One wild card ride later, and Harry was standing on the front steps of Gringotts, blinking in the nearly blinding sunlight.
Hand brushing up against the pocket containing his bulging pouch of galleons, Harry looked around for some hint of where he should run to first, the gold in his pocket singing for him to spend it all. He may not have known how much galleons there were to a 'muggle' pound, but he knew that he had more money in his pocket alone than he'd had his entire life… and he had more money in his vault than the Dursleys could ever dream of.
And either Harry was going insane, or the gold was also chanting quietly as well as singing… thrumming through his ears was this voice chanting in a language he couldn't recognise, something in his blood itself begging for him to follow the voice.
"Might as well get yer uniform," Hagrid said slowly, gesturing with a massive hand towards a store called 'Madam Malkin's Robes for All Occasions'. "Listen, Harry," the large man added nervously, "would yeh mind if I slipped off fer a quick pick-me-up in the Leaky Cauldron? I hate 'em Gringotts carts".
"Huh?" Harry asked dumbly, finally pulling his mind away from the chanting long enough to recognise the huge man had spoken.
Hagrid blinked at him for a moment before sighing, "Yeh head in fer yeh robes," the man instructed as he pointed at Madam Malkin's, "I'm off fer a moment or two. I'll be back, promise, just have a quick errand to run".
"Oh, right," Harry murmured, head swinging around to stare in the direction the chanting was coming from. "I'll see you soon then Hagrid".
"Right," Hagrid agreed, Harry ignoring what he said next in favour of setting off in pursuit of the enthralling chant.
Dismissing the way that Hagrid was calling after him, Harry kept moving in the direction of the voice, something deep inside his chest almost… almost purring… at the unfamiliar language. Weaving through the crowd with an experience learned from avoiding people back at school, Harry eventually found himself standing in front of a run-down building with faded paint, the door tucked into the alleyway between a shop selling supplies for a sport called 'Quidditch' and a store selling stationary items like quills and ink.
Swallowing nervously as he moved down the alleyway, Harry pushed open the door, flinching at the loud tingling of the bell above it. Opening his mouth to ask if anyone were around the seemingly empty store, Harry froze as he realised the volume of the chanting had increased ten-fold, his eyes darting straight to an alcove that had been curtained off by what seemed to be the skin of a deer. After looking around for the store's owner one more time, Harry steeled himself and headed towards the alcove and the chanting behind it, raising a hand to the deer-skin and pulling it back before he could chicken out.
There, resting on a tall podium Harry wasn't even sure he could reach, was a book.
Covered in large pitch-black scales and without a title or any form of writing on it, the book was thick and looked so old Harry would turn it to dust with a poorly aimed sneeze.
And more importantly, it was the source of the loud chanting that occupied the entirety of Harry's thoughts.
Stepping forward and up onto the dais the podium was on, Harry approached the book and pushed up onto the tips of his toes to stare down at the black cover. As he watched, a single word-rune appeared on the cover with a flash of blue-gold light, Harry's hand raising to brush across the surface of the warm rune as his mouth opened to speak it.
"Dovah"
The moment the word fell from his lips, the golden blue light was latching onto his hand and was crawling up his arm, the chanting cutting off instantly as he fearfully tried to tear his arm away. His hand remaining glued to the black cover of the book, the now burning light reached his shoulder and was now making its way up his neck, forcing its way down his throat as it continued to spread towards his chest before stabbing into where his heart would be. A scream of pain trying and failing to push its way past the light in his throat, Harry's body went limp and he collapsed forward against the podium and the book resting upon it.
And then it was over.
Gasping for air as he remained leaning across the book, to exhausted to pull himself away from the probably cursed book, the last thing Harry expected was to hear a woman's voice saying "That'll be 5 galleons".
Pushing away from the podium, Harry spun around to see a woman seated in a comfy looking armchair, a red hood with a single white stripe down the middle pulled low over her eyes. She couldn't see, he wasn't sure how he knew that, but even though her face was aimed in his direction Harry just knew that she was blind.
"What is it?" Harry found himself asking slowly, his throat raw and scratchy, "What did it do to me?"
"It unlocked a power deep within you," the blind woman admitted simply, "One far beyond the comprehension of the wizards we are surrounded by".
"But what is it?" Harry pressed, hand already going to his pocket with his money in it.
"It's the collected power of beings far beyond yourself".
"What beings?" he asked, looking around the room curiously. There were things that seemed so much more impressive than his – the – book, a creepy looking sword both taller and wider than Harry with veins going up and down it's surface and an eye blinking at him slowly. There was a charred and burned helmet with the letters 'N7' printed on their side. A small silver cylinder lay on a cushion beside Harry, a black button on its side. And just within arms-reach on the wall beyond it, a metal gauntlet with a red-orange gem inset in it rested on a small shelf.
The corner of the woman's lip tugged up slightly, "For five gold coins, you could have your answer".
