Chapter 9

"Mmm?" Romi's voice came from behind the two. "What is that thing?" She asked as she dropped a pile of sticks onto the ground and stared at the very still creature.

Harry's eyes softened as he reached into the cabinet and pulled out a tiny thing covered in feathers and fur. "It's a baby hippogriff." He said as a frown formed on his face. "Newborn judging by its size, but it's dead."

Confusion etched on Romi's face as she leaned in over Harry's shoulder. "What's a hippatiff?"

"Hippogriff." Severus corrected as he scrutinized the animal and the cabinet it was in. "Giant bird horse. Very proud. Potter, give me that thing."

Dark brown brows shot up as Harry looked to the man. "It's just a baby! I'm not letting you harvest potion ingredients from it- I don't care if it is dead."

The dark wizard heaved a sigh and stared towards the young man with his hand outstretched. "I'm not going to harvest it, just give me the hippogriff."

Though untrusting, Harry handed it over. He thought for a moment and looked back to Romi. "Wait, hippogriffs aren't around anymore?"

Romi shrugged, but soon Lika came over. "Master, tiny girl not make stick grow. She need help." When Romi left, Lika looked towards the two newcomers and the creature that had captivated their attention. "Ooooh, no no no!" Her little eyes grew large and she stumbled over herself in her attempt to skitter away. "Get thing gone! Away! NO MORE!" She curled into as tiny of a ball as she could muster with her arms over her head.

Harry frowned as he went over to her and he rested a hand on her arm. "It's just a hippogriff. And a baby at that. Plus it's dead, there's nothing to be afraid of."

Lika pulled her arm back and smacked at Harry's hand. "No! Stupid wizard. Lika knew. Not hippo! That steed of them. They died, steeds died, everybody died then no more, NO MORE!" Lika soon began to rock back and forth in her spot as tears sprung forth from her eyes. "No more war... no more."

The young savior's attempts to calm the house elf failed spectacularly and soon Severus stepped in to quell the panic. "Lika, listen to me." Snape called. When the elf looked up to him he glanced back to the baby hippogriff. "That steed, their proper name is Hippogriff." He peered back to Lika. "Those who rode these steeds into battle and started this war were the cruel ones. The animals had nothing to do with it and were only being forced to act on the peoples' will. You see this stick?" He reached out and grabbed one from the nearby pile that Romi had left. "This stick is not cruel. It's just a stick. If I hit Potter here with the stick like this-" Snape gave a half-hearted thwack to Harry's arm which caused the young man to pull back and rub the spot. "-that still means the stick is just a stick. It didn't do anything wrong, the stick wasn't mean to him. I was mean to him. Just like the hippogriffs, they weren't mean to anybody, they were only being used as tools by the people who were mean. Do you understand?"

With a slow nod, Lika looked back to the stiff as a board baby hippogriff. "No more war?"

"For the moment no, no more war." Severus said as he looked back to Potter. "By the way the hippogriff isn't dead."

Just as he was about to admonish Snape for hitting him with the stick, the words registered in Harry's mind. "Wait- but it's stiff. It's cold, its eyes are stuck open."

With a long sigh, Snape explained. "There's about five different spells keeping it in stasis. Probably a potion in the mix as well. The only spell I could identify was a preservation charm, and I won't remove it until I know for sure I can remove everything. We need a medi-witch to run a diagnostics spell, or at the very least to find a medi-witch training book to learn said diagnostic spell."

Finally Harry stopped rubbing his arm and he picked the baby hippogriff up. "In the mean time, we have too much to do to go looking for medi-witches. I doubt there's even any left at this point, I mean we have to teach these people everything." He slipped the creature back into the cabinet.

Coal black eyes looked to Harry and then to the cabinet. "Right. First let's focus on fixing the parts of the castle we can immediately use. Main Entrance, ground level hallways, Grand Staircase, and the infirmary." Severus stood and cast a sonorous. "Alright everyone- we break for breakfast then we set in on repairing the main entrance." He cast a quietus as the group gathered around him and a few stragglers who had gone home the night before wandered back in. "We'll need to do a lot of magic for this, but the core needs to be fed while we do it. That means we're going to open the doors and cast all of the magic from inside this room. While you lot are levitating stones and planks into place, Potter and I will be affixing them to the castle. We'll start figuring out how to get meat soon. I'm sure everyone is tired of plants."

Suddenly an idea struck Harry. "The muggles." He looked up to Snape with a glimmer in his eye. "Surely the muggle world isn't as desecrated as ours, and if I'm right then there's bound to be grocery stores, new technology, all that stuff. I can find some meat there."

Snape nodded him off and while he and the others were preparing breakfast, Harry went on a mission to the muggle world. Off he went in a crack of apparation to his first stop, Diagon Alley where the ruins of the Leaky Cauldron stood.

Dust covered every surface Harry saw around him, buildings lay in ruin, and not a soul was in sight. The young man looked around and finally he found what was left of the brick wall that separated the wizarding and muggle worlds in that area. He stepped over the pile of rubble and went in through the pub and over to the door. When he opened it and stepped through into what he knew to be the muggle world, his eyes widened and his shoulders slumped. "Oh no..." He whispered as shock set in.