden estate of ninety acres in the Severn Valley. The goblins had taken him there and attached him to the temporary wards, which they had a contract to maintain in order to preserve the statute of secrecy. Once the site of Potter Manor, the house had been destroyed in 1978. "How is Master feeling?"

"Good." Harry was in fact feeling quite embarrassed at being called 'master' in front of someone, especially by such a battered and obviously abused house elf.

"Lefty, this is my good friend, Dobby. He recently decided to come and work for me."

"Well met, Elf." Lefty made an awkward seated bow.

"Well met, Goblin." Dobby, glowing with joy at being treated like someone that mattered, returned the bow of an equal.

The door suddenly opened and a gruff looking Goblin stuck his head out. "You're up, Weak Eyes. Move it."

Harry started to rise, but Lefty was already heading for the door.

"See you around, Hairy, Dobby."

"Good luck, Lefty." The door closed and Harry returned his attention to the elf, taking note again of Dobby's foul attire and many burses, burns and contusions. What must people think, seeing him looking like that? "Maybe you need to see the healer first, Dobby. You look worse than I do."

"Master be's the greatest and most kindest of wizards ever." Dobby made an effort and didn't cry, as he knew that crying bothered his master. "Dobby be's healing well from using the master's good strong magic! He will be ready soon!"

Harry looked at the elf. "I never properly thanked you for taking that money away from Tom. Thank you, Dobby. You're a great and true friend of mine."

Dobby couldn't speak for a long moment. Finally he managed, "Master be's welcome. Dobby would do anything for he that faced the green magic to save Dobby from the Bad One."

Harry frowned. "I never had it quite as bad as you, but I understand. I felt like that about Dumbledore after he sent Hagrid to get me away from the Dursleys, but then I found out that they were the ones that put me there in the first place. My relatives stuffed me into a cupboard, locked me away, called me 'Freak' and never once treated me like a real person."

The elf's great bulbous eyes widened in shock.

Scowling, Harry continued, "My uncle was mean every time he said anything to me, my aunt never had a kind word and slapped at me while my cousin hurt me when I couldn't fight back. They set a bulldog on me once and that whole miserable lot just laughed and laughed when it chased me up a tree." Harry gestured at the rag that the Elf wore. "They tried to feed me on scraps and I never got anything good to wear from them either, just things that they threw away. None of it was ever mine, so I know how you feel about that dirty Malfoy rag."

Dobby stared, mouth open. "D-Dobby knew not of these things or he would have come to help long ago. Master freed himself? No, Hoggywarts robes bees uniform, not clothes. Master is not free?" The elf looked completely devastated, as if he might burst into tears.

Harry's jaw tightened as he thought about it. "Freedom is in the mind, Dobby. Your mind. You can't be free until you stop thinking about what you do in terms of other people. I was like that for years, always trying to make them like me. The Dursleys treated me like… well, shit from the beginning, no matter what I did, and for the longest time there was a little voice in my head, always thinking about trying to impress them, always wondering what they thought, whispering that everything bad was happening because I was doing something wrong, that I should feel bad when they got angry, or work harder to try to make them like me."

Dobby made a small shocked noise.

"Yeah. I didn't really want anything else but to be liked." Harry gave a bitter sort of chuckle in remembrance. "That lasted until my cousin's fifth birthday. I worked extra-hard, smiling and running about, trying to be excited as if I liked Dudley, putting up decorations, setting tables in the backyard, making everything really special like they wanted."

Harry grimaced at the memory. "Then I got dragged by the arm and thrown into the cupboard for the party. Without any lunch. After all the kids had left, I was let out to clean the yard. There was food in the bin by the barbeque, but I didn't eat any, even though I was really hungry, because surely they were going to feed me after all my work on this special day." Harry shook his head, remembering his younger self's last moments of naïve hope for the Dursleys.

"When I came back in I saw Dudley, the great fat pig, making a point of eating the last piece of the birthday cake in front of me. All of that work, all that bloody smiling, all that effort to be a part of their special party and they wouldn't even think to give me lunch or a little piece of cake. It came to me then that they were always going to hate me, no matter what I did, just for being me. So why should I make an effort to please them?"