Looking down at the five galleons already waiting in his hand, Harry crossed the room and placed them into the woman's waiting palm, jumping slightly as something nudged his foot. Glancing down at his new book, he glanced between it and the now blank wall that the alcove had once been set in, turning with a frown to face the blind woman only to find an empty chair.
Picking his book up and holding it to his chest, Harry looked around the store a final time before heading towards the door. He no longer wanted to be there, he had his book, he'd never need anything again…
Sniffling as she wiped her face down with her robe sleeves, Hermione Granger pulled her wand from her pocket and held it out before her.
"Lumos"
Watching as light shone from the tip of her wand, Hermione felt some of the pain from Weasley's words earlier that day slipping away. She was a Witch, a darn good one at that, and just because the red-headed boy couldn't manage to cast a simple cantrip didn't mean that she was any less his superior.
She was better than him, and they both knew it. She deserved to be here.
Shaking it off and cancelling her spell, Hermione pocketed her wand and unlatched the door to her cubicle, pausing for a moment at the shuffling sound she could hear in the bathroom beyond. Assuming it was just another student, she swung open the cubicle door and stepped out into the bathroom, freezing at the sight of the huge mountain troll standing in the doorway.
The book she'd read about them, 'Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them', hadn't described them properly. They were magical creatures of immense strength and unbeatable stupidity, and were said to reach up to twelve feet high, weighing around a ton. What the book failed to mention however, was the smell of rotting socks and dead fish that followed them, and the look of savage blood-lust in the troll's eyes as it peered down at her.
Unable to stop the whimper that slipped from her mouth, Hermione stepped back into the cubicle and closed the door, remembering only a second later how useless that action had truly been. Dropping to her knees, she instead tried to crawl back into the corner of the cubicle, only now realising that she was alone in a bathroom with nobody who knew where she was. It didn't matter that she didn't know how a troll got into what she'd been told was the 'safest place in all of Britain', all that matter was the only thing between her and it was a piece of flimsy wood.
A scream was torn from her lips as the cubicle exploded around her, leaving her cowering back further, trying to squeeze as much of herself into the corner as she could, the troll standing over her as it pulled it's club back and raised it over its head.
Moving in what felt like slow motion, Hermione watched as the troll brought it's club down, a muffled shout from the door proving to be her only salvation as a rippling shock wave slammed into the troll and lifted it off it's feet to slam it into the wall.
Sitting there, frozen in shock, it took the troll beginning to climb to it's feet to knock Hermione out of her daze. Pushing herself up, she clambered over the remains of the cubicle and rushed towards the door, faltering only slightly at the sight of the infamous Harry Potter standing alone in the doorway. Allowing the Boy-Who-Lived to grab her arm and push her behind him, she watched as he didn't remove his eyes from the now standing troll.
"Harry!" she hissed, tugging at his robe sleeve as the troll picked up it's club again, "We need to go. Now".
Harry just snorted instead, yanking his arm free of her hand and shaking his head. "I'll not run from this raan," he muttered under his breath. As the troll charged forward, Hermione watched as Harry merely raised his chin and spoke three words.
"Zun Haal Viik".
As the words fell from his lips, she watched a ripple of power exploding from his body, washing over the troll which roared angrily as it's club was torn from it's grasp and thrown back to lodge itself in the wall behind it.
"Oh my god," Hermione blurted in shock, looking between the wandless Harry and the confused looking troll.
"Actually, my name is Harry," the Boy-Who-Lived corrected innocently, still not looking away from the troll which shook it's head before rearing back to roar at them. Whimpering embarrassingly again at the fear-inducing sound, Hermione could only stand there and watch as Harry made an amused sound before saying "My turn," and screaming "Fus Ro Dah!" back at the troll, the same rippling shock wave from before erupting from his mouth and slamming into the troll, hurling it back into the wall with a sickening crack.
"I win," Harry dead-panned, turning on his heel and striding from the bathroom before Hermione had time to react, leaving her cowering against the wall for a moment before she was sprinting after her rescuer.
"How, how did you do that?" she demanded as she caught up with the boy who so far had confused most of Hogwarts by being the opposite of what they'd expected. "You didn't have a wand, and you did all that by just speaking!"
"Yup".
"How?" Hermione pressed, annoyance filling her as Harry didn't say anything else.
Glancing at her from the corner of his eye, the black-haired boy just smiled innocently at her, "Haven't you heard? I'm the Boy-Who-Lived".
Reclining back in her seat, the blind woman felt her lips twitching up into a smirk at the boy's response, her eyes dead to this world but not to the next.
"Our hero, our hero
Claims a warrior's heart"
she sung softly under her breath as she raised her teacup to sip from it gently.
"I tell you, I tell you
The Dragonborn comes".
The Book
Inspired by DZ2's New Power challenge.
The Undercover Operative cannot claim to own either Harry Potter or the Elder Scrolls; Skyrim.