Chapter 3

Harry was not a person that generally woke slowly on a normal day, thus when Harry was in a potentially hostile and unknown location, he'd already had his magic flaring at his fingertips in a ready crouch before he knew he was awake.

After his mind caught up to his reflexes, Harry stood down and went on with his plans for the day, after he'd freshened himself up a bit. It wouldn't do for him to be tracked down by his scent alone.

Once done, his attention turned to the delicate pile of items he acquired the previous day. Then, ignoring the grumblings of his stomach, he began setting up his wizard's workspace.

By following these proper procedures, Harry started with the small things, effectively he was drawing the details to the picture before the picture itself took form. At least, that was always how it felt with the student proper procedures. They were necessary, though, as every move a wizard made in the construction of their workspace took magic, and if not done carefully and conservatively, they'd find themselves drained or dead; if they attempted the main things before having a gauge of how much magic it would take from the small things, they would find themselves dead if they hadn't enough magic, mainly due to their core exploding.

Harry gathered a feel for how much magic it'd take for Harry to effectively use the space.

Thankfully, Harry didn't need the workspace to last long, since he planned on only enchanting or modifying molecular structures in two or three sessions.

Once Harry began to draw out the runes for the main and final section, cutting them into the floor with a practiced eye, he mentally readied himself for what was to come. All too soon the etchings were completed, and Harry took a breath before he magically opened his veins and telekinetically maneuvered the gushed blood into the carved-out gaps. Once the blood touched the stone, it flash-dried.

Along with the blood came Harry's magic, allowing for a better connection with Harry's future intentions and efficiency in powering ritual circles and being ready for use immediately.

Harry was more focused on the last part.

It was not an inconsiderable amount of power for Harry to complete the circles and runes, but he was able to continue with his plans for the day. He took a breather first, of course, but then he gathered the relevant items for his first creation of the day.

A 30 Carat diamond, 13 ounces of gold, 7 ounces of silver, 5 men's rings of platinum, 3 14-carat emeralds, and Harry was ready to make himself a focus.

It began with a flourish, as most things magical did, and a serious expenditure of energy. Harry acted as a conductor at an orchestra of swirling precious materials. Soon, given five minutes of continuous power input, the materials were indiscernible from each other, so fast were they moving. Soon, the heat within their containment reached a crescendo, dropping the metals involved to a liquid state, which Harry used to purify the metals, separating out the impure metals from the gold, silver, and platinum alloys. Once done, Harry had small amounts of pure elemental metals.

His posture changed from a conductor of symphonies to resemble that of a taunting martial artist. His limbs flexed as metals wove, stones were set into intricate jewelry, following a design that allowed for the most magically stable locations for a casting focus. Soon the focus took on the shape of a glove, but not a full glove. It was shaped like that of a spider's web, only that the lines followed a fractal pattern heavily dependant on the number 7.

There was one thing that didn't exactly jive with Harry, though, and that was the fact that he wouldn't be able to fit his hand into the finished product. That meant that before the focus was fully formed, Harry had to cast it onto his hand. His poor, poor hand that had never done him wrong before.

With a visible strain, Harry held his position, and gently shifted forward to not disturb the delicate magic he was working with, and finally was able to thrust his hand into the maelstrom of metals. He just needed to do it. With another sigh followed by a hiss of pain, Harry thrust his hand through the containment field of magic into the heat of hell beyond.

His skin blistered immediately, the insides cooking to a burnt beef jerky consistency. Wrinkles formed, along with charred segments where any liquid touched his flesh. He quickly got to work, not really one to torture himself unnecessarily, along with the fact that he knew he was slipping from the pain.

Normally, for that reason, something like what Harry was attempting required a partner to operate the forge for the items to be casted onto the primary's limbs. Harry didn't exactly have that option, so he weathered the storm.

Hastily, Harry forced the metals onto his flesh, swirling into each other in a spiral pattern, while the gems remained set, held in position where knuckles were, with the centrepiece gem within the palm of his hand.

Now, normally, when metals were embedded within the flesh, those metals were static, and did not allow for movement. They were solid metals, you see. Now, that didn't matter as much to Harry as the searing pain mixed with phantom pain of his nerves in a fiery death. Thus, Harry funneled all the energy focused on heat and telekinetic energy into healing his baked hand from a dead state into a useable state.

It was, in a word, difficult. Essentially, he had to beat the universe's universal rule of entropy to make the destructive forces revive his hand. Added onto that, it was always easier to destroy something (unless that was information) than it was to create it, let alone to fix it.