Harry smiled. "I was laying in my cupboard that night, thinking about it all, trying to understand why Dudley was so different from me. I sort of realized then that I didn't know when my birthday was. I'd never had one, it seemed. Then I finally realized that I wasn't a Dursley and that I couldn't be one on any terms. They were in fact nothing to me, just bad people that I was stuck with, bad people that I shouldn't care about and that I needed to walk away from as soon as possible. And that, Dobby, was the night that I figured out how to unlock and lock that damned cupboard from the inside. I started raiding the ice box every night and snotting their bacon to boot. Stupid muggles never though what the cook can do for them."

Dobby stared at him in open mouthed shock for a long second, and then collapsed with laughter.

Harry snapped out of the memory and had to laugh when a giggling Dobby crawled over and hugged his leg. "Yeah, it's funny now, but it was hard to become free. I felt like I was going against God himself at first." He touched Dobby on the shoulder. "I never want to be anything like Vernon, Dudley, Malfoy, Tom or any of that lot, so I'm your friend and you're mine. We help each other. Nothing more and nothing less. Malfoy had no more right to treat you the way he did than Vernon had a right to beat me all over with a strap for leaving a squeegee streak on the window. You understand, Dobby? The goblins tell me that you need my magic, but nobody needs a bastard like that in his life."

"Dobby agrees." The elf hugged tighter.

"Now I'm still legally a minor and that means that I have to be careful about adults, especially with this whole guardian thing, but in my mind I'm free. I think for myself in terms of what I want and I'll only listen to the people that I trust." He helped Dobby up. "That list is very short and pretty much consists of you and maybe some friends, but no adult. Not any of them."

The elf stood swaying, still giggling. "Dobby so wishes that he had snotted the Bad Malfoy's bacons."

"The bacon was nothing," Harry grinned, "You'd be amazed at what breading will cover up. They ate much worse than snot when I felt the urge for revenge. I always deep cleaned the piss stains around the toilet with Vernon's toothbrush. Never gave it a proper rinse either, just spat on it to make it minty for him. The stupid walrus never once noticed."

This set them both laughing again until they ran down.

"Dobby never thinks of these things with the Bad Ones. He is so happy to be Harry Potter's elf."

"And I'm really glad to have you, Dobby. Now that you reminded me about clothes, I'm going replace the rest of my Dursley rubbish just as soon as I can." Harry gestured at the elf's attire. "I know that giving you clothes somehow means magically dismissing you, but I want you to be free in your mind too. I think that every elf that works for me should look good, be clean, well dressed and healthy, not all beat up and ragged like some slave. Can I give you the galleons for some proper uniforms without accidently dismissing you?"

Dobby looked thrilled. "Uniforms is not clothes! Must Dobby wear a uniform? With many pockets? And a hat? With a Potter crest?"

"I have a crest?" Harry hadn't known.

"Dobby sees crest on Goblin papers." The elf raised a finger and drew a glowing circle in the air, bisected by a line that passed through the apex of an upright triangle within in the circle. "This be's Master's family crest."

"Good to know. Yes, Dobby, take whatever it costs and get yourself uniforms and stuff." Harry smiled with satisfaction.

"What uniforms should Dobby be getting?" The elf was a little confused.

Harry shrugged. "Just because you wear a uniform doesn't mean that you have to wear the same one every day or for everything that you do. I delegate the matter of the Potter Uniforms to you, Dobby. The Queen's Army has different uniforms for different tasks. There are working uniforms that don't show dirt and are easy to clean while still looking smart, dress uniforms for parades, combat uniforms that aren't quite as spectacular but much easier to wear, cold and hot weather uniforms. Cooks, waiters and butlers all have uniforms, as do drivers, gardeners and the like. Look around, see what others do and decide on what's practical. But keep in mind that you can always change it if it doesn't suit!"

The elf nodded vigorously. "Dobby do! Dobby has learned of property that Master owns. Shall Dobby report?"

The door opened. "Potter?" It was a woman in robes like Madame Pomphrey's this time.

Harry rose. "We can talk about it later."

lf

"Madame Bones, we have a big problem. Harry Potter is missing from Saint Mungos." Glenn MacDonnell was on duty at the desk and on hearing the gossip thought that Bones needed to be informed.

