Erasing Death Chapter 3: The Arrival and Arianrhod, a harry potter fanfic

Thanx for your reviews!

Btw, just 'cause Harry arrives with Ron and Hermione doesn't mean that the story'll focus on them that much; he's still the main character, so...

Chapter 3. The Arrival and Arianrhod

Harry hated portkeys. He staggered to the floor, of course, while Ron and Hermione remained mostly on their feet. Damn. It was always him.

"Looks... nice," Hermione muttered uncertainly.

Harry raised his head to observe the place they had appeared in.

They were standing in a vast hall, in the middle of a circle engraved with runes and some symbols Harry had no idea existed. The walls were painted with images of epic battles and fantastical creatures that took his breath away. The ceiling seemed unreachable: high up and hidden by a veil of mist. No windows. A single door.

"Glad you approve," a voice, like clacking of stones, said behind them. The three friends spun around to face the potential threat.

The man who met them with an impassive stare and a cocked head possessed a slightly crooked nose that reminded Harry of Dumbledore, a strong jawline and piercing black eyes partly shielded by a long black fringe, dark brown hair arranged in a feathery haircut. Harry found him fairly handsome despite the expression of eternal melancholy painted on his face.

It helped that behind the man a pair of luxuriously beautiful black wings spread, all feathers and volume.

"Are you... Professor Hilarius Tristis?" Harry stepped forward to ask uncertainly. His eyes flickered to the wings before, bravely, he raised his head to meet those blackest eyes. Harry imagined a nanosecond-long grin to lift the man's lips.

"Yes."

Ron shuffled his feet anxiously and Hermione opened her mouth to ask a question, but Tristis held out his hand to stop the words in her mouth.

"Not here. You expressed a wish to keep it all under wraps in your letter."

They all nodded in reply. Harry didn't take his eyes off the man.

"Then this is not the best place for a talk. Come," he ordered sharply. Without beckoning them to follow, simply expecting it of them, he swivelled and stalked off to the door. Harry shook off the stupor first, catching up quickly.

"Where are we going?" he asked eagerly. Professor Tristis didn't look like a ray of sunshine, but Harry saw no harm in quenching his curiosity. Books hardly specified the inlay of Arianrhod, or its hierarchy, or its web of corridors and hallways. Even Deputy's letters didn't mention much of the inside info about the school or the realm, Creature World, which Harry treated like Wizarding World come again.

Even his brooding about his impending death subsided in the wake of renewed excitement.

From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed Ron and Hermione looking around with wonder, too.

"To the Headmistress."

Harry understood that, despite the politely reserved letters filled with pieces of information, Tristis wasn't one for talking.

The teen accepted the curt reply and fell behind a bit, letting Ron and Hermione catch up. They shared their anticipation and fear in silence, listening as their footfalls echoed through the halls, following the man's.

Change after change – so ran the course of Harry's life lately. A whirlwind of deaths, hurts, betrayals, alterations... Harry hoped that the life he would find in Arianrhod gave him one last moment of respite from those tragedies, so that on his deathbed he would honestly say his life had been fulfilling.

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When Tristis pushed open the office door, Harry deeply inhaled. For a second, his hand found his friends': somehow, after the news of his doom, he found himself enjoying touch more, as if it gave him reassurances his own mind and soul couldn't muster up.

"He could be a little more courteous," Hermione murmured in his ear with disapproval as she commented on Tristis entering the Headmistress's office without any invitation or even a backward glance.

"A bad day?" Harry shrugged; honestly, he cared little about the man's moods. All that mattered was the events unfolding in front of his eyes, and he still questioned whether it had been a complete insanity to come there without any knowledge of customs and traditions of the school and the realm, without any real plan other than cooping themselves up in the library, without any idea what they ought and ought not do.

All in all, Harry trusted his lack to carry them through the day. Hare-brained idea? Perhaps, but also one that worked for him, in past and present.

The door remained dauntingly open.

Arming himself with valour, Harry strode in, tugging Hermione behind him. Ron tagged along; his feet shuffled on the stone floor that wasn't covered with any sort of carpets.