Unfortunately for Harry's hand, Harry hadn't been able to fully utilise these destructive forces before he felt his control over said forces start slipping. He was failing, and he knew it.

He didn't want to lose his hand, though, so he was forced to do something he really did not wish to. It was something drastic, something daring, and something that he would normally have fired an Unspeakable if they had attempted to do the same. At least he knew how stupid he was acting when Harry immersed his entire body into the vortex of angry energy.

The reason he had done this was that he would gain more contact area with what he was working on. The reason why that was something he wanted, was the simple rule that the more contact area a wizard had with arcane magics, the more control they would have over that same magic. The reason why that was a bad thing, was that while it was true it gave him more control, it also took a not inconsiderable amount of power to do so.

However, Harry was proud enough to say that he was good enough at thinking on his feet that he thought he would be able to find a way out of the mess he put himself into once he was fully in it. As his flesh and a great deal of his pain tolerance melted from his body, he had been lucky enough to be proven correct in his assumptions.

Quickly, Harry changed from channeling his energy directly from his body to funnel through the still-developing magical foci. At first, his efforts were sluggish, since the focus wasn't even close to completion. However, as Harry continued to develop the focus with his own core's magic as well as the already expended magical energy, that same energy increased in power while his control spiked.

With a sense of finality, Harry's new foci finished its formation, and Harry would have sighed if he had had functionality of his lungs at that moment. He knew that the only thing keeping his alive was his magic. Anyone normal would have perished in seconds, while he had lasted a full minute thus far.

Now Harry only had to deal with the leftover energy swirling around him, trying its hellish best to make him disintegrate. Resembling a burnt corpse with gold embroidery threaded throughout his body, Harry directed the energy around him to start to condense, fighting it every step of the way, and then absorbed it into the formed foci-fetus. The energy seeped into the metals, energising them in a way that only a phoenix feather would power a holly wood stick.

As much as he wanted to, he hadn't the time to revel in the feeling of the magic reluctantly settling, creating the feeling of magical ley lines throughout his body syncing with his own innate, natural ones from his core. His first act with his new foci was amplifying his own power, and letting his wash over his body, fixing and healing the to the best of its powerful ability.

Unknown to Harry, his magical exertion had detracted from its self-appointed role of his immune system. This had the unpleasant side-effect of letting the infected material in his side, that which he had gotten from his combat roll in a dirty subway station, to begin to fester in its own evolved viral way. As his magic was busy combating the self-destructive maelstrom, and his biology only left to the defence of trace amounts of basilisk venom, Harry began to become a type of patient zero for a particularly devious and incurable virus.

This virus ran into an issue, though, when it became under the attention of Harry's magic once again. As busy as it was, the magic of Harry's body could do nothing, and the quickly evolving into sapience virus knew this. However, it also knew that the distraction of protecting the host from the maelstrom would not last forever. From this, its extreme sense of self preservation kicked in, and the virus decided that it was in its best interest to be content with being symbiotic with both the magical energy permeating the host, and the host itself. To do that, it spread throughout the host, examining the connections between the host and the host's energy and preparing to evolve to imitate the magical energy's connection.

First, though, it needed to transform the biology of the host to do so. Under the guise of the pain originating from the heat, the virus worked to enter each individual cell in the host's body, changing it and combining them for them to gain a compatibility for the virus to nest in, and float throughout the body freely. They reverted the cells from their natural state into their base, origin form of the stem cell, and in many cases, had changed them into neurons for the virus' own thought processes while still maintaining their designated primary functions. The heart, lungs, and reproductive systems were a favorite of the virus.

Once the host was terraformed for the virus to be able to coexist with both the host and the magic, the virus began fulfilling its role in taking over as the immune defence system, and finding any way to improve the host. It started in the brain, where it found and destroyed signs of senility – just because the body looked young again, did not mean the innards were. It attached itself to the pre-existing immune system like the viral infection it was, but instead of turning the system against the host, it bolstered it.

It did so by many way, one in which it had found and subsequently analysed the Basilisk compounds that had stayed in trace amounts in the host's body. Once analysed, the virus had used its template in its effects both magical and biological to integrate it within the immune system. It effectively made Harry's bodily fluids some of the most dangerous toxic substances known to magical kind.