Bones looked up from the group that she was with, all huddled around a series of tables covered with spread out documents. "It's an even bigger problem than that, MacDonnell. He's at Gringotts. We know this because the Ministry liaison has received a demand from the Goblins. We are in violation of a treaty provision and must provide them with the location of Harry Potter's sworn magical guardian or show cause for the sealing of the Potter wills else the lost profit from the Potter investments and associated fines, fees and further assessments will be removed directly from the Ministry vault."

MacDonnell frowned. "But… that vault is located under the Department for Finance."

"Just so. Thanks to our esteemed Minister, we don't have enough aurors on staff to even slow them down. Tell everyone working the lobby that they are to stay clear if they see goblins." Bones returned to her work. If it came down to goblins invading, no one would be throwing away their lives or even getting injured resisting for the pittance the sticky fingered Minister allowed to accumulate in that vault.

lf

"Oh, now that's interesting." The healer stared at the photo that had just emerged from the machine.

Sitting on a normal examination table, Harry was overjoyed not to have horrible voodoo heads waved at him. "What? What is it?"

"As we suspected, you have a soul leach stuck to the curse scar on your forehead." Healer McTavish showed him the picture, all orange red and black blobs. "See, that's it, the blob right there! Fascinating, really."

"No!" Harry recognized nothing in the picture, but his skin crawled anyway. He began swiping at his forehead. "Get it off! Get it off now!"

"Not so fast, it's not hurting you. Well, it's draining some of your magic to stay alive, but other than that it's harmless. Fairly harmless. Unless you actually get sick enough to die or something, then who knows, maybe it might be able to possess-

McTavish turned as someone cleared his throat. "Ah, yes, my… um, colleague, Creepsaw, would like to speak with you about it. He has… expertise with such matters." McTavish' expression spoke volumes of what he thought of Creepsaw's chosen field of study. "I'll just leave you to it." He left, avoiding coming too close to Creepsaw.

An entirely too friendly looking goblin entered the screened off space in which Harry was being examined. "Mister Potter, I would very much like to purchase your most fascinating leech."

"What?" Harry stared in confusion. "Purchase it? Why?"

"The best of all reasons, research!" Creepsaw beamed, looking completely unhinged. "I am conducting important studies, attempting to determine the energetic composition of the soul itself! Your leach is wonderfully unique in that it is freely existing soul-stuff that is amazingly not bound to a horcrux! A stasis jar with a magical sink should be able to hold it long enough for my experiments to conclude. "

Harry felt faint. "What exactly is a horcrux?"

Creepsaw looked pleased with the question. "A flawed device of which all magical beings should be aware. When a particularly vile and ignorant fool begins abusing the rituals of sacrifice to 'improve' himself, he will eventually diminish his common sense enough to try something that he cannot hope to recover from."

The goblin produced a glowing diagnostic paddle and ran it over the boy's forehead. "The horcrux is one of the truly disastrous pitfalls of magic. An evil callous being can use certain ritualized cruelties to stain his own soul to the point of rendering it unfit, trapping it within this crude plain of material existence. Essentially, he shatters his soul and poisons the divine spark that he was granted by binding a fragment to an object called a horcrux. These accursed items of sacrilege are sometimes found in the great funerary fortresses of antiquity."

"That's why I keep meeting Voldemort." Harry felt ill.

Creepsaw nodded enthusiastically, examining the results of his scan. "Indeed! Like the magical tyrants of old, he is altogether mad from such experimentation. Typically after creating the horcrux, the fool uses potions and a ritual to kill his living body and imbue the resulting corpse with an un-aging semblance of life. The corpse is technically a horcrux too, but retains many of its physical abilities. The curse of vampirism is a botched offshoot of this false 'immortality.' However, Mister Riddle's walking corpse was completely destroyed by your mother's trap, leaving his mutilated soul fragment as less than a ghost."

"My mother?" Harry hadn't heard of this.