"Welcome to Arianrhod Academy," an ageless voice said calmly. The trio stared at the woman who smiled at them gently, the expression crinkling her face already ridden with laughter lines. Elderly but sophisticated, she sat regally enthroned behind her desk, dressed spick and span in tasteful dark purple robes, with her greying hair pulled into a neat low ponytail. Professor Tristis calmly stood at her right side. He reminded Harry of a magical statue that would move with one word of order from its conjurer.

As always, it befell Harry to take the first step and to be the bravest of the three, so he spoke before his friends gathered their wits.

"Uh- Hello, we're happy you have allowed us to come here." Uncertain, Harry bowed slightly and hastily. Was he supposed to shake her head? To introduce himself immediately? To compliment the school, or her dress, or the furniture?

Luckily, the woman didn't take offense at his ignorance. She chuckled. Tristis's pressed lips stretched a bit, too.

"As the Headmistress, I cannot reject those in need," she remarked simply, looking at each of them in turn. Her gaze lingered the longest on Harry, but she paid a fair bit of attention to Hermione, too, and almost completely bypassed Ron. "You called for help, and it was my duty to provide it. It is enough that you repay by being proper students and upholding the honour of this school."

"And pay the tuition fees, of course," Tristis added curtly. Ron scoffed, while the woman threw him a reproachful glance.

"We've taken care of it already," Hermione piped in immediately. She fumbled with words before asking, "Um... What is your name? I'm afraid it wasn't listed in any book, and Professor Tristis didn't specify it in any of his replies to us, so we had no means to find out, and I'm terribly sorry-"

"Lavarcam Silverain," the woman interrupted the speech Hermione was on the verge of breaking into. She leaned in to steeple her fingers and rest her chin on them. "You may call me Headmistress or Professor Silverain. I teach the Magic of Time course, but none of you takes it."

Rosy blush tinged Hermione's cheeks and she muttered something like 'too many subjects', and Harry decided to ask a question that had bugged him when they had been choosing their subjects.

"The list..." he started, looking Silverain in the eye. "It mentioned bloodline subjects... What-"

"Subjects which belong to a certain race and cannot be learnt by any outsider," Tristis, surprisingly, answered. His dark eyes glimmered, which discomfited Harry. "The thrall of a veela, the time manipulation by a time demon, the blood magic of vampires..." He paused. The gleam intensified in its power. "There are only a few exceptions to this rule... Of which you make part, Mr. Potter."

Harry blinked and tilted his head to a side. The news surprised him. He didn't consider himself special. In fact, he violently hated moments when people insisted on worshipping him or his abilities or his achievements, and shied away from the attention he might receive due to that, so to be viewed as an oddity again...

The possibility suffocated him. Harry wanted to be normal. At least in Arianrhod, amongst the weird and the abnormal, he willed normalcy to descend upon him, so that everyone treated him like a human being, not some Merlin incarnate or a tool to solve their problems.

Harry decided to take the chance and weasel out of the dreadful prospect. No better way than to feign ignorance.

"What are you talking about?" This time blinking was intentional. The question rang partly true, because Harry didn't know yet, but after some extensive additional reading on creatures, a suspicion crept up on him. "I can't enchant people like a veela, nor can I transform into a beast during full moons. Nothing special, see? I'm just Harry-"

"Speaking to snakes?" The deadpan question rang coldly through the room. Harry didn't like the man much anymore. His shoulders tensed.

"This is not a talent I'm proud of."

"It is your talent no less. Part of you, of your magical legacy, even if the way it carried over to you wasn't natural or right." Tristis's voice possessed a breathless wonder when he spoke of Harry's talent, which made the wizard knit his eyebrows together. The man was watching him hungrily, digging into Harry's very core – but also through him, as if he were seeing with a different set of eyes and seeing more than he should have.

As if whatever he saw in Harry puzzled him-

But Harry was completely ordinary. Completely ordinary and half-dead already, his mind whispered bitterly, but he ignored it. He ignored most those thoughts, preferring to focus on his goals, both long-term and short-term. They eased his existence.