Now the virus, that which was effectively the main sustenance of and the being of Harry's body, need only lie in wait for the next opportunity to improve the host – Harry; when it did so, it would in effect be improving itself. It was a win-win scenario, and one that would lead to both Harry's acceptance while the magic had already done so.

It was then trivial for the virus to repair the damage done to Harry's body, especially with the magic's help in the matter. Where the cells touched the gold, the virus twisted them, using the malleable gold as well to effectively gain the most surface area connection between them. The virus only knew this to be a good thing based off what the magic had impressed upon him. It wouldn't have done so otherwise; heavy metals and biological beings do not tend to get along. Once fully integrated with each other, both heavy metals and cells, the virus finally completed the transformation from magical human to something entirely different: it re-connected all of the nerve endings and healed them.

Harry hollered in pain; pain so great that even he, someone that was so accustomed to pain, had to mentally disassociate himself from his body momentarily. He'd come back from his mental plane later, when he thought that the pain was over.

Thankfully, the magic had only taken a few seconds to win its final battle with the maelstrom of energy.

Energy that had originated from Harry, himself, ironically.

However, the magical energy left over from the forces absorbed into the magical foci now had to go somewhere. It had been subverted from its original mission outside of the body being the forge, ever sense the arcane magic and forces created the vortex within, and Harry stepped through the containment field. It couldn't just dissipate into the ether like where magical theory said that vanished items went, and it instinctively knew that it wasn't welcome or of the world it was on.

When it tried to go back into the core of the wizard that first spawned it, it found an immense resistance. The core had been working overtime to compensate for the fact that it was empty, as all of the energy of the wizard had been active on the outside. The core understood the energy working on the outside to be expended, and that it wouldn't return, so the core started manufacturing more.

The issue was the core no longer had the capacity to retain the magic that it was replacing. The core tried to accommodate all of the magic, forcing its solid shell to expand and make more room in order to accommodate its secondary functions. Unfortunately, it was a moot point, as the three factions of magic warring for the much sought-after space were making it too difficult for it to remain habitable for magic. Thus, the newborn magics, the magics that took it upon itself to defend the body, and the magics that were made with the intent of creation, extreme environments, and the eldest of the three forced the core into a detonation.

The eldest made no effort to circumvent the catastrophe to Harry – it had survived outside of the host, and could continue to do so even if it no longer had a direct purpose. The innate magics of the body that warred with the eldest was simply too exhausted from the invisible battle to spend a single spell – even if that spell was well known. The youngest, though, it was what saved Harry from a most grisly death, that of an exploded core.

It gathered itself, congealed into a gel that, on the magical level, would appear as though it were a slurry of mithril. In this state, it was the most intelligent it could get with its innately born knowledge. In this state, it also made the decision to consort with its newfound ally. The virus was less-than-amused when it was told its new host, especially when it had to edit its base nature in order to be within as well as the host's biology significantly in order to live there, was going to explode like a megaton probability bomb. All the virus wanted to do was incubate for a while and acquaint itself with its hopefully soon-to-be-friend, the host.

Not that it knew what a probability bomb was, what the ramifications for editing itself would entail, nor the name of the host which it would need sometime soon.

It did the horrifying viral equivalent of a sigh, but agreed to go along with whatever the not-fully-developed magic wanted, so long as the virus had a home when it all blew over. With such an agreement, the underdeveloped magic and the virus both launched a plan that effectively anchored the eldest magic to reside outside the body – the body simply didn't have the volume to accommodate that much magical energy, even if it were in a solid state. The eldest led no resistance – it had been tamed out of its insanity, and instead of now being a maelstrom of danger, became an outwardly aura of power. Of course, it still had ties to Harry's will, having been forged by Harry's core.

The virus and the magic with a plan then used the original intent of extreme environments and creation from the eldest, and it recreated the core – the veritable soul of the host. Using the virus' methods, and the magic's direction stemmed from self-preservation, it completed what the core couldn't. The virus and magic alike integrated the core directly into the body, the physical plane. The action had the side-effect of bringing the body slightly out of phase with the physical plane as well, and half into the spiritual plane, that which magic mainly existed and through which interacted with the physical.

The merger had an all entirely different side-effect of merging the virus and the tired magics together into one entity. It was very unintended by any side, but the newer entity of magical virus was honest enough to admit that it didn't really mind. All that it meant was that it was no longer an independent entity and was now subject to the host's will, but it believed that it also gained some as-of-yet seen advantages.

It was the youngest's magic's turn to do the mystical, magical equivalent of a sigh, and continued on with the work ahead.