"Lilly Evans was young for her eminence, but had achieved her Mastery in Enchanting before she was twenty years old." Creepsaw sighed. "I had the honor of conversing with her when she applied for a Gringotts position and we corresponded afterward upon a variety of subjects. I pushed to hire her, but overseer Hack was unwilling to employ a pregnant woman in spite of her obvious power and knowledge. There was much speculation after those tragic events and all of us that knew your family agree that it could not possibly have been your father that destroyed the Dark Lord. He was a respectable wizard as that kind goes, but your mother was a being of actual power."

Harry frowned. He'd heard a about his pureblood father and had some factual information from books and old news articles, but no one had much to say about his mother beyond her eye color. "I didn't even know that she had a mastery."

Creepsaw was surprised by that. "She had struck up a correspondence with Pernell Flamel after reading one of her papers in the Hogwarts library during her second year. This resulted in an invitation to visit the Flamels and take part in the experiment that she had suggested. It led to a series of experiments and your mother took her apprenticeship with Pernell while attending Hogwarts, commuting through the flue. It was something of a scandal in the British Ministry when a young muggleborn girl completed the requirements and applied for the title on the day of her majority. They refused to acknowledge her proofs at first, only relenting in the face of treaty bound reciprocity when Pernell arranged for it to be awarded through the French Ministry."

"And now the Flamels are dead." Harry sighed. Would he ever be able to connect with anyone who had known his mother?

Creepsaw's bushy brows shot up in astonishment. "Certainly not! I correspond with Pernell regularly, young man. We share interests. Not only is Pernell not dead, she very likely won't die until some distant age when she completes her research."

Harry narrowed his eyes, recalling exact words. The old man had not actually stated that they were dead, simply leading him to believe that it had to be so. Dumbledore never technically lied, but the man was a deceiver all the same. Why was it that Harry never seemed to meet anyone that really knew anything about his parents? "Dumbledore got me again."

Creepsaw shrugged. "Politicians are never to be trusted, young man, for we are all but grist for the mills of their ambition. I will inquire of Pernell whether she wishes to initiate contact. Perhaps she will provide a token to let your owl through her wards. If so, I can send it on to you with a Gringotts owl."

"Thank you." Harry bit his lip, wondering if she would ignore him for losing the stone.

"Getting back to the subject at hand, whenever we find a complete horcrux it invariably perishes when its bindings are disrupted. It makes them very difficult to analyze." Creepsaw looked frustrated. "They are damnably hard to come by too. Curse breakers have no proper scientific curiosity!"

"So these horcrux things don't really work then?" Harry touched his scar, thinking about the diary. "What if one of them could take over someone else's magic and make itself a new body with it? Could it use that person to become alive again?"

Creepsaw chuckled at the notion. "Dead is dead. A walking corpse might be recreated, but the animating spirit is still running inexorably down to oblivion. That approach was exhaustively documented over the centuries of the Old Kingdom and it has never worked. The arithmetical calculations make it seem as if it should succeed, but many wizards erroneously assume that magic and the soul are of the same essence and that one can be used to shore up the other." He reached out and touched the scar. "This fragment is feeding off of your magic to maintain its precarious state, but it cannot strengthen itself or improve its situation. It would eventually have failed on its own, or you would have cast it out in a moment of happiness."

Harry glumly reflected that there had been precious few of those in his life. "The soul isn't magic?"

Creepsaw shook his head. "Not even close. There may be a superficial resemblance, but the soul is a divine gift, sovereign and immutable from all harm but that which is inflicted by the divine. Magic is a force of the natural world, changeable, mutable and easily influenced. One may shatter a soul by turning the divine essence against itself and one may ritually bind magic to a broken fragment of that soul, but the resulting chimera mutates as the encapsulated magic reacts to the proximate foulness."

Harry nodded. "I just don't get it. Why would someone deliberately smash up their own soul enough that pieces just start falling off? It's completely crazy."

"Crazy indeed. The Wizarding bloodlines are rife with insanity." Creepsaw's smile faded and he looked grave. "Take this warning to heart, young mage. The magic of ritual sacrifice offers the appearance of an easy power gain, but it changes the subject in unpredictable ways, leading to eccentricity at best and insanity at worst. Fools rush to 'improve' themselves by sacrificing the tried and tested attributes with which nature has equipped us for some ultimately worthless 'gain' that only serves to erode rationality. Many ills of wizarding society can be explained by the fact that the effects of such poorly conducted ritual experiments can be heritable for generations."