Tristis noticed Harry's discomfort. Unexpectedly, his lips curled into a semi-smile.

"I can do a full reading of your soul. Believe me, you will find the results most enlightening." An indecipherable emotion sparked in the depths of his irises. "But you will have to pay me plenty for that. Readings are a costly thing, especially for one such as you."

Black eyes, darker than Snape's, bore into Harry's. He immediately felt trapped, caught up in the swirling tunnels of shadows. The man even smelt like that, too: dark corners and old graveyards covered by the veil of nightfall.

At Harry's side, Ron bristled. "Hey! What are you proposing him-"

"Hilarius," Silverain chided the man. The deputy inclined his head to show he was listening. Harry immediately felt relieved at the loss of eye contact. "I would appreciate it if you kept your deals out of my office."

"On the contrary, your office is the best place to conduct business meetings and forge deals," Tristis disagreed. "No foreign magic interfering, no trickery, no falsehoods."

Harry wondered what deals they were talking about, but hesitant to interfere. Luckily, the Headmistress returned to the matters at hand herself, without further prompting from him or Ron or Hermione.

"Hilarius won't bother you again with his offer-"

"But just so you know, my class would appreciate a lab rat to try soul reading on," Tristis interrupted calmly. His face not moving a muscle, he threw his hood on, which covered his features almost completely, leaving only his chin and his mouth visible. "We are terribly short on those. Of course, this offer is for you two." He nodded at the offended Ron and Hermione. "For Mr. Potter I have a special proposition, not least because I believe you will benefit greatly from knowing what your soul is and how to drive certain- ah, foreign particles out of it."

Without a single word of parting after, he glided out of the office. The man's black cloak and overwhelming aura of corpses and death reminded Harry too much of Dementors to be comfortable. He would surely avoid the man in the future.

Silverain sighed, smiled, and shook her head.

"That man never changes..." he muttered under her breath before her gaze sharpened and she addressed them. "He is the Necromancy professor who sometimes substitutes for Soul Magic."

Ron's face twisted into a disgusted grimace as his body shivered.

"Necromancy. It figures the creep would be a dead-raising monster," he spat. Hermione looked shaken, and even Harry couldn't contain a shiver.

Necromancy was a taboo. Of a serious sort, the one you didn't trespass, never dared break. Voldemort dabbled in Necromancy, too, which constituted another reason Harry wanted to keep as far away from the practitioners as possible. The encounter with inferi had also left a mark.

"He is a professor." For the first time the Headmistress's voice dropped to cold pits. "You need not like him, but I will not stand for disrespect. Things here differ from Human World. You might find yourself in a bind if you stick to the stiff-necked moral code of your native realm."

"We know this," Hermione played the mediator. Her brown eyes shifted a bit, but she sounded certain in her words. "We just... didn't expect to face those differences so quickly."

Silverain's countenance mellowed. "Understandable. Still, I believe that you might heed Hilarius's words and check your soul, Mr. Potter. He might not be the most pleasant demon around, but he never tells lies. Although his prices are always high."

Harry nodded, lying, "I'll seek him out someday."

A gentle smile graced Silverain's elderly face. "Good. Now, you expressed a desire to attend under pseudonyms."

"Yes," Hermione agreed, licking her lips. The trio traded looks. "You are aware of our difficult situation in the human world, right?"

"You are hunted."

"Exactly. Though there is little contact between the realms, we cannot afford even for the sliver of the truth about our real identities to come out. In the letters, Professor Tristis told us that pseudonyms make part of normalcy here, so-"

"It is true. Many of the students here are heirs to prominent families who cannot afford having their child assassinated while he hasn't finished his schooling."

Harry was stumped by the blasé way in which she said it. Cold reality hit him. It was the norm to her. Killed students wasn't news here, and they would have to work their arses off to even scratch the surface of 'powerful and respected' here.

Amazingly, the prospect excited Harry.

"Of course, you have to take care of your disguise yourself."

The three traded looks. Harry cleared his throat first.

"Well, this one isn't a problem. We are going to use only minimal correction of our looks, and the rest will be covered by the Liquid Deception potion."