The elder magic finally took interest in what the others were up to, having felt the odd rippling effect of the physical and spiritual merging together. It ebbed over and through the changes of the body, taking note of everything from the metals directly integrated into the biology to the implications of one of the most devastating viruses becoming magical and under Harry's control. It watched as the underdeveloped magics purified itself, but came out as something completely different than any magics that it'd seen back home. It watched as this magic spread out through the body and solidified itself into biologically compatible liquid crystal nodules attached to the new, strange nervous system the virus came up with.

It wanted none of that; it was perfectly content with staying the normal, predictably strange wizard's magic that it started out as, only now floating freely as an aura instead of locked away in a core, and act only if called upon by its wizard's will.

Save for maybe fixing a few mistakes here or there made by the other idiots the eldritch was symbiotic to, like making sure there were innate ley lines throughout its wizard's body so that it could actually tell if it was being called upon, and fixing the ridiculous attempt at a casting mechanism within the body. It should act as an amplifier of will, not power. The eldritch would supply the power – it had that in spades. What it didn't have was the will to use it, which is what the wizard need only supply, what with the lack of a core being a limiting factor.

Once all three of the factions within Harry were finished with their modifications, they began to lie in wait for the mind to wake.

Meanwhile, inside Harry's mind:

I stared at him in contemplation, while he started back, confused curiosity written all over his face. "I have absolutely no idea what to do with you," I said to him. "The worst part is, you don't even know just how many pans you've ruined just by existing here, where you AREN'T SUPPOSED TO BE!"

"Er, sorry?" Harry half-replied, half-asked. At least it's amusing that he doesn't even know how to reply.

Well, of course he doesn't if I don't. I'm Fate, Urðr, the Cosmos, Karma, Yuanfen, and on the rare occasions Omniscience and Upshot, all with a capital F, U, C, K, Y, O, and U, respectively. It's safe to say that if I don't know what's going to happen, then no-one will.

There's a very good reason why I'm still banned from all types of gambling, everywhere. Getting a relatively sudden idea, I hooked into it and juiced it for all it was worth:

"And that's another thing! You're supposed to be a veteran top-level Unspeakable badass and here we are, sitting in your mind having a cuppa and you're just apologising to a strange thought that entered into your mind! What has become of you?"

Harry's face screwed up in thought, and the scenery around us shifted to accommodate the rapid thought process. Instead of a mid-eighties upper-class sitting room with a roaring fire going, we now found ourselves immersed in a munitions factory going full-tilt in a mid-war economy. Huh, either I broke him even more, or I fixed him with just that.

Harry's well-oiled intelligent machine of a brain quickly set about purging me from his mindscape, and repairing any damage he could find from his previous mental state. I put up no resistance, even though as a deity I very well could have forced the issue.

It should be needless to say, I left with a great smile on my face. All he needed was a bit of encouragement, and that pain became an instrument of my will.

Ah, divinity.

The Grimoire:

Sniper's Hex

Bolt of Intent and Emotion

The Flaying Hex

The Tanner's Spell

First Kill's Spoils

An Unspeakable's Identification

A Wizard's Core: Responsible for housing and creating magic for the wizard/witch to use.

Mithril: Thought to be solid magic, or in various states, as a type of metal. The element of magic, in other words.

The Maelstrom of Forces: Something went wrong in Harry's use of the forge, summoning powers of destruction alongside his own magic, powers that once summoned, needed to be released. Normally this resulted in a massive explosion.

Probability Bomb: A magical bomb that acts like a probability drive, only as a bomb. Its measurement in megatons is the radius of effect in relation to a megaton bomb, respectively.

A/n: I don't really know what to say at this point. Perhaps sorry for the long wait? I know how frustrating that can be, having been on the receiving side of these words more than the giving, but vOv. (That's a shrugging emoticon, by the way.)

Hopefully this is the start of a roll I'll have later, but with the recent news that I'm going back to school after they were on strike, well… I see a lot of homework in my future. It might not be immediate as I think they're going to work to rule, but once that stops, hello take-home assignments and lab reports!

Granted, it is college, so it is what I originally thought it'd be: a shit tonne of homework. It's what I'm paying for, after-all.

Oh, and do tell what you thought of the meeting between Harry and Fate. It's a different take on the whole Harry being Fate's whipping boy. I don't think he is, Fate's not that bad, I think. It can be, but I like to think it's generally neutral.

Anyway, have a take care!