Harry was staring at the goblin, eyes wide and mouth slightly open. "W- What does 'attributes' mean?"

Creepsaw smiled. "It means an inherent part of an object or organism. Fear or shame are two popular attributes to sacrifice. The families involved usually fail, lacking all common sense. They gain a slight advantage in magical strength or casting speed for example, but no more than their physical frame could originally support."

Harry needed to tell Hermione about this before she found some book. "So you go all wonky and don't get any more power than you could have gotten anyway." He frowned. "Is that why Dumbledore acts so… like he does?"

Creepsaw gave him an almost imperceptible nod. "I would not care to speculate on the psychology of specific individuals, but I will opine that many so-called 'light' wizards imagine that sacrificing certain 'dark' attributes, such as wrath or greed, will doubly improve them. Those sorts are often characterized by a certain carelessness. They are also prone to ignoring the mechanics of producing the next generation. Many of the ancient so-called 'light' families extinguished themselves experimenting in this fashion."

"What about the dark ones?" Harry shivered. "I'll bet that Tom started out just wanting to make the bullies leave him alone." He could see Hermione, or any other book-smart muggleborn going straight down the same deadly path if left unwarned.

"Indeed." The goblin frowned. "It depends on his family background. The very worst multigenerational effects of ritual magic can be observed in the physical deformities or extreme eccentricities exhibited by the 'dark' families. Nature does her best to cure the imbalance by purging the organism of its magic so that the next generation can breed true, but the madness runs deep in the afflicted and many of the parents will kill the squib child."

Harry stewed over this information for a long moment, thinking about the magical people that he knew. Could he too be infected by some stupid ritual shortcut taken by his pureblood father? Was this why he didn't really feel anything when it came time to actually fight? "Are there other ways that learning magic can hurt me?"

Creepsaw shrugged. "Life is ultimately fatal, but you cannot go far wrong by keeping in mind that there is no such thing as 'free,' and then honestly asking yourself, 'If I were the deity, would I smile upon this?' Take care in your future endeavors, Young Mage, for magic is at its root a creative force. Use it to do harm and it becomes the sword with no hilt. Your kind cannot immediately feel the damage due to the distance a wand brings, but it is there, if deferred."

"So use a real sword." Harry nodded firmly in agreement. He had never thought highly of magic as a weapon. It was good for tricks and traps if one had the luxury of time or surprise on one's side and it was perfect for transfiguring coffee cups into tea cups and things like that, but it didn't cause instant gruesome death like a gun would most of the time.

"That is the Goblin view on the matter." Creepsaw hoped that the child would spread this knowledge.

"But people do these rituals anyway, go crazy, and the really dumb ones make horcruxes." Harry sighed.

"That sums it up nicely. Erroneous calculations aside, if such a thing were possible then where are the hordes of ancient dark wizards? No, Mister Potter, we are not meant to live so long in this place. Magic may be carried by the blood, but it springs from the soul. A broken soul may repent and heal, but a divided one withers, no matter what sort of construct is conjured to support its fragments." Creepsaw spread his hands, indicating futility. "It's the inevitable final oblivion for yet another murderous fool. All that remains of the once-immortal soul is the odd horcrux and its only 'life' is that of an object subject to entropy, destroyed by time, chance or tomb raiders."

Harry was making panicked little brushing motions against his scar. "You can have it for a knut if it will come off without hurting me!" Harry had concluded from Sunday telly at Mrs. Figg's that when it came to the afterlife the key was to be good, respect others and hope that his relatives weren't actually representative of the heavenly population, but he had to wonder if a soul would be welcome with someone else's muck attached.

"Capital!" Creepsaw flipped him a knut, then dug around in an expanded belt pouch, producing a pair of gold etched pliers made of some sort of bone and a poorly washed jam jar covered with scratched on runes, glowing like a fluorescent bulb. Unscrewing the oddly silvered lid and setting it on the table, he gripped the pliers. "Hold still, Young Potter! This may sting just a bit."