They had discussed the subject of their disguise with vigour. None of them wanted to change their looks too much, not only out of vanity (because, to Harry, his appearance held nothing beautiful in it), but because too many glamours were taxing to keep up and hard to use long-term, especially if they were to be constantly surrounded by people. They would slip up someday, any one of them, and if somebody recognised one, suspicion would fall on all three.

So, after hours of brainstorming, Hermione came up with a solution.

The Liquid Deception.

It was a Dark potion – one of the sacrifices which slaughtered their magical purity, but were utterly necessary. At first they hesitated, and searched for another solution, and refused to do it... But life left them no other choice.

And so the entire batch had been brewed.

The potion had remarkable effect. It didn't morph the features of the person ingesting it, didn't smudge them in the eyes of the beholder, but twisted the recognition in the other person's mind. If Harry drank it, everyone would still know from newspapers that Harry Potter existed, but if that very same person were to see him, they simply wouldn't match the image of Harry Potter from the photographs with him, even when the appearance matched completely. If Harry revealed his identity, than that person would become immune to the Liquid Deception used on Harry and would see through the artificial veneer of magic.

Handy, but very complicated to brew and must be kept secret. As soon as a person found out that their brains were muddled by magic, the effects lifted and the deception vanished. So, seeing that it must be ingested every week, Harry had to be extra careful about where he kept it.

They just tweaked their basic features, too, just in case.

Hermione provided Harry with muggle contact lenses to replace his thick-rimmed glasses, so now his gorgeous green eyes were in full view. He had also done some shopping at his best friend's insistence, so clothes that actually fit hugged his form now. And he drank a potion to lengthen his hair a bit – so it fell just past his shoulders now.

Ron, on the other hand, cropped his hair short, which allowed for a more brutal-macho look, and splurged on a potion that erased all his freckles. The bloke had moped for a day then.

And Hermione straightened her hair completely and took to wear light lipstick – which was as far as her allowance for make-up went. Well, maybe she used something else, too, but Harry didn't know much about those magic bottles labelled 'cosmetics', so he left it at that.

They sorted out their names, too.

"Hermione and I will be cousins," Harry informed the Headmistress, who nodded at him in encouragement. "Hadrian and Hermia Laurifer. Although those names aren't the most inventive, this way we won't make a mistake or ignore people who call us. And Ron-"

"Ronald Prewett," Ron interrupted with a shrug. "There used to be more Prewetts than Weasleys, I hear that even here they've seeped through. And 'Ron' is a common name, like Harry's, except that Harry's got to disguise himself a tad more, no? And Death Eaters don't really care about me 'cause I'm still a pureblood, so they won't torture me on sight or something."

Harry seriously doubted about the latter, but allowed Ron the delusion.

Silverain smiled. "Of course. Now that you have sorted out your issues, I believe we should start on your exams?"

Harry felt fantastic, energised, and as if the world was at his fingertips. He almost danced through the halls, because he had passed. And on his own merits, without Hermione's convenient notes or whispers or tips. Pride didn't often resurfaced in him, but now he honestly could say he was proud of his job, of all the summer hours he had spent revising and learning.

Even Ron managed to scrape through the exams. Without Hermione's stellar results, mind, but still good enough.

So, Harry couldn't wait to get to his dorm room and start un-packing.

Unfortunately, the trio's ways separated there. Hermione, obviously, attained a room in a whole different wing, while Ron's was on the upper floor. Arianrhod was a maze of staircases and winding hallways and classroom, but after living in Hogwarts Harry was well-acquainted with navigation in unknown territories. The map Silverain had given him helped.

The dorms in Arianrhod differed a bit from the familiar Gryffindor ones. They gave Harry more space, but at the same time more duties to do, too: while the school welcomed students to share their meals in the common dining hall, no house elves conveniently did the laundry and the chores. Harry had to make his bed, dust his things, keep everything neat, and the like. He could even cook if he wanted. Not that he wanted to.

The structure alternated from the Hogwarts' dorms too.

Students weren't stuffed in the same room, but rather lived in blocks of a sort. Five rooms for five people came with the shared corridor, kitchen, bathroom, and a small living-room. Somewhat of a flat, all in all.

Harry halted in front of the room, the copper plaque on which read '420'. His dorm.

Bravely, he pushed the door open.

Immediately, a yellow-coloured hex greeted him. Harry ducked, thanking his practice in dodging Petunia's flying crockery, and slammed the door shut. He stood outside for a moment, dumbly staring at the door. Well. Not how he had imagined himself getting acquainted with his... dorm mates? Fellow students?

Resolution filled his heart when Harry opened the door again. His eyes met with startled turquoise. They both blinked at each other, before Harry gained the courage to open the door fully and extend his hand to a strange boy with short dark blue hair and shimmering wings fluttering softly behind his back. Small and with sharp edges, they reminded Harry of Cornish pixies.

"Um... sorry for that," the boy started, shaking Harry's hand. The handshake was weak, the hand itself cold and flaccid, like a dead fish. "Mistook you for someone else. There's just a guy here..."

"I understand." Even if he didn't. Harry nodded and tried for a smile. "I hear it's tough attending Arianrhod sometimes, plenty of enemies and what not-"

"Not really an enemy," the boy, obviously a fairy of some sort, cut Harry off. "A dormmate."

"Oh." Harry hoped the boy wasn't his dormmate. Or at least refrained from hexing all his dormmates on sight every day. "I'll be living here, too, now."

The boy nodded, looking unsure as he shot Harry a gauging look, scrutinising him and attempting to calculate Harry's strengths and weakness, see if he were a worthy opponent... That left Harry rather disconcerted. In Hogwarts people never truly assessed each other before dumping a load of hatred on the other. In Gryffindor especially you just proclaimed your liking for a person casually, or punched him in the face if you disliked him. So simple.

A suspicion nagged Harry that the method of "See a Twit – Hit the Twit" wouldn't work much.

"My name is Zolin Lewis," the boy broke Harry out of his thinking. He shrugged a bony shoulder, which looked so frail Harry imagined it might snap if pressed too tight. "Weather faerie." He threw Harry a warning look. "We are not useless."

Something darker, conceited and ugly reared its head in the weather faerie's mint orbs for a second – which really looked like orbs, because they were much larger than an ordinary person's – but Harry dismissed it as a pride in one's race. Merlin knew purebloods were guilty of that vanity, too.

Harry raised his hands to placate Zolin. Wouldn't do to forge animosities on his first day.

"Hey, cool off! I never said you are. I don't even know what a weather faerie is."

Zolin opened his mouth, appalled at his ignorance, then snapped it shut.

"I guess we'll get along then. Better stick to together here, because our three dormmates are utter prats." His lips quirked upwards shakily in a weak grin. "You're lucky you've met me first. I swear, when I entered this room for the first time and came face to face with that mass of werebear muscle..."

"A werebear?" Harry's eyes widened. "Wait, they actually exist? I mean, I know about werewolves, of course, but-"

"Wolves, bears, and foxes." A frown crinkled Zolin's forehead. "Who are you? You don't know about my weather faeries, don't know about werebears..." He looked Harry up and down with critical eyes. "At first I thought you to be a veela or an incubus, because you certainly look pretty enough-" Harry blushed at the compliment. "-but you don't exude the allure, so-"

"A human," Harry interrupted Zolin's train of thought. Admitting it made him rather nervous. Not everyone would be human-friendly here, Headmistress Silverain had warned them. "A human from Human World. My name is Hadrian Laurifer. You may call me Harry for short."

Harry stole a glance at Zolin, but the weather faerie seemed stuck on his first phrase.

"A- a human? Really?" he stuttered out dubiously. Harry frowned. He didn't appreciate people staring at him again. Especially not his dormmate.

"Yes," he snapped, deciding that he just as well should see his own room now. To discern which one of the doors belonged to him now wasn't hard: all the rooms had the same copper plaques as on the outside, bar one. Harry headed for it.

When he reached his room, he heard footsteps retreating elsewhere.

He sighed. All his previous glee evaporated.

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